From the University of Hawai’i’s International Pacific Research Center at Mānoa, comes this proxy reconstruction that does some similar things the infamous hockey stick reconstruction, but doesn’t need to pull any statistical “tricks” to make the case. Our old friend the Bristlecone pine in the southwest USA is the test subject again. Like Mann et al, they combined the recent instrumental record of ENSO variation with the proxy reconstruction record, except they didn’t need to delete any data, nor cover up any curves that didn’t behave as they wished. “Mike’s nature trick” wasn’t needed.
Why? Well it has to do with the Bristlecone pine being a better proxy for precipitation than temperature, and as we know, El Niño gives some significant precipitation impacts to the desert southwest. I’ve covered the issue of “treemometers” here and here previously, and they are worth a read as a refresher for this new paper.
They write:
During El Niño, the unusually warm surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific lead to changes in the atmospheric circulation, causing unusually wetter winters in the US Southwest, and thus wider tree rings; unusually cold eastern Pacific temperatures during La Niña lead to drought and narrower rings.
Liebig’s Law in a nutshell. In a desert, water is the limiting factor for growth, temperature, not so much. So I’m inclined to trust this reconstruction a bit more than I’d trust Mann’s. The test will be when somebody asks for the data for replication purposes.
Tree Rings Tell a 1100-Year History of El Niño
El Niño and its partner La Niña, the warm and cold phases in the eastern half of the tropical Pacific, play havoc with climate worldwide. Predicting El Niño events more than several months ahead is now routine, but predicting how it will change in a warming world has been hampered by the short instrumental record. An international team of climate scientists has now shown that annually resolved tree-ring records from North America, particularly from the US Southwest, give a continuous representation of the intensity of El Niño events over the past 1100 years and can be used to improve El Niño prediction in climate models. The study, spearheaded by Jinbao Li, International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, is published in the May 6 issue of Nature Climate Change.
Tree rings in the US Southwest, the team found, agree well with the 150-year instrumental sea surface temperature records in the tropical Pacific. During El Niño, the unusually warm surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific lead to changes in the atmospheric circulation, causing unusually wetter winters in the US Southwest, and thus wider tree rings; unusually cold eastern Pacific temperatures during La Niña lead to drought and narrower rings. The tree-ring records, furthermore, match well existing reconstructions of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and correlate highly, for instance, with δ18O isotope concentrations of both living corals and corals that lived hundreds of years ago around Palmyra in the central Pacific.
“Our work revealed that the towering trees on the mountain slopes of the US Southwest and the colorful corals in the tropical Pacific both listen to the music of El Niño, which shows its signature in their yearly growth rings,” explains Li. “The coral records, however, are brief, whereas the tree-ring records from North America supply us with a continuous El Niño record reaching back 1100 years.”
The tree rings reveal that the intensity of El Niño has been highly variable, with decades of strong El Niño events and decades of little activity. The weakest El Niño activity happened during the Medieval Climate Anomaly in the 11th century, whereas the strongest activity has been since the 18th century.
These different periods of El Niño activity are related to long-term changes in Pacific climate. Cores taken from lake sediments in the Galapagos Islands, northern Yucatan, and the Pacific Northwest reveal that the eastern–central tropical Pacific climate swings between warm and cool phases, each lasting from 50 to 90 years. During warm phases, El Niño and La Niña events were more intense than usual. During cool phases, they deviated little from the long-term average as, for instance, during the Medieval Climate Anomaly when the eastern tropical Pacific was cool.
“Since El Niño causes climate extremes around the world, it is important to know how it will change with global warming,” says co-author Shang-Ping Xie. “Current models diverge in their projections of its future behavior, with some showing an increase in amplitude, some no change, and some even a decrease. Our tree-ring data offer key observational benchmarks for evaluating and perfecting climate models and their predictions of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation under global warming.”
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, National Basic Research Program of China, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Citation: Jinbao Li, Shang-Ping Xie, Edward R. Cook, Gang Huang, Rosanne D’Arrigo, Fei Liu, Jian Ma, and Xiao-Tong Zheng, 2011: Interdecadal modulation of El Niño amplitude during the past millennium. Nature Climate Change.
Source here (PDF)
Stephen Wilde says:
May 9, 2011 at 1:15 am
What I get out of the entire paper (and many others) is that the proper interpretation of many aspects of the effects of solar variability on the components of the Earth system is very much an ongoing and so far inconclusive work with many disagreements and discrepancies.
You are missing that that paper is not at all inconclusive and that there is in fact no longer any substantial disagreements for the time after 1700. This is major progress:
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 116, A04109, 12 PP., 2011
doi:10.1029/2010JA016220
Centennial changes in the heliospheric magnetic field and open solar flux: The consensus view from geomagnetic data and cosmogenic isotopes and its implications
M. Lockwood & M. J. Owens
Abstract: Svalgaard and Cliver (2010) recently reported a consensus between the various reconstructions of the heliospheric field over recent centuries. This is a significant development because, individually, each has uncertainties introduced by instrument calibration drifts, limited numbers of observatories, and the strength of the correlations employed. However, taken collectively, a consistent picture is emerging. We here show that this consensus extends to more data sets and methods than reported by Svalgaard and Cliver, including that used by Lockwood et al. (1999), when their algorithm is used to predict the heliospheric field rather than the open solar flux. One area where there is still some debate relates to the existence and meaning of a floor value to the heliospheric field. […]
The debate is concerned with the values before 1700. You cannot hide behind “the data is no good” anymore.
wilde i have never seen a single testable quantified sentence come out of your keyboard.
You are perhaps thee silliest of all.
When I see a reconstruction.
1. I look at the proxy.
2. I look at the methodological issues (artifacts of method)
3. I check the math.
When you see a reconstruction, you first look to see if it supports your ideas or not.
If it agree with your ideas you never question it. If it disagree with your ideas, you reject it out of hand.
That is a FUNDAMENTAL different in approaches.
On the contrary, mosher.
I am constantly looking at new real world data to see if THAT matches my ideas and if that fails to do so then I take note and adjust as necessary.
However I am sceptical of ALL aspects of models and reconstructions because they are consistently failing to account for ongoing real world climate developments or individual features of climate.
Note too that I do not reject anything out of hand. I simply hold it in the back of my mind and subsequently compare it with new real world data when or if such relevant data arises.
The silliness is to pay more attention to models and reconstructions than the real world data. Thus unless it acquires some predictive skill all your looking at the proxy, the method or the math is just building castles of sand and the silliest activity of all.
For all the established methods the whole climate arena remains in flux lacking as it does a comprehensive overview into which all the disparate observed phenomena can be fitted.
I have such an overview in course of construction but neither you nor I are in a position to provide precise quantifications or even yet decide on the correct sign of the interactions between the many components. I do not pretend to have much that is currently quantifiable or testable but I have set out certain types of climate event that could not happen under my ideas so there are opportunities to falsify my propositions.
Even Joanna Haigh acknowledges that there are suspicions about the estabilshed consensus concerning the sign of the solar effect on the atmosphere or part of it.
As regards real world data I consider anything pre the satellite era to be highly suspect and even the satellite data has problems.
I do realise that my approach is frustrating to the many expert scientists who post here and who generally only comment when they have quantifiable evidence of their contentions. However that is not how the AGW camp has been operating. They are running the whole scenario on unquantified unsubstantiated assertions and whilst climate science remains so immature they can only be tackled by providing an equally plausible opposing narrative and if that has to be unquantifioed and untestable for the time being then so be it.
So I am running a different game plan to that of you and many others here but the knowledge I gain here is very helpful in determining what sort of anti AGW narrative would be scientifically plausible on the basis of current observations.
Stephen Wilde says:
May 9, 2011 at 11:10 am
I do realise that my approach is frustrating to the many expert scientists who post here and who generally only comment when they have quantifiable evidence of their contentions. However that is not how the AGW camp has been operating. They are running the whole scenario on unquantified unsubstantiated assertions
And you think that emulating them is a good idea…
I go further than emulating them because they don’t try to account for new climate data. They just stick with the CO2 mantra while the observations diverge from expectations.
What is needed is a general conceptual overview that fits as many observations as possible so that the relationship between components of the system can become clearer.
For example long before the recent solar minimum ‘coincided’ with a record negative AO I had envisaged a solar effect on the characteristics of the polar air masses.
I also told you some time ago that if we were to see a highly positive AO at a time of a weak sun AND negative oceans then my proposition could be falsified. That shows no sign of happening.
I am waiting to see whether any climate events occur that really do falsify my overview.
Note that a lot of climate events have occurred since the late 90s which could only occur together if there were a link between them and it is not silly to try and construct a plausible overview. For new readers some of those events are as follows:
The sun started to weaken on the way down from the peak of cycle 23.
PDO turned negative likely to be followed by other ocean basins.
Tropospheric warming stopped or slowed.
The jets turned more meridional/equatorward.
The stratosphere stopped cooling as did the mesosphere.
Ozone above 45km started to increase with a fall below 45km
Cloudiness and albedo started to increase after a long period of falling.
The AO turned negative with a recent record.
Warmer air more often advected poleward and colder outbreaks in mid latitudes as compared with the late 20th century.
None of that fits readily with the consensus AGW theory but I have constructed a plausible scenario linking it all together.
Perhaps you and Mosh could now come up with an improvement ?
Oh, and by some accounts:
Ocean heat content stopped rising in 2003.
CO2 in the air doesn’t seem to be increasing so quickly.
Sea level rises seem to be slowing down.
Over to you.
Stephen Wilde says:
May 9, 2011 at 12:14 pm
None of that fits readily with the consensus AGW theory but I have constructed a plausible scenario linking it all together.
Not at all. For example you require solar activity to have risen substantially over the past 300 years and the current thinking [which you dismiss out of hand] is that it didn’t. Your scenario is hand waving, no numbers, no quantification, no science.
I require only that some component or components of solar variability have an effect on ozone quantities above 45km.
In fact it is not me who requires that. The Earth system itself requires that in order for the real world observations to arise.
Have you an alternative mechanism for the changes that we have seen recently and which I listed ?
If you contend that it is ALL internal variability please supply a plausible narrative on that basis.
Essentially the precise mix of solar wavelengths and particles has a bearing on the net balance between ozone creation and destruction above 45km and over a period of time there is an effect on the vertical temperature profile of the atmosphere sufficient to contribute to climate changes on the scale of MWP to LIA to date.
I have considered the option of trying to cover all the phenomena without a solar component (as you kindly suggested some time ago) but I cannot get it to work on that basis. There has to be a top down solar effect of some sort.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/3/034008/fulltext
The science has been supplied by others and I have linked to it frequently but Mosher seems not to have noticed. I have merely superimposed a plausible narrative.
Wilde,
Nothing you say is quantifiable. you never make any quantifiable claim. In the world that Lief and I travel in, you’ve said virtually nothing.
#####
1. Ocean heat content stopped rising in 2003.
This says nothing about the physics of GHGs. GHGs warm the planet. That does noy imply a linear warming or a constant increase. The climate exhibits what we call
unforced changes, or natural variability. cyclical ups and down. added c02, for example, imposes an ADDITIONAL warming on top of these cycles. So, without C02 you might see a cycle that dips by .6C. ( for example only) with c02 this dip doesnt disappear. It gets attentuated, say to .4C. Likewise with natural spikes. That is why you can adduce NOTHING from short time frames
CO2 in the air doesn’t seem to be increasing so quickly.
immaterial to the physics of warming
Sea level rises seem to be slowing down.
again, youve said nothing of scientific interest
Stephen Wilde says:
May 9, 2011 at 2:01 pm
I have considered the option of trying to cover all the phenomena without a solar component (as you kindly suggested some time ago) but I cannot get it to work on that basis. There has to be a top down solar effect of some sort.
That you can’t get it ‘to work’, i.e. fit into your scheme, does not imply that ‘there has to be a top down solar effect of some sort’. Perhaps your scheme is simply not good enough… You are in good company, if so.
Figures 10 and 14 of http://www.leif.org/research/2009JA015069.pdf show that there has been no increase in solar activity the past 300 years.
Fig 10 shows the 172 year powerwave that directs overall solar output. The 300 year time frame is misleading and neglects to pick up any of the major grand minima that were prevalent before 1700. There is a ceiling for cycle output that is probably around the levels of SC19 which occurs at the peak of the 172 year wave, so one can only expect small fluctuations in solar modulation from the trough to the peak. BUT what is not being considered is the impact of grand minima. The depth and length of these periods (that incl cycles like SC20) determine the overall strength of solar influence as seen in the isotope records over the Holocene.
Prolonged periods of low EUV activity as witnessed during grand minima determine the chemical reactions that Stephen is discussing that many are starting to think have a bearing on world climate.
“That you can’t get it ‘to work’, i.e. fit into your scheme, does not imply that ‘there has to be a top down solar effect of some sort’. Perhaps your scheme is simply not good enough… You are in good company, if so.”
Leif, that Lockwood paper I just linked you to effectively demolishes all your protestations in this thread abot the inability of small solar changes to affect surface pressure distribution.
I am in good company on the point and you are now the outlier.
Furthermore I was proposing just such an effect BEFORE the publication of the Lockwood paper and BEFORE joanna Haigh’s comments about the possibility of a reverse sign effect from solar input to the atmosphere.
steven mosher says:
May 9, 2011 at 2:14 pm
Thank you Mosh. You just blew your own credibility out of the water.
You have obviously read little or nothing of my description as to how the component phenomena link together.
You are my silliest reader of all so far.
All of my climate description is based on real world observations, is internally consistent, complies with basic physics and the science that I have provided links to is provided by a plethora of respectable scientists. If you dismiss what I say then you dismiss all their findings too.
Feel free to comment further when you have actually done some basic reading.
More support for my approach:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1102/1102.4763v1.pdf
There appears to be a variation of 26.6% in the Schumann-Runge bands which
“is important for heating processes in the middle atmosphere.”
which is highly significant from my point of view because I contend (as per Joanna Haigh’s report) that the solar effect on ozone quantities in the atmsphere reverses at or around 45km i.e. approximately at the stratopause.
Stephen Wilde says:
May 10, 2011 at 5:49 am
More support for my approach
Yes, we know already that anything whatsoever is taken by you as support for your approach… I have never seen you point to something that was not in support of your approach.
Well, if everything supports his approach he must be right then. I have the opposite problem; nothing supports my approach.
=================
Hey, Moshe, the oceanic oscillations are Chladni patterns, and maybe tectonic movement is too.
===========
kim says:
May 10, 2011 at 7:12 am
Well, if everything supports his approach he must be right then.
That is what he thinks and is called confirmation bias.
Well I constructed the approach from what was being observed so what is being observed would support my approach wouldn’t it ?
No huge skill in that, I’m surprised no one else has tried it.
So now I just need to watch out for new observations (not models or reconstructions) that don’t fit.
In the meantime papers are coming out which show that proper scientists have in fact been working along the same lines but while they have been doing so I made a few intuitive leaps.
Still, something could come up tomorrow that throws it all into the melting pot again.
There theory of increased precipitation in Bristlecone zones for ENSO+ is valid during PDO+.
However, when PDO- they also receive increased precipitation when ENSO- .
PDO- will mean increased precipitation in general for areas where the Bristlecones grow.
In fact, the White Mountains just received a fresh coating of snow yesterday.