Pielke Sr: No Climate Heating In “The Pipeline”

So foinavon, found out anything yet about the possibility that various oceanic oscillations can land in bed together? Turns out it is more than just a possibility. Given the variations and noise apparent in all of them with patterns running from a few years to decades and with no correlations between oceanic oscillations strongly apparent so far, it appears mathematically plausible that these oscillations will coincide in cold or warm phases, causing various extreme trends over longish periods of time that some might mistakenly believe are related to solar affects, pollution, or the fact that someone forgot to leave a sacrifice at the goddess’ cave.

By the way, foinavon. What caused the warming of the first half of the 20’th century?
TSI didn’t vary enough (IPCC still uses outdated figures to do the trick). GHG levels too low. According to you, not enough evidence to attribute it to oceanic or atmospheric oscillations including albedo changes. Taminos vulcanic lull suggestion just makes the current flat temperatures even more inexplicable.
Well?

foinavon (04:50:50) :
“If we’re addressing very short periods then we obviously need to consider some of the contributions to temperature changes that occur on very short periods, but are generally averaged out to near zero on the timescales of long term trends in response to enhanced forcings.”
First: “enhanced forcings” has not been proven.
Second: The ‘zeroing’ only applies to forward projections and these factors cannot be ignored in determining attributions and climate sensitivity from the past century’s trend because in the past century the oscillations DID NOT ZERO OUT.
Third: the factors assumed to be responsible for the cooling in the middle of the last century have NOT been present during the current decade of net cooling temperatures in which no warming has occurred since 1998. This puts into question the amount of temperature rise during the last century that can be attributed to CO2 since the opposite warming to the current cooling was not factored in.
It will take two more decades or so to possibly accomplish a zeroing (if we’re speaking only of the PDO) in which time if current trends hold, the net long term trend which even now shows less warming from CO2 than expected from the climate sensitivity determined by the models will demonstrate even less.
The climate models have calculated a climate sensitivity too high and the attribution of factors contributing to warming/cooling is in error. The IPPC has little confidence in their knowledge of aerosol forcing as well they should. The IPPC has also admitted its understanding of low cloud cover is so poor that even the sign of the feedback is in doubt (yest a positive feedback is assumed). Its understanding of the oceans is even less.
Take it from there rather than repeating everything you think you’ve learned that is actually irrelevant to this issue. Studies based on the same assumptions as used in the climate models will by definition have the same errors.

Both the PDO and AMO have sub-oscillations in different parts of these large bodies of water that may need to be considered separately in order to determine if these sub oscillations oscillate together or not, with the big one. If they oscillate together, the larger measure can be used as a proxy in models. If they don’t oscillate together but cycle in and out of phase, they each need to be treated separately in model development. That is true of the Antarctic oscillation with its embedded 2-cycle warm/cool waves. However, it seems reasonable, and has been reported in the literature to be the prevailing case, that the two big oscillations, the PDO and AMO, are not intricately linked in that one directly causes the other with some predictable lag time. There seems very little such direct evidence. But that they do, and have, coincided and correlate with temperature trends, is not disputed.

Smokey: “But a poll of the rank-and-file dues paying membership of a professional organization like, for example, the American Meteorological Society, would certainly have plenty to do with science related to the climate and the weather.”
A poll of scientists on scientific issues would have greater force than a poll of the general public, but since science is not done by surveys such a poll would still not have the force of actual scientific work.

Niels A Nielsen (01:54:40) :

By the way, foinavon. What caused the warming of the first half of the 20′th century?
TSI didn’t vary enough (IPCC still uses outdated figures to do the trick). GHG levels too low. According to you, not enough evidence to attribute it to oceanic or atmospheric oscillations including albedo changes. Taminos vulcanic lull suggestion just makes the current flat temperatures even more inexplicable.

GHG levels weren’t really too low I think. If one inspects, say, the Hadcrut temperature record:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/
The temperature anomaly was around -0.3 in the mid-19th century up towards the end of the 19th century when there was quite a flurry of significant volcanic eruptions that temporarily drove the anomaly towards -0.5 oC. The anomaly reached zero in that odd bump around 1940, and settled around -0.1
It’s pretty likely that there was a bit of recovery from the temperature reduction from the volcanic activity at the end of the 19th century. The CO2 levels were 286 ppm in the mid 19th century and reached around 309 ppm by 1940. Within the mid-value of climate sensitivity (3 oC of warming per doubling of CO2), we expect around 0.35 oC of warming at equilibrium from that rise in CO2.
So we had around 0.3 oC of warming in the early 20th century, nearly all of which could be accounted for by the raised CO2 levels. Of course things aren’t so simple and a full analysis can only be achieved by modeling with the best estimates of the parameterizations and known amplitudes of the various contributions.
This has already been done of course. But if we wanted to make “back of the envelope” estimates we could get the 0.3 oC of early-mid 20th century warming from 0.3 oC of greenhouse forcing (somewhat delayed by the effects of volcanic activity), 0.05 oC of solar warming, and -0.1 oC of aerosolic “cooling” and 0.05 oC of ocean oscillations, if we were determined to include a bit of the latter..something like that seems in accordance with what we know.
The point is that GHG levels weren’t really too low…

foinavon (14:21:24)
The Spatiotemporal Structure of Twentieth-Century Climate Variations in Observations and Reanalyses. Part II: Pacific Pan-Decadal Variability
Chen et al
The spatiotemporal structure of Pacific pan-decadal variability (PDV) is isolated in global long-term surface temperature (ST) datasets and reanalysis atmospheric parameter fields from which El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) effects have been removed. Empirical orthogonal function (EOF) and combined EOF analysis of the resulting time series identify PDV as one of two primary modes of long-term variability, the other being a global warming (GW) trend, which is addressed in a companion paper (Part I).In this study, it is shown that one of several PDV interdecadal regime shifts occurred during the 1990s.
This significant change in the Pacific basin is comparable but antiphase to the well-known 1976 climate regime shift and is consistent with the observed changes in biosystems and ocean circulation. A comprehensive picture of PDV as manifested in the troposphere and at the surface is described. In general, the PDV spatial patterns in different parameter fields share some similarities with the patterns associated with ENSO, but important differences exist. First, the PDV circulation pattern is shifted westward by about 20° and is less zonally extended than that for ENSO. The westward shift of the PDV wave train produces a different North American teleconnection pattern that is more west–east oriented. The lack of a strong PDV surface temperature (ST) signal in the west equatorial Pacific and the relatively strong ST signal in the subtropical regions are consistent with an atmospheric overturning circulation response that differs from the one associated with ENSO. The analysis also suggests that PDV is a combination of decadal and/or interdecadal oscillations interacting through teleconnections.
Bottom line
“Our results therefore appear to be consistent with the conclusion of Chen et al.
(2002) that the observed top-of-atmosphere tropical radiative flux trend over this time is probably due to natural variability rather than external forcing”
egt Pontryagin and Andronov 1937
“Poincare bifurcation theory was elaborated by the Russian mathematicians Pontryagin and Andronov already in the 20’s and in the 30’s (due to the need to apply these bifurcations to radiophysics). Andronov published (with all the proofs) the theory of the birth of a periodic motion of a dynamical system under the generic loss of stability of an equilibrium position, in the case when two eigenvalues of the linearised system cross the imaginary axis, moving from the stable to the unstable complex half-plane.
Andronov’s theorem claims that (depending on the sign of some higher term of the Taylor series) exactly two generic cases may occur: Either the stability of the equilibrium position is inherited by the new-born limit cycle (whose radius grows like the square root of the difference between the new value of the parameter and the value at the stability loss), or else the radius of the attraction domain, diminishing like the square root of the difference between the growing parameter value and the future value, at which the stability will be destroyed, disappears at the stability loss moment.
The first case is called the mild stability loss, the new-born periodic motion-attractor describes a small oscillation near the old stationary regime. The second case is called the hard stability loss, the behaviour of the system after this stability loss being very far from the equilibrium, loosing its stability. The proofs of these results of Andronov on the phase portraits bifurcations were based on the Pontryagin’s extension of Poincare’s results in the holomorphic case to that of the smooth systems of differential equations.”
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Structural_stability

Syl (05:35:33) :

First: “enhanced forcings” has not been proven.

Perhaps…..if we’re taking a philosophical line, where in reality nothing is ever “proven”. But we know that raised greenhouse gas levels constitute an enhanced forcing, and the evidence supports a significant enhanced forcing near 3 oC ish at equilibrium for a doubling of atmospheric CO2.

…..because in the past century the oscillations DID NOT ZERO OUT.

I don’t think the evidence supports that interpretation (not even with capital letters!). That’s not only something that “hasn’t been proven”, but also something for which the evidence indicates specifically is unlikely to be the case (see papers/abstracts in [foinavon (14:21:24)]).
Of course I might be wrong. However a skeptic would like to see some evidence for that assertion (i.e. that ocean currents don’t average out to near zero in their effects on measured surface temperature). And not just a picture of some individual ocean oscillation record, but an analysis that considers the nett effect of ocean oscillations en masse. In my understanding, where this is done, there isn’t very much of a nett ocean current contribution to medium term surface temperature variations (e.g. see abstracts in [foinavon (14:21:24)]).

Third: the factors assumed to be responsible for the cooling in the middle of the last century have NOT been present during the current decade of net cooling temperatures in which no warming has occurred since 1998.

I think you’re confusing the issue by selecting a highly anomalous start year Syl! 1998 was lifted around 0.2 oC above the long term trend by the strongest El Nino of the 20th century. Since global warming is not occurring right now at a rate greater than 0.2 oC per decade, the fact that recent years (2005,2007) were close to 1998 without the benefit of a strong El Nino, indicates that we have warmed quite a bit comparing the decade 2000-now, with 1990-1999. The fact that we haven’t warmed in the past few years is nothing particulalry remarkable. 2008 had a coincidence of “cooling” contributions (La Nina, negative PDO indices, sun right at the bottom of the solar cycle). There will always be periods of temperature statis/cooling on a rising temperature trend where natural variations that can easily combine to give a temporary interannual rise drop of 0.1-0.2 oC provide noise on a temperature trend that may be rising by no more than 0.02 oC per year. We only have to look at the historical record to realize that..

It will take two more decades or so to possibly accomplish a zeroing (if we’re speaking only of the PDO)….

That’s the problem Syl. The PDO is only one ocean current. One can’t base the entire ocean contribution to short/medium term surface temperature by selecting a single ocean oscillation.

The climate models have calculated a climate sensitivity too high and the attribution of factors contributing to warming/cooling is in error.

I don’t think that’s an interpretation that is supported by the evidence. One certainly can’t base such an interpretation on a few years of surface temperature measurements.

Pamela Gray (15:42:34) :

foinavon: I believe the current consensus among researchers in the AGW camp is that the PDO, and by your extention, the AMO, WILL overcome AGW, in the short term (meaning potentially as much as 60 years or more based on your references), possibly reducing us to pre-AGW levels.

Not really Pamela. Have a read of the paper that maksimovich brought to our attention just above, for example. The analyses of ocean currents seems to indicate that the nett effects on global temperature are small. So in the short term we might have a few years where greenhouse-induced warming is countered by some ocean oscillations, and when combined with the sun at its solar minimum, there’s no reason to be surprised at a few years where the temperatures don’t change much or even fall a tad. However, we should be careful not to let these lull us into thinking that global warming might not be as the science indicates. Because remember that those smallish effects that temporarily oppose the warming trend will in a few years likely be supplementing it.

foinavon (16:22:44) :
Indeed it does,hence zonal climatology eg Cess 1976 . Monin 1984 Raspopov 2008
Thus we can state with some certainty(highly likely) that the datasets eg GISS and hadcru are inhomogeneous ie they are not representative ensembles in the ‘Gibbs’ sense of a global representation historically (before the satellite error) or enhanced observation (as present ) with regard to SST.
This was especially the case in ICOADS Worley et al 2005 when compared to high-quality meteorological data collected in the Northwest Atlantic during the period 1980–92 (russian demilitarized datasets) ie substantive samplig error.

Roger Knights (20:36:04) :

foinavon wrote: “………”

No foinavon didn’t write…!
Someone else must have written that Roger…not me!