Temperatures dropped to a record low in Prince Edward Island overnight Tuesday, with reports of frost throughout the province.
An official record low of 3.8 C was set early Wednesday morning at Charlottetown airport.
The previous record for that date was 5.1 C, set in 2005.
Bob Robichaud, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, said that to his knowledge, frost has never been reported before in July in P.E.I.
“That 3.8 we got last night kind of sticks out as being lower than some of the other records for anytime in early July,” Robichaud told CBC News on Wednesday.
“So we’re looking at a significant event,” he said.
Environment Canada has issued a frost risk warning in low-lying areas of the province for Wednesday night. The temperature is expected to dip to 4 C.
The forecast for Thursday, however, calls for sunny skies and a temperature of 22 C for the province.
More focus on temperature range is needed in climate research.
Our forecast for New Brunswick (which “cradles” PEI together with Nova Scotia) includes the possibility of frost in low-lying areas of the province tonight. Also unknown before.
IanM
Not even in 1816?
Well I can see global cooling being the cause, as there has been relatively cool weather compared to average in other places like the Pacific Northwest and Kentucky, have these random areas of cool air going about here and there.
Though we have to see where temperatures go over the next few months, Bob Tisdale reported June SST’s have the 4th highest peak in the entire dataset after 1998, 2003, and 2006, if it goes down immediately it will likely not mean anything rivaling or surpassing 1998. If it does mean a upward trend since 1998 in global temps. then the warmers are going to throw a party declaring victory over those who say CO2 isn’t causing the world to warm.
Here’s the link
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/07/june-2009-sst-anomaly-update.html
SST’s rose quite a bit in June, mainly because the PDO cool area vanished for most of that month (it’s back now according to Unisys)
Anthony, not sure you heard about this, toward the end of June it got down into the 30s at Crescent City. Unreal.
Even though there is no longer any ‘Global Warming’, the so called average temperature is still above levels from the the past 100 years, and therefore these temperature anomalies are nothing but weather extremes, not cooling as such.
Adam from Kansas (18:13:50) :
Well I can see global cooling being the cause, as there has been relatively cool weather compared to average in other places like the Pacific Northwest and Kentucky, have these random areas of cool air going about here and there.
Though we have to see where temperatures go over the next few months, Bob Tisdale reported June SST’s have the 4th highest peak in the entire dataset after 1998, 2003, and 2006, if it goes down immediately it will likely not mean anything rivaling or surpassing 1998. If it does mean a upward trend since 1998 in global temps. then the warmers are going to throw a party declaring victory over those who say CO2 isn’t causing the world to warm.
I don’t think so, Adam. It’s local or regional weather. The National Meteorological Service has been trying to scare us with temperatures higher than 40 °C; nevertheless, just at the moment the thermometers go up to 37 °C, clouds cover the sky or starts raining and the temperatures drop down to 32 °C, so we have had a benign summer, compared with usual temperatures in July. 😉
The bigger question is if the oceans are retaining more heat than is showing up at the surface.
Hey, it’s just weather, not climate.
However, if we have a freak heatwave for a couple of days, it’s climate!
Sorry for the piling on, but I do get really pissed-off about this jopurnalistic double standard.
519 record low max temps. in 7 days according to NOAA, I was actually surprised at this
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/records/index.php?ts=daily&elem=lomx&month=7&day=0&year=2009&submitted=Get+Records
Acting against the wishes of NOAA and the IPCC, mother nature dished 218 more record low max temps. than record high max temps. (link below)
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/records/index.php?ts=daily&elem=maxt&month=7&day=0&year=2009&submitted=Get+Records
Talk about some doozy cold spells
DR (@8:42:50
The bigger question is if the oceans are retaining more heat than is showing up at the surface.
This is nonsensical. The physical properties of water will always push the energy upwards. In fresh water, the Great Lakes for example, the bottom temperature is always 4C; in the oceans it is lower, due to the salt content. There can be no “hidden heat”, secretly scurried away by those global warming squirrels supporting water molecules at the bidding of Jim Bob Hansen.
Meanwhile in London just a week after a so called “heatwave” that many locales would kill for, it’s 64/52F in a July average of 73/59F, according to MSN.
http://weather.msn.com/local.aspx?&wealocations=wc%3aUKXX0085&q=London%2c+GBR&setunit=F
The headlines for the press releases for Jan 2010 have already been written.
2009 ONE OF THE TEN WARMEST YEARS OF THE 21ST CENTURY!!!!
Record Highs set in Alaska yesterday (7/7) and today (7/8)…
Weather is not climate, amirite?
I think the records are a good source of what the weather pattern is up to. I check the records every now and then. The majority of records on a daily basis have been more low lows and more low highs, followed by an even race, and then trailing far behind with more warm records. These records do not necessarily point to average temps dipping or rising. However, in an unstable loopy jet stream pattern, the range of temps is bound to be greater than when the jet stream is stable. It seems a reasonable hypothesis to say that low temp records coincide with a loopy jet stream while high temps coincide with a straight jet stream. I wonder if some kind of statistical analysis on these daily records would show us more about weather pattern variation than average temps.
Even though there is no longer any ‘Global Warming’, the so called average temperature is still above levels from the the past 100 years, and therefore these temperature anomalies are nothing but weather extremes, not cooling as such.
You realize that the raw data for the 1221 USHCN stations (as poorly as they are sited) show only an average of +0.141C per station since we have been measuring temperatures? All the rest is “adjustment” (some perhaps legit, some probably not.)
So, yeah, warmer. But by how much?
One also has to consider that the Little Ice Age did not end until 1840. And most of the rise of the 20th century occurred before 1950.
You also realize that biomass has greatly increased over the last couple of decades (esp. in the rain forests), and that cold-related deaths remain four times that of heat-related deaths.
So assuming that temperatures do not rise uncontrollably from this point, we are in a pretty good situation. Cooler would be worse.
Dave Wendt: You’re so bad. This could also be considered as among the coolest10% of the 21’st century.
Good joke, though.
frost warning here in nova scotia tonight as well
All that “hidden” heat in the pipeline is in South Cental Texas.
The triple digits (°F) continue day-after-day, and throw in some humidity,
it’s mighty uncomfortable outside (unless you’re in a pool).
I have a request. Can I get a reasonalbe warmist point of view on the following scenario:
I build a greenhouse in my back yard. Each year, I add a small additional layer of plastic so as to increase the insulation. I have the same number of 100 Watt lightbulbs warming the greenhouse during the winter months (the “unchanging sun”). How is it possible that it gets colder in the greenhouse in years where I’ve insulated it the most? (Since the Earth is floating in space, my analogy requires that each year, the winter temps are the same in my back yard.)
Some idea of the geographical scope of recent cool weather is given by this anomaly map:
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/climate/synop/td20090708_e.png
This is for the week ending Jul 7. The baseline here is the standard WMO climatology, i.e. 1970-2000.
The host site for this is:
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/climate/synop.html
It looks to me, visually, as if about half the world was cooler than normal, and half was warmer. Imagine that!
Reminds me of the definition of a statistician as someone who can stand with one foot in a bucket of boiling water, and the other in a bucket of freezing water, and say that “on the average” he feels just fine.
Yes, this is all just weather. But there is a climatology that it is being measured against, and it doesn’t look to me like the weather is all that different than the climatology. Which is just another way of saying that climate isn’t changing, it is just reflecting its natural variability.
Pamela Gray (19:15:13) “I wonder if some kind of statistical analysis on these daily records would show us more about weather pattern variation than average temps.
You raise an excellent point Pamela. For the longest time I could not find a variable that would relate consistently with precipitation & extreme monthly temperatures in my region (Pacific Northwest of North America) […without resorting to, for example, big lags] — but finally!: I realized the extremes relate to Earth Orientation Parameters (length of day & polar motion). I’ve just started getting the insights over the past few weeks – back to work on them right now….
Note: I’ve just posted a related graph over here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/01/another-paper-showing-evidence-of-a-solar-signature-in-temperature-records/
There will be more.
Basil (20:10:54) “Reminds me of the definition of a statistician as someone who can stand with one foot in a bucket of boiling water, and the other in a bucket of freezing water, and say that “on the average” he feels just fine.”
Thanks for reminding me of that one Basil. Have you found any time to approach your solar/terrestrial-temperature study via cross-wavelet methods yet?
“Though we have to see where temperatures go over the next few months, Bob Tisdale reported June SST’s have the 4th highest peak in the entire dataset after 1998, 2003, and 2006, if it goes down immediately it will likely not mean anything rivaling or surpassing 1998. If it does mean a upward trend since 1998 in global temps. then the warmers are going to throw a party declaring victory over those who say CO2 isn’t causing the world to warm.”
Perhaps the GRB / SSW event back in January is finally transferring down to the earth’s MAIN energy budget: the oceans.
See number 7 in http://icecap.us/images/uploads/ThereWasNoGlobalWarmingBefore1997(February15th2009).pdf
Let the warmers throw a party. They don’t have any conclusive evidence supporting their cause. None.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Being a statistician means never having to say your certain.
I guess the shoe is moving to the other foot now, after 20 years of every tornado, hurricane, drought, heatwave, spring flood and record high temp being a sign of the apoC02lypse. Now its just weather when record lows and summer frosts start appearing.
What concerns me most is that if the global warming since the 70’s has just maxed out in the past 5 years or so, should it be cooling back off this fast? I would expect cooler averages, but not such a flood of all-time records lows being set when we’re only a few years off the max of the last warming cycle.
Justin Sane (18:36:41) :
“Even though there is no longer any ‘Global Warming’, the so called average temperature is still above levels from the the past 100 years, and therefore these temperature anomalies are nothing but weather extremes, not cooling as such.”
True. Until these temperatures become part of the average. Then they are climate and not weather.
See, weather is like an egg. Frost hatches on Prince Edward Island in July, and it takes two (or maybe fifty, depends on who is doing the nesting) full years for it incubate and hatch into climate. Now, this frost is in its infancy and is very naughty, so ‘corrections’ have to be made for the frost’s own good. It can’t grow up thinking it can just do whatever it wants. We need to ‘warm it up’ to our way of thinking.
Ron de Haan (18:13:49) : Not even in 1816?
Take a look at:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/GHCN_Temperature_Stations.png
Notice the lack of RED dots in that part of Canada? No thermometers of record older than 70 to 90 years…
This is a point I’ve tried to make several times, but folks don’t seem to care much about it: The thermometer record is completely inadequate in both space and time for making ANY statements about “climate” over periods of any significant length of time or any significant surface area.
Other posters mention violation of the Nyquist criterion, but that picture above makes it obvious. We just don’t know and we just can’t know what the temperature history has been. The best we can do is make up rampant guesses based on some (hopefully) related thing. Proxies that may or may not be adequate or fantasies of computer code as in GIStemp.
So unless you have a newspaper morgue from back then and a team of folks to read them looking for reports of frost, you are SOL… (So Out of Luck).
A bit OT, Can anyone point me to the correct place to obtain timeseries data for Canadian surface temperatures? I have only been able to find short term stuff. I would like to look at data from my local area (frost warning here tonight), hopefully over fairly long time periods.
Basil, is that map very reliable you think? Some large regions have few dots and don’t give a full picture.
And what does GRB mean?
Warmer sea surface temperatures mean the Earth’s climate is cooling.
Simplistically you can think of the Earth’s climate as a process of heat gain and retention by the oceans due high humidity greenhouse effect, then release to the atmosphere, transfer by weather over land and to high latitudes, where it is radiated out into space.
Higher SSTs mean more heat in the atmosphere, which means more heat radiated out into space.
Which is why ocean heat content is the only valid measure of whether the Earth’s climate is warming or not. And why atmospheric temperatures may well be a negative indicator of climate change over periods of a decade or more.
The 1998 super El Nino probably caused the subsequent decade of cooling ocean temperatures (although we only have good data for the last 5 years or so), which in turn caused the atmospheric cooling of the last couple of years.
Try Environment Canada, historical records
http://www.climate.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/Welcome_e.html
Justin Sane (18:36:41) : Even though there is no longer any ‘Global Warming’, the so called average temperature is still above levels from the the past 100 years, and therefore these temperature anomalies are nothing but weather extremes, not cooling as such.
The “global average temperature” is a fiction. Completely the product of computer codes stretching data from one thermometer to another location up to 1500 km away and re-writing the history of temperatures based on methods that are senseless (I’ve read the code, it is crazy. WHY would changing the equipment from 2000 to 2009 change the history in 1890 to 1990? Just nuts.)
So you can not, with any veracity, say that the “global average temperature” means anything. Much more valuable (AND more accurate) are the “weather” reports from all over the planet that it’s abnormally cold:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/23/south-hemisphere-record-early-snow/
I’ve stopped adding to the posting since the list was getting so long… but there is a reasonable selection for all over the world in the posting.
Then there is the global crop failure that is setting up:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/argentine-drought-crop-failure/
Latest on Bloomberg in the last couple of days was that Argentina might stop all wheat exports. Add to that the reduced yields in Canada and we have a pattern from both poles…
from: http://www.cwb.ca/public/en/newsroom/releases/2009/061109.jsp
“Cold weather across the Prairies this spring has had a detrimental effect on planting and early crop development in most growing regions,” said Bruce Burnett, CWB director of weather and market analysis, at the annual CWB grain industry briefing today. “In addition, soil moisture levels are dangerously low in parts of Alberta and western Saskatchewan, where dry conditions have persisted since last fall.”
(I added the bold)
I know, that’s only the western hemisphere… just half the planet. There are cold reports from other hemispheres in the “record early snow” link. I started with Southern, then kept adding.
The good news is that the cooler weather in North Africa has raised their wheat production. IFF we are very very lucky, the areas lost to cold in the polar regions will be offset by added growth as the cold makes areas like North Africa, closer to the Equator, more temperate and a bit wetter.
Now you may be happy with computer fantasies, but I need to know what is happening in the real world where real wheat is grown. In the real world, the poles have gone very cold and moisture is persisting in the eastern part of Canada long after it ought to have dried enough for planting. This determines how much I have to eat (both literally and figuratively).
The computer can go play with it’s naughty bits all it wants to, the reality is that it’s cold at the poles, and the cold is spreading toward the equator for the next bunch of years.
DISCLOSURE: I had traded out of most of my JJG (a grains basket) when the momentum went out of it. I have just traded back into it. I’ll be adding more as the world grain situation clarifies.
While the long term trend will be to higher food prices, no market goes straight up. They move in waves. And it isn’t about being right, it’s about what the guys with $Billions think is right. So you may be right, but if they are wrong, you don’t bet against them when they are moving big money. You step aside until the momentum turns, then hop back in, in size. It’s the “up / down” ratio that matters over time, and they can make “down” run for a while by being “wrong in size” … and you need to be timing to be “right” just a little bit, but not too much, before “they” figure it out…
“polar regions” probably ought to have been “pole ward reagions” that is, places like Canada nearer to the poles…
I found this paper:
22 year solar modulation of Earth’s northern hemisphere temperatures
T. Baranyi and A. Ludmany
Heliophysical Obaservatory, Debrecen, Hungary
H. Coffey
NGDC, NOAA, Boulder, CO USA
Solar Wind effects on the Earth marked out according to Solar Equatorial and Polar particle events being parallel or antiparallel. The areas in Europe & North America are different according to which state the Sun is in. 2 nice maps to show you where those areas are.
Prince Edward Island is in the lee according to the paper.
REPLY: Got a link to a PDF? – Anthony
Pamela Gray (19:15:13) : However, in an unstable loopy jet stream pattern, the range of temps is bound to be greater than when the jet stream is stable. It seems a reasonable hypothesis to say that low temp records coincide with a loopy jet stream while high temps coincide with a straight jet stream.
Pamela, you’ve got me thinking about the “loopy jet stream”…
I’ve commented before that the wind here has been more “blustery”. Normally (that being the last 30 years that I’ve lived here) summers have a 3 or 4 day cycle. Long hot days, central valley heats up, starts to pull cool air in from the coast in a nice steady breeze, about day 4 the central valley cools and the pump stops. Repeat until fall… Lately, we’ve had this puffy “blustery” more chaotic winds. Not harder, so much as highly variable and “puffy”. As though there were more vertical component causing more turbulence.
Some thoughts come from this:
1) Might this be related to the loss of 2 jet liners in the one month? More vertical velocity and turbulence? (Unanswerable speculative ponder…)
2) How do we measure vertical wind speeds? Is there a vertical wind speed data set? Do we even KNOW what the average vertical mixing extent is?
3) Might this be the mechanism by which the loopy jet stream (or maybe even the thinner air blanket, solar effects, whatever… ) causes net cooling? More air mass moving up high to cool, then dropping faster?
So does anyone measure the vertical component and how does a loopy jet stream change it?
Ron de Haan: I had the same thought. If Environment Canada (their NWS equivalent) thinks that frost in July is unprecedented they need to go back to the history books. (oops I forgot, according to the AGW crowd before man’s CO2 input the climate didn’t vary at all-the infamous hockey stick)
Not only in Canada. In Finland lowest nigthtime temperature was -3.9 C on 6.7. This is rare.
In Kuusamo daily mean temp was as low as 4,6 C on 4.7. which is lowest temp in July there since 1959.
Basil 20:10:54
Wonder what the hotspot was on eastern Hudson Bay shore? Anyone know?
E.M.Smith (21:48:33) :
Not sure if the link will help you, but you did have me searching and I found this interesting bit:
“The non-zero mean vertical wind speed transports heat, water vapor and carbon dioxide across the plane of the actual measuring height, while this transport is undetectable by the eddy covariance system, which is based on the measurement of the fluctuating signals. Focusing on carbon dioxide, this transport can be severe during nighttime, when carbon dioxide usually accumulating below the inversion layer causing high vertical gradients of CO2 near the ground.”
http://nimbus.elte.hu/~bzoli/thesis/node17.html
Again, not really sure if it is helpful, but the transport of CO2 can be severe during nighttime, and nights are longer in winter. More transport of CO2 in winter would logically follow. Frost in July would not. Haven’t done a whole bunch of reading, but again, your questions were intriguing. Hope I helped.
The link to the Baranyi / Ludmany/ Coffey report:
http://fenyi.sci.klte.hu/publ/Baranyi_et_al1998.pdf
BARANYI,T., LUDMÁNY,A., Coffey,H. 1998, 22 year solar modulation of Earth’s northern hemisphere temperatures, Geophys. Res. Lett. 25, 2269-2272
Not surprising. We seem to be stuck in a pattern of stuck upper level Lows that keep on pumping cool air into the NE. Here (Buffalo, NY) we’ve been lucky to see temps break 70°F so far this July. From now to the first week of August should be the hottest part of our year with average high temps of 80° (27°C). We might get close on Fri & Sat and then it’s back to this cool damp pattern – or so they’re forecasting.
According to the Baranyi map n the paper above, Thule, Greenland sits at one of the places where it gets affected no matter what the polar/equatorial solar particle stuff is doing.
@ Pamela Gray (19:15:13) :
Pamela Gray wrote: “However, in an unstable loopy jet stream pattern, the range of temps is bound to be greater than when the jet stream is stable.”
Yes, that is true, but what causes an “unstable loopy jet stream pattern”?
Answer: A weak jet stream.
And what causes a weak jet stream?
To my knowledge, and please correct me if I’m wrong, less energy of whatever source introduced into the world’s atmosphere.
Strong jet streams generally result in stable high pressure domes in the middle of the continental United States and with those high pressure domes — high temperatures.
Also, as an added thought, strong jet streams during Summer usually ride at a higher latitude dividing the warm air South of the jet stream and colder air North of the jet stream.
So a good measure of energy is the average latitude of the jet stream and its zonal quality. (Does it run straight across the latitude lines or is it loopy and unstable?)
I see at the side-bar that we’re about to say good by to our sunspot that caused such a stir just a few days ago…and so far…no replacement in sight.
I hope that isn’t the extent of the solar 24 cycle (just kidding).
Actually, should this minimum continue into the Fall — that will be the test — if bitter cold on the North American continent prevails next winter, as a possible result of a third winter with low solar activity, it will be very hard for the AGW supporters to keep it up any longer.
Although, they sure will try.
And Congress might just start to get “cold feet”, even Democrats in competitive districts come November 2010.
Leon Brozyna (22:38:26) :
Welcome to the stuck in LowHi club.
We have been stuck with Lows or Highs that defy forecast models for the past year and a half in the Pacific Northwest. And those winds. Summer is the only relief, and the last 2 days saw debris from trees all over the place as the stubborn high gave way to another stubborn low with stuck pressure gradients.
SSN 1024 did nothing to help matters, but it was nice to see.
Got to grab the sweater again. Feels like Fall.
CET for the UK seems to be down, and the data is hidden behind a ‘university researchers only’ firewall, but i found this site which offers a representative point sample.
http://www.stormtrack.co.uk/Pages/CET.aspx
Above average, but the striking thing this year was there have been hardly any days where the day’s average breaks the 95% historical range. Last genuine CET deviation year to date I saw was about +0.79, including the warm days at the start of this month.
Philip_B (21:15:31) :
Warmer sea surface temperatures mean the Earth’s climate is cooling.
Simplistically you can think of the Earth’s climate as a process of heat gain and retention by the oceans due high humidity greenhouse effect, then release to the atmosphere, transfer by weather over land and to high latitudes, where it is radiated out into space.
Spot on Philip. I have been working on solar heat retention in the oceans and found some interesting things out. I think part of the see-sawing of SST is due to the ocean oscillating between heat emittance and placidity. This will be modulated by regional cloud cover, but globally measurable net differences will show up when regional cloud cover in separate sensitive areas goes in and out of phase.
If the satellite altimetry is correct, heat must be retained in the oceans on longish timescales to account for the thermal component of the small sea level rise observed. the atmosphere-centric AGW crowd have glossed over this to some extent, because the source is primarily solar, the run of high amplitude, short minimum solar cycles we have had in the late C20th.
Conversely, we skeptics have glossed over it, because we dislike the ‘heat in the pipeline’ concept put forward by the co2 driven model.
In reality, ‘the heat in the pipeline’ should be seen for what it is. The thermal buffer which helps us through long solar minima, not an ever increasing threat caused by increasing co2. This is why David Archibald’s prediction for a -0.3C anomaly in may failed. He didn’t account for the oceans cushioning the fall.
The question is, how long the ocean battery will keep temperatures moderate if the sun doesn’t buck up with solar cycle 24.
I notice that a frost was recorded in Edmonton, Alberta on 1 July, according to Environment Canada (a minimum of -0.7 C in the early hours of 1 July).
From the same site, the extreme minimum temperature listed for Edmonton in July is +2.8 C, so presumably this is also a new record low for the month?
Just to add to my post at 00:30:01
We might be able to get some idea of how long the retained heat in the oceans will buffer falling temperatures at times of low solar activity. The two low cycles of the Dalton minimum saw a drop of around 0.7C from 1795-1820 in the Central England Temperature series. This followed a long period of generally high solar activity which would have seen a lot of oceanic heat retention. If solar cycles 24 and 25 follow a similar pattern, we might expect a similar fall in temperature. A 1C drop is equivalent to around 200 miles of latitude in agricultural terms, though deeper, later frosts will have an exaggerated effect on crops.
I recommend to our glorious leaders that we stop turning food into fuel for a few years and generate some surplus grain just in case.
rbateman (22:34:46) :
The link to the Baranyi / Ludmany/ Coffey report:
http://fenyi.sci.klte.hu/publ/Baranyi_et_al1998.pdf
BARANYI,T., LUDMÁNY,A., Coffey,H. 1998, 22 year solar modulation of Earth’s northern hemisphere temperatures, Geophys. Res. Lett. 25, 2269-2272
Very interesting. The key sentence for me is this:
“The border separating the two regimes lies close to the meridian crossing the magnetic pole.”
The magnetic pole wanders around quite a lot over time. I wonder what effect the border being predominantly over ocean or land has on climate.
Frost? Well come on now, we all know cooling is just weather and heating is catastrophic global warming. :p lol!
Peter (20:53:41) “A bit OT, Can anyone point me to the correct place to obtain timeseries data for Canadian surface temperatures?”
http://www.climate.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/climateData/canada_e.html
“I recommend to our glorious leaders that we stop turning food into fuel for a few years and generate some surplus grain just in case.”
I wouldn’t agree with that. In modern history, food hast never been produced to increase stocks, because that would have simply devastated the producer prices.
Also, almost all corn and sugar for ethanol has been produced on additional land without competing or hurting the agricultural use.
Thirdly, the corn now grown for ethanol can exactly been regarded as a food reserve, because in case of a food shortage it could be redirected to the food chain.
Adam from Kansas: Thanks for the link.
You wrote, “Bob Tisdale reported June SST’s have the 4th highest peak in the entire dataset after 1998, 2003, and 2006…”
Actually, I don’t do stats. But since you attributed them to me, let me clarify a few things. After 1997/98, the global SST anomaly readings (OI.v2) that were higher than last month’s were in August 2005 at 0.297 deg C and October 2003 at 0.298 deg C, compared to June 2009 at 0.287 deg C. June 1998 was the warmest June on record, with June 2009 coming in second. And since GISS uses OI.v2 SST anomaly data for GISTEMP, expect near record June temps from them.
April 09 was the hottest in austria almost ever recorded, but
during the LIA the April 1800 was 2,0°C hotter than 09.
So we see, that weather creates significant temperatures all the time an all over the planet and it does not matter, if the global average is 14 or 16°C.
The remarks were:
———————-
Philip_B (21:15:31) :
Warmer sea surface temperatures mean the Earth’s climate is cooling.
Simplistically you can think of the Earth’s climate as a process of heat gain and retention by the oceans due high humidity greenhouse effect, then release to the atmosphere, transfer by weather over land and to high latitudes, where it is radiated out into space.
———————–
Begging your pardon here, but: The so-called ‘greenhouse’ effect is complete fiction.
.
First: Water does NOT ‘store’ heat, and neither does any other substance known to man. Rather what ~does~ happen is that the substance heats to maximum level of whatever external source of energy imparts to it.
.
Second: When the substance can no longer accept any additional imparted energy, that substance changes it physical character, i.e., boils or breaks down into something else, releasing energy in the process.
.
Third: Since the oceans —or any other body of water— do not ‘store’ heat, but instead release energy once the external source is removed, any external body (air for instance) adjacent will commence to absorb that released energy, and itself release energy in like fashion upon saturation of imparted energy.
.
IN NO CASE does the atmosphere of the Earth act as a so-called ‘greenhouse’ inasmuch that once the Sun’s energy ceases impinging upon the atmosphere and surface, there is no longer a SOURCE of energy to sustain any such effect.
.
Since greenhouses are in fact sustained by internal heating elements which produce heat in the absence of Sun light, then whole theory is but a contrived bit nonsense.
.
If there is to be ~any~ heating of the water after the Sun sets, it would have to be entirely geothermal in nature. And any thought of human-generated heat having even the slightest effect is yet another bit fanciful thinking.
.
If the activities of Man are supposed to impart heat in any significant quantity, then whole sections of each of the continents would have to be glowing cherry red nightly.
.
Neither bodies of water nor the atmosphere =sustain= the residual heat from either, and any thought that they might is a complete breach of KNOWN thermodynamic principles and the conservation of energy law: Once a source of thermal energy is removed, the affect body releases its excess energy at a calculable rate.
.
Finally, while it ~might~ be remarked that the air above a body of water acts as a layer of insulation, in no case of that —regardless of the constituent gasses— does that have anything to do any degree of warming, inasmuch that the energy is constantly decreasing to towards equilibrium.
.
Finally, if CO2 is such a dandy retainer of heat, then why pray tell, is Mars so bloody cold?
.
tallbloke (01:00:22) :
Just to add to my post at 00:30:01
We might be able to get some idea of how long the retained heat in the oceans will buffer falling temperatures at times of low solar activity. The two low cycles of the Dalton minimum saw a drop of around 0.7C from 1795-1820 in the Central England Temperature series
No it didn’t. From 1795 the CET trend didn’t go negative until ~1812 and that was only due to increased volcanic activity. The fall between 1795 and 1820 was ~0.3 deg. Four of the last 6 years in the DM were all warmer than 1795.
Finally, while it ~might~ be remarked that the air above a body of water acts as a layer of insulation, in no case of that —regardless of the constituent gasses— does that have anything to do any degree of warming, inasmuch that the energy is constantly decreasing to towards equilibrium
Correct, but I think Philip was referring heat gain from an external source, he thinks greenhouse, I think sun, and the rate of decrease to equilibrium is the point at issue. A lot of the heat emitted by the ocean (which has a vastly higher heat capacity than the atmosphere) warms the moist air immediately above it. While a lot of that heat convects, the atmosphere does make an effective insulating blanket, and so the timescale over which extra heat in the ocean gained from several decades of heightened solar activity dissipates can be quite large.
John Finn. I stand corrected, I’d forgotten the volcanic dimension, and had only eyeballed this graph. http://cadenzapress.co.uk/download/beck_mencken_hadley.jpg
Still looks like more than 0.3Cto me though, are you referring to a smoothed figure?
Pamela Gray (19:15:13), E.M.Smith (21:48:33), & James F. Evans (22:41:58)
“[…] loopy jet stream […]”
This seems related to the Russian classification system described here:
http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/005/Y2787E/y2787e03.htm
…which is part of this:
http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/Y2787E/y2787e00.HTM
I never finished looking into this, but I did dig up some other info here:
http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/006/Y5028E/Y5028E00.HTM
…in the Introduction:
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/006/y5028e/y5028e01.pdf
I’d be very curious to hear if anything in these links looks consistent with the “loopy jet stream” ideas.
Finally, if CO2 is such a dandy retainer of heat, then why pray tell, is Mars so bloody cold?
I have often wondered this myself Highlander.
Has anyone calculated the absolute amount of CO2 in the Martian atmosphere as compared to Earth’s?
A simple explanation of the radiative transfer properties of CO2 would be handy, too.
Manfred (02:20:37) :
Thirdly, the corn now grown for ethanol can exactly been regarded as a food reserve, because in case of a food shortage it could be redirected to the food chain.
But only if it has survived a devastating crop failure that normal agricultural production has suffered.
Where are the grain silos? The Egyptians learned the hard way a couple of thousand years ago, and started keeping a surplus in store in case of multiyear drought.
Someone once said no country is more than three meals away from a revolution.
It wouldn’t be pretty.
I wonder if the chilly weather on Prince Edward Island will be noticed on Prince Charles’ Planet?
James F. Evans (22:41:58) : “Strong jet streams generally result in stable high pressure domes in the middle of the continental United States and with those high pressure domes — high temperatures. ”
It is my understanding that the jet stream is the result of clashing air masses. Therefore, the strong jet stream is the result of stable high pressure domes not the cause.
Anthony:
http://fenyi.sci.klte.hu/publ/Praga2002.pdf
a sequel to the Baranyi et al of ’98
This was common across Canada. July 1st many people lost their gardens just North of me (1/2 hour). I’m close to a large river, urban center and industrial facilities so I’m moderated somewhat.
Heck, I guess with a 2 degree limit on warming we can start building more Coal Fired Plants 😀 By the time we get anywhere we’ll be in the next glaciation in this ice age.
John Finn (02:43:31) :
And you learned nothing. The crops rotted in the fields. The only thing that save Europe & England in those years was imports of grain.Trends won’t save you if there isn’t another source. Statistics tell you nothing about the wild swings behind the lazy line of trends. They tell you nothing about the change in patterns that lead to crop losses.
A trend is not data. Events are. Increased volcanic activity due to what? Why in the Dalton?
Magic Wands do not erase Events, and one Event does not erase the previous one except in Reservoirs…provided the thing didn’t go dry first.
However, Armagh record is on the bottom since its start in 1796. To see how the temperature reacts on long-term sun minimum, see the CET record starting at 1659 (during the Maunder minimum); temperatures decreased gradually and lost almost 2 deg C within some 35 years. They restored quickly with the next stronger sun cycle.
http://junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/CETvsArmagh_long.html
Here I connected CET with Armagh where the temperatures overlapped, but using the Armagh record from the 1796, there would be deep gap in temperatures during the Dalton minimum.
http://blog.sme.sk/blog/560/195013/armaghcetssn.jpg
The sun footprint is clearly visible in the SSN/temp record, and also the heat-retaining capacity of the Earth.
A frost such as this is caused by global warming.
Only Algore, James Hansen, Phil and a few others are able to understand the complexity of global warming.
Mere simple mortals think this means the world is cooling.
I don’t know, but I was watching the Red Sox on TV last night, and the mgr and guys in the dugout were wearing jackets in mid July. This has been, so far, “The year without much of a summer”. Who coulda predicted this? That’s right, it was predicted years ago by those crazy talkin’ sun spot flakes. Who didn’t predict this? That’s right, those sober, accuracy above all else, pure scientific, no politics, UN committee members.
Does this prove the sunspot guys right? I don’t know. But it is evidence in their favor that anyone can clearly see.
Being a simple minded engineering type, incapable of grasping the nuanced principles of AGW, could someone explain to me which of the following applies to the mystical property of “stored heat?”
• Zeroth law of thermodynamics, about thermal equilibrium:
If two thermodynamic systems are separately in thermal equilibrium with a third, they are also in thermal equilibrium with each other.
• First law of thermodynamics, about the conservation of energy:
The change in the internal energy of a closed thermodynamic system is equal to the sum of the amount of heat energy supplied to or removed from the system and the work done on or by the system.
• Second law of thermodynamics, about entropy:
The total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value.
• Third law of thermodynamics, about the absolute zero of temperature:
As a system asymptotically approaches absolute zero of temperature all processes virtually cease and the entropy of the system asymptotically approaches a minimum value; also stated as: “the entropy of all systems and of all states of a system is zero at absolute zero” or equivalently “it is impossible to reach the absolute zero of temperature by any finite number of processes”.
• Onsager reciprocal relations:
In connected thermodynamic systems which are in equilibrium neither for pressure nor temperature, heat flow between is caused by forces proportional with unit of pressure difference, and equal to the proportional density flow caused per unit of temperature difference.
We have many charts depicting temp patterns. Where do we take some recent and more popular forcasts by warmists and compare the variaance between their forecast and actual? From this we obtain a variance percentage which we can apply to their 2050 and 2100 forecasts. Give them back a hockey stick that shows their exageration. By 2100 their exageration may be 8 degrees.
rbateman and Juraj V,
my thanks to you both for your relevant comments and links/graphs, they are very helpful to my understanding.
If it helps inform the debate, here is a graph i have made of the cumulative running total of sunspot numbers from 1750 to 2009
http://s630.photobucket.com/albums/uu21/stroller-2009/?action=view¤t=ssn-cumulative.jpg
TJA, the lower temps were predicted when the PDO flipped to cold and we had La Nina conditions. Anyone can clearly see that. And the mechanism is there. Land temps correlate highly to sea surface temps and oscillation conditions WAAAYYY more than to sun spots. If you try to find a match between the day’s sun spots and the sea surface temps you would be searching for a LOOOONNGG time. The occasional match is wriggle matching without mechanism (like watching a clock for 24 hrs to find a match between noon and your need for food-you will occasionally find a match). Follow what the oceans are doing. If you really want to follow the path, then follow the trade winds as well. Use this link and scroll down to Expert Discussions and Predictions. It is updated weekly.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/MJO/enso.shtml#current
Adam,
I’m not sure what dates you looked at for the record lows, but from July 1st-July 7th, I added up only 48 record lows, while record highs showed but when I clicked on your link, it showed your huge number.
That being said, our data input is the same so why is it that your data has such a huge number and mine doesn’t. This is the link to my request:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/records/index.php?ts=daily&elem=mint&month=7&day=0&year=2009&submitted=Get+Records
As per my last post, I noticed that Adam had used highest min temp while I used lowest min temp. Belay my last post.
@John W.
It ain’t that complicated. The Earth has always warmed and cooled.
What the scientist did, and scientist is the same as snake oil salesman nowadays, was to cherry pick a time when the Earth was turning warmer and play that up as a CO2 induced warming.
Same thing as the old days when those that knew the cycles of the Sun and eclipses could amaze the simple minded. And nowadays we have a majority of simple minded doing the voting.
@Pamela Gray
TJA, the lower temps were predicted when the PDO flipped to cold and we had La Nina conditions.
Now with the cooling PDO occuring at the same time as low Sun levels we will not know what is causing this cooling. It is so complicated and the science has not touched the surface.
Well, unless your Algore and the science is settled.
It’s Canada hey!… What do you expect?
Pamela Gray (07:05:48) :
TJA, the lower temps were predicted when the PDO flipped to cold and we had La Nina conditions. Anyone can clearly see that. And the mechanism is there. Land temps correlate highly to sea surface temps and oscillation conditions WAAAYYY more than to sun spots. If you try to find a match between the day’s sun spots and the sea surface temps you would be searching for a LOOOONNGG time. The occasional match is wriggle matching without mechanism.
Oh there is a mechanism for the sun warming the oceans Pamela. You see, the sun is a hulking great nuclear furnace and it chucks out radiation in all directions. Some of it hits the Earth. I agree that you can’t match a single days sunspot activity to global ocean temperatures, but you can see the solarsignal in the SST data if you smooth it using 1/3 of the solar cycle length.
Added to this ~11 year signal, the retained heat of insolation would seem to take a LOOOOONNGG time to work it’s way to the bottom of the thermocline and back up, such that the ocean can smooth out variations in the suns output on timescales of at 100 years. That’s why the wiggles don’t match on scales of a few decades, but in the long run, the solar effect is clear.
Frost warnings this week in parts of Newfoundland as well.
I too noticed that the HadCET data service link brings the response “The requested URL is unavailable at this time. The following error was reported: Failed to connect to server.” and that this has been the case since 30th June. Since this research centre is funded by government departments which, when last I checked were in turn funded from my not inconsiderable tax burden, still being levied in my 70th year, I consider my right to access to be the equal of any “university researcher” and resent this peremptory removal of data under the disingenuous guise of an internet error message.
It may well be that their reconstruction of a long series of records in order to accommodate their changes to locations of monitored sites, and their continuing interference with readings by the application of secretive algorithms, renders their latest figures subject to doubt, but I reserve my right to harbour those doubts and to fester them in my own peculiar way.
For those wishing to continue access to a CET dataset that at least attempts at continuity with early sites and readings may I suggest Philip Eden’s site at http://www.climate-uk.com/index.html
Dear Adam from Kansas
This NOAA temperature record site really is a nice toy. Coming from a small European country it amazes me that many times, on the very same day, some places in Texas show up with record low and others with record high temperatures. This shows 2 things:
1. Texas is a big state.
2. Regional temperature records do not have any significance for the whole wide world.
Pamela,
I am assuming then that you know the root cause of shifts in PDO and therefore can exclude solar activity.
Remember, you are asserting a negative here, that “solar variation does not affect climate”, so your proof better be pretty comprehensive. Otherwise, I have to say that one side predicted this past year or two, and the other side didn’t. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s early innings, I never said ballgame over. I just think that you are arguing about noise still, no matter how arcane your theories. Nobody really knows what the signal is, or this phenomenon would be explainable, which it clearly is not.
Shawn, please explain what you mean by “low Sun levels”. What measurement are you referring too? If it is TSI, total solar irradiance has not decreased to the same extent that SST’s have changed and there is no mechanized dampening or enhancing factor tied to TSI. TSI can therefore be eliminated has a source of variation. Regarding clouds, there is enough moisture in the air from warm ocean pools to explain cloud formation over land. The weak jet stream can also be explained by less than strong trade winds. All of these things that are currently varying around average are endogenous factors tied to Earth, not low Sun levels. There is no “low” Sun level that I know of. It is shining as much as it ever was for purposes of understanding our weather pattern variation here on Earth.
I should have said, “one side predicted it, and the other side is trying to explain it away.”
>Sean (00:20:25) :
>
>CET for the UK seems to be down, and the data is hidden behind >a ‘university researchers only’ firewall, but i found this site which offers a >representative point sample.
>http://www.stormtrack.co.uk/Pages/CET.aspx
>Above average, but the striking thing this year was there have been hardly >any days where the day’s average breaks the 95% historical range. Last >genuine CET deviation year to date I saw was about +0.79, including the >warm days at the start of this month.
>
Sean,
So…what is the URL for that data behind the firewall?
tallbloke, show me the statistical correlation you speak of (provide the link to the statistical graph and explain the thermal mechanism using a mathematical function). If this is true, you should be able to model and predict. Prove it.
Adam from Kansas (21:10:30) :
Basil, is that map very reliable you think? Some large regions have few dots and don’t give a full picture.
And what does GRB mean?
I think it is very reliable. The large regions that have few dots are areas in which surface stations are far and few between. I’d rather have the surface record depicted this way, than with GISS smoothing, which gives a false picture of having “a full picture.” As other posts in this thread have noted, not only are there large gaps in the surface record, but when we look at the length of the records, very few are truly long (like 100 years or longer).
On that, in addition to the link to a great image posted by ” E.M.Smith (20:48:09) : ” here’s a link showing the coverage, since 1880, of stations with at least 90% of the time period covered:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/gcag/GCAGdealtemX?mon2=1&monb2=1&mone2=12&bye2=1880&eye2=2005&proce=90&prob=0&submit=Create+Map¶m=Temperature&klu=2&mon1=0&eye1=0&bye1=0&graph=Dot&glob=AA&mon3=0&monb3=0&mone3=0&ye=0&begX=0&begY=0&endX=0&endY=0&puzo=0&dat=GHCNX&ts=6&nzi=99&sbeX=-180.0&sbeY=90.0&senX=180.0&senY=-90.0
GRB? Gamma Ray Burst?
To get a better perspective on current temps, you still have to look at the very long term data sets. This was started on my part to do a Fourier analysis on temps & sunspots, similar to Leif’s, to see if there was a correlation between the two.
Two of the oldest are the Central England Temperature from 1659-2008
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cetml1659on.dat
or the Stockholm data STOCKH-GML 1755-2005
http://www.rimfrost.no
Rimfrost has a wealth of long term temp data from around the globe. Unfortunately all sets are complete, but enough to give an ides of what other parts of the world were doing.
P.S.
Should have said “Unfortunately NOT all sets are complete”. Sorry.
Solar activity can be excluded on its own merits by looking at measured “stuff” coming out of it and hitting Earth’s outer atmosphere, it’s middle atmosphere, and it’s lower atmosphere. That includes irradiance, cosmic rays, and magnetic disturbances. Of all these energy sources, TSI is BY FAR the larger energy source for heating or cooling. And its ups and downs do NOT coincide with temperature variations here on Earth. Yes there is a small signal but it is mathematically buried in the chaotic and oscillating noise (which by the way does not cancel out to zero). However, if you smooth enough, you can match just about anything to anything.
Lets not dumb down our discussion here. Using words like “low Sun levels” or vague statements like “It’s the Sun stupid” makes us less believable than the CO2 folks. It also behooves us to become educated on oceanic oscillations, how they were discovered, the prevailing theories on their causes, etc. It also behooves us to become educated on jet stream behavior, trade winds, and the Coriolis affect. These things are endogenous weather pattern variation drivers that far exceed the Sun’s ability to cause today to be cold and tomorrow warm. And here is the clincher. Pile enough weather temperature variation data caused by endogenous drivers into a number cruncher and you get … climate. Yes the Sun warms us, yes CO2, along with other trace gasses and water vapor, helps keep the planet warm. But these variables are week little members of a dynamic planet with its own very strong sources of weather pattern variation drivers. Learn about those first. Then I think we will have the basis for making room for discussions of the Sun and human sources of CO2, which should take about 5 extra minutes.
Remember, for every graph you give me on the Sun or CO2 versus climate, I can give you one that is far better. Oceans and trade winds versus climate. And I won’t have to smooth mine nearly as much as you will yours.
Regard from Indonesian Blogger… 🙂
Great Britain yesterday received 3 months of rain in a single day beating the record of the year 1865:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1198127/Flash-floods-power-cuts-record-rainfall-hits-UK.html
Yes, folks, it’s back in the news, and with good reason. Climate change is on the front burner in Washington, where the Senate is taking up the climate change bill the House passed recently. It’s also being debated at the G-8 summit in Italy.
Roger
I last accessed the Met office CET records around july 2nd to pick up the June 2009 CET so it has gone down since then. It has happened several times before which I why I keep a paper record of all the temperatures back to 1660. 🙂
Tonyb
Ron de Haan
I have noticed the date and can confirm that here in the South West I was driving my convertible with the roof down and we had not a drop of rain . The cricket started on time yesterday in Cardiff and they had a full day. By Great Britain they presumably mean a part of GB where all the media are located.
Tonyb
Pamela Gray (07:56:13) :
tallbloke, show me the statistical correlation you speak of (provide the link to the statistical graph and explain the thermal mechanism using a mathematical function). If this is true, you should be able to model and predict. Prove it.
It’s very much a work in progress, but these should hopefully give a bit of insight.
This first one smoothes the SST at 43 months to bring out the solar signal, which is not always ‘in phase’, particularly during the down and upturns of the pacific decadal oscillation (shown in the second graph)
http://s630.photobucket.com/albums/uu21/stroller-2009/?action=view¤t=ssa-sst-ssn.jpg
This second graph shows how the PDO affects the overarching cumulative solar input to the oceans.
http://s630.photobucket.com/albums/uu21/stroller-2009/?action=view¤t=sst-nino-ssa.jpg
A mathematical expression would involve terms such as the amount of insolation recieved at the sea surface in watts, the emissivity of water, the greenhouse feedback from water vapour plus minor trace gases such as co2, and the cumulative running total of TSI with an amplification factor to cover the feedback of cloud etc as quantified by Nir SHaviv in his paper ‘using the oceans as a calorimeter’
A number of years ago, NASA scientists did studies on the correlations between geomagnetic activity and climate variables such as precipitation and temperature. That seems to be out of fashion now, probably because the mechanism remains elusive. Nonetheless, the effect seems real enough according to the data they presented, and shouldn’t be dismissed simply because our current level of understanding doesn’t enable us to establish the chain of causation.
I appreciate that you won’t accept these ideas because they don’t meet the necessary criteria, but I believe there is something in it, even if we are not yet able to explain it.
Yesterday’s science is smartly presented, neatly cut and dried and blow waved. Tomorrows science is at the bottom of a muddy trench covered in grit and obscured by muddy waters of unknown density.
kwl!!!
J Bob anbd others
As CET seems to have mysteriously gone missing I suggest others here grab the data from my own link
http://cadenzapress.co.uk/download/mencken.xls
before I meet with an AARRGGHH!!!
Highlander said: “.
Third: Since the oceans —or any other body of water— do not ’store’ heat, but instead release energy once the external source is removed, any external body (air for instance) adjacent will commence to absorb that released energy, and itself release energy in like fashion upon saturation of imparted energy.”
I’m puzzled as to how this energy is “released” if it hasn’t previously been retained, held, kept or stored. In English, a capacitor holds a charge and a battery stores a charge and, sometimes, vice versa.
” IN NO CASE does the atmosphere of the Earth act as a so-called ‘greenhouse’ inasmuch that once the Sun’s energy ceases impinging upon the atmosphere and surface, there is no longer a SOURCE of energy to sustain any such effect.
.
Since greenhouses are in fact sustained by internal heating elements which produce heat in the absence of Sun light, then whole theory is but a contrived bit nonsense.”
I have a greenhouse; not a so-called greenhouse, but a greenhouse. It is made mostly of glass in order to permit the light to come in. In the summer, it gets muct too hot, (even this summer, which has been pretty cool) if I don’t allow for a good air exchange. I do not reduce the sunlight striking the leaves or floor.
At night, in the summer, the air inside the greenhouse remains warmer than outside without additional heating.
In the winter, the purpose of the greenhouse is to protect from freezing plants that would die if left outside. Only occasionally do I add heat inside; on the coldest nights. Most gardeners would recognize that elements of the atmosphere do, indeed, appear to have a similar effect; cloudy nights often prevent freezing.
Sun? Who needs a Sun? We don’t need no Sun. The oceans will provide all the variations themselves. We will build a Warp Drive Engine in the Earth, and go off visiting other Solar Systems. Think of the benefits: No more pesky Sunglasses to wear, weeds to pull, leaves to rake or those horrible fossil fuels we burn. No more sunblock products to buy, think of the $$ you’ll save.
John W. (06:28:07) :
Q: Being a simple minded engineering type, incapable of grasping the nuanced principles of AGW, could someone explain to me which of the following applies to the mystical property of “stored heat?”
A: None of the above.
The concept of “stored heat” a.k.a. “heat in the pipeline” is a concept I struggled with myself for a while, until I finally understood the patient explanations by its proponents in the blogosphere. The basic idea is this:
The presence of CO2 will cause increased temperature in the atmosphere. This is evident from “basic radiative principles”. This effect is pretty much immediate.
After some time (the time constant is unknown) some of the heat in the atmosphere will be redirected from the atmosphere into the oceans. The mechanism for this is yet unknown, but conceptually this is explained as the “pipeline”. In other words, heat is transferred through an imaginary pipeline from the atmosphere through the sea surface, through the water column and down to the bottom of the oceans, where it is “stored” for an unknown length of time in the said “pipeline”.
Then, after a very long time (some say centuries, others millennia) the heat decides to resurface again.
The real magic of this concept though is that after resurfacing from the deep oceans, the stored heat has multiplied almost infinitely, so that an undetectable amount of heat taken out of the atmosphere, after going through the pipeline and being stored for a century or longer, now contains enough energy to increase the average temperature of the world’s atmosphere by several degrees C. This comes over and above the “transient” temperature response to the increased CO2 in the atmosphere, and thus creates the modeled “equilibrium” temperatures of several degrees C per doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Quite simple, really, if you can accept that the “pipeline” can take an immeasurable amount of thermal energy and transform it into an almost infinite amount of thermal energy, simply by passing it through the sea surface without being detected, and then storing it in the deep oceans again without being detected, then passing it back into the atmosphere to be finally detected, the thermal energy now being infinitely larger than the energy entering into the “pipeline” centuries earlier.
Rhyl Dearden (22:13:59) :
Basil 20:10:54
Wonder what the hotspot was on eastern Hudson Bay shore? Anyone know?
Prevailing winds blew the still full fuel storage containers remaining from the Catlin expedition onto shore where they scraped rock and exploded.
TonyB (09:35:39) :
Ron de Haan
I have noticed the date and can confirm that here in the South West I was driving my convertible with the roof down and we had not a drop of rain . The cricket started on time yesterday in Cardiff and they had a full day. By Great Britain they presumably mean a part of GB where all the media are located.
Tonyb
Bloody Alarmists?
I must say that the pictures in the article were quite convincing.
Must have been caused by the occasional “local weather”.
JAN (10:42:09) :
The concept of “stored heat” a.k.a. “heat in the pipeline” is a concept I struggled with myself for a while, until I finally understood the patient explanations by its proponents in the blogosphere. The basic idea is this:
So it works a bit like the NASA designed IPCC approved oven then?
http://1.2.3.10/bmi/cache.backpackinglight.com/backpackinglight/user_uploads/1225544577_08198.png
🙂
Damn, munged URL should be:
http://cache.backpackinglight.com/backpackinglight/user_uploads/1225544577_08198.png
🙂
I think this situation is really important and we need to focus on weather
Pamela,
i may be oversimplifying things here, but it seems to me that all the energy that drives the weather and climate on our planet comes from the sun. Without the suns energy, we wouldbe a block of Ice.
I am a believer in the sun being the driver of all climate. The energy we receive is constantly changing due to solr amx and minimum, solar wind and cosmic rays, cloud formations, and even the orbit around the sun and the changing distances. All of these and manyother things factor into the energy we receive from the sun.
Climate, trade winds, PDA and ADO, jet stream, they are all a result of an energy imbalance. I think we are all on the same side here saying basically that “it’s the sun” stupid, and not CO2.
I’m not a climate scientist, just an engineer who has followed the AGW for many years.
Cheers.
The high in Rockford, Illinois yesterday was 63 deg. F. It was the lowest high for that day on record.
Ron De Haan
I think what the story illuistrates is that journos get over excited-especially when the event happens on their doorstep and involves the Queen and the other royaklty-the stars of Harry Potter.
It also surely illustrates the difficulty in gluing together a weather record for one small country let alone a global record. AS you know, in reality climate consists of thousands of consecutive weather events, each of which may differ considerably in nature according to the micro climate it occured in. GIss uses a 1200km square for global temperatures and bases it on a tiny number of weather stations from 1880 most of which have since moved or become inconsistent for a variety of reasons.
Even the UK-which has very good records- has highly sporadic ones. For example we have rainfall records back to 1766 but only for a few areas. Back to 1850 for rather more, but it is only from 1931 that we could say with certainty that a rainfall record was broken as that was when national records began.
Even that is patchy in our part of the world (Devon) where we have many steep valleys and the weather/climate in one may be captured by a weather station but the adjacent valley isn’t.
Tonyb
TJA, the lower temps were predicted
By whom? Not the models included in the IPCC ensemble. Some of the models were corrected in the last year or two to include the PDO. But the PDO was discovered in 1997. That is a rather long scientific pipeline.
Matt – I don’t think you’re oversimplifying at all. The sun’s energy – more specifically, the uneven distribution of the sun’s energy on Earth – drives the weather on our planet. Any and all explanations of weather and climate phenomenon can probably be reduced to the uneven distribution of the sun’s energy across our planet. When you get involved in very specific scientific research, it’s really easy to lose the big picture perspective. Unfortunately, I think that happens to many scientists – including myself.
Cheers,
Steve
That’s a very odd statement. Wouldn’t that mean it was a record low? If not, seems a meaningless thing to report.
Repeat after me…very quick:
Warmer than normal, global warming…ALARM BELLS!!!
Cooler than normal, just weather nothing to worry about…oh and it was probably caused by AGW anyway.
I put climate change denial on the same plane as Holocaust denialism.
REPLY: And we put lack of scientific curiosity or willingness to look at what is actually happening now on the same level as lemmingism.
First: Water does NOT ’store’ heat, and neither does any other substance known to man. Rather what ~does~ happen is that the substance heats to maximum level of whatever external source of energy imparts to it.
Uh I’m as much a “greenhouse gas” sceptic as any. So pray tell what is all this 1 kcal per kg per deg. C stuff?
Jeff Alberts (13:13:05) :
Nope. It means exactly what it says. It was the lowest high for that day ever recorded. We did not have a record low (below 43 deg F) because the low was 60F IIRC.
tallbloke (11:42:00) : Thanks. That oven proves beyond doubt the “green”-house effect- and its multiple “positive feedbacks”
James (14:05:27) :
I put climate change denial on the same plane as Holocaust denialism.
You can’t pigeon hole me with that one. Climate changes. Has for millions of years. As to the cause and extent. Well that is under investigation.
Chicago, coldest day in 118 years!
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/weather/chi-wx-weathersummary0709jul09,0,786739.story
Jeff Alberts (13:13:05) :
M. Simon (12:18:57)
The high in Rockford, Illinois yesterday was 63 deg. F. It was the lowest high for that day on record.
That’s a very odd statement. Wouldn’t that mean it was a record low? If not, seems a meaningless thing to report?
No, a record low would indicate that the nightime (min) temp was the lowest on record. He is saying that the daytime (max) temperature was the lowest recorded.
tallbloke (11:42:00) :
Damn, munged URL should be:
http://cache.backpackinglight.com/backpackinglight/user_uploads/1225544577_08198.png
Tallbloke, indeed the same principle as the one behind the NASA/IPCC Energy Free Oven. The bird in the oven seems very small though, is that the same kind of bird sometimes referred to as a Chicken Little?
Take that info Al Gore!! The greatest hoax on the world -global warmng -just isn’t happening!!
Sunspots are only one proxy for a quiet sun. Currently many other solar activity indicators are also low. The make-up of the suns radiance has also change and it is pumping out a higher proportion of UV.
Because both earth and sun are both non-linear systems, I think it unlikely we wil find a one to one correlation between temperature and sun spot number, for example.
We need to look at a broad perspective of potential mechanisms by which the sun can effect out climate before we can hope to find the real drivers. To complicate matters further, it could turn out to be many small effects which combine in a synergistic way to cause a big effect.
Only weather I know, but down here in sunny Sussex the day before yesterday it was 71F early afternoon in my garden, but at seven o’clock the next morning it was down to 39F. Is this a record???
JAN (14:37:29) :
tallbloke (11:42:00) :
http://cache.backpackinglight.com/backpackinglight/user_uploads/1225544577_08198.png
The bird in the oven seems very small though, is that the same kind of bird sometimes referred to as a Chicken Little?
“The sky is falling!”
To use an old British phrase:
Their goose is cooked.
And as my grandfather used to say:
“Two to a duck, you and the duck!”
Thank you rbateman & anna v for the links.
Citations of the 1998 paper can be found here:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-ref_query?bibcode=1998GeoRL..25.2269B&refs=CITATIONS&db_key=AST
Other Baranyi & Ludmany pubs can be found in these directories:
http://fenyi.solarobs.unideb.hu/publ/
http://fenyi.sci.klte.hu/publ/
Examples:
Baranyi, T. & Ludmany, A. (2005). Symmetric or asymmetric energy transfer from Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejections to the magnetosphere depending on the solar dipole.
http://fenyi.sci.klte.hu/publ/BaranyiLudmanyASR2005.pdf
http://fenyi.solarobs.unideb.hu/publ/BaranyiLudmanyASR2005.pdf
Baranyi, T. & Ludmany, A. (2005). Geoeffective and climate-influencing solar and interplanetary conditions.
http://fenyi.sci.klte.hu/publ/BaranyiLudmanyHOB2005.pdf
[Figure 2 in ^this one is interesting.]
Baranyi, T. & Ludmany, A. (2006). Possible north-south asymmetry related to the mean Bz of interplanetary coronal mass ejections.
http://fenyi.sci.klte.hu/publ/BaranyiLudmanyASR2006.pdf
Baranyi, T. & Ludmany, A. (2003). Semiannual behaviour of monthly mean of Bz component of geoeffective (Kp>3) coronal mass ejections.
http://fenyi.sci.klte.hu/publ/BarLudESA2003.pdf
Also, Kalevi Mursula does research on this:
http://spaceweb.oulu.fi/~kalevi/publications/
James (14:05:27) :
I put climate change denial on the same plane as Holocaust denialism.
In a few short years time James, you will feel so ashamed of that statement.
Go in peace.
Pamela Gray,
It’s child’s play to show that the following are related:
SOI, trade winds, atmospheric angular momentum, length of day, rate of change of CO2 concentration, SST.
So what is driving these things?
Do you really want us to stop thinking beyond “What came first? Chicken or Egg?”?
Judging from your comments, I recommend brushing up on the following (for starters):
A) applied multivariate regression analysis.
B) wavelet analysis (& multi-scale analysis more generally).
The work does NOT stop at recognizing main effects. Once the main effects are understood, there are secondary (& higher-order) effects and interactions to study.
It is sensible to start on the Pareto (80/20) Principle, but the era of easy hits has passed and an era of far greater challenge is upon us. Many accept this; understandably, some long for the easier days of the past (when simple linear regression was enough).
Will you be joining us in accepting today’s challenge? Or will you be staying behind, reminiscing about the easier days of the past, and reinventing the wheel?
I mean no offense, but you are disrupting the harmony of hard-working people who accept today’s challenge. I invite you to join us in the hard work.
The Willie Soon and Susan Bulianas paper on the evidence for the MWP can be downloaded free here:
http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr2003/23/c023p089.pdf
And speaking of weather, yesterday Chicago had its coolest July 8th in 114 years.
John W. & JAN
Nice try! However, the key word in John’s exposition is “mystical” and thus unexplainable.
Mystical = having a spiritual meaning or reality that is neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence
James (14:05:27) and those that replied to James
A little clarification please! Are you referring to warming of Earth’s atmosphere because of the additional CO2 entering the atmosphere resulting from activities of humans and some very dire, even catastrophic, changes in Earth systems?
I ask because “climate change denial” – as so expressed – is not something I have found to exist.
Oh! Just exactly what would be the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere today if humans still lived as they did a few thousand years ago?
tallbloke, I’ve seen this woodfortrees graph you’ve posted a few times:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1850/to:2009/mean:43/detrend:0.5/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1850/to:2009/scale:0.001
(Note that I’ve widened it in time.)
As you can see in the following, switching from 43mo to 39mo does not alter the pattern much:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1850/to:2009/mean:39/detrend:0.5/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1850/to:2009/scale:0.001
I think this is (roughly) what you’re really going after:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1850/to:2009/isolate:156/mean:39/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1850/to:2009/scale:0.001/offset:-.05
As tormentors will be quick to point out, the wiggles don’t all match. However, as we know, we would not expect them to since there are other strong signals interfering on both shorter & longer timescales.
So, what happens once one starts taking those into account?
The most obvious problem for phase concordance is the Chandler wobble phase reversal centred at ~1931. This phase-relationship-disruption is strongest for plus/minus a decade, but it also extends over a wider era.
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriod.PNG
Bumpiness — phase-relationship-disruptions.
Sun-Skeptics: See the work of Vondrak & Gross – top experts in their field — and conduct wavelet & cross-wavelet analyses to see the time-timescale spectra for yourself. (Be sure to keep confounding in mind – for example solar UV effect on LOD.)
I’ve shared some intro-level notes on wavelets – & links to Gross & Vondrak papers – over here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/01/another-paper-showing-evidence-of-a-solar-signature-in-temperature-records/
The phase relationship in the last woodfortrees graph settles down noticeably in the early 1950s. See section 3.2, particularly figures 10 (upper panel) & 11, of Vondrak (1999) for important supplementary info:
http://www.yspu.yar.ru/astronomy/lib/Rotation.pdf
SSTs are generally out-of-phase with solar variables before ~1931 at solar-cycle-timescale and in-phase afterwards, with the exception of an interval defined above. The opposite is true for at least one precipitation variable (Pacific NorthWest) which I have studied.
Important:
Make the distinction between different timescales.
This is what wavelet & time-integrated methods are all about. The relationship might be between variable X at timescale A and variable Y at timescale B — and the timescales might vary on top of that – and there are other variables (it’s multivariate) and other timescales (multi-timescale) at play – so expecting to see a simple linear correlation is a clear sign of incomplete thought.
The preceding does not mean disentanglement is hopeless.
Landscheidt was finding mysterious phase reversals and betting heavily on the sun. Interestingly, his phase reversals are a whole lot less mysterious if one takes earth orientation parameters into account.
Every single phase-anomaly in the last woodfortrees graph needs to be explained. Once the Chandler wobble is taken into account, a big anomaly (a phase reversal) is qualitatively simplified. The next steps:
1) Move from rough qualitative conditioning towards increasingly quantitative conditioning (perhaps via interaction terms).
2) Look for the next-biggest conditioning factor(s) & isolate the intervals of their most profound influence.
Clearly this is challenging, particularly due to:
a) the varying timescale (i.e. nonstationarity) of ENSO, which produces a fairly-overwhelming-at-times signal.
b) multi-channel nonstationary harmonics (which means signals are camouflaged, even though present).
Although it may be challenging to master the conditioning, there is no reason to suspect that barriers cannot be overcome to better-isolate the solar-temperature phase-relationship …and once the phase-relationship is better-isolated, perhaps the amplitude puzzle will be less puzzling.
The goal is not to prove “sun explains everything”; rather the goal is to work out the details of all of the relevant variables in support of deep understanding of the whole picture.
The presence of frost in a location, where “…frost has never been reported before in July,” indicates a change in the planet’s climate. Whether this is good or bad, the future will no doubt reveal in due time, however I believe this was predictable. What really surprised me was when you wrote that, “Environment Canada has issued a frost warning…” this can be seen as another indicator of atmospheric and global climate change reverberating to a noticeable event in P.E.I. or it could just be playing it safe, needless to say, I have read many articles from National Geographic about rising sea ice and polar bears, to come to believe that our oceans are rising, and if that correlates strongly with climate change, and it’s many categories ranging from frost to severe snow, then the future will no doubt be interesting to observe. However, this is just a present opinion and more reading is necessary until a complete conclusion can be made about climate change, it’s existance, and it’s impact.
Pamela Gray,
What is the sound of one hand waving? Now I know after reading your post. Slight changes in CO2 are magnified by all kinds of feedback effects. Slight changes in solar output? Nope. They are measured straight up, apparently.
While I am sure that air temp correlates with sea surface temp better than solar, I didn’t get the part of your explanation that elucidates the causes of sea temp changes. You make the point that noise doesn’t necessarily cancel to zero over a finite time horizon, which I agree with. I liken the climate to Brownian motion, however; I don’t find the idea that there are zero forcings changing the climate very convincing myself. And I don’t think you can prove it to be true either. In fact, under your theory, nobody can prove anything, which might be true. But just because the noise is huge compared to the signal, does not prove that there is no signal.
TJA “But just because the noise is huge compared to the signal, does not prove that there is no signal.”
Tallbloke “Yesterday’s science is smartly presented, neatly cut and dried and blow waved. Tomorrows science is at the bottom of a muddy trench covered in grit and obscured by muddy waters of unknown density.”
On both counts….BRAVO!
Chris
Norfolk, VA
@Ohioholic and Paul Vaughan: Thanks for the links, I’m checking them out.
I recommend this 1 minute to add a new perspective on the global climate business….because that is exactly what it is we are getting…..the business…minute 6:30…in 1992 the “baron” introduces his idea to vacuum up all the ugly CO2, make lots of dry ice, and then ship it to the poles to manitain the climate…of course there will be a slight charge his new green bank will require to make this whole save the world thing happen…in his own rothschildish words here…..I am not kidding….
James (14:05:27) : I put climate change denial on the same plane as Holocaust denialism.
James, that just demonstrates your lack of critical thinking skills. I deny climate change caused by people. Now I have a passel of jewish relatives and friends. I’m fairly certain that they are comfortable with my position on the holocaust. That you can’t see the difference speaks volumes about you and says nothing about me.
Just to make myself completely clear: I am absolutely certain that the climate changes. In fact, I think it naturally changes far more than the AGW Advocates accept or allow for. We had the Roman Optimum, the Iron Age Cold Period, the Med. Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and dozens of other extreme events (not the least of which are ice ages and global tropical swamps).
chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/bond-event-zero/
So I’m very comfortable with the notion that climate changes. I am also able to do simple math fairly well and can see that the extent of these changes swamp anything we can do to change climate. And we don’t know why those natural changes happen so we have no idea what is coming next in climate change, what direction it will go, or how to stop it. Though there are a few interesting ideas:
http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages
We do know that this interglacial is nearing an end and the most probable direction is toward a whole lot of cold. We just don’t know in which millennium it will happen (or even if it already started in the LIA – see, a 100,000 year long event that comes in waves is hard to see from our short tiny little lives with our near zero length perspective on time…)
I can also do computer programming and some more subtile math well. This, applied over many dozens (hundreds?) of hours looking into the temperature record and the manipulations of it done by computer codes like GIStemp has lead me to a simple conclusion: Most, by a large margin of the 90% order of magnitude most, of the “A” in AGW comes from computer fantasies working on broken data. The only warming of significance is in the dreams of computers.
Now I did not come to this as an article of faith, as the AGW True Believers do. I came to it starting from thinking “WOW, AGW is an interesting thing and important, I ought to learn about it!”. And the more I looked and the more loose ends I chased down, the more I let go of my AGW belief and slowly moved to skeptic, and now to simple rejection of AGW. I worked through the muck, mud, and details that 99.9% plus of everyone ignores. “Why? Don’t ask why, down that path lies insanity and ruin… -emsmith.” (Lets just say I have a compulsivity to completeness and detail that borders on high function Aspergers.) And at the end of the trail I found that the AGW story does not hang together. It is far more holes than bucket.
Now you want to link a well researched and well understood observation of the facts and history of “global temperature” manufacture with a mindset that particularly does not look at the facts of history and does not do any historical research. That is, at it’s best, naive and at it’s worst, propaganda. I’ll let you decide where on that axis you fit.
When I look at the kind of “thinking process” used by the Holocaust deniers, I see a tendency to start from a conclusion as ask “Given this conclusion, what assumptions can I draw?”. Strangely enough, I see the same thought process in the AGW community. I’ll leave it for you to decide if any dots need connecting…
So, James, please put me firmly in the group that absolutely, publicly and proudly denies that AGW is happening. That is where the facts, science, and history lead. But tie that to the Holocaust and, well, several of my relatives shed blood shutting down the death camps ( 101 st Airborn for one Grandad who liberated a camp or two. One Jewish Uncle was landed at Normandy and walked his way across the continent… ) well, lets just say that you will look pretty silly, at a minimum.
So please let go of the propaganda and the emotionalism. Look at the facts, the science (and how badly some of the AGW “work” is done), and get a perspective on our scale in time and space. We are but nits on the rump of fleas on the tush of the elephant of climate. Then take a deep breath and think a bit about it all. In the end the clear answer is that we don’t matter much, or at all, and the planet is going to do things we do not ken and can not control. That is just observing the truth, nothing more, with no political nor emotional baggage. James, the truth shall set you free.
Re: TJA (18:52:13)
I don’t see noise playing a big role, but I can see how a complex jumble of signals appears noisy upon casual inspection.
Roger (07:42:05) : I too noticed that the HadCET data service link brings the response “The requested URL is unavailable at this time. The following error was reported: Failed to connect to server.” and that this has been the case since 30th June.
Roger, rampant speculation on my part, but as a former computer geek, I feel compelled to come to the defense of my fellow geeks 😉
There was a wide spread DDOS (distributed denial of service attack) on government facilities in the USA at the start of July. It is possible that they were also hit in this attempt and were not as able to stop it.
It is also possible that the server is just having issues and some times it takes days or weeks to get things fixed. It all depends on how much money was available and how many working backup tapes there are.
I have personally had the sinking pit feeling of putting a backup tape on a crashed machine to reload it and discovering that the backup job had run, just never put anything on the tapes… This, BTW, is why I would periodically go into the computer room and just make a tape of the whole system. Once a quarter or so. Then read it. Just in case the formal set was garbage… Once bitten, twice armed with mace and a set of tall leather boots 😉
So before tossing rocks at the folks, consider that they might be working very hard to recover from some very bad situation…
I really hope that Pamely Gray is right because if this is just the start and the trough will be in 2030, I might have to renew my passport and put up with DHS goons again in the future … to feal some heat like I used to daily when I lived South of Glacial Till for a few years.
On the other hand, the barycentric tidal torque planets>sun whatever model seems so damn obvious to me that whatever twists and turns everyone else makes … it only gives me pause to consider how they will reconcile their intellectual investments into reality when it becomes irrefutable. Then there are those who will have to answer for their political stupidity and arrogance at that time … it will look good on them.
This is not a new movie, it is into several generations of reproductions …
Paul Vaughan (18:20:36) :
Paul, The 39 month smoothing looks good. It takes someone like yourself with exceptional skills with the stats tools you have brought to the table to untangle the complex web of climate perturbing influences through the discovery of correlations and the anti-correlating factors which affect them. Probably the best contribution I can make is to use my engineer trained brain to consider the various factors and their relative energies to help keep a perspective and generate ideas for possible mechanisms. I will carry on working through the wavelet tutorial you linked to see how much of it sinks in too.
A couple of questions:
1)Is the Chandler wobble a contra-rotation like the equinoctal precession?
2)The data is with respect to a reference frame. What other known motions have been removed?
3)How much difference does the 18.6 year lunar cycle of rising and falling declination make to earths absolute polar motion?
4)I wonder how much the moons declination cycle affects the jet stream’s latitudinal variation too, could that amplify an effect on the chandler wobble through AAM?
Anyone else who has clues should join in, this is an open source climatology which will be built through co-operation rather than the claim and counter claim of individual competing ideas. There is no grant money at stake, so hopefully this shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve. 🙂
TJA (18:52:13) :
We used to think that deep-space imaging from urban areas was impossible. The noise of the light pollution forming a barrier beyond which no signal could be removed. That the signal was hopelessly buried in the noise.
Then someone noticed that others were getting signal beyond the barrier that was deemed impossible to penetrate.
Turns out that the concept of the signal buried IN the noise was wrong. The signal was in ADDITION to the noise. The trick was to take many samples of short duration.
True, you don’t get as deep in a given amount of time as one would in a non-light polluted environment, but you still get deeper than the “barrier”.
I have faith that removing (subtractive) other signals from the mass of signal will result in isolation of what is sought.
James (14:05:27) :
I put climate change denial on the same plane as Holocaust denialism.
Who here is denying climate change. Apart from you , that is, since you appear to think the climate can only change through the activities of humans.
“I can see how a complex jumble of signals appears noisy upon casual inspection”
Philosophically speaking, every pop of static on your AM radio listening to a Cubs game out of Chicago in a pickup truck in northern Wisconsin has a physical cause and a given sufficient investigation, a scientifically valid explanation. Doesn’t mean it has any bearing on the outcome of the game, or your understanding of it, if it were missing. Noise.
Philosophically speaking, the cubs game has naff all to do with understanding climate.
Apparantly random events are only random if you don’t know what the underlying phenomena and their cyclicities are doing.
As Leno Tonti told a motorcycle journalist who commented on how noisy the Moto Guzzi le Mans was
“Eez notta noise, eez a music.”
rbateman (02:49:07) :
Turns out that the concept of the signal buried IN the noise was wrong. The signal was in ADDITION to the noise. The trick was to take many samples of short duration.
I think there is a good analogy to the wavelet analysis Paul Vaughan is advocating here.
Dan Lee (20:25:32) :
I suspect the clean-up (reduction) of particulates, aerosols, and sulfates during the warming period may have something to due with the suddenness of cooling. Don’t forget a solar minimum contributes another straw for the proverbial camel. Recession is another factor especially to UHI and possibly GHG reduced emissions, also.
Tallbloke quote, “Anyone else who has clues should join in, this is an open source climatology which will be built through co-operation rather than the claim and counter claim of individual competing ideas.”
Maybe differing strengths of the earth’s magnetic field and it’s interaction with other bodies in the solar system, including the sun, could have an impact on this? Perhaps the answer to the problem will be found amongst the non-linear bits of ‘noise’.
Hi tallbloke,
In elliptic response to your interesting questions:
You may find this site to be a useful gateway:
http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/
I will be bookmarking & sharing other links as time passes.
Here’s one now:
Benjamin F. Chao (2004). Earth rotational variations excited by geophysical fluids. International Very Long Base Line Interferometry (VLBI) Service (IVS) 2004 General Meeting Proceedings, 38-46.
ftp://ivscc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/general-meeting/2004/pdf/chao.pdf
–
The lazier reasoning around here:
1) “Correlation does not imply causation.”
2) “You have no mechanism.”
3) “It’s mostly noise.”
My response:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ccLR1CRF.PNG
Tenuc (09:06:54) :
Maybe differing strengths of the earth’s magnetic field and it’s interaction with other bodies in the solar system, including the sun, could have an impact on this? Perhaps the answer to the problem will be found amongst the non-linear bits of ‘noise’.
Certainly does. Temperature seems to almost but not quite follow along in the aa wake. It’s the most fascinating puzzle I’ve come across in thirty years of looking at scientific data.
A very bright man called Brian Tinsley who Leif Svalgaard respects as a careful researcher published a paper last year on the Earth’s global electrical circuit. I couldn’t understand it, but I’ve never been great with working out electrickery. :o)
It’s behind a paywall, find a friend with institutional access.
Paul Vaughan, lovely graph, but you forgot the axis labels. Always playing the man of mystery. 🙂
I’m going to continue pondering ocean heat retention for now.
So far as I’ve been able to work out, the ocean’s thermal inertia works on several different timescales, because of stratification at the thermocline and the base of the near surface mixed layer and varying currents, heat input and rates of emission.
There is an 11 year solar signal visible in the SST data, which gets out of phase with changes in SST when the major ocean oscillations are changing phase. This signal represents an average 0.1C cooling and warming and is the transient response of the near surface waters.
Then there is a multi-decadal response to runs of high amplitude – short minimum solar cycles such as the ones we’ve had in the late C20th. This results in the increase in ocean heat content and thermal expansion we’ve seen between the start of XBT ocean heat measurement in the ’60’s and accurate satellite altimetry in the ’90’s and the levelling off of sea level rise and OHC post 2003. I think these runs of cycles are probably connected with the ~60 year cycles observed in the SST data for the Pacific and Atlantic oceans particularly. Going on the thermal expansion and heat content, I’ve calculated that the heat is stored down to an average of 1000m. The thermocline is deeper than this in some areas, shallower in others.
If as seems likely, we are heading into a period of lower amplitude – longer minima solar cycles, I predict this stored heat will be emitted from the oceans and will cushion the climate somewhat as global temperatures decline further. This graph I’ve produced is a preliminary attempt at understanding what is going on.
http://s630.photobucket.com/albums/uu21/stroller-2009/?action=view¤t=sst-nino-ssa.jpg
Since the heat accumulates in the ocean as evidenced by the thermal expansion picked up by the satellite altimetry, I’ve calculated a running cumulative total for sunspots, as a proxy for accumulated Total Solar Insolation (TSI), and compared it with SST from 1870 to date as a proxy for ocean heat content, plus the pacific decadal oscillation to help get a handle on how the ~60 year oceanic oscillation disturbs the correlation. One of the interesting features of the graph is the upturn in SST in 1910 near solar maximum, several years before the end of the negative phase of the PDO.
Below the thermocline, temperature tapers off towards the seabed in a slow fashion. Differences over time are small, but the volumes are vast. This will be where millenial responses are hidden. I haven’t had the chance to investigate those yet.
“The 1930s warming was part of a warming focused mainly in the northern high latitudes, a pattern reminiscent of an increase in poleward ocean heat transport (Rind and Chandler, 1991)”
“Prior studies suggest that the low precipitation during the Dust Bowl was related in part to sea surface temperature conditions over the tropical oceans (Schubert et al., 2004; Seager et al., 2005).”
http://downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap1-3/sap1-3-final-ch3.pdf
Siegfried D. Schubert, Max J. Suarez, Philip J. Pegion, Randal D. Koster, & Julio T. Bacmeister (2004). On the Cause of the 1930s Dust Bowl. Science 303(5665), 1855-1859.
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/climate/pdf/schubert_2004.pdf
“During the 1930s, the United States experienced one of the most devastating droughts of the past century. The drought affected almost two-thirds of the country and parts of Mexico and Canada and was infamous for the numerous dust storms that occurred in the southern Great Plains. In this study, we present model results that indicate that the drought was caused by anomalous tropical sea surface temperatures during that decade and that interactions between the atmosphere and the land surface increased its severity. We also contrast the 1930s drought with other North American droughts of the 20th century.”
Citations:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-ref_query?bibcode=2004Sci…303.1855S&refs=CITATIONS&db_key=PHY
“[…] the development and maintenance of atmospheric ridges is the prime ingredient for drought conditions […]”
“[…] the longer the anomalous weather conditions persist, the more likely it is to have some stationary forcing acting as a flywheel (i.e., as a source for inertia) to maintain the anomalies […]”
“The droughts discussed above can be distinguished by their duration, with longer lasting events more likely involving forcing of the atmosphere.”
“The atmosphere does not have much heat capacity, and its “memory” of past conditions is relatively short (on the order of a few weeks).”
“Hence, the forcing required to sustain a drought over seasons or years would be expected to lie outside of the atmospheric domain; an obvious possibility with greater heat capacity (and hence a longer “memory”) is the ocean.”
“Therefore, most studies have assessed the ability of particular ocean sea surface temperature patterns to generate the atmospheric wave pattern that would result in tropospheric ridges in the observed locations during drought episodes.”
“For the longer-term events, the effect of steady forcing through sea surface temperature anomalies becomes more important.”
“The North Pacific SST changes appear to be the result of atmospheric forcing, rather than the reverse; therefore, if they are contributing to drought conditions, they may not be the cause of the initial circulation anomalies.”
“Because a large proportion of the variance of drought conditions over North America is unrelated to sea surface temperature perturbations, it is conceivable that when a severe drought occurs it is because numerous mechanisms are acting in tandem.”
http://downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap1-3/sap1-3-final-ch3.pdf
–
A lot of circular logic in ^there.
I think they need to look at this:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriod.PNG
I can show them a unique combination of events that correlate precisely with the ~1931-centred event. It is an event which has happened only once during the entire polar motion record (1846+).
More insight:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriodAgassizBC,CanadaPrecipitationTimePlot.PNG
tallbloke (07:34:16) :
That’s why the wiggles don’t match on scales of a few decades, but in the long run, the solar effect is clear.
Contrast this to all the claims that the solar effect is without or with only short delays. In the long run the number of degrees of freedom falls so fast that there is no statistical significance left. Even in the very longest run [billions of years] there is no solar signal, as the Sun has brightened 35%, but the temps have stayed much the same.
Paul Vaughan (14:41:13) :
“The 1930s warming was part of a warming focused mainly in the northern high latitudes, a pattern reminiscent of an increase in poleward ocean heat transport (Rind and Chandler, 1991)”
“Prior studies suggest that the low precipitation during the Dust Bowl was related in part to sea surface temperature conditions over the tropical oceans (Schubert et al., 2004; Seager et al., 2005).”
http://downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap1-3/sap1-3-final-ch3.pdf
Heat can only escape from the ocean at a certain rate, because the atmosphere acts like a blanket above it. When the solar cycles are running high, the heat which can’t escape upwards has to go sideways and downwards. A lot accumulates in the currently 400m deep Pacific warm pool. Judging by the high anomaly in the north atlantic in the latter C20th, a lot has accumulated there too.
Speculative idea:
The running count of cumulative TSI (sunspot numbers are a good proxy) was at a long time low point in the ’30’s, so if heat was being transported away from the tropics northwards up the Atlantic at that time. It would be due more to surface currents. Solar cycle 17 was the highest amplitude cycle in 60 years, but it didn’t start ramping up until late 1934. Perhaps due to the low state of OHC in the underlying waters there was a particularly low amount of cloud cover allowing the near surface waters to be warmed more in the tropics, with the rapid flush of polewards driven warm waters extending a natural frequency drought in the US.
Paul: How do you see the ~5% increase in the chandler wobble frequency centred at 1930 tying in? If it is mainly due to seabed level oceanic shifts as NASA says, could the longterm decline in my cumulative sunspot count be connected too I wonder. Maybe things start happening in the deep when the battery of heat energy above the thermocline runs low. The adjusted sunspot count was below 10 for 20 months between the end of 1932 and July 1934.
Leif Svalgaard (22:37:05) :
tallbloke (07:34:16) :
That’s why the wiggles don’t match on scales of a few decades, but in the long run, the solar effect is clear.
Contrast this to all the claims that the solar effect is without or with only short delays. In the long run the number of degrees of freedom falls so fast that there is no statistical significance left.
Hi Leif. You’re probably working your way down through the posts but in my post at
12:54:18 I note that the ‘at some times more obvious than others’ 11 year ocean response is the transient ‘short delay’ response of the near surface mixed layer. Under that is the longer term storage layer down to the thermocline. I agree that the signal from that isn’t clear in the surface data. I meant more that it’s clear to me that there is long term storage of solar energy in the oceans, and that this will be affecting our climates (plural).
Paul Vaughan has improved my 11 year signal graph:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1850/to:2009/isolate:156/mean:39/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1850/to:2009/scale:0.001/offset:-.05
I would suggest that during times of high solar cycles when the ocean is gaining net energy, the heat being stored below the surface layers doesn’t interfere with the ‘short delay’ surface response as much as when it’s being emitted during times of low solar cycles.
I’ll just add that stong events like the ’98 el nino will upset the phasing during high solar cycle runs too.
My key piece of evidence is that the satellite altimetry showing a rise in sea level and the SST rise of only 0.3C or so from 1993-2003 proves the oceans must be expanding due to longer term heat stored to a much greater depth than the near surface mixed layer.
Please do comment on that.
tallbloke (12:54:18) :
Quote “…A very bright man called Brian Tinsley who Leif Svalgaard respects as a careful researcher published a paper last year on the Earth’s global electrical circuit. I couldn’t understand it, but I’ve never been great with working out electrickery. :o)…”
Thanks for the heads-up on the paper. Not had time to read it yet, but the abstract certainly looks interesting – Quote “As it [downward current density] flows through layer clouds, it generates space charge in conductivity gradients at the upper and lower boundaries, and this electrical charge is capable of affecting the micro-physical interactions between droplets and both ice-forming nuclei and condensation nuclei.”
The link below provides an open source for this paper if anyone else is interested.
‘The role of the global electric circuit in solar and internal forcing of clouds and climate’
http://www.utdallas.edu/physics/faculty/tinsley/Role%20of%20Global%20Circuit.pdf
Also came across this one, again by Brian Tinsley
‘INFLUENCE OF SOLAR WIND ON THE GLOBAL ELECTRIC CIRCUIT, AND INFERRED EFFECTS ON CLOUD MICROPHYSICS, TEMPERATURE, AND DYNAMICS IN THE TROPOSPHERE’
https://www.utd.edu/nsm/physics/pdf/Tin_rev.pdf
Thanks again Tallbloke – looks like my bedtime reading for the next few days is sorted 🙂
tallbloke,
Your reasoned-speculation is interesting.
I will share a few notes:
1) The cause of the ~1931 phase reversal is still considered a mystery. If you dig around, you may discover that a conventional explanation for this is that AAM & OAM records do not extend back that far.
2) You inquire regarding Chandler frequency; rather than comment on that at this time, I will note that in the days ahead I hope to have some phase plots in presentable form.
3) I’m not on the same page with you regarding solar-terrestrial interpretations. This comment (which could be misunderstood) requires a polite elaboration: The woodfortrees graphs are interesting, but I wouldn’t expect a busy scientist to spend (much) time looking at that work in its current state of development. I’m thinking “cart before the horse” – i.e. rate of acceptance of new ideas depends on sequence of introduction.
4) If you are concerned about losing degrees of freedom (due to time-integration) (in the statistical sense – and assuming you are letting highly questionable [but unyieldingly – & broadly – conventional] assumptions slide), I urge you to reconsider what Currie (1996) has to say and to broaden your investigations beyond global averages to include local temperature ranges. You may recall a recent discussion of solar polar field strength where attention was drawn to some of the benefits of working with ranges vs. averages, such as cancellation of shared (& sometimes unwanted) features. [Note: Such technique can sometimes be applied between stations to gain spatial contrast (vs. blend) information.] This is not to say that range is a “superior” variable to average (for all purposes); it is, rather, to draw attention to the fact that range & average are different variables.
5) I encourage you to always be mindful of confounding (including the possibility of confounding of study variables with lurking variables […that you may not have even imagined]).
Re: rbateman (02:49:07)
Thank you for sharing this comment.
Here’s another signal spotted by Adam from Kansas, plus my comment.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/amoarticlel.pdf
The interesting part is that there was an El-Nino within 12 months of the last four solar minimums and here it is happening again. It’s almost as if there’s an El Nino lying in wait after solar minimum arrives as of recent O.o
Very interesting observation. I think this is some of the excess heat stored below the mixed surface layers during a run of high solar cycles coming back out of the ocean when solar influence is at a low ebb.
When air temperatures drop, the differential between the atmosphere and ocean increases, allowing stored heat a quicker passage to the atmosphere. This will buildup a momentum of upwards moving warm water. There will be overshoot as it warms the atmosphere. Thus the ‘different’ type of el nino commented on in a recent article. Its all starting to fit together for me. Is anyone else getting it, or am I crazy?
Ok, my calculator is hot.
Please could someone help check the maths on these calculations, paying particular attention to orders of magnitude.
According to a world atlas on the web the area of the world’s open oceans is 335,258,000 sq km.
According to the satellite altimetry, the worlds oceans rose 32mm between 1993 and 2003.
According to the IPCC around half this rise was due to melting ice and around half was due to thermal expansion of the oceans.
335,258,000 sq km x 16mm = 5364.128km^3 expansion
According to an approximate average of the studies of ocean heat content done by Levitus et al, Ishii and Kimoto, and Domingues, the ocean heat content rose by around 5.5×10^22J over the same period.
Lets use Levitus et al’s 700 metre depth to obtain the volume of water containing this quantity of heat.
335,258,000 sq km x 0.7km = 234,680,600 km^3
The global ocean has an average temperature of around 17C and an average salinity of 35 psu. It’s average density is therefore around 1.025 kg/l
If we convert the volume to cubic decimetres and multiply by the density we should get the mass in kg.
234,680,600 km^3 = 2.3468×10^20 x 1.025kg/l
So the mass of the upper 700m of the worlds ocean is around
240547615000000000000kg or 2.405×10^20kg
(please check orders of magnitude carefully for me)
To raise water 1C requires 4.1855KJ/Kg so 5.5×10^22J is going to raise 2.405×10^20kg of water by
(5.5×10^19KJ / 2.405×10^20kg) / 4.1855 C
Which comes out at around 0.05C
There is a gradient in temperature from the surface down to the thermocline, which stays at a pretty constant temperature so I think this figure is reasonably consistent with a rise in sea surface temperature measured at 0.3C over the 1993-2003 period.
So the remaining question is how much the top 700m of ocean will expand if we warm it from 17C to 17.05C
According to a table I found at http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_water.htm 17C water will change in density from 0.998774g/cm^3 to 0.998757g/cm^3 for a 0.1C rise in temperature. This is a factor of 1.000017.
For a 0.05C rise we will get around half this factor so 1.0000085 will be our multiplicand.
1.0000085 x 234,680,600 km^3 (the volume of the top 700m of ocean)
=~1994km^3
Spread this over the world’s oceans and we get a sea level rise due to thermal expansion of ~6mm
But the satellite altimetry measure of sea level rise was ~32mm of which half was thermal expansion, so where’s the missing shilling?
If the altimetry is right, there is much more extra heat hiding in the ocean than a survey of the top 700m reveals.
Or if the Ocean heat content is right, the altimetry has overestimated sea level rise due to thermal expansion by a factor of about 2.7.
The other possibility is that I did my sums wrong. :o)
Place bets now!
I’d be grateful if someone else would run through the calcs and let me know.
Thanks.
tallbloke (06:51:48) :
According to an approximate average of the studies of ocean heat content done by Levitus et al, Ishii and Kimoto, and Domingues, the ocean heat content rose by around 5.5×10^22J over the same period.
For each of the three oceans [approx] for a total of 14E22 J…
Leif, with respect, that is the rise for the entire period of record from 1955, not the 1993-2003 period I’m studying. The more accurate satellite altimetry used by the university of Colarado came onstream in 1993, and the Levitus et al 2009 ocean heat content goes a bit haywire after 2003, doubling the rise of the previous 23 years by 2005.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_ns_global.jpg
http://s5.tinypic.com/24v33t4.jpg/bmi_orig_img/24v33t4.jpg
Scaling off these graphs, the sea level rise is 32mm between 1993-2003 and the ocean heat content rise globally is 5.5×10^22J
I hope this clarifies the situation.
tallbloke (12:42:30) :
I hope this clarifies the situation.
Not at all. You show three rather different curves, telling me that the uncertainty is great, and there seems to be some picking here. For the red curve, I eyeball 1993 to be 3.3 and 2003 to be 12, for a change of 8.7E22 J. And what is the reason for Levitus going ‘haywire’. If you can’t trust them after 2003, how can you trust them before? The whole things simply looks too uncertain, including some of your assumptions [e.g. about gradients], to conclude that something is amiss.
Leif, I think you need to look again, you are looking at the red dot for 2004 on the levitus curve, not 2003, which shows around 8.5×10^22 from about 3×10^22 in 1993
Ishii and kimoto runs from around 2.75 to 8×10^22, and Domingues about 4.5 to a spike at 11which goes lower again the following year.
So,
Levitus et al 5.5X10^22
Ishii & Kimoto 5.25×10^22
Domingues 6.5×10^22 but averaging a bit lower.
I’m not trying to ‘pick’ anything, cherries or fights.
When I said Levitus et all graph goes a bit haywire after 2003, I mean in comparison to the other two studies. Do you think it’s credible that the rise in the levitus curve from 2003 to 2005 is equal to the rise from 1980 to 2003?
It maybe a splicing issue between XBT and ARGO data, or maybe Levitus got his sums wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.
tallbloke (13:12:09) :
you are looking at the red dot for 2004
OK, but why do you trust their values before 2004, but not thereafter? Because they ‘don’t agree’?
And a minor point: Are the values plotted for middle of year or beginning of year? I.e. does 2003 mean 2003.0 or 2003.5? and for both all the series involved?
Leif Svalgaard (13:25:49) :
tallbloke (13:12:09) :
you are looking at the red dot for 2004
I looked again. The last red dot is 2008, then counting back 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 would be the 6th red dot from the right. I read that [again] to be 12.
tallbloke (13:20:23) :
When I said Levitus et all graph goes a bit haywire after 2003, I mean in comparison to the other two studies.
They all look a bit shaky and the ‘spread’ is large. That combined with your various assumptions, make it a bit dubious to draw any conclusions. The order of magnitude is about right, that is how far I would go.
Hi Leif,
I worked on the 1993 2003 period because
1) All three studies are in reasonable agreement over this period
2) I can’t go earlier than 1993 because that’s when the Colorado satellite altimetry starts
3)The rises of Sea level, ocean heat content and SST are reasonably linear during the period.
I think you are right that the red dots are mid year, thanks for spotting that. That means the rise for Levitus et al is around 3×10^22 to just over 10×10^22, about 7.3×10^22
Averaged with the other two studies this will give (5.25+6+7.3)3 (allowing for a bit of averaging on the Domingues spike at 2003)
This gives 6.2×10^22 rather than the 5.5×10^22 I originally eyeballed.
This will make the rise of sea level due to expansion 6.75mm rather than 6mm.
So it’s around a factor of 2.37 too small rather than 2.7.
Did you run through the calcs for me to make sure I haven’t stuffed it up anywhere?
I’d be really grateful for confirmation.
Thanks
Leif Svalgaard (15:19:46) :
tallbloke (13:20:23) :
When I said Levitus et all graph goes a bit haywire after 2003, I mean in comparison to the other two studies.
They all look a bit shaky and the ’spread’ is large. That combined with your various assumptions, make it a bit dubious to draw any conclusions. The order of magnitude is about right, that is how far I would go.
I hear you, but there’s actually a bit more of a back story to this than meets the eye. If you confirm my calcs are ok I think I’ll write it up and put it online for others to ponder.
When you say ‘other assumptions’, which do you have in mind?
Size of ocean?
Salinity of seawater?
Some of you will wonder why the graphs stop at ~1984:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriodAgassizBC,CanadaPrecipitationTimePlot.PNG
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriod.PNG
The Morlet 2pi wavelet is a bandwidth hog. This is the cost of frequency resolution. Anything beyond ~1984 is contaminated with edge-effect (at the timescale of focus) – until the future arrives – so it is cut off.
Cautionary Notes:
Most authors don’t snip off edge-contamination. This can be very misleading. Also, those who include a cone-of-influence don’t necessarily locate it where it should be for the wavelet they have chosen.
If anyone wants to know what the Chandler wobble period has been doing since 1984, they can see the work of (for example) Richard Gross (Nasa JPL).
tallbloke: Don’t forget Wijffels et al (2008):
http://i44.tinypic.com/5uizit.png
From this post:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/07/ohc-trends-presented-by-levitus-et-al.html
tallbloke (15:45:18) :
That means the rise for Levitus et al is around 3×10^22 to just over 10×10^22, about 7.3×10^22
For 2003.5 I read 12E22 off the graph…
6th red dot from the right.
E.M.Smith “computer fantasies”
I commend your consistent promotion of this accurate term.
This comment is, in part, inspired by just having suffered through a paper full of “spaghetti”-based confidence intervals. A common (& telling) theme in such papers is phrases that begin with: “Surprisingly …” I interpret such instances as admissions of misconception – as opposed to openness to truth.
“While progress has been made in understanding some of the important processes contributing to drought conditions (3–7), the mechanisms by which a drought can be maintained over many years are not well established.”
“[…] severity, extent, and duration of the 1930s drought was unusual for the 20th century […]”
“Understanding the causes of the 1930s drought is particularly challenging in view of the scarcity of upper-air meteorological observations prior to about 1950.”
“An analysis of the other major central U.S. droughts of the 20th century (11) suggests that a cool tropical Pacific is common to all. Only the Dust Bowl drought, however, combined cool Pacific SSTs with a warm Atlantic Ocean.”
“[…] proxy climate records indicate that major droughts have occurred in the Great Plains approximately once or twice a century over the past 400 years (25). There is evidence for multidecadal droughts during the late 13th and 16th centuries that were of much greater severity and duration than those of the 20th century (25).”
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/climate/pdf/schubert_2004.pdf
I was staying in Tahoe last week near Truckee, on July 9th we got down to 28 degrees Fahrenheit (-2 Celsius), a record low for the date. It was interesting, but perhaps not too meaningful regarding any trends.
tallbloke (15:56:21) :
If you confirm my calcs are ok I think I’ll write it up and put it online for others to ponder.
calcs OK, but round them off to three significant digits. They are unneccesarily and [incorrectly] precise.
When you say ‘other assumptions’, which do you have in mind?
E.g. that the 700 m is the same for all basins, the effect of minor seas: North Sea [which is not 700 m deep], Gulf of Mexico, continental shelves, etc.
tallbloke (15:45:18) :
That means the rise for Levitus et al is around 3×10^22 to just over 10×10^22, about 7.3×10^22
For 2003.5 I read 12E22 off the graph…
6th red dot from the right.
Leif Svalgaard (22:26:30) :
tallbloke (15:56:21) :
If you confirm my calcs are ok I think I’ll write it up and put it online for others to ponder.
calcs OK, but round them off to three significant digits. They are unneccesarily and [incorrectly] precise.
When you say ‘other assumptions’, which do you have in mind?
E.g. that the 700 m is the same for all basins, the effect of minor seas: North Sea [which is not 700 m deep], Gulf of Mexico, continental shelves, etc.
Leif, many thanks for taking the time to confirm my calcs.
The 700 metres is Levitus’ assumption, not mine, see Bob Tisdale’s posts.
Also, the area I used is for open ocean, not including shallow seas, where ARGO buoys can’t do their bobbing up and down 2000m things. I need to read up on XBT.
Leif Svalgaard (22:28:51) :
tallbloke (15:45:18) :
That means the rise for Levitus et al is around 3×10^22 to just over 10×10^22, about 7.3×10^22
For 2003.5 I read 12E22 off the graph…
6th red dot from the right.
Yes, my study goes from the start of 1993 to the start of 2003, not 2003.5. Halfway from 2002.5 to 2003.5 is around the 10×10^22J I said after you spotted the mid year values.
The Chief analyst of the ARGO data, Josh Willis, said in an unguarded moment to an online magazine that since 2003, there had been a “slight cooling.” He made this statement in May 2008, after his 2007b paper in which he ‘corrected’ the ARGO data which had shown steep falls in OHC. It’s for this reason I have dome doubts about the Levitus reconstruction, post 2002.
Thanks again for your input, most helpful.
Bob Tisdale (16:43:36) :
tallbloke: Don’t forget Wijffels et al (2008):
http://i44.tinypic.com/5uizit.png
From this post:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/07/ohc-trends-presented-by-levitus-et-al.html
Thanks Bob, i’d missed that study completely. Their 1993-2003 rise is around 4.2×10^22J as best I can make out from the rather oddly divided vertical scale on your graph. That would bring the average rise for all the studies back down to 5.75×10^22 without adjusting Domingues for the 2003 spike. However, it also increases the ‘spread’ Leif mentioned that is very large in the late 1990’s.
At least the start and end points are in reasonable agreement, so my study has some validity I think, provided I make due mention of the broad spectrum.
You’ll remember I asked you why there was such a difference between Levitus 2000 and Levitus 2009, and you thought it might be due to ‘adjustments’ to the XBT data. Well I have found another answer for the ~250% downward ‘adjustment’. I’ll hang fire on that until I’ve worked out a way to write it up for maximum effect. I think it’s worthy of a post on the blog, but I’ll let Anthony be the judge of that.
I hope that at the end of the day, what I’ve discovered will renew your interest in OHC series, after your comment the other day that there is no OHC story, because there is no reliable OHC data. It’s actually crucial to the correct understanding of solar input to the Earth climate system.
Paul Vaughan (19:45:15) :
“An analysis of the other major central U.S. droughts of the 20th century (11) suggests that a cool tropical Pacific is common to all. Only the Dust Bowl drought, however, combined cool Pacific SSTs with a warm Atlantic Ocean.”
That’s very interesting, and may be indicative of the shape of things to come. Excess heat is coming out of both oceans at the moment, it will be very interesting to see the relative drops of temperature in both oceans following the currently developing ‘modoki’ el nino. It’s crucial to understand the modoki el nino is driven not by rising temperature like the ’98 el nino, but by lowered tropospheric temperature permitting greater ocean heat emission. Momentum built in the upwardly moving warm water will cause an overshoot and a spike in atmospheric warmth, before the consequently increased air temperatures slow down ocean heat emission again. Everything oscillates.
Is the Chandler wobble currently at high or low fequency? Sorry I haven’t had much time to pursue your line of research, I’ve been very busy with mine. I will make some time soon.
Bob Tisdale should get ready for a downward step change in the data. I predict the rapid emission of ocean heat will see us through this coming N. hemisphere winter ok, but the winter following will be severe.
tallbloke (23:34:54) “I hope that at the end of the day, what I’ve discovered will renew your interest in OHC series, after your comment the other day that there is no OHC story, because there is no reliable OHC data. It’s actually crucial to the correct understanding of solar input to the Earth climate system.”
& Re: Bob Tisdale (16:43:36)
These types of calculations aren’t up my alley, but I commend you guys for working on this.
tallbloke (23:55:40) “Is the Chandler wobble currently at high or low fequency? Sorry I haven’t had much time to pursue your line of research, I’ve been very busy with mine. I will make some time soon.”
I’d say carry on with what you are doing – you seem to be on a roll. There are enough dimensions to this climate problem to go around. I’ll share more as time passes…
Bob, I notice Wijffels et al (2008) show the same sort of magnitutude increase from 2003-2005 as Levitus, albeit from a lower baseline. I think that because it brings them back onto the longterm average extanding through the Ishii and Kimoto study, and back into agreement with Domingues too, it is probably more on the right course then Levitus et al which is definitely the outlier of the four.
I think in presenting my study, I’ll come at the problem from the other way round, and back calculate what the satellite altimetry saysthe ocean heat content should be , and then compare this figure with OHC studies past and present.
One of the reasons for doing that is that I’ve found another method using SST and the rate of temperature decline to the thermocline which corroborates the satellite altimetry figures, as well as having found a curious correlation which suggests a change in OHC calculation methodology driven by a need to fit reality to the model.
More on that soon.
Paul Vaughan (00:12:37) :
These types of calculations aren’t up my alley, but I commend you guys for working on this.
Heh, and likewise Paul, the types of calculations you do make my head swim. I’m just a mechanical engineer with a bit of extra knowledge in fluid dynamics learned at my father’s knee.
Let’s stick to what we’re good at and compliment each other by taking the trouble to think about each others work, and keep lobbing fresh ideas over the fence to each other to help inform the directions of our researches.
tallbloke: You wrote, “I hope that at the end of the day, what I’ve discovered will renew your interest in OHC series, after your comment the other day that there is no OHC story, because there is no reliable OHC data. It’s actually crucial to the correct understanding of solar input to the Earth climate system.”
But without cloud amount data that runs to present times, it would be difficult to determine what’s cause and effect.
tallbloke: You wrote, “It’s crucial to understand the modoki el nino is driven not by rising temperature like the ‘98 el nino, but by lowered tropospheric temperature permitting greater ocean heat emission.”
Please explain that.
NINO3.4 Region TLT anomalies follow the SST anomalies:
http://i29.tinypic.com/2a7bj2s.png
NINO3.4 OLR opposes SST anomalies due to the increase in cloud cover:
http://i25.tinypic.com/2035ed.png
Also, you might find the following link helpful. I just finished SST anomaly animations of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans from January 1996 to July 1, 2009, with the contour levels at 0.2 deg C to bring out the lower-intensity temperature anomalies. I’ll finish the “global” today and then upload and post them, probably tomorrow. Here’s a YouTube link to the Pacific:
Bob Tisdale (02:47:09) :
But without cloud amount data that runs to present times, it would be difficult to determine what’s cause and effect.
The non-seasonally adjusted sea level graph shows a lot of spikes occur in the second half of the year
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_global_ORIG.jpg
Until I chart the data for the various oceans I can’t be sure whether this is caused by high insolation in the southern hemisphere springtime before summer mugginess clouds the tropics more, but warm humid conditions will tend to prevent heat escaping from the ocean easily too. Lots to work on and think about, but the overall picture is becoming clearer to me. The sun heats the oceans, the oceans heat the atmosphere. Downwelling radiation doesn’t penetrate the oceans to heat it but creates more evaporation at the surface and that slows down heat emission. Co2 is along for the ride, chipping in it’s tiny contribution to that slowing of heat emission.
I have calculated the rate at which the ocean accumulated heat between 1993 and 2003 in terms of the number of watts per square metre required to warm that much water. According to the 2009 Levitus ocean heat content assessment which is 250% lower than it was in 2000, the figure comes out at; guess what?
1.7W/m2
Now where have we seen that figure before? As I said, the downwelling back-radiation from the atmosphere doesn’t heat the ocean, but limits it’s ability to emit at the rate it would in vacuuo. If the ocean is restricted from emitting by an amount equal to 1.7Wm2 it will accumulate ~6×10^22J per decade, all other things being equal.This figure roughly matches the Levitus et al and other studies.
If what I believe is the correct figure for ocean heat content increase of around 14×10^22J is on the mark, and it not only agrees with the altimetry and the gradient of temperature from the surface to the thermocline for the observed rise in SST, but also James Annan’s calculation of the Levitus et al 2000 data which Levitus got wrong, then the ‘forcing’ is not 1.7W/m^2 but 4W/m2.
This is more than co2 could accomplish in the wildest dreams of overblown climate sensitivity theoreticians, so the there must have been extra energy going into the oceans 1993-2003 as well as any additional restriction on it getting out again.
As soon as it is recognized that the source of extra heat going in has to be solar in origin, the game is up, because the claimed sensitivity rests on the assumption that solar input is near enough constant.
But it isn’t. Using sunspot numbers as a proxy for TSI, and counting them on a running cumulative total of the difference above and below the average sunspot number we can see that the run of high amplitude-short minimum cycle in the late C20th must have been putting a lot of extra TSI into the oceans.
http://s630.photobucket.com/albums/uu21/stroller-2009/?action=view¤t=sst-nino-ssa.jpg
And now the sun has quietened down, we get the modoki el nino, which is the manifestation of that accumulated energy coming back out of the oceans now the troposphere has started to cool down.
Clouds are very important in the major weather and climate shaping events you study, but these overarching processes of ocean heat accumulation and dissipation during runs of high and low solar cycles are the bigger drivers which have been hidden from view by the assumption that the sun’s effect on the energy budget of Earth is constant, and the inability to isolate the signal in the SST data. The modoki el nino is the signal. It’s previously stored energy coming out of the ocean not because temperatures are increasing, but because they are falling due to a quieter sun, creating a bigger heat differential between ocean and atmosphere, sucking the heat out of the ocean.
Having said that, the 11 year solar effect is amplified by the amount calculated by Nir Shaviv, and he believes the major cause is the clouds, and cloud changes on longer timescales too, so we’re both right really.
I just want to get the key points out in the open, so they are on the table if I get hit by a bus later today. I would like it if people let me write it up and present it in more carefully considered words though.
Thanks for listening.
Bob Tisdale (03:40:50) :
tallbloke: You wrote, “It’s crucial to understand the modoki el nino is driven not by rising temperature like the ‘98 el nino, but by lowered tropospheric temperature permitting greater ocean heat emission.”
Please explain that.
NINO3.4 Region TLT anomalies follow the SST anomalies:
http://i29.tinypic.com/2a7bj2s.png
NINO3.4 OLR opposes SST anomalies due to the increase in cloud cover:
Hi Bob, how many interesting graphs do you have in your cupboard? 🙂
I hope the foregoing post covers some of your question, because my fingers are starting to bleed, but what I draw from the second graph is that while temps were rising, the sun was strong, oceans were accumulating extra heat and el ninos were driven by increasing temps exciting trade winds, clouds and the PWP, there were big restrictions on OLR at Nino time.
But at the back end of the graph, since solar cycle 23 started winding down, the minor el ninos this decade haven’t had such a restriction on OLR. I anticipate this one will be the same, because the heat is coming out of the oceans into drier cooler air, and it’s rising to form cumulus which vanish overnight as Willis Eschenbach explained. Less humidity, less restiction on OLR.
The momentum of that heavy warm water heading upwards will keep going as air temps rise for a few months before the newly warmed atmosphere slows the emission rate down again, thus giving us a pale shadow of a full blown el nino like the ones we got in the ’80’s and nineties.
The key thing is, we’ll see SST’s rise almost simultaneously worldwide (southern hemi first?), rather than with a lag like the spreading PWP el nino’s you’ve described so brilliantly. This is because the heat is coming out of the oceans everywhere at once, due to cooler tropospheric temps. There is no ‘teleconnection’ involved, there will be no heat teleported from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The warmth coming out of the Atlantic will be the warmth that has been below the surface of the Atlantic these last 20 years or more, raising the anomaly and the sea level.
Oops, lost Bob’s second graph and my closing italic tag
NINO3.4 OLR opposes SST anomalies due to the increase in cloud cover:
http://i25.tinypic.com/2035ed.png
I’m going for a walk in the cool damp July air. Normal pontification will be resumed when my typing fingers have recovered. :o)
Hmmm. I don’t like the way that SST animation hessssittttates. It doesn’t do that in .avi that GIF Movie Gear spits out. When I get the chance, I’m going to convert it to .wmv then upload it to YouTube again. Sorry.
Bob Tisdale (03:40:50) :
I’ll finish the “global” today and then upload and post them, probably tomorrow. Here’s a YouTube link to the Pacific:
Fascinating. The ‘jerky’ version is as you say, detracts a little from the ‘flow of the narrative’, but it still contains a vast amount of information to the trained eye. To an untrained eye like mine, several things come to mind, but I’ll wait for you to upload the others and especiallythe global animation and view them all.
Thanks for your hard work on this, it must be time consuming.
This is what I would describe as a rupture in the continuity of normalized wavelet harmonic cross-spectrum power between the absolute magnitude of the vector rate of change of terrestrial polar motion |Pr’| and the rate of change of the rate of change (i.e. 2nd derivative) of the distance of the sun from the solar system centre of mass r”:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/1930HarmonicPowerRupture.PNG
Loose resonance can be seen in a plot of the harmonic phase difference:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/1930sHarmonicPhaseDifference.PNG
Note that there is only one 180 degree (black) vertically-oriented trace, in the 1930s (…& note that during ~1910-1920 there was almost an instance of antiphase).
Introducing lunar nodal cycle (LNC) harmonics makes it clear that 1:2:3 resonance was broken in a unique interference pattern that has occurred only once in the entire polar motion record (1846+):
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/1931UniquePhaseHarmonics.png
It is very difficult to get any of my contacts to understand this stuff, but eventually someone of stature & influence will have the necessary patience & lack of prejudice.
Note for anyone pondering physical mechanisms that may have been overlooked in the past: The index r” is confounded with other indices of solar system dynamics.
Speculation: Earth’s shells (atmosphere, ocean, solid, molten parts) respond differentially to gravitational acceleration/shear. Although this may not always be important, it may sometimes be very important when peculiar harmonic phase alignments arise. Perhaps some terms in some equations have been assumed to be near-zero when they are not always near-zero. Or perhaps Earth is being treated as a point mass or as a homogeneous, symmetrical, uniformly-rotating body in (draft) calculations when it should be treated as heterogeneous (& additionally as a member of the Earth-Moon system).
I am only introducing a rough sketch here. I have other clean results. For example, this stuff is clearly related to LOD and local extreme monthly temperatures.
The balance of this investigation is going to take weeks-to-years – (perhaps a decade due to circumstances). The rate of progress could be severely limited by my access to funding beginning as early as this week. Research/Education money is being diverted to pay for the 2010 Olympics in my neck of the woods – and whatever climate research money there is here only goes to projects promising to prove global warming & its implications (supporting the existing carbon tax).
Funding research on the 1930s severe drought, which had severe economic, ecological, & social consequences, is not even on the radar of the funding bodies so far as I can tell (to date). I am left with the impression that our society has gone off the rails with its blinderred sense of priorities, but I choose to remain optimistic.
My strong background in ecology positions me to fully appreciate the importance of the hydrologic cycle, including the ecological impact of severe drought. Appreciable knowledge of statistics positions me to handle the harmonic cross-wavelet calculations. Engineering taught me to focus on extreme & unusual events rather than averages. Physical geography taught me to be relentlessly & acutely conscious of scale & heterogeneity. The results of this research are too clean to be dismissed. It is just a matter of time before the right combination of experts (from different fields since this is trans-disciplinary) polish this work. One patient & open-minded astrophysicist &/or geophysicist in a position of influence might be all I need as a collaborator to successfully see this work through to its fruition, for the benefit of all of society.
Earlier plots, for reference:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriodAgassizBC,CanadaPrecipitationTimePlot.PNG
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriod.PNG
“During the 1930s, the United States experienced one of the most devastating droughts of the past century. The drought affected almost two-thirds of the country and parts of Mexico and Canada and was infamous for the numerous dust storms that occurred in the southern Great Plains.”
“[…] severity, extent, and duration of the 1930s drought was unusual for the 20th century […]”
“While progress has been made in understanding some of the important processes contributing to drought conditions (3–7), the mechanisms by which a drought can be maintained over many years are not well established.”
“Understanding the causes of the 1930s drought is particularly challenging in view of the scarcity of upper-air meteorological observations prior to about 1950.”
Siegfried D. Schubert, Max J. Suarez, Philip J. Pegion, Randal D. Koster, & Julio T. Bacmeister (2004). On the Cause of the 1930s Dust Bowl. Science 303(5665), 1855-1859.
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/climate/pdf/schubert_2004.pdf
“[…] the development and maintenance of atmospheric ridges is the prime ingredient for drought conditions […]”
“[…] the longer the anomalous weather conditions persist, the more likely it is to have some stationary forcing acting as a flywheel (i.e., as a source for inertia) to maintain the anomalies […]”
“[…] the forcing required to sustain a drought over seasons or years would be expected to lie outside of the atmospheric domain […]”
“Because a large proportion of the variance of drought conditions over North America is unrelated to sea surface temperature perturbations, it is conceivable that when a severe drought occurs it is because numerous mechanisms are acting in tandem.”
http://downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap1-3/sap1-3-final-ch3.pdf
Switching to .wmv format eliminated the hesitations in that Pacific SST animation:
I’ll delete that earlier version in a few days.
Bob, great, much smoother. A couple of brief observations. I’m not knowledgeable about this, so take this and quite a few of the statements I made in my long replies to you concerning surface circulatory events with an ‘it seems to me that’ in front of them. I can appear overly definite in the way I write and I would like your feedback to my ideas.
1) The way warm anomalies ‘flow’ across cental america from the Carribean Gulf to the CalMex coasts indicates that clouds are the cause of a lot of the comings and goings of the more ephemeral sea surface anomalies.
2) Apart from the main equatorial alternation of el nino, la nina, the other multiyear features (with an annual oscillation due to axial tilt) are the areas east of Austalasia and Japan. These drift north and south over periods of months. Do you think this drift is connected with shifts in the jet streams at the boundaries of the Hadley cells?
3) The residual warmth sometimes clinging to the sides of south and north America following el nino. Are they affected by the changes in LOD and AAM Paul has been working on, causing water to pile up against continental masses?
I have lots more questions popping into my head, but I’ll leave it there for now.
Just to comment that this thread will fall off the bottom of the thread list soon. I’m getting a lot out of it and I’d hate to see it become a complete ghost town. How about we bookmark it or move the discussion to another site? I could set up a discussion forum, or you could host it? What do you think is best?
Paul Vaughan (16:58:22) :
This is what I would describe as a rupture in the continuity of normalized wavelet harmonic cross-spectrum power between the absolute magnitude of the vector rate of change of terrestrial polar motion |Pr’| and the rate of change of the rate of change (i.e. 2nd derivative) of the distance of the sun from the solar system centre of mass r”:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/1930HarmonicPowerRupture.PNG
Hi Paul,
I note your graph has a wavelet period around the length of the chandler wobble.
So if I understand correctly, you are thinking there may be a link between the acceleration of the sun relative to the COM and the phase shift in the Chandler wobble, possibly due to differential gravitational effects on the earth moon system.
Good to see someone playing with Ray Tomes ideas in a new application by the way.
Was the sun accelerating inwards towards the COM or away at the time?
What stage of the 18.6 year cycle was the moon in, near maximum declination perchance?
The sun was dropping to minimum at the time. Do you think the Earth Moon system might be more susceptible to funny wobbles when the solar wind pressure is low?
tallbloke (00:23:25) “Was the sun accelerating inwards towards the COM or away at the time?”
Zero phase – but that’s not the story — it’s the context that’s interesting – the wave-train tightens, loosens, tightens, loosens, etc. There’s clearly a link with the LOD peak ~1912/1913 – more in the days ahead…
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tallbloke (00:23:25) “What stage of the 18.6 year cycle was the moon in, near maximum declination perchance?”
Max – (also ~winter solstice / ~perihelion).
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tallbloke (00:23:25) “Do you think the Earth Moon system might be more susceptible to funny wobbles when the solar wind pressure is low?”
No comments on solar.
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Did you see these 2 tallbloke?
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/1931UniquePhaseHarmonics.png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriodAgassizBC,CanadaPrecipitationTimePlot.PNG
They are the “take home” part of the chapter 1 story.
–
Thermodynamics was not among my few dozen engineering courses, but it is great to watch the exchange you & Bob are having.
Paul Vaughan (01:39:31) :
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tallbloke (00:23:25) “What stage of the 18.6 year cycle was the moon in, near maximum declination perchance?”
Max – (also ~winter solstice / ~perihelion).
Also the closest Perigee of the year was Jan 15th just 2 hours after full moon, and the furthest Apogee was Jan 28th 1 day after new moon. Very unusual configuration.
Data here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/pacalc.html
–
Did you see these 2 tallbloke?
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/1931UniquePhaseHarmonics.png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriodAgassizBC,CanadaPrecipitationTimePlot.PNG
Yes but I lost the context on the first. Lunar?
The precip/wobble plot is impressive, but you’ll get accused of cherrypicking if you don’t compare it to other locales.
My suspicions about the reasons for the massive downplaying of the true ocean heat content have been confirmed in this realclimate post from last year:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/06/ocean-heat-content-revisions/
“The larger long term trend in ocean warming reported here makes it much easier to reconcile the sea level estimates from thermal expansion with the actual rises. Those estimates do now match. But remember that the second big issue with ocean heat content trends is that they largely reflect the planetary radiative imbalance.”
Gavin is correct on the second count, but wrong on the first as my calcs show. The new ocean heat content estimate is around 2.5 too low to account for the observed sea level rise due to expansion.
Once again reality has been ‘adjusted’ to fit the theory.
tallbloke: You wrote, “1) The way warm anomalies ‘flow’ across cental america from the Carribean Gulf to the CalMex coasts indicates that clouds are the cause of a lot of the comings and goings of the more ephemeral sea surface anomalies.”
Agreed, the more transient anomalies appear to be SST responses to atmospheric processes, though I don’t know that I’d confine the atmospheric processes to clouds alone.
You wrote, “2) Apart from the main equatorial alternation of el nino, la nina, the other multiyear features (with an annual oscillation due to axial tilt) are the areas east of Austalasia and Japan. These drift north and south over periods of months. Do you think this drift is connected with shifts in the jet streams at the boundaries of the Hadley cells?”
I can’t answer your questions regarding jet streams and Hadley cells.
You wrote, “3) The residual warmth sometimes clinging to the sides of south and north America following el nino. Are they affected by the changes in LOD and AAM Paul has been working on, causing water to pile up against continental masses?”
I don’t know enough about Paul’s research to comment, but I would think that the “piling up” along the tropical west coasts of North and South America are at first a “mushrooming” caused by the volume of warm water being carried from west to east by the Equatorial Countercurrent. Eventually, the North and South Equatorial Currents catch up and drag the warm water back to the west. The clinging? Convection follows the warm water, causing a change in the sea surface winds. Would the winds then tend to “hold” the warm water against the coastline? Dunno.
You wrote, “I could set up a discussion forum, or you could host it? What do you think is best?”
Feel free to start commenting on the thread where I threw all of the SST anomaly videos.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/07/animations-of-weekly-sst-anomaly-maps.html
tallbloke (03:42:41) “The precip/wobble plot is impressive, but you’ll get accused of cherrypicking if you don’t compare it to other locales.”
There certainly has been no cherry-picking; Agassiz has been a core focus in my research for a year-&-a-half.
The 1930s drought was catastrophic & of continental scale. This is not in dispute. I am eager to (secure funding &) broaden the study spatially. [You may be interested to know that I think this will be a key to taking the last woodfortrees graph a step further. (I already have preliminary results.)]
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tallbloke (03:42:41) “[…] I lost the context on the first.”
Maybe a look at the base harmonics will help:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/Cos(Phase(abs(Pr.),2r..,3LNC)).png
The number of possible blends & contrasts varies geometrically [2^(n-1)] with the number of harmonics considered [2^(1-1) = 1; 2^(2-1) = 2; 2^(3-1) = 4; 2^(4-1) = 8; etc.].
I’m not going to post all combos, but I will note that another of the combos relates to LOD. The combo I posted should help focus the attention of anyone investigating mechanisms.
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I agree with you that this thread is wrapping up.
Cheers,
Paul.
E.M.Smith (20:48:09) : On the temperature history thing, we agree 🙂
We may never know the real history of global temperature, 100 year back or 100 million years back.
The entire issue of Global Warming is a cruel hoax designed to shift public thinking to allow more and more government regulation of our lives. It is arrogant to believe that government regulation could have any effect on Global temperature either up or down. Costly regulation and taxation will do nothing as it proposes a fix that will never work.