Mid-January 2011 SST Anomaly Update

Combet’s hot air tax
by Bob Carter
January 3, 2011
No seasonal break for the climate commissars
Following the failure of the UN’s Cancun talkfest, Climate Minister Greg Combet, displaying what Paul Keating would doubtless term remarkable intransigence, commented that it was still “very important from the government’s point of view that a market mechanism is adopted” to put a price on carbon dioxide.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2011/01/bob-carter
Support for Australia’s international objectives. Australian objectives presumably should not include economic and political stupidity in the face of the collapsed talkfests at Copenhagen and Cancun. The idea that overseas nations will discriminate against Australia unless we implement anti-carbon dioxide measures is well worn out, and has anyway always been a juvenile argument. Nations take hard decisions in accordance with their sovereign economic interests, irrespective of Green lobby group dreaming.
The irony is that the eleven principles adopted by the MCCC, to the degree that they are not mere persiflage, add up to a strong argument for NOT introducing a levy on carbon dioxide emissions, i.e., the principles indicate a course of action precisely the opposite of what the government currently intends.
This obvious conclusion escapes not only the government, but also our national newspaper which editorialised recently (December 30th):
Blaming Julia Gillard’s [intended] carbon legislation [for recent increases in the price of power] will come easily to consumers — even if putting a price on carbon is inevitable and logical. A price mechanism is the cheapest way to end uncertainty and reduce pollution …
Meanwhile, from the UK has just come the news that, with a December temperature average of -1 deg. C, England has already had its second coldest winter since records begin in 1659 – and, if January and February continue to be cold, England may yet achieve its coldest winter in the last 1,000 years.
The effective response from the British Meteorological Office (BMO) was for Director Julia Sligo to demand more funding to purchase bigger computers, saying:
It’s quite clear that if we could run our models at a higher resolution we could do a much better job — tomorrow — in terms of our seasonal and decadal predictions. It’s so frustrating. We keep saying we need four times the computing power. We’re talking just 10 or 20 million a year — dollars or pounds — which is tiny compared to the damage done by disasters.
The delusion that pouring more funds into ever more powerful computers will “solve” the climate prediction problem is chimerical, and simply represents an infinite regress for continuing (indeed, increased) funding for the very scientists who have led us astray so badly by their naïve over-reliance on unvalidated computer models in the first place.
To the degree that statements such as those made by BMO’s Dr. Sligo represent the views of the professional meteorological community, that community has now moved beyond parody and demands to be ridiculed. Can it really be the case that amidst the hurricane of Green spin about global warming, not a single bureaucrat or government politician in Canberra has retained a functioning bullshit detector?
Remarkably, in enunciating their “eleven principles”, the Canberra MCCC managed to evade entirely any mention of the underpinning scientific justification for introducing a tax on carbon dioxide. That is, of course, because there is none (which is doubtless why only one, tame, scientist was included as a member of the committee in the first place).
As the government will discover from its focus groups over the next few months, no matter how hard Mr. Combet tries to spin it as beneficial, they will introduce a carbon dioxide tax at their considerable electoral peril.
For where global warming alarmism is concerned, the good news is that the bullshit detectors of the Australian electorate are both alive and activated.

There is still a difference in the behavior of the central Atlantic compared to 07/08. Much like the stock market past performance does not predict future performance.

Bob,
In the first chart the period of time for the SST anomalies to be around -1.6 is about the same currently as the time period before and after 2008. That’s just viewing, so I don’t have the exact days or average for these. Still, the current value seems not to be about to jump up. So, is a longer period of slightly less intense La Niña more or less interesting?

The reduction of the strength of the ENSO to just a narrow band of numbers may hide information that would show different behavior.
If these SST anomaly maps are compared:
Jan 13, 2008
http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sst/sst_anom-080113.gif
Jan 14, 2011
http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sst/sst_anom-110123.gif
It is apparent that there is a considerable difference in the spread of the cold upwelling. It may be that the air pressure differential and winds were stronger – but the SST anomalies appear colder and more widely spread this time.
Or am I looking at the wrong thing?

It may look like it’s stalling but it could still drop further. Sun continues to almost flatline. SOI continues high and will prob finish the month around +18

Thanks Mr. Tisdale,
Your site’s archives are the best eduction for anyone hoping to understand the oceans.

I wonder what the Navy Submariners know about the oceans temperature gradient. They know more about this than any scientific organisation do. And the records are go back to the 50’s perhaps?
They need to know. And it’s classified me think.

Ian W says: “It is apparent that there is a considerable difference in the spread of the cold upwelling. It may be that the air pressure differential and winds were stronger – but the SST anomalies appear colder and more widely spread this time.”
Sometimes it’s better to compare monthly maps because of the weather noise. So I checked the monthly maps for Dec 2007:
http://i52.tinypic.com/30lze6r.jpg
and Dec 2010:
http://i55.tinypic.com/huofg0.jpg
Still tough to tell.
The other way to check is at the GISS map making webpage:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/
There you can create a “trend” map of the month and years in question for the SST data only. It gives you the change in temperature based on local linear trends, and it’s the same Reynolds OI.v2 SST data:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2010&month_last=12&sat=-1&sst=1&type=trends&mean_gen=12&year1=2007&year2=2010&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg

@ Ed Scott:
January 27, 2011 at 4:51 pm
Hah. I wonder how it long it will take the BMO to understand that it is their own equations that are wrong and not the resolution. Until they bring those equations back to reality they will only fail miserably. Tuned for an upward slope for so many years, that is their problem and the unwillingness to correct, we have the same problem on this side of the pond.

Mother Nature plays with loaded dice. About anything can and probably will still happen. I strongly suspect this La Niña is not over yet. It very easily could drag on, deepening or just taking its own sweet time about heading back to neutral conditions.

Hi Bob,
So you think this La Niña is going to end in the next three months or so? (Not trying to put words in your mouth, just my take on what you had said.) I was thinking that it would moderate, (to around -1.0 or so…) then swing back into full gear in late summer or early fall. Would you consider that scenario unlikely?

i don’t get the article. sst’s look like they are probably still dropping and the la nina integral looks as big as 2008.

As a humble engineer and not a scientist, unversed so to speak in the intricacies of global thermal dynamics, I have an observation that seems most at odds with global warming per sec.
The ocean temperature anomalies on the high side are in the north and south polar regions bleeding heat into precipitation of wet and white on a global basis.
The warmth in the arctic ocean is of particular concern, as the heat being lost must be huge. The sun having a sabbatical that was predicted by real a scientist is a worry that the lost heat may not be replaced.
That the L.I.A. happened in similar conditions augers unwell for the northern hemisphere. The sun is almost unvarying in its output regardless of sunspots, however the distance to the sun varies greatly and rapidly depending on the orbits and alignments of our large neighbours.
The inverse square rule applies to the distance from the sun for our wattage, thus at the moment we are some-what shy 50 watts per square metre or more.
Measuring the output of the sun from solar orbit is some-what less than useful, and tells nothing of what the Earth receives. The sun is behaving as it always does, pushed and pulled and bullied by its companions and thus is predictable.
Brave forward thinkers have hindcast and forecast our sun and our prevailing climate with real Newtonian mathematics. In very short shift the sun can vary in distance from the Earth 3 to 5 Million Kms, with the inverse square rule that is a ship load of watts we do not get.
The solar system is in a perpetual waltz with periodic sinusoidal occurances that give rise to change in our rather special little life raft. That a cold snap is upon us is beyond doubt, the lack of sunspots is an indication of the effects of the orbits of the major planets and the effects on our climate of this condition is known in history.
For two thousand years the planet has been cooling in fits and starts, one can hope that the overdue ice age stays overdue for a millenium or two, or at least a couple of hundred years.

Walter Dnes says: “Anyone have alternate data for the past 2 weeks?”
You’d have to retrieve through the NOAA NOMADS website:
http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh

Bob
Any idea’s why the Gulf of Mexico and “Gulf Stream” track are so low considering that the AMO is positive?.

Bob said:
“As noted in the November 2010 SST Anomaly Update, the global SST anomalies do not appear as though they will drop to the level they had reached during the 2007/08 La Niña, even if one were to account for the differences in NINO3.4 SST anomalies. This of course will be raised by alarmists as additional proof of anthropogenic global warming.”
_________
Bob, I very much respect your SST analysis, but the last sentence here is quite absurd. As as “warmist”, as in, one who believes that it is more likely than not that some level of AGW is occurring, I also can appreciate the natural long and short term cycles. Even if the current La Nina episode, which is occurring in the context of a cool cycle of the PDO, were to somehow dip lower than the previous La Nina level, that would prove nothing for or against the general theory that anthropogenic GHG’s have caused some level of AGW over the past century.

Mr. Gates,
The trends between ENSO and temperature runs a LOT closer together than the CO2 and temperature trend does.
We know very well that CO2 is going up and up at a fairly steady rate.But temperature goes up and down in a very erratic pattern.No visible connection at all.
I have to agree that the proponents of the AGW hypothesis have little basis to try the CO2/temperature connection argument.It was dead from the start.
Cheers.