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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Correct me if I’m wrong, but if the cooling wasn’t down to aerosols, then doesn’t that in itself invalidate most or all of the IPCC climate models…
” 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. ☺”
Actually, to me they appear to be faffing about in their mother’s basements, proudly showing how they can download images off the net. They couldn’t possibly be serious about calling themselves “scientists”, because they missed (or ignored) this:
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/SixtyYearCycle.htm
Brilliant article, taking just about everything into account, including orbital fluctuations.
In some sense, I think that it is a purely academic question what was the cause of the cooling in the mid 20th century – a question that doesn’t really impact any “planning” of our CO2 economy etc. It seems that whatever the cause was, it can occur again. This statement holds for PDO, AMO, emissions of aerosols, solar activity, anything you think of.
If it were possible for other effects to beat the effect of CO2 emissions between 1940-1970 and achieve cooling, it is possible that the same thing happens in 2010-2040 or other periods. So we’re just far from knowing whether the temperatures in 2040 will be warmer than today or not. It may be somewhat more likely that 2040 will be warmer than 2010 – but why does it matter?
It’s like if you think that it’s somewhat more likely for team A to beat team B in soccer while the bookmaker offers the same odds. Will the knowledge about the asymmetry – or bias – allow you some spectacular profit with the bookmakers? Clearly, you don’t want to bet your house on team A just because it’s somewhat more likely than B, especially if you don’t win anything, anyway.
Surely this merely demonstrates yet again that we don’t know nearly as much about the climate as is claimed.
tonyb
This is the first step in there new science, climate catastrophe or what ever that bloke in the white house wants to call it now. Move the goal posts and re-submit grant applications as the ones on global warming are drying up.
Here’s the thing about modeling. If you get the averages from the known past correct, you can get the averages from the future. That is why interest, as a cost for risk, is obsolete. Just give me a call at (555)555-5555 to learn more about my stock modeling system. It explains all the blips we have seen in the economy in the past with 100% accuracy! And just wait til you see what
Madam Cleothe models have in store for you!The photo, to me, shows an extremely nervous rictus which can be mistaken for a grin, similar to the way your dog ‘grins’ when he’s peed on the carpet in the room he’s not allowed in, that you haven’t discovered yet and the door to the yard (and escape) is firmly shut. He is no doubt mindful that partnering Phil Jones of UEA in a research paper may be akin to a Damoclean sword hanging over his academic reputation and his continued tenure and funding.
And who gave them licence to rape and pillage the English language? Warming hiatus, indeed!
Anthony
You mentioned the map showing the ozone hole behind the researchers back, which appears to be the 2006 version.
This is current information.
http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.html
It reached a mimum in 2006 and doesn’t seem to be ‘healing’ very much despite the ban on cfc’s. Last year I asked the question to the Max Planck institute and Cambridge University as to whether the hole might have always existed, its just that before the 1950’s they didn’t have the equipment to measure it.
They admitted they didn’t know and it was possible a hole had always been there, which I understand is partly a consequence of temperatures.
I know you’ve covered this subject in the past but do you think an update might be in order?
tonyb
Perhaps “David W.J. Thompson, professor of
atmospheric scienceterrestrial astrology at Colorado State University” explains in his paper why the oceans have been coolingThe article reads. “’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.”
There are two things going on according to their plots of SST anomalies for the Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere and the difference. The Southern Hemisphere is rising while the Northern Hemisphere is declining. Shouldn’t the question be, why is one hemisphere cooling while the other is warming?
“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,”
Following, as it does, upon a highly unusual admission of cluelessness, we have the unqualified declaration that this particular patch of the ocean is more climatically important than some others. On behalf of all those who may feel geographically excluded by this statement let me say, without fear of contradiction, that if my particular patch of the Indian Ocean should warm appreciably, cool appreciably, or sharply change its direction of flow, you are all going to know about it.
The thing that is important for Jones and UEA/CRU is that he’s published in Nature which is regarded as one of the ‘high impact journals’ when carrying out academic research assessments.
One of the amusing things about such asssessments is that, 20 years down the line, it doesn’t matter whether you were right or wrong. It matters that you got column inches in the right journals.
I must say though that if he thinks after all the trashing of those moderating the seeohtwo party line that he can just waltz in and take the other explanations and stay as a high priest then he’s the biggest hypocrite in world science right now.
So long as he keeps getting funding, I doubt he’ll care one iota.
I must admit I was sceptical about the claims made in this new paper, until I saw it has the University of East Anglia Mark of Quality (c).
Dave Springer says:
September 22, 2010 at 8:52 pm
It would appear from the Law Dome ice core data CO2 increase took a 20 year hiatus around the same time.
I’ve responded to your strange insistence that the relatively flat growth of CO2 concentrations during the 1928-48 period is some how significant. The Response is here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/20/physicist-says-fossil-fuel-burning-is-insignificant-in-the-global-carbon-pool/#comment-489945
“…this silly picture of the researcher grinning like a banshee”
Your immaturity and irrational hatred of everything to do with science could not be more evident.
[REPLY: Maturity dictates that self-control will intercept personal disparagement … bl57~mod]
There are many scientists who still think human CO2 emissions can affect global temperature but we don’t take much notice of them these days. The science is moving on and the major concern now is working out why both the 70s cooling and 90s warming fears both turned out to be wrong.
What we need from these advocates is a public statement that they have been wrong and we don’t need to make any further steps to reduce CO2 within our energy chain.
This way we prevent further disasters like this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-11395964
It’s not only the science that is corrupted and we need the money for real problems.
Martin Brumby says:
September 22, 2010 at 11:28 pm
Actually Martin, they have no actual intention of dashing the hopes of the third world poor. When the first world is no longer, and everybody is “equal” there will be nothing to compare, so within a generation or so all our grandkids can live in a world where everyone has bugger-all; except of course the chosen ones who out of “necessity” and station are allowed a few “indulgences” like a castle, private jet, stretch-limo and a few hundred billion dollars.
RE:
Stephen Wilde says:
September 23, 2010 at 4:07 am
Luboš had a great article on The Reference Frame the other day titled…
Lesser minds react to Bob Laughlin’s climatic blasphemy
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/09/lesser-minds-react-to-bob-laughlins.html
This paragraph from it is very fitting…
Science is about finding the truth about the climate and other things – and the truth is that the climate has always been changing – for dozens of reasons that came and come in thousands of variations – whether a zealot likes it or not. You can’t insure yourself or your planet against the validity of the laws of physics: the laws will always hold. In particular, the climate is always changing. And the changes have been larger than anything that CO2 can produce after centuries of burning of fossil fuels can achieve.
Regardless of what man does… climate is going to change.
Regardless of what man does… eventually the next glacial period will set in.
The earth, nature is not concerned with man. Man is a speck who too often feels more important than he really is.
This Thompson article appears to be a real beauty:
1) it satisfies the urge of the public to attribute poorly understood phenomena to a single cause.
2) it attributes the cooling to emmm ehh – cooling-? What can be more convicing?
not to mention the Wallace juwel: a “climatically important region of the ocean” makes you wonder which regions are climatically futile?
If anything this paper (exerpt) proves that it is irresponsible to attribute temperature trends to single causes, that correlation cannot be interpretet as causalityand that we are only at the brink of gaining an understanding of the climate system.
Looks like Phil Jones could be wobbling regarding his belief in CAGW…
First we have this:-
BBC Q&A (13-Feb-2010): Professor Phil Jones(PJ) questioned by the BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin(RH).
RH Q (a) – “Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?”
PJ A (a)”…in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.
Here are the trends and significances for each period:”
Period………Len(y)..C/10y..Significance
1860-80 21 0.163 Yes
1910-40 31 0.15 Yes
1975-98 24 0.166 Yes
1975-09 35 0.161 Yes
RH Q (b) – “Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
PJ A (b)”…Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level…”
Then we have this endorsement of natural climate change in the abstract from the new paper…
“..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 time-scale of the drop is shorter than that associated with either tropospheric aerosol loadings or previous characterizations of oscillatory multi-decadal variability. The drop is evident in all available historical sea surface temperature data sets, is not traceable to changes in the attendant meta-data, 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…”
Then we have this (odd?) comment…
…“Maybe it will get them thinking.” he said, when asked how climate sceptics would react to his involvement in a paper highlighting a cause of cooling, rather than warming.
Makes me wonder if the mole behind the CRU Climategate leak held a very senior position???
OK, just a cursory look at the graph of ocean temp submitted in Nature, and shown above (temps 1850 to 2000 – unsteady warming) – the drop from 1940 is commented as being a measurement artefact – in which case, if excluded, the graph shows a steady warming since 1910 at a consistent rate – i.e starting 60 years before the ‘onset of AGW’ in 1970.
Therefore, being as we know how the oceans aftect temperatures, what case is there for CO2 ?
I think I know why the oceans cooled in the 1970s, I seem to remember as a child everyone was more worried about a new ice age starting, so I guess the oceans just tried to scare us into believing the new ice age had started. Now everyone worries about global warming and the planet is doing its best to make us believe the warming is real; so the moral is ‘stop worrying about things and it should all settle down’. Maybe the dinosaurs worried too much about being wiped out by an asteroid strike!
Anthony, this is beneath you. I do not understand the anger towards this researcher. He is saying the cooling was caused by a natural event and not man made. This is what we have been saying all along.
Climate researchers usually underestimate the level of natural climate variability and blame mankind for any change in the energy budget or stored heat. Now we have a researcher who agrees with us and you attack his looks, his smile. Stop making this so personal!
Okay, I wouldn’t have chosen Phil Jones as my co-author but perhaps that was the only way to get the research published in a high impact journal.
Stephen Wilde – thanks for the links, it updates me on Lockwood’s previous paper on blocking high pressure systems that cool Europe – also linked to shifts in the jetstream and that then to UV variability (which is also linked in the literature to the Little Ice Age weather patterns in Western Europe – from work by Drew Shindell at NASA).
On one level, it is good to have one’s analysis confirmed by the mainstream who now begin to redeem themselves – but annoying that they don’t make any reference to anybody who might have drawn their attention to these potential causal links – as I did in my book, ‘Chill’, published in July 2009, and before that in a visit to John Kennedy at Hadley in September 2008! Hadley had simply never thought about the relationship of ocean heat stores, which are spatially distinct – especially in the North Atlantic, and the rate of accumulation or release of heat and what determines those rates. In that year I also asked to meet up with their experts on the jetstream and whether they coudl direct me to the literature on its historic patterns – they had no one working on it and directed me to a US aviation website (which had no archival data).
I critiqued Lockwood’s previous work on the lack of correlation of solar trends with temperature in my book and drew attention to what he had missed. But heh, science progresses! And that is the main thing. They are now all looking at the jetstream, UV, and the spatial distribution of heat – though mainly in relation to the North Atlantic and Western Europe, rather than the PDO and Alaska and the role that the Alaskan northern shelf has in terms of temperature differentials to drive the Beaufort Gyre – and the latter determines whether warm North Atlantic water penetrates into the Arctic Ocean. This is all in the book.
My sense is that the rapid changes in heat content are very largely concerned with the top 200m – the profiles of heat storage show most of it above that depth, and have little to do with longer term ocoean overturning in the thermo-haline conveyor. Meso-scale eddies from storm tracks readily penetrate to this depth and mix the water, with the cyclones acting to transfer heat and mositure to the atmosphere to augment the oceanic transfer on the normal westerly air currents into Europe. In my book I also review the latest research showing that 80% of land warming (UHI notwithstanding) is due to ocean transfer. IPCC itself says that 80% of the heat content (warming) is locked in the upper oceans.
I think the rapid cooling is due to a spatial shift in cloud cover – itself caused by shifting jetstream and storm tracks. The relatively narrow and shallow Gulf Stream current, lets not forget, is wind-driven and supplies the heat to the northern gyre which then accumulates heat at greater depth down to 100-200m. If the northern oceans are more exposed to clear skies they will lose heat at the surface – and NASA satellite data certainly shows spikes in infra-red outflow to space (with Hansen warning that this is likely an instrument error!).
The Little Ice Age (and its opposite, the MWP) are then readily explained in terms of variable accumulation or depletion of these northern heat stores (the Pacific gyre stores heat that affects the western USA and Alaska) – and this then correlates with the jetstream changes expected from more and less UV in those periods. The current solar minimum offers opportunities to study this – as evinced by Lockwood’s work, and now at Hadley.
What these guys fail to point out is that the IPCC models without exception still rely on the old view that it was man-made aerosols that caused the ‘lack of warming’ between 1945-1978 – even though in an obscure section, IPCC4 states that it is now known the aerosol effect was too localised to affect such a global downturn – again, I reveiw all of this in Chill – the work of Pinker, Wild, and Wielicki – all published in Science in 2005, demonstrating that ‘dimming’ and subsequent ‘brightening’ were due to changes in natual aerosol loading and cloud cover. That means the models were falsely validated. They are, at the heart, errroneous, as many of us suspected.
I took this issue up with among others, Gerry Meehl on a visit to NCAR in February this year – they did not know the 2005 Science papers, nor were they familiar with the satellelite data on IR! They still believed that the dip was caused by anthropogenic sulphur.
I don’t care that much about credits, but I get annoyed when past errors are not admitted, and this one is colossal.
Since publishing the book, and despite my science credentials from decades of anti-pollution work and despite its endorsement by the drafting author of the Kyoto Protocol, W.Jackson Davis, I have received not a single invitation to discuss any of this with UK climatologists, nor, despite my green credentials, by any environmental groups. I honestly think the former are too embarassed by their errors and the latter have simply buried their head in the sand and don’t read any critical literature (and I wonder if they have anyone with a critical faculty still working for them!). Likewise the left-liberal press and New Scientist have all failed to review (and hence criticise) the book. Remarkably, it has been the financial world that wants to know – and they can be very specific – like, ‘ come and tell us about shifts in the jetstream, the PDO, AMO and the Little Ice Age’!!
Bit of a personal rant here – apologies – I am with you Stephen and enlightenment is dawning, slowly.