Ok. Another paper
We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model.
Sorry, but “huh”? You did what?!
It’s behind a paywall. I’m not going to spend $32. But… cha know…
in a normal engineering heat transfer problem, if you prescribe temperatures you will affect heat transfer. Let me give a specific example:
Suppose you model a pot of water which is initially at 70F. You prescribe the temperature at the outer walls of the pot and the free surface at 70F. You prescribe the temperature at the bottom of the pot at 300F. Then you start the simulation.
Guess what? By prescribing the temperature at the bottom of the pot, you will be imposing a forcing (i.e. heat addition). The magnitude of the heat flux at the bottom of the pot will be (to use a climate phrase) “emergent” in your solution. But the fact that you imposed the temperature above the level of the water in the pot (and the surrounding air) will “create” heat addition in your problem.
So what exactly is with “prescribing…. the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model”? If the SST’s are forced to rise by imposed boundary condition, this will tend to inject heat into the “model planet”. If they are forced to fall by imposed boundary conditions, this will remove heat.
I guess if I read the paper I could see whether the authors quantified the heat flux away from the surface whose temperature they controlled. But… paywall… grumble grumble.
Still, strikes me as odd. Has anyone read the thing? Does it strike others similarly?
Coincidence is not causation. There are a plethora of attribution graphs out there.
Still it would be possible for a small semi chaotic area to perhaps be more representative of a larger bounded semi chaotic area if the area in the pot was at a locus that mirrored the larger system?
No, wishful thinking as you explain.
If one area could do it then why not others.
angech,
I’m saying rather more than ‘coincidence is not causation’. I’m saying in a model specifying temperatures at a surface (like the surface in the tropica pacific) injects or extracts heat. So, of course if in a model you specify a rising tropical SST’s in the 90s and flat ones in the 2000s, the world temperratures will tend to do that because your model is adding heat in the 90s and not adding it in the 2000s. That’s imposed.
I get that other features might be interesting (e.g. like maybe other climate features are driven by the fact that the temperature just rose or declined in the pacific.) But of course warming will slow if you suddenly flat line the temperature in a region with vigorous mixing in your climate model. That’s because you sucked heat out of those computational cells using the mathemagic of “subtraction”.
Areas with large amounts of mixing and heat transfer will do it better than areas with little mixing. Water is dense, and moves around a lot. Dirt doesn’t. Specifying temperature on the surface with large surface motion (i.e. currents and wind) will result in more heat transfer than regions where the surface doesn’t move (e.g. over dirt).
So, quite likely, specifying temperature over the ocean will have a stronger effect that speciying it over a land mass. More over, specifying surface temperature over the tropics probably would have a larger effect than over Antactica where the winds and ocean water tend to go around in tight vortex around the pole thereby keeping whatever heat is added near the surface over which you specified the temperature. This will actually reduce total heat flux arising from artificially elevating the temperature in your code.
I have a different take on this paper. I think, based on the excerpts I’ve read, that what they are demonstrating is that if a model gets the eastern pacific right, the rest of the work falls into place.
If that is so, then it provides a useful starting place for determining why the models are so far off. In other words, the problem reduces to understanding why they get the SST of the E Pacific wrong.
Anytime you can reduce the problem space you are making progress. However, having not read the paper I could be completely wrong.
John writes “In other words, the problem reduces to understanding why they get the SST of the E Pacific wrong.”
Or in other words, if you cant get ENSO right then forget about forecasting temperatures.
John–
I think that’s the message the authors want you to take away.
Lucia,
It is a bit like regressing global temperatures against the AMO index; you find extremely good correlation, and you can account for the ’60 year oscillation’, but is it just correlation or causation? Anybody who thinks temperature changes must be due to man-made forcing will claim it was just correlation.
.
Since it is well known that variation in Eastern Pacific surface temperature has a strong influence on global average surface temperature and rainfall patterns, it doesn’t seem so unexpected that prescribing Eastern Pacific temperatures would make the model perform better. I just don’t see what there is to get excited about in this paper.
Over at Judy Curry’s blog she’s pretty excited. The claim of the paper is that by hand-specifying the SST over 8% of the globe they get a very good fit over the remaining 92%, including observed regional features such as droughts over the SW U.S., etc. Also, they get the volcano forcings to fit without any additional massage.
It may be an interesting clue as to why so many of the models are systematically off. Obviously, though, hand-specifying an endogenous variable is far from satisfactory by itself either for understanding causality or for confidently forecasting outside the sample range. It would be useful to know if the “prescribed” temperatures in the 8% area converge, diverge, or stay the same as the “calculated” ones would have over the time steps.
Wish I had a more mathematical brain as I agree with your comments but will stumble on with 2+2 lower level logic.
You are making an extremely important point here with your analogy but it needs a little more.
The model is trying to say that what goes into the model is molding the larger observation. Whatever heat you put into or take out of the smaller model is then replicated in the observations.
But in other words [ in your analogy] they are putting the cart before the horse as the heat is not just put in or out at whim.
In a Ying /Yang model any change in one part of a component must affect the other half in a complementary way.
But here they are saying take the effect locally and extrapolate out and it matches.
In actual fact it works the other way. The world global temperature change [from radiative forcing] forces the sea surface temperature over the central to eastern pacific to behave the way it does because it is much larger and more complex.
The novelty is that this area unlike most others has at the moment an appearance of moving in unison over a short decadal time span with this mostly external forcing.
Lucia wrote “I’m saying in a model specifying temperatures at a surface (like the surface in the tropica pacific) injects or extracts heat. ”
Of course we need to see the paper to understand what they actually did, but its possible the specification of the SST was done in an energy neutral way.
Lucia,
” You did what?!”
Yes, that was my first reaction too. I managed to get hold of the paper, and this was my second thought:
I might add that as a control system, it has exciting possibilities.
From the paper we can read that it builds on work they have done on global teleconnections of ENSO.
Concerning how the temperatures are adjusted over the chosen region of Eastern Pacific they write in the paper itself:
In the supporting material the say a little more:
I interpret the paper similarly with John Vetterling.
I’ve been sent the paper! thanks. Now I have to read it.
Nick–
Ok. So they subtract it out again somewhere? That would at least fall in the “not crazy” region. I’ll have to read and look at the figures to get my head around this.
As in: place a lot of heat pumps in the tropical pacific to get the lower the surface temperature by moving the heat somewhere else?
TimTheToolMan @ (Comment #119072) says: “Or in other words, if you cant get ENSO right then forget about forecasting temperatures.”
Bingo. That was the bottom line of Guilyardi et el (2009):
http://www.knmi.nl/publications/fulltexts/guilyardi_al_bams09.pdf
I’ve quoted this before, and I’ll likely quote it again. They wrote:
“Because ENSO is the dominant mode of climate variability at interannual time scales, the lack of consistency in the model predictions of the response of ENSO to global warming currently limits our confidence in using these predictions to address adaptive societal concerns, such as regional impacts or extremes (Joseph and Nigam 2006; Power et al. 2006).”
From my post here:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/guilyardi-et-al-2009-understanding-el-nino-in-ocean-atmosphere-general-circulation-models-progress-and-challenges/
Prescribing the eastern tropical Pacific temperatures (downward) to explain the recent slowdown in warming lies somewhere between very doubtful (if they account for the heat involved by maintaining a global balance) and more than a little nutty (if they just add or remove heat without explanation). In either case, fixing the performance of a climate model this way is only useful if it actually points to what is wrong with the model’s physics. In comments at Judith’s blog, the lead author does not seem to be offering any “what is really wrong with the models” explanations.
.
I wonder also about the apparent lack of volcanic aerosol influences, which certainly contributed to the trajectory of temperatures since the mid 20th century.
lucia,
In 2002, Kevin Trenberth et al. wrote an article about ENSO and its effects on global climate. Like SteveF says, the effects are really quite uncontroversial, the mechanisms behind them fairly well-known and studied.
One very interesting quote from that paper states the following:
“The main tool used in this study is correlation and regression analysis that, through least squares fitting, tends to emphasize the larger events. This seems appropriate as it is in those events that the signal is clearly larger than the noise. Moreover, the method properly weights each event (unlike many composite analyses). Although it is possible to use regression to eliminate the linear portion of the global mean temperature signal associated with ENSO, the processes that contribute regionally to the global mean differ considerably, and the linear approach likely leaves an ENSO residual.“
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/papers/2000JD000298.pdf
The ‘ENSO residual’ would be that which is going on outside the NINO3.4 region, but which is still influenced/induced by and/or directly/indirectly related to the processes working there. The ENSO phenomenon as a whole is not equal to the NINO3.4 index.
Considering how you appear to abhor the straightforward, pristine approach of simply looking at time series to see what information they might convey, I realise that it would be pretty hard to convince you that this ENSO residual is actually readily observable in the data. We see exactly where and when it ‘surfaces’: after the Great Pacific Climate Shift spanning 1976-79, it pretty much all happens in the West Pacific and the North Atlantic and directly on the heels of the 1986-88 and 1997-98 El Niños. And it happens through direct oceanic interaction (WP) and through atmospheric bridges (NA). All ENSO-induced. (Trenberth describes both processes. There is nothing magical or mysterious about them at all.) I’ve shown you before how global temperatures ONLY diverges permanently from NINO3.4 SSTa in those two instances during the last 34-35 years (in 1988 and 1998). And at no other times. The entire global warming in two abrupt hikes. That is what the data show us, lucia. But you don’t even want to look at it. There is no manipulation, no smoothing, no ‘looking for patterns’ here. It’s simply right there in front of you. It only takes eyes to see it.
But I guess this is all still completely unconvincing …
P.S. And yes, Bob Tisdale was the one pointing me to that Trenberth paper …
SteveF, you say:
“I wonder also about the apparent lack of volcanic aerosol influences, which certainly contributed to the trajectory of temperatures since the mid 20th century.”
Why? Volcanic aerosols have never been shown to have any other effect than cooling the world during the 1-3 years they’re up there in the stratosphere blocking sunlight. When they’re gone, the effect is gone as well. They have no influence whatsoever on long-term climate. Only if you’re into linear trendlines …
Kristian,
“But I guess this is all still completely unconvincing …”
.
Yes, completely.
Kristian
I do not abhore looking at time series to see what information they convey. What I abhor is someone just showing images and presenting an argument that amounts to “see”. If whatever you see in the time series is actually there, you should be able to add an explanatory block of text — that is words– to each figure and explain precisely what feature you think means whatever you think it means and why you think it means that. That is: tell us your interpretation and provide that in words.
Nonesense. This claim “I’ve shown you before how global temperatures ONLY diverges permanently from NINO3.4 SSTa in those two instances during the last 34-35 years (in 1988 and 1998).” is a claim you have identified a “pattern”.
But beyond that, harkening back to your previous discussion where you wanted to connect this to something to do with AGW: So what?
Kristian wrote:
“Volcanic aerosols have never been shown to have any other effect than cooling the world during the 1-3 years they’re up there in the stratosphere blocking sunlight.”
Models such as GFDL show a long-lasting effect of major eruptions on ocean heat content. For example, the effect of Krakatoa (and other) eruptions of the 1880s was a decrease in OHC that lasted for a century:
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/cms-filesystem-action/user_files/kd/pdf/gfdlhighlight_vol1n4.pdf
Re: lucia (Comment #119082)
I don’t think that’s typically done when you “relax” some boundary region, e.g. by Newtonian cooling, dT = k(T-T0), to some historical state. The fluxes are just whatever you get, and there’s no explicit conservation statement.
There does seem to be the possibility of a kind of double counting. You impose historical radiative forcing and also predispose the system toward La Nina-like cool conditions in the tropical Pacific (which are already known to be associated with a somewhat smaller drop in global SAT). The result: a drop in global SAT.
On the other hand, the basic hypothesis is plausible. It does require you to consider the flip side of the coin, i.e., if the hiatus is caused by the the cool state in the tropical state, then the 1970–1998 “trend” was perhaps (in large part) an expression of the “warm” state (the authors mention this in the paper, and Judy Curry points it out as well on her blog).
From a sociological standpoint, it will be interesting to follow the reaction to this work in the following months. The existence of a “hiatus” let alone the possibility that multi-decadal “trends” can somehow be affected by decadal variability hasn’t exactly been the topic of” polite” mainstream conversation. 😉
Oliver–
The title of the paper and the press releases are certainly highlighting the “pause” aspect without clearly pointing out the flip side which is that the “cause/effect” interpretation means the dramatic run up preceding the pause would be ’caused’ in part by a run of El Ninos (and so the dramatically fast warming was bound to ‘pause’ eventually as it wasn’t a manifestation of forcing).
As I’ve never interpreted “the pause” as meaning ‘AGW is not true’, my only issue is ‘can we have this degree of ‘pause’ if the ‘underlying trend’ is 0.2 C/dec or even 0.3 C/dec projections show?
“Yes, completely.”
Gotta love the open minds at work here! Why, SteveF? Because you just know CO2 is the culprit, with or without the observational data to back up your claim?
“Models such as GFDL show a long-lasting effect of major eruptions on ocean heat content. For example, the effect of Krakatoa (and other) eruptions of the 1880s was a decrease in OHC that lasted for a century:”
DB: models?
Lucia,
Well, we can all see the title and the PR, and the flip side is mentioned in basically one line in the, so yes, we know what message is trying to be conveyed. 😉 But just from a logic standpoint, people have to consider the flip side and will (hopefully) continue to think about the implications.
Meanwhile, people are going to continue arguing that yes, we can have this degree of pause but the ‘underlying’ trend is still 0.2 or 0.3 C/dec — as long as a plausible source of variability can be found to explain the discrepancy. It could be a) “weather noise” (and/or model spread), it could be b) PDO, maybe a little of a) and a little of b)…
“I do not abhore looking at time series to see what information they convey. What I abhor is someone just showing images and presenting an argument that amounts to “seeâ€. If whatever you see in the time series is actually there, you should be able to add an explanatory block of text — that is words– to each figure and explain precisely what feature you think means whatever you think it means and why you think it means that. That is: tell us your interpretation and provide that in words.”
OK. That does sound reasonable. So I see your point.
My point, though, is that this is exactly what Bob Tisdale has been doing for like 4+ years and still no one seems to ‘be convinced’, or even care. And yet none has ever been able to point out any flaws in his data analysis. The data show what they show. It’s as simple as that. All he’s been getting throughout these years is and endless string of strawmen, diversionary tactics and reflexive dismissals.
SteveF said it straight out and with a straight face: He doesn’t believe Tisdale to be right because he is already convinced (or he KNOWS) that CO2 causes the warming. So he’s sure – a priori – that there is no way ENSO could have done it. No matter what the data reveal.
This obstinately arrogant attitude is what I’m talking about. Quite frankly I find it disturbing …
DB (Comment #119092),
“Models such as GFDL show a long-lasting effect of major eruptions on ocean heat content. For example, the effect of Krakatoa (and other) eruptions of the 1880s was a decrease in OHC that lasted for a century”
.
Certainly true for the GDFL model. But the duration of significant influence of volcanic cooling has to depend to a great extent on overall sensitivity to forcing… which is also tightly linked to ocean heat uptake. A relatively sensitive model like GFDL of course shows longer volcanic influence, because it takes much longer for the model to equilibrate following an essentially impulse drop in forcing. The e-folding time for the decay in response will be less at lower climate sensitivity. This graphic http://i41.tinypic.com/2nlwygn.png (Hadley adjusted for ENSO) shows Pinatubo pretty clearly, but the shape of the temperature trend in the decay period suggests to me that significant influence of Pinatubo was limited to ~12 years. Of course there would be a very small residual influence (it is exponential decay) but probably not important after 2004. This behavior seems consistent with published estimates of e-folding times of 30-34 months for the decay period.
Kristian:
Perhaps SteveF is unconvinced because your claim that “Volcanic aerosols have never been shown to have any other effect than cooling the world during the 1-3 years they’re up there in the stratosphere blocking sunlight” has to be wrong.
If you put an input into a system with an e.g., 3-year duration, unless you are dealing with a “memoryless system”, the response must be temporally stretched compared to the input.
“Nonesense. This claim “I’ve shown you before how global temperatures ONLY diverges permanently from NINO3.4 SSTa in those two instances during the last 34-35 years (in 1988 and 1998).†is a claim you have identified a “patternâ€.”
‘Identifying’ a pattern (that’s evidently there, there is no way of getting around it) is not the same as ‘looking for patterns’ for the sake of looking for them. And also, it’s not so much an identified ‘pattern’ as a straightforward observation of two specific instances along the curves of two superimposed time series where the one (the global) normally follows the other (NINO3.4) in impressive lock-step over decadal stretches of time, at which this first curve instead abrubtly shifts away from the other. It happened. It’s there.
Kristian
I have no idea who you think is “‘looking for patterns’ for the sake of looking for them.” But beyond that, everyone knows that the global temperature are correlated to NINO3.4. That’s why NINO3.4 is assembled by weather forecasting groups. So to the extent that you are seeing a resemblance: yes. eveyrone knows this. Yawn. To the extent that you are seeing jumps or breaks: That sure looks like “‘looking for patterns’ for the sake of looking for them.” to me. And– as I think I’ve said in the past, if that’s is the pattern, then one needs to explain why the jumps have been consistently “up” and/or why you think that is or is not connected to AGW. Otherwise, the whole thing looks like gazing to see patterns in the lint distribution in your navel.
Carrick,
You didn’t include the last part of what I said: I said, they have no influence whatsoever on long term climate.
The climate rebounds fairly quickly after the aerosols are gone, maybe within the course of a year or so. After that, there’s no longer any hint that there was ever a major volcanic eruption. I don’t care what the models say should happen. I care only what the data tell us about what really happens. After 1994/95, there is no longer any trace of the Pinatubo effect in global temperature data. Your very welcome to show us where in the OHC data you see the effect continuing to make its mark past this date.
Kristen: “Models such as GFDL show a long-lasting effect of major eruptions on ocean heat content. For example, the effect of Krakatoa (and other) eruptions of the 1880s was a decrease in OHC that lasted for a century:â€
DB: models?
By default. There was no Argo network in 1883.
Agreed that most GCMs overestimate the (depressive) effect of volcanoes and thus also tend to overestimate the forcing from greenhouse gases to reproduce the climate and ocean heat content of the 20th century.
“I have no idea who you think is “‘looking for patterns’ for the sake of looking for them.”
DeWitt Payne accused me of doing so last time around. He even diagnosed me.
Carrick,
“Perhaps SteveF is unconvinced because your claim that “Volcanic aerosols have never been shown to have any other effect than cooling the world during the 1-3 years they’re up there in the stratosphere blocking sunlight†has to be wrong.”
.
That is part of it. The other part is the wild-eyed nonsense claims of ‘it was all just the ENSO what done it’, which contradicts both theoretical considerations and empirical data. The problem is that the Tisdalites and their ilk accept at face value theories which contradict any basic understanding of how the world works; they lack a sense of the requirement for all of science to be internally consistent… discounting radiative forcing and temporal lags due to large thermal inertia are just symptomatic of the real problem. Which is not to say that others subject to motivated reasoning do not do much the same; Tamino’s near zero-lag solar response in F&R comes immediately to mind. I won’t waste time arguing with Tamino over his nonsense claims either.
.
There is little point in arguing science with Mr. Tisdale or any of his minions; they are less unhinged than the Skydragon Slayers, and somewhat more than Tamino, but all the differences seem modest.
Re: Kristian (Aug 30 09:22),
As I remember, I didn’t ‘diagnose’ you. I merely pointed out that seeing patterns in what are actually random data is so common among humans that there is a word for it. The Rorschach inkblot test is based on it. Then someone else quoted Shakespeare on seeing shapes in clouds. But even more interesting in the Shakespeare quote is the implied observation of how suggestible humans are when someone else claims to see a specific shape.
You then objected to the characterization of the data as random. But the point is that the data are noisy and the noise can be characterized with tests. Noise that is serially autocorrelated imposed on an underlying linear trend does, in fact, produce records that look like step changes. Fractionally integrated noise is even better at it.
“But beyond that, everyone knows that the global temperature are correlated to NINO3.4. That’s why NINO3.4 is assembled by weather forecasting groups. So to the extent that you are seeing a resemblance: yes. eveyrone knows this. Yawn.”
OK. Good. So if everyone knows about this close connection, and knows about the mechanisms governing it, why is it so unfathomably hard to imagine that there is a connection also between ENSO processes outside the NINO3.4 region (you know, Trenberth’s ENSO residual) being responsible for these two distinct global shifts? Why is no one even interested in checking it out? No curiosity whatsoever. This boggles my mind. It seems like people are afraid of what they might find.
You know of course that oceanographers have long since identified major regime shifts in the pan-Pacific climate in both 1976-78, 1988/89 and 1998/99? Exactly at those three instances since the 70s when ‘global warming’ happened.
Coincidence?
There’s a study out just recently from the German oceanographic research institute GEOMAR trying to emulate these Pacific regime shifts, because as they say:
“These shifts also have a profound effect on the average global surface air temperature of the Earth. The most recent shift in the 1990s is one of the reasons that the Earth’s temperature has not risen further since 1998.”
and
“What happened in the years 1976/77 and 1998/99 in the Pacific was so unusual that scientists spoke of abrupt climate changes. They referred to a sudden warming of the tropical Pacific in the mid-1970s and rapid cooling in the late 1990s. Both events turned the world’s climate topsy-turvy and are clearly reflected in the average temperature of the Earth. Today we know that the cause is the interaction between ocean and atmosphere.”
http://www.geomar.de/en/news/article/klimavorhersagen-ueber-mehrere-jahre-moeglich/
So there might in fact be an awakening of some kind on the horizon.
Kristian
You had previously said:
And my response is that you are clearly describing patterns you claim to ‘see’ in the data in your general claims. I’m not sure why you think what you are doing is not ‘looking for patterns’. But even if what you do is not ‘looking’ in the sense of ‘hunting’– and possibly it is not– you somehow seem to believe you have found a pattern.
And I agree with DeWitt that often people see patterns where there are none. I believe I also pointed out that “Noise+Trend” can look like “flatish+ jumps”. this observation shouldn’t be controversial since it can look like that. Since what you claim to ‘see’ is precisely what one would see if it was “trend plus noise”, it can hardly be evidence to disprove “trend plus noise”. Mind you, the appearance also doesn’t prove “trend plus noise”– but you keep trying to present it as evidence to disprove that and it simply is no such thing.
As for what I asked: I said I didn’t know who you thought was looking for patterns because I couldn’t tell if you were implying others look for them, claiming you did not or something else. It is sometimes best to remember that even if you are still peeved over something someone said a month ago, others reading comment probably don’t recall that statement and so will have no idea what you are referring to if you don’t put your statement in context.
“You then objected to the characterization of the data as random. But the point is that the data are noisy and the noise can be characterized with tests. Noise that is serially autocorrelated imposed on an underlying linear trend does, in fact, produce records that look like step changes. Fractionally integrated noise is even better at it.”
DeWitt Payne, please stop acting like you don’t understand what I’m talking about.
Looking at the NINO3.4 curve, are the ups and downs simply random (that is ‘noisy’) data? Or do they represent physical processes going on in the Earth system?
And if you superimpose the global SSTa curve on the (scaled) NINO3.4 SSTa curve, is the fact that they follow each other so tightly (except at these specific instances of global shifts), a random coincidence, or are they related through physical processes going on in the Earth system?
If you believe that all of this is random, then I can understand why you would also think that the shifts themselves are just ‘random’ happenstances. I can assure you, they are not.
Oliver,
“Meanwhile, people are going to continue arguing that yes, we can have this degree of pause but the ‘underlying’ trend is still 0.2 or 0.3 C/dec — as long as a plausible source of variability can be found to explain the discrepancy. It could be a) “weather noise†(and/or model spread), it could be b) PDO, maybe a little of a) and a little of b)…”
.
Or how about c) the models may have the cloud feed-backs way wrong? 😉 Troy Masters has done some good (published) work that seems to support c).
Perhaps they misused prescribed, and just meant modelled.
“And my response is that you are clearly describing patterns you claim to ‘see’ in the data in your general claims. I’m not sure why you think what you are doing is not ‘looking for patterns’. But even if what you do is not ‘looking’ in the sense of ‘hunting’– and possibly it is not– you somehow seem to believe you have found a pattern.”
Seriously, this is a line of discussion I can’t be bothered pursuing. I don’t CLAIM to see a pattern. Everyone that cares to have just a cursory look at the curves can easily identify those two instances and the lock-step ‘pattern’ between those two curves the rest of the time. You say “people see patterns where there are none”. So you’re saying that global temperatures isn’t shifting up from the NINO3.4 in 1988 and 1998. That I’m not seeing what I think I’m seeing. It’s just a figment of my imagination. And that if you look at SSTa data from the West Pacific and the North Atlantic you do not see exactly where these shifts originate.
You say ‘noise+trend’. What trend? The trend you ‘see’ in the data? The trend you mentally and then statistically project onto the data? The steady, gradual trend that happens to agree with your notion that it’s CO2 driving global temperatures, no matter what the data show us?
“The other part is the wild-eyed nonsense claims of ‘it was all just the ENSO what done it’, which contradicts both theoretical considerations and empirical data. The problem is that the Tisdalites and their ilk accept at face value theories which contradict any basic understanding of how the world works; they lack a sense of the requirement for all of science to be internally consistent…”
With all due respect, this is pure nonsense. Please point to these ‘theoretical considerations’ and especially the ’empirical data’ that contradicts ‘just the ENSO what done it’.
Is the eternal strawman of ‘where’s the energy coming from, ENSO just moves it around’ coming up? To this I will tell you: Read Trenberth’s paper from 2002 (I linked to it above).
There is nothing about what Tisdale points to that contradicts physical considerations or empirical data at all. In fact, ALL empirical data verify ‘just the ENSO what done it’. ENSO controls to a significant degree both the amount of incoming solar heat being absorbed by the Earth system, and its subsequent release back out. The energy comes from the Sun. ENSO put controls on how much IN and how much OUT is allowed.
But you don’t like this. Because if this were to be the case, there’s no room left for your hypothetical CO2 warming mechanism. And that can’t be. So all other explanations must be wrong.
So what exactly is with “prescribing…. the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model�
Isaac Held prescribes(fixes various model parameters to observations) all the time.
Regardless of which side of the debate one is on the coupled modeled fits with observations are ‘less then great’.
Prescribing various parameters can gives us hints as to where either the observations are wanting or the modeled physics is missing wanting.
Journals are supposed to be where scientific ‘brainstorming’ takes place.
The issues come in when various groups treat whatever latest ‘brainstorming paper’ agrees with their pet theory as a ‘final fact’.
Wow…if we enter the observations for 8%-10% of the surface area of the world the physics models for the remaining part of the world match observations a lot better.
Is that 8-10% of the surface of the world some sort of natural thermostat that we don’t understand? Please send research $$$$ to find out.
Kristian,
The second sentence is a claim that that a pattern is there and that you see it. Is English not your main language?
So under your notion, why does ENSO decide to make all “jumps” up and none down? You don’t seem to want to touch that.
harrywr2,
“Journals are supposed to be where scientific ‘brainstorming’ takes place.”
.
That is not my experience. The brainstorming usually takes place long before the journal article is written. A journal article may provoke additional work (and even brainstorming by others) of course. Less formal communication seems to me where most new ideas come from.
Kristian,
More like 15 years for Pinatubo.
As Lucia has pointed out and Nick Stokes and Pekka have confirmed, prescribing the temperature constrains the heat flux (“adds heat”) +/-, somewhere in the system.
I’m not sure what happens to the
headheat after as Pekka quotes “overriding the surface sensible heat flux to the ocean” by a temperature difference-based term. Presumably the rest of the model dynamics dictate that story. I guess it would be wrong to assume that this just ends up as stored heat in the ocean. The model would output the ocean heat storage and the TOA imbalance among other things, i haven’t checked to see if that is described in the paper and what the effects were.Lucia,
“So under your notion, why does ENSO decide to make all “jumps†up and none down?”
.
Now you are getting to the heart of the ‘it was all just the ENSO what done it’ argument. The Earth warms 100% based on the influence of ENSO, and only up, not down…. So, ENSO is not really a pseudocyclical process at all, it is more like a climate ratchet wrench for global temperatures. Been like that since 1700, when something flipped the ratchet direction, don’t ya know? (My guess is some kind of alignment of Saturn, Jupiter, and the moon, combined with rising solar activity is what flipped the direction; Scafetta probably already has a theory on this, maybe involving epicenters.) I must also add that the rising atmospheric CO2 level is mainly due to ocean warming from the ENSO ratchet. I simply reject all contrary evidence, and further, I do not believe that adding sand to a bucket must increase its weight. In addition to all that logic, it is clear that any temperature influence of radiative forcing from man made GHG’s must be too small to even detect because….. well, because that is how I want it to be. Just remember, it is ENSO, all the way down.
Re: SteveF (Comment #119114)
I’ll take a wild guess here and say that the people arguing that the recent temperatures, pause or no, are fully consistent with model trends predicted in 1988 (or whatever) are probably not the same people arguing for your choice c). 😉
Oliver,
No, probably not.
“The second sentence is a claim that that a pattern is there and that you see it. Is English not your main language?”
Haha, yeah, OK, you win. But what does it matter? I CLAIM to see a bird in the sky. I point at it, my friend lifts her head and she sees it too. There it is.
“So under your notion, why does ENSO decide to make all “jumps†up and none down? You don’t seem to want to touch that.”
Since The Great Pacific Climate Shift, that is, after 1978/79, the ENSO-induced jumps have been up, true. That’s because there was a climate shift in the Pacific switching ENSO from a cool (negative) phase to a warm (positive) phase. Both around 1945/46 and 1964 there were shifts down, however curiously separated by another shift up in 1957/58.
The global ocean ‘cycles’ are basically Pacific. The other basins, like the North Atlantic, simply follow suit.
So is their “novel method” analogous to the cold-tongue adjustment?
Carrick,
“More like 15 years for Pinatubo.”
Stratosphere?!
Weather and hence climate happens in the troposphere. There is no 15 year rebound to Pinatubo to be found in tropospheric temperatures.
“The Earth warms 100% based on the influence of ENSO, and only up, not down…. So, ENSO is not really a pseudocyclical process at all, it is more like a climate ratchet wrench for global temperatures. Been like that since 1700, when something flipped the ratchet direction, don’t ya know?”
No, SteveF, it’s been going up since 1976/77. Not the 31 years before that, and not between 1879 and 1912 either.
Also, you might perhaps have heard of something called ‘The Sun’.
The ocean cycles + the sun explains neatly the temperature record of the last 150 years.
Kristian, it should be obvious that the two systems are coupled, so if you see a significant and persistent effect in the stratosphere, there certainly is an effect of this on troposphere.
It’s harder to measure the effect in the troposphere because we have this noise source called “weather”. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence applies to this situation.
Kristian
There is a substantive lack of coherency in your arguments now.
As best I can piece together Bob Tisdale’s arguments, he first notes that the weather in the ENSO region can be used to predict to some extent global weather. He infers from this cause and effect.
He then notes that ENSO has internal variability and this internal variability is correlated with climate seen in other parts of the world.
He then seems to invoke a miracle to say that long-term secular global temperature trends must have been produced by ENSO.
By saying “it is the sun” you have now effectively conceded that this long-term secular trend must be caused by external forcings.
Once you say that, one looks at what we know about each of these radiative forcings, and we make a determination by that point.
But it becomes a leap of faith on your part to say “it must be the sun”, rather than e.g. radiative forcing from anthropogenic forcing, especially when long term data on solar irradiance do not support your belief that the warming is related to changes in solar irradiance.
Carrick
“But it becomes a leap of faith on your part to say “it must be the sunâ€, rather than e.g. radiative forcing from anthropogenic forcing, especially when long term data on solar irradiance do not support your belief that the warming is related to changes in solar irradiance.”
Be fair, Kristian did not attribute the change to solar irradiance changes. My understanding of the Tisdale theory is that the state of the ENSO is associated with either the amount of solar radiation allowed to enter the system or the amount that is radiated away. There are plausible mechanisms for both.
Perhaps in El Nino conditions the amount of cloud cover is reduced resulting in a lower albedo and hence warming. Then during a La Nina the cloud cover returns raising the albedo and we get cooling.
Or maybe during La Nina’s there are more tropical thunderstorms which result in vast quantities of heat being carried aloft to be radiated away, again resulting in cooling. The inverse in a El Niño would have the opposite effect.
Thus it is plausible that while the ENSO could not add or subtract energy from the system, it could cause changes in the absorption and radiation of solar energy.
If you stand in front of a fire and open and close an umbrella between you and the fire, your temperature will change, even though the act of opening and closing the umbrella did not by itself change the energy in the system.
By the way, I have no idea if either of the previous mechanisms actually happen. But I’m sure others could come up with alternate plausible, and testable, ways that an ENSO change could result in changes in either absorbing or radiating solar energy and hence result in warming or cooling of the earth.
I suspect that Kristian and maybe Tisdale would argue that these possibilities have not been thoroughly investigated because the investigators are (1) convinced that CO2 is the culprit and (2) are convinced that ENSO is “just” energy being moved around in the system and thus cannot matter to the average Temp.
Jknapp,
“There are plausible mechanisms for both.”
.
So lay out exactly what those mechanisms physically are and then produce credible data showing that they are acting in the way you suggest. ‘Plausible mechanisms’ don’t carry a lot of weight you know, especially when the consequences of those mechanisms, if they were true, would be a climate system which could wander off in a random walk trajectory, rather than be constrained by causal factors. The evidence for reasonably stable temperatures over geological time spans suggests 1) relatively low sensitivity to forcings over most of Earth’s history, and 2) not a lot of random wander in Earth’s climate. The tisdalean arguments you talk about also demand that there be essentially no influence of GHG’s on surface temperatures, which is absurd on its face in light of radiative physics.
jknapp
Maybe not. In which case, we are each challenged to interpret what concept he meant to communicate when he wrote “Also, you might perhaps have heard of something called ‘The Sun’. ”
As for the rest: If Kristian has a theory or explanation of what he thinks we should “see” in the data, he ought to tell us what it is.
Lucia:
“If Kristian has a theory or explanation of what he thinks we should “see†in the data, he ought to tell us what it is.”
Preferably with source code 🙂 And please be R.
AJ–
I said that because jknapp is writing stuff like “I suspect that Kristian and maybe Tisdale would argue….”. If Kristian argues what jknapp suspects he would argue, Kristian can say so in his own words. If he does we’ll know Kristian actually does argue that thing. If Tisdale would endorse whatever argument jknapp thinks Tisdale would endorse, Tisdale could come here to argue (if he wished). But I’m not going to get into a discussion debating whether
a) Tisdale or Kristian really would argue the version of arguments jknapp thinks they would argue.
b) Whether that argument (which may be held by no one) is actually right and so on.
I think jknapp should feel free to present jknapps own arguments and Kristian should present Kristian’s own and so on. Code not necessarily required.
Regarding the final sentence of the abstract (I don’t have access to the full paper):
“Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase.”
Is that to be construed as a quantitative prediction?
michael,
I wouldn’t call that quantitative.
No, I think that is better described as a CYA/tow the party line statement. To paraphrase: ‘Let us end by stating clearly: no matter what the data or our analysis say, we MUST stop burning fossil fuels immediately!’ It is a bit like boiler plate in legal contracts; mostly irrelevant but always present in any climate science paper. These people have neither courage nor shame.
Michael hart (119142)
That sound more like a genuflection to me
It seems to be difficult to attribute the pause to any natural mechanism without allowing that the increase in the late 20c might also be due in part to some natural mechanism.
I.e if the ocean is swallowing the heat now might it not have been belching it previously.
Lucia, point taken. Kristian and Tisdale, my apologies for putting words in your mouth. It was not my intent. I was trying to express my understanding of your thoughts and may have been mistaken.
SteveF, I did lay out a couple of mechanisms that could result in internal variability causing system energy imbalances. This was meant to say that those who argue saying it is the sun means irradiance changes as Carrick did are not correct.
Also, saying that ENSO oscillations would cause a random walk is a great leap. They could be part of the negative feedback mechanisms that the long term stability you have mentioned implies.
And, yes, radiative physics says that all things being equal adding co2 would warm the place up. But, all things aren’t equal. The climate is not just a radiative system, it is a radiative, convective, conductive, evaporative system and when one changes we aren’t quite sure how the others will change. And changing the others could change the radiative equation. But again, based on long term stability we can be pretty confident that the feedbacks are net negative.
I was also suggesting that researchers who were confident that “it is the co2 stupid” may have been neglecting looking into other possible causes. The recent citing of internal variability as explanation of the pause backs up that idea. Besides which, internal variability isn’t an explanation. It is an observation. Until you can explain/predict the variability you aren’t there yet.
I don’t want to wonder off topic, but I have a couple of questions about the sea surface temperature. Here is a graphical presentation of the SST for northern, southern and global temperature.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadSST2.pdf
Now between 1936 and 1946 there appears to be a 0.4 degree increase in the Southern Hemispheres SST.
I just want to know
1) was this decade long increase in SST a real phenomena, and not some sampling artifact caused by changes in sea pattern usage due to WWII?
2) If real, what could have caused such a huge amount of energy to appear at the surface waters of the Southern hemisphere?
DocMartyn,
Maybe it is the other way around – increase in SST cause of WW2. Or maybe you’ve missed the study which linked violence with increase in global temperatures.
The increase you mention did start in 1936. W didn’t become WW until 1941.
Of course this could also be another example of tele-connection.
jknapp:
So your argument is “it’s the sun” = “the sun’s input is constant” = “that’s why temperature’s are increasing”!?
It’s very easy to make hand-waving plausible arguments that are physically unrealizable, but I’d say to that “this is not even a plausible argument”.
Regarding CO2–it is foolish to argue that increasing CO2 does not increase the capacity of the climate system to store more heat energy and that this in turn equals warmer temperature. You are mistaking endorsement of that statement for attribution of all observed global warming to CO2 increase.
“j ferguson
The increase you mention did start in 1936. W didn’t become WW until 1941.”
Indeed?
The Battle of the River Plate was a work of fiction? The British were not forced to introduce a convoy system for the Aus/NZ trade to and from British ports?
The Japanese had not invaded China and the Americans had not banned trade with Japan, forcing a complete change in Pacific trade patterns?
“W didn’t become WW until 1941”
Second Italo–Abyssinian War 1935
Spanish Civil War 1936 to 1939
Germany occupied Rhineland in 1936.
Japanese Invasion of Manchuria leads to all out war in 1937
etc
Well, gosh, Doc, of course you are correct, here, but it’s the world part, not the war part that I might have had the offset incorrect on. And I did read “5 Days in London, 1940”.
Trade routes in the North Pacific completely changed after July 1937 with the second Japan and China war.
Carrick
So your argument is “it’s the sun†= “the sun’s input is constant†= “that’s why temperature’s are increasingâ€!?
At the level you are arguing that applies equally to the CO2 is doing it all. No one says CO2 creates energy in the system. The energy all comes from the sun. CO2 just changes the insolation of the Earth and thus raises temperature.
I’m arguing that there may be other internal variations than moving CO2 from underground to the atmosphere that can also regulate how much energy from the sun is absorbed or radiated away.
So I understand that you are arguing that changes in cloud cover or length and intensity of thunder storms or aerosols in the air are not physically realizable? Because my argument is that changes in ENSO might result in changes in cloud cover/aerosols/thunder storms etc. That in turn could result in warming or cooling of the Earth.
Which means if you have a period of several decades with El Nino dominant you would get several decades of warming (see 1970-2000) and with a neutral ENSO period you would see several decades without warming (see 2001-2013), and if you had a period with La Nina Dominant you might see several decades of cooling. All without resorting to “It’s all CO2.”
Is this hand waving, sure, but should it be investigated, I think so.
jknapp, I think you’re deflecting a bit here.
We’ve been discussing temperature increase. You can’t invoke a constant power source, as Kristian appears to have done, to explain that. You are also assuming that Kristian isn’t claiming that the solar input hasn’t changed over time. Many in the group that think that CO2 doesn’t work as a GHG do assume that solar forcing is increasing and is an explanation for the observed warming.
They are at least self-aware enough to know they need to invoke an alternative hypothesis.
Regarding CO2—nobody here is claiming that CO2 does it by itself. One can estimate the direct sensitivity of climate to CO2 increase, and what you find is rough 1.1°C/doubling of CO2.
To get to e.g. 2.5°C/doubling for climate requires other mechanisms in addition. Nobody disputes this.
Regarding cloud cover changes associated with ENSO—yes these do happen, but they appear synchronized to the dominant periods of ENSO, so these are periodic changes which get smoothed out when computing multi-decadal temperature trends.
Yes this can be modeled and constrained by measurement. I am not aware of anybody doing this, but it seems like a reasonable calculation. I’d be surprised if you could get the energy budget anywhere close to explaining a substantial portion of the long-term warming from that.
Doc, you shouldn’t take anything I write here seriously, (I don’t), but I suppose it would not be impossible to get an order of magnitude for rejected heat by condensers and keel coolers for the transpacific shipping in those days and maybe from that infer whether its effect might have been significant as a result of the rerouting. De minimus is such an enchanting metric.
It could all come down to waste heat.
“waste heat released in major cities in the Northern Hemisphere causes as much as one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees F) of winter warming in high latitudes of the North America and Eurasian continents.”
http://ens-newswire.com/2013/02/05/waste-heat-from-cities-has-global-climate-effects/
Too bad we are not discussing the points put forward by Oliver and Lucia above in this thread and Judith Curry at her blog about the flip side of this recent paper’s conclusions and that of the of other theories/conjectures on the lost heat that might be causing the recent warming pause.
If the sensitivities cannot be adjusted and we need to find the heat hole then would not the current climate models require something of a regime change? I see some interested parties suggesting a portioning of the possible causes that is perhaps motivated by maintaining the modeling status quo.
I too look forward to how the climate science community, interested bloggers and the MSM handle the pause and the attempts to explain it. I think I’ll find it something like a sympathetic but wary MSM spinning of the Obama administrations reasoning on need for action in Syria.
j ferguson, I really don’t think you understand. The calculation of SST is based on recordings of sea temperate from ships logs.
Ships would record their position, date and the temperature. If there is a change in he routes taken by the ships, then a different part of the ocean is sampled, which can lead to sampling bias.
Doc,
You are correct. I didn’t understand. what you write makes good sense. Oddly, I’d thought that the measuring locations were stationary and the traffic moved – pretty dumb of me.
Carrick,
“We’ve been discussing temperature increase. You can’t invoke a constant power source, as Kristian appears to have done, to explain that.” Do you see the contradiction in your argument? You are also invoking a constant heat source, the same sun as Kristian, yet it results in a warming planet via the effects of CO2. Yet you say a constant source cannot do that.
I don’t think I am deflecting. Lucia’s original post said that if you constrain the heat in the Pacific based on ENSO then you are injecting heat into the model planet and thus it is no surprise that the model global temperature tends to follow that constraint. (I hope I understood that correctly Lucia)
I am suggesting that there are plausible mechanisms such that ENSO changes would inject heat into the actual planet as well. If that is correct then to find other heat trends one would need to subtract the ENSO induced variations both accelerating and decelerating the temp change.
I believe that if one does that the result is a pretty much constant rate of temp increase since 1800 or so. The further argument that after 1950 the increase is caused by CO2 but before that it was something else fails the Occam’s razor test. Why isn’t that something else still working?
Now whether Kristian is saying that the temp change is caused solely by solar variation or through some other than CO2 internal variation as I have suggested I have no Idea. And as Lucia so correctly chastised me for is not germane to the discussion here.
lucia (Comment #119141)
August 30th, 2013 at 7:09 pm
“Code not necessarily required.”
I respectfully disagree. He may as well be a politician… Inhofe or Obama… just parroting other’s arguments.
jknapp
Yes. You did.
It’s not so much that the issue is not germane as (a) it’s not clear what he said alluded to but (b) he did involve the ‘solar’ with ” “Also, you might perhaps have heard of something called ‘The Sun’. â€
Of course one has to guess what he thinks one would come to believe if one had heard of “The Sun”, and one has to guess how that fits into a full argument. My main thought is he wants to elaborate, he can. But I don’t think someone else can really interpret that– as that would seem to involve some degree of mind reading.
BTW: I didn’t really intend to chide so much as merely point out that if Kristian has a longer more elaborate explanation of what he means, he really needs to do it. Because — at least in my view– he’s been pretty sparse with words, and I really don’t think someone else can give a paragraph long explanation of what he meant by “Also, you might perhaps have heard of something called ‘The Sun’. †and have an especially good chance of getting it right.
jknapp (Comment #119164),
GHG forcing from CO2, methane, N2O and post 1935, halocarbons, is something which did not start in the mid 20th century. GHG forcing has risen continuously for more than 150 years. The fact that the IPCC has (incorrectly IMO) declared only post 1975 warming due to GHG forcing is not terribly important, and in fact strikes me as nutty. That there has been a long term secular trend upward in temperatures is expected, and not at all surprising. Don’t pay any attention to the claims of aerosol offsets… look at the GHG history.
I guess a nice control for this experiment might be to take other regions of 8% of the surface area and see if you get the same effect by imposing SST in those regions. Maybe as you say Lucia the global will evolve along the lines of that region or maybe not.
Controls are good!
Oh oh i thought of another. Maybe you take one climate model run and impose the East Pacific temp from that on another run and see how that one evolves.
I wish i had the tools to play these games
Lucia,
Thank you for clarifying, I’ll try not to mind read in the future and thank you as well for hosting an excellent blog.
Judith Curry quotes this post from JN Gammon
http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2013/08/learning-from-the-hiatus/
Can anyone explain what he is saying?
Two questions for Lucia: What coordinates did Kosaka and Xie (2013) use for the eastern tropical Pacific? And was the dataset HADISST v1?
Lucia writes: “I didn’t really intend to chide so much as merely point out that if Kristian has a longer more elaborate explanation of what he means, he really needs to do it. Because — at least in my view– he’s been pretty sparse with words, and I really don’t think someone else can give a paragraph long explanation of what he meant by “Also, you might perhaps have heard of something called ‘The Sun’.†and have an especially good chance of getting it right.â€
I believe I understand what Kristian meant. But for me it’ll take a little bit longer than one paragraph. You know me—I like to present data to confirm things.
The sea surface temperature record and the ocean heat content records indicate that ENSO functions as a chaotic recharge-discharge oscillator, with La Niñas serving as the recharge mode and El Niños as the discharge.
This process was described in the Trenberth et al (2002) paper mentioned by Kristian above:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/papers/2000JD000298.pdf
Trenberth et al (2002) wrote:
“The negative feedback between SST and surface fluxes can be interpreted as showing the importance of the discharge of heat during El Niño events and of the recharge of heat during La Niña events. Relatively clear skies in the central and eastern tropical Pacific allow solar radiation to enter the ocean, apparently offsetting the below normal SSTs, but the heat is carried away by Ekman drift, ocean currents, and adjustments through ocean Rossby and Kelvin waves, and the heat is stored in the western Pacific tropics. This is not simply a rearrangement of the ocean heat, but also a restoration of heat in the ocean.â€
This recharge/restoration portion described by Trenberth et al (2002) is evident in the NODC ocean heat content data for the tropical Pacific. (Note the overcharge during the 1995/96 La Niña):
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/figure-20.png
The NCEP/DOE Reanalysis-2 includes downward shortwave radiation (sunlight) and downward longwave radiation data (infrared radiation). The next graph is their DSR and DLR anomalies for the tropical Pacific. They confirm it is solar radiation that’s responsible for the recharge as described by Trenberth et al (2002). The DLR data in the following graph act as a reasonable index for the timing of El Niños and La Niñas. The DLR data also shows it’s the wrong sign to serve in the recharge process because DLR decreases during La Niñas:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/figure-23.png
For additional confirmation, Pavlakis et al (2008) illustrated the ENSO-caused relationship between NINO3.4 sea surface temperature anomalies and downward shortwave radiation (sunlight) with their Figure 7:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/figure-22.png
Pavlakis et al (2008) also presented the relationship between total cloud cover over the tropical Pacific and downward shortwave radiation there. Link to Pavlakis et al (2008):
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/8/6697/2008/acpd-8-6697-2008-print.pdf
And for those wondering why tropical Pacific cloud cover drops during La Niñas: sea surface temperatures there cool during La Niñas as a result of the increase in upwelling—caused by the stronger-than-normal trade winds. As a result of the cooler sea surface temperatures, there’s less evaporation, convection and cloud cover. The stronger-than-normal trade winds during the La Niñas also push the cloud cover farther to the west, causing less cloud cover over the tropical Pacific. Less cloud cover means more sunlight reaches and penetrates the tropical Pacific to depth, as described by Trenberth et al (2002).
Hence, Kristian’s statement “Also, you might perhaps have heard of something called ‘The Sun’.â€
Now the discharge phase:
The discharge described by Trenberth et al (2002) is evident in two subsets.
The first portion is the East Pacific sea surface temperature data (90S-90N, 180-80W).
More ENSO basics: Warm surface and subsurface waters from the west Pacific warm pool slosh into the East Pacific during an El Niño. At the end of the El Niño, the leftover warm waters (ENSO residuals) are redistributed back to the western Pacific. La Niña events are exaggerated “normal conditions†so stronger-than-normal trade winds cause more upwelling of cool subsurface waters along the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. As a result, the sea surface temperatures for the East Pacific (which covers 33% of the surface of the global oceans) warm in response to El Niños and cool in response to La Niñas, but over the past 31 years show little to no long-term trend:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/figure-7.png
The above three graphs (and the Pavlakis illustration) are from the following post:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/open-letter-to-the-royal-meteorological-society-regarding-dr-trenberths-article-has-global-warming-stalled/
I mentioned warm water left over from El Niños in the above discussion. Those leftover warm waters, and their aftereffects, are blatantly obvious, and portray themselves as the slow-moving Rossby wave after the 1997/98 El Niño, in the following animation of sea level residuals from JPL:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/animation-3-1.gif
The second portion of the discharge phase mentioned by Trenberth et al (2002) is evident in the upward steps in the sea surface temperatures of the South Atlantic, Indian and West Pacific Oceans. http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/figure-9-8.png
Unlike the East Pacific, the sea surface temperatures for the South Atlantic, Indian and West Pacific Oceans warmed, but in a very curious way.
(1) The primary causes of the warming of the sea surface temperatures of the South Atlantic-Indian-West Pacific Oceans were the strong El Niño events of 1986/87/88 and 1997/98…and, possibly, of 2009/10. The responses of this region to those El Niños are highlighted in red in the above graph.
(2) The sea surface temperatures cooled slowly—they did not warm—between the strong El Niño events.
And (3) the sea surface temperatures of that region did not cool proportionally during the La Niñas that trailed those strong El Niños. The responses of the South Atlantic-Indian-West Pacific Ocean data to the La Niñas that trailed the strong El Ninos are highlighted in blue. The reason they did not cool proportionally during the La Niñas is also very basic: the ENSO residuals (the leftover warm water) from the strong El Niños prevented the cooling of the sea surface temperatures of the South Atlantic-Indian-West Pacific Oceans.
The end result was that the sea surface temperatures of the South Atlantic-Indian-West Pacific Oceans warmed in very clear upward steps in response to the strong El Niños. And the causes of the upward steps are the leftover warm waters from the El Niño events, part of the discharge mode mentioned by Trenberth et al (2002).
The last graph is from my latest (upcoming) book.
Trenberth et al (2002) described the process. They just didn’t account for the warm waters left over from the 1986/76/88 and 1997/98 El Niño events. That’s not surprising. Trenberth et al (2002) acknowledged that the statistical tools they used could not account for ENSO residuals.
(There’s nothing miraculous about it, Carrick. ENSO basics. I suspect you’ve never tried to understand what I’ve been presenting for 4+ years. It’s all very simple, once you take the time to understand.)
Additionally, on this thread, there was some criticism of Kristian’s statement, “The entire global warming in two abrupt hikes.â€
Curiously, Kevin Trenberth recently acknowledged those same upward steps. He called them “big jumps†in his article for the Royal Meteorological Society:
http://www.rmets.org/weather-and-climate/climate/has-global-warming-stalled
I linked my response to that article above.
Y’all have a nice holiday weekend.
Bob Tisdale,
From the paper:
METHODS SUMMARY
We used the Hadley Centre–Climate Research Unit combined land SAT and SST (HadCRUT) version 4.1.1.0 (ref. 23), the Hadley Centre mean SLP data set version 2 (HadSLP2, ref. 24) and monthly precipitation data fromthe Global Precipitation ClimatologyProject (GPCP) version 2.2 (ref. 25).We examined three sets of coupled model experiments based on the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory coupled model version 2.1 (ref. 8). HIST is forced by historical radiative forcing for 1861–2005 and Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 (RCP4.5) for 2006–2040, based on Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5, ref. 26). In POGA-HandPOGA-C experiments, SSTis restored to themodel climatology plus historical anomaly by a Newtonian cooling over the deep tropical eastern Pacific. The restoring timescale is 10 days for a 50-m-deep mixed layer. Figures 2b and 3b shows the region where SST is restored; within the inner box the ocean surface heat flux is fully overridden, while in the buffer zone between the inner and outer boxes, the flux is blended with the model-diagnosed one. In POGA-H, radiative forcing is identical to HIST, whereas it is fixed at 1990 values in POGA-C. The three experiments consist of ten member runs each.
By eye, the inner box seems to run from 15N to 15S and from the coast to 180W. The outer box is about 5 degrees further out in all directions.
Bob–
Yes. We’ve all read your stuff, and it’s interesting as far as it goes.
(1) I have no idea whether that was what Kristian meant by “the Sun”.
(2) I note that you, unlike Kristian, are not saying anything about what this has to do with AGW or CO2 inducing warming.
(3) Overall, I think all the detail your write about what happens with ENSO is interesting, but with respect to any conclusions on whether CO2 is causing warming, my reaction is, ‘Uhm…. so?’
(4) If one were to claim that all this details means AGW is not true (which Kristian seems to do, but you seem not to do) then one would need to explain why the net effect of the ‘recharge/restoration’ has been upward– as predicted by AGW– and not neutral. (So for example, you note “(2) The sea surface temperatures cooled slowly—they did not warm—between the strong El Niño events.” If this is recharge/restoration, why didn’t the TAS cool more that it actually cooled before popping up? After all: what you describe is precisely what we would see if slow positive warming is superimposed on ‘pops up with cooling’ in a ‘recharge/restoration’ mechanism )
But you don’t provide such an explanation for why the net effect has been warming– which is fine since you don’t make the claim this disproves AGW. But Kristian does make that claim and so needs to explain why more cooling didn’t occur between the ‘up’ events.
So it seems to me all this detail is interesting. But nothing about the explanation means all of warming occurs in “jumps”. The net effect can be that there is reduced cooling relative to what would have occurred during “La Nina” and greater “up pops” during the El Ninos. This would then be exactly the same as “Trend + El Nino + other weather”. The two views are simply not remotely inconsistent.
Bob
Note that Trenberth’s graph strongly suggests he doesn’t think the “jumps” and “trend” views are “either/or”
That is to say, it appears he might agree with ” The two views are simply not remotely inconsistent.” This is the point we are making to Kristian. There is nothing about “jumps” that is inconsistent with “trend + noise”. In in context of our conversations with Kristian, pointing this out is necessary because he seems to be trying to insist that if something “looks” like jumps then it cannot be “trend+noise”. But that simply is not the case. It can be “trend + noise”, but owing to the spectral properties of the noise it looks like “flatish + jumps”.
Saint Lucia, the patient saint.
Surely people aren’t arguing that the ENSO has no impact.
It impacts virtually every important atmospheric process there is.
The question is more of “how much and how long”.
Lucia writes “There is nothing about “jumps†that is inconsistent with “trend + noiseâ€.”
Perhaps. If a trend was flat for 100 years and then jumped 1C and then was flat again for 100 years I think you’d agree it was a “jump” so I guess the issue is how long does it need to be flat?
Jonathan Jones: Thanks. Odd that they don’t list the coordinates.
TTTM,
That depends on the temporal extent of whatever processes are causing the “pauses”. These processes will automatically lead to autocorrelated variation on each respective time scale. If for example, the processes operate over ~1 decade, then decade long pauses would be common. Slower processes (eg the AMO) could contribute to “pauses” of longer duration. The common observation that there seems to be a ~60 year cyclical component suggests multi decade long periods of slower and faster warming would be expected. A combination of processes of different durations will lead to a potentially complicated time series, which can appear for varying periods to be disconnected from an underlying secular trend.
TimTheToolMan,
Well… but it hasn’t done that, has it?
And anyway, you left out details required to say whether your 200 year long thing could be seen as “trend+noise”: How large were the oscillations about flat? Was it absolutely, positively flat with no noise? Or was it ‘flat with ±1.2C jiggling around’? And if there was ‘jiggling around type noise”, what did the spectral properties of that noise look like?
Because what you describe as 100 years maybe could just be mimicked by looking a monthly time series of what we really have with two supposed “jumps” spaced more than 100 months apart. And there is nothing about that the monthly time series that does not look like “trend+noise”.
Lucia writes “How large were the oscillations about flat? Was it absolutely, positively flat with no noise? Or was it ‘flat with ±1.2C jiggling around’? And if there was ‘jiggling around type noiseâ€, what did the spectral properties of that noise look like?”
Yep. That’s pretty much it. And I expect there is an actual answer along with confidence using some statistics I’m not familiar with…
Lucia says: “(2) I note that you, unlike Kristian, are not saying anything about what this has to do with AGW or CO2 inducing warming.
(3) Overall, I think all the detail your write about what happens with ENSO is interesting, but with respect to any conclusions on whether CO2 is causing warming, my reaction is, ‘Uhm…. so?’
(4) If one were to claim that all this details means AGW is not true (which Kristian seems to do, but you seem not to do) then detail you provide, then one would need to explain why the net effect of the ‘recharge/restoration’ has been upward– as predicted by AGW– and not neutral…â€
Sorry if you were misled by my comment. I’ve searched for more than 4 years and I cannot find any evidence of an AGW component in the warming of ocean heat content or satellite-era sea surface temperatures.
Next: Why would it be neutral? ENSO is chaotic. It has decadal and multidecadal variations, during which El Niño events dominate and then La Niña events dominate. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, ENSO was basically neutral—slightly skewed to La Niña then. Did surface temperatures warm? Nope.
Further, please show me the all of the peer-reviewed climate model-based studies that explain why ENSO should have been neutral over the past 30 years. There are none. After multiple decades of modeling efforts, climate models still cannot simulate the fundamental processes of ENSO. See Guilyardi et al (2009):
http://www.knmi.nl/publications/fulltexts/guilyardi_al_bams09.pdf
And more recently, see Bellenger et al (2013):
http://www.euclipse.eu/Publications/Bellenger_etal_ENSO%20representation%20in%20climate%20models%20from%20CMIP3%20to%20CMIP5.pdf
If you were to read Guilyardi et al (2009) you’d discover the following two things. (1) One of the major flaws they found was that climate modeling groups do not use sunlight properly—they use far too little. And that means they’re trying to force ENSO with downward longwave radiation from AGW, which obviously does not work. (2) Most modeling groups skew their flawed ENSO simulations to neutral conditions (that is, they program the models so that their flawed El Niños are countered by flawed La Niñas). There’s only one reason to do that. It prevents ENSO from contributing to or suppressing global warming.
That’s why Judith Curry found the results of Kosaka and Xie (2013) so surprising. Once the models were forced by actual ENSO signals, the control run illustrated that ENSO contributed to the warming from the mid-1970s to 1998. And it was a major contribution.
Now, a question for you. Looking at the control run of Kosaka and Xie (2013), did ENSO cause surface temperatures to warm or cool from 1950 to 1975?
Got to go. Work to do.
Enjoy your holiday weekend.
The paper’s OHC values don’t jibe with NOAA’s. Does anyone know why?
For example, compare the paper’s 0-700m OHC values (panel d of this figure) with NOAA’s (yearly average here). NOAA shows an increase of about 140 ZJ from 1955-2012, while Kosaka & Xie show an increase of about twice that. There’s a similar discrepancy in K&X’s “total” vs. NOAA’s 0-2000m.
[And by the way, why does NOAA express OHC in 10^22 J, and K&X use 10^23, on their graphs — haven’t they heard of SI? ZJ are perfectly good units.]
Oops, almost forgot:
Lucia says: “Note that Trenberth’s graph strongly suggests he doesn’t think the ‘jumps’ and ‘trend’ views are ‘either/or’â€.
Trenberth was very clear in what he wrote about the “big jumpsâ€:
“Coming back to the global temperature record: the past decade is by far the warmest on record. Human induced global warming really kicked in during the 1970s, and warming has been pretty steady since then. But while the overall warming is about 0.16°C per decade, there are 3 10-year periods where there was a hiatus in warming. From 1977 to 1986, from 1987 to 1996, and from 2001-2012. But at each end of these periods there were big jumps.â€
He then goes on to describe how the long-term trend is important–not the short-term hiatus periods and the big jumps. But, like much of AGW, his logic is flawed because he failed to explain the hiatus periods and the big jumps. If you can’t explain the hiatus periods and the big jumps, then you can’t claim the long-term warming was a response to AGW.
Regards
Bob Tisdale
Ok. But Kristian seems to be saying the “jump” view disproves AGW, which is a stronger statement than “I cannot find evidence”. Are you saying anything stronger that “I cannot find any evidence”. Because if you are, you have quite a bit more to show.
Why would I need to find such papers? I haven’t claimed it ‘should have been’ nor even that it ‘was’.
I don’t know what you think my position is here. I am simply saying that
(a) the trend+noise and (b) jump+’noisy flat’ are not either or. It can be both. So the fact that one might ‘see’ “jump+’noisy flat'” does not mean that the ‘trend+noise’ view is incorrect. That view simply does not disprove the notion that a trend exists.
I know you like your theories, but that doesn’t mean I am required to accept more than you have actually shown and my not accepting more than you have shown does not mean I am required to prove more than I have claimed.
I don’t know. And I don’t think you know either.
What we do know: TAS increased– or warmed. But I don’t know if this was caused by ENSO. That is: in this simulation, the fact of warming may not tell us much (or even anything) about the cause of the warming.
Question for you: Is their methodology forcing neutral? Or do they mathemagically inject or extract heat based on the surface temperatures. Because it’s still not clear to me that the compensation is correct. (Mind you, it’s laborday weekend. So I haven’t poured over it. But have you?
And if you have poured over it, is the methodology heat flux neutral? Or does the methodology inject or suck out heat depending on ENSO conditions? If you do not know the answer to that then you do not know if ENSO caused the warming (or later non-warming)
If the methodology is not heat flux neutral more-or-less instantaneously the multi-decadal warming that seems to be ’caused’ by ENSO could be an artifact of the numerical method. In which case, the warming in the “natural variability” case would tell us almost (or possibly absolutely) nothing about whether ENSO can drive multi-decadal warming.
This is not to say that many results of the numerical experiment might not be interesting– but it would mean the claim that ENSO caused warming or cooling would not be supported even if other claims about blocking highs and such like were correct.
Bob Tisdale,
disagree with Trenberth. It’s another thing to say that what he says somehow means “jumps + flat” is inconsistent with “trend +plus noise”. In fact, you know that he thinks these are not inconsistent because you go on to criticize him for explaining that the long term trend exists even while saying things can look like jumps!!
If you want to advance the notion that “jumps + flat” are somehow inconsistent with “trend + noise”, you really can’t use Trenberth as an example of someone who agrees with you on this point. Because he clearly thinks these views are not inconsistent. And that is so even if you think his logic is flawed.
Bob Tisdale–
Think a little more: with respect to the argument about whether the data look like “jump+flat” vs. “trend+noise” and whether it’s an either/or question, I have no idea why you are going on about climate models. Whether ‘trend+noise’ can look like “jumps+flat” has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what the ability of climate models to correctly describe ENSO nor what modelers might do to fix things up if they models don’t get that right. In fact: this issue doesn’t even have much to do with the paper I discussed in the main post.
It is simply the case that something looking like “flatish + jumps” does not disprove “trend+noise”. Trend + noise can look like flat + jumps and this is easily shown as in the graph above.
I am not sure what forcing “flat” trends onto the historical observed or modeled temperature series means by way of any physical manifestations of the climate. If one wants to go with linear trends I would think that using breakpoints and linear segments might be more appropriate. When I do this treatment with observed and modeled data, I see increasing temperatures due to the cumulative trends in the linear segments and also due the “jumps” from the end of one linear segment to the beginning of the following linear segment. Most of the overall upward trend is the result of segment trends, but a significant portion is due to the “jumps”. Again using this approach does not get us any closer to an explanation of the physics behind what we observe, but it does perhaps add some insight about possibilities, like regime changes in the climate.
Besides using linear segments I have used various loess filters to smooth the temperature series from the CMIP5 Historical temperature series and found that the variation of the model trends (as defined as the first temperature of the first linear segment or the filter smooth and the last temperature of the last linear segment or the filter smooth dived by the time) within multiple model runs are greater with the linear segments and the smoothing filters than with a single linear regression over the entire 1964-2012 time period. I do not know what the significance of these differences are by way of different trend measuring methods except to show there are differences and perhaps start a discussion as to what might be a more appropriate way of measuring trends in these temperature series.
Kenneth–
To some extent, I think whether it’s appropriate to model the observed data with a single trend or something else depends on the hypothesis you want to test or idea you want to explore. There isn’t a “right” answer that results in one and only one ‘model’ on must use to explore what the data mean.
HaroldW (Comment #119186),
“Does anyone know why?”
I suspect the difference is due to the model they used (like most GCMs) overestimating the ocean heat uptake, in this case by about a factor of two. This of course means that the model continues to respond relatively weakly to GHG forcing, (an extra ~0.6 watt of GHG forcing ‘disappears’ into the oceans), in spite of high diagnosed climate sensitivity. Nothing new there; the modelers probably would argue that the ocean heat data are wrong and the models are right, as they have in the past. I am more than a little skeptical of that argument.
SteveF(#119193) –
That was my first thought, that the model had too much heat going into the ocean. In which case, what meaning can we attach to what such a model does when we force the tropical Pacific temperature? Won’t it still be way off in terms of its ocean modeling? Is this another argument similar to the one which says it’s fine for models to be inaccurate in absolute temperature as long as they can match in anomaly?
Speaking of OHC, if scientists with as disparate views as Pielke Sr. and Trenberth agree that it’s a better metric of GW than surface temperatures, we ought to have OHC projections from CMIP5, which we — by which I mean Lucia 😉 — can compare to NOAA’s measurements as an indicator of accuracy of the models. I couldn’t find any, but perhaps they’re present but I missed them.
HaroldW–
As far as I am aware, no one has put together an OHC projection from CMIP5. It would require downloading all the run — and probably gridded data– and then doing computations. Also, for all I know, it might not be possible depending on the ocean in the model. I have never looked into the ocean component and I don’t actually know how carefully the geometry of the bottom of the ocean is treated and such like.
Bill Illis (Comment #119179)
September 1st, 2013 at 7:14 am Edit This
Sorry your comment got held up.
I’m certainly not arguing ENSO has no impact and I don’t think anyone else here is. People are merely disagreeing with Kristian who is identifying a partricular pattern of “flat with jumps” and suggesting that means things like
Which seems to suggest all (or nearly all ) the warming is ENSO and this
Which suggests that he thinks the notion a trend exists has been disproven and/or that what we are seeing cannot be “trend+noise”.
In fact: whatever interesting things ENSO may do, and whatever amount of warming one might think is due to ENSO, the observations are at a minimum not inconsistent with the existence of an underlying trend.
That is to say: No one is suggesting ENSO does nothing.
What this argument is about is people (including me) objecting to Kristian’s a characterization which seems to be that the observed warming is known to be 100% ENSO or at least very close to 100% ENSO or something like that .
Harold,
“In which case, what meaning can we attach to what such a model does when we force the tropical Pacific temperature? ”
.
IMO, not much. If cows could fly, practical considerations suggest umbrellas would be designed sturdier than they are. 😉
.
Unless all the model deficiencies are simultaneous addressed and explained, band-aid fixes aren’t terribly informative. We know already that there is a clear dependence of global average temperature on the tropical pacific anomaly, with global average temps tracking at a rate of about 0.1 times the tropical Pacific anomaly, with some delay of course. So setting the tropical Pacific temperatures to match actual values pretty much has to make the models look much better. That doesn’t fix problems like incorrect OHC changes.
Harold writes “Speaking of OHC, if scientists with as disparate views as Pielke Sr. and Trenberth agree that it’s a better metric of GW than surface temperatures, we ought to have OHC projections from CMIP5, which we — by which I mean Lucia — can compare to NOAA’s measurements as an indicator of accuracy of the models. I couldn’t find any, but perhaps they’re present but I missed them.”
.
Its been a bugbear of mine for years. Every year in Jan or Feb, Gavin at Real Climate does another comparison between model results and observations. Every year I ask him to provide an actual model OHC vs measured comparison but every year he simply draws an arbitrary cherry picked line “extrapolating” what the models might have done.
He tells me that he doesn’t have the data to hand. He tells me someone else has made this important comparison…just not him.
What I learn from that is that the model based OHC is very likely to not even be close to what is observed and it would be embarrasing for the warming enthusiasts and modellers if it was shown.
I’ve no doubt they’ll have got their “curve fitting” act together by AR5 though.
Lucia writes “If the methodology is not heat flux neutral more-or-less instantaneously the multi-decadal warming that seems to be ’caused’ by ENSO could be an artifact of the numerical method.”
.
And the obvious test for this would be to do more runs forcing other areas of ocean and maybe land (about 8% at a time) to follow historical temeperatures. If the result is the same improved temperature trend comparrison then there would be a strong argument that the trend correction was “forced” by injected/removed heat.
I’m sure the authors would have thought of that though?
TTM
Well, but this doesn’t really work because pinning the temperature some places will result in more ‘numerically injected or extracted heat’ than others (for reasons I noted very early in this thread. ) See lucia (Comment #119070)
The thing to investigate is the equations in the paper. I haven’t done that yet.
Lucia writes “The thing to investigate is the equations in the paper. I haven’t done that yet.”
Well I would be surprised if they banked any excess energy and withdrew when needed. That would always leave an imbalance and not really be any better than simply adding and subtracting when needed.
Clearly they thought about this. If I were doing it, I’d make it energy neutral at all times (perhaps some lag allowed) and I have no reason to expect they’ve introduced such an obvious flaw.
My guess would be they averaged the energy out across the globe so there would be a very small change everywhere.
“The fact that the IPCC has (incorrectly IMO) declared only post 1975 warming due to GHG forcing is not terribly important”
It’s very important and it would be physically implausible if anthropgenic CO2 had any effect before the middle of the 20th century, assuming CO2 has any significant warming effect at all, which I think is nonsense.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v2/n1/images_article/nclimate1332-f1.jpg
Just compare.
TTTM (#119205) –
The equations are presented in an earlier comment by Pekka (#119079). Over the forced region, the energy flux calculated by the model, is replaced by an energy flux calculated to change the temperature anomaly of the top 50m of ocean, over a period of 10 days, to the forced value. There’s an additional feature, namely a buffer zone around the forced region, in which the change in flux is tapered to zero. Everywhere else, no change.
So no banking of energy, and the method is not energy-neutral. Comparing panels c and d of Extended Data Figure 3, one can see that by 2000, around 200 ZJ have been injected into the system. However, by 2012 that has been largely removed.
[I’d be interested in seeing a chart of the energy imbalance, (c) minus (d), which unfortunately is not in the supplementary data. Does someone have one of those handy-dandy graph digitizers to provide the numeric content of those plots?]
Edim,
The graphic you linked to compares carbon emissions to the carbon intensity of the US economy (g carbon per dollar GDP). I am not sure how you are interpreting that graph, but it doesn’t say anything about how historical warming is related to GHGs in the atmosphere.
.
With regard to the rest: Some people obviously do not understand that you can’t simply wave your arms and declare radiative physics do not have anything to do with GHGs and Earth’s surface temperature. Your understanding, or more accurately, lack thereof, of the physical processes involved has been clearly stated, and more than once. But you should not expect to convince people who do not share that lack of understanding (including most who have actually done science and engineering) of your rather bizarre conclusions about GHGs. I am sure your lack of understanding and your conclusions are warmly embraced and supported by many of the denizens at some climate blogs, at least those who, like you, have not a clue what they are talking about.
SteveF, just compare what we emit now (these years) with what we emitted ~50 or ~100 years ago. It’s peanuts compared to now. It’s insignificant.
Radiative physics is just a part of the story – Earth’s surface temperature is driven by (multimodal) heat exchange at the surface, which includes the pre-dominant non-radiative heat transfer. There’s no radiative balance at the Earth’s surface. Radiative physics is handwaving.
Edim,
That should have been “global economy”, not “US economy”.
Edim,
” Radiative physics is handwaving.”
.
Thanks for that insight; laughter is good for the soul.
Harold writes “The equations are presented in an earlier comment by Pekka”
Ah yes. I dont know how I missed that post actually. So they dont balance the energy budget and actually say “We note that the energy budget is not closed in POGA-H.”
Well IMO thats just silly.
SteveF, when it comes to the Earth’s surface energy budget, radiative physics is handwaving, because it ignores the non-radiative surface fluxes.
HaroldW (Comment #119208)
The effect of this would be that some of what happens outside the forced region is “caused” by the surface temperature being warmer (or colder) relative to the ‘rest’ of the planet irrespective or the cause of the excess (or deficit) temperature and other portions of what happens may be due to the extra energy added (or subtracted).
What this would mean is that observations like blocking highs etc. would be interesting– and would tell us something about models. But attribution of any overall ‘warming’ or ‘cooling’ being caused by El Nino or La Nina respectively should be done very cautiously. Because the one thing we do know in models is that if we shove in heat, the temperature will generally rise. If we pull it out, the temperature will fall. This is generally true for systems as well. Some exceptions can occur– those exceptions are ‘interesting’ and involve regime changes in heat transfer for a particular system. (BTW: interesting regime changes could be very bad for earth weather. Sort of like the Chinese curse ‘may you live in interesting times’.)
Edim,
“when it comes to the Earth’s surface energy budget, radiative physics is handwaving, because it ignores the non-radiative surface fluxes”
.
Who do you imagine is ignoring non-radiative fluxes? It is broadly agreed that all fluxes must be considered, including radiative GHG influence at all altitudes in the atmosphere. And yes, increasing GHGs most certainly do reduce upward radiative flux at all levels for the same temperature.
SteveF, I see many people talking about radiative physics and radiative balance and then more or less ignoring the surface non-radiative heat losses (latent and sensible heat or evaporation and convection). There’s no radiative balance at the surface, not even close – about 60% of the surface cooling is latent and sensible heat and not LWIR radiation (30/51 according to my NASA link).
Regarding reduction in upward radiative flux, I’m not so sure (increasing GHGs also increases atmospheric emissivity), and furthermore increasing GHGs could also increase non-radiative surface cooling. All in all, to me it seems that the surface energy budget problem is not solved properly. On the face of it, I think it’s the bulk of the atmosphere (N2 and O2) that insulates the surface, by not being able to efficiently radiate the gained energy to space. I could be wrong of course, but that’s my understanding, on the face of it.
Edim,
N2 and O2 do not absorb a significant quantity of infrared. They are almost completely transparent at all infrared wavelengths. So as insulators they are not a good choice… radiative cooling would dominate in an atmosphere of pure N2 or O2 E:. Now, water vapor, CO2, and other infrared absorbing gases make much better insulators, since they block infrared. Simple, right? Oh yes, with the addition of more infrared absorbing gases, the atmosphere becomes a marginally better insulator, thus warming the surface. The issue is NOT if GHG warm the Earth’s surface. It has always been a question of how much.
Harold writes “The equations are presented in an earlier comment by Pekkaâ€
OK so I’ve thought about this some more and I think the issue of energy balance isn’t as bad as I first thought.
What I would have preferred is that the parameter used to control cloud condensation be dynamically tweaked within sensible plausible ranges to more naturally create the required fluxes by altering clouds in the region.
In the absense of proper physics determining cloud creation that could, for all intents and purposes, also result in an energy neutral result.
Its still all curve fitting though. Just more obvious when an outcome is aimed at…
“N2 and O2 do not absorb a significant quantity of infrared.”
Agree, but they ‘absorb’ a very significant heat from the surface by non-radiative heat exchange, which they cannot significantly radiate to space, only via the radiatively active gases.
Yet another paper that (sort-of) supports the Tisdale hypothesis.
http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=27382
Steve Ta,
In two sentences or less what precisely is “the Tisdale hypothesis”?
I would suggest that if one can’t state a hypothesis in two sentences or less, then there is no hypothesis. (Note: the argument or data in favor of ‘the hypothesis’ would not be part of the hypothesis.)
I would suggest that it is also important that “the hypothesis” be stated so that (a) we can test it and (b) we can figure out if we agree or disagree with it.
After all, if “the Tisdale hypothesis” is that ENSO merely affects or masks the trend– skewing it upward or downward some unknown amount, that isn’t just the “Tisdale” hypothesis. Nearly everyone agrees with that.
If, on the other hand, “the Tisdale hypothesis” is that ENSO is that the entireapparent trend since 197X is caused by ENSO condistions, well… I haven’t actually read Tisdale saying that– though Kristian seems to claim it. Moreover, even Frietas aren’t claiming ENSO is the entire trend. They write
and in the body of the paper
Which — once again– only attributes some entirely unknown fraction of warming to ENSO. So, Frietas and McLena aren’t saying anything especially controversial here. Most people think ENSO has some effect on the computed longer term trends though their notions of the mechanism may vary.
So… as far as I can tell, Frietas and McLean aren’t supporting the “Tisdale” hypothesis — unless the “Tisdale” hypothesis is the rather weak statement which could be equally well desribed as “what almost everyone including Tisdale thinks.”
Edim,
Do a thought experiment: What would the earth be like if there were no water or CO2 in the atmosphere? No water means no oceans, so daytime solar heating of the dry surface would lead to rising temperatures. Radiational cooling during the day would limit temperatures to a maximum of the point where solar influx balanced outgoing LW. There would be some limited convective cooling, but not much, since an atmosphere which does not absorb much IR neither can emit much IR. So the potential temperature in the atmosphere aloft would approach the daytime high temperature, and then stay there. (There would be some large scale circulation between high and low latitudes, which would help to keep the low latitudes a bit cooler and high latitude a bit warmer.) At night, strong radiational cooling would rapidly drop surface temperatures, setting up a stable boundary layer of cold air, with somewhat warmer air (in a potential temperature sense) above, which would have no influence on the surface temperature, because it does not radiate much IR. This Earth would be much colder on average, but with large day/night temperature swings. Adding CO2 would act to reduce day/night temperature changes and would reduce surface radiative losses because the atmosphere above would both absorb and re-radiate some IR. In effect, the GHGs allow coupling of the surface temperatures to the atmospheric temperatures, effectively increasing the surface heat capacity because both the surface and air aloft must be warmed and cooled, and because “back-radiation” from the atmosphere inhibits loss of heat directly to space. Yes, more convective cooling of the surface would take place with added CO2, but the convection just means that somexradiative loss to space then must take place at a lower temperature (well above the surface)… and cooler ‘objects’ (even gases) emit less at a lower temperature. So on net, adding GHGs MUST lead to both smaller daily temperature swings and warmer average temperatures due to lower loss of heat from the surface. The exact amount of warming due to GHGs added to the real Earth’s atmosphere, with water and clouds, is more complicated, of course, but the direction of the effect must ALWAYS be positive. The real question is not if adding GHGs will warm the surface, it is how much. When someone suggests that adding GHGs will not warm the Earth’s surface, it simply means that person does not understand the basics of the processes involved.
Lucia,
Mr. Tisdale appears to claim (like Kristian) that 1) there is no evidence of rising GHGs causing warming, and 2) all, or virtually all, warming during the instrumental period, including flat-to-slightly-falling periods, was due to the influence of ENSO. When pressed, Mr. Tisdale claims to accept radiative physics, but consistently claims no evidence exists of GHG influence, since everything can be ‘explained’ by ENSO. So I suspect the ‘Tisdale hypothesis’ is not really testable, and is nothing but pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. Pure rubbish. He throws a ton of nonsensical BS at the wall and hopes some of it sticks. Which is why I do not bother with him, or his many minions.
I had some exchanges with Bob Tisdale a couple of years ago on WUWT.
Bob was asserting that temperature shifts occur at the time of strong El Nino events such as 1998, but that between the events the climate was relatively flat. Thus when there is a predominance of such events, as in 1974 to 1998, there appears to be an overall trend but in fact it is flat with shifts (as per Kristian).
My question was this: if you take the “flat with shifts” graph, and rotate it by about 3 degrees clockwise, you get no overall trend, and you see a “pump and relax” type of pattern, which to me made more sense – i.e. the El Nino events bump up the global avg, which then slowly reverts to normal. On top of this, of course, you can then impose a small CO2-induced warming and get the resulting “flat with shifts” pattern.
I wanted to know how you could distinguish these two patterns, as it seemed to me they would appear identical.
The response was that the ENSO induced pattern was sufficient to explain the temperature pattern since 1970 so there was simply no need for the CO2 hypothesis – and this I beleive is the “Tisdale hypothesis.
I persisted, to try and determine how one could tell the two explanations apart using just the temperature measurements. As always happens when you ask awkward questions on WUWT, I started getting flamed from all sides and accused of trolling, etc. so gave up. (this occurs whenever I ask awkward questions on WUWT, so I’ve pretty much given up asking).
Steve Ta,
“this occurs whenever I ask awkward questions on WUWT, so I’ve pretty much given up asking.”
.
Indeed; I have given up as well.
Steve Ta
If so: (1) The Freitas and McLean paper doesn’t say anything like this. Which mean (2) it is not “support” of ‘the Tisdale Hypothesis’.
Which then… means… what? After all: it is rather obvious that if “ENSO” was a pure “recharge and restoration” involving sudden “bursts” that slowly declined (as the blue below) and we superimposed a trend (orange below), the graph would look precisely like “flat with shifts” (black below)
They would. See above.
If so, while Freitas and McLean may possibly agree with Tisdale, their paper doesn’t say that. So either (a) they don’t agree with Tisdale or (b) they don’t think the evidence really rules out AGW or (c) they can’t convince reviewers that the positive trend due to AGW is ruled out. But the upshot is: At least the peer reviewed paper as written does not rule out (or even say there is ‘no need for’ the AGW idea.) So: the paper gives no support for the ‘no AGW’ idea.
In anycase with respect to this “there was simply no need for the CO2 hypothesis” if that’s what he claims (and certainly what he says in comments here suggests he thinks it) he has really shown anything to let us know whether there is any “need” for it. Because (a) his methods don’t quantify anything– especially not the magnitude of effect one would expect from repeated ENSOs and (b) temperature have risen– though unsteadily– since the the 1900s, not merely this “two up steps” period.
The answer is. ‘You can’t.’ But it’s not even on issue of just temperature measurements. The two just aren’t either or (see graph above.)
Anyway the “step plus flat” isn’t counter evidence to “trend plus noise” — it wouldn’t be even if we had a very long stairway with repeated steps up and down. The AGW would then be the “reason” for all (or most) the steps go “up” with none “down”. But it’s not at all clear that seeing things in “up & flat” is ever any better than “trend plus noise”.
I guess we’ll find out if the next 40 years hadsa “drop plus flat” pattern. Clearly an endless excess of El Ninos cannot result in endless steps upwards without some additional energy input from somewhere ;(
I actually wish Bob would engage and state clearly what his hypothesis is, and why he thinks his demonstration the effect of ENSO on climate is counter-evidence to CO2 have an influence on climate, if he really thinks that.
In the mean time, it is very easy to fool ones-self when looking at tends + oscillatory behavior, and deriving from that appartently constant periods (e.g. “stair-stepping”).
Here’s a simple example of sin + trend, where you end up with flat ~2.5-year periods. The secular trend is 2°C/century (0.02°/yr) and the “ENSO” amplitude is 0.015°C.
figure.
In a more realistic climate, ENSO amplitude would vary, period would vary and the secular trend would vary–and you’d still end up with extended periods where the amplitude was relatively flat…. they just wouldn’t be periodic.
Carrick,
“I actually wish Bob would engage and state clearly what his hypothesis is, and why he thinks his demonstration the effect of ENSO on climate is counter-evidence to CO2 have an influence on climate, if he really thinks that.”
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I am pretty sure that really is what he thinks, but the only argument seems to be that there is “no need” to use GHG forcing to “explain” warming, so therefore GHG driven warming must be zero, or nearly so. That he believes his mountains of ocean data somehow shows ENSO is the cause for all temperature changes is very odd indeed. With regard to engaging with a substantive argument on causal effects, I have never seen him present one, so don’t expect that to happen.
Steve Ta,
One would think not.
But really, in the end, as complicated and detailed as Tisdale’s discussions are, they amount to “Natural variability is large”.
Well… yes. Obviously, if he doesn’t quantify and doesn’t quite say that there is no AGW effect, but merely says stuff like
Then one gets the impression that he’s suggesting that the AGW component is not there. After all he’s searched for more than 4 years.
But meanwhile, he hasn’t actually said he think his stuff shows it is not there. So my reaction to all that is that there is very little to engage there. After all: Yes. ENSO exists. Yes, interesting things happen with water upwelling, spreading out, flowing. Yes, it’s warm during El Nino events and cool during La Nina events and TAS logs the diagonsis of ENSO in the tropical pacific. And so on and so on.
But with respect to AGW: So? All this may mean something and it’s useful to know whether we seem to have had enough ENSO cycles or anomalous ones when attributing a trend to AGW. But I haven’t seen anything in anything Tisdale writes to quantify. At least if one does a correlation of SOI (or whatever you like) vs TAS you can get an empirical estimate of the effect. And we know if you do that, a trend remains. So, no matter how complicated and beautiful the water motions associated with ENSO might be, there really isn’t any evidence to suggests it’s enough to explain all of the trend!
The Tisdale hypothesis? I’ll attempt to define it as best I understand it. I do believe he holds a piece of the climate puzzle but it is a very big puzzle.
[ ENSO is a climate process that facilitates increased ocean warming in equatorial regions through changes in wind, currents and cloud patterns (albedo) during El Nino, and transports this ocean heat northward to the polar region during La Nina where most of earths heat is lost to the space.]
Periods of high ENSO activity (1978-1998) result in rising global average temps with more solar heat being absorbed by equatorial oceans. Periods of low ENSO activity (2000-2013) result in attenuated equatorial ocean heating and no global average temp increases. There is significant lag time 3-10 years between equatorial ocean heat capture and polar region heat release which complicates testing this hypothesis if indeed I captured Tisdale’s thoughts. I don’t think this nullifies AGW but it offers some explanation of natural variability that we can observe and was essentially overlooked by AR4.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
ivp0,
Is the part between [] a Tisdale quote and the rest of it you?
I don’t think ENSO is overlooked by AR4 (or any document.) I think the fact that wind and currents are different during El Nino vs. La Nina is pretty well recognized. Whether there is net heat gain to the system caused by El Nino during El Ninos and heat loss caused by La Nina during La Nina is difficult to tell and I don’t think Bob has shown this is the case either on earth or in models. (This is not to say it doesn’t happen. Nor that he hasn’t done it. Only that I haven’t seen it. So if someone has seen it, they could point to that specific bit preferably providing me a link and quote so I can find that bit within all the qualitative descriptions of water moving around the planet.)
Anyway even if the fact of El Nino causes the earth to gain heat during El Nino, to attribute a longer term secular trend to recent El Nino’s or to figure out how much of the trend is due to this we would need to ENSO component of heat loss or gain quantified‘. I haven’t seen quantititive estimate under this (which again is not to say they don’t exist.)
But movies showing warm water spreading out from the tropics and reaching the arctic don’t just quantify this on their own.) And my general sense is that proponents of the “water moves from the tropics to the poles” don’t attempt to quantify how much that should affect the heat balance during the episodes. That is: I haven’t seen any attempt to quantify.
Admittedly, at a certain point, I end up not reading the discussions about how the water moves. Because… I end up anticipating no one will quantify. But if someone has do so, I urge those who believe the argument is convinceing to
(a) link to article where something is quantified AND
(b) post some quotes so I can find the ‘bits’ that are quantified AND
(c) explain in your own words the estimated magnitude of the trend due to ENSO during a partiucular period (e.g. “ENSO contribure .01 c/dec out of the 0.15C/dec trend– replacing the numbers with whatever you estimate for whatever periods.)
Parts (b) and (c) of the task are required as “bread crumbs” — because I don’t want to be sent to a very, very, very long post discussing tons of qualitative stuff (which may be both interesting and correct) and have to guess which bits the person who is convinced think represent “quantifying”. I don’t want to be insulting, but there are a wide range of people here. And some do not understand the distinction between interesting qualitative descriptions and quantitative estimates. And with respect to what anything Tisdale talks about “means” relative to theories about AGW we need to quantify not just discuss pretty pictures or flows of warm surface water.
I think Lucia hits the rub of it… simply because a mechanism for heat energy transport is plausible, and even if it is shown to be physically realizable, isn’t enough to demonstrate that this mechanism is the dominant mechanism responsible for heat energy gain/loss in the atmosphere.
It does seem that Bob believes that because he has a mechanism that (theoretically) could explain the observed warming from 1970-now, that the onus is now on others to prove that his suggestions about ENSO (not really models) isn’t real or isn’t the dominant mechanism.
I think, however, that most people would agree that the onus remains on the person proposing an idea to demonstrate its viability as a mechanism for long-term global warming. Like others, I’ve advanced the notion that he needs to have a quantitative model, since as long as you leave it qualitative, almost anything can be made to seem plausible, given the right graphs and rhetoric…
just wondering whether the Foster-Rahmstorf(sic) model counts – whereby adjusting observed temperatures for ENSO events and volcanoes means that the climate models are “right” – means that Tisdale and the warmists are in agreement.
I accept that this is a rhetorical question and so waits for punishment.
Diogenes, you failed to put the question mark in. So perhaps you will live. For now. 😉
I haven’t seen anybody on this blog that liked Foster-Rahmstorf (no sic). At least it was quantitative, if wrong. Provably false is always better than “non-falsifiable” which is where Tisdale’s work is right now, as far as I can I tell.
Speaking of Tamino, there’s a bit of back and forth between him & Judith, including a criticism of some of his misreadings of Kosalka Xie’s paper.
Link.
People that like certain answers seem to work overtime to find them, even when it involves erroneous interpretations of other people’s works.
Diogenese
I think Foster-Rahmstor doesn’t discuss models. They just discuss trend is not 0… right?
I agree with Carrick on Tamino’s paper.Foster-Rahmstorf is quantitative. I don’t like the paper. I’d put it in with some of the Scafetta stuff which is also quantitative but to some extent curve fitting. But both are quantitative and can be tested against data in that sense.
Sorry guys/gals, work got in the way. Yes the brackets [ ] are my best guess at his developing hypothesis.
You are right Lucia that B. Tisdale has not quantified his understanding of ENSO in a way that can be tested and compared with other easily tested and measured climate metrics. He is not there yet and may never get there. I am not sure how this process could be measured exactly and yet he has demonstrated that ENSO is a complex heat transfer mechanism and not just a simple temp oscillation in the tropics as many climate scientists have described it. Pseudoscience? Maybe. Or perhaps the earliest awareness of a process that is a key player in global climate.
This process may be an area for future study if only to better understand natural climate variation. I see no evidence to suggest that the Tisdale ENSO process nullifies what we know about AGW.
ivp0,
I haven’t suggested pseudoscience. Merely that with zero quantification, it’s just interesting ramblings about how water moves around. Since it’s about a physical phenomena and it’s based on observations, it falls in the realm of science. But lots of science tells us very little about climate sensitivity, the trajectory of global warming and so on. And until Bob makes at least a teensy beensy attempt at quantification the contribution of all this water motion (and assumed effect on cloudcover?) statements like
should, from a science POV be considered disconnected from any of his lengthy discussion of the ENSO.
Moreover, the “jump+flat” idea can easily be shown to in no way contradict the “trend plus noise” idea. Both Carrick and I have independent proofs they are “not inconsistent” with each other, in the form of graphs. Here’s mine where I tried to create a perfectly recharging-discharging “ENSO”+trend
Here’s Carrick’s with perfectly sinusoidal ‘noise’.
These are just two over simplified examples of noise types that, when added to a trend, can look like “flat + jumps”. It isn’t remotely difficult to find them. And the fact that the only answer to this seems to be “But it’s really, really, really just ‘flat+jump'” or ENSO is really complicated, water flows around and affects heat transfer, is rather lame. Because everyone agrees surface waters move around during ENSO and that warm surface waters moving around affects heat transfer. Moreover, it might affect cloud cover, having an additional effect. But does it have an effect that is quantitatively relevant to AGW? Who knows. You certainly can’t tell from anything Tisdale presents. Based on the lack of any attempt to quantify on his part, the effect of all this motion might be miniscule– with a magnitude 10-10 that of the trend. Or it might be overwhelming with a magnitude 10+10 that of AGW. And you can change that 10 to a 100 and my observation would be the same.
And the fact is: if all this complicated water motion and hypothesized effect on cloud cover was dominant, the effect should be evident in a correlation between ENSO indices and global surface temperatures. Simple regressions of ENSO indices on global surface temperatures suggest that all this motion may constitute something on the order of more than 10% but less than 50% of the trend.
And moreover, the remaining trend remains statistically significant relative to zero. So I don’t know why Tisdale is unable to find a trend after supposedly looking for 4 years. It certainly seems to be there.
I have not been following in close detail the conjectures being put forth by the those in the climate science community, like Trenberth, on how the deep ocean is capturing the “extra” heat, but I am wondering whether those conjectures are going to be based on the something along the lines of the divergence problem with tree ring width reconstructions. Making the divergence problem a new phenomena and related to AGW was hinted and hand waved and in this way kept the whole argument consistent with AGW whereby the consequences of a past divergence and its effects on temperatures could be ignored.
Are we going to see such conjectures coming out of the climate science community with regards to the heat pathway to the deep oceans being a new phenomena and related to effects of AGW? I know Trenberth has talked about changing wind patterns as part of the phenomena. Is he proposing that as something unique to the recent warming period?
Kenneth–
The ocean heat explanation is post hoc. There is nothing necessarily wrong with post hoc explanations– they are required in science. In fact, many ultimately correct explanations initially start out as post hoc explanations of something observed. That said, it is generally the case that several post hoc explanations will seem equally consistent with data. Often, they should be viewed as suggested explanations. Additional investigation is required to confirm or rebut the suggested explanation. Most post-hoc explanations will turn out to be either entirely or mostly wrong.
So, whenever a new post-hoc explanation is proposed one has to wait a until additional investigations can be performed. When lab experiments are possible, this may just mean someone can get funding and do them within a few years. But in climate, this is not always possible. So we may simply need to wait. After all: this particular explanation is that it’s gone into the ocean in a way that has to do with natural variability. If so, we should see temperature pop up with a vengance in a few years.
Look: I at least already deemed that the model mean in the AR4 was inconsistent with data using AR1 with reality not warming at the projected rate back in 2008. Maybe that noise model wasn’t so hot.. or maybe it’s ok. But all sorts of people ‘confindently’ insisted that things would flip around to the high side on the next El Nino. Well. No. The trends not only never flipped around to to the highside, but the observations have been sitting in the lower half of the AR4 models.
And we wait… it’s now 2013 and the model mean in the AR4 still looks inconsistent with data using AR1 and it’s never flipping to looking inconsistent with warming being ‘too high” relative to models. Moreover, we are now seeing inconsistent even using the model spread to gauge inconsistency. And the AR5 models predict more warming– and so look even worse.
So while it is not impossible that some shift occurred that caused the oceans to mix anomalously and resulted in an anomolously high rate of cooling into the oceans…. really… the models still look to high over a longer periods than explained by this sudden mixing into the deep.
I have not paid a lot of attention to the discussion of the Tisdale conjectures here either, but I have wondered how one gets around the question of treating the temperature series as pure noise (including cyclical events) knowing that the basic physics points to a deterministic trend of some magnitude. Unfortunately I do not think that statistical tools are available that would allow one to show that a trend of even a lengthy duration is not part of the red noise given that the series has high auto correlation or could be part of a series with long term persistence.
Most of the useful temperature series indexes I see, involve detrending and correlating the residuals of a global temperature series and a regional one. If one knows either what is the deterministic trend part or the noise part these determinations are simplified. Physics says there is a deterministic trend of some magnitude and if one assumes the feedback that exists is a net positive, and perhaps a small net positive, then a lower limit for the deterministic trend becomes available. That does not mean that over the instrumental period that noise cannot make finding the magnitude of the deterministic trend difficult.
Obviously if we understood the detailed physics operating here we could get around these statistical limitations. Understanding and learning those physics is something where I do have less faith in a layperson’ conjectures than a so-called expert in the field and what gets published by way of peer review. Seeing examples of the failures of peer review and the conjectures that are published vis a vis peer review and seemingly accepted as reasonable theories after a few progressives hand-offs in the literature is bad enough without an amateur out there throwing out conjectures that will never be challenged unless they attempt to publish evidence for those conjectures or – and I would accept this approach – they can make a convincing argument outside the peer review literature in venues like the blogosphere. The limitation of the blogosphere versus peer review is that crackpots, near crackpots and the unqualified can take away discussion space for those with more legitimate ideas.
lucia (Comment #119264)
September 4th, 2013 at 9:03 am
“So while it is not impossible that some shift occurred that caused the oceans to mix anomalously…”
It might not be anomalous. It could be that due to inertia it takes some years for convection to get rolling. If that were the case, then the ocean surface may continue to show less than expected warming as the heat is convected into the deep. On the other hand, sea-level rise may continue to accelerate (slowly but surely is my guess).
It’s a post-hoc explanation as you would say. Crackpottery as Kenneth would say 🙂
AJ–
I guess by anomolously, I mean an event that results in “weather” that corresponds 20 or so year trends outside the ±95% confidence intervals of actual ‘weather’. That’s what needs to be the case for the models to not be biased high– we need quite unusual ‘weather’ with ‘weather’ including long-term weather (i.e. ocean events.)
Of course in stochastic systems events that happen 1 in a million times do happen. They happen 1 in a millions times.
The link below points to a number of warmists who connected drought and AGW and the recent Syrian conflict. Back in the 1930s it appears that yo-yo use was connected with drought and as result yo-yos were banned. Some of these warmists place the blame back on the US and other GHG emitting nations for the Syrian conflict via responsibility for carbon emissions. How far have we actually come in our reasoning about these issues since the 1930s?
http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/09/06/2013-conflict-in-syria-blamed-on-drought-caused-by-global-warming-flashback-1933-yo-yo-banned-in-syria-blamed-for-drought-by-moslems/