Multiple Wrongs Don’t Make A Right on ENSO Impacts

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?

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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 …

M Jeff
Of course, it’s outrageous. It’s milking the taxpayer to holiday cruise under the guise of important government business. Throw the bums out. Make ’em pay it back!

I understood the exaggeration comment perfectly as it directed me to the underlying mechanisms of a La Nina SST condition or event or an oscillation. The mechanisms return to neutral and sometimes over-shoot to cold. Kind of like another on/not on mechanism we love to talk about here. This reminds me of the Sun’s coiled magnetic ropes (which lead to more spots) that sometimes uncoil to neutral and even over-shoot to lax (which leads to no spots). La Nina is a re-setting of an overly energized system filled with heat that cannot take any more heat.
Question: Why isn’t the cold condition the energized chaotic one that is frantically loosing heat, and when it relaxes the mechanisms return to neutral and start absorbing heat again, sometimes being so lazy that more than enough heat is absorbed?

Circling the waggons?
Circling the drain.

Once again, if you add two sources of heat to the globe, are they directly and simply additive? If heat from El Nino’s end up raising global temperatures, and then you add anthropogenic greenhouse heating, is it additive to the El Nino heat or buried by it with no additive affect at the temperature gauge?

Timetochooseagain: You wrote, “If El Ninos do have after effects…”
Significant El Nino events do have aftereffects. No if is required in your statement. Significant El Nino events cause lingering upward step changes in SST anomalies of the East Indian and West Pacific Oceans. These were discussed in detail in my posts “Can El Nino Events Explain All of the Global Warming Since 1976?” Parts 1 and 2:
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
The remainder of your comment appears to deal with the comparison of global temperature anomalies to a scaled running total of NINO3.4 SST anomalies that I included in my post on “The Reemergence Mechanism”:
http://i42.tinypic.com/iom6ab.jpg
That graph is from an earlier post. In it, I illustrated that global temperature anomalies can be reproduced using natural variables:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/01/reproducing-global-temperature.html
And I explained in detail the process I used to recreate the global temperature anomaly curve: multipliers, base years for anomalies, etc.
Regards.

So these “whos who” of climate scientists have basically pulled together a load of research papers that use different statistical tools and methods in order to write a refutation of another paper. And this is science how, exactly?
I mean, this any 3rd year undergraduate could do already.

Richard111: You wrote, “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
Richard, at present eastern equatorial Pacific SST anomalies are in El Nino ranges, not La Nina. These can be seen in a graph of NINO3.4 SST anomalies. The one that follows includes preliminary July 2009 data.
http://i31.tinypic.com/5f2e0o.png
It’s from this post:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/07/very-very-preliminary-july-2009-sst.html
Also the graph you’ve referred to on page 10 is the average subsurface temperature for the eastern equatorial Pacific that they title “Central & Eastern Pacific Upper-Ocean (0-300 m) Weekly Heat Content Anomalies.” It’s not a measure of El Nino or La Nina status.

Jimmy Haigh (07:27:28) :
Paul K (22:10:30) :
“…(the referees may have been selected by the authors).”
And this is rich!
The sad fact is that academic science is not what it used to be. They don’t make peers like they used to…
If you are not writing for a “leader” scientific magazine, it’s preferable to send your papers to an associated university and let the board to decide who the reviewers would be. It has a price tag, but it is highly valuable. You’ll never know who examined your paper.

M. Jeff (07:26:39) :
And that $500,000 will cost us $1.5T when they get done writing the bill over correcting a natural variance. The South Pole is uninhabitable and Coral Reef just grow in new places if the Sea Level rises, which as far as I can tell has not budged in 50 years. Historical photos compared to today don’t show it.
And this latest spiel on CNN: “South Cascade glacier in Washington and the Wolverine and Gulcana glaciers in Alaska. The three glaciers are considered “benchmarks” for the conditions of thousands of other glaciers because they’re in different climate zones and at various elevations.”
and…
“So we feel it’s definitely something going on, probably on a global scale, ”
Probably. There’s a $500 billion dollar word. Probably.
PolyScience want a Probably “faster than predicted” Glacier-Melt Cracker?
They will probably tack on another $500 billion in taxes, even though we have cleaned up our act but certain nations pollute & spill like they’re on a mission. So we are to pay for thier profit.

Paul K (22:10:30) : REPLY: Meanwhile they all ignore the trainwreck that is Steig Et al
The entry title says it all!!!!
Multiple Wrongs Don’t Make A Right

Paul K (21:57:35) :
……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?
First of all Paul, there never been a heating of dimensions told not in athmosphere nor have the ice sheets melted the way the so called scholars told nor have the waterlevels risen more than +1 cm, which btw is normal since the normal anual difference during a single year can show a difference, and so have done every single year since 1890, for +/- 1 meter….
No ice sheet melting the was the so called scholars told here and elsewhere? Well if you take into account reality which can’t be dismissed due to faked, yes faked, ‘corrections’ where assumed not real changes over daytime, weeks, months and years been put into computer models we do have real observations. Winsor P., Arctic Sea Ice Thickness Remained Constant During the 1990s, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 28, NO. 6, PAGES 1039-1041, MARCH 15, 2001
Apart from that…. false information been provided by the so called scholars regarding the temperatures in the Arctic past…
“There is a farm that already around mid 1300’s – was abandoned due to permafrost, which struck during the so-called. “Little Ice Age”. The farm is known as The Farm in the sand (also called GUS), has not been possible to dig out until the last 20 years of the 1900s when parts of the farm re-saved from the permafrost layer.
“Most of the Viking expansion took place during what scientist refer to as the dimatic optimum of the Medieval Warm Period dated ca, A.D. 800 to 1200 (Jones 1986: McGovern 1991); a general term for warm periods that reached chere optimum at different times
across the North Atlantic (Groves and Switsur 1991). During this time the niean annual temperature for southem Greenland was 1 to 3°C higher than today. sid 40 Julie Megan Ross, Paleoethnobotanical Investigation of Garden Under Sandet,
a Waterlogged Norse Farm Site. Western Settlement. Greenland (Kaiaallit Nunaata), University of Alberta, Department of Anthropology Edmonton. Alberta Fa11 1997″ ….. excerpts fromNorah4you page Miljöfrågan-‘Klimathotet’ (Miljöfrågan = eng. Environmental question; ‘Klimathotet’= ‘Climate threat’
If imput to support a theory/hypothesis isn’t worth a dime, how much do you think the rest of the analyse of such a theory is worth? Not to mention the conclusions drawn from such imput…..

Jimmy Haigh (07:27:28) :
replying to
Paul K (22:10:30) :
“…how a paper …got published in a peer reviewed journal. ”
Isn’t peer review one of the bastions of AGW? I’m thinking about hockey sticks – just as an example…
Actually peer review is one of the bastions of any science, including skeptical views on AGW. I have been looking for skeptical arguments that have withstood scientific scrutiny for the last several years, but to no avail. Most skeptical papers are shown to be incorrect in the peer review process. Occasionally, a skeptical paper gets published, either not peer reviewed (such as the Monckton paper last summer), or even rarer in a peer reviewed journal (Such as Gerlich and Tscheuschner paper last winter, or the MFC paper last month. Unfortunately, the conclusions in these papers didn’t survive widespread scientific scrutiny.
Monckton’s paper was debunked by many scientists, in particular Arthur Smith wrote a convincing rebuttal that he submitted to the APS for publication. On the WUWT posts last summer, Duae Quartunciae comments destroyed Monckton’s hypothesis.
G&T’s conclusions were widely attacked and wiped out. The most effective rebuttal that I read, was put together by a coalition of scientists working together on the internet, resulting in a submitted rebuttal available here:
http://rabett-run-labs.googlegroups.com/web/G%26T2.11.pdf?hl=en&gda=JoAP8z8AAADEUdes6psiZfp7tCY5Z2rJeSsAWGd7SgbzN_MZz4nAjJ44BYODPBG_uViJnpPh3QqccyFKn-rNKC-d1pM_IdV0
I highly recommend reading this paper, since the math and science in the paper should be within the reach of anyone holding an undergraduate degree in science or engineering.
The MFC paper is wiped out by the response submitted by the nine authors listed above.
Jimmy Haigh, please ask yourself, why is it than no significant skeptical talking points are surviving widespread scientific scrutiny? Any real skeptic, would be looking for the errors in Monckton, G&T, MFW, or for that matter, in Lindzen’s hypotheses.

But, the MJO activity is suppressed in El-Niño and La-Niña.
however is very active in neutral periods (almost always).
ENSO-neutral and La Niña. have different characteristics.

Bob Tisdale,
I understand your basic idea, that El Nino spreads stored heat out over a larger region and biases upward global temmperatures for years after a significant event. Some weeks ago I asked you on another forum about a potential feedback of El Nino in addition to this time/heat shifting tendency.
The feedback is thus: In addition to transporting stored heat, a significant El Nino must also humidify the atmosphere–perhaps over as large a region, or larger, than the 40% of the planet directly affected by enhanced surface water temperature. The effect of this could be quite complex, but imagine for a moment that the principle effect is to enhance the water vapor “greenhouse” effect. Thus in addition to time shifting previously stored energy, a powerful El Nino also enhances a forcing function temporarily–a positive feedback. Both effects, the direct and the feedback, will raise global temperature.
Twenty-five years ago Lorenz wrote a paper that discussed, among other topics, the effect that complex feedback of this sort has on observed global temperature. The time scales involved in coming back to equilibrium from an isolated impulse can exceed several hundred years, and Lorenz said specifically that observers could mistake the lengthy return to equilibrium for a secular change in climate.

WTH: You asked, “Bob – any plans on submitting your work for publication?”
No. I’m a blogger. I’ve been published. It was in a totally different field, decades ago. I’m retired now. I illustrate and discuss the variability of SST and other datasets at my website for fun. When scientific studies disagree with the data, I comment. This post was one of those comments.

So if the AGW hypothesis states that rising CO2 causes rising Global Mean Temperature, and real world data are contrary to that hypothesis, why does any of the above even have relevance? ENSO, El Nino, La Nina, etc. may be of great interest scientifically, yet none have any relevance to the primary hypothesis!
If hypothesis does not adhere to data, one is obliged to discard hypothesis and shut up!
…at least that was what I was taught when introduced to the Scientific Method of the Western World as a Freshman in High School in 1962. Was the Scientific Method repealed and I never heard about it? There are so many trees, we’ve forgotten where the forest was in the first place!

Richard M: You wrote, “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?”
I included a detailed description of El Nino events in the linked post “Regression Analyses Do Not Capture The Multiyear Aftereffects Of Significant El Nino Events”.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/07/regression-analyses-do-not-capture.html
Attached to that post was a link to Bill Kessler’s (NOAA) ENSO FAQ webpage:
http://faculty.washington.edu/kessler/occasionally-asked-questions.html
He writes, “Many scientists are coming to the view that there may not be such a thing as La Niña, or at least that it is not just the opposite of El Niño. Perhaps there is just the normal situation that is disturbed every few years by an El Niño. In that case the swinging back to cool temperatures should not be called La Niña but just plain normal.”
I expanded on that in my post “La Nina Events Are Not The Opposite Of El Nino Events.”
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/08/la-nina-events-are-not-opposite-of-el.html
Why did I expand on it? Because the global temperature response to La Nina events is not the same as it is to El Nino events, which is why regression analyses fail to capture the long-term effects of significant El Nino events. I guess I should have been clearer. I’ll have to add something to the version at my website to clarify that.
Thanks.

Re: Pamela Gray (10:02:03)
Keep in mind that confidence limits on regression lines are based on assumptions [that are untenable for most of the series we discuss around here (…even though the overwhelmingly-widespread convention is to simply ignore this – i.e. pretend otherwise in an effort to create some illusion of objectively quantitative reasoning)]. This contrasts with purely descriptive summaries (which make no assumptions). Variable-bandwidth smoothing percentiles would be a sensible empirical means of addressing your concern, but as we know, critics love pretending smoothing is bad in all contexts […so using smoothing (appropriately) can be a recipe for getting sucked into (ridiculous) protracted arguments]. Practical issues aside, you raise a good point [that underscores the need for a more efficient education system].

“G. Foster, J. D. Annan, P. D. Jones, M. E. Mann, B. Mullan, J. Renwick, J. Salinger, G. A. Schmidt, and K. E. Trenberth”
I can’t tell. Is that a list of the authors, or the Top 10 Worst Scienctists Ever?

Bob Tisdale
You said
matt v.: Regarding your 07:10:20 comment, can you graph what you’ve done? Posting all those numbers is confusing.
Bob , I don’t have a graph but here is what my earlier number reflected. If the temperature anomaly for say 1976 is [-0.254 C] and if the temperature anomaly for 1977, an El Nino year, is + 0 .063 C, there is a net temperature gain of + 0.317 C. If you do this for all 9 EL Ninos between JAN 1977 and Dec ember 2008 and add these nine anomaly increases together you get a total of 0.990 C. This is measure of total anomaly increases during El Nino years. If you do the same for the 5 La Nina years you get a total reduction of 0.5 C. There was net increase in global temperature anomalies. I also show other heating and cooling factors. I showed how the cooler anomaly of 1976 morphed into the warmer 2008 anomaly.
One of the key reasons for Global warming seems to be the net temperature increases due to extra heating resulting from more frequent El Ninos and extra solar heating around solar maximums. This heating was greater than the global cooling during La Ninas and other causes. It should be noted that these temperature anomaly changes are net increases during El Ninos/ La Ninas and Solar Maximums and naturally incorporate the heating/ cooling from other separate causes like AMO and other SST warming, etc., which are more difficult to measure.
If you have a house and your furnace is on twice as much and some time at higher settings as your air conditioning, naturally your house is going to get warmer than normal
SOURCES
Enso events
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensoyears.shtml
Hadcrut3 temperature anomalies
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt

Nasif Nahle Sensei (12:32:35) : “Sorry for my ignorance… What the phrase “beating a dead horse” does mean and when does it apply? Thanks!”
In the sense used in this post the ‘dead horse’ is something already laid to rest and need not be discussed again.
However, the term has an historical meaning from the time of sailors being hauled out of bars dead-drunk after the captain’s mate paid off the poor man’s bar bill – euphemistically called the ‘dead horse.’ The recruited sailor then had to work for two weeks or so until he had “paid off the dead horse.” Well out to sea by then the sailors would have a ceremony to mark the date they actually began making wages. A canvas and straw horse figure would be raise out over the water and cut loose. Some say these floating false-dead-horses became the source of the name “the horse latitudes” although there are other well know possibilities.
Here is an introduction:
http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/sea-shanty/Dead_Horse.htm

Pierre Gosselin (03:40:54) :
Hurricane Season indeed !
Just watched the weather channel, and they were saying how there have been no named storms this year (or one?) and that folks should be reminded of the year that that ended with a monster hurricane. Be afraid, be very very afraid.
They then zoomed in on the awful heat in Chicago where one person died of a heart attack, with no word to rule out the possiblity that it was HEAT related.

Fernando (12:23:32) “But, the MJO activity is suppressed in El-Niño and La-Niña. however is very active in neutral periods (almost always). ENSO-neutral and La Niña. have different characteristics.”
Thanks for this note.
Can you provide links &/or references?
– –
Dave Andrews (11:40:23) “I’ve made a number of comments on different threads at Tamino relating to Steig et al and their corrigendum. None have been posted.”
I’ve encountered the same reaction (on another topic) despite objectivity coupled with genuine diplomacy. I honestly think he has a great sense of humor, judging by how thickly he lays on the distortion.

Frank Mosher: “Contrary ro conventional wisdom, when i look at ENSO 3.4 anomalies over the last 25 years, what jumps out at me is the very deep, prolonged La Nina of JJA 1998 thru JFM 2001. IMHO, that event is very significant. TLT temps also bottomed at that time, and have not cooled beyond those levels. Apparently i am the only person on the planet that sees that string of 35 months of continuous negative anomalies as significant.”
But that string of 35 months of continuous negative NINO3.4 SST anomalies has little apparent impact on the tropical heat that migrated to the mid-to-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Refer to the top cell:
http://i44.tinypic.com/16leq39.jpg
Since it had little apparent impact on the TLT of the mid-to-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, why is it significant?

If we consider the past 100 years, for which reasonable temperature data is availabe, a plot of global fossil fuel consumption shows about a 1200% increase in the rate of rise, after 1945. However, the rate of of global temperature increase between 1910 and 1940 is about twice as high as the period from 1945 to today.
How on earth could anyone possibly conclude from the graphs of fossil fuel use and global temperature that:
“the general rise in temperatures over the 2nd half of the 20th century is very likely predominantly due to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.” ????
If anything, one might conclude that fossil fuel use has decreased the rate of global temperature increase … not that any correlation implies causation.

Paul Vaughan (13:25:25) :
Paul K (11:18:42) “Well, if the math was done correctly, the actual impact of SOI on global temperature variation is less than 4%.”
LMAO! Are you going to provide a link to help people see exactly where you are getting such comical distortion?
I provided the link to the analysis in the comment above. Please read more carefully before you laugh so hard your anatomy is damaged.
In the Trenberth rebuttal, they refer to papers that claim 15-30% of variation is due to ENSO, still significantly less than the 72% claimed by MFC. If I understand correctly, these numbers excluded impacts of volcanic eruptions.
Tamino left the volcanic eruption impacts in, and then stuck to a proper mathematical treatment based on the method suggested by MFC (which still isn’t likely to give the best estimate of ENSO impacts). He simply also ran an example where he looked at SOI, volcanoes, and a LT warming trend together, and still came up well below the 72% number MFC claimed.
“It turns out that all three influences combined account for only 51% of the variance in UAH TLT. Even including the effect of volcanoes and trend in addition to SOI, the actual fraction of explained variance is far less than that estimated by McLean et al. and claimed to be entirely due to SOI — that’s how strongly the filter they apply to the data distorts the results.”

matt v. (13:30:09) “One of the key reasons for Global warming seems to be the net temperature increases due to extra heating resulting from more frequent El Ninos and extra solar heating around solar maximums.”
Be careful with the latter line of logic. (You may need to adjust your message)…
Elaboration:
See Figures 7 & 8 here:
Abarca del Rio, R.; Gambis, D.; Salstein, D.; Nelson, P.; & Dai, A. (2003). Solar activity and earth rotation variability. Journal of Geodynamics 36, 423-443.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/Abarca_delRio_etal_JGeodyn03.pdf
…And Figure 3 here:
Keeling, C. D. & Whorf, T. P. (1997). Possible forcing of global temperature by the oceanic tides. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 94(16), 8321-8328.
http://www.pnas.org/content/94/16/8321.full.pdf?ijkey=YjbRA3bMQaGic
Theories should be able to account for the phase reversal. I haven’t seen any that do yet. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.
This is not some trivial matter that can be swept under a rug; on the contrary, this is a MAIN effect demanding TOP priority.
Paradox is what makes natural climate so interesting; it stretches our capacity for conditional thinking.

OK; Pamela….I agree.
Vertical wind profile typically associated with (a) inactive Atlantic basin hurricane seasons and (b) active Atlantic basin hurricane seasons. Note that (b) has reduced levels of vertical wind shear.
the Atlantic Main Development Region (MDR) from 10-20°N, 20-70°W
http://img91.imageshack.us/img91/921/windc.png

matt v.: Thanks for the clarification in your 13:30:09 reply.
But adding and subtracting temperature anomalies during El Nino and La Nina years on the ONI index neglects the effects the tropical Pacific is having during the years and months in between. You need to look at all the data. You’re also overlooking the effects of volcanic aerosols which counteracted at least two of those El Nino events.
You wrote, “One of the key reasons for Global warming seems to be the net temperature increases due to extra heating resulting from more frequent El Ninos and extra solar heating around solar maximums.”
But the difference between TSI levels at solar maximums is minimal and has a negligible effect on global temperature. You’re also overlooking solar minimums and the periods in between for some reason.

Bob Tisdale (14:19:52) “[…] that string of 35 months of continuous negative NINO3.4 SST anomalies […] had little apparent impact on the TLT of the mid-to-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, why is it significant?”
10 metres of snow makes for a lot of avalanches (including in places where they do not normally happen) in the Coast Mountains …and that’s a lot of runoff (floods, water supply). i.e. Let’s not forget the hydrologic cycle.

Paul Vaughan
Thanks for the references . You are referring to the fact that the association between solar variability and climate is lagged and that there is also an oceanic tidal influence on global temperatures . I did not look into this level of detail . As I used a broad recent 33 year period , some of this may be already be incorporated in my numbers , but you are right that individual short term relationships may not all be valid . I was trying to make the point about the doubling of El Nino events compared to La Nina events especially when compared to a similar period just before 1976. This is just too significant to ignore.

Pamela Gray (14:30:19) “So it does seem to me that La Nina is the energetic state and El Nino is the resting state while the batteries are being recharged. Comments?”
I think I see what is going on here: oceanic-centric view vs. atmosphere-centric view (i.e. 2 ways of looking at the same thing).
For an interesting brain-twister, study Erl Happ’s Figure 4 & related notes (including the whole article) here:
http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/climate-change-a-la-naturale/
–
Bob, thanks for the videos on your blog pages.
Question:
Do you know of any webpages providing:
1) unsmoothed monthly TNI series?
[The series I find via your blog-links suggests the authors only provide a 5-month smoothed series (which severely limits a responsible analyst).]
2) raw (not anomaly) monthly Nino1+2?
[Your blog links point to raw N4 (& N3.4), so with N1+2 I can construct unsmoothed TNI if necessary.]
It is interesting to note that the period of relatively mild & anomalous polar motion (Vondrak 1999) roughly coincides with the period of reduced volcanic aerosols. (I’m not making any statements about causation – just pointing out something we might keep in mind.)

Toto (10:40:33) :
Regarding citations in science, read this article in the Guardian about bad science with AGW and IPCC in mind:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/08/ben-goldacre-bad-science-research
“Hit and myth: curse of the ghostwriters”
The article in Toto’s link references a study titled “How citation distortions create unfounded authority: analysis of a citation network” by Steven A Greenberg, a professor of neurology at Harvard. IMHO, this is a landmark study. He focuses on the medical field, but the results apply to any field. Please read the entire study (or at least the abstract) at:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/339/jul20_3/b2680
From the Conclusions section:
“Through distortions in its social use that include bias, amplification, and invention, citation can be used to generate information cascades resulting in unfounded authority of claims.”
The findings of this study have profound implications. Note how those findings support some of the conclusions made in the Wegman Report, especially the one about the impact of a “social network of authorships.”

rbateman (14:12:54) :
Pamela Gray (13:06:35) :
Yep, we got a dozen record low maximum on the 6th and two more yesterday (7th). Ground is soaked down a foot here. All that heat got blown off into space. I never though of Tstorms that way before. Long range forecast is all downhill from here. 1 heat wave of 2 weeks maybe 1 or 2 max-max records broken in the state (Ca.) . We wuz robbed, I tell ya.
Winter looks to be a doozy, Pam. I have to wear a sweater in the morning, in early August.
Agreed to both. Long Range forecast is cooler and wetter than normal.I live near the foothills in South LaGrande, Or.My Black Locust is turning and there is reddish leaves showing at the tops of what hills I see. Going to the Coast for business (Coos Bay)
It will be interesting to see if there is ANY sign of El Nino-I know a bunch of Coasties and Commercial Fishermen.They called the big Nino of ’97/98 before NOAA.If I have time, I’ll see my old ret.Coastie CPO friend who still fishes and works the USCG Aux. he keeps up with the Crabbasket scuttlebutt.(theCrabbasket is one of those places where if a meteor hit Charleston harbor a 5:00 am there wouldn’t be a
Crabber or Fisherman left…
Bob Tisdale (13:34:08) :
Thanks Bob, I have 500 quatloos riding on a weak to moderate Nino with and
an extra 200 riding it being neutral before the end of the year.This with a Warmist in my office who says that NOAA’s Nino earlier forecast is correct…
-And ABC News…

Regarding Dr. A.’s post above. Here is global CO2 emissions from human activities for 20th century.
http://www.mongabay.com/images/2006/graphs/co2_global_1750-2000.jpg
1200 million Metric tons in 1950 versus over 700 million Metric tons now.
This leads to CO2 being the “Houdini of Gases”.
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/pdf/Carbon_Dioxide_The_Houdini_of_Gases.pdf
And it all leads back to this extremely “simplistic” diagram which is at the hear of the matter. Forget about all the complexities discussed above. Because if this doesn’t make complete and total sense, then nothing else is right. (scroll 1/3rd down)
http://www.eia.doe.gov/bookshelf/brochures/greenhouse/Chapter1.htm
The theory that 50% of man-made CO2 is taken back by a sink, just doesn’t make sense. It is a completely made up fictitious number that was created to make the parts fit, and they still don’t fit.

I am not climate scientist but, to me this is an interesting way of looking at things.
Use the HADCRUT3 data from 1938-1979 and then use the UAH data from 1979-1998. (does not include the 1998 El Nino data).
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1938/to:1979/mean:12/plot/uah/from:1979/to:1998/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1938/to:1979/trend/plot/uah/from:1979/to:1998/trend
50 years of man-made CO2 skyrocking, and the Hadley data is in a slight downtrend from 38-78. Then pick up in 1979 with the more accurate satellite temps and that data continues to show a only very slight uptrend.
Certainly these 50 years of skyrocketing emissions are NOTHING remarkable WHATSOEVER in the history of temperature change in our planet.
But then we get to 1998 something happened and why would it be CO2 when CO2 had little or not effect for the prior 50 years? And if it didn’t have any effect from 1938-1997, then how could it be responsible for the rise from 1910-1940?? And so you are going to tell me it was ALL “natural variability”, except for this big step up in 1998, and the TV tells me the glaciers are melting and that proves it??? Temperatures haven’t even risen in many places where the glaciers are rising, like Glacier National Park.
Here is the step, the big whoop of climate change.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/to:2009/plot/uah/from:1998/to:2009/trend/plot/uah/from:1979/to:1997/trend
more – El Nino drives Global Temperature and global fleecing.
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GlobalElNino.htm
And don’t forget about Alaska step up around 1997, was that CO2??
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.html
We can only hope this will fade and recalled like a bad dream someday!

Bob Tisdale, thanks for your many posts here and on your own site. Who needs peer reviewed journals? Many are not enhancing the reputation of the scientific method — they are crony publishing, with sloppy mathematics, methods, and data — and no one is checking. They used to be “prestigious” but are now becoming laughable.
The consistent building of scientific knowledge about ocean temperature and “behavior “, out in the open with many critics and assistant thinkers, is a remarkable scientific achievement. Anthony knows a fellow venturer into the heretofore unknown. I am a grateful and faithful reader.

Bob Tisdale (00:56:20) :
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
Actually, I was not speaking of global temps- rather the conditions of the event. My fault for not making that clear. I have always wondered how heat dissipates in the oceans.

@Bob Tisdale
Thanks a lot for the explanation! Some people don’t read well the articles and, what is worst, don’t understand a word from those articles or give opinions without knowing what’s the main arguments in the articles.

My comment regarding the modeling paradigm presented in the 2001 paper on volcanic/ENSO forcing:
With all due respect:
Get Real.

Bob Tisdale
I think I qualified my figures with a comment ” very quick analysis” . not a detailed analysis that you are suggesting . I did include Mt Pinatubo . I also qualified my comments subsequently that I used the “net’ effect of all causes by noting the actual temperature changes due to all causes. I just wanted to note that during the last 9 El Nino events , the global temperature anomalies went up in 9 steps and during the last 5 L a Nina events the global temperature anomalies went down in 5 steps . In my opinion , this could account for a significant part of the warming that took place This is more than just coincidence. If anyone can give a better detail analysis and explanation , i would be pleased to read it. I don’t have a problem with the concept that EL Nino events impact a longer period than their main event but the main event can still be very significant which is what I noted.

Steve Hempell (16:58:21) :
“Actually Dr A Burns, you are correct. I went back to a Hadcrutv3 graph and took the anomalies for 1911(-.573) to 1944 (0.099) and 1945 (-0.024) to 1998 (0.526) and the rates of change are as you stated. Interesting way of looking at it, but – I can hear the cries of “cherry-picking”!”
One could hardly be accused of cherry picking if one compares the first half of the century (representing a period of low CO2 emissions) with the second half (representing the modern world of high emissions). Interestingly, the Hadcrut3 trend for both is 0.1K/decade.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1950/to:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1950/to:2000
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1900/to:1950/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1900/to:1950

“Peer review” was created for one purpose, and one purpose only – to protect the reputation of the journal and its editor of the day. Since journal editors and editorial boards were sufficiently astute to recognize that they were not experts in every field, they needed a mechanism to protect themselves from ridicule and other political, personal, and financial consequences of the printing of a paper that was either a fraud, charlatan, or just plain wacky. Hence, papers were farmed out to known (ie, trusted) colleagues or contacts to pass judgment on the acceptability of publishing the paper. It also was a means to favour certain groups and individuals with advanced knowledge of new discoveries of some import.
The rather silly idea grabbed by lay folk today that “peer review” is some kind of acid test to the science presented is just that – a silly idea. Preservation of reputation is what it always was about, and still is.
There is more substantive peer review occurring in one week here on Anthony’s blog than what occurs in a year at Nature, or any other journal.

Re: Bob Tisdale (02:29:26)
Thanks Bob.
I have to use no fewer than 22 websites to get all of the data & info I need to reconstruct the raw monthly series accurately.
These institutions really need to get past these habits of:
a) only providing anomalies.
b) not being explicit about climatologies & base periods when only anomalies are provided.
c) chopping series at arbitrary dates like 1950 & 1991 (when 1866-2009 are available).
d) scrimping on decimal places for cosmetic reasons.
e) smoothing monthly data before posting it …and additionally still labeling it [misleadingly] “monthly”.
I’ve just consumed precious time pursuing tedious detective work (including splicing & cross-comparisons between files to discern exactly what processing has been carried out) and it is going to take yet more time to reconstruct high-quality raw series now that all of the necessary clues have been gathered.
Very Serious [rhetorical] Question:
Why can’t these institutions simply be straightforward in providing raw data (with all of the digits) on a plain-text webpage?
That way if people want to sloppily construct unspecified anomalies, apply unspecified filtering, and chop series into random fragments to be scattered all over the net, they can do so themselves – efficiently.
We have inherited ridiculously inefficient & backward conventions.

I’ve been digging into the references on “COWL” (cold oceans – warm land). In attacking McLean et al. (2009), Foster et al. (2009) cite Thompson et al. (2008) who cite Wallace et al. (1995) who make a statement that supports McLean et al. (2009). Wallace et al. (1995) acknowledge right in their abstract that ENSO has contributed to an upward trend in temperature anomalies since 1975. Interesting …as is this COWL concept.

I’ve just spent some time investigating the Trans-Nino Index (TNI). It is easy to see why the originators employ 5-month smoothing. With raw series, this index can easily be improved substantially. So now the question is: Why is full-record-length raw-data not easily-accessible? It appears that more time-consuming digging & auditing will be necessary. (It’s like these agencies are going well out-of-their-way to make it a hassle for us to see something…)

http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ClimateRegimeChangePoints.PNG

In Foster et al.’s (2009) attack on McLean et al. (2009) they cite Thompson et al. (2008).
Thompson et al. (2008):
“~100 Hiroshima-sized explosions are predicted to lead to a global-mean cooling of ~1.25C (ref. 5) […] 5. Robock, A. et al. Climatic consequences of regional nuclear conflicts. Atmos. Chem. Phys. 7, 2003-2012 (2007).”
How many animals will die?
How many trees will die?
]’: