NOTE: As is typical these days, and in keeping with co-author Phil Jones tradition of not giving up anything, the publicly funded scientific paper is not included with the news, and is hidden behind a paywall. All we can get is the press release and abstract and this silly picture of the researcher grinning like a banshee. Speculate away with impunity. I wonder why he has the ozone hole in Antarctica next to the HadCRUT temperature series?
Caption: David W.J. Thompson, professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, is the lead author of a Nature paper that shows sudden ocean cooling contributed to a global warming hiatus in the middle 20th century in the Northern Hemisphere. Credit: Colorado State University
FORT COLLINS – The hiatus of global warming in the Northern Hemisphere during the mid-20th century may have been due to an abrupt cooling event centered over the North Atlantic around 1970, rather than the cooling effects of tropospheric pollution, according to a new paper appearing today in Nature.
David W. J. Thompson, an atmospheric science professor at Colorado State University, is the lead author on the paper. Other authors are John M. Wallace at the University of Washington, and John J. Kennedy at the Met Office and Phil D. Jones of the University of East Anglia, both in the United Kingdom.
The international team of scientists discovered an unexpectedly abrupt cooling event that occurred between roughly 1968 and 1972 in Northern Hemisphere ocean temperatures. The research indicates that the cooling played a key role in the different rates of warming seen in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in the middle 20th century.
“We knew that the Northern Hemisphere oceans cooled during the mid-20th century, but the sudden nature of that cooling surprised us,” Thompson said.
While the temperature drop was evident in data from all Northern Hemisphere oceans, it was most pronounced in the northern North Atlantic, a region of the world ocean thought to be climatically dynamic.
“Accounting for the effects of some forms of natural variability – such as El Nino and volcanic eruptions – helped us to identify the suddenness of the event,” Jones said.
The different rates of warming in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in the middle 20th century are frequently attributed to the larger buildup of tropospheric aerosol pollution in the rapidly industrializing Northern Hemisphere. Aerosol pollution contributes to cooling of the Earth’s surface and thus can attenuate the warming due to increasing greenhouse gases.
But the new paper offers an alternative interpretation of the difference in mid-century temperature trends.
“The suddenness of the drop in Northern Hemisphere ocean temperatures relative to the Southern Hemisphere is difficult to reconcile with the relatively slow buildup of tropospheric aerosols,” Thompson said.
“We don’t know why the Northern Hemisphere ocean areas cooled so rapidly around 1970. But the cooling appears to be largest in a climatically important region of the ocean,” Wallace said.
Global temperatures 1850-2010 [Nature News]
An abrupt drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperature around 1970
David W. J. Thompson1, John M. Wallace2, John J. Kennedy3 & Phil D. Jones4
- Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523, USA
- Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195-1640, USA
- Met Office Hadley Centre, Met Office, Exeter EX1 3PB, UK
- Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK
Correspondence to: David W. J. Thompson1 Email: davet@atmos.colostate.edu
Abstract
The twentieth-century trend in global-mean surface temperature was not monotonic: temperatures rose from the start of the century to the 1940s, fell slightly during the middle part of the century, and rose rapidly from the mid-1970s onwards1. The warming–cooling–warming pattern of twentieth-century temperatures is typically interpreted as the superposition of long-term warming due to increasing greenhouse gases and either cooling due to a mid-twentieth century increase of sulphate aerosols in the troposphere2, 3, 4, or changes in the climate of the world’s oceans that evolve over decades (oscillatory multidecadal variability)2, 5. Loadings of sulphate aerosol in the troposphere are thought to have had a particularly important role in the differences in temperature trends between the Northern and Southern hemispheres during the decades following the Second World War2, 3, 4. Here we show that the hemispheric differences in temperature trends in the middle of the twentieth century stem largely from a rapid drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperatures of about 0.3 °C between about 1968 and 1972. The timescale of the drop is shorter than that associated with either tropospheric aerosol loadings or previous characterizations of oscillatory multidecadal variability. The drop is evident in all available historical sea surface temperature data sets, is not traceable to changes in the attendant metadata, and is not linked to any known biases in surface temperature measurements. The drop is not concentrated in any discrete region of the Northern Hemisphere oceans, but its amplitude is largest over the northern North Atlantic.
=============================
hmmm, maybe this graph from ICECAP will help them:
And this too:
The historical variability of the Arctic Oscillation. 1969-1970 was darned cold.
Also see this image from the Climate Prediction Center:
ALSO: Quote from Phil Jones: Reuters
Jones, at the centre of a furore over e-mails hacked from the University of East Anglia in late 2009, was reinstated this year after reviews cleared him of suspicions of exaggerating evidence in favour of global warming.
Thursday’s paper is the first he has since published in Nature. “Maybe it will get them thinking,” he said, asked how climate sceptics would react to his involvement in a paper highlighting a cause of cooling, rather than warming.
——————-
I wonder how good that Southern Hemisphere SST data is back in the 1960s, which is used here to demonstrate “robustness”. From Physicsworld.com
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This looks like normal science to me. Prior explanation found inadequate. Work continues to find better or correct explanation. What’s to see here? What’s the implied argument – the warmists are incompetent because they’ve recognized our understanding is not complete?
@Anthony
Banshees scream and wail but never heard of one grinning.
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=%22grinning+like+a+banshee%22&word2=%22screaming+like+a+banshee%22
REPLY: Well, where I come from they grin too.
Can’t wait for them to “discover” what drives the ocean oscillations.
There will be much more back peddling of BS CO2 ideas as the cyclic processes continue the warming hiatus.
” I wonder why he has the ozone hole in Antarctica next to the HadCRUT temperature series?”
Come on Anthony… to prove to the world he really is a clitomatologist. ☺
I’m surely going to hurl.
Either the good doctor is being simplistic or I’m a buffoon, and to be honest, I’ve been a buffoon before. But what in this analysis identifies a world capacity to produce a mysterious outburst of heat/cold/no change at all in the ocean? What ever happened to the notion that all the energy in the world worth thinking about comes from the sun, and that if it is sequestered for a time in the ocean and is suddenly or otherwise released, it does not constitute new energy in the global energy state? It is simply additive.
As I read this it would appear that energy expresses like an apparition to change the climate in little understood ways. That is playing dice with sequestered energy and a pretty smart guy once said God does not play dice. Not that I’m handing all this off to God, but substitute laws of nature for the diety of your choice and the same rules apply.
If the energy was already here then it is NOT NEW ENERGY! It has only reemerged. If it has been unsequestered, learn why. Don’t blame me and my Harley for the problem.
Give good old Phil Jones another 50 years and he might figure out that the sudden cooling event in the mid 20th century was, OMG, a natural cycle!
He is just really slow at seeing, detecting, or understanding cycles – probably dropped on his head as a baby.
Mirabile dictu! The strange incident of the tail wagging in the night-time was caused by the dog it was attached to! Maybe we should have been watching the dog all along.
It REALLY annoys me that I have to bust a gut trying to get a paper published in Nature from the biological/medical sciences field while these muppets continually get their shonky manuscripts accepted. Bah Hunbug!!
For years the climate scientists have been researching the climate armed with lavish funding and allowed almost total freedom to play with expensive computer models and it seems they know less now than when they started.
We were told that the oceans were rapidly warming and that their computer models predicted runaway warming as the warming oceans reached a tipping point and could no longer act as a heat sink for the atmospheric warming that their adjusted temperature data promised. We were confidently informed that the oceans cycles were very well understood because their computer models told them so, runaway dangerous climate change was just around the corner as tipping points were reached and all this was due to carbon dioxide.
Climate science had it all worked out in theory, the jigsaw fitted almost perfectly together and they knew this because the computer models told them so with ever higher atmospheric temperatures and ever rising sea temperatures and levels. It was all a done deal with the climate scientists confidently asserting their knowledge and wisdom to a trusting media.
Then came the trickle of doubts that turned into a flood, the temperature series was flawed and adjusted, the scientists had private doubts which they concealed in case their lavish funding dried up, the dirty tricks and manipulations and smearing of enemies and all of a sudden it seems the climate science community was seen to have feet of clay and their knowledge of the climate was very much less than complete.
What they thought they knew they didnt, what they believed was wrong, what they hoped for did not appear and their castle so carefully fabricated was found to have been built on the shifting sands of arrogance and deceit and so our real knowledge of the earths climate is no more advanced than it was when the art of climate science was born.
The scientists involved wanted certainty so in the absence of certain knowledge they substituted what they thought was applied predictive logic based on computer modelling quite forgetting the basic principles of of science, advance a theory and then match the theory to real world observation. The most powerful computer in the world is only as good as the data fed into it, if real data is used the results are stunning but if guesses and wishful thinking and made up data are used then the results are just pure rubbish.
We are now in the position of having to witness the embarrassing spectacle of climate science coming to terms with its errors and mistakes, the old saying ‘be sure your sins will find you out’ is very accurate.
Tamino should be very upset about this paper since he has a firm belief that the mid century 20th century cooling was due to aerosols.
REPLY: A light breeze will upset “Tamino” -Anthony
Cliff,
The warmists are incompetent because they advocate a complete re-structuring of modern society on nothing more than a hypothesis. If the warmists just stuck to the science, it would only be an academic debate, versus the birth of the cap and tax montrosity that was passed in the US House.
Finally, the warmists are the type of people who argue until they are blue in the face that they are right, only to reverse their position 180 degrees about 5 years later than most other scientific disciplines. I will give you an example. They are still touting their climate models even though the model assumptions are circa late 1990’s. My guess that future climate models will likely show only a 2C rise in global temps in the 21st century. Again, anyone without an agenda (i.e., need fantastic results for more grant money) could have produced the same result about 10 years ago. This is why they have no credibility.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiatus
“” I wonder why he has the ozone hole in Antarctica next to the HadCRUT temperature series?””
Just two cases where the proposed mechanism was flawed but pushed till accepted for monetary gain.
The reason O2 changes to O3 is because the magnetic reluctance of O2 is three orders of magnitude higher than O3. So by the rules of the conservation of energy, it is much more efficient for some of the EUV and UV EMF flowing into the atmosphere, to convert O2 into O3 to lower the resistance to its flow. As long as the levels of UV energy is above normal / average the O3 level is maintained.
When the seasonal total spectrum EMF drops as the magnetic fields of the Earth also decreases slowly long term, the maintenance of the O3 is allowed to decrease back to almost all O2. The whole CFC freon 12 debacle was commercial/political in origin, and as the background levels of the earth’s magnetic field strength continues to decrease the “Ozone hole” continues to respond as it did before and gets larger every year. With not a word on the MSM about the continued gradual hole size increase, with a new record level almost every year.
The CFC freon 12 scare was never viable, just like the CAGW CO2 scare is never going to drive the atmosphere into Venus type conditions. I am wondering what third picture in on his monitor behind the HadCRUT temp scam? Looks kinda like a map of the Himalayas?
The smile on his face is like some one with pair of aces in the hole, who just went all in, calling an opponent’s hand that turns out surprisingly to be a royal flush.
Or just proud to an assistant to a benched team member.
Warming during the 20th century was most probably caused by the ordered trefoil movement of the solar system barycenter between 1906-1956. The irregular, chaotic pattern began in 1985, and will last until 2040, as predicted by Rhodes Fairbridge, causing the present cooling, as is also proposed by Ivanka Chárvátova and Pavel Hedja (2008).
The quiet volcanic period between 1915 and 1960 is an indication of the barycenter influence on Earth’s climate and geologic activity. The present chaotic pattern the barycenter is doing and the increase on volcanic and seismic activity is another strong indication.
But don’t expect these people will look up and take a look at the sun. The sun is no-no for grant applications.
I do not have to publish in Nature nor work in University to see, that the aerosol BS theory was, well, BS.
So if natural cooling can cool down the climate, can also natural warming warm it?
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/ihadsst2_280-360E_0-70N_na.png
See the shift in N Atlantic. Next 30 years we are going downhill again. To h*ll with all banshees.
GCMs defended by Stott from the Met office.
He states “Climate models capture much of the complexity and richness of this behaviour” saying they are just as chaotic as reality.
LOL
Not mentioning, of course, that that the behavior is totally different.
From Revkins blog:
Peter Stott, Met Office:
——
So the analysis done in this paper by David Thompson et al is a valuable piece of additional evidence in enabling us to get down into the real detail as Gabi has says and pick out the interplay between the different factors that can affect climate. As to the models, this interplay between climate change and climate variability is fascinating and this richness of behaviour is indeed seen in the climate models.
……………………………….
Climate models capture much of the complexity and richness of this behaviour – behaviour that is not programed into the climate models but which – actually a remarkable success for the science of climate modelling – but which emerges from these models when we make
simulations of climate over the last century.
From http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html
“My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.” – Freeman Dyson.
So far as I am concerned, any paper which has Phil Jones as a co-author (co-conspirator?) has ZERO credibility.
“We don’t know why the Northern Hemisphere ocean areas cooled so rapidly around 1970. ” The only thing in this paper which I will accept is the first three words of this sentence.
And they are happy that the politicians, on the basis of their “settled”, “consensus” science, will destroy the economy of the developed world and dash the hopes of the third world poor?
Hmmm, so science is supposed to be a continuing journey. We have made our case that natural cycles can be appropriately used to show that CO2 is not a big driver of warming. We have a study that now may confirm one of our base tenets, that actually goes against the meme that sulfates/pollution were the cause for the cooling of the past mid century. And yet, it is mostly met with derision, because of one of the authors.
Sad really.
🙁
If natural cooling of the Northern Hemisphere ocean areas resulted in the “ice age” scare, then the reverse of that natural trend led to how much of the current warming?
Take a minute, and go back to the top, look at the photo and ask yourself ,
‘ would I buy a used car from this man’ ?
Only one little old lady driver,
Stored in a climate controlled environment,
Always covered by a dust sheet,
Oil changed every 50 miles,
Never driven in the rain,
The snow tires and chains in the trunk are from another car,
The drivers seat is worn because the cat always slept there.
What took them so long?
Ocean cooling causes Global Warming.
Global Cooling causes Ocean warming. So now that the N. Atlantic is warmer than everything else, it’s Global Cooling time.
That Phil Jones is a genius, I tell you.
I believe this latest idea comes from what I was talking about a few threads back:
As La Nina upwells cold water in the Pacific, it shoves (read does not replace) the warm water northwards in it’s wake.
But, the warm water in the N. Atlantic is temporary, just like the cold event there in 1968-72 was temporary.
The cooling Arctic Winter will make short work of it.
From University of Washington
Causes for the PDO are not currently known. Likewise, the potential predictability for this climate oscillation are not known. The mechanisms giving rise to PDO will determine whether skilful decades-long PDO climate predictions are possible.
Here is the answer to the cause and prediction mechanism.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PDO.htm
Let me get this straight – the 70s global cooling that had all the alarmists up in arms about the onset of the next ice age was actually global warming in disguise?
Is there a rubber room big enough to contain all these “experts”?
I just want to know when we can start suing these charlatans. Surely they have committed crimes. The three enquiries that Jones survived were not enquiries in the legal sense. They were a bunch of mates covering each others arse. The number of frauds just keeps getting bigger and now includes the enquirers. A fair dinkum court case could and would discover the truth and expose these clowns for the cheats they are. It would also expose the universities and Government agencies that simply went along with the lies. Let’s sue.
“The twentieth-century trend in global-mean surface temperature was not monotonic…..”
Why should it be?
The authors still regard the temperature stasis c.1940–c. 1980, which doesn’t fit the model (assuming the veracity of the data), as an aberration which has to be explained away http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1900/mean:25/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1940/to:1980/trend .