Comments On Tamino’s AMO Post
by Bob Tisdale
Tamino’s AMO post is a response to my post Removing The Effects of Natural Variables – Multiple Linear Regression-Based or “Eyeballed” Scaling Factors (hereinafter referred to as the “Removing” post). Tamino took exception to my inclusion of the AMO as one of the datasets used to explain the rise in GISS Land-Ocean Temperature Index (60S-60N) during the satellite era. Please read Tamino’s AMO post before continuing.
My “Removing” post, as discussed in its opening paragraph, was the second in a series follow-ups to the earlier post Can Most Of The Rise In The Satellite-Era Surface Temperatures Be Explained Without Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gases? (hereinafter referred to as the “Can Most” post). The first follow-up was Notes On Polar Amplification.
And for those new to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) please refer to the post An Introduction To ENSO, AMO, and PDO — Part 2.
THE REAL CLIMATE DESCRIPTION OF THE AMO
Tamino wrote in his post,
“Bob Tisdale (and others) simply can’t wrap their brains around the fact that global warming is the cause, not the effect, of much of the changes in N.Atl SST anomaly. Therefore global warming is the cause, not the effect, of much of the variation in the AMO.”
My AMO posts typically include the RealClimate description of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (“AMO”), but I failed to include it in “Removing” post. RealClimate states, “A multidecadal (50-80 year timescale) pattern of North Atlantic ocean-atmosphere variability whose existence has been argued for based on statistical analyses of observational and proxy climate data, and coupled Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Model (“AOGCM”) simulations. This pattern is believed to describe some of the observed early 20th century (1920s-1930s) high-latitude Northern Hemisphere warming and some, but not all, of the high-latitude warming observed in the late 20th century. The term was introduced in a summary by Kerr (2000) of a study by Delworth and Mann (2000).”
Tamino’s opinion contradicts the opinions of his associates at RealClimate, or at least the opinion of the author of the RealClimate AMO webpage. RealClimate describes the AMO as being responsible for some, but not all, of the warming, but Tamino states it’s the other way around, that the global warming signal is the cause of the AMO variability.
Tamino’s RealClimate associates must be among “the others” who “simply can’t wrap their brains around the fact that global warming is the cause, not the effect, of much of the changes in N.Atl SST anomaly.”
A NOTE ABOUT THE SST DATASET USED IN THIS POST
GISS uses two SST anomaly datasets in its Land-Ocean Temperature (LOTI) product: HADISST from January 1880 to November 1981 and Reynolds OI.v2 from December 1981 to present. There is little difference between the HADISST and Reynolds OI.v2 data for the North Atlantic during the satellite era, as shown in Figure 1. So my use of HADISST data in the short-term will not influence the results of this post.
http://i52.tinypic.com/fxyvwp.jpg
Figure 1
However, there is a significant difference between the long-term Kaplan North Atlantic SST data used by the ESRL (and Tamino) and the HADISST data used by GISS. Refer to Figure 2. Keep in mind my use of the ESRL data was only for the AMO index in the short term, not the long-term SST data used by Tamino. (Note: I confirmed via email that the ESRL uses the coordinates of 0-70N and 80W-0 for its AMO data.)
http://i51.tinypic.com/28atkzb.jpg
Figure 2
And the difference does impact Tamino’s post. He uses the wrong North Atlantic SST anomaly dataset when he subtracts global temperatures from it. That is, assuming Tamino did not switch to the HADISST version of the North Atlantic, he biased the results in his last graph by the difference in the trends of the HADISST data (used by GISS) and the Kaplan data (used by ESRL) shown in Figure 2.
ON THE NONLINEARITY OF THE WARMING SIGNAL
The natural multidecadal variability of the North Atlantic SST anomalies is significantly greater than that of the Global (90S-90N) SST anomalies. This is very apparent if we compare detrended North Atlantic SST anomalies (AMO) to detrended Global SST data, Figure 3. The data have been smoothed with a 121-month running-average filter.
http://i54.tinypic.com/xnuvbq.jpg
Figure 3
Tamino opens his post with a discussion of the how the AMO is calculated by detrending North Atlantic SST anomalies, and he notes that the Wikipedia definition warns about the nonlinearity of the actual warming signal. The nonlinearity of the detrended global SST signal is shown clearly in my Figure 5 above. Based on his presentation, Tamino concludes, “Variations in the forced signal do leak into the AMO definition.”
Let’s compare the short-term linear trends of the North Atlantic SST anomalies to the trends of the other ocean basins. This is a general discussion of the AMO, so I’ve left in the Arctic and Southern Ocean data. Keep in mind that my “Removing” and “Can Most” posts only dealt with the period starting in 1982, which is the satellite era for SST data. As shown in the spaghetti graph, Figure 4, the SST anomaly linear trend of the North Atlantic is significantly higher than all other SST basins. The linear trend of the Arctic Ocean SST anomalies comes in second, in part because those two datasets overlap and due to the influence of the North Atlantic on the Arctic Ocean. Regardless, the North Atlantic linear trend is almost twice that of the Arctic Ocean. The North Atlantic trend is more than 3 times higher than the trends of the North Pacific and Indian Oceans and more than 5 times higher than the trends of the South Atlantic and South Pacific. And of course, the Southern Ocean linear trend is negative. (Note: The impact of the Southern Ocean cooling is so substantial that the trend is basically flat for all HADISST anomaly data south of 40S, or about 35% of the global oceans, since 1982.)
http://i56.tinypic.com/vo0ck0.jpg
Figure 4
This difference in linear trends can also be seen in the comparison of North Atlantic SST anomalies and the SST anomalies for the rest of the world. To determine the rest-of-the-world data (identified as “Global Without No Atlantic” in Figure 5), I approximated the North Atlantic surface area as a percentage of the global oceans. The Atlantic represents approximately 30% of the surface area of the global oceans. I assumed the North Atlantic made up half of that, or 15%, before scaling the North Atlantic data and subtracting it from the global data for Figure 5. The linear trend of the North Atlantic SST anomalies is more than 5 times greater than the average of the other ocean basins.
http://i53.tinypic.com/ml1jz9.jpg
Figure 5
In fact, the contribution of the North Atlantic is so great, without it, the global trend drops by 45%, Figure 6.
http://i56.tinypic.com/2zhei46.jpg
Figure 6
Tamino did not suggest how to account for the global warming signal in his AMO post, unless the last graph in which he subtracts global GISS LAND-Ocean Temperature Index data from North Atlantic SEA Surface Temperature data is his recommendation. But he did make a suggestion on his earlier How Fast is Earth Warming? thread. He wrote in response to a January 23, 2011 at 4:42 pm comment, “It might be interesting to correlate AMO to short-term global temperature fluctuations, if AMO is detrended nonlinearly, or if only the modern era (1975 to present) is detrended separately. But then: the denialists’ claim disappears.”
To account for the nonlinear signal, Trenberth and Shea (2006) proposed subtracting the global (60S-60N) SST data from the North Atlantic in “Atlantic hurricanes and natural variability in 2005”. But the North Atlantic represents a major portion (almost 50%) of the recent rise in global SST anomalies (90S-90N) since 1982, Figure 6. Therefore, Trenberth and Shea are suggesting the subtraction of a dataset with a strong North Atlantic signal from the North Atlantic SST data itself. Why not subtract the SST anomalies of the rest of the world from the North Atlantic? It’s the additional variability of the North Atlantic, above and beyond the rest of the world, that’s of interest, not a signal that’s been suppressed by itself.
The reason that method hasn’t been suggested becomes obvious when one compares that dataset to the AMO data based on detrended North Atlantic SST anomalies. Refer to Figure 7. (The “Rest of the World” data is calculated the same as the “Global Without North Atlantic” from Figures 5 & 6.) Note how the curves mimic one another from 1905 to the early 1980s. They diverge from time to time, but the curves are similar. But note how VERY similar the two curves are after 1982. That’s the period of the AMO data used in my “Removing” post.
http://i53.tinypic.com/2v1ukg5.jpg
Figure 7
Let’s look at the satellite-era portion (1982 to present) of those two datasets, Figure 8. The trends are basically the same, and the year-to-year variability of the two signals mimic one another with small divergences and lags. Based on Figure 10, the “Variations in the forced signal do leak into the AMO definition,” as Tamino notes, but they have had little impact on the results of my “Removing” post.
http://i54.tinypic.com/kdpe7c.jpg
Figure 8
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE KAPLAN AND HADISST NORTH ATLANTIC SST ANOMALIES
The Kaplan and HADISST versions of the North Atlantic SST anomalies were illustrated together in Figure 2. There was a significant difference in their linear trends. For Figure 9, I subtracted the HADISST version of the North Atlantic SST anomalies from the Kaplan SST anomalies used by ESRL (and Tamino for his last graph). Note the similarities between Figure 9 and Tamino’s final graph in his AMO post.
http://i53.tinypic.com/2806uqx.jpg
Figure 9
TAMINO’S FINAL COMPARISONS
Tamino’s post included a comparison graph of Global (90S-90N) GISS LOTI and the North Atlantic SST anomalies he created from the data on the ESRL AMO webpage. The last illustration was a graph of the difference. While I can’t find fault in his not knowing there was a shift in the Kaplan North Atlantic SST data, I can find fault in his using the wrong SST dataset. GISS does not use Kaplan SST.
There is little difference between the HADISST and Reynolds OI.v2 versions of the North Atlantic SST data, as shown in Figure 1. To assure the following comparisons were correct, for the following graphs I spliced those two North Atlantic SST anomaly datasets using the method described by GISS in Step 4 on their current analysis webpage. Had Tamino used the HADISST/Reynolds OI.v2-based GISS SST anomalies for the North Atlantic in his comparison, Figure 10, the difference between it and the Global GISS LOTI data would have maintained the appearance of the AMO.
http://i53.tinypic.com/2hofas0.jpg
Figure 10
And had Tamino detrended both datasets and smoothed them with 121-month filters, Figure 11, he would have noted that the multidecadal variability of the North Atlantic far exceeds that of the Global GISS LOFTI data—even with the additional land surface temperature variability in the LOTI data—even with the exaggeration of polar amplification in the LOTI data—even with the bias caused by GISS’s deletion of polar sea surface temperature data in the LOTI data.
http://i52.tinypic.com/3149sm9.jpg
Figure 11
I’ll respond to his comments about “eyeballing” in another post.
SOURCES
With the exception of the ESRL North Atlantic SST data (linked numerous times in the post), all data are available through the KNMI Climate Explorer:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectfield_obs.cgi?someone@somewhere
Bob,
I think that you are missing the central point of Tamino’s post: that the current definition of the AMO does not adequately remove the global warming signal. He demonstrates this quite adequately. If you look at the AMO the uptrends and downtrends follow the periods of 20th century warming where that warming was faster than the linear trend. So you see an increase in the AMO from about 1910 to 1950 (or so) and again from 1970 (or so) to present. The GW signal leaks into the AMO signal.
This combined with the fact that AMO shows a two month lag (AMO changes about two months after global temp.) makes it highly unlikely that AMO is driving anything.
Bill Illis,
How does the Kuroshio Current correlate with the oscillations in the Gulf Stream?
Fisheries data suggest teleconnections that would also suggest there would be a similarity for the Kuroshio but lead the Gulf stream by several years. Have you plotted the Kuroshio as well?
Tamino is best ignored.
I think there is a hidden assumption, or at least usually unstated assumption that makes ‘warmists’ sceptical of claims cyclic processes like AMO, PDO, ENSO can be the cause of a trend.
Cyclic processes with a long history are (in money terms) like savings accounts, you pay in for a while and then use them to spend more later. They change the timing of expenditure, but not the overall income. If cyclic processes COULD change the ‘income’ the amount of energy available to warm the globe then they would have been the cause of trends in the past.
Therefore any trend in a cyclic process, longer periods or higher temperatures during peaks must be a response to an external source of extra energy because they cannot change the amount of energy that is input to the system themselves.
Bob Tisdale says:
February 3, 2011 at 2:28 pm
steven mosher says: “Since the lag is negative, that’s a point in Tamino’s favor.”
Care to expand on your statement?
#####
see ratuss’ comment.
Woo woo another righteous chance to display a now quite old grudge I have with Dr. Foster, namely how lil’ alarmist kiddies prior to Climategate bashed my Central England Don’t Panic chart that plotted the world’s oldest actual thermometer record (that shows that recent warming is a boring continuation of a 350 year old linear trend)….based on his still standing blog post that is a classic example of lying with statistics. This is simple enough for anybody to understand and is a similar to what Dr. Mann clings to as well: bad maths.
http://i49.tinypic.com/w1g68.jpg
He moderated out my post containing this information. I post it here for posterity. Eventually I added a bunch of other single site very long running thermometer records to my original simple chart of Central England: http://oi49.tinypic.com/rc93fa.jpg
Relevant to this wildly complicated thread is the simple observation that Dr. Foster has a history of data terrorism.
I have found dissent is not tolerated at Tamino’s. They speak of intangibles affecting highly questionable probabilities that always tend to gloom and disaster.
Simple questions that question the answers to their orthodoxy are deleted.
Very head in the clouds pretend science, but very precise.
eadler says:
February 3, 2011 at 8:46 pm
Bob Tisdale wrote:
” If the oceans have been gaining heat, and the surface of the North Atlantic has been getting warmer, it doesn’t make sense to rule out global warming resulting from GHG’s as the ultimate cause.”
True, but it does not make sense to rule CO2 IN as primarily responsible. Until you can QUANTIFY the ocean warming effect of a given W/2m increase in SWR, COMPARED to the ocean warming effect of an equivalant W/2m increase in DWLR, then I see no reason that a multi decadal change in SWR due to increased solar flux at the surface driven by changes in TSI or cloud cover could not be seen as the primary driver of any ocean warming.
Rattus Norvegicus says: “I think that you are missing the central point of Tamino’s post: that the current definition of the AMO does not adequately remove the global warming signal. He demonstrates this quite adequately.”
Based on this portion of your reply, it appears you didn’t bother to read my post, Rattus.
I didn’t miss the point Tamino tried (but failed) to make. Tamino used the wrong North Atlantic SST data in his post to attempt to make that point. If he had used HADISST/Reynolds SST anomalies, the North Atlantic SST data dominates the multidecadal variability. See my last two illustrations.
Also refer to my discussion on nonlinearity of the warming signal that starts with Figure 3 and ends at Figure 8. That’s most of the post, and it’s tough to miss, Rattus. In it I concluded, if the AMO is represented as the difference between the North Atlantic SST anomalies and the SST anomalies of the rest of the world (to account for the additional variability of the North Atlantic), then there is little difference in the short-term trends and variability of the (detrended and ROW SST-adjusted) AMO datasets.
You added, “This combined with the fact that AMO shows a two month lag (AMO changes about two months after global temp.) makes it highly unlikely that AMO is driving anything.”
The trend of the recent AMO-related rise of the North Atlantic SST anomalies is more than five times higher than the trend of the SST anomalies for the rest of the world. See Figure 5 above. Your belief that it’s “unlikely that AMO is driving anything”, therefore, defies logic.
And how are you determining this two month lag? Are you keying your observations off the responses of the AMO and global temperatures to ENSO events? Global temperatures include the primary ENSO signal in the central and eastern tropical Pacific. But the response of the North Atlantic to ENSO is through teleconnections, and it requires those teleconnections to slow the tropical North Atlantic trade winds, etc., in order to raise North Atlantic SST anomalies. The lag between the change in SST in the Eastern and Central Tropical Pacific and the response of the North Atlantic is approximately 2 months.
If you’re not keying your 2-month lag off of ENSO responses, then please define how you are determining the lag.
Steven Mosher replied, “see ratuss’ comment.”
See my reply to Rattus.
eadler: A reply to your February 3, 2011 at 8:46 pm comment: This is why we’re discussing the additional variability of the North Atlantic to show that that additional variability CAN account for a significant portion of the recent rise in global temperatures. Also, your reply assumes that the rise in the SST anomalies for the rest of the oceans can’t be explained as responses to natural variables, such as ENSO. But I have shown in a number of posts that it can.
Also, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is a sea level pressure phenomenon, and it was discovered in the 1920s by Sir Gilbert Walker. It’s been studied for decades. Are you confusing the NAO for the AMO?
HR says: “In Fig7&8 you subtract the global minus N. Atlantic from the N. Atlantic. You seem to suggest that in doing this you have removed the AGW trend from this data to reveal the natural variation. It’s strikes me all you have revealed is the difference in the trend between the N. Atlantic and the global, it seems like a leap to try to attribute this to any one cause.”
I was attempting to show that it was better to subtract the ROW SST anomalies from the North Atlantic SST anomalies that to subtract global SST anomalies, because a major portion of the global variations are the result of the North Atlantic.
“The AMO changes about two months after global temp.”
The satellite UAH graph has a data point for each month. Is there an identical N.A. SST anomaly graph that could be overlaid” to see the two month lag? A separate chart of “NA only” SST with “NA only” air temperatures may help to see the lag which should not be surprising and has nothing to do with CO2.
As my comment to Elder (David says: February 4, 2011 at 2:28 am) points out, SWR fluctuations are the primary driver of short term daily and monthly atmospheric temperature changes as well as the likely driver of some SST changes. Of course upwelling ocean warm pools (Long term lag SWR flux affects) and wind affects also change SST over short time scales. However CO2 can NOT be responsible for short term temperature flux in either the SSTs or atmosphere. CO2 can only affect the average atmospheric temperature and perhaps over much longer periods affect ocean temperature. The ability of LWR to affect the ocean appears to be poorly studied and quantified by experiments and observations.
The point is that some things that control short term flux in both the atmosphere and SST, SWR / wind / cloud cover, obviously affect the atmosphere first, due to its much lower heat capacity. However the ocean, warming or cooling, drives the long term atmospheric average. A change or lag at the transition does not affect the average nearly as much as the average. The oceans may lag the atmosphere short term, but long term they drive it.
This is seen on a hemispheric bases biannually, as the earth’s seasonal energy pulse can reveal on a hemispheric scale some of what happens with the ocean / atmosphere on a monthly daily and hourly basis. Sunlight, falling on the Earth when it’s about 3,000,000 miles closer to the sun in January, is about 7% more intense than in July. Because the Northern Hemisphere has more land which heats easier then water most people state that the Earth’s average temperature is about 4 degrees F higher in July than January, when in fact they should be stating that the stating that the ATMOSPHERE is 4 degrees higher in July. In January this extra SW energy is being pumped into the oceans where the “residence time” within the Earth’s ocean land and atmosphere is the longest. There are also other factors, such as the Northern hemispheres winter increase in albedo exceeds the southern hemisphere’s winter albedo due to the far larger northern hemisphere land mass. So at perihelion we have a permanent loss to space of ? W/2m SWR due to increased albedo and a temporary loss of SWR to the atmosphere, as at perihelion the SWR is falling on far more ocean, where it is absorbed into the oceans for far longer then if that SWR fell on land. Do these balance (unlikely) or is the earth gaining or losing energy during perihelion??? The TOA seasonal flux should tell us and climate models should accurately predict the observation. The point is CO2 cannot drive the changes, short term or long term compared to flux in SWR and its far greater ocean affect.
Bob Tisdale says:
February 4, 2011 at 3:38 am
eadler: A reply to your February 3, 2011 at 8:46 pm comment: This is why we’re discussing the additional variability of the North Atlantic to show that that additional variability CAN account for a significant portion of the recent rise in global temperatures. Also, your reply assumes that the rise in the SST anomalies for the rest of the oceans can’t be explained as responses to natural variables, such as ENSO. But I have shown in a number of posts that it can.
Also, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is a sea level pressure phenomenon, and it was discovered in the 1920s by Sir Gilbert Walker. It’s been studied for decades. Are you confusing the NAO for the AMO?
I relied on a Wikipedia reference to the following paper as the first which identified the AMO:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v367/n6465/abs/367723a0.html
Nature 367, 723 – 726 (24 February 1994); doi:10.1038/367723a0
An oscillation in the global climate system of period 65–70 years
Michael E. Schlesinger & Navin Ramankutty
Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 105 South Gregory Avenue, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA
IN addition to the well-known warming of approx 0.5 °C since the middle of the nineteenth century, global-mean surface temperature records1–4display substantial variability on timescales of a century or less. Accurate prediction of future temperature change requires an understanding of the causes of this variability; possibilities include external factors, such as increasing greenhouse-gas concentrations 5–7 and anthropogenic sulphate aerosols8–10, and internal factors, both predictable (such as El Niño11) and unpredictable (noise12,13). Here we apply singular spectrum analysis14–20 to four global-mean temperature records1–4, and identify a temperature oscillation with a period of 65–70 years. Singular spectrum analysis of the surface temperature records for 11 geographical regions shows that the 65–70-year oscillation is the statistical result of 50–88-year oscillations for the North Atlantic Ocean and its bounding Northern Hemisphere continents. These oscillations have obscured the greenhouse warming signal in the North Atlantic and North America. Comparison with previous observations and model simulations suggests that the oscillation arises from predictable internal variability of the ocean–atmosphere system.
——————
Alan McIntire says:
February 3, 2011 at 9:06 pm
“Even “realclimate” admits Tamino has it backwards, and that it’s ocean temps that drive air temps.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/09/why-greenhouse-gases-heat-the-ocean/
According to the September 5, 2006 posting,
“The slope of the relationship is 0.002K (W/m2)-1. Of course the
range of net infrared forcing caused by changing cloud conditions
(~100W/m2) is much greater than that caused by increasing levels of
greenhouse gases (e.g. doubling pre-industrial CO2 levels will
increase the net forcing by ~4W/m2), but the objective of this
exercise was to demonstrate a relationship.”
Note that CO2 hasn’t yet doubled from the 280ppm at the beginning of
the 20th century to now, but when it does, the net effect will be a
warming of the oceans of 4*0.002= a whopping 0.008 C.
Obviously any MEASURABLE changes in ocean warming must be due to
factors other than CO2- most likely cloud cover- A. McIntire”
The post of the experiment attempting to measure this effect directly, does not prove what you claim it does.
This experiment was a first. Because of the small dimensions involved in the surface skin, it is not clear that the accuracy in placement of the equipment was sufficient to determine the quantitative effects accurately. It did detect a small effect, which was a first.
The real underpinning of the theory that the downwelling radiation keeps the oceans warm, is the measurement of the fluxes from the atmosphere into and out of the ocean, and the principle of conservation of energy. When you add up the fluxes, it is found that downwelling radiation averaged over the surface of the earth is twice as large as the absorbed short wave solar radiation that strikes the earths surface.
http://chriscolose.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/an-update-to-kiehl-and-trenberth-1997/
The energy flow diagram, and the quantities involved, show that the claim that down-welling radiation, has a negligible effect on thermal energy flux into the ocean, is nonsense.
Bob,
Tamino is using the definition of the AMO to calculate it. He is using the correct dataset:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/timeseries/AMO/
Which is the official definition of the AMO. Whatever you are calculating, it ain’t the AMO.
Rattus Norvegicus says:
Then you would agree that GISS does not contain the correct sst data in order to make comparisons with NOAA’s Kaplan based AMO calculation – as any difference artifacts between the data sources would not be accounted for?
Rattus Norvegicus says: “Tamino is using the definition of the AMO to calculate it. He is using the correct dataset”
Based in this reply also, it appears you did not read my post.
The AMO is dervived from the North Atlantic SST anomalies. Since it’s detrended, there’s very little difference in the AMO if you use Kaplan or HADISST North Atlantic SST anomalies. The key word in that sentence is detrended.
Tamino downloaded Kaplan North Atlantic SST data from the ESRL website and converted it to anomalies. The error he made was assuming that all SST datasets are the same. They are not. GISS uses HADISST data not Kaplan. He used the wrong SST dataset for his final two graphs. You can’t subtract an SST subset that’s not included in the global temperature dataset you’re referencing and expect to get the right results. You would have understood that if you had read my post.
eadler says: “I relied on a Wikipedia reference to the following paper as the first which identified the AMO”
Thank you for clarifying/confirming that you were discussing the AMO, and not the NAO.
David says:
February 4, 2011 at 2:28 am
eadler says:
February 3, 2011 at 8:46 pm
Bob Tisdale wrote:
” If the oceans have been gaining heat, and the surface of the North Atlantic has been getting warmer, it doesn’t make sense to rule out global warming resulting from GHG’s as the ultimate cause.”
True, but it does not make sense to rule CO2 IN as primarily responsible. Until you can QUANTIFY the ocean warming effect of a given W/2m increase in SWR, COMPARED to the ocean warming effect of an equivalant W/2m increase in DWLR, then I see no reason that a multi decadal change in SWR due to increased solar flux at the surface driven by changes in TSI or cloud cover could not be seen as the primary driver of any ocean warming.”
If you don’t see a reason why these cannot be the drivers, it is because you are not looking. Solar radiation is not the driver of the warming we have seen in the past 40 years. We know this because measurments show that the solar irradience has been declining. Cloud cover is not a persistent process. Cloud formation and precipitation are processes that take place in a matter of hours. They are reactions or feedback processes rather than drivers.
eadler: Why is my name in your February 4, 2011 at 8:00 pm comment? Nothing you included was written by me. It’s really difficult to follow what you’ve got there. In fact, it looks as though you are replying to one of your own comments.
eadler, In fact, you presented this:
XXXXXX
Bob Tisdale wrote:
” If the oceans have been gaining heat, and the surface of the North Atlantic has been getting warmer, it doesn’t make sense to rule out global warming resulting from GHG’s as the ultimate cause.”
XXXXXX
But I did not write that. You did. Refer back to your February 3, 2011 at 8:46 pm comment.
You have to change the way you reply to comments, because you’ve falsely attributed that statement to me, when it was you who wrote it.
REPLY: Mr. Adler, you need to apologize to continue posting here – Anthony
I was replying to a post by David,
David says:
February 4, 2011 at 2:28 am.
which I copied and pasted as a reference. It was David who inserted your name into his post.
I apologize for any confusion this caused.
I am sorry about that.