From Scientific American via Reuters
By David Fogarty, Climate Change Correspondent, Asia
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Research showing an El Nino event in 1918 was far stronger than previously thought is challenging the notion climate change is making El Nino episodes more intense, a U.S. scientist said on Tuesday.
El Nino causes global climate chaos such as droughts and floods. The events of 1982/83 and 1997/98 were the strongest of the 20th Century, causing loss of life and economic havoc through lost crops and damage to infrastructure.
But Ben Giese of Texas A&M University said complex computer modelling showed the 1918 El Nino event was almost as strong and occurred before there was much global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels or widespread deforestation.
The outcome of the research was valuable for several reasons, Giese told Reuters from Perth in Western Australia.
“It questions the notion that El Ninos have been getting stronger because of global warming,” he said ahead of a presentation of his team’s research at a major climate change conference in Perth.
The 1918 event also co-incided with one of India’s worst droughts of the 20th century.
“We know that El Ninos and drought in India are often related to each other,” he said.
El Nino is an abnormal warming of the surface waters in the eastern Pacific off South America that causes the normally rainy weather in the western Pacific to shift further to the east.
This causes drought in parts of Australia, Southeast Asia and India as well as flooding in Chile and Peru, colder and wetter winters in the southern United States and fewer Atlantic hurricanes.
The droughts in Australia of 1982-83 and 1997-98 rank among the worst in the nation’s modern history. Drought also occurred in eastern Australia from 1918-20.
Giese said his team ran a complex ocean computer model that, for the first time, used the results of a separate atmospheric model produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The result was a simulation of ocean temperatures, currents and other measures from 1908 to 1958.
For 1918, the simulation produced a strong abnormal surface warming in the central Pacific and weaker warming nearer the South American coast.
There were very few measurements of the tropical Pacific during 1918, the last year of World War One, and ship-based measurements along the South American coast suggested only a weak El Nino.
This, Giese said, reinforced the point that there is limited data about El Ninos prior to the 1950s and that computer models were one way to get a clearer picture of the past.
“We cannot rely on what El Nino looks like today to try to understand what El Nino patterns looked like in the past.”
“It makes it a challenge to talk about El Nino and global warming because we simply don’t have a detailed record,” he added.
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lgl & Sarah: Please create a time-series graph outgoing longwave radiation ANOMALIES. Your link is pretty, but it shows nothing of value to your cause.
Bob Tisdale,
What is your best guess as the mechanism that ultimately drives the ENSO/PDO cycles? If these cycles serve to redistrubute heat, then certainly something must be generating or at least concentrating energy in localized areas, no?
‘Why? The only way to eradicate your impact is to die, yet even then your body will still emit CO2. CO2 is also very nutritious for plants. Also, I can tell you are concerned about warming. Why is warming bad?’
I didn’t say eradicate – I said limit. As in lets not go pumping tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere until we can be absolutely certain we won’t alter the climate.
Not all warming is bad, we wouldn’t be here if the Earth was still stuck in an ice age. However I don’t think anyone wants to have a hot house climate return. The break up and rapid moving of the Earth’s tectonic plates when Pangea broke up caused a lot of warming and release of CO2 into the atmosphere which was then captured and burried by plants giving us the ice house climates with glacials and interglacials. Then humans come along, dig up all those fossil fuels and pump that CO2 back into the atmosphere. No one fully knows what that will do to the global climate system, and for that very reason it isn’t smart to continue doing so with reckless abandon.
‘Where is the theory? ‘
I was refering to global warming as a whole, not hurricanes per ce. Incidently those guys proved that if hurricanes do form they’ll be extra big and powerful. One of the predictions of global warming is increased severity of weather phenomena. This supports the theory.
‘“The warming resumed by 8500 BC. By 5000 to 3000 BC average global temperatures reached their maximum level during the Holocene and were 1 to 2 degrees Celsius warmer than they are today.” From: ‘
Yes, and I’m sure the ancient Egyptians loved it, very fertile growing land for them. However, what was the weather like in Northern Europe at the time – or anywhere else for that matter?
This evidence shows that warmer climates lead to wild fires which were widespread at the end of the Younger Dryas. Bearing in mind that a lot more people now occupy areas where these fires were burning and you’ve got yourself a modern day problem.
http://pmr.uoregon.edu/science-and-innovation/uo-research-news/research-news-2009/january/charcoal-evidence-tracks-climate-changes-in-younger-dryas/
The issue isn’t whether or not the Earth will survive what we’re doing, I’m sure the Earth will just regulate itself as it always has. The question is if we as a human race will survive the changes.
‘From the work I do on water flows in Eastern Australia, I would have thought that while the drought in 1918 is worth looking at, it is the drought sequence of 1936-1945 that most closely matches the current 10 year drought sequence in Australia (which appears to be ending now). This drought was very severe, both in terms of lack of rainfall and duration, and occurred just before the modern “CO2 era”.’
The industrial revolution started long before this. Just because the patterns of CO2 in the atmosphere were not seen until the 60’s doesn’t mean they weren’t there or that this is a modern problem. They were there, but no one had thought to look.
Coal fires had been burning for years before 1900.
“The issue isn’t whether or not the Earth will survive what we’re doing, I’m sure the Earth will just regulate itself as it always has. The question is if we as a human race will survive the changes.”
The answer is no. At some point in time, we will die off.
“I was refering to global warming as a whole”
Refer here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/11/climate-change-science-pope
Also, where is all the severe weather?
Does anyone else think it’s lunar declination that causes ENSO or is it just this chap here?
https://www.predictweather.co.nz/assets/articles/article_home.php?id=66
I like the 1877-78 El Nino event in that it was the biggest on record and you can definitely see its signal in global temperatures.
The spring of 1878 was probably the warmest temperatures recorded (taking into account how much they have played around with the historic temperature record).
The Feb, 1878 Hadcrut3 temperature at +0.364C is actually higher than Feb. 2009 temp anomaly at +0.345C.
130 years of global warming and one big El Nino combined with a mild La Nina can make it look like there is no temperature increase at all.
Nothing special happened in 1918, however, except for the Battle of Vimy Ridge. The 1915 AMO spike and the 1915 Battle of the Ypres where mustard gas was used for the first time had much bigger impacts.
‘Please create a time-series graph outgoing longwave radiation ANOMALIES. Your link is pretty, but it shows nothing of value to your cause.’
Pass me £30000 and I’ll be happy to do it as a PhD thesis. Cash only, no cheques or credit cards.
There is some interesting work by NOAA and the Japanese using their satellites to track ocean-atmospheric fluxes.
http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/science/time-series-data.html
Also this http://folk.uib.no/ngftf/CV/Misc/regclim_gtr3ft.html
Moderator – is my other post offensive somehow, or just too blunt?
REPLY: Neither, It’s called “I’m doing something else (like running my business) at the moment and I have just now returned to moderating”. Patience, read the site policy in the tab at masthead. – Anthony
John F. Hultquist : GLASSES .
Imagine we build Sarah´s ideal Greenhouse, an antique greenhouse to be covered by 10.000 individual glasses which would represent a % of CO2 gas. Then she would have only 3.85 glasses for her ideal greenhouse, but not only that, these, as they are made not of crystal but of CO2, really are “flying glasses”.
How could these keep such a greenhouse warm?
Sarah: You wrote: “However, no one has really prooved the mechanisms that cause El Ninos to begin.”
That’s not really the point, is it? The question at hand is what fuels it. Do you really think a 1 watt/meter^2 increase in the AGGI from 1979 to 2007 could create all that tropical heat, when in a single year (1997/98) the downward shortwave radiation varied (increased then decreased) ~25 watts/meter^2 over the Pacific Warm Pool due to a shift in cloud cover. It’s a matter of scale. Refer to Table 2 here for AGGI data:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/
Refer to Figure 8 here for a graph of the DSR-A over the PWP:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/8/6697/2008/acpd-8-6697-2008-print.pdf
I discussed the Pavlakis paper here:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/02/recharging-pacific-warm-pool-part-2.html
You wrote, “Given that ash from volcanic eruptions reflects heat back into space as well as insulating Earth it would be difficult to proove what the net effect was without satellite data. If there is proof you’re aware of please post a link.”
All you have to do is examine the effects by plotting sea surface temperature anomalies for the East Indian and West Pacific oceans versus NINO3.4 and Sato Index data. It’s very obvious in the data, once you know it’s there. Feel free to refer to my guest posts here at WUWT or to the originals here:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/01/can-el-nino-events-explain-all-of.html
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/01/can-el-nino-events-explain-all-of_11.html
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/01/supplement-to-can-enso-events-explain.html
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/01/supplement-2-to-can-enso-events-explain.html
Feel free to plot the data yourself to check my work.
You wrote: “You would then expect La Nina events to be stronger and the NAO to be more pronounced leading to cooler and wetter Northern Europe climates.”
Are you discussing the La Nina of 2007/08 and the current La Nina conditions and how they relate to Northern European weather? If so, I don’t pay much attention to weather .
You wrote: “If you’re right in saying that El Ninos are triggered by a natural feedback which removes excess heat, then it does link quite nicely to the recent global warming patterns.”
Bingo. But you don’t have to take my word for it. On David Enfield’s El Nino FAQ webpage, he writes, “El Nino may be thought of as one of Earth’s standard mechanisms for getting heat from the tropics (where more comes in from the sun than goes out) to the polar regions (where more heat returns to space than comes in). Ordinary winter storms also do this. Without these poleward transports of heat, the planet would be an unbearable hothouse in the tropics or too cold for habitation toward the poles. In the years between ENSO events, excess heat accumulates in the tropics and then gets ‘exported’ during El Nino.”
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/general/enso_faq/
Regards
FEEBLE El NIÑO : 1927, 1943, 1948, 1953, 1958, 1969, 2002-2003.
MODERATE El NIÑO : 1929,1951, 1965, 1976, 1987, 1991-1992.
STRONG NINO: 1925-1926, 1930-1931, 1940-1941, 1957-1958, 1972-1973.
EXTRAORDINARY NINO: 1982-1983, 1997-1998.
John F. Hultquist: You asked, “Would the eruption of Karakatau have decreased the peaks that follow 1878?”
I haven’t studied the period close enough to give you a reasonable answer. The data is sparse, especially NINO data, back then.
REPLY: Neither, It’s called “I’m doing something else (like running my business) at the moment and I have just now returned to moderating”. Patience, read the site policy in the tab at masthead. – Anthony
Aye Corumba! Sorry, there were new posts bracketing that one, so I thought I had stepped out of bounds. I assumed and have again proven the old axiom dealing with assumptions. Run that business round and round, just don’t run it into the ground!
JamesG (15:44:19) : about the chap (Ken Ring) you pointed to
Samuel Johnson is quoted as having replied to an author:
“Your manuscript is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.”
That seems to fit.
“Sarah (06:05:50) :
Increased frequency of extreme weather phenomena are a symptom of anthropogenic global warming.
This is conjecture, it hasn’t been proven.”
“It’s a theory actually, like black holes and evolution. None have been proven but all have significant evidence.”
I’m going to assume that Sara simply means that increased frequency of extreme weather events are a symptom of warming in general, whether anthropogenic or not. The statement otherwise doesn’t make a lot of sense as there would be no reason to think that warming from CO2 causes the climate to behave differently than if the warming had been natural.
My real beef with this argument is that it ignores the quality of the tests that are applied to try to falsify the hypothesis. The whole premise behind the scientific inquiry is that a theory gains strength as attempts to falsify that theory fail over time. The problem with comparing global warming theory to evolution and black holes is that, with global warming, the best you can do to try to test the theory is prod weakly around the edges. There is no measurement instrument capable of distinguishing natural warming from man-made warming. Scientists can’t vary the rate of CO2 going into the atmosphere to gather statistical data for quantifying the effect of CO2. Even more fundamentally, since any ongoing changes in climate variables such as temperature, humidity, etc can only be distinguished from the chaotic noise of the climate system by averaging over large time intervals, how is it possible to gain any significant understanding about the inner workings of the climate in such a short time interval as a mere three or four decades? Stated simply, we simply have not had the ability to meaningfully test the global warming hypothesis (e.g. quantify the effect in a mathematical manner) in the relatively short time that scientists have been studying the climate. Since changes in the behavior of the system being studied take decades to scientifically distinguish, it’s silly to think that you can learn enough about that extraordinarily complex system, in a mere two to three measurement cycles, to be able to quantify the effect of CO2 on temperature let alone second level considerations such as temperature on hurricanes, drought, El Nino, etc.
Pearland Aggie: You asked, “What is your best guess as the mechanism that ultimately drives the ENSO/PDO cycles? If these cycles serve to redistrubute heat, then certainly something must be generating or at least concentrating energy in localized areas, no?”
Let me give you a link to Bill Kessler’s webpage. He discusses the process very well. What he misses, though, are the changes in cloud cover, which increase downward shortwave radiation and also fuel El Nino events.
http://faculty.washington.edu/kessler/occasionally-asked-questions.html
Do you ever get to the west side of Houston? Out by Dairy-Ashford and Briarforest? I lived on that side of town on and off for about ten years.
‘ It is right to be cautious. If you step over the line and become a skeptic: Your friends and family will think you have gone batty. Your local Starbucks will only serve you cold coffee. Members of the PTA will warn the school kids about you.
But, to not make a choice is still a choice.’
I have made a choice, and defended it. In fact I used to be a skeptic as a young geologist student, but quickly changed my mind with further study.
I used to think that global warming was a great way to avoid ice age reoccurance. Needless to say I’ve changed my stance!
Your articles on how not to measure temperature seem to focus on accurately measuring temperature while ignoring long term trends that all techniques demonstrated in the data patterns. It’s ok being imprecise as long as you’re consistently so and can correct measurements with other proxies.
I have to admit I’m a fan of ice core temperature plots myself since the poles are far more stable to measure long term trends and the data set goes back a long way to compare with other proxies. Anoxic marine sediment come second but only because it involves long arduous hours of analysis with a scanning electron microscope. *Boring*
‘Also, where is all the severe weather?’
Of all of the early predictions made with global warming back in the 1960’s we have seen evidence slowly mounting for all of it. Increased size of deserts, severe storms, flooding in some areas, doughts and wild fires in others as global precipitation redistributes. There is a direct link with increased global precipitation and global warming.
http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/trends-in-natural-disasters
Short term storm events are harder to prove because of the complex nature of the storm system. This is why the Met office refuses to comment until more in depth work has been done. In particular the media was jumping all over the flooding stories in the U.K claiming it was due to global warming, having no direct scientific link the Met office released that statement. However, they didn’t say that the the extreme weather experienced in the U.K over the last 30 years wasn’t to do with global warming, and they do consider it to be a research priority.
BTW here’s what else Vicky Pope has to say about global warming – notice how she talks about flooding and heatwaves?
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/explained/explained1.html
It comes back again about how WE deal with a changing climate. Homes a businesses were flooded 2 years ago because more rain fell that the drainage system was designed to cope with. Drainage systems in the U.K can deal with a 1:30 year event with no problem and are designed to flood with an event of greater magnitude. The problem is that the so called 1:30 year or greater events are happening a lot more frequently.
Adolfo Giurfa: You wrote, “You tell me!, that 1983 el Nino was really big…to the extent that peruvian economy went default. 1991/92 its ok.”
The 1982/83 El Nino was big and the localized weather effects in western South America should have been extreme, but my comment had to do with the poleward heat transport.
sarah answers the question:
‘Also, where is all the severe weather?’
by stating:
“Of all of the early predictions made with global warming back in the 1960’s we have seen evidence slowly mounting for all of it….”
Sarah, that’s wrong, as we see here: click
Anecdotal reports of severe weather are meaningless alarmism.
Sarah,
It is right to be cautious. If you step over the line and become a skeptic: Your friends and family will think you have gone batty. Your local Starbucks will only serve you cold coffee. Members of the PTA will warn the school kids about you.
But, facts won’t go away and to not make a choice is still a choice.
I suggest you spend a little time reading the “how not to measure temperature” posts – parts 84 & 85 are still listed at the top-right. Or go here: http://surfacestations.org/
Also read some papers – here are three:
Two Natural Components of the Recent Climate Change by Akasofu, here:
http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/pdf/two_natural_components_recent_climate_change.pdf
http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/ohio.pdf by Steve McIntyre
http://www.davidarchibald.info/papers/The%20Past%20and%20Future%20of%20Climate.pdf
You seem to be repeating a lot of stuff from Al Gore. He showed a picture of two polar bears on an ice berg. There were four relevant facts. Were the animals about to die? Where was the picture taken? When was the picture taken? Who took the picture? Gore got all four answers wrong. Oh, he also had the sex of the photographer wrong. That’s five. He doesn’t get anything else right either:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/press_releases/monckton-response-to-gore-errors.pdf
You also might want to have a look at the “even if” statements at the end of this paper:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/warming_not_happening.pdf
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
JamesG (15:44:19) : about the chap (Ken Ring) you pointed to
Samuel Johnson is quoted as having replied to an author:
“Your manuscript is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.”
That seems to fit.
Sorry Anthony, I didn’t realize that thing to Sarah go thru.. Snip it.
the one to JamesG is new
Well the bottom half of the stuff to Sarah was new. I think I’ll sign off and go read about logs to the base e — that and supper.
Bob Tisdale, 19th century Lima´s temperature records here:
http://www.giurfa.com/lima.jpg
As a reference, during 1998 El Nino, temperature reached 38°C.