From the University of Washington and the department of Trenberth’s missing heat comes a claim that we’ll have to wait another 15 years for global warming to resume. Sounds like a goalpost mover to me.
The Oceans that Slowed 21st Century Global Warming
Why did the rapid global warming that characterized the latter part of the 20th century slow down over the last 15 years or so? Many different theories have been proposed, but a new study suggests that a massive movement of heat from shallow surface waters to deep regions of the Atlantic and Southern Oceans — but not the Pacific Ocean, as many researchers had predicted — might be responsible. Xianyao Chen and Ka-Kit Tung analyzed data from profiling floats, or oceanographic sensors that can move vertically throughout the water column, and traced the pathways that heat has taken through the world’s oceans since the turn of the 21st century. The oceans are capable of storing about 90% of the world’s surface heat content, and the researchers suggest that most of the excess heat that would have otherwise continued to fuel global warming is currently stored in the basins of the Atlantic and Southern Oceans.
The researchers also suggest that a sudden shift in salinity that corresponded with the slowdown of global warming at the beginning of the 21st century may have triggered this migration of heat to deeper waters. Historically, similar events have lasted 20 to 35 years, according to Chen and Tung. Consequently, the researchers suggest that global warming will pick back up in 15 more years or so, when heat returns to the surface waters.
Article #11: “Varying planetary heat sink led to global-warming slowdown and acceleration,” by X. Chen at Ocean University of China in Qingdao, China; X. Chen; K.-K. Tung at University of Washington in Seattle, WA.
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Following rapid warming in the late 20th century, this century has so far seen surprisingly little increase in the average temperature at the Earth’s surface. At first this was a blip, then a trend, then a puzzle for the climate science community.
More than a dozen theories have now been proposed for the so-called global warming hiatus, ranging from air pollution to volcanoes to sunspots. New research from the University of Washington shows that the heat absent from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, and is part of a naturally occurring cycle. The study is published Aug. 22 in Science.
Subsurface warming in the ocean explains why global average air temperatures have flatlined since 1999, despite greenhouse gases trapping more solar heat at the Earth’s surface.
“Every week there’s a new explanation of the hiatus,” said corresponding author Ka-Kit Tung, a UW professor of applied mathematics and adjunct faculty member in atmospheric sciences. “Many of the earlier papers had necessarily focused on symptoms at the surface of the Earth, where we see many different and related phenomena. We looked at observations in the ocean to try to find the underlying cause.”
The results show that a slow-moving current in the Atlantic, which carries heat between the two poles, sped up earlier this century to draw heat down almost a mile (1,500 meters). Most of the previous studies focused on shorter-term variability or particles that could block incoming sunlight, but they could not explain the massive amount of heat missing for more than a decade.
“The finding is a surprise, since the current theories had pointed to the Pacific Ocean as the culprit for hiding heat,” Tung said. “But the data are quite convincing and they show otherwise.”
Tung and co-author Xianyao Chen of the Ocean University of China, who was a UW visiting professor last year, used recent observations of deep-sea temperatures from Argo floats that sample the water down to 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) depth. The data show an increase in heat sinking around 1999, when the rapid warming of the 20th century stopped.
“There are recurrent cycles that are salinity-driven that can store heat deep in the Atlantic and Southern oceans,” Tung said. “After 30 years of rapid warming in the warm phase, now it’s time for the cool phase.”
Rapid warming in the last three decades of the 20th century, they found, was roughly half due to global warming and half to the natural Atlantic Ocean cycle that kept more heat near the surface. When observations show the ocean cycle flipped, around the year 2000, the current began to draw heat deeper into the ocean, working to counteract human-driven warming.
The cycle starts when saltier, denser water at the surface northern part of the Atlantic, near Iceland, causes the water to sink. This changes the speed of the huge current in the Atlantic Ocean that circulates heat throughout the planet.
“When it’s heavy water on top of light water, it just plunges very fast and takes heat with it,” Tung said. Recent observations at the surface in the North Atlantic show record-high saltiness, Tung said, while at the same time, deeper water in the North Atlantic shows increasing amounts of heat.
The authors dug up historical data to show that the cooling in the three decades between 1945 to 1975 – which caused people to worry about the start of an Ice Age – was during a cooling phase. (It was thought to be caused by air pollution.) Earlier records in Central England show the 40- to 70-year cycle goes back centuries, and other records show it has existed for millennia.
Changes in Atlantic Ocean circulation historically meant roughly 30 warmer years followed by 30 cooler years. Now that it is happening on top of global warming, however, the trend looks more like a staircase.
The temperature oscillations have a natural switch. During the warm period, faster currents cause more tropical water to travel to the North Atlantic, warming both the surface and the deep water. At the surface this warming melts ice. This eventually makes the surface water there less dense and after a few decades puts the brakes on the circulation, setting off a 30-year cooling phase.
This explanation implies that the current slowdown in global warming could last for another decade, or longer, and then rapid warming will return. But Tung emphasizes it’s hard to predict what will happen next.
A pool of freshwater from melting ice, now sitting in the Arctic Ocean, could overflow into the North Atlantic to upset the cycle.
“We are not talking about a normal situation because there are so many other things happening due to climate change,” Tung said.
The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
(I expect we’ll see a rebuttal from Bob Tisdale soon) UPDATE: We have and it is here.
UPDATE2: The list of excuses is up to 38 now, and an updated permanent count is here on this WUWT page under “Climate FAIL files”: http://wattsupwiththat.com/climate-fail-files/list-of-excuses-for-the-pause-in-global-warming/
“Rapid warming in the last three decades of the 20th century, they found, was roughly half due to global warming and half to the natural Atlantic Ocean cycle”
So…. does this not say that “only half” of global warming is due to greenhouse emissions?
That is NOT the party line…
there never was any man made global warming and there probably never will be any
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/02/21/henrys-pool-tables-on-global-warmingcooling/
They are doing better than Larry the Liar as far as excuses.
When they get to 100, sell!
So, another cyclical phenomenon that goes up for 30 years then down for 30 years. No one mentioned it when temperatures were rising, even though it must have contributed to the rise.
Thank you, WUWT, for counting alarmists’ increasingly gymnastic explanations of something entirely normal.
I wish somebody with more talent than me created a news story from 1998 say, whenever the mainstream Gore BS kicked off and had the hard-of-thinking running around in circles waving their hands in the air.
Instead of the models it could use today’s reality as if it’s a panic story. Using all the alarmist terms and showing that unless we act fast and spend big we’ll find in 2015 that everything will be exactly the same.
These bozos are going to keep on with the pushing out the boundaries and you know what? The idiots will suck it all up like true converted. Very depressing
Not a goalpost mover but a cover-up to buy time and an alibi whenit turns out that they were wrong.
Anthony writes, “I expect we’ll see a rebuttal from Bob Tisdale soon.”
And here it is:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2014/08/21/will-the-next-el-nino-bring-an-end-to-the-slowdown-in-global-surface-warming/
Cheers
PS: Save yourself a trip to my blog. The above post has already been cross posted here at WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/21/will-the-next-el-nino-bring-an-end-to-the-slowdown-in-global-surface-warming/
Actually a very helpful new finding.
The various long term temperature oscillations such as the PDO must have some cause and this paper provides a mechanism at least. Obviously there is more to the story, but it seems that another advance in understanding climate has been achieved.
Ahhh I see… all is revealed Macbeth Act 4 Scene 1 or “don’t stop the bucks!”
Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
Just got this from a friend.
http://peoplesclimate.org/march/
I was also contacted by email last year, to see if I would give presentations(propaganda) and be a contact for people in our community to explain(indoctrinate) to people the position(theory) and help educate(brainwash) those in this community.
First, I needed to take a test and answer some of their questions before they would train me.
I knew all the answers to get 100% on the test. I just didn’t want to lie.
Didn’t decent spacial coverage of Atlantic temperature profiles only start in 2003 with ARGO?
Actually, what they claim appears on the surface to be consistent with observations. It’s just another hypothesis that can’t be tested for at least another 15 years, but it’s one of the more intriguing hypotheses I’ve come across regarding climate change drivers and the global warming pause.
They key question is – to what extent can deep, dense oceans retain heat content? When you densify matter (which is what happens to ocean water when it is pushed downward), it loses heat, but is the same heat restored when the water rises back to the surface? That’s the question I have.
Updated list of 38 excuses for the “pause”
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/07/updated-list-of-29-excuses-for-18-year.html
At least the Atlantic thermohaline circulation provides a plausible mechanism, unlike Trenberth. Seems possibly an extension of the stadium wave, which if I recall correctly had the Atlantic as a driver rather than the Pacific.
In any event, to the extent true puts the kibosh on IPCC anthropogenic attribution, 95% certainty, and settled science. As if the pause itself had not already done that.
We seek him here, we seek him there;
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere!
Is he in heaven? — Is he in hell?
That damned, elusive Pimpernel!
“… observations of deep-sea temperatures from Argo floats that sample the water down to 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) depth. The data show an increase in heat sinking around 1999….”
Unfortunately the ARGO system was not even started for several years after 1999, and did not reach a statistically reliable sample size until the mid 2000s.
It IS nice to see recognition of the six decade cyclicity, though.
The obvious consequence is the realization that the late 20th century warming was not all due to CO2, as widely assumed, but was at least 50% natural.
And of course that has implications for the likely future development of temperatures, a major reduction in warming rates predicted on the basis of those erroneous assumptions:
hang on. didn’t the little ice age end around 1850? surely things must have beed warming up since then due to natural causes. add to that the warming cooling cycle of the oceans and you have the staircase. nothing left to be causes by ghg.
I like the way they acknowledge that GASTA can rise without a “forcing.” This is not accepted by many or most warmist scientists.
It seems at some point as the growing influence of natural variability is recognized in more and more papers, the climate sensitivity numbers that IPCC used will start to come down given the increase in apparent oscillations and the likelihood that more flat temperature trends will happen during the rest of this century.
Seems to me, IF what they are proposing, that it is a “staircase” effect on the warming. Then that means that at least HALF of the late 20th century warming was due to the positive phase. They therefore need to recalculate CO2 sensitivity based on no more than half of the observed temperature increase being due to CO2 (plus it’s feedbacks). Once they do that, game over, sensitivity down to 1C or less.
Is the science settled again yet? Or are there more explanations to come?
Although the AMO has plateaued, it is still in positive territory, and probably will be for another decade.
When it goes cold, we can really expect 30 yrs of declining temperatures, in the NH at least.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/atlantic-multidecadal-oscillation-is-a-naturally-occurring-cycle/
As Andronova and Schlesinger show, the steady rise in the AMO from around 1975 substantially exaggerated the global warming signal, just as it had obscured it for the previous 30 yrs.
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/faq/faq_fig2.php
I like how this partially vindicates Akasofu.
Annoying that scientists can’t recognize there is no missing heat. More heat is being radiated into space than models predicted and the positive feedback’s that would produce extra heat don’t seem to exist in the real world.
This research adds another piece to the puzzle but is not the whole story. Nice to see natural cycles getting recognized as dominant forcing’s.
M’thinks they pulled this explanation right out of the deep Atlantic orifice…..
The authors’ figure fails to show what came before the first “hiatus”. It wouldn’t be a hiatus in global warming had it not been preceded by warming. There is nothing the least bit unprecedented about the warming from c. 1977 to 1996 or 2006 (more likely 20 years than the 30 they claim), just as the current “hiatus” is also not the least bit unusual.
The “hiatus” or cooling from c. 1946 to 1977 (30 years) occurred during rising CO2. The subsequent warming of whatever length and magnitude, ditto. The present hiatus or cooling, ditto. The warming which preceded the post-War cooling or hiatus happened with falling CO2. Previous ups and downs occurred when CO2 was flat or rising just from natural warming. Thus, no correlation is observable between CO2 concentration and temperature changes.
Since the end of the Little Ice Age, there was pronounced warming in the 1860s-70s, followed by sharp cooling in the 1880s-90s, followed by warming, by cooling and by warming. It’s natural, driven, as Bob points out in the next blog post, by solar activity and factors modulation its influence.
In the 18th century, coming out of the depths of the LIA in the 1690s-1700s, a warming interval (1710s-30s) longer and bigger than the late 20th century warming occurred. Naturally.
But at least the authors appear to recognize, without stating so plainly, that naturally occurring oceanic oscillations control climate, so that man-made GHGs aren’t the primary driver of climate change.
Presumably, this massive movement of heat remains an active process in 2014. If an oceanographic expedition were to be immediately launched to send the appropriate research vessels and the appropriate temperature measuring equipment to the locations where this process is theorized to be happening, could the theorized massive movement of heat be detected and confirmed?
The warm is turning.
The bandwagon has a flat tire.
The natives are getting restless (EU Elections).
It’s the end of the beginning.
Psuedo-eco-theologic dogma!
Those who subscribe to the Global Warming propheteers (or profiteers) of CO2 enduced armegedddon have to come up with some excuse explain why Global Warming stopped, other than admitting that their psuedo-eco-theological anthropogenic doomsday prophesies were wrong. Rather than admit that it is natural cycles or the Solar Cycles, they have to come up with another dogmatic explanation to justify their false religion.
I am getting tired of this endless stream of model output masquerading as fact. What happened to the good old days when data and observations were facts, and model output was nothing more than that, just model output. And everyone understood the difference.
http://nhill.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/climatescienceposter.jpg
Any heat that has gone into the deep ocean has raised the temperature there by only hundredths of a degree, so sorry Climate Worriers it ain’t gonna have diddly effect on surface temperatures ever again. If that ain’t so then I’m going to the beach tomorrow to get some of that deep water to heat my home this winter.
philjourdan says:
August 21, 2014 at 11:29 am
When they get to 100, sell!
=============================================
Why wait? Sell now and avoid the rush!
ahTUNG CHEN! Ve vill stoat (weasel) our vay out of dis little problem…
That’s longer than the recent warming rise. In fact it is equal to the generally accepted period of climate being 30 years of weather data. The models certainly did not project this, as they were already in serious trouble with 17 years of hiatus.
Judith Curry has a more sympathetic assessment http://judithcurry.com/2014/08/21/cause-of-hiatus-found-deep-in-the-atlantic-ocean/
A couple of points: 1) the statement that about 50% of the late 20th century warming is due to ocean oscillations is good to see, because IPCC have implied all of it was man-made and that none of the warm-peaking ocean cycles (AMO, PDO, AO and ENSO) had any significant impact – obviously highly unlikely; and IPCC itself admits that prior to 1950 no significant part of the warming could be attributed to human emissions, 2) this means that 75% of the warming since 1900 is natural.
In ‘Chill’ I estimated 80% from looking at surface radiative flux data from 1980-2000 and John Christy when asked by the BBC, said his estimate was 75% natural. I still think these figures are generous toward AGW because the radiative flux data at the surface (NASA data) showed about 4 watts/square metre increase in short-wave radiation (caused by a 4% decline in low-cloud cover), compared to about 1 rising to 2 watts computed for GHGs’ long-wave radiation during those two decades.
I have never been convinced that the AMOC has a great deal to do with shorter-term cycles of warming and cooling – to be convinced I would like to see some old-fashioned back-of-the-envelope calculations of radiative flux and the quantity of heat that the North Atlantic can sequester – maybe the paper has such, I will check once I have negotiated the paywall.
Finally, the Arctic has been maintaining its warming through the first decade of the 21st century, despite the hiatus elsewhere. My reading is that the ‘missing heat’ was shipped into the northern oceans and the surface warming in the Arctic is the heat actually leaving the planet. It is not missing, nor is much hiding in the oceans – its actually mostly gone to space. The data should be available to check this – radiative fluxes are available for gridded zones, but I have not the resources to check it.( a job for Willis??).
Peter Taylor says:
August 21, 2014 at 1:53 pm
That is correct. The warm PDO carries oceanic heat to the Arctic, melting ice there, whence it ascends to heat heaven.
Please excuse me for being simplistic. Each day the temperature rises in the afternoon (after high sun), in a year the temperature rises in the summer (after the equinox). In the 20th Century solar activity rose until the early sixties after over 100 years of increase. Why is it so surprising that temperatures increased for a while and have now stopped rising. “Heavy water on top of other water plunging the heat down” – oh yeah I get it now sorry to be so stupid.
I can understand how desperate Ph.D. candidates would write such fiction about OHC at depths greater than 1000 meters prior to the 2003 start of ARGO and beyond 300 meters prior to ALACE in 1990. They should choose something else to study for their dissertation, but I can understand how in desperation they may grasp as such straws where data collection is so poorly sampled and geographically biased. “It comes out of a computer, so it must be right”
What I cannot understand is how any university or professor who values a reputation contributes to such studies where the data does not exist with the geographic sampling and accuracy to support ANY conclusions.
Beyond the tripe of “knowing” the temperature or heat content of the oceans in 1950-1990 from 300 meters to 2000 meters, the top illustration has two fatal flaws in my opinion.
1. the upper graph says “Global Mean Temperature Anomaly” which has to do with the surface air, not the water. It is misdirection by association and ambiguous titling.
2. the central chart has a color scale that goes up to 1×10^20 J. It might be a technicality, but as a density plot, the units have to be J/m of depth — if that what it really is.
I was looking for a plot of actual temperature instead of heat. There isn’t one because it isn’t alarming.
It takes 27.5 ZJ (1 ZJ = 10^21 J) to raise the 0-2000 m water column a grand total of 0.01 deg C. So, it takes 0.14 ZJ to raise each meter of water by 0.1 deg C.
The maximum scale, even with most generous accuracy in depth resolution, can only show 0.07 deg C the upper few meters of water. Maybe with 100,000 ARGO profiles per year, we know the 0-2000 meter water average temperature to a few hundredths of a deg C. But it does not follow that we know each meter of water to the same precision – the uncertainties, even with heavy dependence, don’t work that way.
Prior to ARGO, we don’t have anywhere near the data collection to support such precision.
Studies of ocean heat content for intervals deeper than 1000 meters and times prior to 2004 should be shredded on first reading.
And why wasn’t the previous warming streak the result of an upwelling of previously down-dropped, non-CO2 caused, warm water?
Because today is Special. History does not apply because, like us Gaia-loving liberals, today is Special.
There is no recourse to the “today is Special” excuse.
“Rapid warming in the last three decades of the 20th century, they found, was roughly half due to global warming […]“. So the global warming was half caused by itself.
Well, if the apparent 60-year cycle held we’d be well into a cooling phase already, with 13+ years to go until warming again. So mebbe warming is actually occurring due something else.
[“Guessing Alert” ;-]
(I say 13+ because a slow arming trend that people say is evident since about 1750 would shift the return of warming downstream a bit, depending on relative rate of both phenomenon.
Of course difficult to detect point of turnaround if the cycle is sinusoidal, as rate of change is lowest at bottom and top.)
Has anyone noticed anything odd about the graph of heat content?
The period when the heat is supposed to have “sunk” starts around 1995. And the period of “cold in the depths” starts around 1970.
These both coincide with the AMO warm and cold periods.
Think this through! The current “heat” has not sunk into the depths, the heat extends to the surface. Equally, during the cold phase of the AMO, the cold extended to the surface.
This can be seen clearly on the graphs, which extend up to 0m.
In other words, since 1995 the heat is not “hidden in the depths”. Instead it is actually at the surface, offsetting the cold phase of the PDO.
When both the AMO and PDO both go cold in the 2020’s, what will happen then?
Hey no wait i have seen this – is this the part where Peter Lorre punches Kirk Douglas in the stomach?
Just been on the BBC news website, where they’re suddenly coming out with ‘the pause’. It’s only within the last few days that they were going on about melting Arctic ice again, and heatwaves! Big question is whether the gentle viewers will be able to spot the contradictions…..
People who walk around wit their brain disengaged, eyes closed and their hands over their ears shouting “naah naah naah nahh CAGW” ad infinitum rarely hear or spot ANYTHING.
[“Subsurface warming in the ocean explains why global average air temperatures have flatlined since 1999, despite greenhouse gases trapping more solar heat at the Earth’s surface.”]
No it doesn’t explain this, subsurface warming occurred while the surface global temperatures were warming. When the subsurface warming stabilized so did surface global temperatures.
[“There are recurrent cycles that are salinity-driven that can store heat deep in the Atlantic and Southern oceans,” Tung said. “After 30 years of rapid warming in the warm phase, now it’s time for the cool phase.”
Rapid warming in the last three decades of the 20th century, they found, was roughly half due to global warming and half to the natural Atlantic Ocean cycle that kept more heat near the surface. When observations show the ocean cycle flipped, around the year 2000, the current began to draw heat deeper into the ocean, working to counteract human-driven warming.]
30 years of warming in the rapid phase is actually closer to 20 years or less and numerous scientists were suggesting many years ago, the cool phase would happen due to the change in the PDO and AMO. This can be explained by natural ocean cycles and CO2 has no noticeable contribution towards it. Where’s this half global warming contribution come from? You cant blame a 4-5% global cloud albedo decline increasing solar radiation into the ocean on CO2.
That is why you have had the ocean/atmosphere wrong and why alarmist climate scientists are wrong now.
“……..roughly half due to global warming and half to the natural Atlantic Ocean cycle”
The reality should be “……roughly half due to urbanization and half to …….”
This was pointed out almost 6 years ago on this website – that the north Atlantic ocean cycles have a huge part to play and the real warming rate is only half of that which is portrayed. [Wayback machine capture since the images have dissappeared into Internet purgatory].
http://web.archive.org/web/20090626174702/http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/25/adjusting-temperatures-for-the-enso-and-the-amo/
Anthony, you have become a victim of bogus temperature data when you ask “…Why did the rapid global warming that characterized the latter part of the 20th century slow down over the last 15 years or so?” There is no such thing as a rapid global warming that characterized the latter part of the 20th century. The temperature chart you show with it is phony and those dots representing yearly temperatures are inaccurate, misleading, and useless. I should show you a real temperature chart but this comment does not allow it so you will just have to be content with looking up Figure 15 in my book “What Warming?” and following my commentary. The figure is an annotated satellite temperature record from 1979 to 2010 that includes that “rapid warming” region of your chart. You will note detail that is impossible to show with a yearly temperature chart. On the left there are outlines of five El Nino peaks, separated from one another by La Nina valleys. The temperature difference between the tip of an El Nino peak and the bottom of the adjacent La Nina valley is about half a degree Celsius. Ground based data, if they show them at all, show this as a mere 0.2 degree difference. The half way mark between the El Nino peak and its adjacent La Nina valley is their mean temperature. You will find these points marked with yellow dots in Figure 15. To find the history of global mean temperature you must connect these dots. There is a small amount of scatter but a a straight horizontal line fits them well. It runs from 1979, where the chart begins, to 1997, where the super El Nino of 1998 starts forming. This is a stretch of 18 years of no warming, a period comparable to the current pause/hiatus, but completely wiped out in fake ground based temperature curves. What you will find is that instead of a horizontal straight line indicating no warming, their mean temperature rises by one tenth of a degree in this region. This is false and I pointed it out in my book but nobody seems to care. It changes a no-warming region as long as the present pause/hiatus into that of a phony “late twentieth century warming.” This is true of GISTEMP, HadCRUT, and NCDC temperature sources, one of which has you believing in it. This is not the only thing that they have in common. All three were computer processed, quite likely with the aim of coordinating this fraud. But they screwed up and the computer left its calling card on all three data sets in the form of high spikes sticking up above the temperature curve. They are all near the beginnings of years and their locations are exactly the same in all three data sets. That is proof of secret temperature machinations that demands an explanation. The row of five normal El Nino peaks I just described is followed by the super El Nino of 1998. It is sharply defined so I left off the red band that covers the rest of the graph. It is also twice as high as the other five peaks are. This difference in height is lost in ground-based data which reduce he super El Nino to a pancake. Checking global temperature records it is clear that the super El Nino of 1998 is the only super El Nino during the entire twentieth century. Clearly it has to have an additional source of warm water which is added to the normal ENSO circulation. Theoretically there are just two possibilities – either the southern warm pool or the Indian Ocean. Right after the super El Nino recedes, however, there is a short step warming. It starts in 1999, in only three years raises global temperature by a third of a degree Celsius, and then stops. This step warming most likely is related to the large amount of warm water the super El Nino carried across the ocean. There has been no warming since then because what follows it is our friend, that pause/hiatus. This step warming is actually the only warming during the entire satellite era that begins in 1979. This is why the temperature of the twenty-first century is higher than that of the eighties and nineties before it. Hansen noticed that too and pointed out that nine out of ten warmest years occurred in the decade between 2000 and 2010. He had no knowledge of the step warming and put it down to greenhouse warming. And then neglected to tell us that there was no warming whatsoever during that entire decade. The super El Nino of 1998 itself is not part of the normal ENSO oscillation and does not count as part of any rapid global warming these fake warming people babble about. There actually was a rapid global warming, caused by that step warming, but it lasted only three years and had nothing to do with the global warming myth they sell. None of this has been investigated because the billions allotted for climate research by governments were all spent trying to prove that the greenhouse effect is real. Apparently it is not real because existence of the pause/hiatus proves that there cannot be any such thing as greenhouse warming.
Okay. So the AMO ate the heat, but this this quote is the nugget I find interesting.
“Rapid warming in the last three decades of the 20th century, they found, was roughly half due to global warming and half to the natural Atlantic Ocean cycle…”
Was that an admittance that “Global Warming” estimates are twice what they should be for the 20th century?
If I read it another way it appears to falsify their own claims. If the Atlantic phase change is responsible for half the Global warming, where did the other half go? We know that ALL the warming has disappeared, yet this statement would admit that only half of it should be gone.
I am confused. How can the heat be stored in the ocean? According to the CAGW theory, the heat should not reach the ocean. It should be stuck in the 3.5 to 4% co2 in the atmosphere. I’m just saying….
Fabricated Data, fabricated conclusions. Do they really expect us to believe this data EXISTS and that it can be found. DANG IT! I was still building TUBE electronic devices in the ’70’s. In the 80’s compact A/D cards and devices…capable of remote application (not just in a Lab) were JUST BEGINNING to become available. YES, in the ’90’s they WERE available. BUT, as is well know with regard to TEMPERATURE profiles, until the ARGO bouys there were NO reliable, regularily taken data of the sort the Argo’s provided. Now we are supposed to believe that there were measurements of ocean salinity and “heat content” prior to 2000???? Rubbish. Nonsense, worse than the 97% solution. (I think most of the folks doing this are on the 7% solution…if anyone knows what that means!)
I had nearly given up hope of finding how heat escapes the poles during weak solar conditions but here it is! This article allows one speculate that
1/ A weak stable solar wind leads to a stable polar vortex
2/A stable polar vortex leads to continuous strong catabatic antarctic winds increasing antarctic sea ice formation.
3/ Increased sea-ice formation increases ocean salt concentration allowing deep water formation at a higher temperature
4/ More heat escapes the polar region with an increased volume via the deep water thermohaline circulation
5/ An increased THC causes more deep water upwelling which may lead to more low clouds.(For a brief period antarctic sea-ice formation matched Dr Spencers’ low cloud data but unfortunately the satellite went off line).
The 25 year “rapid global warming” ~1975 — ~2000 is at almost exactly the same rate as the 35 year “rapid global warming” ~1910 — ~1945 before human emissions could possibly have been a significant factor:
http://i1244.photobucket.com/albums/gg580/stanrobertson/Twowarmingperiods_zps6123c6c3.jpg
“New research from the University of Washington shows that the heat absent from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, and is part of a naturally occurring cycle.”
This is the thermohaline circulation. Its cycle time is 1,000 years. The heat will resurface after a millennium. It’s too long for warmists so they mixed it up with AMO to shorten it to 30 years. The explanation is contrived because AMO is currently in the warm phase.
Tung and Chen are right with the paradigm that changes in heat distribution in the ocean are a major source of climate change. However they are wring to mix it up with the flawed dogma that heat is being gained by the earth as a whole by co2. The former is based on good thermodynamics and real data. The latter is a fiction of simplistic computer models that fatally exclude nonlinear thermodynamics.
Co2 really is the spare prick at the wedding. It is not responsible for any climate change. Its all the oceans under weak nonlinear astrophysical forcing.
I wonder if the authors expect not to worry about grant fishing in about 10 years , but till then are very keen to keep the gravy train on track . Meanwhile remind again how much actual measurement of the ‘vast area’ of the deep ocean actual exists,as opposed to loaded dice ‘models’?
In a current article on this topic, The Guardian has taken to deleting perfectly reasonable comments from skeptics because they are getting more likes than the Warmist cheerleaders…the wheels are really falling off now!
Anth0ny:
At 08.08 BST this morning BBC 1 TV reported this paper and admitted there is “what some people call a hiatus to global warming that has lasted about 15 years”. The entire report lasted less than a minute.
I think it to be the first time the BBC has openly admitted on air that global warming has stopped.
The matter is important because the BBC has an official policy of only providing one-sided pro-AGW propaganda that excludes contrary information. Thus, a breakthrough may have been obtained in getting a major MSM outlet to tell some truth about the present state of the global warming scare,and I think it important for climate realists to now pressure the BBC to provide more factual information and less propaganda.
Richard
These poor desperate CAGW grant hounds…
I almost feel sorry for them..
None of their “settled science” is working out and all they can do is come up with excuses for why their hypothesis sucks and doesn’t reflect reality.
Their models overestimate CO2’s warming effect by a factor of 5~10, so all they can do is move the goal posts to buy more time in order to steal more government funding until their hypothesis is tossed on the trash pile of failed ideas…
Come to think of it, perhaps a more appropriate metaphor than “moving the goal posts” is picking up the entire stadium and dumping it in the ocean…
Their precious CO2 induced “missing heat” isn’t being “buried in the ocean”, it’s getting blown out to space…
CAGW hypothesizes that roughly 1.2 watts/M^2 is being “buried in the oceans”, but Levitus et al puts OHC for the top 2000 meters of oceans at about +0.09C since 1948, which works out to only 0.4 watts/M^2, which is off by a factor of 3…
What seems to be even more important than the AMO is the PDO, which entered its 30-yr cool cycle in 2005. The AMO entered its 30-yr warm cycle around 1994, which perfectly explains all the energy being dumped in Arctic and the loss of Arctic sea ice since then. The 30-yr AMO is starting to wind down, which may explain the Arctic sea ice recovery since hitting its 2007 low (the 2012 Arctic minimum was just due to a one-in-50-year Arctic cyclone, not Gloooobal Waaarming; even NASA/NOAA acknowledge that).
CAGW is seriously in a crash and burn mode… How much longer can they keep this farce going? It’s getting pathetic.
Their top graph sure look like a portion of an oscillation…..
charles nelson says August 22, 2014 at 12:13 am
Sorry, they’ve been doing that for a while. There are about three Warmist commenters on that site who are tasked with engaging sceptics – mainly through linking to SkS. They go by the names of SteB1, Liam23 and rockyrex. If they aren’t around they just shut the site comments down, effectively. For the last week they haven’t been in. Probably they are on holiday.
On the Guardian, when the sceptic wins you are deleted.
If it isn’t clear who won some of your comments are deleted to give a false impression.
Not sure what happens when you definitively lose.
My favourite rockyrex quote:
I don’t debate, as that is not how science works; I refer to scientific information from scientific organisations.
Says it all, really.
Must have missed that bit in physics class where warm water and heat sinks…..
Must be this “simple” physics about AGW i’m getting confused about………
Warm water rises to the top, denser saltier water descends does any one have a graph that correlates saltiness to temp differences and buoyancy. I’m thinking that the salty water is some what diminished in tropical heat before it descends.
Mixing for fifteen years with the cold water below would further reduce it’s temperature, thus when surfacing would not give much warmth. This I feel is one of the Earths thermostats to dump excess heat.
The Guardian is back on form.
I wrote this;
“Or to quote the IPCC AR5:
Almost every guess they made was wrong and they were all wrong the same way – too warm. That isn’t just bad luck. It’s a systematic failure.”
An immediate reply from the mysteriously named ID4625022
And then my every post was not allowed to appear. This made it look like I made it up.
But I could quote the page (772) and Box 9.2… yet they censored the reference.
Andy says:
August 21, 2014 at 11:40 am
I wish somebody with more talent than me created a news story from 1998 say, whenever the mainstream Gore BS kicked off and had the hard-of-thinking running around in circles waving their hands in the air. Instead of the models it could use today’s reality as if it’s a panic story.
You know, that is one advantage of this new theory for the “missing heat” surfacing. At least, with it out there, if temperatures dive for the next 10-15 years we won’t have the next “global cooling” scam foisted upon us. Plus it will be cold enough for long enough that everyone will actually be looking forward to the resumption of some warming. This theory could save us trillions of dollars worth of wasted taxpayer dollars and inane government regulations over the next two to three decades. I say we go with it.
Tung writes:
“Rapid warming in the last three decades of the 20th century, they found, was roughly half due to global warming and half to the natural Atlantic Ocean cycle that kept more heat near the surface. When observations show the ocean cycle flipped, the current began to draw heat deeper into the ocean, working to counteract human-driven warming”
It has not really flipped yet. A more pertinent measure of the north Atlantic temperature is the AMO, and that will stay in its warm mode for at least another solar cycle yet (max to max):
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/mean:25/normalise/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1855/normalise
Increased forcing of the climate gives a colder AMO, the warm AMO mode since 1995 is due to declines in solar forcing. In which case, half of the global warming in the last three decades is due to the negative feedback of increased poleward oceanic heat transport as a result of weaker solar activity. By means of a more southerly atmospheric circulation caused by increasingly negative AO/NAO conditions.
I nearly spluttered tea all over my bed this morning listening to the 7am news on BBC Radio 2 back hear in Blighty! Coupled with the announcement that the EU has banned high-power vacuum cleaners & we only have two more weeks to buy one if wanted. This follows recent advice & guidance from the UK DECC (Department for Entropy & Catastrophic Claptrap) that fat people refrain from purchasing large tvs & refridgerators. This is all about the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of the European Union’s desire for us all to use less & less of everything because we’re such a drain on natural resources & thus a burden upon Gaia! Honestly, it’s true I tell you! Check it all out! So, you colonists of the Virginias, you’re next! I’ll make a small wager with anyone that the US EPA will in the not too distant future make a ruling that you’re all using too much energy & therefore natural resources. You will be expected, probably under pain of a fine, to keep as many lights & devices switched off in your homes, so that as you drive past the nearest EPA building with its lights & every electrical gizmo blazing away I dare say! Remember, it’s not Guvment that must reduce its Carbon Footprint, it’s the flagrantly irresponsible energy abusive people that must do so! Long live freedom & democracy. Sometimes I seriously do wonder why we as a people, sacrificed so much on that great alter around the World in WWII, & other subsequent conflicts in the name of that potent vision, for what? Apologies for borrowing from Abraham Lincoln but was one of my historical heroes as a boy!
Sorry about typo, I didn’t mean “fat” people, it should have read “the people”!
I don’t understand why there is the need to try to explain anything, as I’ve been told over and over again that the science is settled. The AGWers would be wise to stick with that mantra, and conduct no more research into studies like these. The principle of unintended consequences is going to catch up with them, and one of these researchers is going to unintentionally shine the light on something that will not only shoot them in the foot… it will shoot holes in their entire field of study.
When they start looking for the lost heat on the ocean bottom I know that the warmists are really desperate. The cause of that hiatus/pause they fear is not lost heat but lack of understanding of applicable laws of nature. More specifically, laws controlling the production of the greenhouse effect. According to the Arrhenius greenhouse theory addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will cause CO2 to absorb IR and thereby warm the air. There is no doubt that the amount of atmospheric CO2 is increasing today but there is no sign of the corresponding warming it should lead to. Clearly the predictions of the Arrhenius greenhouse theory are incorrect. If a theory predicts warming and nothing happens for 17 years this theory should be rejected. There is a spot for it in the waste basket of history, right next to phlogiston, another failed theory. Of all the possible greenhouse theories the only one whose predictions are correct is the Miskolczi greenhouse theory (MGT). It predicts exactly what we see: addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere does not warm the air. The problem with Arrhenius theory is that there are several greenhouse gases in the atmosphere but Arrhenius theory applies to only one – carbon dioxide – and is incomplete. Not so with Miskolczi theory that can handle several greenhouse gases simultaneously absorbing in the IR. The most important GHGs in the atmosphere are water vapor and carbon dioxide. According to Arrhenius they form a joint optimal absorption window in the IR which they control. Its optical thickness in the IR is 1.87, determined from first principles by Miskolczi himself. It corresponds to an IR transmittance of 15 percent or absorbance of 85 percent. If you now add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere it will start to absorb, just as Arrhenius says. But this will increase the optical thickness. And as soon as it happens, water vapor will start to diminish, rain out, and the original optical thickness is restored. The introduced carbon dioxide will of course continue to absorb but the simultaneous reduction of water vapor will prevent this from causing any warming. This is the reason why there is no warming now despite a steady increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide. This has important consequences for climate theory. For one thing, it makes a runaway greenhouse effect that Hansen keeps babbling about entirely impossible. That is why very high carbon dioxide in geologic time did not cause any runaway warming. For another thing, it blocks the enhanced greenhouse warming alleged to be the cause of anthropogenic global warming or AGW. Hence, we can say that AGW is nothing more than a pseudo-scientific fantasy, invented by over-eager climate scientists wishing to prove that the greenhouse effect is real. The existence of the pause/hiatus proves that it is not.
I doubt they have found the missing heat. The temperature difference we are talking about is of the order of hundredths of a degree. Together with the sparseness of Argo coverage there is little reliable data that can state with significance that heat has been found hiding in the oceans.
But they could be right. If so, there is still nothing to worry about because that heat cannot any longer raise the GASTA. The heat has been stored at a low temperature and cannot flow to a higher temperature. That is basic thermodynamics.
Problem solved.
“According to Arrhenius…” should be: “According to Miskolczy…”
Anthony, you have been taken in by bogus temperature data when you cite: “…Why did the rapid global warming that characterized the latter part of the 20th century slow down over the last 15 years or so?” There is no such thing as a rapid global warming that characterized the latter part of the 20th century. But rapid warming appears also as part of your first global temperature anomaly chart.This chart is simply phony. Those dots representing yearly temperatures are inaccurate, misleading, and useless. I should show you a real temperature chart but this comment does not accept it so you just have to be content with looking up my Figure 15 in “What Warming?” and following the commentary that follows. The figure itself is an annotated satellite temperature chart from 1979 to 2010 and includes that “rapid warming” region you speak of. You will note details that are impossible to show otherwise. On the left there are five El Nino peaks, separated from one another by La Nina valleys. The temperature difference between the tip of an El Nino peak and the bottom of the adjacent La Nina valley is about half a degree Celsius. Ground based data, if they show them at all, show this as a mere 0.2 degree difference. The half way mark between the El Nino peak and its adjacent La Nina valley defines their mean temperature. You will find these marked with yellow dots in Figure 15. To get the history of global mean temperature you must connect these dots. There is a small amount of scatter but a straight horizontal line fits them well from 1979, where the chart begins, to 1997, where the super El Nino starts forming. This is an 18 year stretch of no warming, a period comparable to the current pause/hiatus. It is completely wiped out by fake warming in ground based temperature curves. What you will find is that instead of a horizontal straight line indicating no warming, their mean temperature curve rises by one tenth of a degree in this time period. This is false as I pointed it out in my book but nobody seems to listen. Instead of a no-warming region as long as the present pause/hiatus it becomes a “late twentieth century warming.” You will find it in GISTEMP, HadCRUT, and NCDC temperature sources. This is not the only thing that they have in common. All three were computer processed, quite likely with the aim of coordinating this fraud. But they screwed up and the computer left its calling card on all three data sets in the form of high spikes sticking up above the temperature curve. They are all near the beginnings of years and their locations are exactly the same in all three data sets. “It could not happen by pure chance” applies here. It is proof of secret temperature machinations that demands an explanation. The row of five normal El Nino peaks I just described is followed by the super El Nino of 1998. It is sharply defined so I left off the red band that covers the rest of the graph. It is also twice as high as the other five peaks are. This difference in height is lost in ground-based data which reduce the super El Nino to a pancake. Checking global temperature records it is clear that the super El Nino of 1998 is the only one during the entire twentieth century. The warmist dream of a super El Nino to rescue their warming obviously is not going to happen. To create one it needs an additional source of warm water beyond that available to a normal El Nino, like the five before it. Theoretically, there are only two possibilities – either the southern warm pool or the Indian Ocean, both hard to get. Right after the super El Nino receded there was a short step warming in 1999. In only three years it raised global temperature by a third of a degree Celsius, and then stopped. Its origin most likely is related to the large amount of warm water the super El Nino carried across the ocean. It was followed by the pause/hiatus we are experiencing now. This short step warming is actually the only warming since 1979 when the satellite era began. While the super El Nino itself was temporary the step warming it brought is its permanent imprint on climate. That is why the temperature of the twenty-first century is higher than that of the eighties and nineties before it. Hansen noticed that too and pointed out that nine out of ten warmest years occurred in the decade between 2000 and 2010. He had no knowledge of the step warming and put it down to his greenhouse warming. And then he just neglected to tell us that there was no warming whatsoever during that entire decade. The super El Nino itself lasted only two years and does not count as part of any rapid global warming. What does count as rapid global warming is the three year spurt of the step warming that followed it. It had nothing to do with any phony greenhouse effect. None of this has been investigated because the billions allotted for climate research by governments were all spent trying to prove that the greenhouse effect is real. Apparently it is not real because existence of the pause/hiatus proves that there cannot be any such thing as greenhouse warming.
Chen & Tung rely entirely upon data series of highly non-uniform spatial coverage and reliablity in drawing their over-reaching conclusions. And all they really show is that upper-layer OHC and salinity are higher during “pauses” in “global mean temperature” than during rises. Inasmuch as the oceans heat the atmosphere from below, this is almost a tautological result. It merely shows multi-decadal oscillations in the rate of heat transfer, but nothing of “sequestration” in Trenberth’s sense of “hiding heat.”
“More than three dozen excuses have now been proposed for the global warming halt, ranging from air pollution to volcanoes to sunspots.”
There, fixed. They really need to do better editing.
Wake me when they get to excuse #100.
M Courtney says:
There are about three Warmist commenters on that site who are tasked with engaging sceptics – mainly through linking to SkS.
I posted a chart on a blog called truth-out, and they deleted it and banned me when I re-posted it. I was banned from Scientific American for “name-calling”, which was not true. I still have the post that got me banned. There is no ‘name calling’ in it at all.
It seems that since the alarmist crowd has lost the science debate, their tactic is to just ban skeptics from commenting. If they can control what readers see, they can control what readers think.