From the AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE and the “if warming can’t overcome Nature, is it really there at all?” department.
Amid climate change debates revolving around limited increases in recent global mean surface temperature (GMST) rates, Kevin Trenberth argues that natural climate fluxes – larger than commonly appreciated – can overwhelm background warming, making plateaued rates, or hiatuses, deceiving in significance. After many years of monitoring, it’s clear that the GMST can vary from year to year, even decade to decade; these differences, Trenberth argues, are largely a result of internal natural variability. For example, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), a phenomenon where the Pacific Ocean goes through periods of warming and cooling, can have a very strong impact on the climate by altering ocean currents, convection, and overturning. The PDO results in more sequestration of heat in the deep ocean during the negative phase of the PDO; therefore GMST tends to stagnate during this negative PDO phase, but increases during the positive phase. Indeed, observations and models show that the PDO is a key player in the two recent hiatus periods. Some other examples of causes behind natural variation include El Niño, volcanic activity, and decreased water vapor in the stratosphere. These natural variations are strong enough to mask steady background warming at any point in time, Trenberth argues. As researchers develop and test climate change models, it’s important to expect these variations and plan for them.
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Article #7: “Has there been a hiatus?,” by K.E. Trenberth at National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO.
This typical climate lame-o press release (where getting the PR is more important than the paper itself) gives an incomplete citation. No Journal. No DOI, No URL. I’ve looked all over trying to find the citation in the press release and have come up empty. If anyone knows where it is, please leave a comment
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Well, the trend can’t amount to much then, can it?
There’s no pause….NOAA said so
Hey ! The climate is the climate. It changes; get used to it.
“Internal climate variability ” is gobbledegook, and sad to say it has a Kiwi accent.
The reason why so many “scientists” especially climate ones, wear exotic beards and other facial embelishments, is they seldom shave, because they just can’t bear to look in a mirror; they are so ashamed of asking for money to propagate this garbage.
And no I didn’t say they are all that way.
The reason why so many “scientists” especially climate ones, wear exotic beards and other facial embelishments, is
================
the reason is clear. after they shave no one will recognize them. allowing them to escape detection once the GW bubble collapses.
however, this is nothing new. one of the James Bond novels employed just this device. likely some climate scientists learned to read somewhere in their careers.
George, I’ve always been amazed that people get up in the morning, look in the mirror and make themselves look like that……and approve of it
And Karl et. al. There’s been a really hot bit of ocean that was never noticed before. Oh and it used to be really cold.
But hang on: Hasn’t the IPCC told us that natural variability and the sun don’t matter? Isn’t there a bristle-cone pine somewhere that proves it’s all CO2?
This could all be settled with a simple scientific experiment: Kill all human beings except one. Leave her with a thermometer and she can report what happens to the temperature.
Woops! This experiment design may need some work in the details. Maybe two females each with thermometers so they could report the results to each other.
Death masks the trends of life. This makes as much sense as that excuse for the pause.
Kevin Trenberth argues that natural climate fluxes – larger than commonly appreciated – can overwhelm background warming, making plateaued rates, or hiatuses, deceiving in significance.
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if natural variability can overwhelm warming, it can also create false warming. For example:
Kevin Trenberth argues that natural climate fluxes – larger than commonly appreciated – can overwhelm absence of background warming, making increased rates, or global warming, deceiving in significance.
” background warming ” is warming, and it is part of natural climate variability.
It warms, it cools, over 30 years, it’s climate, and it changes. Less than 30 years, it’s weather, and it changes even more and even faster.
If it ever stops changing, either climate or weather; put your head down between your knees, and kiss your are goodbye.
G
Lovin it …
So we currently have a “Strong El Nino”, but so far little warming seen. How can that be if we are living in a ‘Warming Earth”? Shouldn’t we be blowing out all previous records month after month?
Try this cite:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6249/691.full
The killer paragraph in that article is this
“Another reason to think there had been a hiatus in the rise of GMST comes from comparing model expectations and observations. Human activities are causing increases in heat-trapping greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels (4). These increases are expected to cause rising atmospheric temperatures. Atmospheric aerosols, mostly from fossil fuel combustion, are expected to reduce this rise to some extent. The increasing gap between model expectations and observed temperatures provides further grounds for concluding that there has been a hiatus.”
It doesn’t seem to occur to him that the real reason may be that the model expectation is wrong.
As an engineer who has worked with complex chemical process simulations for years I know what would happen if I said to my customers that it wasn’t the model that was wrong so it must be their plant.
Keith, I have similar experience modeling complex chemical systems for the past 40 years. If we ever see a situation where the ‘noise’ (natural variation) is greater than the ‘effect’ (AGW) that we are trying to find, we simply do many more experiments to reduce the noise, or declare the model useless.
Of course, Trenberth is free to do more experiments if he can find planets he can use.
bigterguy:
It’s best not to call the natural variation the “noise” when the application of the model is to control,
Keith: Your post is a classic example of confirmation bias. You read an article making the case for X, but pulled out one paragraph that seems to support Y.
“The combination of decadal variability and a trend from increasing greenhouse gases makes the GMST record more like a rising staircase than a monotonic rise.”
Felix: The problem is that they used the riser portion of the “stairstep” to calibrate the models. Now the tread portion is giving them fits.
If you go back another hundred years, you find a stairstep going down.
I do electromagnetic model simulations. SImilar to you, if I ever suggested that the actual measurements were wrong and the model correct, I would get laughed out of the office. That does not mean that there is a place for examining the measurement method to insure accuracy, but in the end, the measurement is the proof, the simulation is only an indicator of what the truth may be.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6249/691.full.pdf
How can anyone say “The Science is Settled” when there are so many things they didn’t account for?
How dare you?
Physics was settled a century ago. We are only working out the uninteresting details now!
I’m just a layman, not a climate scientist. I don’t know any better.
Actually, all the really interesting physics, happened in the first 10^-43 seconds after the ” tiny ” bang. Excuse me, it was a very tiny bang; almost point like. Maybe it was 10^-34 seconds, which is a whole Billion times longer.
g
Here’s my explanation of inflation, as you go down the wormhole, black holes (and the start of the big bang) are points, the logical conclusion is that at a minimum the 3 dimensions of space were collapsed, just like all of the other 8 or 9 dimensions string theory says exists but are all rolled up.
We should also close the patent office since everything worth inventing has already been invented.
I find this to be the most amazing thing that goes unmentioned. Along with the size of the miss and the size of the adjustments. These topics which are: 1) The science is settled 30 years ago except they obviously keep discovering errors in what they thought 2) the size of the miss is equal to the entire warming they say has happened in the last 70 years. They thought temps would be 0.5C higher than they are which is equal roughly to all the warming since we started putting CO2 in greater quantities. 3) The adjustments to the land record now have doubled what the satellites say has happened. The adjustments are fully half of all the change they say has happened since 1900. If the average person knew any/all of these facts they would be greatly less concerned. Oh wait. They are greatly less concerned. Maybe they are smarter than the “scientists” think.
*deep breath* Haahaahaahaahaahaahaahaahaa!
Just when I think Trenberth cannot possibly be as oblivious and/or evil as he seems to be, he publishes again!
Of course Variability has nothing to do with increasing trends…only flat or declining trends.
…. yep, has nincompoop scientist Trenberth ever not started with the conclusion, EVER ??
Yes. In “private,” in 2009, in the first batch of Climategate emails…
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
Ha ha. Do you think that the idiot’s figured out yet that heat hiding in the deep oceans can’t cause a positive water vapor feedback effect ?
… well, actually maybe in his world it can.
Exactly, Larry. Our lack of Nat Var for the past 2 centuries following the coldest period of the Holocene would surely indicate the reverse of man-made CO2 warming. Nat Var is not just responsible for the pause but for all of that tiny 0.8c increase since GAT records began.
Perhaps he’s got it wrong way round; perhaps the warming is natural, and the variability that masks it is man-made.
We’re doomed either way.
Ya, he kind of shot himself in the foot here. An “Own Goal”. If natural variations could “mask warming”, they could also impersonate warming. Maybe the warming we saw in the 1980s, 1990s was just due to natural variations (like we skeptics have been saying for a long time).
Just got this from No Tricks Zone by a german Meteorologist. Interesting. This came from a discussion about the former NOAA climate researcher, Dr. Dilley, who claims we are heading into a very cold period.
Hans-Dieter Schmidt 13. August 2015 at 9:01 PM | Permalink | Reply
“Well said. May I contribute a confirmation of Dilleys speech from an entirely different direction? Every synoptical meteorologist should have noticed that there is an extraordinary series of most intense low pressure systems on the Atlantic. Just today there is one with core pressure below 975 hPa! In average this happens every five years ONCE in summer, but a sieries like this one I never experueinced in more than 40 years of work as a bench forecaster.
The intensity, amongst other phenomena, depends on the temperature difference between high and low latitudes. The bigger the difference, the stronger the low pressure systems. Thats why in winter this is a regular phenomenon – there is much more seasonal variability in the arctics than in the tropics. If there is a series like this occurring in summer, there is just one conclusion: it must be extraordinary cold in the arctics this summer! This must not necessarily be mirrored by sea ice cover instantly, but wait for the next few years.
More information about this can be found in my article (in German) over by the EIKE here:
http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/news-cache/bemerkungen-zu-den-hitzewellen-2015-in-mitteleuropa/”
Dipl.-Met. Hans-Dieter Schmidt
Hans-Dieter, your “If there is a series like this occurring in summer, there is just one conclusion: it must be extraordinary cold in the arctics this summer! This must not necessarily be mirrored by sea ice cover instantly, but wait for the next few years.” seems to be showing up in Icelandic temperatures.
H/T to NoTricks
The first thirteen weeks of summer this year have been the coldest in Reykjavik in over twenty years, reveals Icelandic meteorologist Trausti Jónsson.
The northern city of Akureyri fares even worse – one has to go back around thirty years to find a colder summer. Last year was Akureyri’s warmest summer in 67 years.
Summer in Reykjavik has not been this cold since 1992, although the summer of 1979 was by far the coldest. The warmest summer in Reykjavik in the past 67 years was in 2010.
Summer in Akureyri has not been this cold since 1983.
Check out the weather forecast for your part of Iceland on Iceland Monitor
http://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2015/07/22/coldest_summer_since_1992/
Wouldn’t the water temperatures in the N. Atlantic pretty much control Iceland’s air temperatures? So much for he claim that the oceans are getting warmer.
Hans-Dieter, DD Moore. This cold summer has also been the case in eastern Canada where the snow was about a month late in melting off and May and June were ~5C cooler than normal – it still goes down to ~11-14C at night in July August. I note also that new ice is forming in the Beaufort Sea over the past week. Only the Danish Meteorological Institute is reporting near normal ice extent and NSIDC and Cryosphere Today (both US) are showing rapid decline of ice. I trust Scandinavians with Arctic metrics over the other politicized bunch. It is a sacrosanct area for them, having done all the early spectacular exploration of both poles.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/icecover_current_new.png
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
Everything is being staged for the Paris Climate meeting. The fools are holding it in December. With the cold water around the top half of Europe, I’m predicting a cold white Christmas for Paris. Canada and the US (maybe except for the westernmost part) will also plunge into another in a string of record cold winters.
One the el nino rains start flooding CA, they will not even have the drought angle to play up anymore.
BTW, who are these people that think droughts are some new and highly unusual phenomenon?
They seem to be everywhere.
They know nothing, but are sure of everything!
the Paris Climate meeting. The fools are holding it in December.
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thus Climate Parisites.
I am puzzled by the difference. Presumably they should be using the same data and methods.
Farther down the ice page is a graph for the temperature north of 80 deg. I note that the temperature has been pretty much glued to the average since it went above 0 deg. C. I realize that Reykjavik, and Akureyri are not north of 80 but the difference between there and the area covered by the graph intrigues me.
NE Ohio has had about 3 weeks of summer so far this year, last night it dropped into the upper 50’s F.
micro — 51F just the other morning here in west MD. Still hasn’t got to 90F here (89F couple times).
Three weeks ago, the Greenland ice melt/gain experienced a rapid gain in ice mass and moved above the long term average. At that time, most of the Greenland coastline was showing red = ice mass loss. Three weeks ago was also where Arctic temps, as shown at DMI, took a moderate dip below average and have stayed low in the interim. Then around 10 days days ago the Greenland Ice Sheet page started showing blue mass/gain areas. I would suspect that this is tied in with the dip in Arctic temps from 3 weeks prior. The south end of Greenland is showing the most ice mass gain, which seems odd.
Something else that has caught my attention recently is that in looking at daily temps in many locations around the globe, I have noted that in well over half of worldwide locations the minimum temps are no longer running above average. A 14 day temp observation shows mostly average minimums. On top of that, a moderate % of locations are showing below average highs over a 14 day period. This is a noticeable change as compared to the 9 month period from last Sept through May of this year. I can feel the difference here where I live in Northern California. This is the nicest summer of the last 4+ years, with mainly average temps. There have been a few summer rains. Nighttime temperatures have remained below 60F for much of the summer. This last week the nights have gone down to 50F. Things are cooling down, and this is going to become more noticeable in the upcoming years.
I think it was only west coast of Greenland showing ice loss. The Eastern side, and esp. the southeast, has been colder and colderer for quite some time. Or so I believe.
Look here, it is GFS model predicting low pressure system near Alaska with 939hPa. This looks really low. It is 10% difference in air pressure against maximum pressures.
http://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/models/?model=gfs®ion=nhem&pkg=mslpa_sd&runtime=2015081318&fh=126&xpos=0&ypos=602
Look on 25th August 06:00z
It’s in this week’s Science, 14 August 2015, 691-692. See http://www.sciencemag.org/content/current
RickA wins! But no author is shown in the link…
It’s on Trenberth’s CGD website:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert/publish.html#2015
Trenberth, K. E., 2015: Has there been a hiatus? Science, 349, 691-692. doi:10.1126/science.aac9225.
This is the CYA excuse.
A covering of holey lace if you ask me. They are saying “this global warming isn’t due to natural variations, but natural variations are hiding it”.
That the situation is one in which an anthropogenic signal is buried in the noise of natural variation is a faulty theory, for the reason that I recently related to phaedo.
If the phrase were not so hackneyed, I would say “You cannot make this stuff up.”
If the CAGW storyline was the subject of a work of fiction, no one would buy it, and anyone who started reading it would throw it in the trash.
Some good quotes from Miracle on 34th Street kind of explains these people.
“Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to.”
“You mean it’s like, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again?”
“I believe, I believe, it’s silly but I believe.”
Fake it ’til you make it.
Trenberth, K. E., 2015: Has there been a hiatus? Science, 349, 691-692. doi:10.1126/science.aac9225.
…….but if Trenberth can’t define the internal, natural variations he, eo ipso, cannot know whether there is any human-caused warming. He should go back to university and do a course in logic.
I think he should go back to school, but this time just make it trade school.
Maybe he can work with his hands. After all, those who have a hard time with logic and weighty concepts often have some more physical talent. I think it has something to do with how a person’s genes ever survived this long.
Kevin, just call it Dark Warming so we can have a more formalized name for it and move on from there. If that does not do it for you then String Theory Warming is also available.
Might try to work in a variant of The Harmonic Convergence, somehow.
heh the trenberth bosun effect…..
More like the Trenberth Bozo Effect…
Trenberth’s Uncertainty Principle
Super-symmetry Warming might work. For all warming, there is a corresponding cooling, equal in magnitude put opposite sign.
He already has a good start what kind of spin the warming needs to have.
Somewhere Schrodinger’s Cat is in a box here – simultaneously cold and warm.
It won’t be happy about that. Cats like to be warm without any cold. I can predict that when you open the box you will find a very grumpy cat.
Dark Warming
===========
Perfect. We don’t have a Pause. What we have is Dark Warming. The sort of warming that is happening, but no one can see.
Well most of the warming was at night.
” Well most of the warming was at night.”
No, not really, on average it cooled slightly more over night than it warmed the day before, and this was for the period from 1940 to 2013.
What pause? I though Zeke told us that the new fake temperatures said the pause did not exist.
Meanwhile back in the real world, why do these fraudsters not tell us the AMO is still in the warm phase and when it turns the NH will experience 30 yrs of colder climate?
You’re on point, Paul.
In AGW-land, either Tom Karl is right (there’s been no pause) or Kevin Trenberth is right (there is a pause but it’s due to natural variation), but both of them cannot be right.
The logical of the situation is anti-symmetric because both of them could be wrong.
Science also recently published Tom Karl’s pause buster article. So, it appears that Science magazine has no scruple about publishing back-to-back mutually contradictory articles, and touting each of them as independently true.
A good journal should have no problem publishing simultaneous articles that are mutually contradictory. They just should not be “touting” any of them as being “true.”
In AGW-land, either Tom Karl is right (there’s been no pause) or Kevin Trenberth is right (there is a pause but it’s due to natural variation), but both of them cannot be right.
So, on which one is the 97% science is settled sit down and shut up based on?
Mutually contradictory papers in serious journals typically argue over interpretation of some observable, James, not about the existence of the observable itself.
Science Magazine has stupidly painted itself into a corner.
It has been demonstrated time and time again that were it not for “administrative” adjustments there would be little to no warming in the post war period.
I got it, it’s in Al Gore’s lock box. And it comes out with enough variability to cause problems for modeling. We don’t actually know where the lock box is but that’s not a concern for its handlers.
Read Trenberth’s comment in Science. RickA link. He trashes Karl, then goes with his ocean heat thing, and predicts the positive PDO will start the warming again. Never occurs to him that part of the 1975-2000 rise might have been natural also. He embraces natural cooling, but not natural warming. Utterly illogical. The desperation amongst the warmunists continues to mount. Their consensus facade is visibly cracking.
Kevin Trenberth has just become a skeptic of the very lukewarm type. These people do not state that there is no human contribution to climate variation, only that it is likely small and dominated by natural variation, and thus not an issue of concern by itself. However, there should be some concern of the direction of natural variation (we are likely near the end of the Holocene based on duration of several previous interglacials), and severe cooling is a possible problem of great importance. The CAGW and AGW emphasis would make humanity prepare for the wrong direction of climate variation to be concerned with, and greatly increase the chance for not being properly prepared.
Leonard “preparing in the wrong direction”..I submit that wasting capital, materials and labor to pursue an energy policy that is manifestly incapable of supporting modern industrial agriculture and manufacturing much less provide a surplus capacity is the wrong direction no matter what!
True dat!
Seems internal climate variability must be significant. Maybe the major factor. Alarmists take note.
I figured it all out about a decade ago.
atlantis is arising again. while arising it is sucking the heat from the oceans to power itself.
Geez –
natural climate fluxes don’t mask what is happening,
they ARE what is happening.
I think what he’s saying is that what is natural is now abnormal. It’s a cultural thing. Get with the times! 😎
Ah, so the missing heat isn’t really missing
it is just being masked by natural cooling.
“Trenberth says ‘Internal climate variability masks climate-warming trends’”
Well, look who just caught up! 🙂
In other words, climate scientists like Trenberth don’t really know what is happening. Natural climate fluxes could be masking the warming, or they could be masking the cooling. Only time will tell, which is what I have suspected all along.
Chris Mooney is already pushing this one over at WAPO (and I’m sure the rest of the coordinated media will be following dutifully) because, apparently, this – the 70th or so excuse for the Pause (I’ve lost track, but they tend to volley back and forth between ‘it never happened at all’ and the ‘rationalization/excuse of the week’ for why it did) – but THIS is the one that’s going to away our favorite ‘talking point’.
But I’ll bet… I’ll just bet… there will be another excuse before the end of next week.
Mooney did include the figures for amount of change in temp right there in open sight as .9 degree in the 20th century and .01 degree in a ten year period in the 21st century. Really? Is that what the “alarm” is all about? No wonder “natural variability” can mask it! I tried to post a comment pointing that out but the Post wouldn’t let me sign in.