I think readers will appreciate the point by point style that this book is written in. It enables you to zero in on argument rebuttals with graphs and data. Highly recommended – Anthony
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Bob Tisdale announces: This Free Preview includes the Table of Contents; the Introduction; the beginning of Section 1, with the cartoon-like illustrations; the discussion About the Cover; and the Closing.
Have you searched the web, looking for information about La Niña and her big brother El Niño? You know, those colossal cooling and warming events in the tropical Pacific that cause flooding in some parts of the world, drought in others—heat waves here, cold spells there—blizzards and record snowfall in your driveway, but a snow-free winter at your favorite ski resort. Yup, those El Niño and La Niña. Scientists have given them that highfalutin name El Niño-Southern Oscillation or ENSO for short. Then, if you make a mistake and spell it ENZO with a “Z” in your search engine, you wind up watching a video from BBC’s Top Gear, of Jeremy Clarkson and The Stig driving a Ferrari F60 owned by Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason in exchange for plugging Nick’s book. That’s a nice diversion, though. As your search continues, you keep finding technical web pages with very similar overviews, and, if you’re lucky, three schematics: one for El Niño conditions, one for La Niña and one for ENSO-neutral or “normal” conditions. Frustratingly, those three illustrations look the same to you, leaving you scratching your head. No matter where you turn, what you read, you still have no idea what they’re talking about. But you still want to know what those blasted El Niño and La Niña things are all about.
Who Turned on the Heat? begins with 29, not 3, cartoon-like illustrations, with text right there on the drawings, that explain the processes of ENSO with easy-to-understand terms.
After presenting some background information at the beginning of that section, the discussions of ENSO start with “normal” (a.k.a. ENSO-neutral) conditions in the tropical Pacific, then move on to the transition from ENSO-neutral to El Niño with an overview of what causes the El Niño to begin. That’s where the free Preview of that section ends. In the book, it continues with a presentation of El Niño conditions and the transition back to ENSO-neutral, then on to La Niña and eventually back ENSO-neutral again, providing readers with a complete overview of the ENSO phases in sequence. It discusses how La Niña is not the opposite of El Niño. The phases all fit together logically. Mother Nature’s pretty good about things like that, but she still has some tricks up her sleeves.
For those readers who haven’t looked at or read anything technical since high school, the next section discusses very basics things like how to read a graph. It presents the types of graphs used throughout the rest of the book, and a bunch of other introductory topics.
Section 3 of Who Turned on the Heat? is a more detailed overview of the phases of ENSO—it includes graphs of satellite-based sea surface temperature and other variables, color-coded maps, links to animations—all of which are furnished to support and confirm the naturally fueled processes of the ENSO-neutral, El Niño and La Niña phases. In other words, the fundamentals of ENSO are presented and documented in detail. That’s followed by a section that discusses topics that are still related to El Niño and La Niña but are beyond the basics, like what actually triggers an El Niño. Did you know that El Niño events are so big that sometimes it takes a couple of tropical cyclones (yup, the same things as hurricanes) in the western tropical Pacific just to kick-start one?
What may become your favorite section of Who Turned on the Heat? is next. In it, the sea surface temperature data presents how it accounts for global warming. The combined long-term effects of major El Niño and La Niña events are presented, discussed and documented—with satellite-based sea surface temperatures data, not climate models. Major El Niño and La Niña events are not like the smaller ones. Far from it. The big ones are responsible for the vast majority of the natural warming of the global sea surface temperatures for the past 30 years.
Yup. You’re right, that’s the time the climate models used by the IPCC say that only greenhouse gases could have caused the warming. Those scientists, who must have their heads immersed in climate models, apparently haven’t bothered to come out into the real world long enough to examine the sea surface temperature records for the last 3 decades. If they had, they’d find the data doesn’t agree with the models. All the modelers would have had to do is divide the global oceans into 3 logical subsets. Then they could see why sea surface temperatures have warmed and that Mother Nature’s two rambunctious children La Niña and El Niño were the primary natural culprits. Logically, those energetic natural siblings can explain most of the warming of land surface air temperatures, too, since temperatures there simply mimic and exaggerate the short- and long-term variations in sea surface temperatures. Of course, anthropogenic global warming exists; that is, there’s a small part of the land surface air temperature warming that can’t be explained by the natural warming of sea surfaces, and that small portion is likely manmade, with a host of contributing factors. But back to the oceans: natural variables can also explain their warming to depths of 700 meters—a dataset called Ocean Heat Content.
That would have been a great section on which to end Who Turned on the Heat?
– However –
Who Turned on the Heat? continues with three more sections. One presents links to additional animations so that you can watch the cumulative effects of an El Niño and La Niña as they took place. Remember, La Niña is not the opposite of El Niño—there are some not-so-subtle differences between the two phases. The next section presents the myths and failed arguments that proponents of manmade global warming have created to try to downplay the long-term effects of major El Niño and La Niña events. The last section is Q&A. Take a look at the Preview of Who Turned on the Heat? Scroll down through the Table of Contents.
Who Turned on the Heat? weighs in at a whopping 550+ pages, about 110,000+ words. It contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 380 color illustrations. In pdf form, it’s about 23MB. It includes links to more than a dozen animations, which allow the reader to view ENSO processes and the interactions between variables.
After reading Who Turned on the Heat? you should have a better understanding of El Niño and La Niña—AND—you should understand why global surface temperatures warm during multidecadal periods when El Niño events are stronger, occur more often and endure longer than La Niña events. The most recent period with ENSO conditions weighted toward the El Niño phase started in the late 1970s, and it’s no coincidence that global surface temperatures have warmed since then. Also not by coincidence, La Niña events dominated ENSO, but just a little bit, from the mid-1940s to the late-1970s, and global surface temperatures cooled slightly. Why did surface temperatures warm from the late 1910s to the mid-1940s? Yup, ENSO was skewed toward El Niño during that period, too.
Further to that, as you’ll find, this book clearly illustrates and describes the following:
1. Sea surface temperature data for the past 30 years show the global oceans have warmed. There is, however, no evidence the warming was caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases in part or in whole; that is, the warming can be explained by natural ocean-atmosphere processes, primarily ENSO.
2. The global oceans have not warmed as hindcast and projected by the climate models maintained in the CMIP3 and CMIP5 archives, which were used, and are being used, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for their 4th and upcoming 5thAssessment Reports; in other words, the models cannot and do not simulate the warming rates or spatial patterns of the warming of the global oceans—even after decades of modeling efforts.
3. Based on the preceding two points, the climate models in the CMIP3 and CMIP5 archives show no skill at being able to simulate how and why global surface temperatures warmed; that is, the climate models presented in the IPCC’s 4th and upcoming 5thAssessment Reports would provide little to no value as tools for projecting future climate change on global and regional levels.
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The book is:
Who Turned on the Heat? – The Unsuspected Global Warming Culprit, El Niño-Southern Oscillation is now on sale in pdf form for US$8.00 – Please click here to buy a copy.
Bob Tisdale adds:
For those who would prefer a Kindle edition, I haven’t decided if I’m going to publish it in that format. Due to the massive number of color illustrations, the Kindle edition price would be somewhere close to US$16.00. Personally, I think that’s a little steep for an e-book. And since other electronic versions of a book have to be priced 20% higher than the Kindle edition, that would make the pdf version about US$19.00, and that’s way too high. Right now, US$8.00 sounds like a bargain for an easy-to-read, well-illustrated, well-documented book about El Niño-Southern Oscillation and its long-term effects on global surface temperatures.
Naturally, some readers will think the price is way too low, and they’ll want to pay more for the years of research that went into preparing this book, through a tip or donation to the author. (Wishful thinking on my part.)
If you have any questions about the content, please ask them on any thread at my blog Climate Observations.
Regards,
Bob Tisdale
So I will ignore him for now and at least talk to a more rational Philip.
Tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling are linked to the idea that when less heat is allowed to escape into the upper atmosphere, the more heat energy is allowed to accumulate in the lower layers. With less heat escaping above, the stratosphere is not receiving that heat that would normally go there from below, and thus it cools.
The key difference between troposphere warming by aerosols and GHGs is former traps heat originating from above (sunlight) and the latter traps heat originating from below (LWR). Stratosphere cooling doesn’t seem to be well understood, but your statement is likely mostly true, and the stratosphere will cool irrespective of the cause of troposphere warming.
You seem to think stratosphere cooling is evidence that GHGs must be warming SSTs. It isn’t as I have explained, it could equally well be evidence aerosols are cooling SSTs
FWIIW, I think troposphere GHG (warming) and aerosol (cooling) effects on SSTs on a global average are probably roughly equal. So a valid working assumption is zero troposphere warming/cooling of SSTs.
Whether this is consistent with Bob’s position is up to him to say.
Philip,
Thanks for at least directly responding to my comment. Bob thinks that by ignoring my questions, or never willing to at least directly answer them make me go away. Sorry Bob, but that won’t work when science is on my side.
Bob said and repeated this: “It is well known that ENSO impacts the locations of the jet streams in both hemispheres. In turn, the ENSO-caused relocations of the jet streams impact where around the globe SURFACE temperatures warm or cool and precipitation increases and decreases. Nowhere in that discussion do lower stratosphere temperatures come into play.”
There is a recently published paper that shows there is a relationship between ENSO El Nino and La Nina cycles and temperatures in the lower stratosphere: http://www.columbia.edu/~lmp/paps/garfinkel+etal-JGR-2012-inpress.pdf
Unfortunately for Bob, the relationship is the opposite of the claims he keeps making here. From what I understand, he claims the warming that has occurred over the past 30+years is due to an increase in El Nino’s, That’s all well and good. But as the paper I linked to describes this link:
“There is an apparent inconsistency between the impact of opposite phases of ENSO on the seasonal mean vortex and on SSWs: El Nino leads to an anomalously warm, and La Nina There is an apparent inconsistency between the impact of opposite phases of ENSO on the seasonal mean vortex and on SSWs: El Nino leads to an anomalously warm, and La Nina leads to an anomalously cool, seasonal mean polar stratospheric state, but both phases of ENSO lead to an increased SSW frequency.”
So if Bob is right that all the warming in the oceans and lower atmosphere is due to an increase in El Nino’s. But what Bob can’t explain here is with that reported increase in El Nino’s, there should be a corresponding increase of temperatures in the lower Stratosphere, with everything else remaining equal. But that is not being reflected the observation record of a cooling stratopshere as I linked to in my earlier comments.
Bob always thinks he can just get away with harshly criticizing me in public and calling me a troll for supposedly asking him questions that are to him “unreasonable.” But Bob just never gets that he is the one being unreasonable when all he has to do take a deep breath and just answer my questions without going ballistic. The biggest problem for Bob is he does not have any scientific background, at least he has never actually provided on his blog site or elsewhere despite his claims of being an expert on this subject that just so happens to require some important decisions to be made for our future generations.
You may all now go on with your book lovefest with Bob as he happily takes your money for a book that will become scientifically irrelevant in the near future as the polar sea ice continue to melt to seasonally low levels and global weather extremes become more frequent: http://icons.wxug.com/hurricane/2012/cei_jan-aug2012.png
Bob, ignoring me and all the other actual scientists out there will not make us go away and we will continue to question you until you become irrelvant and actually go away.
To Smokey (and all the rest),
I find it sad that Bob thinks he can tell you not to respond to me and that you graciously agreed. Does Bob own this blog site? Why does he feel that he can tell you that you should not freely comment here? Who made Bob the boss here and why do you feel totally obliged to do exactly what he says or tells you to do? For a great country like the USA that fights for an individual’s rights and freedoms, it certainly looks like some limitations are being drawn here and I for one will not stand for it.
Bob thinks he can just shut out the opposing view by calling people names like trolls, banning them from his blog site, or as he has done repeatedly done to me over the many years just not ever respond directly to any of my questions because he doesn’t think he has to.
I say we need more discussion on this not less, that’s what our country is all about isn’t it? And anyone that tries to limit that discussion is simply getting in the way.
Our future generations depend on us to continuing with those discussions and important decisions, and I will do just that, with or without Bob.
Bob Tisdale says:
September 5, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Derek Sorensen: The book is geared towards readers without heavy-duty science backgrounds. If I was a better animator, I’d make the cartoons move and I’d narrate, I might even try that.
Bob, I was objecting to the pitch, not the content. I understand the need to communicate with those without an understanding of science, but just because someone doesn’t grok the scientific method isn’t any reason to treat them like idiots or mere punters, which is how the sales-pitch came across to me.
Derek Sorensen: What exactly are you objecting to, the link that reads “Please click here to buy a copy”?
Wikipedia definition of troll (my boldface):
In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.
This has been an interesting thread to read through once again. Interesting inasmuch as a troll has reached a new low with his inferences and that new low is questioning my patriotism.
Bob,
All I have done here is pose a legitimate scientific question that goes directly to your written claim in the actual forum posting that there is no evidence that the warming is caused by anthropogenic GHG. Through the latest data and research studies I linked to, I can directly tie ENSO cycles to known atmospheric responses all the way up to the lower stratosphere that indicates that your claim that you made is not supported by the evidence. Your willful failure to respond to that legitimate question in direct response to the claims being made in those blog topic and to also tell other people to not engage in the debate on this issue is indeed a travesty here.
Dennis H says: “Through the latest data and research studies I linked to, I can directly tie ENSO cycles to known atmospheric responses all the way up to the lower stratosphere that indicates that your claim that you made is not supported by the evidence.”
Dennis, all you’ve managed to do is further illustrate to all of the readers here that you have no idea of what you’re talking about. You’re wasting their time, my time and Anthony’s bandwidth. The links you provided do not confirm your nonsensical statements. For instance, you have cause and effect backwards in your mind with the Garfinkel et al paper you linked:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lmp/paps/garfinkel+etal-JGR-2012-inpress.pdf
It’s a study of how ENSO impacts Stratospheric Sudden Warming Events, not vice versa. It is irrelevant in a discussion of the ENSO-caused natural warming of the sea surface temperatures of the global oceans. Why do you persist with this nonsense?
You keep digging the hole larger for yourself. Stop digging. Move on. You have no credibility here. If you had credibility here in the past, which I doubt, it’s gone now. Every comment you’ve made on this thread has destroyed it.
Good-bye, Dennis Hlinka.
Bob Tisdale says:
September 11, 2012 at 5:52 am
Derek Sorensen: What exactly are you objecting to, the link that reads “Please click here to buy a copy”?
Bob, apologies, it might be a cultural thing. I’m a Brit, we are in the maion unused to the style of pitch used in the OP. More than that: we find it off-putting. I’m happy to correspond privately if you’d like more explanation, but it’s probably not fruitful to continue the discussion further here. Anthony, please feel free to forward my email address to Bob.