Steve McIntyre writes:
In the context of IPCC SOD FIgure 1.5 (or similar comparison of models and observations), CW13 is slightly warmer than HadCRUT4 but the difference is small relative to the discrepancy between models and observations; the CW13 variation is also outside the Figure 1.5 envelope.
Figure 1. Cowtan and Way 2013 hybrid plotted onto IPCC AR5SOD Figure 1.5
Next, here is a simple plot showing the difference between the CW13 hybrid and HadCRUT 4. Up to the end of 2005, there was a zero trend between the two; the difference has arisen entirely since 2005.
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Pity the polar data, tortured into an inadequate confession. After all, greenhouse theory says the tropical troposphere is supposed to warm first and fastest.
What happened to all the heat that was hiding deep in the oceans?
How did it suddenly migrate to the Arctic – retrospectively too, apparently.
Clearly this is groundbreaking new scientific theory!
the difference has arisen entirely since 2005.
Could it be because that’s when Arctic amplification really started getting underway?
So one man’s BS doesn’t match another’s? Its starting to look like the data sets are all fake religions.
Note that surface temperatures were above the projection in 1998, because of the El Nino (positive ENSO index event) that year.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
Notice how the ENSO index has been much smaller lately, with a lot of negative La Ninas which store heat deep in the Pacific ocean where ARGO and the central limit theorem have measured it. It’s worth pondering what will happen when we have another El Nino like the one in 1998. All that heat hasn’t vanished, and we’ll have to deal with it sooner or later. Luckily for WUWT and Climate Audit, that future temperature spike (whatever its human cost) could serve as the basis for articles like “Global warming stopped in 201X!”
Apparently, going down the up escalator never gets old:
http://skepticalscience.com/still-going-down-the-up-escalator.html
Darn, Steve M beat me to the apparent 2005 breakpoint in the difference between the HADCRUT and Cowart and Ray (2013) data. My versions are here:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/figure-44.png
My post will hopefully be finished tomorrow and I’ll explain why that’s odd…among other things the warmistas have overlooked.
I have just posted this on Lucia’s “The Blackboard”
As a humble member of the public who is expected to pay for most of this climate science research guff and who as a member of that low life uninformed public who are expected to lay down and be data raped by every passing wannabe climate scientist, it seems to me that the finangling [ I could use some quite unprintable language to describe this ] of the data where no data exists to get a result that ensures that what is seen to be happening in the climate, isn’t according to the non existent data.
In this case attempting to dispel the idea that there is a “Pause” in the warming using some fancy and argued about statistical techniques applied to that non existent data taken from a region where there are almost no records to justify the claim there isn’t a Pause of over 16 years running in the climb in global temperatures.
So why is it that this particular statistical lash-up couldn’t also be applied to those 20 years of supposed increasing temperatures from 1978 to 2007, a period which is only 4 years longer than the Pause and on which 20 years the entire global warming meme / ideology is based.
Using Cowtan & Way’s statistical techniques and the same identical data base of temperatures it could probably be proven that there was no increase in global temperatures during that 20 years of supposed warming.
Why is that +/- 0.2 degree gray band always shown? It is the equivalent to 20 years of warming. Whoever put that gray band on the graph doesn’t really believe in global warming. Take it away and the correlation (models to measurements) really looks ugly.
“Notice how the ENSO index has been much smaller lately, with a lot of negative La Ninas which store heat deep in the Pacific ocean where ARGO and the central limit theorem have measured it”
So in the 50’s-60’s-70’s, when we had a negative PDO and more cooling La Nina’s and also modest global cooling in the atmosphere, the Pacific Ocean must have also been storing deep heat. Correct DS?
Sure sounds like a natural cycle to me. Unless you want to elaborate on how CO2 can cause a negative PDO around every 30 years along with the increase in La Nina’s during that period………even before CO2 went up much.
Temperature have in fact warmed the last 100+ years (like an elevator going up as you stated). But the take home point is that during that period, like the 50’s-60’s-70’s, a natural cycle was even more powerful than CO’s warming effect…………….unless you want to DENY that temperatures dropped a bit during that 30 year period.
Since temperatures DID drop for that 30 year period, (and others with a -PDO) the analogy of going down the up escalator is a good one………..except skeptical science clearly doesn’t understand this effect.
They completely miss the correlation between the -PDO and atmospheric cooling based on the uptrending temp graph they show on your link and the silly little uncorrelated to anything downtrend lines they made up along the way during the mostly +PDO period.
Actually, the correlation on that graph is with the authors lack of understanding of how this meteorologist thinks the atmosphere works.
Dumb Scientist;
All that heat hasn’t vanished, and we’ll have to deal with it sooner or later.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Could you help me out here? Because I’d really like to understand this.
The oceans have a heat capacity about 1200 times that of the atmosphere. So, if the heat actually is going into the oceans instead of the atmosphere, then it will take 1200 times as much energy to heat them up by one degree as it would to heat the atmosphere by one degree. Now I get it, if all that energy were to come back all at once, that would make for one hot atmosphere, you bet. What I don’t understand is how this is going to happen.
See, if the oceans did get to be one degree warmer than the atmosphere, the most they could increase the temperature of the atmosphere at that point would be…. one degree. At which point the whole system would be back in equilibrium and the other 1199 times as much heat would just be stuck in the ocean with no place to go.
Can you please explain to me the part I don’t understand?
Mike Maguire says:
November 18, 2013 at 3:39 pm
So in the 50′s-60′s-70′s, when we had a negative PDO and more cooling La Nina’s and also modest global cooling in the atmosphere, the Pacific Ocean must have also been storing deep heat. Correct DS? Sure sounds like a natural cycle to me.
====================
This part seems reasonable, but it would be difficult to confirm because measurements of the deep ocean were rather sparse before ARGO. Scientists are aware of natural cycles (in fact, most natural cycles were named by scientists) which is why attribution studies place bounds on the amount of warming that could be contributed by PDO/etc. compared to human influences.
The problem I have with these revelations of the real nature of actual warming is that they are at the very limits of our knowledge, yet they confirm what the researchers believed all along. In 2007 the lack of warming was due to the cooling impact of aerosols. Then Kevin Trenberth resolved his angst of the missing heat, by postulating that it was hidden in the deep oceans. Now Cowtan and Way postulate that it is again where we cannot measure it, or (as Steve McIntyre implies) by correcting existing data. We have to trust the computer models, run by the expert scientists.
There were two issues with the aerosols. The first was that they were concentrated over very small areas of the plant, where the major industrial areas are concentrated. So one would expect a significant difference in temperature trends in the areas of Sao Paulo, New York, Shanghai and Seoul when compared to less industrial areas. Seperately, the radiative forcing impact of aerosols should not fit together to form a nice convenient picture, like it did in AR4. Complex data ain’t like that. Check the numbers at http://manicbeancounter.com/2012/04/10/aerosols-the-unipcc-ar4-adjustment-factor/
There is a single big issue with Cowtan and Way, that Steve McIntyre has identified. The missing temperature increase is all after 2005. The 16% of the earth not covered by HADCRUT4 is also concentrated in the polar regions. If there was a whole degree of warming in this period, it might be perceived in a significant increase in the rate of melting of the polar ice-caps.
Sheppard et al. 2012 has estimates (table 1 page 1188) covering the period 1992-2011. The comparing the periods 2000-2011 and 2005-2010, the authors found a trivial increase in Greenland ice melt and no change in Antarctica.
Shepard et al. 2012. A Reconciled Estimate of Ice-Sheet Mass Balance, Science 338, 1183 (2012); DOI: 10.1126/science.1228102
Another issue, analogous to my issue above with aerosols. In their notes, the authors show that the Met Office postulated in 2009 a distribution of likely warming rates. Lo and behold, Cowtan and Way’s estimates just happen to land slam dunk in the middle of the distribution four years later. I don’t believe it. The Met Office have got a forecast right for once!
http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~kdc3/papers/coverage2013/background.html
davidmhoffer says:
November 18, 2013 at 3:54 pm
======================
Good question. Basically, the Earth’s climate isn’t ever in equilibrium. Heat stored in the ocean doesn’t emerge during an El Nino because the ocean as a whole became warmer than the atmosphere. That heat emerges when the upwelling of cold water to the surface temporarily weakens, so the ocean doesn’t store heat as effectively as when the ENSO index is 0 (or neutral). During a La Nina, that upwelling strengthens so the ocean stores heat even more effectively.
Instead of drawing an analogy with static thermodynamics, the complex dependence of ENSO on ocean currents suggests that an analogy involving dynamics might be more informative:
Imagine filling a measuring cup at a constant rate while the water sloshes around. Sometimes the water will pile up against the side of the cup that doesn’t have the measuring tick marks. As it piles up, the water level against the tick marks might go down even as the faucet pours water into the cup.
In this analogy, the water level in the cup is the Earth’s total energy and the constant water flow is the extra radiative power added by human emissions. The side of the cup with the tick marks is the Earth’s surface, where most of our temperature sensors are. The other side of the cup is the deep ocean, which we can’t measure as well as the surface.
Water sloshing towards the tickmarks is like a temporarily warm El Nino, while water sloshing away from the tickmarks is like a temporarily cool La Nina.
Humans add extra water to the cup, but it sloshes around the cup naturally.
Humans add extra energy to the Earth, but it sloshes around the Earth naturally.
“which is why attribution studies place bounds on the amount of warming that could be contributed by PDO/etc. compared to human influences”
Instead of studies, to be more accurate, that should say theories or models using mathematical equations to represent the physical laws of the theory.
There is nobody that has been able to separate out the amount of PDO, solar and other natural cycles from effects of humans.
Again, the planet cooled for 30 years prior to this recent warming………..and global climate models predicted the recent warming(late 70’s-80’s-90’s) would continue without dialing in the effect of the -PDO and La Nina’s that you mentioned or any other natural cycles or non human effects.
So these “attribution studies placing bounds” and global climate models missed the temp stall the last 15 years.
Call it what you want, or where the heat went and or why but it got missed which means that the sources were in fact UNABLE to place bounds on warming/cooling from the PDO.
davidmhoffer says:
November 18, 2013 at 3:54 pm
See, if the oceans did get to be one degree warmer than the atmosphere, the most they could increase the temperature of the atmosphere at that point would be…. one degree.
Do we have time to check this out?
I did a calculation based on a graph that showed the top 2000 m of the ocean gained 25 x 10^22 J over the last 55 years.
The total mass of the ocean above 2000 m is 48% of the total mass of the ocean.
The total mass of the ocean is 1.37 x 10^21 kg.
The specific heat capacity of ocean water is 4000 J/kgK.
Applying H = mct, I get a change in t of
25 x 10^22 J/(0.48 x 1.37 x 10^21 kg x 4000 J/kgK) = 0.1 K. At this rate it would take about 500 years to go up 1.0 C. I read that the average temperature of the ocean is 6 C. So to get to the air temperature of 14 C would take 4000 years. Then we have to wait another 500 years to go 1 C above the air temperature to see if what you say is correct. Of course if the deep ocean has to gain all that heat as well, then the wait is far longer.
Mike Maguire says:
November 18, 2013 at 4:13 pm
Instead of studies, to be more accurate, that should say theories or models using mathematical equations to represent the physical laws of the theory. There is nobody that has been able to separate out the amount of PDO, solar and other natural cycles from effects of humans.
=====================
Huber and Knutti 2011 used observations of natural and human radiative forcings (Fig 1a) and observations of surface temperatures (Fig 1b) and observations of ocean heat content (Fig 1c) to separate natural and human effects:
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/people/knuttir/papers/huber11natgeo.pdf
Dumb Scientist;
Imagine filling a measuring cup at a constant rate while the water sloshes around. Sometimes the water will pile up against the side of the cup that doesn’t have the measuring tick marks. As it piles up, the water level against the tick marks might go down even as the faucet pours water into the cup.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well that’s wonderful Dumb Scientist. I just don’t understand how water when poured in a stream into a volume constrained by a physical vessel of known dimensions at a rate that results in break down of laminar flow has anything to do with energy fluxes due to processes such as conduction, evaporation and radiance.
I’m also confused as to how you know that ENSO changes the way that energy is stored in the oceans. I mean, one of the things the climate modelers have universally admitted is that they can’t model ENSO at all. It just seems to me, and perhaps you could explain this part too, that if they can’t model ENSO then it means they don’t actually know how it works? And if they don’t know how it works, how can they say what it does or doesn’t do to the way energy is stored in the first place.
Then there’s that whole thing that Mr Brozek raised which showed that based on some fancy calculations, the temperature of the oceans will take 500 years to rise one degree. I mean, that’s a really long time, isn’t it? And only one degree at that? Plus, then he says that the oceans are only 6 degrees in the first place. Well, I know from reading a lot of stuff on the internet that the average surface temperature of earth is about 15 degrees. So, in 500 years, if the oceans have actually gotten to one degree warmer, wouldn’t they still be 8 degrees cooler than the average? How does the heat get transmitted from something cooler to something warmer? I mean I remember doing an experiment in grade 3 where the teacher had a metal rod and a bunson burner and she put one end in the flame from the bunson burner and the other end got warmer, but not as warm as the hot end in the flame and I just can’t figure out how the warm end could possibly make the hot end even hotter.
Really confused on this stuff.
davidmhoffer says:
November 18, 2013 at 5:01 pm
Well that’s wonderful Dumb Scientist. I just don’t understand how water when poured in a stream into a volume constrained by a physical vessel of known dimensions at a rate that results in break down of laminar flow has anything to do with energy fluxes due to processes such as conduction, evaporation and radiance.
======================
It’s just an analogy that tries to show how heat can slosh back and forth between atmosphere and ocean for dynamic reasons rather than purely static thermodynamic reasons. Not all analogies work for all people, though.
======================
I’m also confused as to how you know that ENSO changes the way that energy is stored in the oceans. I mean, one of the things the climate modelers have universally admitted is that they can’t model ENSO at all. It just seems to me, and perhaps you could explain this part too, that if they can’t model ENSO then it means they don’t actually know how it works? And if they don’t know how it works, how can they say what it does or doesn’t do to the way energy is stored in the first place.
======================
As far as I understand it, ENSO variability in models is getting better in the sense that the overall frequency of El Nino and La Nina events and their approximate magnitude is becoming realistic. But the timing of El Nino and La Nina events is essentially random. In that sense we don’t really know what causes the currents to change well enough to predict it with any confidence.
But that’s different (and much harder) than knowing what happened after it happens. Regardless of exactly how it’s triggered, during an El Nino warm water pools off the west coast of South America. This warm water doesn’t cool the atmosphere as easily, so the atmosphere warms.
However I should note that I don’t specialize in modelling (ENSO or otherwise) so take my opinions with a grain of salt. Like you were probably going to anyway. 😉
Odd.
ENSO variability and/or frequency and/or magnitude modeling getting better. Where? Exactly which model and verified by whom?
ENSO timing (frequency?) essentially (say what?) random. You mean the fakers actually don’t understand ‘natural variability’? All that guff about the models getting ENSO better is just guff then? Believe in the CAGW nonsense and the models and dumb scientists all make sense?
ENSO modeling incapable of interpreting/determining/understanding ENSO for prediction confidence.
Make up your mind, if there is one. Take your silly games back to skssy land and swap tales with them. Stop making things up and then slinging doubletalk out and telling us it’s science.
DS,
From your source:
“Based on a massive ensemble of
simulations with an intermediate-complexity climate model we
demonstrate that known changes in the global energy balance
and in radiative forcing tightly constrain the magnitude of
anthropogenic warming”
“Methods
We use the Bern2.5D Earth system model of intermediate complexity, which is
based on a zonally averaged dynamic ocean model. The ocean basins of the Atlantic,
Pacific, Indian and Southern oceans are resolved and are coupled to a zonally and
vertically averaged energy and moisture-balance model of the atmosphere
12,25
. The
prescribed historical natural and anthropogenic radiative forcings used to drive the
climate model are based on refs 16 and 15 and are identical to ref. 26”
Your source/link proves my point.
Dumb Scientist;
However I should note that I don’t specialize in modelling (ENSO or otherwise) so take my opinions with a grain of salt. Like you were probably going to anyway. 😉
Ah, so you figured out that I’m a cat playing with a mouse, and you are the mouse. Perhaps you’re not so dumb after all. At least you were bright enough to admit that you know squat about ENSO before you dug yourself any deeper. I sense Bob Tisdale lurking somewhere nearby, but he’ll probably save his ammunition for his next post which I suggest you pay close attention to so that you understand how hilariously wrong your explanation upthread is.
It’s just an analogy that tries to show how heat can slosh back and forth between atmosphere and ocean for dynamic reasons rather than purely static thermodynamic reasons.
What that shows is that you’ve never studied physics. Heat doesn’t slosh, it doesn’t even move. Energy moves, and something that contains heat can drive an energy flux by one of several mechanisms including the ones I mentioned earlier, conductance, evaporation, radiance. None of these are mechanisms by which heat “sloshes” and no such mechanism exists in known physics, in fact, the opposite. Your analogy demonstrates that either you don’t have a clue what you are talking about, or that you are using the analogy in a deliberate attempt to mislead others.
As far as I understand it, ENSO variability in models is getting better in the sense that the overall frequency of El Nino and La Nina events and their approximate magnitude is becoming realistic.
Well then your understanding is pretty weak since the models have gone from awful to almost-not-awful. But you already admitted that you don’t know anything about ENSO, so no point beating you over the head with that.
But the timing of El Nino and La Nina events is essentially random.
Ah. They’re completely random. As in can’t be predicted at all. Oh, I said I’s stop beating you over the head on your admitted lack of knowledge, sorry about that.
This warm water doesn’t cool the atmosphere as easily, so the atmosphere warms.
Ah. At least you got SOME physics right. Yes, the atmosphere would in theory cool more slowly if the ocean warmed. Except that wasn’t your claim. YOUR claim was that the oceans were absorbing the heat which would COME BACK into the atmosphere at a later date.. I challenged you to explain how that could be, how the heat could go from the oceans to the warmer atmosphere, all at once, or any other way, and you have skirted the question.
mods – think I blew the close bold tag at the end of my last comment, apologies.
Mike Maguire says:
November 18, 2013 at 5:35 pm
the climate model… Your source/link proves my point.
=====================
We have observations of solar/volcanic/etc. forcing, and observations of surface temperatures and observations of ocean heat content.
1. Can these observations be used to learn about the climate?
If you don’t think so, then science is impossible.
2. Is there any way to use these observations to learn about the climate without using equations or physics (i.e. a model)?
No. Science = models. Anyone who doesn’t like models doesn’t like science. The observations we have are useless without physics.
ATheoK says:
November 18, 2013 at 5:30 pm
ENSO variability and/or frequency and/or magnitude modeling getting better. Where? Exactly which model and verified by whom?
=========================
“… the models that do a good job simulating the observations (GFDL CM 2.1, MPI ECHAM5, and MRI CGCM 2.3.2A) are among those that have been identified as realistically reproducing ENSO [Lin, 2007].”
http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/216/Dessler2011.pdf
Dumb Scientist says:
November 18, 2013 at 5:44 pm
The models aren’t based upon either physics or observations. They’re based upon GIGO assumptions not in evidence, indeed contrary to all actual observations & physical evidence.