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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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? It is hard to see how those European beginnings influenced the North Atlantic Ocean. Or perhaps, the peopling of North American and the accompanying use of fire can be the culprit. However, I recall reading or hearing of drought in Africa going back centuries. Yes! Here is one such:
http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/news/drought-brought-end-to-egypt%E2%80%99s-old-kingdom/
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“the source of the Blue Nile—found that around 4,200 years ago, lake levels dropped considerably, indicating massive water shortages and drought may have ultimately brought an end to Egypt’s first major dynastic civilization”
I guess you didn’t hear about the age of Sphnix being as old as 10,000-12,000 years old.
http://www.robertschoch.com/sphinxcontent.html. The people you mentioned 4,200 years old may have inherited abandoned old city from earlier period. There are a few others like the one in Peru and Turkey that are that old. http://www.robertschoch.com/turkey.html and http://hiddenincatours.com/titicaca-and-tiwanaku/. To find out what happened 10,000 years or so, I stumbled on Watt’s website and others. Based on MtDNA and homo sapiens bones, we were on the earth for only about 200,000 years. Makes you wonder. Here is the youtube video. I would hate to have lived in that harsh condition a long time ago. The past 10,000 years is relative calm compared to the years before that.
Gail Combs says:
April 12, 2012 at 4:50 am
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….
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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
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Gail, don’t forget that the sea level was 300-400 feet lower. – http://www.iceagenow.com/Sea_Level_During_Last_Ice_Age.htm
E.M.Smith says:
April 11, 2012 at 11:54 pm
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….
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YES!
The rot in science is across the board too.
Scientists acknowledge colleagues are engaging in questionable practices, “14.12% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices It would seem scientists are not only aware of the problem but that it is systemic.
This type of information is now making it into the public domain.
Scandalous: Scientists and Doctors Falsifying Data
Dutch scientist accused of falsifying data
Red wine researcher Dr. Dipak K. Das published fake data: UConn
FDA updates time frame for Cetero inquiry; CRO allegedly falsified data “The five-plus years of Cetero Research clinical data called into question by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is being shortened by nearly nine month…”
Science is now getting a black eye that will be very difficult to recover from. This leads the general public from the Scientific Method and concrete facts towards the Hegelian Dialectic where there is no such thing as facts or truths only a synthesis of opposing thoughts.
The same thing happened to Science News a few years ago. Scientific American, Nature, Physics Today, Science News: they have all jumped the shark. It’s too bad. I especially miss SN, since I used to spend a few hours every Saturday morning reading it. Now I can’t stand even to look at it, or its website, or take in its dumbed-down writing or editorial propaganda. There is no reason to subscribe to any of the science magazines.There just aren’t any left (that I know of).
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….
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You are also missing the point that wildfires have been around since well before human use of fire therefore aerosols from the burning of wood or from volcanoes or naturally burning coal seams, or tar pools, or oil seeps has also been around.
Here is a bit of proof from biology:
Pyrophytes are plants which have adapted to tolerate fire…. See Wiki
Perhaps I am being thick today but I could not find anything that looked relevant. Would you please supply a link.
Maybe they should rename their journal Nature’s Fables.
Too bad the sample size is so low.
Scottish Sceptic says:
from now on you animals can have a democratic vote to decide which pigs run the farm”.
This is democracy. There is the centre line which you have to follow to have any chance of being elected. All candidates have to be close to the line to have a hope so they appear identical. With little to choose between them, people get heated about the twist in the tails.
It is now blatantly obvious that science is scraping the bottom of the barrel with such nonsense. There was a time when one could have faith in the peer review scientific literature. Now, I believe there are two types of scientific literature (a) studies like this one constantly trying to promote the catastrophic man-made global warming mantra, and (b) studies that constantly expose such studies and demonstrate there is no basis to support the catastrophic man-made global warming mantra. It truly has descended into a bloody mess, and a joke!
Mike says:
April 11, 2012 at 8:42 pm
This is how the Nutrino episode differs from CAGW a-science :
A serries of MEASUREMENTS were made in the real world.
They did not agree with the NULL THEORY
More MEASUREMENTS were made in the real world that also demostrated the same anomoly.
When the experimenters (scientists/people who use REAL WORLD experiments) could not explain the REAL WORLD MEASUREMENTS they published a paper – which basically said – WE DO NOT BELIEVE OUR RESULTS; please help us explain – here is the DATA from our real world EXPERIMENTS. Can any one see where we went wrong OR is there something new IN OUR DATA.
Do you see any models ? Do you see the original Data ? Are you invited to FIND OUT what is WRONG ?
This latest climate scam paper appears tobe the follwoing
Using a MODEL (which is not validated against the real world or against other models) with model parameters we can NOT justify against real world measuremnets we have made up a scenario IN OUR MODEL where black is white and the flim flam dances with a million angels on the head of a pin. As a result of tampering with all the un-validated input variables in our un-validated model (which we have not cross checked against either other models or reality) the flim flam indicates that Climate is affected by Aerosols.
Models != Science
Garbage In = Garbage Out
un-validated models = propoganda = garbage
What we are now seeing is the demonstration the instability of falshoods. The maintainece of a lie eventually requires the production of more than one additional lie. Eventually this results in a situation where lies are produced at rates that resemble the production rate of snowflakes by a blizzard. The snow is starting to stick and the temperature and the barometric pressure are falling. The good news is that when this is over the credibility of those who attempted to hijack science for purely political purposes will be both thouroughy and permanently destroyed.
Please look at this photo:
http://www.giurfa.com/volcanes.jpg
There are 8 volcanoes, one of them, the Huaynaputina, erupted with a VEI=6, during the Maunder Minimum. There are, also, more than 3´000,000 people down there, do you see any of those pesky and contaminating human begins down there?, any of their contaminating industries, copper roasting plants, etc., there?
This is, as you see, a REALITY CHECK.
As the great George Carlin said: “the Earth is not going anywhere, WE ARE!, …so pack your sh**s folk, WE are leaving…! “
Guest post by Dr. Patrick Michaels:
“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.”
================
Mr. Michaels, I find it amusing that you keep bringing up the Santer paper after Dr. Santer so thoroughly owned you on the subject during your dishonet congressional testimony a year-and-a-half ago. The credibilty of your criticism amounts to zero, IMO.
John@EF (April 12, 2012),
You’ve got the wrong paper.
-Chip Knappenberger
So we are to believe that the oceans, with a thousand times the heat capacity of the air, are being driven by trace gas needed for life on the planet that accounts for 1/400th of the greenhouse gasses and .04% of the atmosphere? Also the supposed facts that TERMITES emit over 56 billion tonnes of c02 to mans 22 billion tonnes, and that according to DOE, mans contribution of co2 in the 1990s when the bulk of the warming took place was only 3 to 5% added to this makes me wonder, does anyone on that side of the issue stop and look not only at recent data but the sheer magnitude of the weight indicating co2 CAN NOT have anything to do with this that would be able to be detected. Combine that with the recent advancement of ideas that the specific gravity, heat and radiative properties are different and the fact that record cold is now showing up over the tropics at the very place trapping hot spots were supposed to be developing, that the pdo has flipped and the AMO is now cooling, AHEAD OF SCHEDULE, makes me wonder how these people could have risen to the levels they have, and have any credibility at all. There is no way you can look at these facts and not at least have doubt, if not just laugh at the absurdity it will be proven to be.
I will tell you this. I can now see how the Germans and Italians were brainwashed in the 1930s. Give fanatics control and have them keep pressing their agenda on unsuspecting people and you can see the results. A different type here, more soft tyranny, but unless stopped it will again mean a giant setback for the progress of mankind, Kind of scary.
We’d be living in a much better world if more of our politicians had developed their world views from MAD Magazine. Cynicism is a virtue.
@Gail Combs says:
Looking to Nature for science on the climate is like looking to Mad Magazine for political commentary.
___________________________
You are insulting Mad Magazine.
++++++++++++++
At least Mad Magazine is funny.
@Mervyn says:
It is now blatantly obvious that science is scraping the bottom of the barrel with such nonsense. There was a time when one could have faith in the peer review scientific literature. Now, I believe there are two types of scientific literature (a) studies like this one constantly trying to promote the catastrophic man-made global warming mantra, and (b) studies that constantly expose such studies and demonstrate there is no basis to support the catastrophic man-made global warming mantra. It truly has descended into a bloody mess, and a joke!
++++++++++++++
Remember when Mann said they had to get rid of the MWP? The reason was obviously the contradiction between the temperatures at the time and the modern warming. Now someone has obviously said, “We need to get rid of the AMO.” The reason is obviously because it proves the natural AMO dramatically overwhelms the human contributions. This will no doubt lead to a new book debunking the AMO-stick and the Team will in response rally round their fallen hero with soothing public words and private ridicule. Yawn….
The editors of Nature seem to subscribe to reductionism, the proposition that every system can be reduced to cause and effect relationships. In systems which, like the climate, have non-linear dynamics, reductionism is a false proposition.
They need headlines in the run up to Rio, that they can justify their gathering. It also provides a needed sound-bite that will reinforce to the uninformed that the West is bad and owes the 2nd and 3rd world its existence. Thus the West also owes them its wealth, since it was upon the backs of the “downtrodden” that the West has prospered.
OH, you are soooo naïve.
Let´s say that the chances of having the rebuttals reviewed by the authors of the paper at stake are high. And do you think the reviewers are going to let the journal publish the rebuttal? not a chance.
Look at Steig et al 2009 Nature paper, Harry, the weather station on the western Antarctica that showed the largest upward trend produced data prior to its construction. Harry AWS station was built in Nov 1994 but Steig paper produces numbers for Harry back to 1979. There were only less than a dozen west Antarctic stations described in the paper. The paper has 6 authors and it should have reviewed, and approved for publication, for at least 2 reviewers, yet, nobody noticed the error.
Do you think that it was a mistake or it was something worse? If you think it was just a mistake you are being naïve.
http://climateaudit.org/2009/02/02/when-harry-met-gill/
The AGW crew is desperate. The wheels are coming off, and they know it. Hence the circling of the wagons to their controlled outlets such as Nature and the latest round of fantastic and ridiculous claims. These are the last gasps. The public is simply bored with and unconvinced by decades of Chicken Little hysteria from Hansen, Gore, Schmidt, Santer, Mann, Jones, et. al.
I think truly Nature Has Jumped The Shark with this one. Seems so appropriate in this context.
pcknappenberger says:
April 12, 2012 at 8:28 am
John@EF (April 12, 2012),
You’ve got the wrong paper.
-Chip Knappenberger
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Sorry, Chip, can you help me out? Which 1996 paper was Michaels referencing in my quote from his commentary, above, and which paper is being discussed at about the 11:30 mark of the video I posted during their discussion on aerosols?