By Joe Bastardi, Weatherbell Analytics
When the PDO turned cold, most of the meteorological and climate community understood that the pattern was turning very similar the last time of the PDO reversal, the 1950s, and it was a matter of time before the global temperatures, which have leveled off, would start falling in the same herby jerky fashion they had risen when the PDO turned warm at the end of the 1970s. I am not going to rehash the sordid details of how the AGW crowd simply ignores the major drivers of a cyclical nature. We all know that. Nor am I going to question them as to why they believe a trace gas like CO2 (needed for life on the planet) with a specific gravity of 1.5 as compared to the atmospheres 1.0, was going to mix with air in a way to affect the earth’s temperatures. Instead I am going to drive home points I have been making since 2007 and are now dramatically validating.
The La Ninas of 2008-09 and now this one had rapid mid level temperature drops that followed their onset and this years was nothing short of the most dramatic mid tropospheric drop since the start of the millennium. It is much more plausible to believe that rapid cooling in the mid levels would have an effect at leading to extremes, rather than what the warmingistas claim, which of course is anything that happens. In any case, one very interesting level that cooled to record cold levels was 400 mb, the very levels that the so called trapping hot spots were going to show up because of CO2…again a neat trick since somehow CO2 was going to defy the laws of Gravity, since, as mentioned above, its specific gravity is higher than the atmosphere (of course even if it was, it a) has not been proven to cause warming and b) man’s contribution is so tiny as to render it a non item anyway in climate considerations.
However first came the flip in the PDO, seen nicely here on the Multivariate Enso Index chart, which clearly illustrates the colder Pacific when the earth was colder, the start of the warming period coinciding with the satellite era, and now.
Now from the AMSU site, the amazing one year drop in temperature, the orange tan line being after the El Nino of 2009/10, the purplish line this past year and one can see the green this year, we are near record cold levels again.
600 mb (14,000 feet) (enlarged)
And oh my my, the trapping hot spot itself.. 400mb or 25,000 feet… coldest in the entore decade
But the 2 meter temperatures, being in the boundary layer, do not respond as fast as the ocean, or a transparent atmosphere above
Nevertheless three downturns in a jagged fashion started predictably after the last El Nino now falling again in fits and spurts through December.
From Dr Roy Spencer’s site:
(enlarged)
In May, I forecasted the global temperatures to fall to -0.15C in one of the months – Jan, Feb or Mar this year, and perhaps as low as levels we saw in the 2008 La Nina. A rapid free fall has begun. Dr. Ryan Maue at his site (http://policlimate.com/weather/) maintains a plethora of useful forecast information including GFS global temp projections over the next 16 days.
They have been routinely reading greater than 0.2 C below normal and I suspect the Jan reading will plummet quite a bit from December with February even lower. An example of this can be seen with these two charts off Ryan’s site,
-0.258 C globally for 2 meters. (enlarged)
Day 8.5-16 a whopping -0.352 C (enlarged)
The reason the arctic looks warm is that it has been stormy, and when it’s windy the air is well mixed and so the temperatures are not as low as if it’s calm, but it’s still frigid. Notice in the second map, that the arctic cools because the arctic oscillation is starting to go negative, leading to higher pressures and lighter winds. But the most astounding aspect of this is the northern hemisphere mid latitude temperatures, at -2.1 C.
Currently, with gas so high because we are being handcuffed by an administration that won’t drill (if gas was a 1.50 lower, it would be worth a half trillion dollars to the economy) and an EPA that is causing untold economic damage (I would conservatively etiolate a half trillion dollars, from jobs lost to burdensome regulations) along with a 100 billion dollar subsidy to fight global warming world wide, it is costing each ACTUAL TAX PAYER close to 7000 dollars (1.1 trillion divided by 150 million tax payers).
One has to wonder, how even the most dogmatic of them don’t look at the actual facts, how they can continue to carry on their denial while the results of such things handcuff the American economy and cause untold misery for many as our wealth is not only redistributed, but dwindles. One can only conclude this is being done on purpose, and with purpose.
See PDF with enlarged images.
UPDATE: Bob Tisdale disagrees with portions of this analysis and has an essay here.
Allan,
For the geological past, the cause and effect has almost always been as you say, to our knowledge (but check the PETM event for a potential analogue to today). And you are quite wrong that no one talks about it. In fact this meme has been done to death (google ‘CO2 lags temperature’ – I got 4 million hits on google, and 17 500 hits on google scholar).
But today human industry is increasing atmospheric CO2, and physics tells us that, all else being equal, this will heat the planet. To deny that is to deny physics.
(It is a logical fallacy to posit that if A causes B, then B cannot cause A. If that were the case, feedback systems could not exist)
barry says:
“I am amazed that people in this day and age can so casually dismiss the explanatory power of the effect of increasing atmospheric CO2 on planetary temperature. When Lindzen, Spencer, Christy, Pielke’s Snr and Jnr, Bob Tisdale and most of the skeptical bloggers – including Anthony Watts – accept the physics, the holdouts must truly have a problem.”
You are the holdout, and it doesn’t take much to amaze you, barry. All the folks you mention are highly knowlegeable. You, OTOH, apparently get your talking points from Pseudo-Skeptical Pseudo-Science, so it’s not surprising that you don’t understand. Here, let me help:
The planet has been emerging from the unusually cold temperatures of the LIA: click
Even if it’s not clear to you, it is clear to the rest of us that the rising temperature trend is irrespective of the rise in the entirely beneficial trace gas and airborne fertilizer CO2. Believe whatever nonsense you want about “carbon”, barry, but the fact is that the planet’s temperature changes without regard to CO2.
Actually, Barry it has been ignored to death.
The counter-arguments, like yours here, are religious, not scientific, based on global warming dogma.
_________________________
The following is from memory but is reasonably accurate.
The northern CO2 measuring station at Barrow, Alaska has a seasonal amplitude of almost 20ppm whereas the one at the South Pole has almost no seasonal amplitude.
The rise in average atmospheric CO2 is about 2ppm/year, or about one-tenth of the seasonal amplitude at Barrow.
Natural CO2 flux is therefore many times greater than the relatively small component from humanmade emissions.
Furthermore, the material balance argument does not work, and is probably based on faulty assumptions.
One more clue is that in the modern data record, dCO2/dt varies almost contemporaneously with T AND CO2 lags T by ~9 months*
(where CO2 is global average atmospheric CO2, t is time, and T is global average Temperature)
AND
From ice core data, CO2 lags Temperature by ~600-800 years on much longer time scales
SO
CO2 lags Temperature at all measured time scales.
AND YET
Most parties still insist that the mainstream climate debate should be “by how much does increasing atmospheric CO2 drive temperature upwards”, when perhaps they should be asking themselves why they apparently allege that the future is causing the past.
Maybe atmospheric CO2 is still increasing because of a 600-800 year lag since the Medieval Warm Period.
And there is a much shorter cycle with a ~9 month lag of CO2 after Temperature.
Conclusion:
Atmospheric CO2 LAGS temperature at all measured time scales,
SO
the hypothesis that CO2 is a significant driver of global temperature apparently assumes that the future is causing the past.
The popular counter-arguments are:
a) It is a “feedback effect”,
OR
b) It is clear evidence that time machines really do exist.
Both counterarguments a) and b) are supported by equal amounts of compelling evidence.
Saying it louder or more often does not make it true. Neither does saying “everybody agrees that…”
The one certainty about climate science is that we have a lot to learn.
The other certainty is that we are in the latter part in a brief warming period, between periodic (~100,000 year) advances of continental glaciers.
All this nonsense about catastrophic humanmade global warming ignores the vast body of scientific evidence – that it is predominantly natural and mild, and is not dangerous.
On the other hand, the next glacial advance, soon to come to your neighbourhood, could really mess up your golf game…
______________________________________________________
• http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2vsTMacRae.pdf
barry says:
January 23, 2012 at 5:31 pm
But Smokey gave you the cause, coming out of the Little Ice Age accounts for all the warming
Are you suggesting that there is a ‘normal’ temperature that the Earth gravitates towards?
? Of course, the Ice Age we’re in. Every 100,000 thousand years we have a brief respite from it for around 15,000 years, it’s called an interglacial, our current one is called the Holocene. When, inexplicably still, but it’s an ongoing study, this happens and gazillions of tons of ice melt and raise sea levels 300ft plus we have balmy global warming, but at each peak of temperature we begin the slide back down into our Ice Age. In sort of hiccups of ups and downs, but always down.. [Our Holocene had an unexpected 1,000 year flip back into glacial near its beginning which killed off our weird and wonderful megafauna, some think this was asteroid catching the animals who would have moved north by then, off-guard.]
‘Recovery from little ice age’ in no way describes a physical mechanism/s responsible for changing the Earth’s temperature. It’s vacuous. Like saying the reason the Earth is warmer than before is that it was cooler back then.
I was replying to :
Erinome says:
“Of course — OF COURSE — it is necessary to give a cause for global warming. That’s bleeding obvious.”
Coming out of the Little Ice Age was the cause, the effect was that temperatures rose. Just as the rise of the Mediaeval Warm Period was the effect of the preceding dip into cold ending.
But all of these are just blips, hiccups of warming, on the inexorable slide back down into our Ice Age, back to another 100,000 years of glaciation. Sea levels will again drop 300ft + and those, say in Britain, will have a couple of miles of ice on top of them if they live in Birmingham, I don’t recall off-hand if Birmingham Alabama escapes this, but I think it does.
Now, carbon dioxide always follows these changes, trailing by around 800 years, so obviously irrelevant to whatever does cause this – do you really think it logical to think that a miniscule rise of a trace gas now which has never shown any inclination to drive these great and dramatic cyclical changes of temperatures in the past, is causing the little hiccup rise of warming now on the recurring slide back down in our Ice Age?
Ice Age is our Norm. Carbon dioxide lagged behind the rapid rises of temperatures at the beginning of interglacials by around 800 years – does carbon dioxide have some kind of magic powers that it can make such powerful changes to end glacials 800 years before it makes its own rise?
If you can’t explain these dramatic changes in warming and cooling in and out of our Ice Age with reference to carbon dioxide, then you simply don’t have anything worth saying about carbon dioxide now. The cause is the Norm of these cycles, our particular rise now the effect of the previous blip of cold ending, and both just a blips on the usual slide back into glaciations at the end of interglacials.
What’s vacuous is pretending carbon dioxide is the cause when there is no logical reason to associate it with these recurring cycles of massive global warming and cooling.
barry says @ur momisugly January 23, 2012 at 10:16 “I am amazed that people in this day and age can so casually dismiss the explanatory power of the effect of increasing atmospheric CO2 on planetary temperature.”
I have not read every comment, but it is a gross misstatement to suggest that skeptics dismiss the ability of CO2 to increase air temperature in laboratory conditions. Since laboratory work supports the theory, there are very few people who doubt that increasing CO2 impacts global temperature.* The question is how much! Could the natural variations swamp the CO2-induced global warming? Could the CO2-induced global warming fall far short of catastrophic implications? Consider that in 2008, the global temperature was below the 1988 value. Notice that I did not say 1998! Over 20 years, natural variation swamped whatever impact we had from increasing CO2 levels. Of course, 20 years is a short time, but alarmists have used shorter lengths of time to support their arguments.
I parted ways with Dr. Hansen several years ago on his GCC model. I made no headway in pointing out to him that his model was designed to give CO2 high explanatory power and therefore by design would forecast significant temperature increases as CO2 levels increased. The question is not whether CO2 can cause temperatures to increase, but rather: Have we built a reliable model that is unbiased in its delegation of explanatory power to CO2? Many months of examining the models tell me NO to that question. Of course, I hear a rejoinder: “Let the skeptics build a better model.” Reaction to that rejoinder: I doubt that we have a good enough handle on relationships – or even the basic data – to build such a model. Of course, one example of a successful model is a simple one putting global temperature as a function of PDO and AMO. But can we say what drives the PDO and AMO? Bob Tisdale has useful insight on the impact of ENSO and SOI on PDO, but this does not get us very far in the ability to build a forecasting model.
_______________________________________________________-
*(Actually, here is an interesting counter thought: In some localities, increased CO2 could lead to ground cooling. The logic is not difficult: increased CO2 leads to more vigorous flora growth which shades the ground. Further, we might see some temperature impact of evaporation, but this post already too long. . .)
“barry says:
January 23, 2012 at 9:57 pm
OTOH, if each real data point fell on or very close to the trend line, then it would be possible to achieve statistical significance for a 0.01/C/decade trend over 17 years.”
I almost agree. But I think it should be 19 years since the 95% error bars at the following span a range of about 0.19 degrees C:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/
But for discussion sake, let us use 17 years. As a result of our discourse, I would now even go so far as to say that if you had a slope of 0.01/C/decade trend over 17 years, it would be 95% significant, even if the data points were all over the place.
What we had for the last two years was:
#Selected data up to 2011
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0108234 per year
#Selected data up to 2012
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0084082 per year
So to be consistent with what I said above,
I would say 0.0108234 per year over 16 years IS significant, but
0.0084082 per year over 17 years is NOT significant.
(16/17 x 0.0108234 = 0.0101867)
So if the years/17 x trend is above 0.01, then you have 95% significance. So in that case, you would need the slope of 0.0084082 per year for 20 years to achieve 95% significance.
Allan, we’ve increased the atmospheric content of CO2 by 40% over the last couple hundred years. This heats the planet. To deny that is to deny basic physics. Invoking the historical cause/effect relationship is irrelevant to this fact.
There are a great many blog pages dealing with the CO2 lag/lead meme. If you’ve failed to find them by googling then perhaps you haven’t learned to make best use of a search engine from a popular debunking series.
And here’s a couple of articles on the subject from a well-known climate science site – how did you miss these?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/co2-in-ice-cores/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/
And here’s another
http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/01/15/co2-lags-temperature-in-the-ice-core-record-doesnt-that-prove-the-ipcc-wrong/
And I’d post one from skepticalscience, but that is tabla non grata around here. You can google it easily enough.
Bottom line – rising CO2 can be both a consequence and a cause of rising temperatures. In the modern era, it is primarily a cause. It took 5000 years for CO2 to increase by 100ppm during the climb out of the last ice age, and that occurred during a 5 decree C global temperature change. Clearly, that has not happened since, even though CO2 has again risen by 100ppm in the last couple hundred years. It is the emissions of human industry that have increased atmospheric CO2 now, not global temps. It is happening much faster than in the geological record, and physics tells us that increased GHGs will raise the heat of the planet. This is straightforward, and controversial only to people who deny or are ignorant of empirically proven facts. Such people shed no light on the debate.
An Enquirer,
Can you not see the posts in between yours and mine saying that CO2 cannot be a cause of temperature rise because it is a consequence of temperature rise – essentially arguing that because A has caused B in the past, that B cannot cause A? These people are denying the empirical fact you have alluded to.
Let’s be clear – the people making this argument are
Mhyrr – “there is no logical reason to associate [CO2] with these recurring cycles of massive global warming and cooling.”
Smokey = “Believe whatever nonsense you want about “carbon”, barry, but the fact is that the planet’s temperature changes without regard to CO2.”
Allan Macrae – “Most parties still insist that the mainstream climate debate should be “by how much does increasing atmospheric CO2 drive temperature upwards”, when perhaps they should be asking themselves why they apparently allege that the future is causing the past.”
This CO2-no-effect opinion is alive and well among the denizens of WUWT. Smokey thinks I have a problem because I agree with Lindzen, Spencer, Christy, Pielke, Tisdale and A Watts on this. Go figure.
Yeah, that’s what I said.
But we’ve strayed from the point. I’ll remind you that some have said upthread that the reason the globe has warmed is that we’ve emerged (or recovered) from the little ice age. Well, “today is colder than yesterday, as we have ’emerged’ out of yesterday’s warmth”. Have you learned anything about why this change occurred? I deployed ’emerged’ in the sentence, and according to you this should illuminate something about the cause of the change.
barry says:
“Bottom line – rising CO2 can be both a consequence and a cause of rising temperatures.”
Nope. Only the consequence has been proven. On all time scales, from months to hundreds of millennia, rises in CO2 always follow rises in temperature. No exceptions; rises in CO2 never lead rises in temperature. Therefore, the religious belief that rises in CO2 cause rising temperature is an evidence-free leap of faith.
The past decade shows zero cause and effect between global temperature and rising CO2. In any of the hard sciences, that disconnect between models and reality would be more than enough to falsify the AGW conjecture. The planet is just not cooperating with the alarmist cult’s beliefs. So who should we believe? The cultists? Or Planet Earth?
Any warming due to CO2 is so insignificant that it can be completely disregarded for all practical purposes. And what little warming may be caused by CO2 is entirely beneficial – as is the increase in CO2 itself. Only those whose common sense has been hijacked by the constant barrage of anti-“carbon” propaganda still buy into the CO2=CAGW nonsense.
2xCO2 may cause a 1°C rise, ±0.5°C, but that is insignificant, and entirely beneficial. More warmth is entirely a good thing, and more CO2 is entirely beneficial. The lunatic belief that CO2 can cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe has no basis in the entire history of the planet.
Werner, you’re not understanding me. You’ve confused a hypothetical example with actual data. And you have not in any way calculated statistical significance.
Go to the wiki page I linked for you. Read it. Look at the equations for determining statistical significance. You are completely off base.
Or, forget the temperature data – just explain to me what you think statistical significance is, and how you would test for it. I’m actually curious as to what you imagine this concept to be.
Good comments, Smokey (January 24, 2012 at 6:04 pm)
I used to participate in the “mainstream debate”, which is argues whether the sensitivity of climate to atmospheric CO2 is high (alarmists) or low (skeptics).
Any numerate person should now realize that the alarmists have lost that debate. Despite increased combustion of fossil fuels, there has been no significant global warming for about a decade, according to satellite data..
It is further notable that ALL the dire predictions of the IPCC and the climate alarmists have failed to materialize. The alarmists have a perfect track record – of being wrong.
In 2002 I co-authored a paper at the request of APEGGA with Dr. Sallie Baliunas, Harvard Astrophysicist, and Dr. Tim Patterson, Carleton Paleoclimatologist, at
http://www.apegga.com/members/Publications/peggs/Web11_02/kyoto_pt.htm
We wrote that article as skeptics of alleged catastrophic humanmade global warming, and I think it is clear that we won that debate (repeat – NO global warming for a decade!).
Reviewing the eight summary points in our 2002 APEGGA paper, it is clear that our predictive track record is infinitely better than that of the IPCC and the global warming alarmist movement.
Some of our predictions did not fully materialize in Canada, because our country did not adopt all the excesses of the Kyoto Protocol, but those countries that did so, particularly the UK and Western Europe, have experienced all these downsides of global warming fervor.
Here are the eight predictions from our 2002 APEGGA paper:
Kyoto has many fatal flaws, any one of which should cause this treaty to be scrapped.
1. Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.
2. Kyoto focuses primarily on reducing CO2, a relatively harmless gas, and does nothing to control real air pollution like NOx, SO2, and particulates, or serious pollutants in water and soil.
3. Kyoto wastes enormous resources that are urgently needed to solve real environmental and social problems that exist today. For example, the money spent on Kyoto in one year would provide clean drinking water and sanitation for all the people of the developing world in perpetuity.
4. Kyoto will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and damage the Canadian economy – the U.S., Canada’s biggest trading partner, will not ratify Kyoto, and developing countries are exempt.
5. Kyoto will actually hurt the global environment – it will cause energy-intensive industries to move to exempted developing countries that do not control even the worst forms of pollution.
6. Kyoto’s CO2 credit trading scheme punishes the most energy efficient countries and rewards the most wasteful. Due to the strange rules of Kyoto, Canada will pay the former Soviet Union billions of dollars per year for CO2 credits.
7. Kyoto will be ineffective – even assuming the overstated pro-Kyoto science is correct, Kyoto will reduce projected warming insignificantly, and it would take as many as 40 such treaties to stop alleged global warming.
8. The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.
**********************************************************************************
“barry says:
January 24, 2012 at 6:14 pm”
My last statistics course in university was 40 years ago so I am rusty. But let me ask you this:
Suppose that on a data set, I find that the slope is -0.001/year for 14 years.
Could I say
A. “It has cooled but it isn’t statistically significant” or
B. “There is a greater than a 50% chance that cooling has taken place according to this data set over this period”
Would you say both A and B are correct or neither are necessarily correct or just one of these statements is correct? Thanks!