Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
Multiple Wrongs Don’t Make A Right, Especially When It Comes To Determining The Impacts Of ENSO
This post does not discuss the analysis by Carter et al nor does it examine the methods used by Foster et al to critique it. This post lists the papers cited by Foster et al that determine “the connection between ENSO and large-scale temperature variability, particularly with regard to the role of ENSO in any long-term warming trends, that has been carried out over the past two decades,” and discusses the errors that are common to those papers.
THE PAPERS CITED BY FOSTER ET AL
Jones, P.D., (1989), The influence of ENSO on global temperatures, Climate Monitor, 17, 80–89.
(I have not found a link to this paper. Since I haven’t read it, I can’t comment about it. It is, therefore, excluded from my post.)
Santer, B.D., Wigley, T.M.L., Doutriaux, C., Boyle, J.S., Hansen, J.E., Jones, P.D., Meehl, G.A., Roeckner, E., Sengupta, S., and Taylor K.E. (2001), Accounting for the effects of volcanoes and ENSO in comparisons of modeled and observed temperature trends, J. Geophys. Res., 106, 28033–28059.
Link:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/2001_Santer_etal.pdf
Thompson, D. W. J., J. J. Kennedy, J. M. Wallace, and P. D. Jones (2008), A large discontinuity in the mid-twentieth century in observed global-mean surface temperature, Nature, 453, 646–650, doi:10.1038/nature06982.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7195/abs/nature06982.html
Trenberth, K.E., J.M.Caron, D.P.Stepaniak, and S.Worley, (2002), Evolution of El Nino-Southern Oscillation and global atmospheric surface temperatures, J. Geophys. Res., 107 (D8), 4065, doi:10.1029/2000JD000298
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/papers/2000JD000298.pdf
Wigley, T. M. L. (2000), ENSO, volcanoes, and record-breaking temperatures, Geophysical Res. Lett., 27, 4101–4104.ENSO, volcanoes and record‐breaking temperatures
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2000/2000GL012159.shtml
COMMON ERRORS IN PAPERS CITED BY FOSTER ET AL
The authors of the papers used different statistical tools and ENSO indices to remove the ENSO signal from Global Temperature and TLT records, and they all failed to account for the multiyear aftereffects of significant El Nino events. This was discussed in detail in my post “Regression Analyses Do Not Capture The Multiyear Aftereffects Of Significant El Nino Events”. That post also appeared at WattsUpWithThat as “Why regression analysis fails to capture the aftereffects of El Nino events.” The post included a detailed discussion of the processes that take place before, during, and after significant El Nino events under the heading “EL NINO OVERVIEW”.
That overview was supplemented by my post “La Nina Events Are Not The Opposite Of El Nino Events.” Briefly, a La Nina event is an exaggeration of ENSO-neutral conditions that occurs when the coupled ocean-atmosphere processes attempt to return to “normal” after a traditional El Nino.
The statistical techniques used in the papers cited by Foster et al also do not address the differences between traditional El Nino events and El Nino Modoki. El Nino Modoki events were discussed in my posts “There Is Nothing New About The El Nino Modoki” and “Comparison of El Nino Modoki Index and NINO3.4 SST Anomalies.”
And the papers that Foster et al cite do not account for “The Reemergence Mechanism,” which should integrate the effects of ENSO events.
ALSO IN PREPRINT RELEASE: THOMPSON ET AL (2009) REPEATS THE ERROR
The 2009 Thompson et al paper “Identifying signatures of natural climate variability in time series of global-mean surface temperature: Methodology and Insights” has been accepted for publication by the Journal of Climate. In it, Thompson et al repeat the errors made by Thompson et al 2008.
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2009JCLI3089.1
Preprint Version:
http://www.atmos.colostate.edu/ao/ThompsonPapers/TWJK_JClimate2009_revised.pdf
Thompson et al were kind enough to post the data that resulted from their analyses for those who like to review findings:
http://www.atmos.colostate.edu/~davet/ThompsonWallaceJonesKennedy/
CLOSING
As long as climate scientists continue to neglect the multiyear aftereffects of significant El Nino events, they will continue to incorrectly conclude, as Foster et al concludes, “the general rise in temperatures over the 2nd half of the 20th century is very likely predominantly due to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.”
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“…was written by a who’s who of climate scientists. The authors include G. Foster, J. D. Annan, P. D. Jones, M. E. Mann, B. Mullan, J. Renwick, J. Salinger, G. A. Schmidt, and K. E. Trenberth.”
Circling the waggons?…
So, a ‘la nina’ event will not take us from neutral to cool because it can only take us from warm to neutral?
Bob Tisdale- Could you please provide a list of published papers that support the hypothesis you raised in your previous post, and discussed again in this post?
I am troubled by the heat balance considerations of the hypothetical ENSO causation of planetary heating.
Where is the additional heat coming from? We know heated the oceans heated over the last 30 years (as evidenced by sea level rise due to thermal expansion). And over the same period the atmosphere heated and ice sheets melted, albeit using less heat input than ocean heating. So where did all this heat come from?
Thanks, Bob T.
The rapid response times by you and others on these sorts of papers is extremely helpful.
Over the past several months links have been given to the video of Richard Feynman talking about how an honest scientist would list all the issues that were contrary to her or his current theory. In the current instances these authors should know about “the multiyear aftereffects of significant El Nino events” and either they don’t know or are ignoring this information.
The “wrongs” just keep piling up.
Jimmy Haigh, if you read the comments, you will see that they demolished the McClain, de Freitas, and Carter paper conclusions. After reading the rebuttal by these nine climate scientists, then please read the MF&C press release (available right here on another post on WUWT), in light of the rebuttal.
You will see MF&C managed to get a paper published that reached unsupported conclusions, then hyped the results even further in the press release. It really is a very sad story of how a paper (that made mistakes evident to even first year calculus students) got published in a peer reviewed journal. The evidence seems to be that the fix was in (the referees may have been selected by the authors).
You can read about serious problems with the paper at Deep Climate, Real Climate, Tamino, Open Mind, Climate Progress and many other sites on the net.
REPLY: Meanwhile they all ignore the trainwreck that is Steig Et al
If El Ninos do have after effects, I have to doubt that the best way to capture them is integration over an ever growing time span. Bob, it seems you model assumes that the El Nino’s back in the beginning of the time series have as much importance as recent El Nino’s-that seems far fetched to me. It might make more sense to have a function which slowly fades the influence of past El Ninos out of the sum.
And another thing-you have to be very careful that you have the anomalies properly centered. Otherwise you can get spurious long term trends. The methodology you are using just seems rather odd to me and I don’t fully understand what you did-I suspect that it may be partly me being clueless. However it still strikes me as a very silly bit of bad math.
If that’s the case, it’s up to other forces to take us out of warp heat. It has been warmer and colder in past ages, and man wasn’t around to blame.
Perhaps the dinosaurs ate too much vegetation and doomed themselves, like man is supposed to be overheating the Earth.
We could manage to nuke ourselves out, invent diseases that destroy all but insects and bacteria, but what’s the chance of us overheating the Entire planet with fossilized vegetation that partly captured the stored carbon from a hundred million years ago?
How much carbon dioxide is there available for us to release? Could we get within half of the highest previous total?
When we run out of fossil fuels, it’s back to the Stone Age.
Let’s see how quickly the journal publishes a comment on the comment. Actually, isn’t it usual for the author of a paper being critiqued to be invited to respond to a comment so they can be published together?
Totally agree…You have to ignore the oceans cancellation of the solar activity increase from 1945-1960, in order to make the temp increase since 1980 anthropogenic…
Just keep moving…eyes in front…good little sheep. Just buy into our new deficit reduction program…there you go…green jobs for all.
Thanks for this clarification, I have long suspected that the Greenstrife and Fiends of the Earth ‘science’ is flawed and biased to provide the answers they want to maintain the hysteria they feed on in public ignorance.
I’m no statistician, but I am all too aware of just how easily they can misrepresent data if taken in solation or, as in the climate debate, used selectively and excluding (And sometimes suppressing) any which do not support the argument being advanced.
Now that it has become a political agenda of course, we may expect to see the sort of bullying tactics deployed against anyone who dares to attempt to break ranks and raise the issues which counter the newspeak “truth” that politicians seem to specialise in.
Y.H. Zhou, D.W. Zheng, & X.H. Liao (2001). Wavelet analysis of interannual LOD, AAM, and ENSO: 1997-98 El Nino and 1998-99 La Nina signals. Journal of Geodesy 75, 164-168.
http://www.shao.ac.cn/yhzhou/ZhouYH_2001JG_LOD_ENSO_wavelet.pdf
alt:
http://202.127.29.4/yhzhou/ZhouYH_2001JG_LOD_ENSO_wavelet.pdf
Monahan, A.H.; & Dai, A. (2004). The spatial and temporal structure of ENSO nonlinearity. Journal of Climate 17, 3026-3036.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/MonahanDai_JC04.pdf
par5: You wrote, “So, a ‘la nina’ event will not take us from neutral to cool because it can only take us from warm to neutral?”
Not even close to a rewording of what I wrote. My sentence about La Ninas in the post , “a La Nina event is an exaggeration of ENSO-neutral conditions that occurs when the coupled ocean-atmosphere processes attempt to return to ‘normal’ after a traditional El Nino,” pertained to trade winds, currents, etc., in the tropical Pacific, not the impact of a La Nina on global temperature. It is explained in detail in the linked post. Here’s the link again:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/08/la-nina-events-are-not-opposite-of-el.html
Regards
Foster, G; Annan, J.D.; Jones, P.D.; Mann, M.E.; Renwick, J.; Salinger, J.; Schmidt, G.A.; & Trenberth, K.E. (2009). Comment on “Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature” by J. D. McLean, C. R. de Freitas, and R. M. Carter. Journal of Geophysical Research (submitted Aug. 2009).
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/Foster_et%20alJGR09_formatted.pdf
Yes but Foster et al basically recanted their results here and elsewhere when they admitted that their paper did not study temperature trends, only variability.
You’re beating a dead horse.
Steve McIntyre has just written up posts about faulty papers by Steig and Rahmstorf. I get the feeling these papers intentionally bend data to get the results and headlines they want. John Hultquist is correct in saying these papers be reviwed and corrected as quickly as possible.
By the way, lest we’ve all forgotten, it is hurricane season. It really is, though you may not have noticed.
Any chance of getting a post about this year’s hurricane season?
The 2009 Foster et al paper (In Press) “Comment on ‘Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature’ by J. D. McLean, C. R. de Freitas, and R. M. Carter” was written by a who’s who of climate scientists. The authors include G. Foster, J. D. Annan, P. D. Jones, M. E. Mann, B. Mullan, J. Renwick, J. Salinger, G. A. Schmidt, and K. E. Trenberth. Their comment is summarized by a sentence in the abstract: “Their [McLean, Freitas, and Carter’s] analysis is incorrect in a number of ways, and greatly overstates the influence of ENSO on the climate system.”
**************************************
Thanks to those who continue to read and comment on these reports.
I can no longer be bothered to read anything by Jones, Mann, Schmidt or Trenberth.
As Steve McIntyre has demonstrated, you can burn an incredible amount of time uncovering the flaws in their analyses.
For me, these people have lost all credibility and I no longer waste any time on them.
Sorry to be so negative, but time is irreplaceable.
“Briefly, a La Nina event is an exaggeration of ENSO-neutral conditions that occurs when the coupled ocean-atmosphere processes attempt to return to “normal” after a traditional El Nino.”
I’m not in disagreement with the overall opinion presented here. However, this comment appears to me to be strange. Is there some reason to express La Nina this way vs. giving the situation more weight? As long as it can be defined what’s the problem with calling it a unique event?
As an amateur, I could ‘sense’ a ‘multi-year delayed after-effect’ of high solar output in the apparent temperature records since 1800.
That’s not science, that’s a hunch.
Is there any scientific confirmation/refutation of that possibility out there?
The current La Nina seems to have peaked June/July and is now dropping.
See page 10 of PDF below:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
Bob, I think this kind of critique of the critique should also be sent in quickly to counter the who’s-who of climate science’s piling on in this fashion. Just their names alone are sufficient for a pass by the peerage and there won’t be any consideration of content and the wider audience will just accept it most likely.
Bob Tisdale
I have done a very quick analysis of the impact of El Ninos and La Ninas on global temperature anomalies . I have not read all the papers that you quoted but are they saying that this type of analysis is not valid?
PERIOD JAN/1977- DEC/2008
Temperature increases
Number of El Nino events 9
Sum of all temperature anomaly increases during El Ninos 0.990 C
Number of solar maximums 3 [2000, 1989, 1979]
Sum of all temperature anomaly increases around solar max 0.318C
Total temperature anomaly increases 0.990+ 0.318= 1.308 C
NOTE
1] There have been temperature anomaly increases immediately after a solar maximum for 8 0f the last 11 solar maximums]
2] Mount Pinatubo effect is included here [- 0.193C] for 1991-1992 El Nino.
3] 2005 -2006 El Nino also [-0.060 C]
Temperature decreases
Number of La Nina events 5
Sum of all temperature anomaly decreases during to La Ninas 0.500C
Sum of other temperature anomaly decreases due other causes 0.233C
[1981-1982, 1977-1978, 1990-1991]
Total temperature anomaly decreases 0.500 +0.233= 0 .733C
NET CHANGE 1.308- 0.733 = 0.575C
EXPECTED ANOMALY -0.254 + 0.575= 0.321C
[1976 anomaly plus net changes]
ACTUAL TEMPERATURE ANOMALY 2008 0.325C [OK]
I used hadcrut3 global annual temperature anomalies for the analysis
“Pierre Gosselin (03:40:54) :
By the way, lest we’ve all forgotten, it is hurricane season. It really is, though you may not have noticed.
Any chance of getting a post about this year’s hurricane season?”
According to Gore and every other alarmist I’ve spoken to says it’ll be worse than 2005 (And 2006 and 2007 and 2008) and Katrina. Of course, these people forget, or don’t know, the region Katrina struck is a flood plain, New Orleans is placed in a “flood” basin and is “proptected” from floods from the Mississippi by levees, poorly made as it turns out. But, AGW is the cause and the blame.
I wonder when Naples being swamped by Vesuvious, like Pompei, will be blamed on AWG?
Reply: there was one a few days ago, search for ACE is search box or look at hurricane tag category
AnonyMoose (22:47:10) :
“Let’s see how quickly the journal publishes a comment on the comment. Actually, isn’t it usual for the author of a paper being critiqued to be invited to respond to a comment so they can be published together?”
What about Bob? If his writeups are as significant as he says then it seems to me they should either be submitted as comment to this or better yet as articles by their own right.
Bob – any plans on submitting your work for publication?
Off topic, but for all you AGW skeptics, here is incontrovertible proof that “climate change” is a very costly problem.
From: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124967502810515267.html
Lawmakers’ Global-Warming Trip Hit Tourist Hot Spots
When 10 members of Congress wanted to study climate change, they did more than just dip their toes into the subject: They went diving and snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef. They also rode a cable car through the Australian rain forest, visited a penguin rookery and flew to the South Pole. …
… The 11-day trip — with six spouses traveling along as well — took place over New Year’s 2008. …
… Flight costs would lift the total tab to more than $500,000 …