No No to el Nino ( till 2012)By Joe Bastardi (from his WeatherBell blog)
I was going to write something about the dreaded back door front and how while it may be 90 at the masters this weekend it may snow in the I-90 corridor in the northeast but then Joe D Aleo sent me this:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/settled-science-masters-vs-masters-vs-hansen-vs-noaa/
knowing it would wave a red flag in front of me and off I go.
The amazing thing is that the high priests of high temps keep claiming co2 is the cause, then admit its not because of the obvious relationship of the enso to global temps! Its simple to see that when the nino comes on, the earth warms, the nina comes on its cool. I don’t understand why they can not, through simple deduction, understand that the warm PDO ( 1978 to 2007) leads to a warming of the globe, especially when there is part of that time the amo is warm) and the cooling will follow when the PDO turns colder, as it is now? In addition we have to remember that a lot of these folks ( NOT Dr. Jeff Masters who is trying to nail the forecast here though he does see different from me on AGW) but some of the non meteorologists in the field, simply don’t understand that its tough to sustain a warm enso in a cold PDO. And that the cold Enso is much more likely. Actually they WILL NOT SEE IT because it means they were wrong about the eternal warmth, the feedback, everything. More preposterous is the supposition that a trace gas needed for life on the planet, a very minor weight in the atmosphere as it is, would influence the ocean, which is far more important in total energy contribution to the planet than the atmosphere, or anything we are putting into the atmosphere. Do the math good friend.. take the weight of the ocean and atmosphere together and the energy implications of the gas and
the liquid and then stack co2 against it.
The only rout bigger than that is a wrestling match between me and Cael Sanderson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cael_Sanderson
not much of a chance either way.
But again, aren’t you admitting that the first leg of my triple crown of cooling ( oceanic cycles) is the main driver.
Lets just look at this folks. First the Multivariate enso index, which is
Wolters baby, shows the warmth from the late 70s till recently:
Warm PDO, ( then AMO) what do you think the result is. But look there is more! At 600 mb, which is a good measuring point for the troposphere we are near record cold, the most recent coldest in 2008 and way the heck under where we were. The blue line is last year, the red this year, the yellow 08 , the orange average the purple is the record low:
Now why would Hansen want the super nino, which he has been in a habit of forecasting since the 97-98 one? Well, let’s look at the ocean temps:
In this case, the red line is 08, the yellow last year, and you can see we are in the middle of the pack, biased low. But the amazing thing about the nino forecast is THE PROOF OF MY POINT THAT IT IS THE OCEANS, since we can see the warmth that developed as the nino roared on last year, and the cool that has responded this year to the cooling. What is interesting is how close we have been to 2008 at 600mb, when we are a bit less cool in the ocean. So here is what you have to believe.. Yes it is the oceans but their actions are being caused by a trace gas essential for life on the planet.
If you believe that, then when I go into wrestling practice later today, perhaps this is my day to end the 159-0 Gold medalists domination.
I don’t think so.
Now perhaps the NOAA model, which was forecasting a minor warming event a couple of weeks ago is still doing so. Two years ago, I had the nino called in Feb and predicted the non hurricane season. Last year again in Feb with the NINA, 18 STORMS, HOT SUMMER I dont see the hot summer this in the n plains and lakes, I see less storms, more US impact but most importantly to this post, I don’t see an el nino. neutral cool, yes like 08, but I don’t see the nino and I am not a model worshiper. The models are agreeing with me, because I said so before. There is no physical reason, in a cold PDO, to forecast a rapid return of enso warm conditions. Increased volcanic actions in the tropics could play a role, but that along with the sun are wild cards. And by the way, I have already been out publicly saying that the return of a weak to perhaps moderate warm event in 12-13 could lead to winters, because of solar and seismic considerations, that could rival the late 70s. So its not like I don’t see the chance of the warm enso, its just not coming now.
The CFS, the reactionary model, which I call it since it reacts after most should see what is going on, is colder with the bulk of the recent runs colder than the means ( recent runs in blue)
The JMA, and ECMWF, which when they agree with me, really pump me up
as I like their performance better
ecmwf
but they show this is backing off, but no nino.
Let me again be clear. Dr Masters has a site that has done well because he is good at what he does, so its Michigan vs PSU, met on met, honest disagreement ( I have no PHD in meteo though, just a Bachelors). But though I disagree with Dr Masters on AGW, this is an honest forecast disagreement. I do think Dr. Hansen, an outstanding astronomer, is
forecasting this like a couple of the others without looking at the same thing Jeff and I are looking at.. Jeff’s ideas seem measured and taking into account things I see, but I have the other reasons listed.
Hiding behind all this though its the admission that the enso drives global temps, and the implication for AGW has to then be that co2 emissions are causing the large scale cyclical changes in the ocean, which I just do not believe can be true, given what I know about gasses, liquids, and the fact that temps are a measure of energy and the composition and density of the measured gas or liquid increases as the amount of water vapor increases, or in the case of the oceans, a saturated body! But there is no malice intended here.
Actually it gives me hope that I can walk into that wrestling room at PSU and go after Cael:
A round robin with him and that bear is just what a 55 year old wrestling
wanted to be needs.
ciao for now
onion2 says:
April 5, 2011 at 5:36 pm
My point is that given the ENSO decline since 2002, the solar decline since 2002 and the PDO decline since 2002, we should have quite a decline. Not flat. Unless something else is producing quite a warming effect and so is masking the decline.
Surfacestation monkeywrenchen und gefingerpoken.
A highly technical shell game.
All I gotta do is look up at 8000 foot peaks smeared with crushing snows not seen since 1983, which were supposed to be ‘things of the past’.
AGW is in a 13 year long penalty box. That’s got to hurt, but they got what was coming to them.
@onion, smokey, chris
The “science is settled” phrase is in this March 21 2007 story on Gore’s testimony to Congress, but without quotation marks, so was it really said?:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9047642
“All I gotta do is look up at 8000 foot peaks smeared with crushing snows not seen since 1983, which were supposed to be ‘things of the past’.”
But surely more relevant is UAH, RSS, HadCRUT and GISTEMP which do not show a significant decline in global temperatures since 2002. That’s despite ENSO, the Sun (and presumably) the PDO having a cooling influence. When 3 factors are supposed to produce a large cooling effect and a large cooling effect doesn’t happen isn’t it logical then that something else is producing an equivalent warming effect?
@onion2 says: April 5, 2011 at 6:30 pm
“so smokey as far as you are concerned the science is settled? that we know for 100% certainty that a 2C warmer world will be much better? No shadow of any doubt in your mind? Personally I dont think we have anything to compare 2C warmer with to know what will happen!”
And you have “no shadow of any doubt” that it makes sense to pour Trillions of pounds into “alternative energy” scams that demonstrably don’t work and to hugely inflate the cost of reliable and affordable energy desperately needed by the world’s poor? Even when the net effect on global temperatures of those Trillions, based upon the IPCC’s worst “projections”, will be the square root of bugger all?
Really?
“I don’t understand why they can not, through simple deduction, understand that the warm PDO ( 1978 to 2007) leads to a warming of the globe”
My take on it is this. PDO was warmer in the 1980s than in the 1990s and warmer in the 1990s than the 2000s:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1980
So my thinking is that, like a fading El Nino, PDO since the 1980s has had a cooling effect.
Onion 2
Your education obviously was lacking in history ( that’s not climate history, but the crusader type were it snowed on the game ) if you have some time to spare, try reading Smokey’s older posts and get the education you missed.
Dear Mr. Bastardi,
Your quote: “Do the math good friend.. take the weight of the ocean and atmosphere together and the energy implications of the gas and the liquid and then stack co2 against it.”
I totally agree with you. I made the comparison once in a comment on another blog, that the manmade CO2-based global warming theory is like trying to heat the water of your bath by heating up the air in your bathroom. The warmists overthere thought I was nuts. Now I know for sure that I was right.
Thanks for this blog post! With people like you we will make logic prevail over superstition.
Kind regards,
Scarface
‘My point is that given the ENSO decline since 2002, the solar decline since 2002 and the PDO decline since 2002, we should have quite a decline. Not flat. Unless something else is producing quite a warming effect and so is masking the decline. ‘
From a laymans point of view don’t we get told that the oceans depths provide an estimated 10 year buffer to the measured global average temperature which would mean a downturn in temperatures around now or the next couple of years?
Has the last decade of flat temperature been the expelling of energy from the oceans with a lowered external input which will now try and equilibriate to the new level of external input thus bringing a lower average temperature for at least 10 years or longer dependent upon when the external input starts to ramp up again?
Maybe someone with technical ability could explain this to us.
Pamela, I agree with you that Joe’s written-down speech is tortuous, but if one ‘goes with the flow’ the meaning becomes clear. In my view, Joe’s stream-of-consciousness style is uniquely entertaining and his forecasts are usually accurate so, to me, anything from Joe Bastardi is very welcome.
I don’t find Joe’s arguments very compelling simply because they are too loosely framed. However when I read R Gates’s lame arguments I felt that we had the balance (or lack of it) restored. Gates’s criticism is fair enough: you do need to look at long term trends. However when you smooth over the longer term you realise that the sea rise and ice melt of the late 20th century (that he says is unexplained) is only a continuation of the recovery from the little ice age and does not need an explanation. If he thinks it does perhaps he can explain the original cooling. And if you look over a longer period still you see periods of warmth similar to now; this was one of Courtillo’s message yesterday. So I do not agree with Joe when he says that CO2 cannot have an effect I just don’t think we need to postulate one to explain the data. I am still waiting for someone to do some proper science to prove that a significant CO2 effect (that is one with positive feedback) really exists in the real world. In the meantime Joe does not make me any more or less convinced.
R. Gates says: “Bob, you know as well as I do that that SST’s and OHC are very different metrics, with one having ENSO variability while OHC has indeed increased over the past three decades, (though not enough to account for poor Dr. Trenberth’s missing heat!), while the deeper ocean (from what little measurements we do have) also is showing signs of warming.”
There is nothing in the long-term OHC data that confirms that the rise was been caused by an increase in anthropogenic greeenhouse gases. If greenhouse gases were the primary driver, OHC would not have plateaued since 2003. The global OHC linear trend since 2003 is approximately 12% of the rate it had been from 1993 through 2002. The two ocean basins with the decreases since 2003 are the South Pacific and the North Atlantic, and both are cooling at mid to low latitudes as well as high latitudes.
There seems to be an Alarmist talking-point which suggests there is less-cooling-than-expected. Expected? Well, we have a (formerly) quiet sun and a (somewhat) cool PDO, and therefore the earth should be really, really cool. Instead it is only a little bit cool. Therefore the cooling is actually “masked warming,” according to their logic.
This talking point was effective last August, when the daily world-temperature anomalies, (which had been slowly settling down, as the La Nina came on,) surprised many by shooting up from -0.2 of normal to nearly +0.4 of normal, in only ten days or so.
It plunged down to -0.05 in October, but the upward trend continued in a yo-yoing manner until early Novemeber, when the temperature anomaly peaked at nearly +0.6 of normal. There was wild cheering from the Alarmist peanut-gallery, as the Skeptics scratched their heads in baffled wonder, for this upswing truely wasn’t expected by those who were focused on the cool PDO and the “quiet sun.”
This is what lead to the Alarmist talking-point. However what followed is not mentioned by Alarmists.
Last November the daily world-temperature anomalies took a nose dive, falling from +0.59 to -0.25 in only twenty days.
This was a real eye-opener to me, because:
A.) Twenty year’s worth of “warming” vanished in twenty days.
B.) The Alarmist talking-points stayed stuck in September.
Dr. Ryan N. Maue has a really neat chart of how wildly the daily anomalies swing, at:
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/jra25/global_temperature_anomalies.jpg
The chart shows how fickle air temperatures are, (or perhaps I should use the word “responsive.”) Bastardi seems correct, when he sees such temperatures as driven, rather than a driver.
temperatures change, climates change, but CO2 does not cause either.
@BillD
“Bastardi argues that because CO2 is a trace gas that is required for life, it cannot also act as a green house gas with substantial effects on the climate. This agument just makes no sense.”
Maybe because that is not what he said, but what you interpreted what he said and that is why the argument doesn’t make sense. So, essentially, you just stated that your argument doesn’t make any sense. :p
onion2 says:
April 5, 2011 at 4:22 pm
PDO and ENSO are flat over the 20th century. But it warmed. Therefore there has been warming independent of ENSO and PDO.
Quite. There is no trend in PDO or ENSO but there is a warming trend. This illustrates the point.
Mean UAH Jan-Mar 2011 (LA NINA peak) anomaly is -0.04 deg
Mean UAH Jan-Mar 1987 (EL NINO peak) anomaly is -0.02 deg
The temperatures during 3 months of an EL NINO 20 odd years ago are just a two hundredths of a degree warmer than the most recent La Nina-affected 3 month period. I think Joe should take a closer look at the data.
pete says:
April 5, 2011 at 5:57 pm
Onion2: There has been a consistent warming trend independent of cyclical behaviour for centuries now, long-term temperature records such as the CET show it clearly.
The CET record does not show a “consistent warming trend” over centuries. CET temperatures during the 19th century were basically flat. Trends are as follows:
1800-1900: 0.03 deg per century
1900-2000: 0.65 deg per century
The 20th century warmed at more than 20 times the rate of the 19th century.
>>Onion2
>>Yet 1998 and 2010 are tied warmest years on record.
The only difference being, that nobody believes the 2010 warm record has any basis in reality.
.
R. Gates says:
April 5, 2011 at 5:10 pm
…I would be curious as to what he attributes the warmest water entering the Arctic in at least 2,000 years to? What natural cycle is this part of and where did all this energy come from?…
Not to put words into Joe’s mouth, but here’s my take on why a warmer Arctic ocean means the world is moving to a cool weather regime rather than warming.
The poles provide the same cooling function for our climate heat engine as the radiator does on a car and both use the same heat exchange fluid to do this – water.
As in a car engine, little cooling happens until the oceans have been headed. The high levels of solar activity seen during the 1980/90’s heated the ocean, then when the warmer water arrives in the Arctic the thermal energy is efficiently radiated out into space.
Over the next few years ocean water arriving in the Arctic will cool once more as solar activity continues at lower levels for the next few cycles. I estimate that there is ~8 to 10y lag between solar activity and warm water arriving in the Arctic. Expect levels of Arctic sea ice to start increasing again over the next few years.
What I see is there was essentially a step change after the 1998 El Nino and following La Nina, of about +.2C. 2002-2007, you’ve got a relatively stable period that is +.2C higher than temps before the ’98 El Nino.
Of course that is a short period. Still, to me the interesting thing will likely be late this year (after La Nina effects fade) and next year (assuming we don’t get another immediate El Nino). Will we return to 2002-2007 levels, or will we settle in at a lower level?
Some of the comments seem to promote the “Melting of the Arctic scare” because it is so unusually warm NOW. For those who still do not believe there was an even warmer medieval period, read this report:
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp04/mq22551.pdf
I find it hard to believe that the archeologists writing this had a second (Climate skeptic) agenda.
If you still do not believe – take a trip to visit some of the places described in the report, and live there like the settlers did – for a year or two. (They lived there close to 500 years)
And one more thing. The place from where Leiv Eriksson set out to discover America around the year 1000 is in the middle of downtown Trondheim, Norway. Today, it is located ca 2 metres above sea level, just as expected due to the lifting of entire Norway since that year due to unloading of the ice cover during the ice age. Other than that, no dramatic sign of changing sea level can be observed in Trondheim or in Greenland. The ruins of the Greenland settlements are still relatively close to the sea, as they must have been a thousand years ago. If the warmth of the MWP had resulted in extraordinary sea level rise, both the farms and the Leiv Eriksson harbour in Trondheim would have been inundated during MWP. This was truly not the case. Something must be rotten in the state of Denmark.
I still think we have it arse about. When el nino’s happen it is actually the globe cooling , even though the atmosphere heats up, as the oceans release heat to the atmosphere , which eventually gets lost to space.
This is the only way I can see that the OHC can reduce.
Ralph says:
April 6, 2011 at 4:29 am
>>Onion2
>>Yet 1998 and 2010 are tied warmest years on record.
The only difference being, that nobody believes the 2010 warm record has any basis in reality.
So you’re questioning the UAH satellite record are you? On what grounds?
If you heat the air over water it will cause an increase in evaporation of the water (Air will absorb more water to preserve the same relative humidity). This means then that the water will be cooled due to evaporation losses, as the latent heat will be taken from the water. So as an engineer I can predict that a hotter atmosphere will produce a colder ocean. This is very trivial analysis due to the actual mechanism of convection at the interphase is not clearly understood, but is counterintuitive.
Tenuc says:
April 6, 2011 at 5:45 am
R. Gates says:
April 5, 2011 at 5:10 pm
…I would be curious as to what he attributes the warmest water entering the Arctic in at least 2,000 years to? What natural cycle is this part of and where did all this energy come from?…
Not to put words into Joe’s mouth, but here’s my take on why a warmer Arctic ocean means the world is moving to a cool weather regime rather than warming.
The poles provide the same cooling function for our climate heat engine as the radiator does on a car and both use the same heat exchange fluid to do this – water.
As in a car engine, little cooling happens until the oceans have been headed. The high levels of solar activity seen during the 1980/90′s heated the ocean, then when the warmer water arrives in the Arctic the thermal energy is efficiently radiated out into space.
Over the next few years ocean water arriving in the Arctic will cool once more as solar activity continues at lower levels for the next few cycles. I estimate that there is ~8 to 10y lag between solar activity and warm water arriving in the Arctic. Expect levels of Arctic sea ice to start increasing again over the next few years.
___
Interesting idea, but again…where is the data to support some kind of 2,000 year cycle? The heat in the deeper ocean moving into the Arctic was not created by the oceans, so some kind of theory would need to account for where the energy may have come from. Of course the original source was the sun, but looking at earth’s energy balance, that “extra” heat now trapped in the earth’s energy system causing the deeper ocean water moving into the Arctic to be the warmest in 2,000 years must have been trapped by some mechanism. I think the AGW skeptics know where I’m going with this, and certainly the GCM’s would expect such a warming to occur when factoring in all the effects of the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700’s, and the simple physical fact that most of the heat trapped by this CO2 must have gone in the oceans.
As we get better and better metrics for the warming going on in the deeper oceans, expect more studies to confirm that the deeper ocean current worldwide will be showing a net warming in alignment with some of the results we already are seeing.
I never understand why el nino is termed a warming event for the Earth. I understand it as a warming event for the atmosphere. Maybe I do not understand something but el nino should increase radiative loss to the cosmic background and thus be a cooling event for the energy budget of the planet as a whole assuming all else remains equal.
R. Gates says:
April 6, 2011 at 7:07 am
Reply to Tenuc:
“Interesting idea, but again…where is the data to support some kind of 2,000 year cycle?…”
Even our current Arctic ocean temperature measurements are far from accurate, and I dread to think what errors exist using proxies for ocean temperatures 2000y ago, and one swallow does not a summer make. However, there is a strong long-term 2000y quasi-cycle which does show climatic cooling and warming as shown below – exact start/end dates vary for each iteration…
1410-1500 cold – Low Solar Activity(LSA?)-(Sporer minimum)
1510-1600 warm – High Solar Activity(HSA?)
1610-1700 cold – (LSA) (Maunder minimum)
1710-1800 warm – (HSA)
1810-1900 cold – (LSA) (Dalton minimum)
1910-2000 warm – (HSA)
2010-2100 (cold???) – (LSA???)