NOTE: As is typical these days, and in keeping with co-author Phil Jones tradition of not giving up anything, the publicly funded scientific paper is not included with the news, and is hidden behind a paywall. All we can get is the press release and abstract and this silly picture of the researcher grinning like a banshee. Speculate away with impunity. I wonder why he has the ozone hole in Antarctica next to the HadCRUT temperature series?
Caption: David W.J. Thompson, professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, is the lead author of a Nature paper that shows sudden ocean cooling contributed to a global warming hiatus in the middle 20th century in the Northern Hemisphere. Credit: Colorado State University
FORT COLLINS – The hiatus of global warming in the Northern Hemisphere during the mid-20th century may have been due to an abrupt cooling event centered over the North Atlantic around 1970, rather than the cooling effects of tropospheric pollution, according to a new paper appearing today in Nature.
David W. J. Thompson, an atmospheric science professor at Colorado State University, is the lead author on the paper. Other authors are John M. Wallace at the University of Washington, and John J. Kennedy at the Met Office and Phil D. Jones of the University of East Anglia, both in the United Kingdom.
The international team of scientists discovered an unexpectedly abrupt cooling event that occurred between roughly 1968 and 1972 in Northern Hemisphere ocean temperatures. The research indicates that the cooling played a key role in the different rates of warming seen in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in the middle 20th century.
“We knew that the Northern Hemisphere oceans cooled during the mid-20th century, but the sudden nature of that cooling surprised us,” Thompson said.
While the temperature drop was evident in data from all Northern Hemisphere oceans, it was most pronounced in the northern North Atlantic, a region of the world ocean thought to be climatically dynamic.
“Accounting for the effects of some forms of natural variability – such as El Nino and volcanic eruptions – helped us to identify the suddenness of the event,” Jones said.
The different rates of warming in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in the middle 20th century are frequently attributed to the larger buildup of tropospheric aerosol pollution in the rapidly industrializing Northern Hemisphere. Aerosol pollution contributes to cooling of the Earth’s surface and thus can attenuate the warming due to increasing greenhouse gases.
But the new paper offers an alternative interpretation of the difference in mid-century temperature trends.
“The suddenness of the drop in Northern Hemisphere ocean temperatures relative to the Southern Hemisphere is difficult to reconcile with the relatively slow buildup of tropospheric aerosols,” Thompson said.
“We don’t know why the Northern Hemisphere ocean areas cooled so rapidly around 1970. But the cooling appears to be largest in a climatically important region of the ocean,” Wallace said.
Global temperatures 1850-2010 [Nature News]
An abrupt drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperature around 1970
David W. J. Thompson1, John M. Wallace2, John J. Kennedy3 & Phil D. Jones4
- Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523, USA
- Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195-1640, USA
- Met Office Hadley Centre, Met Office, Exeter EX1 3PB, UK
- Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK
Correspondence to: David W. J. Thompson1 Email: davet@atmos.colostate.edu
Abstract
The twentieth-century trend in global-mean surface temperature was not monotonic: temperatures rose from the start of the century to the 1940s, fell slightly during the middle part of the century, and rose rapidly from the mid-1970s onwards1. The warming–cooling–warming pattern of twentieth-century temperatures is typically interpreted as the superposition of long-term warming due to increasing greenhouse gases and either cooling due to a mid-twentieth century increase of sulphate aerosols in the troposphere2, 3, 4, or changes in the climate of the world’s oceans that evolve over decades (oscillatory multidecadal variability)2, 5. Loadings of sulphate aerosol in the troposphere are thought to have had a particularly important role in the differences in temperature trends between the Northern and Southern hemispheres during the decades following the Second World War2, 3, 4. Here we show that the hemispheric differences in temperature trends in the middle of the twentieth century stem largely from a rapid drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperatures of about 0.3 °C between about 1968 and 1972. The timescale of the drop is shorter than that associated with either tropospheric aerosol loadings or previous characterizations of oscillatory multidecadal variability. The drop is evident in all available historical sea surface temperature data sets, is not traceable to changes in the attendant metadata, and is not linked to any known biases in surface temperature measurements. The drop is not concentrated in any discrete region of the Northern Hemisphere oceans, but its amplitude is largest over the northern North Atlantic.
=============================
hmmm, maybe this graph from ICECAP will help them:
And this too:
The historical variability of the Arctic Oscillation. 1969-1970 was darned cold.
Also see this image from the Climate Prediction Center:
ALSO: Quote from Phil Jones: Reuters
Jones, at the centre of a furore over e-mails hacked from the University of East Anglia in late 2009, was reinstated this year after reviews cleared him of suspicions of exaggerating evidence in favour of global warming.
Thursday’s paper is the first he has since published in Nature. “Maybe it will get them thinking,” he said, asked how climate sceptics would react to his involvement in a paper highlighting a cause of cooling, rather than warming.
——————-
I wonder how good that Southern Hemisphere SST data is back in the 1960s, which is used here to demonstrate “robustness”. From Physicsworld.com
I think he is smiling because he can sit in judgement of data and say whatever he can think of while drunk/high whatever and gets payed by the tax-payer to come up with theories that rely on no outside information and therefore are impossible to prove incorrect. Post-modern science has once again eaten more money buy paying sub-standard scientists to come up with what is now called science.
I didn’t know that the oceans began cooling suddenly in the 1970’s, I thought it was much later, like the 90’s.
If it’s in Nature that tells me about all I need to know.
Can I translate that last bit there?
“Difficult to reconcile…” means, “I haven’t got a friggin’ clue. I got nothing.”
Hop that helps! 😉
Fantastic! Any year now we can expect the venerable Dr. Jones to discover the Pacific Decadal Oscillation! Such breakthroughs as our beloved Climate Science is making!
The important question is whether such cooling (or warming) events are generated by internal ocean variability which is largely independent of other factors such as events in the air.
I have proposed just that for nearly three years now – and rather tiresomely described some of the potential implications for the global energy budget and the actual climate observations.
The variations in TSI alone are clearly not enough to explain what we see and I’m with Leif Svalgaard on that.
However the effect on albedo and the energy flux generally from changes in the spectrum of energy received from the sun is a different matter.
This article has been referred to before but it is highly relevant :
http://iopscience.iop.or…9326/5/3/034008/fulltext
Not everyone agrees with Leif as to a lack of potential for solar variability to have a top down effect and that paper substantially supports my propositions about the effect of solar variability on the polar oscillation, jetstream positioning, speed of hydrological cycle and albedo changes.
As you will see in the article the effect only really comes to the fore on centennial time scales which is something I have been saying for quite some time.
Then one only has to introduce a bottom up oceanic forcing as observed here in this new paper and here:
http://esciencenews.com/…h.past.climate.anomalies
to see the beginnings of establishment support for my basic propositions
I know this is very OT, but “grinning like a banshee” doesn’t sound right. My Irish folklore is rustier than my old Chevy, I thought Banshees screamed when death was imminent. No grinning involved. Perhaps “grinning like a wolf” or “grinning like a Cheshire cat” would be a more apt simile.
Thanks for the indulgence… back now to our usual programming. 🙂
““We don’t know why the Northern Hemisphere ocean areas cooled so rapidly around 1970. But the cooling appears to be largest in a climatically important region of the ocean,” Wallace said.”
Well according to all their charts it started cooling back in the 1940’s. What rapid cooling is he talking about?
Bn D, I agree: falsificationism is no longer the gate-keeper of science, and we’ve all lost out.
My favorite quote is his co-author’s statement from the link Bill Illis posted on the Tips & Notes page (When the North Atlantic caught a chill):
Maybe that’s why Thompson’s grinning.
OK S.
I’m fascinated by the way-with-words of these warmists. (Mind you, that’s all that fascinates me.) Cooling is now to be called a warming hiatus. I really think it’s time for an all-out Peace Offensive on double-speak.
Just by the way, today I was checking the Elders Weather site because it’s the time of year I need thunderstorms to kick-start my bamboo with some nitrogen soup. I happened to notice that the lowest September maximum temp was in 2006 and the highest was in 1965.
To me this indicates absolutely nothing.
To a warmist this indicates absolutely nothing.
If those stats were reversed, so that the hottest september max was in 2006, and the lowest in 1965…
To me this would indicate absolutely nothing.
To a warmist it would indicate absolutely everything.
Well, circumpolar yacht-racing should thin out their ranks over the next decade. But there could be lasting damage to the English language.
Hockey stick – check, ozone hole over Antarctica – check, ‘post it note’ reminder to occasionally look outside at the real world- check
I posted this over at Revkinworld-
From Nature News come several precious statements about this article-
“…says co-author Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, “we spent a lot of time in trying to rule out possible data issues”.
LOL!!!!!!
“But Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, isn’t so sure… “I’m unconvinced they’ve shown that the model of an isolated brief event is a better fit to the data.”
LOL!!!!!!
Oh REALLLYYYY! Watch how El Nino warms, and then La Nina cools Pendleton!
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/climate/temp_graphs.php?stn=KPDT&wfo=pdt
Just so ya know, I’ve had two glasses of red wine and just finished making a bodacious venison stew, so if I typewe the wrorng letterssr, yaa nkows whys.
The rest of you typists, what’s your exscuse????
oops. Apparently I didn’t finsish reading. it said “ahaitus” int he tillte. My bad.
Again and again, these “climate scientists” can’t even see the flaws they uncover. Studying the meaning of this sentence reveals much:
“The hiatus of global warming in the Northern Hemisphere during the mid-20th century may have been due to an abrupt cooling event centered over the North Atlantic around 1970, rather than the cooling effects of tropospheric pollution, according to a new paper appearing today in Nature.”
Aside from the usual “may have been” so prevalent in this type of study, note that they are saying the coefficients in their computer models “may” be wrong. Yes, the computer models that have been teased out to at least 90 years into the future “may” have incorrect coefficients.
Never, ever do these kind of findings result in re-evaluations of the General Circulation Models upon which ALL their doom and gloom resides.
Did the press release include ” so this is why we tend to start all our calculations from this period, the cold (sorry lack of warm) spell makes the trend look better”
So Jones is right after all. Warming is CO2, cooling is naturalr.
Pamela-that Pendelton Data is what I call”The Green Tomato chart.”
Since when has 1972 been mid twentieth century?
We use WUWT for an abbreviation.
My teenager, alas uses, WTF (World Trade Federation) in his texting.
However, in this instance, I’d say “World Trade Federation” is probably appropriate.
WTF !!! The oceans just suddenly decided to “get colder”? Even if one RECOGNIZES the salient point that the oceans represent a “heat sink” which has ((6/7)*(8000/15)) or 457 times as much capacity as the atmosphere…and therefore should in the long run “damp” any atmospheric change by a factor of almost 500 (i.e., so that if extra energy is put in the atmosphere, say enough to raise the temperature by 10 C during a year, it may take 500 years before that complete rise in temperature is seen..), one still has to explain WHY they would engage in a massive “turn over” and decide to drop temperatures down (absorb significantly more energy than in previous years…)
And, in the final assesment, if the oceans CAN do this, until such mechanisms are understood, movements BOTH upward and DOWNWARD in tropopsheric temperatures CANNOT be attributed to a “single cause”, be that aerosols, CO2, or bovine belching.
These guys ARE a piece of work!
This is Jones’s rehabilitation piece, he can hardly do a first paper back after Climategate on warming so he picks cooling but with a twist.
Although the study has highlighted holes in our knowledge of past temperature trends, it hasn’t changed the fact that greenhouse gases are warming the world up, said Gabi Hegerl at the University of Edinburgh. “In my opinion, this research does not question our current interpretation of the overall causes of 20th-century warming.”
I’ll try again in the hope that the links work this time.
The important question is whether such cooling (or warming) events are generated by internal ocean variability which is largely independent of other factors such as events in the air.
I have proposed just that for nearly three years now – and rather tiresomely described some of the potential implications for the global energy budget and the actual climate observations.
The variations in TSI alone are clearly not enough to explain what we see and I’m with Leif Svalgaard on that.
However the effect on albedo and the energy flux generally from changes in the spectrum of energy received from the sun is a different matter.
This article has been referred to before but it is highly relevant :
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/3/034008/fulltext
Not everyone agrees with Leif as to a lack of potential for solar variability to have a top down effect and that paper substantially supports my propositions about the effect of solar variability on the polar oscillation, jetstream positioning, speed of hydrological cycle and albedo changes.
As you will see in the article the effect only really comes to the fore on centennial time scales which is something I have been saying for quite some time.
Then one only has to introduce a bottom up oceanic forcing as observed here in this new paper and here:
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/08/14/changes.net.flow.ocean.heat.correlate.with.past.climate.anomalies
to see the beginnings of establishment support for my basic propositions
I think they are trying to lay the groundwork for an excuse they can apply to the approaching global warming hiatus.
Wasn’t that period of cooling previously blamed on aerosols? And the warming that followed was said to be due to the reduction of aerosols due to pollution controls. If that’s not the case then obviously the GCMs are wrong.
What a shock.
That period of cooling couldn’t possibly be due to natural variability, could it? 😉
I, for one, enjoy the cold. Or a warming hiatus or whatever Dr. Backpeddle wants to call it after a 30 year warming period. I had a LOT of fun in the snow of the 70’s. My son loves what he calls “tobogalling”. Always look for the silver lining. Cheers.
Perhaps the effects of aerosol particles was enhanced or multiplied in some means, thereby creating sudden tipping points at which its effects are magnified in a sudden or catastrophic fashion. Isn’t that how the gradual increase of CO2 is supposed to create ocean level rises of 20 meters or whatever?
q/ I wonder why he has the ozone hole in Antarctica next to the HadCRUT temperature series?unq
Because he is an idiot???
regards.
(and no apologies)
Max Hugoson said:
“one still has to explain WHY they would engage in a massive “turn over” and decide to drop temperatures down (absorb significantly more energy than in previous years…)”
More pertinently one would need to explain why a vast body of liquid with an internal system of movement (probably variable) and large areas of temperature and density differentials subject to the rotational forces set up by the planet and affected by highly variable winds would NOT engage in massive changes in “turnover”.
Such changes would be trivial for the oceans but massive for the air due to the density differential between water and air.
The rate of energy absorption by the oceans would be induced primarily by albedo changes as the main cloud bands shift latitudinally on centennial time scales.
The rate of energy release by the oceans would be induced by internal ocean cycling.
What is important about this paper is that these pro-AGW climate scientists to date are recognizing that there are profound natural variations in the climate (mostly driven by unexplainable ocean cycles).
The IPCC reports really downplayed this natural effect but these scientists are confirming that the natural cycles are very important. Having Phil Jones and John J. Kennedy (in charge of ocean SSTs and HadSST at the Met Office) sign off and confirm this finding is a major event in climate science.
It will be disputed (and the quotes from other scientists show this in less than 24 hours) but it should signify a change in philosophy.
Once one goes down this road, the 1976 to 1998 warming period then starts to look more like 50% caused by natural warming. Climate models have to be rewritten and the CO2 sensitivity is reduced by 50% of that previously assumed.
It is a significant event having prominent pro-AGW scientists recognize ocean cycles that cannot be caused by the other typical climate forcings of GHGs, aerosols, volcanoes or the ENSO. It is perfectly reasonable but the community has not been able to make this leap before.
Douglas, you’ld be right ’bout that. The only time I get to enjoy fried steak-sized green toms is when it’s witch-tit cold in August and Septmeber.
That picture is so garbage…
The Mann hockey stick and the Ozone hole…
Thompson is quite a work of art… dart board quality…
REPLY: It’s HadCRUT temperature, not the Mann Hockey Stick – Anthony
It has been a circuitous and costly journey back to what we have known for 30 years. Or is it just me, …..
His grin looks quite sheepish to me.
tom says:
September 22, 2010 at 7:41 pm
I think they are trying to lay the groundwork for an excuse they can apply to the approaching global warming hiatus.
…………………………………………………………….
True story… i know some of the folks in Co. they are throwing out fishing lines in all directions…
This is not the only oceanic phenomenon affecting climate but it is good to see it getting attention. Another one in the Pacific is the PDO which may or may not be related to it in some way. That is because PDO may be influenced by the terminus of the thermohaline circulation which starts in the North Atlantic and snakes south from there along the bottom of the ocean. But when it comes to the North Atlantic temperatures it is abundantly clear that any temperature shift there implies a change in the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream comes up along the North American east coast and then turns east and broadens out into the North Atlantic drift. From there its branches spread out towards the North Sea and towards the Arctic Ocean which is reached by passing between Iceland and Scandinavia. This arctic branch of the Gulf Stream keeps the Russian Arctic ice free as far as Novaya Zemlya and beyond. After cooling its water sinks and contributes to the thermohaline circulation, a cold current moving south along the bottom of the ocean. To cool the North Atlantic you either have to slow this system down at some point or to divert it south towards the Bay of Biscay. In either case the Russian Arctic would be affected which should have been checked. Unfortunately I don’t see that any of these possibilities were checked by the authors who seem to be oblivious to what controls the temperature of the North Atlantic. This is par from people who don’t even know that warm currents of the North Atlantic, chiefly the Gulf Stream, are the cause of Arctic warming. It started abruptly at the turn of the twentieth century after a two thousand year, linear, cooling stretch (Kaufman et al., Science 325:1236-1239). This sudden start of warming rules out carbon dioxide as the causative agent despite what Kaufman et al. think about their own discovery. Laws of physics simply don’t allow it. Only a rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system at the turn of the century is capable of suddenly delivering the massive amounts of heat that began to pour into the Arctic at that time. This is one crucial period in the history of the Atlantic that should be studied but nothing has been done so far even though this information has been available since last December. A lesser amount of warm water flowing through the Bering Strait also contributes to Arctic warming. In 2007 more than the usual amount of warm water entered the Arctic this way and melted a large patch of ice on the west side of the ocean while the Gulf Stream side hardly changed. Read:
http://www.amazon.com/What-Warming-Satellite-global-temperature/dp/1439264708/ref=sr_1_1?s=gateway&ie=UTF8&qid=1285209232&sr=8-1
tom says: September 22, 2010 at 7:41 pm
“I think they are trying to lay the groundwork for an excuse they can apply to the approaching global warming hiatus.”
You think so!
ps. “approaching global warming hiatus” should be “ongoing cooling phase of the global climate cycle”
Perhaps Mr/Dr Thompson could explain WTF happened to the Little Ice Age in the Hokey-Schtick graph on his computer screen. As we all at WUWT know, that event was a). REAL, and b). A cooling that didn’t come on “suddenly” but managed to linger for nearly 300 years. Gee, whatever might have caused that?
These Calamit(y)-ologists seem to think they can replicate the past if they just twiddle the GCM knobs a little here and there. But they still can’t explain the 1900-1940 warming because CO2 is the only knob they have for “heat”.
Just another $50-$100 Bn in “research” funding ought to do the “trick”.
“We don’t know why the Northern Hemisphere ocean areas cooled so rapidly around 1970. But the cooling appears to be largest in a climatically important region of the ocean,” Wallace said.
“While the temperature drop was evident in data from all Northern Hemisphere oceans, it was most pronounced in the northern North Atlantic, a region of the world ocean thought to be climatically dynamic.”
====================================
Idiots! No mention at all in the press release of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation where, during 1970, both were in the troughs of those waves.
How ******* stupid do they think we are?
Keep grinning. The grin reminds me of Gavin in the coffee shop in NYC.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
There’s a healthy, detailed discussion of the paper and its implications on Dot Earth: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/a-sharp-ocean-chill-and-20th-century-climate/
Where is it written that only one potential impact can act at a time? North American sulfate emissions peaked around 1974 — why can’t that have added to the PDO? Sulfate emissions might have climbed a bit more in the FSU, but it is US sulfate emissions that could cool the adjacent Atlantic.
“We knew that the Northern Hemisphere oceans cooled during the mid-20th century, but the sudden nature of that cooling surprised us,” Thompson said.
These fellows should stop saying they are surprised by things. It only shows how little they know—I think they don’t understand that.
I’m particularly fond of this phrase – “cooling played a key role in the different rates of warming “
This is actually quite a significant result, given its publication in Nature. For years, the CAGW true believers have been claiming that the mid 20th century cooling (which led to the abortive “global cooling” panic in the mid 70’s) was a result of the cooling effects of anthropogenic aerosols masking the greenhouse gas-induced warming. Now we have, in Nature, the warmists’ favorite tabloid, a paper, co-authored by none other than Climategate Phil, that implies an oceanic oscillation was the driver. If oceanic cycles can cause cooling – gee, I dunno Phil, do ya think they could also cause warming?????
But watch, instead the CAGW zealots will now use this result to somehow claim that climate sensitivity has therefore been underestimated and …… it’s worse than we thought!!!! Long live CAGW cargo cult science.
Here comes the return of reason, it will be painful.
To everyone.
It will be blamed on the oceans, those dastardly ocean cycles convinced our leaders the end was near.
But, now it is clear, it is cyclic.
Who knew?
Actually, without reading the paper yet, I see this as very positive erosion of AGW. Aerosols have been “eruditely” tossed about to account for all temperature deviations that differ from the Keeling curve despite very very flimsy data. I suspect we will soon see a few papers that show aerosols as insignificant. So natural variation is all that’s left and they need to look like they are on top of things even when they are out of ammunition.
may have been
I am so sick of this.
It would appear from the Law Dome ice core data CO2 increase took a 20 year hiatus around the same time.
This looks like normal science to me. Prior explanation found inadequate. Work continues to find better or correct explanation. What’s to see here? What’s the implied argument – the warmists are incompetent because they’ve recognized our understanding is not complete?
@Anthony
Banshees scream and wail but never heard of one grinning.
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=%22grinning+like+a+banshee%22&word2=%22screaming+like+a+banshee%22
REPLY: Well, where I come from they grin too.
Can’t wait for them to “discover” what drives the ocean oscillations.
There will be much more back peddling of BS CO2 ideas as the cyclic processes continue the warming hiatus.
” I wonder why he has the ozone hole in Antarctica next to the HadCRUT temperature series?”
Come on Anthony… to prove to the world he really is a clitomatologist. ☺
I’m surely going to hurl.
Either the good doctor is being simplistic or I’m a buffoon, and to be honest, I’ve been a buffoon before. But what in this analysis identifies a world capacity to produce a mysterious outburst of heat/cold/no change at all in the ocean? What ever happened to the notion that all the energy in the world worth thinking about comes from the sun, and that if it is sequestered for a time in the ocean and is suddenly or otherwise released, it does not constitute new energy in the global energy state? It is simply additive.
As I read this it would appear that energy expresses like an apparition to change the climate in little understood ways. That is playing dice with sequestered energy and a pretty smart guy once said God does not play dice. Not that I’m handing all this off to God, but substitute laws of nature for the diety of your choice and the same rules apply.
If the energy was already here then it is NOT NEW ENERGY! It has only reemerged. If it has been unsequestered, learn why. Don’t blame me and my Harley for the problem.
Give good old Phil Jones another 50 years and he might figure out that the sudden cooling event in the mid 20th century was, OMG, a natural cycle!
He is just really slow at seeing, detecting, or understanding cycles – probably dropped on his head as a baby.
Mirabile dictu! The strange incident of the tail wagging in the night-time was caused by the dog it was attached to! Maybe we should have been watching the dog all along.
It REALLY annoys me that I have to bust a gut trying to get a paper published in Nature from the biological/medical sciences field while these muppets continually get their shonky manuscripts accepted. Bah Hunbug!!
For years the climate scientists have been researching the climate armed with lavish funding and allowed almost total freedom to play with expensive computer models and it seems they know less now than when they started.
We were told that the oceans were rapidly warming and that their computer models predicted runaway warming as the warming oceans reached a tipping point and could no longer act as a heat sink for the atmospheric warming that their adjusted temperature data promised. We were confidently informed that the oceans cycles were very well understood because their computer models told them so, runaway dangerous climate change was just around the corner as tipping points were reached and all this was due to carbon dioxide.
Climate science had it all worked out in theory, the jigsaw fitted almost perfectly together and they knew this because the computer models told them so with ever higher atmospheric temperatures and ever rising sea temperatures and levels. It was all a done deal with the climate scientists confidently asserting their knowledge and wisdom to a trusting media.
Then came the trickle of doubts that turned into a flood, the temperature series was flawed and adjusted, the scientists had private doubts which they concealed in case their lavish funding dried up, the dirty tricks and manipulations and smearing of enemies and all of a sudden it seems the climate science community was seen to have feet of clay and their knowledge of the climate was very much less than complete.
What they thought they knew they didnt, what they believed was wrong, what they hoped for did not appear and their castle so carefully fabricated was found to have been built on the shifting sands of arrogance and deceit and so our real knowledge of the earths climate is no more advanced than it was when the art of climate science was born.
The scientists involved wanted certainty so in the absence of certain knowledge they substituted what they thought was applied predictive logic based on computer modelling quite forgetting the basic principles of of science, advance a theory and then match the theory to real world observation. The most powerful computer in the world is only as good as the data fed into it, if real data is used the results are stunning but if guesses and wishful thinking and made up data are used then the results are just pure rubbish.
We are now in the position of having to witness the embarrassing spectacle of climate science coming to terms with its errors and mistakes, the old saying ‘be sure your sins will find you out’ is very accurate.
Tamino should be very upset about this paper since he has a firm belief that the mid century 20th century cooling was due to aerosols.
REPLY: A light breeze will upset “Tamino” -Anthony
Cliff,
The warmists are incompetent because they advocate a complete re-structuring of modern society on nothing more than a hypothesis. If the warmists just stuck to the science, it would only be an academic debate, versus the birth of the cap and tax montrosity that was passed in the US House.
Finally, the warmists are the type of people who argue until they are blue in the face that they are right, only to reverse their position 180 degrees about 5 years later than most other scientific disciplines. I will give you an example. They are still touting their climate models even though the model assumptions are circa late 1990’s. My guess that future climate models will likely show only a 2C rise in global temps in the 21st century. Again, anyone without an agenda (i.e., need fantastic results for more grant money) could have produced the same result about 10 years ago. This is why they have no credibility.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiatus
“” I wonder why he has the ozone hole in Antarctica next to the HadCRUT temperature series?””
Just two cases where the proposed mechanism was flawed but pushed till accepted for monetary gain.
The reason O2 changes to O3 is because the magnetic reluctance of O2 is three orders of magnitude higher than O3. So by the rules of the conservation of energy, it is much more efficient for some of the EUV and UV EMF flowing into the atmosphere, to convert O2 into O3 to lower the resistance to its flow. As long as the levels of UV energy is above normal / average the O3 level is maintained.
When the seasonal total spectrum EMF drops as the magnetic fields of the Earth also decreases slowly long term, the maintenance of the O3 is allowed to decrease back to almost all O2. The whole CFC freon 12 debacle was commercial/political in origin, and as the background levels of the earth’s magnetic field strength continues to decrease the “Ozone hole” continues to respond as it did before and gets larger every year. With not a word on the MSM about the continued gradual hole size increase, with a new record level almost every year.
The CFC freon 12 scare was never viable, just like the CAGW CO2 scare is never going to drive the atmosphere into Venus type conditions. I am wondering what third picture in on his monitor behind the HadCRUT temp scam? Looks kinda like a map of the Himalayas?
The smile on his face is like some one with pair of aces in the hole, who just went all in, calling an opponent’s hand that turns out surprisingly to be a royal flush.
Or just proud to an assistant to a benched team member.
Warming during the 20th century was most probably caused by the ordered trefoil movement of the solar system barycenter between 1906-1956. The irregular, chaotic pattern began in 1985, and will last until 2040, as predicted by Rhodes Fairbridge, causing the present cooling, as is also proposed by Ivanka Chárvátova and Pavel Hedja (2008).
The quiet volcanic period between 1915 and 1960 is an indication of the barycenter influence on Earth’s climate and geologic activity. The present chaotic pattern the barycenter is doing and the increase on volcanic and seismic activity is another strong indication.
But don’t expect these people will look up and take a look at the sun. The sun is no-no for grant applications.
I do not have to publish in Nature nor work in University to see, that the aerosol BS theory was, well, BS.
So if natural cooling can cool down the climate, can also natural warming warm it?
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/ihadsst2_280-360E_0-70N_na.png
See the shift in N Atlantic. Next 30 years we are going downhill again. To h*ll with all banshees.
GCMs defended by Stott from the Met office.
He states “Climate models capture much of the complexity and richness of this behaviour” saying they are just as chaotic as reality.
LOL
Not mentioning, of course, that that the behavior is totally different.
From Revkins blog:
Peter Stott, Met Office:
——
So the analysis done in this paper by David Thompson et al is a valuable piece of additional evidence in enabling us to get down into the real detail as Gabi has says and pick out the interplay between the different factors that can affect climate. As to the models, this interplay between climate change and climate variability is fascinating and this richness of behaviour is indeed seen in the climate models.
……………………………….
Climate models capture much of the complexity and richness of this behaviour – behaviour that is not programed into the climate models but which – actually a remarkable success for the science of climate modelling – but which emerges from these models when we make
simulations of climate over the last century.
From http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html
“My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.” – Freeman Dyson.
So far as I am concerned, any paper which has Phil Jones as a co-author (co-conspirator?) has ZERO credibility.
“We don’t know why the Northern Hemisphere ocean areas cooled so rapidly around 1970. ” The only thing in this paper which I will accept is the first three words of this sentence.
And they are happy that the politicians, on the basis of their “settled”, “consensus” science, will destroy the economy of the developed world and dash the hopes of the third world poor?
Hmmm, so science is supposed to be a continuing journey. We have made our case that natural cycles can be appropriately used to show that CO2 is not a big driver of warming. We have a study that now may confirm one of our base tenets, that actually goes against the meme that sulfates/pollution were the cause for the cooling of the past mid century. And yet, it is mostly met with derision, because of one of the authors.
Sad really.
🙁
If natural cooling of the Northern Hemisphere ocean areas resulted in the “ice age” scare, then the reverse of that natural trend led to how much of the current warming?
Take a minute, and go back to the top, look at the photo and ask yourself ,
‘ would I buy a used car from this man’ ?
Only one little old lady driver,
Stored in a climate controlled environment,
Always covered by a dust sheet,
Oil changed every 50 miles,
Never driven in the rain,
The snow tires and chains in the trunk are from another car,
The drivers seat is worn because the cat always slept there.
What took them so long?
Ocean cooling causes Global Warming.
Global Cooling causes Ocean warming. So now that the N. Atlantic is warmer than everything else, it’s Global Cooling time.
That Phil Jones is a genius, I tell you.
I believe this latest idea comes from what I was talking about a few threads back:
As La Nina upwells cold water in the Pacific, it shoves (read does not replace) the warm water northwards in it’s wake.
But, the warm water in the N. Atlantic is temporary, just like the cold event there in 1968-72 was temporary.
The cooling Arctic Winter will make short work of it.
From University of Washington
Causes for the PDO are not currently known. Likewise, the potential predictability for this climate oscillation are not known. The mechanisms giving rise to PDO will determine whether skilful decades-long PDO climate predictions are possible.
Here is the answer to the cause and prediction mechanism.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PDO.htm
Let me get this straight – the 70s global cooling that had all the alarmists up in arms about the onset of the next ice age was actually global warming in disguise?
Is there a rubber room big enough to contain all these “experts”?
I just want to know when we can start suing these charlatans. Surely they have committed crimes. The three enquiries that Jones survived were not enquiries in the legal sense. They were a bunch of mates covering each others arse. The number of frauds just keeps getting bigger and now includes the enquirers. A fair dinkum court case could and would discover the truth and expose these clowns for the cheats they are. It would also expose the universities and Government agencies that simply went along with the lies. Let’s sue.
“The twentieth-century trend in global-mean surface temperature was not monotonic…..”
Why should it be?
The authors still regard the temperature stasis c.1940–c. 1980, which doesn’t fit the model (assuming the veracity of the data), as an aberration which has to be explained away http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1900/mean:25/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1940/to:1980/trend .
Correct me if I’m wrong, but if the cooling wasn’t down to aerosols, then doesn’t that in itself invalidate most or all of the IPCC climate models…
” I wonder why he has the ozone hole in Antarctica next to the HadCRUT temperature series?”
“Come on Anthony… to prove to the world he really is a clitomatologist. ☺”
Actually, to me they appear to be faffing about in their mother’s basements, proudly showing how they can download images off the net. They couldn’t possibly be serious about calling themselves “scientists”, because they missed (or ignored) this:
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/SixtyYearCycle.htm
Brilliant article, taking just about everything into account, including orbital fluctuations.
In some sense, I think that it is a purely academic question what was the cause of the cooling in the mid 20th century – a question that doesn’t really impact any “planning” of our CO2 economy etc. It seems that whatever the cause was, it can occur again. This statement holds for PDO, AMO, emissions of aerosols, solar activity, anything you think of.
If it were possible for other effects to beat the effect of CO2 emissions between 1940-1970 and achieve cooling, it is possible that the same thing happens in 2010-2040 or other periods. So we’re just far from knowing whether the temperatures in 2040 will be warmer than today or not. It may be somewhat more likely that 2040 will be warmer than 2010 – but why does it matter?
It’s like if you think that it’s somewhat more likely for team A to beat team B in soccer while the bookmaker offers the same odds. Will the knowledge about the asymmetry – or bias – allow you some spectacular profit with the bookmakers? Clearly, you don’t want to bet your house on team A just because it’s somewhat more likely than B, especially if you don’t win anything, anyway.
Surely this merely demonstrates yet again that we don’t know nearly as much about the climate as is claimed.
tonyb
This is the first step in there new science, climate catastrophe or what ever that bloke in the white house wants to call it now. Move the goal posts and re-submit grant applications as the ones on global warming are drying up.
Here’s the thing about modeling. If you get the averages from the known past correct, you can get the averages from the future. That is why interest, as a cost for risk, is obsolete. Just give me a call at (555)555-5555 to learn more about my stock modeling system. It explains all the blips we have seen in the economy in the past with 100% accuracy! And just wait til you see what
Madam Cleothe models have in store for you!The photo, to me, shows an extremely nervous rictus which can be mistaken for a grin, similar to the way your dog ‘grins’ when he’s peed on the carpet in the room he’s not allowed in, that you haven’t discovered yet and the door to the yard (and escape) is firmly shut. He is no doubt mindful that partnering Phil Jones of UEA in a research paper may be akin to a Damoclean sword hanging over his academic reputation and his continued tenure and funding.
And who gave them licence to rape and pillage the English language? Warming hiatus, indeed!
Anthony
You mentioned the map showing the ozone hole behind the researchers back, which appears to be the 2006 version.
This is current information.
http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.html
It reached a mimum in 2006 and doesn’t seem to be ‘healing’ very much despite the ban on cfc’s. Last year I asked the question to the Max Planck institute and Cambridge University as to whether the hole might have always existed, its just that before the 1950’s they didn’t have the equipment to measure it.
They admitted they didn’t know and it was possible a hole had always been there, which I understand is partly a consequence of temperatures.
I know you’ve covered this subject in the past but do you think an update might be in order?
tonyb
Perhaps “David W.J. Thompson, professor of
atmospheric scienceterrestrial astrology at Colorado State University” explains in his paper why the oceans have been coolingThe article reads. “’The suddenness of the drop in Northern Hemisphere ocean temperatures relative to the Southern Hemisphere is difficult to reconcile with the relatively slow buildup of tropospheric aerosols,’ Thompson said.”
There are two things going on according to their plots of SST anomalies for the Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere and the difference. The Southern Hemisphere is rising while the Northern Hemisphere is declining. Shouldn’t the question be, why is one hemisphere cooling while the other is warming?
“We don’t know why the Northern Hemisphere ocean areas cooled so rapidly around 1970. But the cooling appears to be largest in a climatically important region of the ocean,”
Following, as it does, upon a highly unusual admission of cluelessness, we have the unqualified declaration that this particular patch of the ocean is more climatically important than some others. On behalf of all those who may feel geographically excluded by this statement let me say, without fear of contradiction, that if my particular patch of the Indian Ocean should warm appreciably, cool appreciably, or sharply change its direction of flow, you are all going to know about it.
The thing that is important for Jones and UEA/CRU is that he’s published in Nature which is regarded as one of the ‘high impact journals’ when carrying out academic research assessments.
One of the amusing things about such asssessments is that, 20 years down the line, it doesn’t matter whether you were right or wrong. It matters that you got column inches in the right journals.
I must say though that if he thinks after all the trashing of those moderating the seeohtwo party line that he can just waltz in and take the other explanations and stay as a high priest then he’s the biggest hypocrite in world science right now.
So long as he keeps getting funding, I doubt he’ll care one iota.
I must admit I was sceptical about the claims made in this new paper, until I saw it has the University of East Anglia Mark of Quality (c).
Dave Springer says:
September 22, 2010 at 8:52 pm
It would appear from the Law Dome ice core data CO2 increase took a 20 year hiatus around the same time.
I’ve responded to your strange insistence that the relatively flat growth of CO2 concentrations during the 1928-48 period is some how significant. The Response is here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/20/physicist-says-fossil-fuel-burning-is-insignificant-in-the-global-carbon-pool/#comment-489945
“…this silly picture of the researcher grinning like a banshee”
Your immaturity and irrational hatred of everything to do with science could not be more evident.
[REPLY: Maturity dictates that self-control will intercept personal disparagement … bl57~mod]
There are many scientists who still think human CO2 emissions can affect global temperature but we don’t take much notice of them these days. The science is moving on and the major concern now is working out why both the 70s cooling and 90s warming fears both turned out to be wrong.
What we need from these advocates is a public statement that they have been wrong and we don’t need to make any further steps to reduce CO2 within our energy chain.
This way we prevent further disasters like this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-11395964
It’s not only the science that is corrupted and we need the money for real problems.
Martin Brumby says:
September 22, 2010 at 11:28 pm
Actually Martin, they have no actual intention of dashing the hopes of the third world poor. When the first world is no longer, and everybody is “equal” there will be nothing to compare, so within a generation or so all our grandkids can live in a world where everyone has bugger-all; except of course the chosen ones who out of “necessity” and station are allowed a few “indulgences” like a castle, private jet, stretch-limo and a few hundred billion dollars.
RE:
Stephen Wilde says:
September 23, 2010 at 4:07 am
Luboš had a great article on The Reference Frame the other day titled…
Lesser minds react to Bob Laughlin’s climatic blasphemy
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/09/lesser-minds-react-to-bob-laughlins.html
This paragraph from it is very fitting…
Science is about finding the truth about the climate and other things – and the truth is that the climate has always been changing – for dozens of reasons that came and come in thousands of variations – whether a zealot likes it or not. You can’t insure yourself or your planet against the validity of the laws of physics: the laws will always hold. In particular, the climate is always changing. And the changes have been larger than anything that CO2 can produce after centuries of burning of fossil fuels can achieve.
Regardless of what man does… climate is going to change.
Regardless of what man does… eventually the next glacial period will set in.
The earth, nature is not concerned with man. Man is a speck who too often feels more important than he really is.
This Thompson article appears to be a real beauty:
1) it satisfies the urge of the public to attribute poorly understood phenomena to a single cause.
2) it attributes the cooling to emmm ehh – cooling-? What can be more convicing?
not to mention the Wallace juwel: a “climatically important region of the ocean” makes you wonder which regions are climatically futile?
If anything this paper (exerpt) proves that it is irresponsible to attribute temperature trends to single causes, that correlation cannot be interpretet as causalityand that we are only at the brink of gaining an understanding of the climate system.
Looks like Phil Jones could be wobbling regarding his belief in CAGW…
First we have this:-
BBC Q&A (13-Feb-2010): Professor Phil Jones(PJ) questioned by the BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin(RH).
RH Q (a) – “Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?”
PJ A (a)”…in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.
Here are the trends and significances for each period:”
Period………Len(y)..C/10y..Significance
1860-80 21 0.163 Yes
1910-40 31 0.15 Yes
1975-98 24 0.166 Yes
1975-09 35 0.161 Yes
RH Q (b) – “Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
PJ A (b)”…Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level…”
Then we have this endorsement of natural climate change in the abstract from the new paper…
“..Here we show that the hemispheric differences in temperature trends in the middle of the twentieth century stem largely from a rapid drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperatures of about 0.3 °C between about 1968 and 1972. The time-scale of the drop is shorter than that associated with either tropospheric aerosol loadings or previous characterizations of oscillatory multi-decadal variability. The drop is evident in all available historical sea surface temperature data sets, is not traceable to changes in the attendant meta-data, and is not linked to any known biases in surface temperature measurements. The drop is not concentrated in any discrete region of the Northern Hemisphere oceans, but its amplitude is largest over the northern North Atlantic…”
Then we have this (odd?) comment…
…“Maybe it will get them thinking.” he said, when asked how climate sceptics would react to his involvement in a paper highlighting a cause of cooling, rather than warming.
Makes me wonder if the mole behind the CRU Climategate leak held a very senior position???
OK, just a cursory look at the graph of ocean temp submitted in Nature, and shown above (temps 1850 to 2000 – unsteady warming) – the drop from 1940 is commented as being a measurement artefact – in which case, if excluded, the graph shows a steady warming since 1910 at a consistent rate – i.e starting 60 years before the ‘onset of AGW’ in 1970.
Therefore, being as we know how the oceans aftect temperatures, what case is there for CO2 ?
I think I know why the oceans cooled in the 1970s, I seem to remember as a child everyone was more worried about a new ice age starting, so I guess the oceans just tried to scare us into believing the new ice age had started. Now everyone worries about global warming and the planet is doing its best to make us believe the warming is real; so the moral is ‘stop worrying about things and it should all settle down’. Maybe the dinosaurs worried too much about being wiped out by an asteroid strike!
Anthony, this is beneath you. I do not understand the anger towards this researcher. He is saying the cooling was caused by a natural event and not man made. This is what we have been saying all along.
Climate researchers usually underestimate the level of natural climate variability and blame mankind for any change in the energy budget or stored heat. Now we have a researcher who agrees with us and you attack his looks, his smile. Stop making this so personal!
Okay, I wouldn’t have chosen Phil Jones as my co-author but perhaps that was the only way to get the research published in a high impact journal.
Stephen Wilde – thanks for the links, it updates me on Lockwood’s previous paper on blocking high pressure systems that cool Europe – also linked to shifts in the jetstream and that then to UV variability (which is also linked in the literature to the Little Ice Age weather patterns in Western Europe – from work by Drew Shindell at NASA).
On one level, it is good to have one’s analysis confirmed by the mainstream who now begin to redeem themselves – but annoying that they don’t make any reference to anybody who might have drawn their attention to these potential causal links – as I did in my book, ‘Chill’, published in July 2009, and before that in a visit to John Kennedy at Hadley in September 2008! Hadley had simply never thought about the relationship of ocean heat stores, which are spatially distinct – especially in the North Atlantic, and the rate of accumulation or release of heat and what determines those rates. In that year I also asked to meet up with their experts on the jetstream and whether they coudl direct me to the literature on its historic patterns – they had no one working on it and directed me to a US aviation website (which had no archival data).
I critiqued Lockwood’s previous work on the lack of correlation of solar trends with temperature in my book and drew attention to what he had missed. But heh, science progresses! And that is the main thing. They are now all looking at the jetstream, UV, and the spatial distribution of heat – though mainly in relation to the North Atlantic and Western Europe, rather than the PDO and Alaska and the role that the Alaskan northern shelf has in terms of temperature differentials to drive the Beaufort Gyre – and the latter determines whether warm North Atlantic water penetrates into the Arctic Ocean. This is all in the book.
My sense is that the rapid changes in heat content are very largely concerned with the top 200m – the profiles of heat storage show most of it above that depth, and have little to do with longer term ocoean overturning in the thermo-haline conveyor. Meso-scale eddies from storm tracks readily penetrate to this depth and mix the water, with the cyclones acting to transfer heat and mositure to the atmosphere to augment the oceanic transfer on the normal westerly air currents into Europe. In my book I also review the latest research showing that 80% of land warming (UHI notwithstanding) is due to ocean transfer. IPCC itself says that 80% of the heat content (warming) is locked in the upper oceans.
I think the rapid cooling is due to a spatial shift in cloud cover – itself caused by shifting jetstream and storm tracks. The relatively narrow and shallow Gulf Stream current, lets not forget, is wind-driven and supplies the heat to the northern gyre which then accumulates heat at greater depth down to 100-200m. If the northern oceans are more exposed to clear skies they will lose heat at the surface – and NASA satellite data certainly shows spikes in infra-red outflow to space (with Hansen warning that this is likely an instrument error!).
The Little Ice Age (and its opposite, the MWP) are then readily explained in terms of variable accumulation or depletion of these northern heat stores (the Pacific gyre stores heat that affects the western USA and Alaska) – and this then correlates with the jetstream changes expected from more and less UV in those periods. The current solar minimum offers opportunities to study this – as evinced by Lockwood’s work, and now at Hadley.
What these guys fail to point out is that the IPCC models without exception still rely on the old view that it was man-made aerosols that caused the ‘lack of warming’ between 1945-1978 – even though in an obscure section, IPCC4 states that it is now known the aerosol effect was too localised to affect such a global downturn – again, I reveiw all of this in Chill – the work of Pinker, Wild, and Wielicki – all published in Science in 2005, demonstrating that ‘dimming’ and subsequent ‘brightening’ were due to changes in natual aerosol loading and cloud cover. That means the models were falsely validated. They are, at the heart, errroneous, as many of us suspected.
I took this issue up with among others, Gerry Meehl on a visit to NCAR in February this year – they did not know the 2005 Science papers, nor were they familiar with the satellelite data on IR! They still believed that the dip was caused by anthropogenic sulphur.
I don’t care that much about credits, but I get annoyed when past errors are not admitted, and this one is colossal.
Since publishing the book, and despite my science credentials from decades of anti-pollution work and despite its endorsement by the drafting author of the Kyoto Protocol, W.Jackson Davis, I have received not a single invitation to discuss any of this with UK climatologists, nor, despite my green credentials, by any environmental groups. I honestly think the former are too embarassed by their errors and the latter have simply buried their head in the sand and don’t read any critical literature (and I wonder if they have anyone with a critical faculty still working for them!). Likewise the left-liberal press and New Scientist have all failed to review (and hence criticise) the book. Remarkably, it has been the financial world that wants to know – and they can be very specific – like, ‘ come and tell us about shifts in the jetstream, the PDO, AMO and the Little Ice Age’!!
Bit of a personal rant here – apologies – I am with you Stephen and enlightenment is dawning, slowly.
Easy question, difficult answer.
With global land temperatures, there are prominently hot years at about 1915, 1934, 1970, 1982, 1996 and 2008. Conversely, there is a rather cold year in 1997. The definition of a hot or cold land year is not only absolute: mostly, there is not a corresponding global oceanic equivalent. (NOAA data).
Example, look at that graph over years 2005-10. The NH is even, the SH is falling, but the NH-SH is even again. Where went the SH downward trend in the difference graph?
Even allowing for a more sluggish response in ocean temperatures, the question is, why do most of the really hot land years fail to show up at sea? And what happened at sea for the really cold land year 1997? Nothing. These conflicting incidents are not prominent on the lowest graph in the header to this thread, for either NH or SH.
I’m not going to attempt an explanation. It would be clouded by errors that others have made in the construction of various graphs. Example, look at that graph over years 2004-9. The NH is even, the SH is falling, but the NH-SH is even again. Where went the SH downward trend in the difference graph?
Ok, I’ll speculate away: Perhaps it’s Nature’s policy to only have the articles available for paid subscriptions (I don’t like it either). And perhaps Phil Jones has nothing to do with it.
Tenuc says: Makes me wonder if the mole behind the CRU Climategate leak held a very senior position???
Probably not.
Luboš Motl says:
September 23, 2010 at 12:42 am
“…If it were possible for other effects to beat the effect of CO2 emissions between 1940-1970 and achieve cooling, it is possible that the same thing happens in 2010-2040 or other periods. So we’re just far from knowing whether the temperatures in 2040 will be warmer than today or not. It may be somewhat more likely that 2040 will be warmer than 2010 – but why does it matter?…”
You’ve hit the nail on the head, Luboš, we just don’t know!
Weather/climate is controlled by many many complex interlinked mechanisms, some of which are known and understood, some of which are not. These energy transfer and storage mechanisms lead to the deterministic chaos which drives our climate and causes the quasi-cyclic oscillating behaviour we observe.
The effects of GHG’s is only one factor in this turbulent cauldron of energy movement and all evidence seems to indicate that CO2, which is only a minor GHG, has a very small part to play in climate change. Other driver, like the hydrological cycle and the sun for example, play a much more significant role.
As has always happened in the past, life on earth will change and adapt to the vagaries of our oscillating climate. As ever, these changes will favour some species to the detriment of others as habitat alters. Luckily Homo Sapiens is up there with the best in the adaptability stakes.
By the way, what’s hilarious about the the biggest wind park in the world off the coast of Kent is the fact that there is no wind at the day of the opening.
Watch the video here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-11395964
Who said wind mills are symbols for men’s stupidity?
Chris,
“The warmists are incompetent because they advocate a complete re-structuring of modern society on nothing more than a hypothesis. If the warmists just stuck to the science, it would only be an academic debate, versus the birth of the cap and tax montrosity that was passed in the US House.”
Scientists can only be incompetent if they do very bad scientific work. They don’t become incompetent by taking political positions you disagree with. Also, virtually all science is a hypothesis. It was or is a hypothesis that smoking causes cancer. That doesn’t mean we should keep smoking.
“Finally, the warmists are the type of people who argue until they are blue in the face that they are right, only to reverse their position 180 degrees about 5 years later than most other scientific disciplines.”
Most people hold their positions very strongly, particularly academics of all stripes. This is only human. Further, you admit they can change their position, which is all that really matters.
“I will give you an example. They are still touting their climate models even though the model assumptions are circa late 1990′s. My guess that future climate models will likely show only a 2C rise in global temps in the 21st century. Again, anyone without an agenda (i.e., need fantastic results for more grant money) could have produced the same result about 10 years ago. This is why they have no credibility.”
So all the assumptions used in all the current models are from the 90s? Nothing has been updated? That seems unlikely. And, even if the newer models show the same results that means continuing to confirm the results has no scientific value?
And aren’t these folks all tenured professors? Seems like they have job security no matter what their science shows. Sure they have come to certain conclusions and they are going to stick to those if there’s a scientific, plausible basis. That’s true of all academics. It’s true of the skeptics too. Individuals have a bias for their own notions. But science has a way of correcting for that. Specifically, other scientists can arise and challenge the mainstream view. Scientists have a big incentive to do that. It brings fame and accolades. So the whole process is self correcting. The problem you guys have is that the weight of scientific opinion supports AGW. Take the recent NAS report to Congress from this year. Did you guys cover that?
Stephen Wilde says:
September 23, 2010 at 4:07 am
Let me save everyone a lot of time and effort with this suggestion:
Because the advocates and promulgators of fear don’t know what they are talking about?
One further point. As I mentioned, science is self correcting. If some hypothesis is wrong, someone will point that out and convince scientists at large. It’s a process and takes time but ultimately the truth prevails. The main problem you guys have is that no scientists skeptical of AGW have been able to convince scientists at large that AGW is wrong. It’s the prevailing view. That doesn’t mean it won’t be proven wrong in the future but it hasn’t been so far in the eyes of most experts in this area. Sorry but that’s the simple fact.
tonyb: September 23, 2010 at 1:48 am
Well if the ozone hole over some year or two suddenly reverts back to October 1979, then we should know conclusively it was just a hyped sun and no satellites in the the prior years. Funny but on a graph I have here 1979 was the very year the sun went hyper. Oops, false alarm (but thanks for the billions)!
http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/monthly/monthly_1979-10.html
“I wonder why he has the ozone hole in Antarctica next to the HadCRUT temperature series?”
Well, the hole is caused by humans and the temperature series shows the rising human caused trend. Looks to me like a plug for AGW (or GCD).
Cliff, you are correct that science is self-correcting and takes time. The concern though is that it may take so much time that it costs the taxpayers trillions of dollars needlessly.
The self-correcting has taken a longer time than usual because of the advent of government funding into research and by the gatekeeping that keeps skeptics from publishing. Climate researchers would typically rather get on the gravy train than try to go against the received wisdom. There are exceptions (Lindzen, Christy, Spencer, Pielke Sr. etc.) but they have struggled to get papers published.
The real self-correcting started after researchers from other disciplines have started to look at it, specifically the statisticians led by McIntyre, the geologists and the physicists. It is much more acceptable for a scientist to voice his skepticism of catastrophic climate change now than ever.
Studying the sharp drop in ocean heat during the 1970s, a time period not confounded by a change in instruments (such as from buckets to engine inlets in the 40s), actually shows a real concern to understand the extent of natural climate variability.
The researchers should be commended for looking at this event closely. Perhaps Phil Jones wanted to be involved because he is trying to rehabilitate his reputation. I cannot help but wonder if Michael Mann has taken Phil Jones off of his Christmas card list.
This paper again demonstrates why CO2 cannot be the logical answer to any global warming as it is neither necessary or sufficient. The temperature went down while CO2 was going up.
# RField says: September 23, 2010 at 4:44 am
___(1) ”the graph shows a steady warming since 1910”
___(2) ”the drop from 1940”
(1) The warming during the early 20th Century only started in winter 1918/19 and in the Arctic, although it was felt all over the Northern Hemisphere for two decades until World War II commenced in September 1939. See : http://www.arctic-warming.com/poze/pozaAa.jpg , In detail: http://www.arctic-heats-up.com/
(2) There are many indications that a three decades global cooling started in winter 1939/40, at least in Europe. In 1943 the British scientist A. J. Drummond wrote: “The present century has been marked by such a widespread tendency towards mild winters that the ‘old-fashioned winters’, of which one had heard so much, seemed to have gone for ever. The sudden arrival at the end of 1939 of what was to be the beginning of a series of cold winters was therefore all the more surprising,” ( in QJoR Met. Society, 1943). more at: http://www.oceanclimate.de/A_Large_Scale_Experiment_with_Climate/A_Large_Scale_Experiment_with_Climate.html
Even J. Hansen et al (Science, 1981) does not object the mid century cold period : ‘In fact, the temperature in the Northern Hemisphere decreased by about 0.5°C between 1940 and 1970….’.
Although there are good reasons to assume that the oceans and seas played a major role in the cooling event since it commenced in winter 1939/40, http://climate-ocean.com/ , Thomson et al. identify only the time period from 1968-1972 for a significant oceanic contribution, but which marks only the very end of the global cooling period. This is a far to narrow approach, and any research should cover the full earth cooling period from 1940 to the mid 1970s from a maritime perspective. .
Ron,
“Cliff, you are correct that science is self-correcting and takes time. The concern though is that it may take so much time that it costs the taxpayers trillions of dollars needlessly.”
I’m not sure about “needlessly” given the other good reasons to reduce carbon fuels use. Plus any carbon reduction is going to be phased in over a long period. Nobody is talking about switching off all carbon fuels tomorrow. The costs are going to be phased in over decades, more than enough time for the skeptics to persuade scientists at large (if they can, which so far they have failed to do).
“The self-correcting has taken a longer time than usual because of the advent of government funding into research and by the gatekeeping that keeps skeptics from publishing. Climate researchers would typically rather get on the gravy train than try to go against the received wisdom. There are exceptions (Lindzen, Christy, Spencer, Pielke Sr. etc.) but they have struggled to get papers published.”
“advent of government funding”? The government has been giving money to universities and researchers forever. Further, the funding wasn’t premised on any particular answer being given. A lot of the money goes to data collection, satellites, etc. as well.
On that gravy train, so you’re saying that if a young scientist could make his or her name and reputation (ie become known) by proving the majority view wrong, they would not do that? The fact is there are folks who are against the mainstream view, and you name a few of them. They seem not to have been forced into the majority view by the “gravy train”. The basic problem is that these minority scientists have been unable to convince scientists at large. Nothing is holding them back, nothing is stopping them from writing. It’s just that their ideas have not been persuasive.
“The real self-correcting started after researchers from other disciplines have started to look at it, specifically the statisticians led by McIntyre, the geologists and the physicists. It is much more acceptable for a scientist to voice his skepticism of catastrophic climate change now than ever.”
It seems that these folks have identified errors that required refinement and corrections of some of the details, but they have not undermined AGW in general in the eyes of the scientific community at large. See the NAS report from this year, for example.
Honestly, I see a lot of excuses being made for the failure of the minority scientists to persuade the majority scientists. That doesn’t mean the minority is wrong. But they are to be treated as wrong until they can convince science at large that they are right. So far they have failed to do so, pretty badly I must say.
I will speculate that since it is in Nature, the supporting data is likely either not supporting or non existent. It will certainly be non available and the method will be “proprietary” i.e. not related to scientific method in any way.
The author has another “peer reviewed” success to add to his CV. Though how one can peer review something without the publication of data nad method is a mystery.
I appear to have become cynical how did that happen?
I agree with Bill Illis and several others who have said similar. This is an astounding piece purely bacause its Phil Jones. If we take out this ‘sudden cooling’ then Jones is saying warming began way before man made CO2 could have any effect and apart from this ‘weird whatever caused it’ cooling period has increased at pretty much the same rate ever since.
If that does not drive a horse and cart through ‘unprecedented recent warmth’ I do not know what does.
Interesting departure from the agenda by Jones. He now has two pretty much opposing views with his name on them? If he takes the cooling factor out, then AGW CO2 has done diddly.
Ron Cram says:
September 23, 2010 at 4:57 am “I do not understand the anger towards this researcher.”
I would second this comment. I see no reason to make personal attacks on the researcher.
Repackaging and prettying up the lies, because there is just too much of your money at stake …
So when do we get to the truth, like what was said by Phil Jones under oath hearings? No longer operative?
Cliff, you mention “the other good reasons to reduce carbon fuels use.” What reasons might those be? As far as I know, atmospheric CO2 is plant food responsible for the greening of the Earth and for significant reduction in malnutrition around the world.
Do you really believe governments have been funding research “forever?” I suggest you do a little reading on the history of science with special attention on how alarmist scenarios can significantly increase government funding.
I am saying, in the case of climate change, that young scientists would not invest the time or effort to prove the majority wrong because the effort would be bad for their career. The evidences for this are too numerous to mention. There is a general fear of being blacklisted, not invited to speak at conferences, not able to publish papers on even noncontroversial topics. All you have to do is read the Climategate emails and you will see the vengeance and energy all skeptics were targeted with.
You are correct that AGW is still on top with the majority of scientists simply because the majority of scientists have not yet looked at the problem closely. But there is no question when scientists do look at it closely, they do not find it to be catastrophic. Physicists members of AGU are asking their organization to reevaluate their stated position on climate change. This will have to happen at some point and you can expect a much, much less alarming statement from AGU.
Arno Arrak says: “That is because PDO may be influenced by the terminus of the thermohaline circulation which starts in the North Atlantic and snakes south from there along the bottom of the ocean.”
Nope. The PDO is an aftereffect of ENSO that’s also influenced by the Sea Level Pressure of the North Pacific. Refer to:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/09/introduction-to-enso-amo-and-pdo-part-3.html
And:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/04/is-difference-between-nino34-sst.html
And the variability of the North Atlantic and North Pacific run in and out of phase. This does not support your conjectures about thermohaline circulation:
http://i56.tinypic.com/t9zhua.jpg
Additionally, the North Pacific SST residuals (North Pacific SST anomalies MINUS Global SST anomalies) are inversely related to the PDO, meaning, on a decadal basis, the North Pacific contributes to Global temperatures when the PDO is negative, and subtracts from global temperatures when the PDO is positive.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/09/inverse-relationship-between-pdo-and.html
Holy Cow, Cliff. My view is the Polar opposite of yours. Having been very close to someone who has tried to be heard by the “consensus” scientists. Ask David Suzuki why he and Jim Hoggan have taken extreme steps to silence and marginalize a “minority” scientist. It has been a nasty struggle thanks to the control of canadian media (like the CBC), and the skill of PR man Hoggan. Their failure was that they have not stopped us. As some brilliant fellow said on WUWT? long ago; “The warm has turned.”
Ron Cram says:
September 23, 2010 at 4:57 am
“Anthony, this is beneath you. I do not understand the anger towards this researcher. He is saying the cooling was caused by a natural event and not man made. This is what we have been saying all along”.
Yes but at the same time he is keeping the hoax of AGW alive by ignoring well known facts. Read the title of the article and yo know all you need to know.
I would be humiliated if I had to publish a paper with Phil Jones name attached as a author. However, understand that once you get past second author on a science paper, the other authors are usually just filler and are added because you use a tiny bit of their data, or simply as a way of padding the other `authors’ publication record.
In with others, I would like to see an update on the ozone hole and it’s impact. After my industry (HVAC) spent billions on replacing CFC’s, I’m very interested in:
1. If the ozone hole has not healed, what’s the hold up?
2. If they don’t know if the hole has always existed, why didn’t we attempt to get a longer trend before making a global proclamation?
3. If healing the ozone hole actually leads to global warming, how are we to balance the affect with other efforts.
After all, I was told this science was “settled”.
I think it would be more accurate to characterize the grin as (the polite term) “coprophagous.”
Interesting. I like how CO2 soaring was included int he figure above the cooling, then when it got warming, there’s CO2 increasing.
But I thought that cooling was due to particulates and aerosols now regulated by government?
I think it’s amusing that warmists are just coming around to the idea that maybe the oceans have a bigger impact on planetary temperature than CO2. Something that we chemists have known for a long time. If you chart El Nino / La Nina versus planetary temperature, you’ll see a nice correlation.
I have a new one for Kate’s list: We are not to call it Global Warming anymore. Instead, let’s use “Cooling Hiatus” — John M Reynolds
Ron,
As to other benefits of carbon fuels reduction, I was thinking of energy independence, not sending billions to countries that support terrorism, reduced pollution (the traditional kind not greenhouse gases), no more Deepwater Horizons, etc.
Are you saying that the authors of the NAS report didn’t look closely at the science?
As for AGU, on the front page of their website today is a link to an article defending Phil Jones. Then you go to their Earth and Space Science News Archive and we find articles about scientists sending letters to Congress in support of the IPCC, about CRU researchers being cleared of distorting climate data, etc. Doesn’t seem like they are about to switch to the skeptic view of AGW anytime soon.
With respect to your claims about careers being ruined, etc., at some point you guys are going to have to stop giving excuses for the failure of the skeptical scientists’ ideas to persuade science at large. As you note, it’s more acceptable than ever for scientists to be skeptical of the mainstream view. So it’s time to put up or shut up. Sure, the “warmists” are well funded. But there are enough universities and think tanks to support alternative science. It’s time to write something that isn’t debunked AND actually goes to the heart of AGW, such that it can persuade the majority of scientists that AGW is not real and is not a serious threat. So far the skeptics have drawn blanks on that. At some point, when you fail to persuade, you need to look at yourself and stop making excuses.
Stephen Wilde says:
September 23, 2010 at 4:07 am
There are many scientists who still think human CO2 emissions can affect global temperature but we don’t take much notice of them these days. The science is moving on and the major concern now is working out why both the 70s cooling and 90s warming fears both turned out to be wrong.
The fears turned out to be unfounded, not because anything unusual was going on, but because we did not realize that the climate varies so much. The really scary part is the fact that temperatures can vary that much in a lifetime. Before the advent of temperature measurements, mankind was only aware of the consequences of back-to-back cooling or warming trends. The consequences being failed crops, pestilence, mega-droughts, little ice ages, etc.
Now that we know that it is normal for temperatures to go through 30 year trends and promptly reverse course, the next trick is to try and understand why this reversal is normal, why there are periods in our past where reversal didn’t happen, and when such things will happen in the future.
It just so happens that climate change is wide open for abuse, no matter which way it is currently headed, due to massive lack of long-term knowledge.
David,
As you say, “Their failure was that they have not stopped us.” That’s the point. Nothing is stopping scientists that believe AGW is false or not serious from getting their views out today. Pielke, MacIntyre, Christy, and others. They’ve all made presentations, gotten their ideas out. Their views have not persuaded science at large that AGW is not a serious threat. Bottom line, they have failed to persuade. Their ideas were not strong enough, did not go to the heart of AGW or were wrong in the eyes of science at large. So we have the NAS reports from this year, with the headline on their website: “Strong Evidence on Climate Change Underscores Need For Actions to Reduce Emissions and Begin Adapting to Impacts.”
http://americasclimatechoices.org/?utm_medium=etmail&utm_source=National%20Academies%20Press&utm_campaign=NAP+mail+cb+05.19.10&utm_content=Customer&utm_term
Ron,
I’m just a layman (mechanical engineer), but I think there’s already been plenty to show that this science is not settled. In my view, the concetnration on CO2 drives the focus away from true energy independence and is a political weapon aimed at so called non-sustainable energy systems.
Surveying articles and data from all sources:
1. There is not agreement on the impact of CO2; I have seen multiple articles on feedback and degree of the effect.
2. Forecasts by AGW proponents have not come true except in isolated cases. There has been no significant increase in hurricanses/tropical storms, sea levels haven’t risen significantly, and ice volumes have not decreased at the rates predicted.
3. Data sources are corrupt at least to some degree. This could fill a book, so it’s easier just to search the archives on WUWT.
4. AGW seems to oversimplify the impacts of all sources of thermal impact on the earth. Even to me, there should be effects by oscillation of the earth’s axis, solar radiation, cloud cover, moisture, etc.
I’ve already been led by the nose on the ozone issue where I trusted the science; I’m not going there again.
I think its pretty well known now that the AMO affects global SSTs… Not only NH ones…
Cliff says:
September 23, 2010 at 7:37 am
“It’s time to write something that isn’t debunked AND actually goes to the heart of AGW, such that it can persuade the majority of scientists that AGW is not real and is not a serious threat. So far the skeptics have drawn blanks on that. At some point, when you fail to persuade, you need to look at yourself and stop making excuses.”
Cliff, you are so far off the mark it’s untrue!
Here is a list of 800 peer-reviewed papers supporting scepticism of CAGW.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
These papers actually got through a highly ‘consensus biased’ peer review process, but only a tiny proportion got widespread publicity in the MSM.
Read the Climategate emails to see how climate scientists colluded with the MSM to subvert the peer review process and to suppress non-consensus media reporting.
Follow the money to see who will benefit from a carbon tax and check which bits of the MSM they own.
Read the list of IPCCgate revelations to see how science is being used to justify political ends, which include reducing world population and the redistribution of wealth.
Luckily the tide has turned against CAGW as our climate oscillates back into cold-century mode. It is now much too late for world carbon control legislation to be agreed.
Tenue,
I sincerely hope you are right that the climate will go into some kind of cold mode and prove the warmists wrong (or at least buy us a lot of time). One good thing about this debate is that if the warmists are right, and I currently think they are, we are going to be in deep shit by mid-century and that will be clear to anyone with half a brain. So the debate is kind of going to resolve itself in 20 or so years.
I find those 800 papers really encouraging. It turns out that climate skeptics have NOT been prevented from getting their views out. Blacklists, speculation about young scientists’ careers getting ruined – all this has not stopped anything. This only proves my point. Skeptics’ views and ideas have gotten out. They just were unable to persuade the majority of scientists that AGW is not a serious threat. Time for 800 better papers that have more persuasive force and go to the hear to heart of AGW (not monkey with the edges or pieces of it).
Say Anthony,
I’m not a weather or climate geek like you; so maybe this is a dumb question; but I’ve been known to ask dumb questions.
So some of us have believed some data and statements by some fairly well known apparently AGW skeptical climae scientists to the effect that the period of recent (izzat neo ?) global warming probably stopped about 15 years ago; about 1995; well save for that pesky 1998 El Nino spike.
So let’s go out on a limb, and “assume” that that is a correct conclusion.
So if the planet earth stopped warming about 15 years ago; and seems to have cooled since, would it be fair to say that SOMETHING on earth might have actually gotten colder during that time frame. I mean, how can the whole planet cool if everything warms up; so something must have got colder.
Now the atmosphere goes everywhere; at least everywhere on the outside of the planet; but it is fairly low density; so if it got colder, it wouldn’t really matter too much in the scheme of things, since it has such a low relative thermal capacity.
So it would seem to be necessary to have something else besides the atmosphere get colder, in order for the whole darm place to register an overall cooling.
Well besides the atmosphere around the planet; there’s not a whole lot left on planet earth to be a suitable candidate fro a significant amount of cooling that would show up overall.
I mean we have the land; and we have the oceans; and there’s not a hell of a lot more of other things that might get colder besides the atmosphere.
So if it isn’t the land that cooled; and it isn’t the oceans that cooled; what the blazes else could it be.
Apparently theres about a 70:30 split between the oceans and the land; so a lot more oceans than land; so if you had to pick one to be the main thing that cooled, does it make any sense to you that it might be the oceans that cooled ?
Yeah I know; I said it was a dumb question; and I’m rather embarrased to have to ask; but does that make any sense to you; if the whole planet on average gets cooler; it is quite likely that the oceans would show some cooling.
Not a big deal Anthony; but if you have any thoughts on it; and have some time ?
Djozar, the ozone hole is healed and will be back to normal by 2050, all thanx to the montreal accord.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/16/ozone-hole-2010-internati_n_719652.html
http://www.examiner.com/environmental-policy-in-national/upper-level-ozone-hole-healed-world-environmental-policy-protection-success
DeNihilist;
Considering that we don’t have information on the extent of the ozone layer before 1970, how can it be claimed that it’s recovering? Not being sarcastic, just wondering.
Looking at their Nature News graph, I can see a sudden cooling at 1900 and another one at about 1945; but I don’t see a darn thing happening at 1970 on that graph; well outside of the random noise of course.
So what the blazes are they talking about; and why is that chap grinning like that? Izzat some sort of trick picture that we aren’t supposed to be able to figure out.
And I love that “measurement artefact” which I will translate for free into American, as “measurement artifact”. Well it could be a typo; which we don’t do, rather than British speeling.
But that event is 1970 sure was fast, and gone before you could tell it was there.
Is it standard practice in high class peer reviewable Climate Science to publish data containing known measurement artifacts.
When do the authors plan to release the revised paper containing no measurement artefacts ?
These guys are big on symptoms and small on fundamentals. Gawping at a mass of chaotic data and proclaiming parts of it significant is medieval; it’s dumb numerology.
This isn’t science, and Climatologists they carry their ‘ology’ under false pretences. At best they’re worth an ‘ography’.
Cliff says:
September 23, 2010 at 8:01 am
So Cliff, if the cooling of the 70’s wasn’t aerosols, what was it? The AGW apologists blame it on aerosols to erase the difficulty of cooling temps/rising [CO2]. Give us you intrepretation.
And by the way folks, give my alma mater a break here. ;~P
Speculate away with impunity. I wonder why he has the ozone hole in Antarctica next to the HadCRUT temperature series?
Because they are saving the world? Its a secret message to green activist sleepers who have been primed to wake up when they see these two iconic images of the problems facing mankind, they used to use the hockey stick as a stimulus but this has lost some of its power recently. Green activists looking at this picture will swoon with pride and then when they recover they will be all fired up to wage war and mount another attack on “the deniers”
Funny how they all refer to the HadCRUT global temperature curve and try their utmost to find an explanation to what the curve shows. It is like discussing holes in a flat Earth…
And, could not the gradual reversal of that sudden cooling account for the subsequent resumption of the warming?
Tim,
Actually I think the authors here are reporting it was not purely aerosols. So they are reporting something here that calls into doubt their prior explanation. Wow, that doesn’t sound like someone afraid of the truth or only interested in a one-side presentation of stuff that supports their theory.
As to my theory? I don’t have one. The authors themselves don’t have a theory. It seems the PDO is being floated as an explanation here but the authors seem to say oscillations don’t fully explain it either. Seems like something for further study. But in any event the cooling of the 70s halted and things returned to warming. So maybe we can hope an unexplained cooling phenomena will come back and buy us some more time. That would be great! But I’m not exactly counting on it when we don’t know the cause apparently.
Ben:
At September 23, 2010 at 12:24 am you say:
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but if the cooling wasn’t down to aerosols, then doesn’t that in itself invalidate most or all of the IPCC climate models…”
You are not “wrong”. Indeed, you are very, very right and this invalidation of the models has been known for a long time.
A decade ago I published a peer-reviewed paper that showed the UK’s Hadley Centre general circulation model (GCM) could not model climate and only obtained agreement between past average global temperature and the model’s indications of average global temperature by forcing the agreement with an input of assumed aerosol cooling. And my paper demonstrated that the assumption of aerosol effects being responsible for the model’s failure was incorrect.
(ref. Courtney RS An assessment of validation experiments conducted on computer models of global climate using the general circulation model of the UK’s Hadley Centre Energy & Environment, Volume 10, Number 5, pp. 491-502, September 1999).
More recently, in 2007, Kiehle published a paper that assessed 9 GCMs and two energy balance models.
(ref. Kiehl JT,Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 34, L22710, doi:10.1029/2007GL031383, 2007)
He found the same as my paper except that each model used a different aerosol ‘fix’ from every other model.
Kiehl says in his paper:
One curious aspect of this result is that it is also well known [Houghton et al., 2001] that the same models that agree in simulating the anomaly in surface air temperature differ significantly in their predicted climate sensitivity. The cited range in climate sensitivity from a wide collection of models is usually 1.5 to 4.5 deg C for a doubling of CO2, where most global climate models used for climate change studies vary by at least a factor of two in equilibrium sensitivity.
The question is: if climate models differ by a factor of 2 to 3 in their climate sensitivity, how can they all simulate the global temperature record with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Kerr [2007] and S. E. Schwartz et al. (Quantifying climate changetoo rosy a picture?, available at http://www.nature.com/reports/climatechange, 2007) recently pointed out the importance of understanding the answer to this question. Indeed, Kerr [2007] referred to the present work and the current paper provides the widely circulated analysis referred to by Kerr [2007]. This report investigates the most probable explanation for such an agreement. It uses published results from a wide variety of model simulations to understand this apparent paradox between model climate responses for the 20th century, but diverse climate model sensitivity. ”
And his paper says:
“These results explain to a large degree why models with such diverse climate sensitivities can all simulate the global anomaly in surface temperature. The magnitude of applied anthropogenic total forcing compensates for the model sensitivity.”
And the “magnitude of applied anthropogenic total forcing” is fixed in each model by the input value of aerosol forcing.
I cannot post Kiehle’s Figure 2 here but it is for 7 GCMs and 2 energy balance models. Its title is this:
“Figure 2. Total anthropogenic forcing (Wm2) versus aerosol forcing (Wm2) from nine fully coupled climate models and two energy balance models used to simulate the 20th century.”
So, each model uses a different aerosol ‘fiddle factor’ to get it to emulate past global temperatures of the Earth. But there is only one Earth and, therefore, at most only one of the models can be right and they are probably all wrong.
The underlying problem is that the modelers assume that additional energy content in the atmosphere will result in an increase of temperature, but that assumption is very, very unlikely to be true.
Radiation physics tells us that additional greenhouse gases will increase the energy content of the atmosphere. But energy content is not necessarily sensible heat.
An adequate climate physics (n.b. not radiation physics) would tell us how that increased energy content will be distributed among all the climate modes of the Earth. Additional atmospheric greenhouse gases may heat the atmosphere, may have an undetectable effect on heat content, or may even cause the atmosphere to cool.
The latter could happen, for example, if the extra energy went into a more vigorous hydrological cycle with resulting increase to low cloudiness. Low clouds reflect incoming solar energy (as every sunbather has noticed when a cloud passed in front of the Sun) and have a negative feedback on surface temperature.
Alternatively, there could be an oscillation in cloudiness (in a feedback cycle) between atmospheric energy and hydrology: as the energy content cycles up and down with cloudiness, then the cloudiness cycles up and down with energy with their cycles not quite 180 degrees out of phase (this is analogous to the observed phase relationship of insolation and atmospheric temperature). The net result of such an oscillation process could be no detectable change in sensible heat, but a marginally observable change in cloud dynamics.
However, nobody understands cloud dynamics so the reality of climate response to increased GHGs cannot be known.
Richard
“The net result of such an oscillation process could be no detectable change in sensible heat, but a marginally observable change in cloud dynamics.”
That has been my published contention for some time now with the latitudinal positioning of the air circulation systems standing as a proxy for the change in cloud dynamics.
Back in the 70’s I was privy a study of CFC’s by the University of Washington and
Battlle NW labs. They had a instrumented Aircraft flying at all levels of the atmosphere that Airbreathers could reach. One such research paper could NOT find a correlation with the Ozone breakdown or depletion. One of the scientitsts speculated that CFC’s heavier than air, anyway, would just simply circulate until they broke down.
That wasn’t what they wanted to hear. So it didn’t get the peer review or the funding that was needed-Sound familiar?….
I’d like to know what happened to that bit of research-can’t find it on the web.
hmm..
Cliff says:
September 23, 2010 at 10:35 am
“So maybe we can hope an unexplained cooling phenomena will come back and buy us some more time. That would be great! But I’m not exactly counting on it when we don’t know the cause apparently.
No need for hope, Cliff, the cooling phenomenon is already back and is easy to explain.
Our climate is driven by deterministic chaos and, as a result, is driven by many quasi-cyclical events. This mean the 21st century will be a cool one as it is on the downturn of a 200y temperature oscillation, like this:-
1410-1500 cold – Low Solar Activity(LSA?)-(Sporer minimum)
1510-1600 warm – High Solar Activity(HSA?)
1610-1700 cold – (LSA) (Maunder minimum)
1710-1800 warm – (HSA)
1810-1900 cold – (LSA) (Dalton minimum)
1910-2000 warm – (HSA)
2010-2100 (cold???) – (LSA???)
Historically, mankind and the rest of the biosphere have always thrives during warm periods. The only scary thing is just how cold is the current period going to get?
One of the issues the paper raised was the ENSO and volcanoes do not seem to be able to explain the drop in north Atlantic temperatures in the 1969 to 1975 period (I changed the timeline to more accurately reflect what actually happened). I certainly agree on the volcano front but I’m not so sure about the ENSO. There were some larger La Ninas in 1970, 1973 and 1975.
I’ve also speculated recently about how the AMO sometimes responds to the ENSO with a lag of about 8 months.
I’ve put together some charts to show this. Generally, the correlation is very poor (R^2 of just 0.06) but there certainly does seem to be some periods when there is a secondary affect of the ENSO on the AMO lagging about 8 months (doesn’t appear to be predictable however).
First 1979 to 2010 so one can see it a little better (also note the volcanoes don’t seem to have any impact at all on these two most important ocean cycles).
http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/7276/ensoamolag8mon1979.png
And then all the way back to 1871 which shows similar results.
http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/2963/ensoamolag8mon1871.png
Take anything generated in Boulder CO, Berkley CA and Madison WI with a grain of salt.
So it’s warming in Hiatus Port, so what?
“Doh” Homer Simpson, Atmospheric Brain
Cliff,
“They just were unable to persuade the majority of scientists that AGW is not a serious threat.”
The way I understand, it is IPCC reports that provide the climate science storey lines, which are handed down in a Mt. Sinai fashion to the rest of the world. This is not to be derogatory towards the IPCC (that would be OT), but simply to make an observation of the way things work. Is it therefore pertinent to consider that the chapters of the IPCC reports are controlled by a handful of lead authors, who have total control of the contents of these chapters.
We also need to consider that the only place in the IPCC report that addresses the question: what effect does manmade GHG’s have on the climate? occurs in one place – chapter 9 of WGI. Although about 500 authors are cited in the references, they do not write the text of this chapter (or any chapter), nor contribute to the text in any meaningful way. Indeed, many of them have written reviews highly critical of the contents of the text and conclusions drawn. Yet they have no power to change a single word.
The idea that sceptical papers are unable to convince the majority of scientists that AGW is not a threat, should thus be restated as: sceptical papers have been unable to convince the 50 lead authors and authors of chapter 9 that AGW is not a threat. But judging by the recent response of Mann and Schmidt to the M&W paper which is the latest in a long line of papers debunking Mann’s hockey sticks, I fear that nothing short of hell freezing over will convince them.
But feel free to remain worried.
Why the HadCRUT series on the monitor screen ends in 2002?
Vince,
What about the NAS report from this year? I understand all of the hubbub about the IPCC but dispatching its reports doesn’t quite dispatch AGW (or should I say, the majority science view that AGW is a serious threat). That view was taken in the NAS report. After Climategate. After the Hockey Stick fights. After all or most of the 800 skeptical papers cited above.
In particular, as to the Hockey Stick debate, if that’s all that AGW rested upon, I’d feel better. But that’s not the case. I don’t know the details of that fight, but my impression is that (a) temperature proxies and reconstructions are difficult, imperfect and (b) the two sides are now fighting over what reasonable minds can disagree about. Neither side has quite proven the other wrong anymore.
Tenuc,
Are you saying the cooling period is back in the data? Things have been pretty hot this decade. Maybe you can point me to that (not saying you’re wrong, I just don’t know where that is).
Maybe you’re saying it’s going to start real soon now – that’s fine, but is the basis for that expected lower solar activity? I keep reading there’s been no correlation between the recent warming since the 70s and solar activity. In fact I read that solar activity has been down while temperatures have been up. Or at best any solar activity cannot account for all of the warming. Do I have that wrong?
Bob Tisdale says:
September 23, 2010 at 6:49 am
Arno Arrak says: “That is because PDO may be influenced by the terminus of the thermohaline circulation which starts in the North Atlantic and snakes south from there along the bottom of the ocean.”
Nope. The PDO is an aftereffect of ENSO that’s also influenced by the Sea Level Pressure of the North Pacific. Refer to:
If it is ENSO that is driving PDO, what is it that causes the ENSO to switch pattern and frequency every 30 odd years to give the phenomenon of the oscillating PDO? It could be a spontaneously emerging nonlinear pattern emerging from the system itself. Or have some solar / planetary forcing – or possibly both, a forced oscillatory nonlinear pattern.
Additionally, the North Pacific SST residuals (North Pacific SST anomalies MINUS Global SST anomalies) are inversely related to the PDO, meaning, on a decadal basis, the North Pacific contributes to Global temperatures when the PDO is negative, and subtracts from global temperatures when the PDO is positive.
Pursuing the nonlinear pattern possibility, the North Pacific SST would represent damping or friction in the global PDO related temperature oscillation (i.e. going in the opposite direction to PDO). Damping or friction is an important pre-requisite for a system to enter a regime of non-equilibrium / nonlinear emergent oscillatory pattern.
Just ideas – thanks for the solid data as usual to keep us on the straight and narrow.
“”” Richard S Courtney says:
September 23, 2010 at 11:00 am
Ben:
At September 23, 2010 at 12:24 am you say:
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but if the cooling wasn’t down to aerosols, then doesn’t that in itself invalidate most or all of the IPCC climate models…”
You are not “wrong”. Indeed, you are very, very right and this invalidation of the models has been known for a long time. “””
“””” The latter could happen, for example, if the extra energy went into a more vigorous hydrological cycle with resulting increase to low cloudiness. Low clouds reflect incoming solar energy (as every sunbather has noticed when a cloud passed in front of the Sun) and have a negative feedback on surface temperature.
Alternatively, there could be an oscillation in cloudiness (in a feedback cycle) between atmospheric energy and hydrology: as the energy content cycles up and down with cloudiness, then the cloudiness cycles up and down with energy with their cycles not quite 180 degrees out of phase (this is analogous to the observed phase relationship of insolation and atmospheric temperature). The net result of such an oscillation process could be no detectable change in sensible heat, but a marginally observable change in cloud dynamics.
However, nobody understands cloud dynamics so the reality of climate response to increased GHGs cannot be known.
Richard “””
Well Richard, I suspect the answer can be found in the paper by Frank Wentz et al; SCIENCE for July-7, 2007; “How Much More Rain will Global Warming Bring ?”
They report from actual satellite observations, that a one deg C increase in mean global (surface?) Temperature, results in a 7% increase in total global evaporation; a 7% increase in total atmospehric moisture content; and a 7% increase in total global precipitation. They also reported that the GCMs agreed with their 7% increase in total atmospheric moisture; but placed the total evap/precip at only 1-3%; not 7%. So the GCMs disagree with reality by as much as a factor of 7.
What they did not say; but which I have opned m,any times now, is that one migth treasoanbly expect a 7% increase in total global precipitation to be accompanied by maybe something like a 7% increase in total global (precipitable) cloud cover; since it is traditional to have dark clouds with your rain. That cloud increase could of course be an increase in cloud area; an increase in cloud optical density (with water content) or an increase in the cloud persistence time; or some combination of all three.
And I submit that a 75 increase in precipitable clouds is an astronomical negative feedback that would crush whatever was trying to do the one degree C temperature rise.
I have also observed that nobody has ever observed the Temperature to increase in the shadow zone when a cloud passes in front of the sun. That also is true no matter what altitude the clouds happen to be; so I do not constrain your postulate to only low clouds. High clouds also block sunlight from the surface.
the argument that high clouds warm the surface; and the higher the clouds the more the warming is just plain silly. Simple Optical theory would demonstrate that simpley isn’t possible.
And I would point out that climate is about changes that take place and persist over some considerable time (some say at least 30 years. So we are not interested in what happened to last night’s weather, because the warm humid daytime temperatures created some high wispy clouds at night when the atmosphere cooled to the dew point. I suggest those high clouds are the result of the daytimne mugginess; not the cause of it.
So in my book; any increase in total global cloud cover; no matter where the clouds are, is always a negative feedback cooling effect.
When GHGs and clouds inhibit the escape of surface emitted LWIR thermal radiation; daytime temperatures tend to increase; because the sun keeps on feeding in extra solar energy during that propagation delay for the escape of the surface radiation; and it is that extra solar input during that delay that is the cause of the warming.
But when that interception occurs at night with say high clouds; there is no sunlight to be pouring in more solar insolation, so there is no warming; just a slowing of the overnight cooling which is still going to happen. It never warms up after the sun sets; just cools slower if there are clouds; but as I said that is last night’s weather not climate.
Stephen Wilde says:
September 22, 2010 at 6:52 pm
Then one only has to introduce a bottom up oceanic forcing as observed here in this new paper and here:
http://esciencenews.com/…h.past.climate.anomalies
to see the beginnings of establishment support for my basic propositions
I would love to see papers on “bottom up ocean forcing”, internal ocean oscillation seems very compelling as a source of climate oscillation.
But your above link is broken – can we have another one?
ArndB at 6:01 am:
“…even J. Hansen et al (Science, 1981) does not object the mid century cold period : ‘In fact, the temperature in the Northern Hemisphere decreased by about 0.5°C between 1940 and 1970….’ ”
It’s a mystery how a 0.5°C decrease http://hidethedecline.eu/media/Northern%20hemisphere%20temperatures/NHNatGeo76small.jpg became a mere 0.1°C dip http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1900/mean:25/plot/gistemp/from:1940/to:1970/trend.
Where is the evidence that sulphate aerosols caused cooling after 1940, then warming again due to “Clean Air Acts” of the 70’s ? 3rd world fossil fuel consumption outstripped 1st world consumption around this time. The 3rd world had no “Clean Air Acts” …
Phlogiston,
I repeated the post a bit later on with links that work. For convenience I’ll repeat it again here:
The important question is whether such cooling (or warming) events are generated by internal ocean variability which is largely independent of other factors such as events in the air.
I have proposed just that for nearly three years now – and rather tiresomely described some of the potential implications for the global energy budget and the actual climate observations.
The variations in TSI alone are clearly not enough to explain what we see and I’m with Leif Svalgaard on that.
However the effect on albedo and the energy flux generally from changes in the spectrum of energy received from the sun is a different matter.
This article has been referred to before but it is highly relevant :
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/3/034008/fulltext
Not everyone agrees with Leif as to a lack of potential for solar variability to have a top down effect and that paper substantially supports my propositions about the effect of solar variability on the polar oscillation, jetstream positioning, speed of hydrological cycle and albedo changes.
As you will see in the article the effect only really comes to the fore on centennial time scales which is something I have been saying for quite some time.
Then one only has to introduce a bottom up oceanic forcing as observed here in this new paper and here:
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/08/14/changes.net.flow.ocean.heat.correlate.with.past.climate.anomalies
to see the beginnings of establishment support for my basic propositions
I found myself thinking that if this coincided, as stated by Jones, with a large influx of cold non-saltwater from the Arctic, that the obvious candidate is some kind of under ice volcanic warming (not necessarily an eruption) melting a large amount of arctic ice at one time to pour all that fresh cold water into the Atlantic.
It once again does make me wish the satellite coverage of the Arctic started sooner than 1979. . .I wonder what the extents would have looked like 1968-1979 given this information?
George E Smith
September 23, 2010 at 8:56 am
I’m not sure that it is necessary for a faster hydrological cycle to produce more clouds overall. If the whole cycle speeds up to retain global optical depth as it does seem to do then rather than having more clouds one just sees the water in cloud form for a shorter period of time before it falls to Earth.
I don’t necessarily contend that there is NO change in total cloudiness, there may well be some but on it’s own I didn’t see the cloudiness change as an adequately large enough or obvious enough effect on it’s own to achieve the observed change in the overall energy budget.
Hence my suggestion that the factor most likely to have a large enough effect would be a change in albedo for the entire globe resulting from a change in the angle of incidence of solar input onto the clouds when all the air circulation systems and all the associated clouds shift latitudinally.
Unfortunately there is currently no adequate data to resolve that issue definitively.
It’s the music of the spheres, keeping everything in time.
At the top level we have grand minima controlled by the Neptune/Uranus 172 yr cycle, the current solar slowdown is right on track as predicted.
The next level down is the 60 year cycle controlled by Jupiter/Saturn that as Scafetta has noticed sync’s with the PDO. Both of these cycles are working together but can experience a phase change as we saw during the MWP. Also the amplitude of the 60 year cycle is governed by the 172 yr cycle. Notice how the PDO modulation is weaker when N/U are apart.
The next level down is the atmospheric teleconnections (NAO, AO, SAM etc), which look to align themselves with solar UV output which of course is related to the first cycle.
“”” Stephen Wilde says:
September 23, 2010 at 3:01 pm
George E Smith
September 23, 2010 at 8:56 am
I’m not sure that it is necessary for a faster hydrological cycle to produce more clouds overall. “””
Well I don’t know where you got that “faster hydrological cycle stuff from; I certainly said nothing about it. It seems like something that you and Dr Judith Curry understand between you.
I’m rather simple minded. If I expect to get more rain; I also expect to get more clouds; simple as that.
If you can get precipitation without clouds; then good for you; I can’t.
Cliff, the difference is, one side admits this shortcoming of knowledge, and the other is forecasting impending doom with absolute certainty (using the same information). As no doom-sayer has been correct (we are still here), I know which horse I am backing. The honest, conscientious, humble, hard-working, straight shooting (shall I go on?) side. Try peddling the fence sitting position over at RC or DePropaganda blog and see how far you get.
It was ocean cooling!
If El Niño will be more frequent because of CO2, then we are to believe CO2 also causes a rise in SSTs? What caused the ocean to cool? I didn’t catch the explanation of that…
Hi George E. Smith, I just wanted to chime in real fast. It is possible that the hydrological cycle could speed up with less clouds if the amount of precipitation per event increased faster than the frequency of the events decreased. I don’t think that is at all likely, but it is possible.
David,
“Cliff, the difference is, one side admits this shortcoming of knowledge, and the other is forecasting impending doom with absolute certainty (using the same information). ”
Respectfully, that’s a bit of an overstatement or at least overgeneralization. Even the IPCC talks in terms of what is likely or very likely, not a certainty. Also, the NAS report from this year is much more restrained than your characterization. But then I can’t get a single person here to acknowledge or deal with that report.
“As no doom-sayer has been correct (we are still here), I know which horse I am backing.”
But even the extreme doomsayers are talking about the future. Not current conditions.
“The honest, conscientious, humble, hard-working, straight shooting (shall I go on?) side. “. Really, all those authors of the NAS report and yes the IPCC reports are dishonest and arrogant? I find that really hard to believe.
Wow! They’ve finally noticed that it was bloody cold a lot of the time in the 1970’s and not just in the northern hemisphere.
This surely must go down in the annals of science as a historic discovery and must surely be a consideration for at least another 3 year’s worth of grants.
And it was bloody cold here down under as well but what would I as an ordinary old Australian country farmer who had to live and work and make a living out in the that 1960’s and 70’s weather actually know about the climate of the times?
And I don’t have a number of letters after my name so I guess I would have to produce reams of data to support my claims.
Sigh! Could have been so easy if I had got a corn flake packet degree in climate science.
Make a claim, no backup verification data required as I had all those letters after my name and therefore was a leading authority on any subject so couldn’t be doubted.
Much, much easier and far more profitable farming for tax payer’s grant money than farming to grow food and you can do it from an airconditioned office.
I’m late to the party but the banshee bit covered by PaulH
September 22, 2010 at 6:55 pm, really grated me too. Like chalk scraping a blackboard or a banshee screaming.
Cliff says:
September 23, 2010 at 6:20 pm
“The honest, conscientious, humble, hard-working, straight shooting (shall I go on?) side. “. Really, all those authors of the NAS report and yes the IPCC reports are dishonest and arrogant? I find that really hard to believe. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~That is quite a leap , Cliff 🙂 and cleverly avoiding the point of my post.
And doom-sayers are always talking about a future that NEVER comes to pass.
I’ve seen that kind of grin before. It is the grin of someone who intends on tweaking someone else’s nose. Rule number two of “king of the hill”. Rule number one is to get there by any means. It is a no holds barred game. Rule number two has to do with sticking your tongue out once you gain the summit after kicking out the current occupant. The unrelated-to-CO2 web pic of the ozone hole was put there, along with the hockey stick, to tweak as many noses as possible. It is the game boys play when one of them is temporarily king of the hill. Most boys know their role is only temporary but the end game isn’t who stays on the top, but who gets to be there for a while (even if only for a moment). Once there, one must tweak the noses of those who are not at the top. There are no other rules. Only those two.
This is why I often go fishing during these times.
Sort of like this grin, Pamela?
I doubt if he fishes, either, lol.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/nyregion/thecity/02clim.html
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Oh please.
CLIMATE OVER PAST MILLENNIA – PD Jones & M Mann (2004)
Climatic and anthropogenic factors affecting river discharge to the
global ocean, 1951–2000 – PD Jones (et al) 2008
Proxy-Based Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Reconstructions: Sensitivity to Method, Predictor Network, Target Season, and Target Domain – Mann, PD Jones (et al) 2005
etc etc etc
To say that Thompson is ‘grinning like a banshee’ is an adolescent-like personal slur and should not have been made. Just stick to the facts, and where possible, the science.
Cliff says:
September 23, 2010 at 1:40 pm
“Reply to Tenuc: Are you saying the cooling period is back in the data? Things have been pretty hot this decade. Maybe you can point me to that (not saying you’re wrong, I just don’t know where that is).
Maybe you’re saying it’s going to start real soon now – that’s fine, but is the basis for that expected lower solar activity? I keep reading there’s been no correlation between the recent warming since the 70s and solar activity. In fact I read that solar activity has been down while temperatures have been up. Or at best any solar activity cannot account for all of the warming. Do I have that wrong?”
Cliff, there has be no statistically significant global warming for the last 15 years, despite a large increase in CO2. Here’s a snippet from a BBC Q&A interview earlier this year with Professor Phil Jones answering questions from the BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin:-
Question:
“Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Answer:
”…Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level…”
To find out about the link between low solar activity and climate, read Dr. John A. Eddy paper “The Maunder Minimum” (published1976) and the solar/Earth climate link will become clear.
Question for you Cliff. If you heat a cast iron kettle full of water on an electric radiant ring until it boils, does it stop boiling straight away once you turn off the power?
“We don’t know why the Northern Hemisphere ocean areas cooled so rapidly around 1970. But the cooling appears to be largest in a climatically important region of the ocean,” Wallace said.
Uhh, what about sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere reacting with water vapor, creating sulfate ions (the precursors to sulfuric acid), which are very reflective? What about this making more clouds and also making them more reflective, so that more incoming sunlight is reflected back into space and less reaches the Earth’s surface. It seems you have avoided basic global dimming and it sure looks like there was a real good cause for that.
http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/find_eruptions.cfm
Agung
Indonesia
1963 Feb 18 1964 Jan 27 VEI 5
Shiveluch
Russia
1964 Nov 12 1964 Nov 12 VEI 4+
Taal
Philippines
1965 Sep 28 1965 Sep 30 VEI 4
Awu
Indonesia
1966 Aug 12 1966 Oct VEI 4
Kelut
Indonesia
1966 Apr 26 1966 Apr 27 VEI 4
Fernandina
Ecuador
1968 Jun 11 1968 Jul 4 (on or before) VEI 4
Spaced out quite nicely with numerous puffs from VEI-3’s in between. Seeing as how one eruption’s sulfate aerosols can stay in the stratosphere for a couple of years or so I’d say there was plenty of dimming to bring on some cooling.
George E Smith said:
“7% increase in total global evaporation; a 7% increase in total atmospehric moisture content; and a 7% increase in total global precipitation.”
I’d call that either a larger or a a faster hydrological cycle, wouldn’t you ? Larger would involve more clouds but faster needn’t do so.
Now a 7% increase in total atmospheric moisture if reflected in cloud quantities would result in a change in global optical depth but apparently that doesn’t happen so instead the vapour from the increased evaporation must be getting shoved through the system faster for no significant increase in total cloud quantities.
Thus I felt the need for another factor to indicate whether we are dealing with a larger hydro cycle or just a faster one.
The latitudinal shift in the jets is just such an extra factor. The more poleward the jets go the faster the hydro cycle is working and the more equatorward the slower it is working. Throughout that the hydro cycle remains the same basic size (but there is bound to be some variability admittedly) because the optical depth of the atmosphere does not change significantly.
I aver that the size of the hydro cycle is initially set by the density, volume and pressure differentials between sea air and space acting with the phase changes of water.
If any other factor such as the speed of energy passing from oceans to air or from air to space or from sun to Earth changes then the size of the hydro cycle (and the total cloudiness) does not change much but the speed of the cycle does and the mechanism for changing that speed globally is the latitudinal shift of the jets.
It’s like boiling a kettle. As the heat is turned up the rate of boiling increases but the size of the space occupied by the boiling process does not. So it is with the Earth’s climate. Evaporation from the oceans and condensation into clouds is just a slow motion boiling process in a closed system so that all the water from that ‘boiling’ is returned back to the system as condensed water. If one had a supercooled lid on the top of a pan of boiling water it would work the same way. As one turns up the heat the speed of the phase changes would increase but at any given moment the amount of vapour between boiling water surface and supercooled lid would remain the same.
However the shape of the water circulation within the boiling pot would change commensurate with the speed of the process – thus the change in the shape of the air circulation around the globe with changes in the speed of the hydro cycle.
Space is that supercooled lid on our ‘boiling’ oceans and the height of the tropopause (which is a reflection of the temperature of the stratosphere) is the effective ‘lid’.
“The observed climate is just the equilibrium response to such variations with
the positions of the air circulation systems and the speed of the hydrological
cycle always adjusting to bring energy differentials above and below the
troposphere back towards equilibrium (Wilde’s Law ?).”
from here:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5497
and also to be found in the archive of WUWT.
Stephen Wilde says:
September 23, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Phlogiston,
I repeated the post a bit later on with links that work. For convenience I’ll repeat it again here:
Both links work now, thanks!
The international team of scientists discovered an unexpectedly abrupt cooling event that occurred between roughly 1968 and 1972 in Northern Hemisphere ocean temperatures. The research indicates that the cooling played a key role in the different rates of warming seen in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in the middle 20th century.
The BBC our dear old Auntie have picked up on the story – remarkable at first sight – of this 1970 Northern hemisphere ocean cooling event. And what title did they give this news article?
“Oceans divide over 1970s warming”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11391238
Perhaps they have a spell checker which automatically changes cooling to warming?
“The great tragedy of Science-the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”
Thomas Huxley
“”””” Stephen Wilde says:
September 24, 2010 at 1:08 am
George E Smith said:
“7% increase in total global evaporation; a 7% increase in total atmospheric moisture content; and a 7% increase in total global precipitation.”
I’d call that either a larger or a a faster hydrological cycle, wouldn’t you ? Larger would involve more clouds but faster needn’t do so.
Now a 7% increase in total atmospheric moisture if reflected in cloud quantities would result in a change in global optical depth but apparently that doesn’t happen so instead the vapor from the increased evaporation must be getting shoved through the system faster for no significant increase in total cloud quantities. “””””
Stephen, YOU can call it whatever you like; but NO, I would not, and do not. It simply is what IS.
Now if someone did a new study (not a revision of an old study) and made a discovery that a one Deg C rise in mean global surface Temperature now results in a 13% increase in total global evaporation and a 13% increase in total atmospheric water content, and a 13% increase in total global precipitation; then it MIGHT be appropriate to describe that as an “increased” hydrological cycle; after all the forward “gain” of the system has increased; but that also does not mean anything has “speeded up”; so in no way is anything speeded up just because the driving input signal has increased.
But as I said; you can call it whatever you like; however it fits into your new climatology theory; but don’t go reading anything into MY words, that is NOT specifically written into them.
I merely cited the Published scientific work of the authors (Wentz et al) and as I always do I cited the specific journal reference to that work; and to it I added my own PURELY CONJECTURAL observation that a similar order change in total global cloud cover should accompany what they observed. I have NEVER tested that; and I know of nobody else who has ever tested that so it remains an unproven conjecture.
And I am ALWAYS open to enjoying any rational explanation for how their results (Wentz et al) could be true; but MY conjecture be false. To me it is quite axiomatic; but I am here to learn and will gladly embrace any rational scientific argument that shows my conjecture to be likely false.
It doesn’t matter how fast water goes through the cycle of moving from some quite arbitrary location in the ocean, into the atmosphere, and returning to the ocean; perhaps via some land stopover; or directly; or how slowly it is a dynamic system but the disruptive effects on the solar radiation energy cycle depend on what quantities of reagents are where , at any time; not on their rate of turnover.
It’s the same situation as the mythology of the 200 year CO2 atmospheric residence time. It doesn’t matter if a given CO2 molecule resides in the atmosphere for 20 nanoseconds; or 20 million years; only the total number resent at any time matters not how long it takes to replace one serial numbered molecule with another indistinguishable but serial numbered molecule.
I’m sure that “Wilde’s Law” will gain wide recognition as more and more people become apprised of it, and it gets tested and found to be compatible with observations; or not as the case may be.
As for my simple stick in the sand observation from Wentz et al’s peer reviewed work; well somebody may disprove that this afternoon.
[typos fixed mod]
“”””” Tenuc says:
September 23, 2010 at 11:40 pm
Cliff says:
September 23, 2010 at 1:40 pm
…………………………
Question:
“Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Answer:
”…Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level…”
To find out about the link between low solar activity and climate, read Dr. John A. Eddy paper “The Maunder Minimum” (published1976) and the solar/Earth climate link will become clear. “””””
Even better I would read:- The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun-Earth Connection ” by Wilie Wei-Hock Soon and Steven H. Yaskell, published by World Scientific. Soon is of course with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Atro-Physics. Yaskell is I believe a ghost writer. As many will know Dr Soon is an ESL person. ISBN 981-238-274-7 or 981-238-275-5 for the paperback edition. It’s the most extensive treatise on the Maunders; and the Maunder Minimum.
“”” Robuk says:
September 24, 2010 at 9:04 am
“The great tragedy of Science-the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”
Thomas Huxley “””
How true; and akin to the statement attributed to Albert Einstein that no amount of evidence can prove a scientific theory; but one single experiment can disprove it.
We should all be mindful of these truisms. How often do we read of; or ourselves criticise papers or statements that so-and-so “feels” or “believes” such-and-such. Where’s the proof; we demand.
Well get real; live with it; there is not and there never can be “proof” of the truth of any theory about anything; specially anything real like science and the universe. So we shouldn’t even try to prove anything in the scientific sense; and we don’t.
What we do is to construct in our heads out of base metals; a model that is a manifestation of our theory; it is pure fiction. But it has the advantage that we can manipulate that model using mathematics; which also is pure fiction; we made it all up in our heads. There is no reality in any of this.
BUT !! we can make observations of reality; the universe of science if you will, and we can compare those observations with the mathematically predicted behavior OF OUR MODEL !!
And if our model exhibits analagous behavior to the real system that we made observations of; THEN we say that WE BELIEVE that we have a good model.
We do not; and we cannot, say that we have proved how the real system works. The most we can say is that every time we use our model to make predictions or projections that we find those predictions agree with out observations; so WE BELIEVE that we have a good model.
So don’t kid yourself; Science is no more determinate than religion. We have no more assurance about our beliefs in the faithfulness of our models to emulate reality; than we do in the tenets of any religious belief.
We do (as Scientists) have a discipline, that says that if our model makes a prediction that disagrees with our error checked observations of reality; that we MUST change our models. We don’t necessarily discard our models; they may still work rather well for most needs; but we do note the boundaries of validity that must be respected. And then we construct new models to conform to our new observations.
The only difference that religion has, is that theire is NO compulsion to change one’s religious beliefs, simply because one encounters a discrepancy between our beliefs and our experiences.
Otherwise science and religion are quite the same.
We use our science theories and our mathematics; only because we BELIEVE that we get the best explanations of our observations by doing so.
George E Smith said:
“It doesn’t matter how fast water goes through the cycle of moving from some quite arbitrary location in the ocean, into the atmosphere, and returning to the ocean; perhaps via some land stopover; or directly; or how slowly it is a dynamic system but the disruptive effects on the solar radiation energy cycle depend on what quantities of reagents are where , at any time; not on their rate of turnover.”
I’m not sure that is correct in relation to the hydrological cycle because each evaporated molecule carries latent heat upward and each time a molecule of water condenses out at a higher level then that latent heat is released again and the net effect is to accelerate the upward energy flow. So more evaporation in a given period of time and more condensation into rainfall during that given period of time must result in a further acceleration of outgoing energy upwards. If an increase in the amount of evaporation over a period of say 12 hours results in a matching increase in the amount of condensation into rainfall during the same 12 hours then that seems to be a speeding up of the hydrological cycle and no more clouds would be required. Only if the precipitation failed to keep up with the development of more clouds would total cloudiness need to increase but that doesn’t happen if one accepts the evidence of a stable optical depth for the atmosphere as a whole.
The hydrological cycle involves both convective and radiative processes working in tandem very flexibly in terms of acceleration and deceleration.
and also George said:
“It’s the same situation as the mythology of the 200 year CO2 atmospheric residence time. It doesn’t matter if a given CO2 molecule resides in the atmosphere for 20 nanoseconds; or 20 million years; only the total number resent at any time matters not how long it takes to replace one serial numbered molecule with another indistinguishable but serial numbered molecule.”
It’s not the same situation because CO2 involves radiative processes alone and not convective processes. In that situation the number of CO2 molecules present at any given time is indeed what matters. CO2 molecules do not change phase, convert sensible heat to latent heat and then carry it elsewhere and then release it during another phase change. If CO2 could do those things then the rate of turnover would matter.
George E Smith said:
“Now if someone did a new study (not a revision of an old study) and made a discovery that a one Deg C rise in mean global surface Temperature now results in a 13% increase in total global evaporation and a 13% increase in total atmospheric water content, and a 13% increase in total global precipitation; then it MIGHT be appropriate to describe that as an “increased” hydrological cycle; after all the forward “gain” of the system has increased; but that also does not mean anything has “speeded up”; so in no way is anything speeded up just because the driving input signal has increased”
But George, one doesn’t need an increase in temperature to achieve a faster hydrological cycle.
All one needs is more evaporation per unit of time and that can come from a variety of causes such as more wind or more downward infra red radiation from more CO2 in the air.
The reason is that water vapour is lighter than air so more evaporation from any cause will increase convection without any rise in surface temperature being necessary. In fact unless compensated for in some other way there will actually be a surface cooling because evaporation is a net cooling process. Just wave a sweaty arm about to note the effect.
Pamela Gray says:
September 23, 2010 at 8:21 pm
I’ve seen that kind of grin before. It is the grin of someone who intends on tweaking someone else’s nose. Rule number two of “king of the hill”. Rule number one is to get there by any means. It is a no holds barred game. Rule number two has to do with sticking your tongue out once you gain the summit after kicking out the current occupant. The unrelated-to-CO2 web pic of the ozone hole was put there, along with the hockey stick, to tweak as many noses as possible. It is the game boys play when one of them is temporarily king of the hill. Most boys know their role is only temporary but the end game isn’t who stays on the top, but who gets to be there for a while (even if only for a moment). Once there, one must tweak the noses of those who are not at the top. There are no other rules. Only those two.
This is why I often go fishing during these times.
Great human socio-biology/psycology! Are you by any chance one of the great^x grandchildren of Leo Tolstoy? His perception of human deep inner motivations was astonishing to the point of spooky.