March 2012 Sea Surface Temperature (SST) Anomaly Update – A New Look

And that goes double for trend lines.

So is it getting warmer or colder?

Bob, I appreciate the updates, but TMI !!!! The information you put out gives me too much to think about in such a small place to think of such things!
That said, the North Pacific temps are interesting in relation to the sea ice we saw and are seeing. I don’t typically regard the arctic ice much. It is usually of little interest to me, but I think this year there is something worth watching, here. There may be some learning to be had.
Bob, thanks again.
James

At first I was against showing the models, but it doesn’t obscure the data very much, and I think it’s important for people to see just how bad they are, in trend, variation, simulation of cyclical movements, etc. It’s clear to me that you need to have just about every parameter wrong to do so badly. I want my money back.
Look at the real data vs modeled for South Pacific. The real data shows huge swings, but the model can barely manage a squiggle as it goes along its high +trend.
Then look at Arctic and Southern ocean models. It looks like the model has a huge math error that makes any deviation from zero want to strongly correct to zero, and once close, deviate away again. The tops of the waves at the left of the chart and the bottoms of the waves on the right all want to converge to zero then get pushed away again. Like a pendulum with a magnet on the end that swings over an opposing magnet. Very strange. I would guess it is a very simple model with a very simple (but very significant) math error. It isn’t even close to modeling anything real (or it would have been compared to data and corrected by now).

Oops, it would appear that I assumed the work was carried out by Anthony instead of the magnificent effort by Bob Tisdale, my apologies.

i have tried repeatedly to post this on Tips & Notes, but cannot, so am hoping it’s ok to post here, as this is being reported in Russia, Singapore, around the US etc, (On the road to Rio?) as MIT researchers say, or Smithsonian says, etc:
4 April: Yahoo: AP: Next Great Depression? MIT study predicting ‘global economic collapse’ by 2030 still on track
A renowned Australian research scientist says a study from researchers at MIT claiming the world could suffer from a “global economic collapse” and “precipitous population decline” if people continue to consume the world’s resources at the current pace is still on track, nearly 40 years after it was first produced.
The Smithsonian Magazine writes that Australian physicist Graham Turner says “the world is on track for disaster” and that current research from Turner coincides with a famous, and in some quarters, infamous, academic report from 1972 entitled, “The Limits to Growth.” Turner’s research is not affiliated with MIT or The Club for Rome…
***However, the study said “unlimited economic growth” is still possible if world governments enact policies and invest in green technologies that help limit the expansion of our ecological footprint…
Turner says that perhaps the most startling find from the study is that the results of the computer scenarios were nearly identical to those predicted in similar computer scenarios used as the basis for “The Limits to Growth.”
“There is a very clear warning bell being rung here,” Turner said. “We are not on a sustainable trajectory.”…
***Correction: This post has been edited to reflect that MIT has not updated its research from the original 1972 study.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/next-great-depression-mit-researchers-predict-global-economic-190352944.html
April 2012: Smithsonian Magazine: Mark Strauss: Looking Back on the Limits of Growth
Forty years after the release of the groundbreaking study, were the concerns about overpopulation and the environment correct?
However, the study also noted that unlimited economic growth was possible, if governments forged policies and invested in technologies to regulate the expansion of humanity’s ecological footprint. Prominent economists disagreed with the report’s methodology and conclusions. Yale’s Henry Wallich opposed active intervention, declaring that limiting economic growth too soon would be “consigning billions to permanent poverty.”
Turner compared real-world data from 1970 to 2000 with the business-as-usual scenario…
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Looking-Back-on-the-Limits-of-Growth.html
the Smithsonian is referring to a CSIRO June 2008 piece by Turner!
CSIRO: Graham Turner: A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with 30 years of reality
http://www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf
6 April: Popular Science, Australia: Rebecca Boyle: MIT Predicts That World Economy Will Collapse By 2030
Is this impossible to fix? No, according to both Turner and the original study. If governments enact stricter policies and technologies can be improved to reduce our environmental footprint, economic growth doesn’t have to become a market white dwarf, marching toward inevitable implosion…
http://www.popsci.com.au/science/mit-predicts-that-world-economy-will-collapse-by-2030

Does anybody else refer to the CMIP3 model as “CHIMP” model, or is it just me?

I like the “old look” without the ensemble means. Maybe a separate posting with the model ensembles but I like the ones you produced every month with just the monthly and weekly with the trends and the running mean.

The point of charts is to learn something about climate, not show models are wrong (though the two might overlap occasionally).

Bob, what abour /lack of/ recent OHC recharge by La Nina? The latest afterNino flat period seems similar to the previous one. If your ENSO heat release/heat recharge is correct fior the warm AMO period, there should be some mechanism allowing for step-down period now for the cold one.. any ideas yet?

What is the expected impact of increased albedo on SSTs, and where is that impact expected? Given over 7% increase in albedo over the last fifteen years (largely from increased mean cloud cover) it should be starting to affect the ocean’s energy budget outside of (or rather, literally on top of) the usual ENSO-driven cycle. Do the models explicitly take this into account? The cooling for this large an increase “should” be order of 2 degrees K worldwide, but because the Earth is a self-organized system it might take decades longer for the full impact to be felt. However, I’d expect the ocean to be where it has the greatest impact in the long run, slowly reducing the heat content of the top few hundred meters of the seawater as vertical mixing occurs and heat lost is not replenished at he same rate.
rgb

Steven Mosher says:
April 9, 2012 at 10:43 pm
Thanks Steve for pointing that out, it simply didn’t register with me… The averaging would do just what I was describing, increase the frequency, decrease amplitude.
I still think the last two I mentioned look odd. Mike S.

Danger Will Robinson! The downward trend seems to be in line with the low pass filtered UAH. I pray it’s a sine wave or something like it, long term. It may not be that good. We may actually be in the ringing just prior to the state change (e.g. the end of the interglacial).

tallbloke says:
April 10, 2012 at 5:52 am
Bob says:
“But, eventually, the AMO will switch modes.”
Ah that must be it then. Nothing to do with Sun or cloud albedo. The AMO just wakes up one morning and says to itself.
“Life’s a bit samey, think I’ll switch modes today.”
The AMO – like the related PDO – are oscillations that might be forced by solar variations (albeit in a weak and nonsynchronous way). So its not necessarily either solar or AMO – maybe a bit of both.

Why is it customary to use a 13 month moving average on climate charts? A 12 month MA would completely suppress the 12 month annual cycle; a 13 month MA does not. Is there a reason why you want the annual cycle to appear in the average?

This means if you were to plot the change in global temperatures over say 10 or 100 year intervals, over a much longer period, against the frequency of each change magnitude, and plot both as natural log, then at least a significant portion of the resultant log-log plot would form a straight line. The gradient of this line would represent the fractal dimension of the system. I calculated this once for the Vostok ice core records but don’t have the data to hand.
Sure, but if one looks at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.png
(Lisiecki and Raymo, 2005) and take it at face value, there are several features that argue against the ice age being due to this sort of fractal variability.
a) The climate was cooling slowly from 5 mya up to 3 mya (from a baseline that appears about 2 K warmer than current temperatures and that I cannot help but believe is the absolute upper bound of any anthropogenic or natural warming short of a complete rearrangement of the continents or alteration in the dynamics of the solar system including the sun itself). In this state the climate oscillated by roughly 1 K up or down around a running but fairly smooth trend. The oscillation here is likely chaotic noise of the sort you describe, but not unbounded — there is clear negative feedback stabilizing it on a timescale of a few tens of thousands of years. On this graph oscillations of decades or centuries are irrelevant and invisible — secular variation is all on the time scale of millennia.
b) Between 3.3 and 2.8 mya, the character of the warm phase altered. The cooling accelerated and the first precursor cold spikes occurred, but the climate returned to what was still arguably a slowly depressing warm phase afterwards.
c) Between 1 mya and 2.5 mya, the earth cooled and average of some 6 K, or 1 K every 250,000 years, while oscillating sharply between a degree or two warmer and a degree or two colder. “Sharply” is with a period of some 40 ky, but there is plenty of (again, probably chaotic) noise and excursion. A new (and highly interesting) feature emerges. At the beginning, the small oscillations did not suffice to return the planet to its initial warm-phase baseline vicinity. However, the (mean) colder that it grew, the greater the amplitude of the oscillations, and starting some 1.75 mya the oscillations at least sometimes managed to return to warm phase conditions, but always for a heartbreakingly brief period of geologic time. On this scale they appear as sharp spikes, but those spikes are a few thousand years in duration.
d) Around 1 mya the system appears to stabilize around a consistent mean temperature some 5.5 to 6 K cooler than the present (and the now-ancient warm phase). The character of the oscillations radically shifts, altering both period and amplitude. Upward swings are around 6 K, highly transient excursions back to a warm phase. Downward swings are some 4 K, with the coldest times some 10K cooler than the present (and “dangerously cool” from the point of view of CO_2 absorption into the ocean and its risk to land-based plant life — CO_2 levels dropped to partial pressures only a bit larger than that needed to sustain plant life and hence land based animal life). Although there is a lot of noise, over the last 600,000 ya, the warm phase excursions have had a crude periodicity of 100 ky or so with fairly well separated and distinct warm peaks, well-defined “interglacials” as it were.
If one looks at e.g. the Vostok cores to try to get a higher resolution picture of this latter interval, one sees that the Holocene is not (yet) the warmest interglacial — its peak temperatures (which probably occurred some 10 kya near the beginning) were a degree or so cooler than at least one or two of the other interglacial peaks in this interval. It is already one of the longest interglacials — there is one that was longer but it was also somewhat cooler.
Looking at this, it is highly implausible that the data from 3 mya to the present can be adequately explained just by chaotic oscillation in a system with otherwise steady drivers. There is clear evidence of “events” or discrete changes of some of the important drivers, and equally clear evidence of quasi-resonance with some external driver modulation (41 ky and 100 kya periodicity). IMO none of those modulations match up particularly well with known or understandable periods of orbital dynamics, although some complicated pattern of double or triple resonances being fed back through a chaotic internal dynamics make this hypothesis still tenable if not terribly consistent with the actual data as far as we can at this time understand it.
Here are things that I think function as confounding factors for most simple explanations. It is difficult to explain the gradual cooling precursor to the more rapid drop. If the opening of the Panama Seaway altered oceanic circulation abruptly that is fine, but how did the effect precede this nearly discrete cause? Also, where are Milankovitch cycle modulations at this time? Presumably they were occurring, but they had no meaningful effect on the global climate — the fluctuations here are basically pure noise with no particular orbital resonance signal. The smooth depression of the mean temperature (smoothed over perhaps 50 ky) has nothing whatsoever of “chaos” about it. This is clearly a secular motion of a chaotic attractor (perhaps) brought about by variation of some external driver that is smoothly varying on a time scale of tens of thousands of years over 1.5 million years! Finally, why, when this driver finally stabilized in a cold phase state with extremely large and asymmetric thermal excursions, did a 100 ky cycle of highly transient but fairly consistent warm phase excursions emerge?
There is an interesting way to plot the phase space of this system that I may attempt. If one puts time on (say) the x axis, temperature on the y axis and an effective potential on the z axis that is characterized by the quadratic return rate to a locally stable equilibrium, then the minimum of the potential occurs at the location of the attractor and width provides a measure of its local stability. The surface thus rendered would be sharp and narrow in warm phase a) above and then would widen as it descends b), at first symmetrically b), c) and then asymmetrically d), with larger warm excursions than cold ones.
Such a curve would be a first step in trying to deduce the actual Poincare cycle history that included the secular motion of the primary attractor in some reasonable number of dimensions, trying very hard to do a systematic decomposition of those dimensions from most to least important and at least trying to associate some explanation with the primary motion of the attractor.
I’m perfectly happy with albedo modulation being the core feedback responsible for the oscillations about the mean, although albedo modulation is itself multifactorial and not terribly well understood. However, it is not terribly plausible as a cause of the movement of the primary attractor, the stable point around which albedo modulation swings the local climate. The time scale of the secular motion is too long! What is the memory of this non-Markovian system that would cause smooth variation of the mean temperature on million year timescales when at most a few tens of thousands of years appears sufficient to reset any possible clock, including the ocean, unless there were a driver that varied persistently across those timescales?
Again, this is the sort of thing that needs to be done thoroughly — and I do mean thoroughly, to the point of general acceptance of the explanation — before one screws around with baseless assertions of catastrophic warming. The latter are basically asserting that the Earth has a still warmer warm phase that is locally stable under the planet’s current geological and solar dynamic drivers, and that CO_2 alone is sufficient to push the climate into this new stable driver. Yet the direct evidence of the Earth’s climate history at the very least fails to provide the faintest hint of support for this hypothesis, if it doesn’t quite outright refute it. If anything, the Earth is pulled as far out in the warming direction as it ever goes, or has gone, for millions of years with a much more stable thermal state that is some 5-6K cooler just waiting to happen.
Until we fully understand what the Earth’s temperature should be, in the sense that we can completely understand if not predict this entire 5 my curve in terms of its most important parametric drivers and the actual Poincare helix the Earth’s temperature traces out in time, we cannot possibly resolve the powerful and dominant long term signal from the noise and hope to detect the non-noise signal of “CO_2 variation” from everything else, let alone predict future behavior.
Anyone who examines this 5 my history should be very, very afraid. There is indeed a “catastrophe” awaiting the human race, one that we haven’t the slightest ability to influence. That is the cold catastrophe that is quite inevitable, and that could occur quite literally at any time. We don’t know why it will happen or when it will happen when it happens. We don’t understand why the Earth turned cold in the first place and why it has warm phase excursions now. Yet we are “confidently” predicting warming unprecedented over the last five million years! Piffle!
If it happened, and if it managed to stabilize the entire planet in warm phase for a few hundred thousand years or longer, that would be simply awesome. Warm phase is fecund and happy, with the entire Earth a hotbed of life. Cold phase is dangerous — Ragnarok indeed — with frost giants stalking the landscape and the carbon dioxide that land life itself depends on being sucked out of the air by the relentless, cold, sea. Drop it below 180 ppm and plant life vanishes from the poles to the equator (unless it manages to evolve to where it can survive at still lower partial pressures). Things that live on plants starve. Land life dies and the Earth starts over. And yeah, the croplands of today are covered once again by massive glaciers long before this happens, so the human race necessarily shrinks back to a much smaller surviving core, probably in the most violent of ways.
Sure, not in my lifetime. Probably not in the lifetime of my children or grandchildren. But the whole point of science is to understand all of this and ultimately, to be able to predict and perhaps control it.
Lots of work to be done.
rgb

I have a real problem accepting those kind of graphs (1), when data scatter is greater than the trend and the phenomenon is probably cyclic (thus straight line fits are a wrong approach).
That graph only covers the period from close to when climate temperature was at its last low to the present.
If you look only at the period from the last high to present a straight line fit would show no increase or perhaps slight decrease.
A minimum period would be 100 years, to completely span the possible 60-year cycle (1930s warm period to 1990s warm period and a margin each side of that).
Even that is dodgy, because there may be several cyclic functions of different periodicity, the combination of which may vary in strength and timing (note that ENSO does).
It does seem to disprove IPCC predictions.