UPDATE: The subject of this article, Mojib Latif, has challenged the Daily Mail article and it’s interpretation. In another story at the Guardian, Latif says the interpretation by the Daily Mail and a similar story in the Telegraph is wrongly interpreting his work.
Read the Guardian story here and decide for yourself. If anyone knows of a contact for Dr. Latif, please leave it in comments as I’ll make this forum available to him should he wish to elaborate further.
h/t to WUWT reader Werner Weber for notifying me.
UPDATE2: Werner Weber writes to me in email:
> I have send him an e-mail, pointing out what happened during the night
> and invite him to take the oportunity to present his views in one of the
> leading sceptics blogs.
=====================================
We’ve been covering a lot of the recent cold outbreaks under the “weather is not climate department” heading. This story however is about both weather and climate and what one IPCC scientist thinks is headed our way.
The cold this December and January has been noteworthy and newsworthy. We just posted that December 2009 was the Second Snowiest on Record in the Northern Hemisphere. Beijing was hit by its heaviest snowfall in 60 years, and Korea had the largest snowfall ever recorded since record keeping began in 1937. Plus all of Britain was recently covered by snow.
The cold is setting records too.
Oranges are freezing and millions of tropical fish are dying in Florida, there are Record low temperatures in Cuba and thousands of new low temperature records being set in the USA as well as Europe.
There are signs everywhere, according to an article in the Daily Mail, which produced this graphic below:
According to IPCC scientist Mojib Latif in an article for the Daily Mail, it could be just the beginning of a decades-long deep freeze. Latif is known as one of the world’s leading climate modelers.
Latif, is a professor at the Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University and an author of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Latif is a prominent scientist in the UN’s IPCC climate research group.
Latif thinks the cold snap Americans, Brits, and Europeans have been suffering through is the beginning of another cycle, this one a down cycle. He says we’re in for 30 years of cooler temperatures. While maybe it is a harsh prediction, he calls it a “mini ice age”. That phrase is sure to stick in the craw of more than a few people. His theory is based on an analysis of natural oscillations in water temperatures in the oceans.
According to his He believes our current cold weather pattern is a pause, a “30-years-long blip”, in the larger cycle of global warming, which postulates that temperatures will rise rapidly over the coming years.
At a U.N. conference in September, Latif said that changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation could mask over any “manmade global warming” for the next few decades. He said the fluctuations in the NAO could also be responsible for much of the rise in global temperatures seen over the past 30 years.
In a stunning revelation, he told the Daily Mail that:
“a significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 percent.”
Quite a revelation, and a smack down of much of the climate science in the last 30 years that attributes the cause mostly to CO2 increases.
In other news, Arctic sea ice is on the rise too.
According to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007.I’m betting that summer 2010 will have even more ice retained.
Right now, there doesn’t appear to be much of that “rotten ice” that one Canadian alarmist researcher squawked about to the media just a few weeks ago. In fact, we aren’t looking bad at all compared to 30 years ago.
Note that 30 years ago, the technology didn’t exist to display snow cover on the left image, but today we can see just how much our northern hemisphere resembles a snowball.
Now, watch the warmists throw Latif under the bus.
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Bob Tisdale (09:14:16)
Bob, I have read the Lu paper and these are my comments:
Lu:
Further examination of the temperature response in the model simulations (not shown) reveals that the trends in tropopause pressure and the consequent widening of the tropics is largely a result of stratospheric cooling
Reply:
It appears from SABER observations that an active sun accelerates the flow of energy to space so the stratospheric cooling may well be attributable to the more active sun during the period under consideration. Lu attributes that cooling to human caused extra radiative forcing. On that basis the cooling of the stratosphere should not have ceased in the mid 90s (as it seems it did) as solar cycle 23 declined yet CO2 emissions continued to rise.
Lu:
Finally, we underline that our results are based on the PDF of the tropopause to distinguish between tropics and extratropics. This is only one specific definition of tropical width, and its connection to other approaches, for example those based on tropospheric circulation or hydrological features, remains to be established. Preliminary analysis indicates that the connections between the different measures are complex and hence warrant further investigation.
Reply:
My proposals envisage the width of the tropics being determined by circulation and hydrological features so this paper is not adequate to deal with my suggestions.
Lu:
the observed widening of the tropics during 1958-1999 as estimated from the ERA40 and NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis data. This result confirms the findings of Seidel and Randel (2007) and corroborates the reality of the expansion of the tropical belt since 1958
Reply:
The run of strong solar cycles goes back to the 50s even though the air cooled a little until the late 70s and CO2 emissions rose throughout the period to date. In contrast the tropics began to narrow again around 2000 and that narrowing has continued to date. That is support for the proposition that solar activity levels dictate the temperature of the stratosphere and not CO2 emissions.
Lu:
By contrasting the results from two sets of experiments, one forced by SST/sea ice alone and the other by SST/sea ice plus direct radiative effects, we demonstrate that our measure of tropical expansion is entirely attributable to direct radiative forcing; SST forcing alone causes no significant change in the width of the tropics, and even a contraction in some seasons.
Reply:
I do not propose that SST forcing alone dictates the width of the tropics. I propose that it is a constant balancing act between oceanic energy release widening the tropics (on the basis of a tropospheric circulation and hydrological features definition) whilst at the same time the Arctic Oscillation provides more or less resistance depending on the level of solar activity. That constant battle would produce occasions when the tropics would contract despite warming SSTs. Such a battle has been going on during the 2009 / 2010 northern hemisphere winter.
It is also necessary to net out all the global SSTs for this purpose and not just PDO.
I trust that the above demonstrates that my propositions are not misguided or at least no more misguided than the Lu paper may be.
ENSO: El Niño-Southern Oscillation
SOI: Southern Oscillation Index
PDO: Pacific Decadal Oscillation (the Big Kahuna IMHO)
AMO: Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation or Atlantic Meridional Oscillation
NAO: North Atlantic Oscillation
AO: Arctic Oscillation
I believe that all of these oscillations are to some degree linked through teleconnections. It seems to me that the phase of the PDO is a pretty darn good telltale of global warming vs. global cooling.
The low frequency component of the PDO has a very good correlation with the general trend of the HadCRUT3 global temperature anomaly…
PDO Phase vs. HadCRUT3
It also has a pretty good correlation with OHC trends…
PDO Phase vs. OHC
I’m not saying that I think the PDO drives climate change (it’s just an index for SST changes in the North Pacific)… But the PDO seems to be a good “barometer.” Most likely the PDO and global temperatures are being driven by the same thing.
I can’t do that right now. It may never be possible to correlate a specific function of solar cycles to the PDO or any other oscillation. If the process goes through the oceans (as I think it does), there will be a significant and variable lag time between the modulations of solar input and the warming/cooling of the oceans and the atmosphere.
I think that the best bet for finding a correlation between solar and ocean cycles is through calculating the instantaneous frequency of solar activity (magnetic, SSN, TSI, etc.) and comparing those attributes to the phase of the PDO.
Steve, You say “…I was just trying to find out whether you had anything to refute my proposition that ocean surface changes drive events in the air and not vice versa. The significance is that if oceans are in control then Svensmarks ideas become relegated to a second order influence on climate.”
Why?
I see no reason there could not be two (or more) independent processes going on. From dealing with chemical manufacturing processes I would say there are definitely more than two processes going on and that is why it is so hard to model climate. When they are all going in the wrong direction we get the “tipping point” into an ice age if the earth is at the right point in the Malinkovitch cycle.
Thanks David! I do understand it a bit – believe or not.
And I think you got everything completely right, with all your comments. You must be a climate expert?
As I said earlier- most pointers that I could find show that as from 2003, global warming turned and we are now heading into global cooling. To me, this is now beyond doubt. The question in my mind now is: can we predict how cold it is going get?
David Middleton (11:50:11)
I agree completely.
Henry,
Glad I could help.
NOAA actually has a lot of very good articles on the various climate oscilations on their website.
I’m far from a climate expert. Like you, I’m just another scientist who has developed a hobby! My background is in oil & gas exploration (geology & geophysics).
I agree that things changed in 2003. Upwelling rates in the Eastern Pacific were “kicked up nothch”, the UAH data show that the lower troposphere over the oceans started to cool, NASA even announced a suddne cooling of the oceans (since mostly retracted).
The only clear solar connection I can draw is with the length of the Schwabe (11-yr) Cycle. When it’s longer than 11 years, we tend to have cooling. When it’s shorter than 11 years we tend to have warming. Cycle 22 (1986-1996) was one of the shortest Schwabe Cycles in the last few hundred years at 9.7 years. SC 23 has been one of the longest in the last few hundred years.
I think that a plot of the instantaneous frequency of the sunspot cycle might just correlate very well with the PDO.
As far as how long this cooling will last and how cold it will get, Don Easterbrook posted a paper here that he presented at the 2008 AGU meeting…
Easterbrook 2008
Gail Coombes (12:34:09)
I don’t disagree but one really should rank the processes in order of scale and relative dominance.
On that basis I have so far put the oceans in control but kept the Svensmark hypothesis as one of possibly several modulating factors.
My questions are an attempt to see whether there is enough evidence to give the Svensmark hypothesis an equal or superior place in the scheme of things as against the oceans but I can’t see it yet.
Why does one process or another have to be given equal or superior status?
It seems to me that we ought to be correlating the processes and pattern-matching to see how it all fits together. Once the pieces of the puzzle are arranged, it ought to be a lot easier to determine the causal relationships.
I wouldn’t try to describe the geological history of the Grand Canyon before I correlated the rock formations and geological sequences.
Wow…talk about a circle-jerk.
Stephen Wilde: A clarification:
You wrote, “Thanks for confirming that I may be the first to link PDO with AO. It is always hard to know whether one is being original or not.”
When I wrote, “You’re the first to mention the PDO and AO,” I was discussing the comments on this thread, not scientific studies. I was responding to your statement, “Although others have referred to the PDO and AO and NAO I think that so far I’m the only person who…” which I understood to refer to comments on this thread.
In the Western Mail, there was an article yesterday about a claim by Dr Alun Hubbard, a scientist at Aberystwyth University’s Centre for Glaciology, that there could be glaciers on Snowdon within 40 years.
‘Glaciers on Snowdon’ warning by climate expert
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2010/01/12/glaciers-on-snowdon-warning-by-climate-expert-91466-25576951/
The reason given for expecting the return of glaciers was that global warming would cause the Greenland ice sheet to melt with the result that the Gulf Stream would be forced further south and north west Europe would freeze.
Just three years ago another Welsh scientist predicted that Snowdon would be free of snow in winter in another 13 years.
Snowdon will be snow-free in 13 years, scientists warn
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/snowdon-will-be-snowfree-in-13-years-scientists-warn-432596.html
The reason given was global warming. Therefore whether Snowdon never has snow again or gets covered by glaciers the cause will be the same! Whatever happens the cause will be global warming.
Presumably that is what people mean when they say “the science is settled!” In that case the complacent concensus obviously needs to be challenged. Climate “science” is ripe for a paradigm shift, to use the phrase popularised by Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.
David Middleton (13:51:49)
Seeing how it all fits together would need to include the relative scale and dominance of each process wouldn’t it ?
In fact that is the difficult bit since many possible processes and variables are either known or proposed but we can’t even make a start at sorting wheat from chaff until we have determined the relative significance of each process and variable.
Indeed the problem for the models is probably having given an undue weight to a certain single factor and we wouldn’t want to make the same error with either the oceans or GCRs would we ?
My approach is to start with sun and oceans and then see what needs to be added to arrive at a workable climate description that covers as many real world observations as possible.
A major problem that I am encountering is conflicting information from individual scientists but so far it’s looking reasonable just playing around with the timing and size of multiple overlapping solar and oceanic cycles in a multilayered Earth system where the speed of energy transmission from layer to layer can vary at each interface.
If the Svensmark hypothesis can be slotted in as an influence in the air that’s fine by me but at present I can’t see it being a driver of oceanic events despite your earlier plausible suggestion because I can’t see a suitable correlation with oceanic variability. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one, just that any evidence is lacking so I’m leaving it out of my efforts for the time being.
Stephen Wilde: You wrote, “Bob, I respect your work and have no wish to question it.”
That’s good, because my work is not in question on this thread. And I could always point you to all of the comments you leave on my guest posts here at WUWT in which you claim that my post supports your research.
You wrote, “It appears from SABER observations that an active sun accelerates the flow of energy to space so the stratospheric cooling may well be attributable to the more active sun during the period under consideration.”
Do you have a link to an illustration of this?
You wrote, “My proposals envisage the width of the tropics being determined by circulation and hydrological features so this paper is not adequate to deal with my suggestions.”
And without a way for you to document your suggestions, your proposals are not theory or hypothesis. They are simply conjecture.
You wrote, “In contrast the tropics began to narrow again around 2000 and that narrowing has continued to date.”
Do you have a link to anything that documents this? Figure 3 of Lu et al only runs to 2007 and does not clearly show a narrowing starting in 2000.
You wrote, “The run of strong solar cycles goes back to the 50s even though the air cooled a little…”
Air? What level are you discussing? Also, you jump back and forth between variables and datasets in that paragraph without providing a clear reason for doing so.
Bob Tisdale (15:43:48)
I can deal with those queries but this is not the place to go into full detail and I am concerned at the personal hostility that I see no good reason for.
If you haven’t noticed the equatorward migration of the jets since 2000 then so be it.
I’ve linked to the SABER item several times before.
David Middleton: You wrote, “I’m not saying that I think the PDO drives climate change (it’s just an index for SST changes in the North Pacific)… ”
The PDO only reflects the PATTERN of SST anomalies in the North Pacific North of 20N. (warm PDO = positive anomalies in the eastern North Pacific North of 20N and negative anomalies in the central and western North Pacific, and vice versa for a cool PDO)
One of the misunderstandings about the PDO is based on how it’s presented. The entire Pacific basin is normally shown:
http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/645fall2003_web.dir/Jason_Amundson/pdo_warm_cool.jpg
But the PDO only deals with the area North of 20N:
http://i39.tinypic.com/4r5oxx.jpg
That’s it. Nothing else. And as you can see the illustration shows the PDO in a cool phase, which means the SST anomalies in the eastern North Pacific are cool while the SST anomalies in the central and western portions are warm. But note that the warm area is significantly larger than the cool area in the east. The average SST anomalies for the North Pacific north of 20N in that case are probably positive even though the PDO is in the cool phase. And if the average SST anomaly is positive, it is contributing more positive anomalies to the global average than “normal”.
You wrote, “But the PDO seems to be a good “barometer.” Most likely the PDO and global temperatures are being driven by the same thing”
And that same thing is ENSO.
Stephen Wilde
A very general question – is it a fair guess that heat exchange between the ocean and atmosphere is, ultimately, of a much greater magnitude and significance, to global climate, than heat exchange between different layers of the atmosphere and loss to space? At least on a year to decade time scale.
The oscillations of the sun’s output and the direct and indirect effects of this on the atmosphere, including the very complex interactions involving cosmic rays, atmospheric cloud, ice, etc., might be expected to exert their effect by, over a very long time, entraining the ocean-atmosphere exchange by various resonances, near-resonances or harmonics.
On the south west coast of the county of Cornwall in England, at the coastal town of Treen (near Porthcurno) sits a granite rock called Logan’s Rock. Before 1824 it was a famous tourist attraction and curiosity since, although the rock weighed 65 tons (empirical), it could be swayed by a single man pushing it at the correct (resonant) frequency. But in 1824 a group of sailors applied too strong a resonant forcing, and the rock fell from the top of the cliff to the sea 30 meters below. (Metaphor of a switch from one attractor to another?) The sailors were “forced” to return the rock to its former abode but sadly its unique quasi-instability could not be restored and the rock now is as un-budgable as most other 65 ton granite rocks in Cornwall.
Could the ability of one man to sway the rock be a metaphor of the entraining influence of solar and upper atmospheric periodic variations in radiation input and heat exchange, on the cyclical input of heat from ocean to atmosphere? Or the solar-upper atmosphere influence is a conductor but the ocean is the orchestra? After all as you often remind us, the ocean is where the lions share of climate heat resides.
Or am I completely off the rails here?
I think that this next round of brutally cooler earth temperatures is mainly due to low sunspot activity. The basic sunspot hypothesis is:
Less sunspot activity allows more cosmic ray power into the atmosphere. More cosmic ray power into the atmosphere causes more cloud formation. More clouds reflect more solar radiation & this causes generally cooler earth surface temperatures.
after many refreshes, that cryosphere image refuses to update to 2010…
Henry@David
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/29/don-easterbrooks-agu-paper-on-potential-global-cooling/
is great! Thanks.
…but now, which of the 3 roads to take? Surely, is there no way we can figure out where we are in the current major cycles? I’d like to find out which is the most likely scenario.
phlogiston (16:31:12)
“Could the ability of one man to sway the rock be a metaphor of the entraining influence of solar and upper atmospheric periodic variations in radiation input and heat exchange, on the cyclical input of heat from ocean to atmosphere? Or the solar-upper atmosphere influence is a conductor but the ocean is the orchestra? After all as you often remind us, the ocean is where the lions share of climate heat resides.”
I’d go with either analogy depending on where the data leads.
Although I think the temperature of the troposphere depends on the balance between energy from the oceans to the troposphere and energy out of the troposphere to stratosphere and then to space the former is way more substantial and more rapidly variable than the former. The stratosphere itself appears to act as a buffer between the two processes but is less effective as a buffer when the solar and oceanic cycles are out of phase and supplementing one another as during ice ages.
So I see the solar effect on the rate of energy loss from stratosphere upwards as providing a long term solar induced trend then over shorter terms we have at least 3 overlapping oceanic cycles as I have explained elsewhere.
We have a suite of 4 possible combinations of interaction between son and oceans (as per my published articles) and an infinite number of intermediate states all being disrupted over shorter time scales by at least those 3 ocean cycles but at least those 3 cycles deal with recorded history well enough.
Get the timings right and the correct scale for the current most active oceanic cycle then one can guess reasonably well what the jets will do and the climate consequences follow.
I’ve predicted the last two winters correctly on that basis.
Stephen Wilde: You wrote, “I can deal with those queries but this is not the place to go into full detail and I am concerned at the personal hostility that I see no good reason for.”
Then I’ll patiently await the next thread here at WUWT in which you raise this subject and I’ll remind you of the unanswered questions you’ve left on this thread. We can then address them on the new thread. No hostility on my part.
You wrote, “If you haven’t noticed the equatorward migration of the jets since 2000 then so be it.”
And since you apparently do not wish to provide any means to verify it, those reading this thread will wonder as I do.
You wrote, “I’ve linked to the SABER item several times before.”
It’s a shame you feel no need to link it again. Readers change from thread to thread. Why force those who are interested in what you have written to go off and search through past threads looking for your links?
Bob Tisdale (03:23:35)
Saber findings here : http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/AGU-SABER.html
Leif’s objection to my finding that report significant was that in his view the effects would be too weak to transmit downwards but I beg to differ with him on that point. I see no reason why a change in energy flow from thermosphere to space should not affect the rates of energy flow through the layers below.
If you have another reason for my interpretation of that report being incorrect then please do say and I will consider it.
As regards the latitudinal position of the jets I have told you that there seem to be no datasets clearly recording their latitudinal movements over time beyond seasonal variation.
I have pointed out certain less rigorous indicators which are highly persuasive.
It seems to be generally accepted that such movements do occur and have occurred. I noted the poleward shift in 1975 and noted a tendency to reverse that shift from 2000. Precise timing to within a couple of years is not necessary as long as the new trend becomes clear over time and I think we are at that point by now.
This is a blog not a University Department so I think that the demands you make on me as a non scientist are excessive.
Perhaps you could confirm your earlier suggestion that you do accept that such shifts do occur and, if you wish, state whether you concur with my diagnosis of oceanic involvement and if not please indicate your preferred diagnosis.
I’m content to do my own research as necessary but it is always helpful to liase with more knowledgeable specialists to save much time. That is the purpose of these blogs after all.
Isn’t the ENSO really just an index too?
It seems to me that the ENSO, PDO, AMO, etc. are all just functions of multi-year to multi-decadal patterns in oceanic circulation.
I understand what you are saying about the PDO, and I don’t disagree with it; but the long-term trend of the PDO seems to be a pretty good indicator of whether or not the Earth’s climate is warming or cooling.
David Middleton (07:08:45)
I’ve had that discussion with Bob previously.
He is right to say that PDO is a statistical artifact derived from ENSO data.
However, artifact or not, it represents a real world phenomenon.
Every 25 to 30 years the relative strengths of the positive (warming) and negative (cooling) ENSO signals reverse to create what is known as the PDO.
Strictly speaking one should invent a new name for that cyclical phenomenon but generally the name given to the statistical artifact is the name most readily to hand and best understood by most people.