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
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Nature = Tabloid Science
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/10/1c-the-silent-killer/#comment-951737
Heh… I said so 2 days ago.
Hey, the Amerinds were using controlled burns in forests and prairies centuries before even Columbus, much less James Watt. They undoubtedly got the AMO going.
🙂
Given their records in this field and the levels of politicization engaged in, with whom does the benefit of doubt responsibly lie? Michaels? Or Nature and Santer? C’mon now. Really! Not even close.
It had its problems with biology too. They rejected the first paper on PCR (polymerase chain reaction) The single most important method discovered in biochemistry in the last 30 years. It was essential for the Human Genome Project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_polymerase_chain_reaction
Stephen Richards says:
April 12, 2012 at 1:09 am
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.
You could at least do me the courtesy of reading what I wrote. The paper may or may not be ****, as I said I haven’t read it yet.
My point was that the assumption that anthropogenic aerosol production only started with the Industrial Revolution is probably false for the reason I stated and for several other reasons. One of which is that large scale burning of agricultural waste was a common practice in the developed world until about 40 years ago and still is in much of the developing world. Practices that pre-date industrialization and would be unaffected by industrialization.
davidmhoffer says:
April 11, 2012 at 11:57 pm
“Next up in Nature:
Model Proves Flies Cause Manure!”
You forgot to end that with “…due to increased levels of CO2.”
That’s all right. You’ll get the hang of it eventually ;o)
What do they think?
Some random thoughts —
The idea of submitting a really absurd pseudoscience paper as a trick is known; the classic example is Alan Sokal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
..and it looks like Nature, Sci-Am, New Scientist, and even the National Geographic might be good targets for such an exercise.
The concept that institutions can be captured by various political and economic interests is not only well known — some say that ‘regulatory capture’ is unavoidable:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
This is somewhat related to the long-term political strategy of the left, the “Long March Through the Institutions” of Gramsci.
Here in the US, public education is pretty well captured by the left. Some parents resort to home-schooling as a response. Enter ‘dumbing down’ as a search term on Amazon.
There is an old joke about US politics — you can vote for the evil party or the stupid party. Note that only one of 100 senators, Inhofe, identifies AGW as a hoax. I don’t expect much from the current presidential challenger.
Can the internet era, in which the establishment does not have complete control, allow a countermarch? WUWT would be an early example, if that is possible. Right now, AGW propaganda can indeed claim most of the major institutions in US science.
Are psychological tricks deliberate? Enter ‘obama NLP’ in google…get 241K hits. The late professor E. R. Hilgard of Stanford studied hypnotic suggestion in about 5000 students and discovered a ~normal distribution, which means that about 15% of the population is VERY suggestible. The results were confirmed at Harvard with group experiments. The high responders supply recruits for the left. I suspect that the readers of this blog are the other end of the curve.
Why would a “scientist” refer to dirty pollution? This is not a scientific term.
Phil, your point about charcoal manufacturing as a major source of aerosols is simply not correct. In the Mediaeval context, charcoal production was extremely expensive. The prinicipal use of the charcoal was almost exclusively for production of high quality steel for weapons and armour. It was not generally used for bulk heating; it was simply too expensive.
The total production of such weaponry during four to five centuries was perhaps equivalent to about a week’s worth of modern steel production today. Given that an average suit of armour weighed about 50 lbs and add another 50 lbs for weapons. Assume that 10 million such suits were produced across five centuries (probably a considerable over-estimate, given the longevity of such weaponry and its recycling into newer weaponry and armour). This would be sufficient to cover the armour requirements of Europe, the Middle East, China and Japan during these five centuries.
That’s only 500,000 tons of steel or barely 1000 tons per year.
So you want to attribute major global aerosol influences to an annual global production of about 1000 tons of high quality steel? This is ludicrous.
Kaboom says:
April 11, 2012 at 6:18 pm
Looking to Nature for science on the climate is like looking to Mad Magazine for political commentary.
=============================================================
Mad Magazine has some good political commentary, always has—-as satire :-). (but then
the pollies don’t deserve anything more).
Unfortunately, Nature’s bloopers are a lot sadder than satire.
Further to my above post on D. V. Hoyt and aerosols, and the FABRICATION of aerosol data to fudge the hindcast of CAGW models to mimic the global cooling that occurred from ~1940-1975.
I have written a few technical and financial models in my career, I would dismiss anyone who claimed their model exhibited history-matching and therefore predictive skill, when they had to FABRICATE key data to force the model do so. The modeling of climate using such fraudulent practices is a blatant scam.
We have known about this climate model scam since at least 2006 (see my above post), and probably much earlier.
It is appalling that the global warming scam has lasted this long, has compromised the energy security of entire countries and their economies, and has wasted a trillion dollars of scarce global resources.
____________________
“I am always happy to be in the minority. Concerning the climate models, I know enough of the details to be sure that they are unreliable. They are full of fudge factors that are fitted to the existing climate, so the models more or less agree with the observed data. But there is no reason to believe that the same fudge factors would give the right behavior in a world with different chemistry, for example in a world with increased CO2 in the atmosphere.”
– Freeman Dyson
__________
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/02/aerosol-sat-observations-and-climate-models-differ-by-a-factor-of-three-to-six/#comment-711396
Douglas Hoyt says: August 3, 2011 at 12:15 pm
This paper is hard to understand, but basically it seems to be saying that modelled aerosol cooling effects are 3 to 6 times greater than measured aerosol cooling effects. Therefore, they conclude, the observations are incorrect. If the observations are correct, the 1940-1976 cooling cannot be explained by aerosols. Furthermore, if the observations are correct, then the sensitivity of climate to CO2 must be much smaller than is presently modelled, just like Spencer is arguing.
Is this a correct summary?
__________
Richard S Courtney says: August 3, 2011 at 2:24 pm
Douglas Hoyt:
Yes. You do provide a correct summary.
The implications of the findings of Penner at al. are explained in this thread by several posts.
These explanatory posts include those from
myself at August 2, 2011 at 6:46 am and August 2, 2011 at 8:52 am
Matt G at August 2, 2011 at 1:15 pm
D. J. Hawkins at August 2, 2011 at 2:59 pm
Richard
__________
Douglas Hoyt says: August 3, 2011 at 3:32 pm
Richard Courtney
Thanks for the confirmation. Penner has shown that the aerosol forcing is too weak to explain the 1940-1976 cooling using the model aerosol changes claimed by Charlson (1991). The Charlson paper does not agree with observations (e.g., Hoyt, D. V. and C. Frohlich, 1983. Atmospheric transmission at Davos, Switzerland, 1909-1979. Climatic Change, 5, 61-72). In Davos there was no trend in aerosol loading from 1909 to 1979 and yet the Charlson paper claims that maximum increase in aerosol loading directly over Davos. So it is now a double whammy for the aerosol-cooling explanation – weaker than modelled forcing and weaker than claim trends.
There are other papers supporting the trend conclusions above. For example, MacDonald’s (1938) Atlas Of Climatic Charts of the Oceans shows the same geographical distribution of aerosols as are now seen in the satellites. There is just one exception and that is an aerosol cloud coming off England into the North Sea. It didn’t get as far as Norway or Belgium. This manmade aerosol cloud disappeared in the 1950s along with London fogs caused by coal burning. So the trend there is actually in the opposite direction of what the modellers assume.
With the small to non-existent aerosol forcing, the only remaining way to get the models to agree with observations for 1940-1976 is have a very low climate sensitivity as Lindzen, Spencer, and others have deduced.
____________
Richard S Courtney says: August 4, 2011 at 2:14 am
Douglas Hoyt:
Your very fine post at August 3, 2011 at 3:32 pm includes this comment:
“With the small to non-existent aerosol forcing, the only remaining way to get the models to agree with observations for 1940-1976 is have a very low climate sensitivity as Lindzen, Spencer, and others have deduced.”
Yes! See
http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/8167/kiehl2007figure2.png
Richard
__________
“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.”
Aha! I’ve *always* suspected that industrial pollution had something to do with the demise of the Sahara Forest…
Logan in AZ: “There is an old joke about US politics — you can vote for the evil party or the stupid party. Note that only one of 100 senators, Inhofe, identifies AGW as a hoax. I don’t expect much from the current presidential challenger.
…. The high responders supply recruits for the left. I suspect that the readers of this blog are the other end of the curve.
Logan, I’m surprised you don’t see the obvious trick. You correctly identify that elected-politics has this left-right opposition, but you fail to see that real people have views that can not be squeezed into this left-right con.
There is a famous ending I wrote to animal farm that goes: “and the pigs gathered all the animals and told them … we have made mistakes … from now on you animals can have a democratic vote to decide which pigs run the farm”.
In case, it isn’t obvious, the two parties (left curled tails & right curled tails) are in essence identical (they both are pigs!) but they present themselves as being entirely opposite and if you don’t like the pigs in power, then the opposite is the pigs in opposition.
At no point do any of the pig elite allow the animals to believe that they could have a government without pigs … there only choice is whether the pigs have tails that curl to the left of ones that curl to the right.
Of course in Ancient Greece, the animals did run the government because the government was randomly selected animals running each ministery.
But don’t ever let the pigs know that you know that we know their left-right “opposition” is a complete fraud meant to suggest a choice where there is none.
As for me. I’m pro-healthcare, anti big-government, anti-WMD pro strong military. Pro women’s right, sick to the back teeth of women who then think equality means we should give them a free leg up when they are not up to the job and “equality” means making a society that suits women but not men.
Sometimes I think I’m on the left, sometimes on the right …. but most often I think that I have no place in the “piggish” politics which forces me into the one-dimensional politics which means we will be forever ruled by politicians with snouts in the trough.
Philip Bradley says:
April 12, 2012 at 2:47 am
My point was that the assumption that anthropogenic aerosol production only started with the Industrial Revolution is probably false for the reason I stated and for several other reasons. One of which is that large scale burning of agricultural waste was a common practice in the developed world until about 40 years ago and still is in much of the developing world. Practices that pre-date industrialization and would be unaffected by industrialization.
It’s been a common practice in agricultural areas around the world for about the past, oh, say, 10.000 years or so — all of Southeast Asia goes into brownout at the end of the dry season due to burning rice chaff. If “anthropogenic aerosols” have such a profound effect on the Atlantic, why wouldn’t they have the same effect on the Pacific?
John F. Hultquist says:
April 11, 2012 at 9:14 pm
Are we to assume hurricanes in the Atlantic and drought in Africa began with the use of wood for fuel or coal for steam engines? ……I recall reading or hearing of drought in Africa going back centuries….
___________________________________
Here is another with a world map showing extreme desert over close to half the land mass 18,000 C-14 years ago. http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc.html#maps
It is no surprise that they take CO2 data from ice cores and correlate them with temperatures from away, derived from data not of that area.
They just as logically merged Antarctic ice core data with Mauna Loa volcano data to produce their fraudulent CO2 record for the last 100 years and we know what they had to do to make the data merge nicely, advancing data in to the future until they overlapped.
So, the question is, what did they have to do to make the global temperature data from many proxies give them the answer they desired?
higley7 says:
April 12, 2012 at 4:57 am
So, the question is, what did they have to do to make the global temperature data from many proxies give them the answer they desired?
Threaten their families…
TheBigYinJames says:
April 12, 2012 at 12:35 am
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.
__________________
The billionaire Gaylord family, who’s wealth originated from publishing Oklahoma’s largest newspaper, has sold the paper and moved on.
I was amazed that anyone would buy it. I guess all of those “yard sale” ads really do pay off.
Now that’s science!
—
“Our research *implies* that far from being natural, these changes *could have* been largely driven by dirty pollution and volcanoes. “
DirkH says:
April 11, 2012 at 10:43 pm
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….
_____________________________________
The Wall Street Journal had a back page article in April of 1994 stating papers in the Kremlin had come to light showing US Activist groups were not only funded by the KGB but were also run by the KGB. My husband knew Issy Stone who was receiving funding from the KGB for his radical left paper. (known from comments Issy made bemoaning the fact he lost that funding.)
The press is our chief ideological weapon. ~ Nikita Khrushchev
I guess he kew what he was talking about.
“..that it took me and my colleagues about three hours to completely destroy it.”
Well well Mr. Michaels: Why haven’t you published a rebuttal in the same or in another magazine?
Beat these scientists at their own game. Not in blogs.
I am beginning to get quite upset that all the skeptics (Mr. Eschenbach and Mr. Easterbrook on the Shakun paper) know so perfectly well everything, but refuse to publish their results in peer-reviewed magazines.
If you have good points on which one cannot get around it should be easy to get published.
Büntgen et al 2012, Xia 2012 and Svensmark 2007
I think there may be another chicken/egg situation here.
I would like to see how our economic activity and recessions correlate with solar activity and ocean cycles. I’m guessing that what actually happens is that the bad weather leads to more aerosol pollution (more use for heating, more diesel use, less efficient transportation system, more property damage…).
And that solar activity drives volcano and earthquake activity.