Satellite Temperatures and El Niño

Wren:
The evidence of what Hansen said in the congressional testimony is on line here:
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Environment/documents/2008/06/23/ClimateChangeHearing1988.pdf
It explains the difference between A, B, and C
A Being if emissions continued rising at the current rate
B if emissions held at the current level
C If there was a drastic reduction in emissions
Hansen was so wrong that his supporters had to attempt to rewrite history and you fell for the deception.
Read it for your self!

@ur momisugly Jbar May 15, 2010 at 7:57 am:

Geoff Sherrington,
“If ENSO causes heat, where does it come from?”
I think that is not well understood. ENSO is related to a change in air and water currents in the tropical Pacific which leads to anomalous warming in the eastern Pacific, but it also affects temperatures farther away. Hypothetically less vertical mixing in the ocean could cause higher than normal surface temperatures, thus raising global temps./blockquote>
One of my recurring doubts comes in when someone says that A causes B, in this case ENSO causes heat.
When we see A and B and they appear to move in tandem, assuming one is the cause and other the effect should be done only tentatively and it should be presented as only tentative.
There is heat and there is ENSO.
I have always thought of ENSO as a resultant, an effect – not a cause. It is a transporter of heat, YES. But is it the SOURCE of the heat?
The speculation that there might be mixing or lack of mixing of the deeper ocean heat to the surface is only speculation. There are a lot of comments on this post that indicate belief in the reality of this mixing. But there isn’t much solid anything behind the speculation. It is just grabbing at straws because nothing better comes to mind. One comment talked about it “coming from above.” If it came from above, why would it be localized in the western Pacific along the equator? Along the equator, yes – but why THERE?
In some ways, the closest thing we have to ENSO is the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is not the cause of the heat within it. It gets its heat from the Gulf of Mexico. The heat comes from the slow meandering the current does clockwise around from its entry into the gulf north of the Yucatan, and then around the coast of Mexico, finally exiting through the Florida Strait. The water stays baking in the Gulf long enough to absorb huge amounts of heat.
My question is this, “Is there any kind of baking possible in the western equatorial Pacific region? Is there a possible slow circulation there, too?
But then, even if such a phenomenon occurring, why does it flow eastward then and only then – when the area has reached some massive heat accumulation?
This question must arise whether the heat comes from below or above.
There certainly appears to be a connection between the accumulation of the heat and the subsequent reversal of the equatorial water current.
But appearances are not us looking at causes, but us looking at effects.
Some talk about this all in terms of the air currents blowing the water eastward. But large atmospheric events are also talked about as ONLY arising from the heating of the land or water. So these ideas SEEM to be getting it backward. Air heating generally, if not always, comes from the surface being warmed by radiation and then heat convecting (mostly) upward. Land rarely gets heated by the air over it, but by the Sun.
So, where is the heat accumulating? And why does this tie in with the change of the currents? Are they both caused by some single other phenomenon? If so, what?
Mixing: Thermoclines. How deep is the thermocline in the equatorial western Pacific region? A generic ocean temperature graph is shown at Thermocline, where below 200m the temp has dropped by 16C. This article also states that the tropical ocean has a relatively stable thermocline. The variable thermocline in temperate zones is tied in with summer and winter variability of solar energy. If the graph is reasonably correct, what warmth is available from below to upwell and mix? None – it is substantially cooler below. If mixing occurs, then it is upwelling/mixing during La Niña and failing to mix during El Niño. Could the heat be stored in the vertical region between the thermocline and the surface? In 200 meters? But the temps are declining with depth, so again, if anything is going on, it would appear that it is NOT coming from below, except from possible cooling thought the mixing during La Niña phase.
But is there enough heat stored in that 200 meters at times when there is NO mixing? Can it sit there and “soak” (in a heating sense) long enough to create the long heat plume that identifies an El Niño? And if it can, WHY does it happen THERE? And in such a narrow band? And why does it then motor eastward? Where does the motive force come from? The winds? The same ones that don’t push the water in that direction at other times? What changes the wind current direction?
Does all this have a single cause? Or is it a slow confluence of factors, kind of like a resonance that wows and then backs off, and then wows again in an oscillating temporal way? Or like two or more non-equal oscillations (or maybe two more or less equal ones that are out of phase) that are of long enough pitch that they add together for several months in their positive phase and also in their negative phase, but they get very equivocal in between? Perhaps each oscillation has its variations which complicate and confuse matters. But these oscillations are just speculation. Is there any chance they really exist? And if so, what are they? Oscillations in the local thermocline in that location? Oscillations in the boundaries of warm currents bypassing each other? This latter might explain why the heat tongue/plume heads east – the boundary shift allows the eastward-heading current to push through, where in the other phase it is blocked by a north or south current. And does the PDO have ANY part in the creation of the El Niño or La Niña? Doesn’t the PDO also imply some contention between currents, sometimes reversing or blocking a warm or cooling current? And could the PDO have daughter currents or fractal-like eddies (like the ones on the boundaries of the Gulf Stream off the Eatern US) that grow and shrink at smaller time scales?
All this is speculating, and not judging others’ ideas, just throwing my impressions into the fray. If anyone cares to, jump on all this and rip it to shreds. Or build on any of the ideas. They are probably too simplistic, but might trigger something in someone’s head.

Feet2theFire says:
May 17, 2010 at 10:07 pm (quoting Wikipedia)
‘One widely reported satellite temperature record, developed by Roy Spencer and John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), is currently version 5.2 which corrects previous errors in their analysis … … identifying an error in the diurnal correction that leads to the 40% jump in Spencer and Christy’s trend from version 5.1 to 5.2.’
Perhaps Dr’s Christy and Spencer would like to show us a comparison of temperatures since 1998, version 5.1 vs version 5.2. I’d be very keen to see such information along with the surface record.