Cool sea surface temperatures overrode warming
December 4, 2009
Left side: 1970-2007 trend in annual surface air temperature. Right sid: 2008 annual surface air temperature, shown as a departure from the 1971-2000 climatology.
High resolution (Credit: NOAA)
Cooler North American temperatures in 2008 resulted from a strong natural effect, and the overall warming trend that has been observed since 1970 is likely to resume, according to university and NOAA scientists.
“Our work shows that there can be cold periods, but that does not mean the end of global warming. The recent coolness was caused by transitory natural factors that temporarily masked the human-caused signal,” said Judith Perlwitz, lead author of the study and a researcher with the Cooperative Institute for Research Environmental Sciences, and NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, both in Boulder, Colo. The paper will be published Dec. 8 in Geophysical Research Letters.
[NOTE: We have it here – see link below]
Using computer-generated models as well as observations, the team analyzed causes for climate variations in the recent decades. Special emphasis was given to the reasons for North American coolness in 2008. The research is an exercise in climate attribution, a scientific process for identifying the sources of observed climate and weather patterns. Climate attribution is a vital part of NOAA’s climate services.
“We found that North American coolness resulted from a strong bout of naturally caused cooling in the tropical and northeastern Pacific sea surface temperatures,” said Martin Hoerling, a NOAA meteorologist and co-author. “This illustrates how regional patterns can vary independent of the overall global average. In 2008, global land temperatures were the sixth warmest on record, whereas it was the coldest year in North America since 1996.”
The analysis included historical data and climate model simulations that were conducted in the U.S. and internationally. The science team discerned both natural and human-caused influences for 2008.
“North American temperatures would have been considerably colder in 2008 had there been no human-induced warming influence present,” Perlwitz said.
The scientists conclude that the North American temperatures are likely to resume increasing again, and do not see the recent coolness as an emerging downward trend.
“Our work shows the importance of the role of natural climate variability in temporarily masking or enhancing human-induced climate change. Through diagnosis, we ensure that natural changes, when occurring, are not misunderstood to mean that climate change is either not happening or is happening more intensely than the expected human influence,” said Arun Kumar, a NOAA meteorologist and co-author.
Authors of A strong bout of natural cooling in 2008 are Judith Perlwitz, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Boulder, Colo., and NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, Colo.; Martin Hoerling, NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, Colo.; Jon Eischeid and Taiyi Xu, both of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Boulder, Colo., and NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, Colo.; and Arun Kumar, NOAA Climate Prediction Center, Camp Springs, Md.
The work was funded by the NOAA Climate Program Office.
NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.
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Link to GRL Paper is here
(Thanks to Leif Svalgaard)
Lets subtract natural effects and first-order forcings from the 150 year old temperature record to see what is happening globally
1. If you subtract the natural decadal fluctuations you are left with an almost linear warming trend.
2. If you subtract natural linear trend that pre-dates the AGW hypothesis then you have an almost flat temperature record.
3. If you subtract first-order forcings associated with the rise in CO2 then you have a cooling trend in the global record.
Here is the good part.
4. Finally if you subtract the GCM’s much larger warming trend from the remainder of the temperature record then you have a rapid cooling trend.
In order to maintain faith in AGW you have to believe that increasing CO2 levels prevented the world from cooling very rapidly over the last 50 years.
How credible is that when you already know that the same models failed to predict the lack of warming over the last decade?
Wayne Delbeke (22:01:21) : tallbloke (00:31:07) :
The http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php site has been having difficulties. Yesterday, I saw their downward hook and now today 8th December at 11-31 GMT, I see the http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm site has the same shape downward hook.
OT: In the “weather is not climate” department …
At 3 AM MST Dec 8 2009 in Lethbridge, Alberta (two hours N of Great Falls, MT) it was:
-39°C with a wind chill of -51°C.
The mean temp in the past 24 hours was -32°C which is 26 degrees below the long-term daily mean. Old record shattered by four degrees.
Okay fine. It’s just weather. Whatever. Ugh! ☺
Todd (21:56:27)
the temp record showed a 40% drop after 1945 (~0.3C). 40% relative to the 100 year old rate that is, and all that implies…
AGW hockey players argued, of course, that it was a glitch in the record keeping because, during the war, the records came mostly from american ships, which measured the temp of the water before pumping it into the various ships’ engine cooling systems, during their tiny little paths across a small part of the oceans for a few years, and after the war it went back to the brits and whatever minuscule part of the ocean they were measuring at the time.
The key thing here is to ask WHY they use 1970 as the starting point for their ‘normality’.
It would seem to any person of scientific critical faculties sufficient to be worthy of possessing influence and authority that there is a double PDO cycle which represents the most obvious ‘unit’ of comparison.
Now no doubt scientists far more knowledgeable than me will be able to argue as to when in history is the comparable position to 2008 in that cyclical pattern.
But I would hesitate to suggest that it is sometime around 1940s?
Having compared a complete double PDO cycle, one is also minded to ask whether anyone has worked out the multicentennial ‘beat’ yet from geological/ice core data and asked where we stand on THAT oscillation from ‘normality’. Clearly that might be dangerous, as we might find us rather SIMILAR to the MWP equivalent??
This arbitrary definition of normality is rather unprofessional, unscientific and deliberately manipulative, in my humble opinion.
You will note at http://www.nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews how they emphasise in their latest monthly report the lack of ice in Hudson Bay and the Barents sea, whilst failing to highlight the higher than average ice to the NW of Alaska and the NE extremity of Siberia……
Me thinks they doth protest too much…….
Can’t have it both ways can you? CO2 is either warming the earth or it’s natural warming/cooling cycles.
[1] A precipitous drop in North American temperature
in 2008, commingled with a decade-long fall in global
mean temperatures,
[2] Doubts on the science of human-induced climate
change have been cast by recent cooling. Noteworthy has
been a decade-long decline (1998–2007) in globally averaged
temperatures from the record heat of 1998 [Easterling
and Wehner, 2009]
Translation: It began as a steady decline and then the dam burst.
[5] Observational NA temperature analysis is based on a
merger of four data sets: U.K. Hadley Center’s HadCRUT3v
[Brohan et al., 2006], National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) Land/Sea Merged Temperatures
[Smith and Reynolds, 2005], National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies)
Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP) [Hansen et al.,
2001] and NOAAs’s National Climate Data Center (NCDC)
Gridded Land Temperatures based on the Global Historical
Climatology Network (GHCN) [Peterson and Vose, 1997].
You mean a merger of 4 doctored/cherry-picked/clubbed data sets.
[8] The 2008 NA temperature was noteworthy for its
appreciable departure from the trajectory of warming since
1970 (Figure 1a).
Yeah, the bottom fell out of it. And it continues, does it not?
[15] There is increasing public and decision maker demand
to explain evolving climate conditions, and assess especially
the role of human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases.
The 2008 North American surface temperatures diverged
strongly from the warming trend of recent decades, with the
lowest continental average temperatures since at least 1996.
This same thing happened before, in the early 1880’s, only they didn’t have
C02 to kick around as the scapegoat.
Our appraisal of the natural SST
conditions in the Nin˜o 4 region, with anomalies of about
1.1 K suggests a condition colder than any in the instrumental
record since 1871 (Figure S2 and discussion in the
auxiliary material). We illustrated that North America would
have experienced considerably colder temperatures just due
to the impact of such natural ocean variability alone, and that
the simultaneous presence of anthropogenic warming reduced
the severity of cooling.
Not so fast, bub. Much of the ‘instrumental record’ from 1871 to 1894 is missing.
This is why you have a Black Eye in Public Opinion, and it’s not going away until you stop propping up bad science with excuses and drop the pretense of ‘settled science’.
Somewhat on topic: For those who are following this series of posts, I just finished “More Detail On The Multiyear Aftereffects Of ENSO – Part 3 – East Indian and West Pacific Oceans Can Warm In Response To Both El Nino and La Nina Events”
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/12/more-detail-on-multiyear-aftereffects.html
Both the El Nino and La Nina portions of major traditional El Nino events warm the SST anomalies of the East Indian and West Pacific Oceans, so their SST anomalies appear to rise in steps. Ocean currents then blend these natural increases in SST anomalies for the East Indian and West Pacific Oceans with the other oceans, raising the SST anomalies globally. The resulting increases in global SST anomalies are mistakenly attributed to anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
JER0ME (22:09:35) :
So when it’s warm it’s CO2, and when it’s cold it’s natural? And they can’t see the stupidity of this?
Nup — when it’s warm, it’s “manmade forcing,” and when it’s cold, it’s natural.
CO2 is natural, too, unless it’s *manmade* CO2, in which case it’s more poisonous than dioxin-contaminated, plutonium-enhanced ricin.
*koff*
Sorry — should’ve been “…*manmade* CO2…”
%$#! twitchy “submit” thumb.
paullm (22:26:37) :
“What we have here are all kinds of maybes that do not amount to any kind of support for the destruction of the worlds economies in order to address the age old problem of what I see as the real goal of the AGWers – the conquering of WEATHER CHANGE. ”
I suggest that there are two groups of AGWers with 2 different goals: the first and most vociferous are within the green lobby and their goal is to largely eliminate private cars and air travel; the second are the governments and their corporate friends who are using the green concerns to achieve their goal of exerting more control and further impoverish the poor to the advantage of the rich. Neither group really believes that anything other than natural causes are the primary driver of climate change which is why arguing about the science – while it is important to those of us who value truth, decency and integrity – is essentially an exercise in futility.
Here in the UK, we’ve had some highly-paid spokeswoman admitting that jobs will disappear but, hey, not to worry, there’ll be lots of new opportunities in green jobs! I can only hope that the ‘let them eat cake’ philosophy always has the same outcome.
How many times do they get away with the ‘cooling is natural, heating is AGW’ scam?
It’s the same with Antartica! It’s the hole in the Ozone layer that’s causing the sea-ice growth,masking man-made cooling.(Although the Ozone problem was man-made via CFCs).Kind of makes you think it’s a very complicated system,the climate? Not easy to model?
The fact that the sun is a G5 star has masked the fact that it will become a M3 star too.
This NOAA publication is a petty excuse to cover up their their failing warming predictions.
But instead of saying they have been wrong about their theory that CO2 is warming up our planet, they still consist they are right about the “consensus”.
“Our work shows the importance of the role of natural climate variability in temporarily masking or enhancing human-induced climate change. Through diagnosis, we ensure that natural changes, when occurring, are not misunderstood to mean that climate change is either not happening or is happening more intensely than the expected human influence,” said Arun Kumar, a NOAA meteorologist and co-author”.
I suggest you use this paper in the “little house” and use it to wipe your…you know what.
“Our work shows that there can be cold periods, but that does not mean the end of global warming. The recent coolness was caused by transitory natural factors that temporarily masked the human-caused signal,” said Judith Perlwitz.
What human-caused signal? You geniuses can decompose the data and identify the human-caused portion?
My question…can we truly resolve the signal from the data? It appears that the noise is much larger than changes in the signal. Any statisticians out there? I often believe this isn’t a climate science battle, but rather a statistical analysis battle.
Statisticians Unite!
But, of course, the strong warming effect in the 1980s and 90s was most certainly NOT caused by these natural effects. Nature only causes cooling, never warming. 😉
.
speaking of the sun, we’re on 15 spotless days in a row with only some small areas of activity to speak of. we may have already seen solar minimum, but SC24 is in no hurry to ramp up the sunspot conveyor!
Yep. Without man-made global warming, we would all be freezing to death right now.
North America Cooling?
But now, the Met Office claims the noughties are the world’s warmest ever!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/08/met-office-warmest-decade
… are they making it up as they go along?
NOAA are just re-iterating what the Met Office here in London said last year. When it cooled, against their models, they said that global warming was being masked.
They predicted that winter 2008/2009 in the UK would see the continuation of warmer than average winters. It turned out to be colder than the 1971-2000 (adjusted) average.
They had the gall to announce “It would have been even colder if it had not been for global warming”
yet their forecast was ALREADY based on global warming models.
This is the sort of obnoxiousness that seems to be copied from one climatic organisation to another.
So it clearly suggests these people have no clue about the natural workings of the weather and climate. Reassuring indeed…
Anyone else notice the Arctic ice extent curve has headed down at the same time the Arctice temp has taken a drop (and there appears to be a discontinuity in the temp curve)??
NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment based on fraudulent pseudo-science. So NOAA doesn’t really know much about climate at all.
NOAA can and should do better than this pitiful bilge it pumps out.
NOAA needs to know and understand what it doesn’t know or understand; that it is primarily changes in the sun and the oceans which drive climate.
NOAA needs to be brave and delve into some actual science, but it probably won’t, which is sad.
Anthony,
The report from Copenhagen this morning was that the past decade was the warmest ever recorded, and that 2009 will be the warmest year ever recorded.
What’s up with that?
How can they say such a thing in public?