Atmospheric Aerosols and the Death of Nature
Guest post by Dr. Patrick Michaels
Big news last week was that new findings published in Nature magazine showed that human emissions of aerosols (primarily from fossil fuel use) have been largely responsible for the multi-decadal patterns of sea surface temperature variability in the Atlantic ocean that have been observed over the past 150 years or so. This variability—commonly referred to as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO—has been linked to several socially significant climate phenomena including the ebb and flow of active Atlantic hurricane periods and drought in the African Sahel.
This paper marks, in my opinion, the death of credibility for Nature on global warming. The first symptoms showed up in 1996 when they published a paper by Ben Santer and 13 coauthors that was so obviously cherry-picked that it took me and my colleagues about three hours to completely destroy it. Things have gone steadily downhill, from a crazy screamer by Jonathan Patz on mortality from warming that didn’t even bother to examine whether fossil fuels were associated with extended lifespan (they are), to the recent Shakun debacle. But the latest whopper, by Ben Booth and his colleagues at the UK Met Office indeed signals the death of Nature in this field.
The U.K. Met Office issued a press release touting the findings by several of their researchers, and didn’t pull any punches as to the study’s significance. The headline read “Industrial pollution linked to ‘natural’ disasters” and included things like:
These shifts in ocean temperature, known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation or AMO, are believed to affect rainfall patterns in Africa, South America and India, as well as hurricane activity in the North Atlantic – in extreme cases leading to humanitarian disasters.
Ben Booth, a Met Office climate processes scientist and lead author of the research, said: “Until now, no-one has been able to demonstrate a physical link to what is causing these observed Atlantic Ocean fluctuations, so it was assumed they must be caused by natural variability.
“Our research implies that far from being natural, these changes could have been largely driven by dirty pollution and volcanoes. If so, this means a number of natural disasters linked to these ocean fluctuations, such as persistent African drought during the 1970’s and 80’s, may not be so natural after all.”
An accompanying “News and Views” piece in Nature put the findings of Booth and colleagues in climatological perspective:
If Booth and colleagues’ results can be corroborated, then they suggest that multidecadal temperature fluctuations of the North Atlantic are dominated by human activity, with natural variability taking a secondary role. This has many implications. Foremost among them is that the AMO does not exist, in the sense that the temperature variations concerned are neither intrinsically oscillatory nor purely multidecadal.
But not everyone was so impressed with the conclusions of Booth et al.
For instance, Judith Curry had this to say at her blog, “Climate Etc.,”
Color me unconvinced by this paper. I suspect that if this paper had been submitted to J. Geophysical Research or J. Climate, it would have been rejected. In any event, a much more lengthy manuscript would have been submitted with more details, allowing people to more critically assess this. By publishing this, Nature seems to be looking for headlines, rather than promoting good science.
And Curry has good reason to be skeptical.
“In press” at the journal Geophysical Research Letters is a paper titled “Greenland ice core evidence for spatial and temporal variability of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation” by Petr Chylek and colleagues, including Chris Folland of the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office.
In this paper, Chylek et al. examine evidence of the AMO that is contained in several ice core records distributed across Greenland. The researchers were looking to see whether there were changes in the character of the AMO over different climatological periods in the past, such as the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period—periods that long preceded large-scale human aerosol emissions. And indeed they found some. The AMO during the Little Ice Age was characterized by a quasi-periodicity of about 20 years, while the during the Medieval Warm Period the AMO oscillated with a period of about 45 to 65 years.
And Chylek and colleagues had this to say about the mechanisms involved:
The observed intermittency of these modes over the last 4000 years supports the view that these are internal ocean-atmosphere modes, with little or no external forcing.
Better read that again. “…with little or no external forcing.”
Chylek’s conclusion is vastly different from the one reached by Booth et al., which in an Editorial, Nature touted as [emphasis added]:
[B]ecause the AMO has been implicated in global processes, such as the frequency of Atlantic hurricanes and drought in the Sahel region of Africa in the 1980s, the findings greatly extend the possible reach of human activity on global climate. Moreover, if correct, the study effectively does away with the AMO as it is currently posited, in that the multidecadal oscillation is neither truly oscillatory nor multidecadal.
Funny how the ice core records analyzed by Chylek (as opposed to the largely climate model exercise of Booth et al.) and show the AMO to be both oscillatory and multidecadal—and to be exhibiting such characteristics long before any possible human influence.
Judith Curry’s words “By publishing this, Nature seems to be looking for headlines, rather than promoting good science” seem to ring loud and true in light of further observation-based research.
May God rest the soul of Nature.
References:
Booth, B., et al., 2012. Aerosols implicated as a prime driver of twentieth-century North Atlantic climate variability. Nature, doi:10.1038/nature10946, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10946.html
Chylek, P., et al., 2012. Greenland ice core evidence for spatial and temporal variability of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. Geophysical Research Letters, in press, http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/pip/2012GL051241.shtml
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Was it Nature magazine who debunked Cold fusion? Cheep renewable energy? if it was, I have questions.
Yet another sign of desperation. I think we can look forward to many more such popcorn moments as the Great Global Warming Mass Hysteria unwinds.
Richyroo says:
This is exactly correct. We see writers and editors with no meaningful education in the subject of which they discourse. And this is true of economics, the military, sciences, agriculture, etc. These writers and editors went to college to learn how to influence people, they have no grounding in any discipline. Professional journals have been taken over by dolts.
It is like a teacher who has a degree in teaching. He is teaching….what?
A possible explanation for the scientific decline.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-08/american-universities-infected-by-foreign-spies-detected-by-fbi.html
For a while now I’ve become more and more convinced that foreign energy interests play a large role. Not NWO type … only (state-run) businesses…
Bruce of Newcastle says: April 11, 2012 at 10:31 pm
“Do they think we’re stupid?”
No they wrote ‘us’ off long ago.
They are putting this out for the headline, like Dr, Curry surmised.
What they do know is that much of the non-scientific public is now properly prepared and gullible. What they don’t know is how the media will respond to this.
They need this story published so that they can get ownership of Global Weirding.
It may be a lie, and it is a long shot but it is all they have. Quarter finals, fourth down on their on 30 yard line with 20 seconds on the clock; it’s a Hail-Mary.
Will the media catch the pass?
For the non-North American readers:
Hail-Mary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hail_Mary_pass
Sparks says:
April 11, 2012 at 10:32 pm
Yeah–look for several of those “impossible cold fusion” products within the next dozen months or so. But as long as consumers can get the benefit from this revolutionary contraption, I could care less what Nature says about it (and it will be just one more nail in their coffin).
“The thing to remember when traveling is that the trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. The Dutchman was hard…he was stone. His brain was eroded granite where the few ideas he had carved their deep ruts of opinion. There was no way for another idea to seep in, no place for imagination, no place for dreams, none for compassion or mercy or even fear.”
Louis L’Amour in ‘Ride the Dark Trail’
The whole mess is based on one unvalidated computer model. Do they really expect people to take this seriously?
Didn’t Mann try to claim credit for naming the AMO?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/08/mann-and-coining-the-amo-and-claims-of-credit/
So the creator of the “hockey stick” says he discovered a natural cycle in the Atlantic Ocean that he also claims to have coined the AMO, which Booth et al. now say is “dominated by human activity”?
You just can’t make this stuff up. Oh, the irony.
As mentioned previously These “climate scientists” are going to destroying Nature magazine
AMO is The thorn. Oh how sharp it is!
http://oi56.tinypic.com/wa6mia.jpg
See the regular, linearly warming and cooling periods of the North Atlantic (the bottom chart). Also see the 1910-1940 warming period being UNDISTINGUISHABLE of the 1980-2005 warming period. Significant cooling between them, which “they” managed almost to get rid of from the global record. Switch to cooling since 2006. And totally off climate model projection (upper chart), blindly following the CO2 curve, obviously powered by some unphysical mechanism.
And we modelled our work on underarm anti-perspirant aerosols, which were shown to reduce humidity, and found all manner of droughts coincided with their increased use.
Doug Proctor says:
“This isn’t an attempt at science. This is a barrage designed to be picked up by the MSM, another peer-reviewed study that can be quoted that “supports” the warmist view, but NOT to be considered seriously by scientists. It is part of the fighting back of CAGW: if they won’t agree, if they won’t stay silent, then we’ll overwhelm them with paper.
Never have I seen a paper so far out since Veilokovsky: at least he believed what he wrote.”
Well, at least Veilokovsky poured through data, put his reasoning out for examination/review, and as you said, was sincere, not a money grubbing govt. funded, PR hack.
Why the restriction on loss of credibility as ‘in this field’? I’m sorry, but once a journal is shown to be politicized and non-competent, it’s an across the board thing. You can’t be incompetent on Mondays and just fine on Tuesdays, failing logic in Climate by having logic work fine in biology… It’s the same board of directors, the same executive staff, the same editorial board, the same…
So, IMHO, Nature joins “Scientific American” in the trash heap of hysterical junk science rags.
Maybe they do have some good stuff in there, but figuring out which bits are the good bits takes too much time swimming in the sewer parts to sort it out; and I’m not willing to put up with the smell.
It’s much easier to just do a web search and find the good stuff yourself.
Next up in Nature:
Model Proves Flies Cause Manure!
Expresing scepticism about the unholy grail of AGW is like fighting a zombie army. Every stupid idea the alarmists come up with is examined, found wanting, killed and buried, here and elsewhere; but the next time you look the thing has come back to life and surfaced again in some unthinking MSM promo. It is particularly worrying to have seen the cancer spread so quickly and easily to all the main scientific magazines and institutions. Look at this cack. I’m ashamed that my tax money has been abused to pay for this agenda driven sleight of hand.
Is there nobody reading WUWT who can get things – even if they’re only opinion pieces – into the MSM – anywhere? Because at present Joe Public is being exposed to 99.9% pure AGW drivel and, given the collapse in educational standards over the last few decades, is being given neither factual evidence nor the skills to analyse and disprove the dross he’s being fed. Intellectually, the sceptical position wins hands down every time, but from reading the MSM you simply wouldn’t know it. That, rather than relatively trifling disproofs of kindergarten pseudoscience, is the real challenge: we’ve won, but we still have no way of spreading the good news.
I would not be alone in having predicted in my own mind that if the lack of 21st temperature rise continues, the warmists will find a way to blame it on man-made aerosols, thus allowing them to continue to blame it on fossil fuels and our selfish economic development. I remember including that prediction in comments at Realclimate a couple of times, before being censored.
I suppose we could develop a computer model to predict where warmists will go next in their desparation to continue their weird form of science.
The MSM’s time is almost over anyway, thanks to the internet. The reason there are so many uneducated idiots in journalism is because the clever ones smelled the coffee years ago and left the rats on the sinking ship. AGW was/is mainstream media’s last gasp at controlling the opinions of the population, it will never be able to manage it again.
Mike says:
April 11, 2012 at 8:42 pm
So, controversial papers that go against the consensus should not be published? Interesting. Maybe we can start a on line poll to get these bad people fired because that is how science should be done!
When researches had evidence that they had observed neutrinos going faster than than speed of light they published this. That was the right thing to do. It now looks like they were wrong. That’s how science is done.
Mike you will have seen that there is NO evidence only a model and one that has not even been cross checked against other more sophisticated models. You will also see that aerosols have NOT been varying – see the cites from Hoyt in the posts above. A single model based on incorrect assumptions and using incorrect data should not really survive peer review.
The case of the neutrino speed was an actual experimental observation – observational science and the data on which it is based _should be_ published – the fact that it was later found to be erroneous is also real science. However, if the neutrino team had used a single unsophisticated computer model with incorrect assumptions on say the mass of the neutrino and based on that claimed Einstein was wrong – their paper would have been rejected; as this paper from climate ‘scientists’ should have been rejected.
I’ve been banging on for years about how aerosols are at least as important as GHGs in influencing climate. So I’m inclined to give this paper rather more credence than others.
I’ll read it in detail later, but one point.
Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period—periods that long preceded large-scale human aerosol emissions.
It’s something of a misconception that anthropogenic aerosols took off with the industrial revolution. what happened was that coal replaced charcoal as the primary fuel and previously widely distributed industrial production was concentrated in urban factories.
It happens I have seen charcoal made the traditional way and the process produces a solid column of smoke for 3 days to produce perhaps 200 lbs of charcoal. When coal replaced charcoal as a fuel, aerosol production would have been dramatically reduced. Even though coal production rapidly expanded.
Otherwise, I noted yesterday in the Bob Tisdale thread that there appears to be a reduced anthropogenic aerosol signature in the the latitudinal SST trends.
One key claim in the paper published in Nature by Booth & All. is that the NAO is NOT STICTLY periodical and multidecennal and, CONSEQUENTLY, cannot tbe of natural orgin. They just forget (or don’t know) that natural complex phenomena can be chaotic (dynamical system), which leads to “approximate” periodical behavior (more precisely, in mathematical terms “approximate periodic switches in trajectories from the vicinity of one attractor to another”). Time series for NAO indicators & proxies (and for El Nino, volcanic activity, and son flares, etc.) exhibit a clear chaotic signature when submitted to the toolbox for non-linear series analysis. Also, a complex (natural) system can show some synchronisation (and resonance) between different oscillators, even if they are not linked by conventional causal links. For example a threshold, which is a non linear mechanism, can induce such synchronization (LEGION model, see wilkipedia for details).
first they managed to find that CO² rise precedes temperature and now that the AMO isn’t real. Do you sense this panic before Rio syndrome?
Philip Bradley says:
April 12, 2012 at 12:39 am
It happens I have seen charcoal made the traditional way and the process produces a solid column of smoke for 3 days to produce perhaps 200 lbs of charcoal.
Philip, really, and how many charcoal fires would one need at one moment in time to effect a change in the atmosphere of the planet. This paper is $h&t. You know it, I know, Judith knows.
Drug addiction has obvious unpleasant side effects, the same is the case for ‘climate science’ grant addicts.
In both instances, the addict will do, or say, anything to fund his/her addiction and cares little about truth and the reality of the outside world.
Mann, Nature, Chylek, Hansen etc are all classic examples of grant addiction.
Problem is: science is bedevilled by ‘impact factors’ in publication. You can publish a load of tripe in Nature, but if it has an impact factor of 23, your institution will love you. If you publish world-changing science in a less high profile journal, they won’t.
The whole mechanism underpinning institutional evaluation of scientific output needs to change from top to bottom.
Nothing else short of a large-scale boycott by readers will change this distortion by a few ‘high impact journals’.