Satellite Temperatures and El Niño

AC Osborn and Wren:
Right, Wren. The Bart post doesn’t talk at all about the cause of warming. It is entirely focused on refuting the claim that GW has stopped in the last 10 years.
Unless the info that AC Osborn is referring to is in one of the two-thousand one-hundred and fifty-seven comments to that post. Anyone care to read through them? Not I.

Bob Tisdale: Explanation of Nino 3.4
What I meant was, is the Nino 3.4 index a measure of the difference between the SST in zone 3 and zone 4,
or is it the SST in a region that includes both a piece of zone 3 and a piece of zone 4?

To: A C Osborn
Cc: Wren
OK. I went back and skimmed thru early VS comments. Half of what he says sounds to me like made-up jargon/ gibberish, including applying an “econometric” model to this problem. As for “proving” that there’s no correlation between CO2 and temp, VS seems to be saying that insolation is identified as the single largest factor in temperature. I don’t doubt that prior to 1850 this was true, particularly if you go back hundreds of thousands or millions of years, since there was no significant sustained amount of GHGs being artificially injected into the system to perturb it and CO2 was a “slave” to other drivers (and a positive feedback). [Note – Look up Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) for a “natural experiment” of injecting very large amounts of GHGs into the atmosphere.] I’m not aware that anybody denies orbital forcing and the Milankovitch theory’s general principles. In fact even some AGW scientists state that the sun is the main driver of temperature UP UNTIL the last 3o years, during which they state that temp breaks away from its insolation correlation and gets driven more by GHGs.
BUT, if we want to determine how artificially added GHGs perturbs the system, we would not look before 1850, but rather after, because that is when the “experiment” is being conducted. The data since 1850 unequivocally shows a clear correlation between CO2 and global temperature like so, and not just for the last 30 years:
http://chartsgraphs.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/co2_temp_scatter_regression.png
How can anyone claim that this is not a correlation? If VS is claiming that this statistical method is not valid and you MUST use his stock market method to show what’s really going on, this is fatally flawed method-cherry-picking.
To deny that there is a correlation in the above link is an “extraordinary claim”. To claim that the CO2/temp relationship is “random” in the face of this evidence does not make sense for the time period in question. To argue that regression analysis is invalid in THIS case is an “extraordinary claim”, and “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”! So where is the extraordinary proof that this regression is wrong or that we can’t use regression as a methodology or that it LOOKS like a correlation but really isn’t???
I did not see it in VS’s comments, other than his emphatic assertions and saying “look in this link”.

Jbar: You asked, “What I meant was, is the Nino 3.4 index a measure of the difference between the SST in zone 3 and zone 4,
or is it the SST in a region that includes both a piece of zone 3 and a piece of zone 4?”
It covers portions of NINO3 and NINO4:
http://i44.tinypic.com/97qt08.jpg

I get a little tired of these graphs suggesting that the sensitivities of the instruments involved are sufficient to quote temperatures to hundredths of a degree. Fact is that the satellite measurements have a sensitivity of 0.3Celsius so these readings should really only be shown as steps with 6 possible steps in the whole graph. What they have done is taken multiple readings and then quoted them to two decimal places (again) as if the original measurement was that accurate (which it never was and never needed to be – because it was only for weather purposes, not climate). Without that process, it would be entirely impossible to detect any trend at all, and that is before you get into the issue of the actual accuracy of the measurement.

Just The Facts says:
May 17, 2010 at 5:58 am
Wren says: May 16, 2010 at 9:57 pm
“The appeal is to the facts.
The facts:
1. Burning fossil fuels releases CO2, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.
2. Greenhouse gases are a warming influence on global temperature.
3. As more fossil fuels are burned, the level of greenhouse gases rise.
4. Higher levels of greenhouse gases drive global temperatures to higher levels, despite temporary pauses as a result of natural cooling influences.
The facts explain why you won’t find a scientific society of standing that disputes anthropogenic global warming.”
1. Agreed
2. Agreed, though the effect appears to be slight and logarithmic
3. Kinda redundant to 1., but agreed
4. Kinda redundant to 2., but at least you realize that there are “natural cooling (and warming) influences”
So if we don’t understand how the sun works, we don’t understand how the clouds work, we barely understand how the oceans work and volcanic activity is a complete wild card, what makes you so sure that the slight increase in the trace amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is primarily responsible for the slight increase in Earth’s average temperature that seems to have occurred over the last century?
“The facts explain why you won’t find a scientific society of standing that disputes anthropogenic global warming.”
I don’t know of many people who dispute the existence of anthropogenic global warming. Most people who travel between cities and the burbs are familiar with the Urban Heat Island Effect, and the basic science of CO2s slight and logarithmic upward influence on Earth temperature seems reasonably well founded. However, I think there are many intelligent people who see through the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Narrative and the flimsy predictive models that it’s based on.
Individuals who claim to have figured out how to accurately predict and even control Earth’s temperature 50 – 100 years into the future are guilty of hubris, are you one of them?
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Webster’s defines hubris as “exaggerated pride or self-confidence.” If I were James Hansen I would be proud of how my “most likely” 1988-202o global temperature scenario I made 22 years ago has predicted the current temperature.
On the other hand , if I had predicted no more warming, I wouldn’t be proud. But who would predict no more warming when global temperatures have been rising for a long time you might ask. The answer is anyone who thinks we should do nothing about man-made global warming because we don’t know the future with absolute certainty. Implicit in that view is a prediction of no more warming or none that matters.

The weekly NOAA ENSO update has a surprisingly rapid development toward La Nina conditions.
Nino 3.4 dropped to -0.1C
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/data/indices/wksst.for
The equatorial upper ocean heat content chart is in the -0.7C range (sorry chart doesn’t translate over very well).
http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/4220/euohcmay13.png
And the animation is showing cool upper ocean conditions unlike anything I’ve seen before.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ocean/anim/wkxzteq_anm.gif
The latest SST map is also showing major changes toward La Nina.
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2010/anomnight.5.17.2010.gif

The higher one goes in the atmosphere, the less fewer GHG’s outgoing long-wavelength radiation needs to travel through to escape to space – and thereby increasing the effectiveness of radiative cooling. At 18,000 ft (only a little above TLT), atmospheric pressure is 50% of sea level, so the ability of CO2 to interfere with outgoing radiation (and produce radiative forcing) is 50% as important as at sea level. The influence of water vapor at 14,000 ft is reduced by both pressure and temperature – which dramatically reduces the amount of water vapor the atmosphere can hold without condensation. It seems to me, that increases in temperature at 14,000 ft relative to surface temperature imply that chaotic weather has become more efficient at cooling the earth by convection of heat and latent heat to altitudes where it should leave the planet more easily. All of the snow this winter seemed to be accompanied by record satellite temperature high in the atmosphere – exactly what one would expect from the release of unusual amounts of latent heat from unusual snowfall. (The connection between snowfall and satellite temperature may be fortuitous, however, because the main site of convective heat transport into the upper atmosphere is in the tropics.)

Just The Facts says:
May 17, 2010 at 10:45 am
Wren says:
May 17, 2010 at 8:08 am
“Webster’s defines hubris as “exaggerated pride or self-confidence.” If I were James Hansen I would be proud of how my “most likely” 1988-202o global temperature scenario I made 22 years ago has predicted the current temperature.
On the other hand , if I had predicted no more warming, I wouldn’t be proud. But who would predict no more warming when global temperatures have been rising for a long time you might ask. The answer is anyone who thinks we should do nothing about man-made global warming because we don’t know the future with absolute certainty. Implicit in that view is a prediction of no more warming or none that matters.”
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Yes, I am sure James is very proud of his predictions (aka guesses), even the ones that turn out to be completely wrong:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/22/a-little-known-but-failed-20-year-old-climate-change-prediction-by-dr-james-hansen/
So I’ll take that as a yes in answer to my question on hubris and look forward to the day that you and your ilk will become aware of your shortcomings…
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I have many shortcomings, but I do try to refrain from berating others for their shortcomings.
I’m afraid you misinterpreted my comment on James Hansen. I didn’t mean to imply his pride is exaggerated. But he does have much to be proud about when it comes to climate modeling and projecting. The American Meteorological Society awarded him their highest honor in 2009, the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, for his contributions in climate modeling, understanding of climate forcing and sensitivity, and for clear communication of climate science in the public arena.
The link you provided refers to what someone said Hansen said he predicted, rather than to what he presented in a paper or report. I don’t know if Hansen ever confirmed the accuracy of the comments attributed to him, but I do know people may misreport or embellish what others say.