An Inconvenient Truth: Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies along Sandy’s Track Haven’t Warmed in 70+ Years

The temperature hasn’t changed?
But I just read Trenberth saying that 0.6 degrees of the warming was anthropogenic. When you calculate everything you get lebenty-leben gazillion Joules of raw hurricane energy.
Don’t tell me all that heat has gone missing again! If you lose something once it’s an accident. Twice it’s incompetence.

Bob, a well done study,,,, only one tiny objection, you quote:
””’Apparently the “world’s best thinkers on energy and climate” rely
on thought….”’??
I am pretty sure that their thought was completly turned off, if there is
any left of it which is not even proven….
Spreading Warmist hoax does not need any thoughts…., you need “willing”
and not “thoughtful” personell, a big difference….JS

Nick,
It fits because of the amount of variability in local sea surface temperatures. For example, look at the temps in Bob’s first chart between 2010 and 2012; in that short span of time the temp varied from about -0.6 to +1.0. So is the current sea surface temperature off the shore of New Jersey anomalously high? Yes, and that could very well have contributed to Sandy’s strength. But that temperature is due to the variability, not a long term trend.

Well, Bob, this almost certainly means it was caused by the lack of Arctic ice!
(/sarc if needed)

I had made this obervation in a comment as Sady was riding up the coast – somewhere, I noted that SST were not warmer lately until you got past the pine barrens.

Geeyore says:
November 5, 2012 at 5:41 pm

According to Trenberth, the missing heat is in the deep dark oceans where it can’t be measured (even by Argos).

I want to know where we might find the “heat elevator” that gets all that deep oceanic heat to the surface to create (rather normal) storms like Sandy. Or is that “heat elevator” invisible, too?

All the schlock from the Astrologers (‘Climate Scientists’) reads like blatant plagiarism of Monty Python And The Holy Grail!
So Monty Python And The Holy Grail is the cutting edge of Climate Science?
XD
Oh that is a good one! 🙂
Thanks for the inspiration!

Brian Reynold’s post “How a Warm Earth fueled Hurricane Sandy” at The Energy Collective is so bad, you could really feel sorry for one of “the world’s best thinkers on energy and climate”. He may still be an expert in energy and perhaps write about that topic.
I saw a Siemens ad on their webpage – an excellent match, well deserved for both.

Nick,
Is your passive aggressive comment an attempted subliminal suggestion that anthropogenic carbon dioxide caused Sandy ?

Its the difference in temperatures between air masses + humidity that cause storm intensity. So COLDER air (or more extensive area of cold) from the north meeting warm humid air from south probably accounts for Sandy storm intensity plus the fact that there are MORE buildings and people living there. Example: humid cold air -10C meets colder air -40C will cause a storm/disturbance front. Its the DIFFERENCE. There are now 6 Billion humans compared to 2 Billion when I was born. so ANY strom more likely to cause MORE damage DUH…..cheers

David Ball said on November 5, 2012 at 8:26 pm:

o/t,.. Happy Guy Faukes day everyone.

Happy Guy Fawkes day as well.
How is that off topic? Isn’t Guy Fawkes Night all about unnecessary excessive releases of anthropogenic carbon dioxide from excessive human-induced combustioning of unnecessary carbon-bearing combustibles?

OT but If Romney wins (aka Ryan Climate Skeptic) lets watch at last resignations in the global warming Industry and academia In the USA.

Bob Tisdale says: “… you would have discovered that the sea surface temperatures anomalies of Sandy’s storm track (12N-40N, 80W-70W) haven’t warmed since 1938, when the another super storm hit the Northeast U.S. ”
First problem here is hurricanes don’t just pop out of nowhere in the middle of the Caribbean. They are born in the tropical N. Atlantic , that is where you need to looking. Most of the storm track you are looking at is when the storm is already mature and is not feeding of surface temps, so you plot is irrelevant to the comments on “the warming oceans and their assumed impacts on Sandy”
Secondly, even looking at the area you chose to plot saying ” haven’t warmed since 1938″ is about a stupid as some of the alarmist comments I’ve seen this week.
The plot you show HAS warmed since 1938: in the period 1980 to present. It has also cooled before that. One comment you could make might be that area was AS WARM as present in 1938 when there was a comparable storm.
Noting that would actually point out warming oceans DO matter so we have to look at whether temperatures have warmed more in the recent warming than before.
So if we look at AMO (without detrending it) we see quite a remarkable correlation to accumulated cyclone energy.
http://i49.tinypic.com/xbfqtw.png
We also see the recent warm phase is somewhat warmer than the previous one. That does leave the possibility (but not a proof) that a relatively small part of that warming was AGW.
That is what the data shows, so why not be honest about it? I’m no warmist but if the data shows warming I’m not going to deny it or look somewhere else.
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, please try an up your game from fitting straight lines with Excel. Fitting a linear model to a chaotic system with large oscillations is meaningless at best and more often , like here, can be totally misleading.

Try heating the surface of water with a heat gun and good luck. Trenberth’s heat is not missing, it did not go in in the first place. Heat will not pass from the atmosphere into the ocean because it will be stopped by surface tension. Only radiation passes through surface tension. Ocean and sun are in lock step.

P Solar says…
First problem here is hurricanes don’t just pop out of nowhere in the middle of the Caribbean. They are born in the tropical N. Atlantic , that is where you need to looking. Most of the storm track you are looking at is when the storm is already mature and is not feeding of surface temps, so you plot is irrelevant to the comments on “the warming oceans and their assumed impacts on Sandy”
Your personal emotions are showing. That tropical storms do not continue to feed on SSTs is astounding news to the scientific hurricane experts. (The fact is that they do, and the effect on a storms strgenth can be very dramatic) Also Bob article was a response to an alarmist who, showing some of the very area Bod tracked, talked about the increase in SST in that area, all though he sumarised the entire Atlantic. And finally Bob’s statement, ““… you would have discovered that the sea surface temperatures anomalies of Sandy’s storm track (12N-40N, 80W-70W) haven’t warmed since 1938, when the another super storm hit the Northeast U.S. ” is
true, as he is talking about a trend which shows no warming. and SSTs today, that are no warmer then SSTs in the late 1930s. (The fact that they cooled, and then warmed, and cooled, and then warmed, is not relevant.)

Without the internet we would have lost out to this religion a long time ago. Keep up the good fight for the facts and nothing more.

Thanks, Bob, good information, as is usual.

This pattern agrees with the findings of the late Roger Pocklington, an oceanographer from Nova Scotia who was studying the temperature trends along a transect from Newfoundland to Bermuda. Ironically, Roger became a victim of climate change because in the1970s when he announced his data was showing cooling he was the toast of the prevailing ‘cooling’ consensus. Then by the early 1990s he became anathema to the new ‘warming’ consensus because his data was still showing cooling.
The attacks were sufficient to make him re-examine what the official science was saying and he became a skeptic. The last time I met with him he was giving a paper at a skeptics conference titled “Global warming:The Science and the Politics,” organized by the Fraser Institute in 1997. His paper was titled “Oceanography and Inferences from Time-Series Data.”
Because of his data and the work I had done on eastern Canada including the Arctic we determined the increased flow of the Labrador Current was a significant factor in fish migrations. The implications and then the result of decreasing water temperatures was a decline in the cod stocks on the Grand Banks. We were trying without success to warn anyone who would listen about this decline. Instead they blamed the fisherman and shut down the entire cod fisheries. It is still shut down after 15+ years and the cod stocks have not shown recovery. This shut down is akin to banning corn in Iowa. In a delightful irony Newfoundland’s economy was saved by the discovery of oil at Hibernia on the Grand Banks. Take that income out of their economy and Newfoundland is an economic basket case.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I’ve been trying to think a of good way to present that *global* warming cannot effect local weather directly.
Maybe it’s hotter in Greenland, Mongolia, or atop Kilimanjaro (depending on who you believe), but a cyclonic storm can only extract energy from the water it is actually over. This is conduction at the contact surface when it starts.
At the end of the day q-dot = -k *dt … and if dt aint different then q-dot aint either!
Actually, even if a warmer portion of the ocean earlier in the storm pre-warmed the cyclone, the heat flow would be reduced (or reversed) as dt would be reduced (or reversed) 🙂

M Courtney says:
November 6, 2012 at 12:23 am
The idea has been suggested on the Guardian comments (I forget where) that the rapid refreeze after the record low ice has increased the thermohaline flow rate and so altered the probable direction of the Hurricane (later storm) Sandy. Therefore Sandy was pulled north instead of into the Carribean.
This is a claim worth considering as the terrible impact of Sandy was due to where it hit not how hard it blew.
The claim is preposterous. Where are the measurements of ‘thermohaline flow rate’?
Sandy was not a blow hard at any time during its life. Sandy was a Cat 2 hurricane in the vicinity of Cuba, but it spent most of its life as a Cat 1.

kadaka (KD Knoebel) said @ November 5, 2012 at 8:06 pm

…The Energy Collective, which heralds itself as “The world’s best thinkers on energy and climate”.
Collective is not cumulative, clearly.
The rough rule of teamwork, arising from ordinary factors such as overlap of skills, timing conflicts, etc:
Two people working together will yield the output of one and three-fourths individuals. Three people yields two and a third. Etc. It’s highly approximate, with varying yields, but the rule is as more people are added, average productivity drops, exponentially. Thus you find equivalences of output, like how five can do the work of eight. If adding more to the first one yields a rise in average output, up to where the drop-off starts, you’ve identified a minimum working unit size, like a physical job that must be done by two people, etc.

Let’s see, two Shoshone hunting jackrabbits independently catch maybe one per hour. Two Shoshone hunting jackrabbits with a rabbit net catch maybe 10-20 times that number. Let’s add a third Shoshone and double the length of the rabbit net and catch twice as many again for a 50% increase in manpower.

Of course the Mannian explanation for Bob’s excellent observation is that Bob obviously cherry-picked his data choosing only to look at the area of ocean encompassing the storm track. He neglects to notice that the storm was teleconnected to a group of thunder-struck bristlecone pines high in the mountains of the North American continent, not to mention YAD061.

Bob Tisdale says; “I never said they did. I simply plotted the sea surface temperature along Sandy’s track to show that there has been little to no long-term warming in that region–contrary to the unfounded beliefs of many. ”
Another classic of avoiding the issue from you there Bob.
Let me try again:
Also having identified the area in which it first developed into a formally identified tropical storm you plot everything but that area. Rather odd. So let me help you out. Here is the same hadISST data you chose to discuss from the bit of your chosen area that you did not plot. 12-20N 70-80W
This is the montlhy data with a 12m gaussian filter.
http://i45.tinypic.com/1o3d6w.png
So your “unfounded beliefs of many ” appear not to be so unfounded.
I’m not out to promote AGW but neither do I see any point in criticising Mann and the team for perverting the data and “hide the decline” etc. and then playing the same games of hide and seek with the data.
Why did you chose not to present this information , did you just find what you expected to see and posted without looking properly:
And why do you so studiously avoid commenting on it when I point it out?

You’re probably asking yourself why you should spend $8.00 for a book written by an independent climate researcher.
Better question: Why am I willing to spend $12 or more for it on a USB drive?
I’m on dial-up and wouldn’t want to try a long download of something I’m paying for.
More generally, if I don’t like a printed book then I have a paperweight, or fire-making material, or a target. There is some residual value. If I don’t like an e-book, I could delete it, either way I got nothing show for it.
But an e-book on a USB drive, I’ll still have the drive, which has a much higher residual value than a printed book.
On a quick eBay search, I found lots of 3 sticks, 2GB each, $12.75 with free shipping, from North Carolina. So they’re available for $4.25 just from here for a lot this small.
Look around, you can find local companies offering custom logos for small businesses, from T-shirts and hats to pens. You can get drives with your book title. But even a sticker would be fine, so it’s labeled. But that’s a desired option, not a deal breaker. There are companies that do custom preloaded/duplicated drives (example, not endorsement), if you find the volume of sales too great to do it yourself. You have choices to consider.
So you can pick up sales from the curious, as they’ll have something worthwhile no matter what. Your book will also be in a form that is portable, moveable between devices and also loanable, without the worries among the moral about possible copyright violations. I could read your book on whichever computer I’m using without leaving multiple copies around, etc.
I realize we’re in the digital age, print is dead. But the preference for tangible physical ownership is not.

kadaka;
As an alternative to your alternative, an external USB drive (160 GB) cost me $40 about a year or two ago (now available larger and cheaper). Can hold thousands of e-books and/or lotsa other stuff. Mine’s sub-divided into 5 letter-drives. Will move to any and every upgrade/new computer I get (imminent, long overdue).

Manfred says: “2. Temperature differences to the peak in the 1940s are still small. And 0.1 degrees of this increase is highly dubious and consequence of a disturbing adjustment:”
My main conclusion from the AMO graph is that there is a strong correlation, most of the current peak is just natural variations but there is a slightly higher peak than last cycle.
Objectively this has at least two interpretations: a) a small AGW signal; b) a small increase in the amplitude of the natural variation.
I see both as credible possibilities.