Note: Above graph comes from this source and not the paper below. Only the abstract is available. (Note from 2016: The link to the graph died, the image was recovered from the Wayback Machine and an edit made to restore it on Oct 31, 2016)
A new peer-reviewed climate study is presenting a head on challenge to man-made global warming claims. The study by three climate researchers appears in the July 23, 2009 edition of Journal of Geophysical Research. (Link to Abstract)
Full Press Release and Abstract to Study:
July 23, 2009
Three Australasian researchers have shown that natural forces are the dominant influence on climate, in a study just published in the highly-regarded Journal of Geophysical Research. According to this study little or none of the late 20th century global warming and cooling can be attributed to human activity.
The research, by Chris de Freitas, a climate scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, John McLean (Melbourne) and Bob Carter (James Cook University), finds that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a key indicator of global atmospheric temperatures seven months later. As an additional influence, intermittent volcanic activity injects cooling aerosols into the atmosphere and produces significant cooling.
“The surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that made warming El Niño conditions more likely than they were over the previous 30 years and cooling La Niña conditions less likely” says corresponding author de Freitas.
“We have shown that internal global climate-system variability accounts for at least 80% of the observed global climate variation over the past half-century. It may even be more if the period of influence of major volcanoes can be more clearly identified and the corresponding data excluded from the analysis.”
Climate researchers have long been aware that ENSO events influence global temperature, for example causing a high temperature spike in 1998 and a subsequent fall as conditions moved to La Niña. It is also well known that volcanic activity has a cooling influence, and as is well documented by the effects of the 1991 Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption.
The new paper draws these two strands of climate control together and shows, by demonstrating a strong relationship between the Southern Oscillation and lower-atmospheric temperature, that ENSO has been a major temperature influence since continuous measurement of lower-atmospheric temperature first began in 1958.
According to the three researchers, ENSO-related warming during El Niño conditions is caused by a stronger Hadley Cell circulation moving warm tropical air into the mid-latitudes. During La Niña conditions the Pacific Ocean is cooler and the Walker circulation, west to east in the upper atmosphere along the equator, dominates.
“When climate models failed to retrospectively produce the temperatures since 1950 the modellers added some estimated influences of carbon dioxide to make up the shortfall,” says McLean.
“The IPCC acknowledges in its 4th Assessment Report that ENSO conditions cannot be predicted more than about 12 months ahead, so the output of climate models that could not predict ENSO conditions were being compared to temperatures during a period that was dominated by those influences. It’s no wonder that model outputs have been so inaccurate, and it is clear that future modelling must incorporate the ENSO effect if it is to be meaningful.”
Bob Carter, one of four scientists who has recently questioned the justification for the proposed Australian emissions trading scheme, says that this paper has significant consequences for public climate policy.
“The close relationship between ENSO and global temperature, as described in the paper, leaves little room for any warming driven by human carbon dioxide emissions. The available data indicate that future global temperatures will continue to change primarily in response to ENSO cycling, volcanic activity and solar changes.”
“Our paper confirms what many scientists already know: which is that no scientific justification exists for emissions regulation, and that, irrespective of the severity of the cuts proposed, ETS (emission trading scheme) will exert no measurable effect on future climate.”
—
McLean, J. D., C. R. de Freitas, and R. M. Carter (2009), Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature, Journal of Geophysical Research, 114, D14104, doi:10.1029/2008JD011637.
This figure from the McLean et al (2009) research shows that mean monthly global temperature (MSU GTTA) corresponds in general terms with the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) of seven months earlier. The SOI is a rough indicator of general atmospheric circulation and thus global climate change. The possible influence of the Rabaul volcanic eruption is shown.
Excerpted Abstract of the Paper appearing in the Journal of Geophysical Research:
Time series for the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) and global tropospheric temperature anomalies (GTTA) are compared for the 1958−2008 period. GTTA are represented by data from satellite microwave sensing units (MSU) for the period 1980–2008 and from radiosondes (RATPAC) for 1958–2008. After the removal from the data set of short periods of temperature perturbation that relate to near-equator volcanic eruption, we use derivatives to document the presence of a 5- to 7-month delayed close relationship between SOI and GTTA. Change in SOI accounts for 72% of the variance in GTTA for the 29-year-long MSU record and 68% of the variance in GTTA for the longer 50-year RATPAC record. Because El Niño−Southern Oscillation is known to exercise a particularly strong influence in the tropics, we also compared the SOI with tropical temperature anomalies between 20°S and 20°N. The results showed that SOI accounted for 81% of the variance in tropospheric temperature anomalies in the tropics. Overall the results suggest that the Southern Oscillation exercises a consistently dominant influence on mean global temperature, with a maximum effect in the tropics, except for periods when equatorial volcanism causes ad hoc cooling. That mean global tropospheric temperature has for the last 50 years fallen and risen in close accord with the SOI of 5–7 months earlier shows the potential of natural forcing mechanisms to account for most of the temperature variation.
Received 16 December 2008; accepted 14 May 2009; published 23 July 2009.
UPDATE: Kenneth Trenberth of NCAR has posted a rebuttal to this paper. Which you can read here:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/FosteretalJGR09.pdf
Thanks to WUWT reader “Bob” for the email notice. – Anthony
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@Anthony
“Well then if we are all just too “stupid”, your word, why frequent here?”
Hmmm, the question was:
“do you think that there is or there could be an anti-AGW statement, paper, posting that is too stupid for you to put it on your web side?”
The statement and the question most probably become equivalent once the differences are computed and smoothing is applied.
REPLY: By the same token, is there any claim, or pro-AGW statement, newspaper article posting that is not too stupid for you or Tamino or the rest of the AGW crowd to let stand?
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
We could go round and round. Point is, you start off with insults, and that speaks volumes to your credibility. Folks like yourself relish in pointing out the errors of others, but are apparently unable to do so themselves for the things in their corner. When Tamino starts rebuking Gore’s claims and comes out of hiding, his opinion will matter. – Anthony
Having read the paper now, it is quite good – thanks for the link Joel. I would have preferred if they used the Nino 3.4 anomaly rather than the SOI and used monthly data rather than the smoothing function they used because they would have gotten better results. The volcanoes adjustment would have been easier to justify if they had used the actual ENSO numbers rather than SOI as well.
To put the warming residual trends into perspective, …
If one pulls just the ENSO out of the dataseries, the warming trend is 0.09C per decade.
If you pull the AMO and the ENSO out, it equates to about 0.06C per decade.
Global warming theory would have had temps rising at about 0.14C per decade during this period.
Joel Shore (07:02:18) :
“Well, I think we already know that peer review is an imperfect filter.”
They don’t make peers like they used to.
Bill Illis
I agree with you that the AMO impact has to be considered. The Pacific Ocean is not the only climate maker on the globe . It is a major player and tracking it will predict a significant part of the anomalies but not all. As I have shown before AMO changes play a major part as well. I like your first graph .
corresponding author de Freitas:
“We have shown that internal global climate-system variability accounts for at least 80% of the observed global climate variation over the past half-century. It may even be more if the period of influence of major volcanoes can be more clearly identified and the corresponding data excluded from the analysis.”
That leaves very little room for solar-related changes. [no need to counter by saying that it also leaves very little room for CO2-related changes]
One of the main arguments of the non-technical AGW faithful is the consensus of peer reviewed literature. If nothing else this paper refutes that claim and gives skeptics leverage. IIRC, a paper was presented here last year that demonstrated that 80% of peer reviewed literature was found to be wrong after 25 years. Most scientists know this. Most non-scientists don’t.
A poster asked a couple of days ago how to discuss AGW with a fanatic. This paper provides a means to open communication.
Georg Hoffmann (07:29:21):
The “little room” refers to correlation. Constants do not correlate.
Joel Shore (07:20:41) :
But, the constant is then completely irrelevant to the subsequent correlation computation.
———————
Georg and Joel,
I still haven’t gotten around to reading the paper (I will), but I’m not seeing a substantive criticism here.
This this through with me. Imagine two linear series which are perfectly correlated, except that one is growing twice as fast as the other. When you correlate them, the differences in rate of growth will be capture by the slope of the regression. (The constant will just depend on where the data series begin.)
If you difference them, you can still correlate the differences, but the meaning of the slope and constant change. Now the constant captures the difference in trend, and the slope captures the degree of correlation. If they are totally uncorrelated, the slope will not be significantly different than zero, and if they are highly correlated, the slope will not be significantly different than 1.0.
Without having read the paper, I’m going to guess that this is the kind of analysis they did. I.e., while differencing removes the differences in trend (to a constant), it still allows for measuring the correlations between the stationary components of the series. And frankly, if the purpose is to isolate the effect of “natural climate variability” then differencing the data to achieve stationarity makes a lot of sense to me.
But the bottom line is that to claim that correlations are no longer possible, or meaningful, with differenced data is just plain wrong.
Regarding trends:
Surely this paper is demonstrating a naturally cyclic phenomenon based on ENSO/PDO variability and we are only just past the peak of that cycle so any trend calculated from the cycle start up to this point is pessimistic. You have to project a completion to the cycle to get a trend from it. Or you could go further back and take out the natural trend from before 1950 and see what’s left. The latter is what Swanson recently did of course, except that he said the pre 1950 trend may have been man-made too. I was probably assuming Nick was referring to that. The trouble with AGWers is that they keep moving the goalposts. It’s difficult to know which time-period they’ll use next as the definitive start of man’s influence. When it comes to debunking any solar correlation, the start point is usually made at 1980 or 1985.
Another funny thing about these skeptic skeptics like Nick, Joel and Georg is that they could pick any number of pro-AGW papers that use obviously gross statistical errors to project thermageddon. Instead they use every opportunity to defend such bad science if it is pro-AGW and they nit-pick every nuance of uncertainty in anti-AGW papers. Always the double standards.
As for Tamino, the company he works for does financial modeling. That pretty much says it all. Or did he actually manage to predict this crisis using his all too fallible time series analyses? Bill D. at least has a model that might make sense. All he needs to do is make a prediction for the next few years in order to test it.
Anthony, you are a glaring idiot, who does not know any math. How much they are paying to you to spred this bullshit?
[REPLY – About as much as they are paying you for correct spelling and punctuation? ~ Evan]
Sorry Bill Illis, i meant your model, not Bill D’s
Very interesting indeed. But hold hard: if the temperature measurements are sparse, of low quality, and “adjusted” by methods that seem to be juvenile or bogus, is any explanation of them worth much?
The very fact that surface temperatures lag ENSO by several months is not, of itself, sufficient to tell us that it’s their driver. It is an enigmatic, short-period, oceanic response of the climate system, which can tell us little about what changes, if any, slightly increased atmospheric heat capacitance due to increased CO2 may bring in surface air temperatures over centennial time-scales. And it is only over such scales and longer that data slopes given by linear regression can be taken to be truly secular trends. At multi-decadal scales the data slopes of surface temperature series are much too variable, due to long-period natural oscillations such as AMO.
Basil (07:03:25) is entirely correct, however, in pointing out that the first-difference series does not “remove” the “trend,” it produces a (quite variable) “constant.” AGWers love linear trends in data, because any two straight lines correlate perfectly, leaving the field open to all sorts of imputed causal connections. This analytic deficiency of regressional analysis of time series obscures the fact that the cross-spectral coherence with CO2 at the lowest frequencies that we can reasonably estimate from available records is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Have a good week-end, everybody.
Moderator: Please change my first sentence to read: “The very fact that surface temperatures lag ENSO by several months is not, of itself, sufficient to tell us that it’s their driver.”
[REPLY – Done ~ Evan]
Exactly as pointed in my run of climate articles over the past 18 months at climaterealists.com
When the oceans emit energy at a higher rate the equatorial air masses expand and all the air circulation systems move poleward.
When they emit energy at a lower rate everything moves back equatorward.
The only effect of more GHGs in the air is to influence that natural movement to a miniscule degree.
Bill Illis (07:48:31) :
“If one pulls just the ENSO out of the dataseries, the warming trend is 0.09C per decade.
If you pull the AMO and the ENSO out, it equates to about 0.06C per decade.
Global warming theory would have had temps rising at about 0.14C per decade during this period.”
Inflammatory language and the discussion of it does not help the quality of debate here; leave that for RC. I would rather see the substance of Tamino’s criticism acknowledged. The paper is, unfortunately, not well-written if it does not point out that their correlation of temp to ENSO is not relevant to a more constant longer-term trend, which is what the net effect of AGW would have to be. Tamino’s criticism is correct from what I can tell. OTOH, if the net trend is 0.09C (or 0.06C)/ decade, then it would be nice to know if that’s really different from 1.4C? Can’t tell statistically from the data provided, but would seem so intuitively. More interesting would be to see how the residual trend from this analysis looks over the full 50 year period. Not having the paper, does it carefully examine THAT analysis to come to its overall conclusion of little room left for a CO2-driven change?
Or admit that the prominently vaunted “Hockey Stick” is bogus, Rahmsmoothing, Steig, etc…
Looks like the “Oceans Dictate Climate” train of thought is starting to gain traction. Here is a paper published late last year in Climate Dynamics, which seems to say about the same thing as the de Frietas / McLean / Carter paper. The abstract reads:
Joel Shore (07:20:41) responding to Basil: “But, the constant is then completely irrelevant to the subsequent correlation computation. So, from the point of view of computing correlations, you have indeed taken out any effect of the trend. The correlation that you get is identical even when you add a fake linear trend of 10 C / decade to the original temperature data!!”
Any 2 monotonically increasing or decreasing time series will show a correlation.
Over at realclimate they had a blurb on this in the July 24th Friday news roundup. The following was the summary of the paper: ” Nevermore let it be said that you can’t get any old rubbish published in a peer-reviewed journal!” Now I don’t normally agree with very much over there, but this sums up my feelings on the AGW crowds requirement that only peer reviewed papers have any value.
Bob Tisdale (07:40:48) :
Ron de Haan: You wrote, “I think it is extremely important to kill the AGW hoax with a single report.”
That’s a nice thought, but I believe it’s impossible.
Bob, the entire AGW doctrine states that Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are responsible temps to go up, eventually turning our atmosphere in a heat house.
The proof comes from crooked model forecast that do not match up with real world observations. That’s it.
If we have one single report that clearly explains what other factors but Antrhopogenic CO2 are responsible for driving our climate, the warming and cooling, eliminating CO2 as a driver, we are on target.
Until know we have debunked all the exaggerated and alarmist claims without any exception.
But there is not a single report that describes the complete mechanism that drives our climate, involving the oceans, ENSO, Volcano emissions and our sun and leaves no room for CO2 forcing.
If we have it and methods and used data is “rock solid”, it will be the end of the hoax.
I have clearly listened to what President Obama said about the dangers that await us
if we don’t accept the Waxman Markley Bill and I listened to him when he stated that the G8 meeting agreed to a temperature limit of 2 degrees Celsius above pré Industrial average temperature.
There zero science in his remarks but alarmism and sheer madness.
We can do with a single good report all right.
Because the other side stands naked and razing mad.
We should exchange specifics and make the best possible report available.
No buts, no maybe’s, no “we have to research this or that”.
Just the facts, clear language and the best science, methods and data available.
I really believe that is all we need.
Basil (08:40:27) “[…] I.e., while differencing removes the differences in trend (to a constant), it still allows for measuring the correlations between the stationary components of the series. And frankly, if the purpose is to isolate the effect of “natural climate variability” then differencing the data to achieve stationarity makes a lot of sense to me.”
…and it’s not just the stationary components…
John S. (09:39:26) “Basil (07:03:25) is entirely correct, however, in pointing out that the first-difference series does not “remove” the “trend,” it produces a (quite variable) “constant.” AGWers love linear trends in data, because any two straight lines correlate perfectly, leaving the field open to all sorts of imputed causal connections. This analytic deficiency of regressional analysis of time series obscures the fact that the cross-spectral coherence with CO2 at the lowest frequencies that we can reasonably estimate from available records is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”
As always, thank you for your valuable comments John S.
I encourage you to drop a brief lesson on (multivariate) shared-variance sometime.
In reading the solar science & earth orientation parameter literature, I have noted a lack of awareness (even in authors considered “top of their field”) that:
1) the order in which one enters terms into a model affects the step-wise impact on r^2.
2) increases in r^2 (due to adding terms) aren’t always statistically significant. (If they were, we could just keep adding random terms.)
It’s like these experts have missed their fundamental schooling on confounding, F-tests, & partial-residuals. I’m not saying I blame them. There are a lot of bases to cover – and being at the front of one’s field generally entails sacrifice (e.g. time management). Still, we can all learn.
Thanks again for your valuable notes.
Another review
http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2009/07/surprising-conclusions-from.html
Stephen Wilde (10:09:01)
“When the oceans emit energy at a higher rate the equatorial air masses expand and all the air circulation systems move poleward.
When they emit energy at a lower rate everything moves back equatorward.”
–
This fits in nicely with what Erl Happ has to say over here:
http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/climate-change-a-la-naturale/
Thank you! Now when are articles like this going to share airtime on the networks?