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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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
JImmy Haigh wonders why peer reviewed paper can be criticized. Well, peer review usually will filter the really bad papers, and leave the substantial papers for the broad scientific community to consider. Occasionally papers that make mistakes in their work slip through. But rarely do papers that are so mistake ridden and easily debunked as the MF&C paper.
Look at the big conclusion in the MF&C paper, that 72% of variation in the global temperature anomaly (as measured by UAH TLT) is due to SOI (the metric they choose to represent the ENSO)… To put this in lay terms that anyone should understand, they are claiming that 72% of the changes in global temperatures can be explained by the El Nino cycle.
Well, if the math was done correctly, the actual impact of SOI on global temperature variation is less than 4%. Very big oops, that!
(Of course Bob Tisdale’s post above attempts to go beyond the methodology of MF&C to show a larger ENSO impact, but this isn’t in the MF&C paper.)
For those interested, the analysis is here, with an excerpt below:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/influence-of-the-southern-oscillation-on-tropospheric-temperature/
Yet in their recent paper, McLean et al. (2009) did exactly that. They removed the influence of volcanoes by simply removing data which they suspected coincided with the influence of volcanoes. They suppressed random noise by taking 12-month moving averages. And they eliminated man-made global warming by taking differences between values 12 months apart, which not only completely eliminates all influence of trends, it strongly suppresses all low-frequency variation. It’s like estimating the influence of color on the sales of a new car, but first eliminating the influence of gas mileage, passenger comfort, reliability, and price! No wonder they’re able to claim that SOI accounts for 72% of the variance in GTTA as represented by UAH TLT — they got rid of the other influences first.
So what is the actual influence of SOI on GTTA? Let’s look at just the global data from UAH TLT (used by McLean et al.), for which they claim that SOI accounts for 72% of the variance. …
…the correlation is negative (and not very big), and the squared correlation is a mere 0.036, so SOI accounts for a mere 3.6% of the variance in GTTA (as represented by UAH TLT). Not 72%.
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…..
I’ve made a number of comments on different threads at Tamino relating to Steig et al and their corrigendum. None have been posted.
It is obvious that the Team is attacking in depth the McLean et al paper as a smokescreen to hide their own shortcomings.
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.
Paul K (11:18:42) :
For those interested, the analysis is here, with an excerpt below:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/influence-of-the-southern-oscillation-on-tropospheric-temperature/
Yet in their recent paper, McLean et al. (2009) did exactly that. They removed the influence of volcanoes by simply removing data which they suspected coincided with the influence of volcanoes. They suppressed random noise by taking 12-month moving averages. And they eliminated man-made global warming by taking differences between values 12 months apart, which not only completely eliminates all influence of trends, it strongly suppresses all low-frequency variation. It’s like estimating the influence of color on the sales of a new car, but first eliminating the influence of gas mileage, passenger comfort, reliability, and price! No wonder they’re able to claim that SOI accounts for 72% of the variance in GTTA as represented by UAH TLT — they got rid of the other influences first.
Taking differences twelve months apart does not remove low-frequency variation. It removes some low frequency variation while preserving other. Please refer to the concept of “aliasing” via discretization. The effect is more complicated than stated here. The 12 month running averages suppresses very short term variations, but preserves longer term variation, albeit with reduced amplitude possibly; however, the preserved variation is in the same spectral band as the differencing preserves.
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.
M. Jeff (07:26:39) :
From: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124967502810515267.html
Lawmakers’ Global-Warming Trip Hit Tourist Hot Spots
If there are any doubts that this invasion of “Congressional study” is picking the taxpayer pocket – continue reading. Chicken Little says, “The sky is falling. Now pay me to tell you how fast.”
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.
Sorry for my ignorance… What the phrase “beating a dead horse” does mean and when does it apply? Thanks!
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.
One can just examine the monthly ENSO numbers versus the tropics temps (back to 1958, the dates of the original paper) and notice that the ENSO most definitely affects the tropics temperatures.
http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/6448/ensoversushadrsstropics.png
I would say 45% of the variability is explained by the ENSO/SOI.
The AMO and the ENSO together explain about 62% of the variability.
http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/7530/ensoamoversushadrsstrop.png
Add in a little CO2 for a slight warming trend and you can get to 71%.
http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/9021/hadat2rsstropics.png
The rest is random noise and/or explained by something else.
http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/4545/hadatandrsstropicsresid.png
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!
The storm that has finally passed by us and onto the midwest had water galore in it. There have been records breaking all the way back to 1888 in terms of low daytime temps and rain amounts. All that water vapor and aerosols were sent to us from a rather warm pool in the upper regions of the Pacific. When it hit the further loaded dry dust filled air over us, it layered us in a thick carpet of cumulonimbus clouds and poured out that moisture till we all thought we were gonna drown! My hunch is that the thunder heads sent some kicked out heat up into the outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere and belched it into space. I am thinking August will be average to cooler over the West and Northwest portions of the US because of it.
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.
Dave Dodd (12:57:03) : 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!
Dave, I second your lines. Never understood, but seen same ignorance of Scientific Methods presented over and over among scholars the last 10 years. Doesn’t matter if it’s here in Sweden where some metreologists tries to make belive that lake Vaenern, tipping southward for the last 6800 years due to landrise, would overflow northwards due to AGW ‘effects’ or in discussions here, same bad maner shown everywhere.
I have an other question to add to your question “Was the Scientific Method repealed and I never heard about it?” and that is IF it’s possible that the teaching and learning of Scientific Methods been put in shadow and IF sociologic lefttheoryanalyse methods been placed higher that real Scientific Methods. Can’t help wondering.
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].
Gary Pearse: You wrote, “Bob, I think this kind of critique of the critique…”
Actually, it was a critique of the papers cited by the critique.
“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?
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 see you provided a hint further upthread. Tamino has a great sense of humor. His style of attack is fun to watch.)
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
Douglas DC: You wrote, “Been monitoring the SST charts again EL Nino appears not to be building…”
The data used for the ONI, which is the OI.v2 SST data, can be downloaded on a weekly or monthly basis, using the NOAA NOMADS website:
http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh?lite=
They update on Monday mornings.
And for those who haven’t seen it recently, Douglas DC’s statement is confirmed here:
http://i27.tinypic.com/14bq3xt.png
NINO3.4 SST anomalies have flattened for the past few weeks.
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
Bill Illis
You said
The rest is random noise and/or explained by something else.
Here is what I found .Global SST anomalies have gone up during 10 out of the last 14 solar maximums . The rest were cooler due to L a Ninas or cool AMO/PDO. Global temperature anomalies [hadcrut3] have gone up the year after solar maximums in 9 out the last 14 solar maximums . Those that showed cooling, 2 were due to La Ninas or cool/low AMO or PDO levels or cool SST.
Could some of the extra warming be due to extra direct solar heating around solar maximums.?
At the same time global temperature anomalies went down for 9 of the last 14 solar minimums . Of those that got warmer , 5 had El Ninos .
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.