Why El Niño and not the AMO?

Isn’t this topic yet another indication that for purposes of making climate-related predictions, the signal/noise paradigm of temperature signal versus weather noise is a completely flaky proposition — all of it, the whole signal/noise paradigm.

You would need to know exactly how much of the temperature was the result of Enso in order to subtract it. I’m pretty sure we don’t know what that is.

The problem is why to alter the data at the first place?
We see a problem whit temperatures because they tweak the data so they get the warming they want. Now they be leaf there is warming because the data says so but they alter the data 3 times before the final numbers get out. So how mutts cooler is it now? 0,5 or 1 or even 2 or 3 degrees? I think we cane say easy that is 1,5 degrees cooler then they say.
But why alter the data? A thermometer saying its 25 says its 25! That means its 25 not 28. If you take boiling water and put a thermometer in it and it reads 100 degrees Celsius then you can be verily sure thats 100 degrees, way would someone say that its 105 degrees or 95?
If you want to be sure of what you do, you must look at the thermometer and wright whats stand there no more no less. Whit the oceans the same, read what the thermometer says and wright it down no more no less.
All the Nino, Nina, Pdo, PDA’s and what more are part of the climate and must be taken just lake that.
Every other thing done to the data like AGWers like to do is Freud and far from being scientific.

The ocean not only has this great heat pump, it is a gigantic heat sink, requiring 1154 times the energy to change one degree in temperature as the atmosphere. Since the El Nino cycle influences atmospheric temperature, the is obviously some nearby atmosphere/water temperature delta at which almost all additional atmospheric heat effectively goes straight to the ocean rather than atmospheric temperature.

Nothing is actually ‘noise’, except perhaps measurement uncertainty.
Everything is a signal of some sort, whether it indicates changes in ENSO, PDO, AMO, or whatever else.
And one major problem with some papers is the assumption that they are able to identify all the ‘natural’ variations to be removed from the data to reveal the supposed anthropogenic component.
Even if the data adjustments were valid (eg- Rahmstorf and Foster) , it is not reasonable to deem the remainder to be all due to CO2 and supposed feedbacks, since we have no way of knowing what other unknown factors might be involved in that remainder.
This especially when there is reason to suspect (from the work of Svensmark, Kirkby, and others) that there is a solar and cosmic ray contributor to global temperature changes that has not been considered at all in the current climate models.

With regards –
Bloke down the pub says:
January 17, 2013 at 7:00 am
So could a mechanism that disrupts the cycle of enso be the cause of ice ages? Not sure what it might be just yet.
It would be reasonable to assume that the “mechanism” that triggers the ice ages and disrupts this cycle will be “off world.” That is, a Solar cycle – sort of like what we are seeing now regards solar activitiy.

Perhaps the global temperature record is the noise and the El Nino 3.4 Index is the signal?
Why not? Isn’t the global temperature record extremely noisy due to factors such as changing distribution of thermometers, changes to surrounding land areas due to agriculture and urbanization, as well as changes in the ocean due to flora and fauna due to industrialized fishing?
Perhaps the El Nino 3.4 Index is the true signal?

Dear Willis,
With all due respect, your claim that ENSO SSTs “modulate” the trade winds/AAM state is incorrect. There’s a reason they “start to warm” again. You’ll find that variation in the annular modes/the associated mid latitude stress fields/standing gyres precede variations in the SOI and ONI/MEI by several months. This activity correlates extremely well to the rocking phase of the QBO and variations in solar activity, specifically geomagnetic activity, which correlates to O^3 levels hence Rossby amplitude.

Alan Millar says:
January 17, 2013 at 7:33 am
However, what causes the 30 year positive and negative PDO cycles which have more El Ninos or La Ninas respectively? We don’t see 30 year cycles in the source of the energy for this heat pump, the Sun.
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First harmonic between Jupiter and Saturn orbits is 60 years.

It is pretty standard practice in geophysical data analysis to remove sources of variation that are well understood, in order to better quantify the “anomalies” that are of interest. One example would be the standard practice of backing out effects of elevation and latitude from raw gravity measurements. There are two caveats, though. You shouldn’t be backing anything out unless it is very well quantified, and you have to be absolutely consistent. No fair talking about how hot 1998 was and then suggesting ENSO should be backed out of the temperature record.

We can take it out because it is an oscillation that has Zero trend over time and well-defined impacts on temperature that are reasonably predictable from event to event. The total impact approached about +/-0.25C or, more accurately, Temp Impact = 0.08 * Nino 3.4 (of three months prior). This a LARGE enough variation that it should be accounted for if we want to understand the climate.
The ENSO also affects global water vapour levels in exactly the same manner (with the same lag), cloud patterns, OLR patterns, wind patterns, even the rotation of the Earth, etc. Or in other words, just about everything that is defined as the climate. It is the biggest weather phenomenon on the planet.
The AMO is also a big impactor. The AMO is the driver of the 60 year cycle in temperatures or it is a very, very good proxy for whatever is driving the 60 year cycle in temperatures. It can affect global temperatures by +/-0.3C and like the ENSO’s impact, that is a BIG enough impact that it should be accounted for. There is also a southern ocean version of the AMO which I quite can’t nail down yet.

Anyone know the derivation of the word “jigger?” As in: “Someone has jiggered the numbers to make it work.”
I believe NASA refers to the surface temperature of the earth as “combined Land-Surface Air and Sea-Surface.” There is a lot in that little phrase. Notice that they use the word “combined” rather than “average” or “weighted average.” NOAA (Tom Karl?) on the other hand uses the phrase “merged land air and sea surface temperature.” Here the word becomes “merged.” To me both “combined” and “merged” imply that an extraneous method was employed backed by some sort of ad hoc justification – the jigger factor.

Doesn’t Newton’s law of cooling (ie that the hotter something is the faster it cools) mean that if the earth “stores up” high temperature water that the water will necessarily cool at a different (and higher) rate than a well mixed pool? I suppose what I’m asking is whether two jugs of water one at 50 degrees and the other at 100 degrees and averaged, will cool faster than one big jug at 75. My guess is that since temperatures follow an exponential curve during cooling the two averaged would cool faster than the one. If cooling were straight line then you would expect the two to cool in the same way as the one.

My only comment on this description of the heat pump is this. The planet cools more efficiently when the heat absorbed in the tropics is not transported towards the poles. Because the heat is ultimately lost via radiation, anything that reduces temperature variation on the surface area by transporting hot spot heat elsewhere has a net warming influence.
This effect is substantial. The transportation of heat from the equatorial regions into the temperate zones is one of the only things that keeps the planet out of glaciation. In the Atlantic, the key player is the Gulf Stream (and its subsidiary currents) in the thermohaline circulation. A glance at the SSTs visible e.g. here:
http://classic.wunderground.com/tropical/?index_region=at
clearly shows the plume of warm water carrying tropical heat up to Europe and the Atlantic side of the Arctic. Interrupt that flow, or divert it East so that it runs into Africa instead of Europe, and Europe goes into the icebox and the tropical Atlantic warms until they both are in equilibrium without heat transport. However, the temperate zone temperature will drop more than the tropical temperature will rise to maintain stasis because of that .
The issue is further complicated, of course, by vertical transport. The Enthalpy content “in the ocean” or at ground level is subject to the fully atmospheric greenhouse effect. Heat that rises, however, penetrates the greenhouse layer and is lost more efficiently wherever it might be found. Wet heat (water vapor) that rises is particularly efficient as it carries the latent heat of vaporization in addition to “just” the enthalpy content in the water molecules themselves at constant temperature, and have to give up this heat in order to form clouds. Clouds then are highly nonlinear temperature regulators — both increasing daytime albedo and increasing nighttime greenhouse trapping. Clouds are negative feedback driven nucleation points — when daytime clouds start to form the albedo causes further cooling beneath them and heat-engine thunderstorms form from the updrafts of warm wet air lofted up to the stratosphere to efficiently cool and spread, creating a local convective cell that pulls heat out of the ocean (or the moist land or air) and moves it to a cold reservoir. Sometimes enormous chunks of the ocean self-organize into the heat engines we call hurricanes, sucking latent heat out of the warm ocean underneath and moving it up into the stratosphere to be radiatively lost with great force and efficiency.
These are the “natural signal” eggs that must be juggled, for all of the oceans and decadal oscillations and the THC that turns over waters heated or cooled a few centuries ago and feeds it back into the system determining surface temperatures. The general circulation models attempt to do the juggling but it is obviously an enormously difficult problem. I, like you, am very skeptical of any attempt to remove some particular “natural signal” from a coupled nonlinear chaotic system with gazillions of feedbacks known and unknown and (mostly) transient, fluctuations that happened to nucleate at some particular point and grow.
Watching the evolution of hurricanes in the Atlantic is particularly instructive. A tiny wave in circulation/air pressure forms off of the coast of Africa somewhere. Most times — depending on things like the shear in the upper atmosphere, which is in turn determined by things that went on thousands of miles away and weeks in the past in ways that depend on e.g. the state of the ENSO and more — the waves peter out, forming nothing but a few thunderstorms and then dissipating. Every now and then, however, the shear is low and a cluster of thunderstorms joins up and creates a persistent updraft as warm wet air is pulled into the low pressure underneath, is lifted up (cooling), and falls back as much cooler rain. The winds build up and start to bend from the coriolis force as they approach the low pressure center, and the whole thing migrates to the west and north, moving like a vacuum cleaner over warm water and growing in size and strength as long as the shear remains low.
We can barely predict in the roughest of terms how many of the waves are likely to nucleate into storms (not all of which start off of Africa — sometimes they nucleate in the Gulf of Mexico, sometimes in the Caribbean, sometimes in the middle of the Atlantic), and the distribution of energy among those storms. We do somewhat better with predicting the future trajectory and evolution of storms once they form, at least when there are distinct steering patterns of weather present (not always true). Who would have predicted that we would be continuing the longest single stretch without a major (cat 3 or better) Atlantic hurricane at this point in 2013? Who can predict at this point how much longer this stretch will continue? This seems as though it would be a feature of the climate, given the importance of hurricanes as transporters of energy, factors in the warming or cooling of the tropical ocean and yet we are completely clueless about this, helpless to do more than observe what happens and try to “explain” it away after the fact. Who would have predicted the erratic pattern of the ENSO, or anticipated its obvious role in the bulk of the observed “global warming” in the modern satellite era, where a single strong ENSO event is associated with almost the entire warming observed over the entire 33 year period? And ENSO in turn regulates the rainfall in West Africa and hence the hurricane pattern in the Atlantic, which influences the end-of-summer temperatures of the tropics and residual warmth that is transported to Europe, which affects (no doubt) the monsoon, which probably couples back to the ENSO with a lag of anywhere from years to decades, with additional contributions from what happens in the Antarctic, in the Indian Ocean, in the waters off of Australia, from the severity of the winter in Siberia and Mongolia, from what the weather/climate was like a century ago when a band of upwelling water in the thermohaline circulation was first pulled under to circulate as a deep current.
We haven’t a prayer of simulating, or understanding this, especially without data. Data we are still just barely beginning to obtain from projects like ARGO and ever-improving satellite observations. Most of the world’s oceans is a mystery as far as temperature, motion, salinity and contribution to the climate are concerned. Our sampling of surface temperatures with actual thermometers is horribly non-uniform, biased and often just plain corrupt. Our knowledge of what is going on in the various layers of the atmosphere is improving, but even less sampled than the oceans (except by satellite). And our models of the sun and its varied coupling to the earth’s geomagnetic system and atmospheric chemistry is primitive but improving.
In a century, we probably will be able to make quantitative climate predictions with some skill. In the current decade, we cannot. AGW is by no means disproven by the last 15 to 18 years of arguably flat temperatures, just as it was by no means proven by the temperature rise that occurred during the ENSO event or since the end of the LIA or the Dalton minimum. Temperature change cannot either prove or disprove the (C)AGW hypothesis, not without a full understanding of the climate system sufficient to predict what the temperature would be in the absence of extra CO_2, which we utterly lack. All the more so since we have to understand it in the presence or absence of CO_2, soot, various aerosols of anthropogenic or natural origin, with a variable sun, varying phases of decadal oscillations, and an unknown ocean sucking heat down or delivering heat up in a global circulation process with timescales ranging from years to centuries, with land use changes and pollutants in the waters that have visible global effects that we do not yet understand, all in a highly nonlinear chaotic system with numerous feedbacks and spontaneous self-organizing stabilizing macroscopic phenomena with global impact, on a planet that is inexorably pursing an orbital cycle that completely changes the underlying “equilibrium” over time in ways we do not fully understand and cannot predict or compute.
In the meantime, prudence suggests that we concentrate on the ongoing disaster of global energy poverty first as it is a certain disaster that is happening now and forces 1/3 of the world’s population to live in near prehistoric levels of poverty and misery. Even if CO_2 were precisely as disastrous as the worst-case CAGW scenarios suggest — which few people believe any more, including climate scientists — the impact of a 2.5-3.5 C rise in global temperature by the end of the century will be smaller than the impact of a century more of global energy poverty, even if the ocean does rise a full meter or more, even if storms do actually get discernibly worse eventually, even if there is increased desertification, none of which are currently observible.
Somewhere in the world, as I type this, not one but hundreds of millions of people are cooking a sparse day’s meal on animal dung or a small charcoal fire. Their children are breathing in particulates and smoke and suffering from malnutrition and diseases. Their clothes must be hand washed, if they are washed at all. They have neither fresh, clean water nor anything but the great outdoors as a sewer system. Some two billion people will light their homes — if one can call a tin shanty or mud or grass hut a home — with an oil lamp or nothing at all tonight. The children of those two billion people will not go to school tomorrow, cannot read or do simple arithmetic, and will go to bed hungry (indeed, live always hungry, as they do not take in enough food to support their growth). They will grow up stunted in stature and damaged in their brains, all because they lack access to cheap electricity, running clean water and sewer facilities and clothes washing and refrigeration and schools and houses and adequate supplies of fertilizer-grown food that electricity enables. Many will die young, or live to become “criminals” as they do what they must to stay alive, or will become cannon fodder for anyone who promises to give them a better life if they will fight and die for them.
They, not the threat of a supposed apocalypse that might or might not happen in a century, are the moral imperative of the twenty-first century. There is no need for 1/3 of the world’s population to live in squalid misery — not any more. We have the technology, we have the wealth, to utterly eliminate global poverty within a few decades. What we lack is the will and the vision to do so.
And we will never succeed in doing so at the same time we make energy more expensive and discourage its use. The poverty in question is energy poverty. Fundamentally. With enough, cheap enough, energy, we can make the deserts bloom, create jobs in the heart of Africa or India or South America, bring medicine and electric lights and running water to the world. Cheap, clean energy solves all problems; it is the fundamental scarcity.
rgb

Just what is the history of treating Nino 3-4 as “noise”.
And is it being subtracted because it is “noise” or because it is a strong non-CO2 forcing?
Hypothetically, if you want to bracket T sensitivity to CO2 doubling, you ought to do your best to remove the Temp impact of other known or suspected forcings such as the Nino 3-4. This bring up two flaws… Once you admit there is a forcing other than GHG, such as Nino 3-4, you then need to forthright in estimates for all other identifiable forcings. A bigger flaw is that it must increase uncertainty rather than reduce it.
Willis, what you describe seems to be a process where people want to estimate the climate sensitivity,
Mean(GHG_double) = Mean(Global Temp Recorded(Tortured)) – Mean(Nino3-4).
Missing in this exercise is proper treatment of the uncertainty. Variance(GHG_Double). It cannot be a subtraction of variances.
If you have two uncertain components A, B, uncorrelated, independent, making a total T,
where A and B are measured components, then we can statistically add them for an estimated T
Mean(T_estimated) = Mean(A_measured) + Mean(B_measured)
Variance(T_estimated) = Variance(A_measured) + Variance(B_measured)
But what we have in the real world is not T_estimated but T_measured and we are trying to estimate its component A_estimate from a guess of B_guess.
If our physical model is:
T_measured = A_estimated + B_guess, with A (GHG) and B (Nino3-4) uncorrelated, then by trying to solve for A we face a big problem.
A_estimated = T_measured – B_guess, T and B necessarily must be positively correlated by an unconstrained degree between 0 and 1.
At it’s simplest, and wrong, level you could assume T_measured and B_guess are independent, but then
Mean(A_estimated) = Mean(T_measured) – Mean(B_guess)
Variance(A_estimated) = Variance(T_measured) + Variance(B_guess) ‘Note the PLUS sign.
The bigger the variance on B_guess, the bigger will be the variance on the sought after A_estimate.
Or in this case, Variance(GHG_double) can be no smaller than Variance(Nino3-4) unless we have VERY good knowledge of their covariance.
= = = = = = =
I’ll close by refreshing a link to the topic of tracking uncertainty through Tmax, Tmin data.
I fear we are throwing away a lot of variance by starting with monthly Tavg or Tmean and ignoring the variance that comes from the (Tmax-Tmin)/2 mean std error.
Every adjustment you make to a temperature record, be it adding or subtracting a value, you must ALWAYS ADD the variance of uncertainty of the result.
How many adjustments has GISS made to the temperature record?
How much variance needs to be been added to the temperature record from all these uncertain adjustments?
How much bigger must the error bars really be because of adjustment uncertainty and proper accounting of uncertainty in the averaging?

rgbatduke- exactly I feel there is an element of racism involved also,in the lack of equality in Development. Greenies fear healthy, happy, prosperous , dark skinned people.
(Their son or daughter might marry one..) . I’m all three races,BTW…

philr1992 says:
January 17, 2013 at 8:06 am
Willis, with all due respect, your claim that ENSO SSTs modulate the trade wind/AAM phase space regime is inaccurate. You’ll find that variations in the polar annular modes, hence the associated stress fields/standing gyres, precede variations in the SOI/ONI by a few months. This circulatory behavior appears to be driven by the rocking phase of the QBO and solar wind fluxes affecting stratospheric O^3 content.
ENSO is absolutely not an internal system oscillation. It is externally forced, the SST anomaly stripe along the axial equator should be considered a result, not a causative mechanism via ludicrous positive thermodynamic feedback loops.
=================
” It is externally forced ” ? Likely, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to just assert it is so. I’ll come back to that.
To Willis’ questions, no of course it’s not “noise” neither does the fact is oscillates ( in a very vague sense of the term) mean it is a mean zero effect.
If it’s just noise a suitable low pass filter will take it out and leave any residual. Of course this is just what those who try the “noise” argument have in mind. But if it’s not mean zero then any resulting change – warming just for example – will get falsely attributed to something else such as … hmmm, Ah! AGW !!
Any attempt to model climate has to model all of it , not make arbitrary assumptions like: all change is due to human CO2 and everything else must average to zero.

This is my latest model of Hadcrut4 monthly back to 1871 based on Nino 3.4, the AMO, Solar TSI, Volcanoes AOD, and a Ln(CO2) warming trend.
This is no fluke.
http://s2.postimage.org/xbe6i3cfd/Hadcrut4_Model_Nov12.png
The Ln(Co2) warming residual is this (including the AMO as a natural cycle).
http://s8.postimage.org/hb6q21t5x/Hadcrut4_Warming_with_AMO.png
And when you leave out the AMO, you get a 60 year up and down cycle as shown here. (Chart also notes the starting point of Tamino and Rahmstorf’s 2011 paper which left out the AMO on purpose (and used the old PMOD composite data for TSI which is known to be suffering from degradation in the instruments in recent years).
http://s13.postimage.org/u9ciffzqf/Hadcrut4_without_AMO.png

Great questions, Willis. Great discussion, everyone. Thanks. I heartily endorse the comment by rgbatduke, especially the following:
“In a century, we probably will be able to make quantitative climate predictions with some skill. In the current decade, we cannot. AGW is by no means disproven by the last 15 to 18 years of arguably flat temperatures, just as it was by no means proven by the temperature rise that occurred during the ENSO event or since the end of the LIA or the Dalton minimum. Temperature change cannot either prove or disprove the (C)AGW hypothesis, not without a full understanding of the climate system sufficient to predict what the temperature would be in the absence of extra CO_2, which we utterly lack.”
That is an accurate description of where climate science is today.

This is a helpful post, the ENSO should indeed be seen as a heat pump.
The heart is also a pump. The analogy is not completely misplaced since both the metazoan heart-beat and the ENSO are nonlinear oscillators.
This debate is settling into the familiar internal versus external oscillation debate.
What Willis has described in terms of the interaction of the trades blowing equatorial Pacific water westward, cloud cover and upwelling in the east Pacific is a concise description of the Bjerknes feedback, described here.
The crucial understanding that Bjerknes brought to the ENSO is that both La Nina and el Nino phases are driven by positive feedbacks. They are time-limited positive feedbacks since their operation leads to remove the conditions driving the positive feedback.
Since the wind and current setup of the Pacific can lead periodically to either of these feedbacks, the Pacific thermodynamically can be described as an “excitable medium” or a reactive medium. This is the condition that leads to nonlinear oscillation (see Bertram). The classic Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical oscillator is a good example of this.
The heartbeat, as mentioned initially, is also a nonlinear oscillator – it is driven by very strong positive feedbacks, with the result that the emergent oscillation is regular and monotonic, and with strong amplitude. By contrast the Bjerknes positive feedbacks which make the Pacific an excitable medium are of limited strength, thus the oscillation is intermittent since the system is subject to various other influences.
Alan Millar says:
January 17, 2013 at 7:33 am
Succinct post Willis.
However, what causes the 30 year positive and negative PDO cycles which have more El Ninos or La Ninas respectively? We don’t see 30 year cycles in the source of the energy for this heat pump, the Sun.
Alan
Following on from the ENSO being a nonlinear oscillator, such nonliear systems typically evolve in a manner dictated by attractors. One common such attractor is the Lorenz attractor, whose waveform is illustrated here. The gtract plots show alternating periods of low and high oscillation swings, analogous to alternating periods of La Nina and el Nino dominance in the East Pacific.
The 60 year oscillation could represent the two alternating “wings” of the Lorenz attractor governing the ENSO nonlinear oscillation.

Bill Illis,
Are you saying, that you have isolated the CO2 warming trend?

There are a lot of good mathematical/statistical observations in the post and comments. But I feel that the primary failure in trying to define these large effects as “noise” is a simple misuse of language, in the Orwellian sense. If the data is inconvenient, slander it as :”noise”.
A proper definition of noise would not include the data which is coupled to the signal of interest in any way by feedback or control as noise. For example the cosmic microwave background can be safely removed from the microwave observations of a single star of interest, since they are not coupled or correlated. The AGW crowd’s attempt to turn these oscillations into “noise” is logically as ridiculous as trying to understand a pulsar by first filtering out the pulses.

To return to the original question, why treat this effect as noise?
In a very simple model, the output is presumed to be some linear multiplier times each factor, plus a constant. O = M1 * F1 + M2 * F2 + C
There is one multiplier, M1 and M2 for each factor F1 and F2, and so on.
Your goal is find M1, M2, and C. The way you do that is cancel out factor F1, so whatever is left is driven solely by F2, then vice versa. The proper way to do that operation is to find data where F1 is a high value, then a low value, while F2 is absolutely unchanging, then vice versa.
A more sophisticated approach might look for more than 2 values of F1, all while F2 is held rock steady. That would see whether the response to F1 is something besides a simple multiplier.
As always, this operation is only as good as its assumptions and its execution. If there is some other big factor F3 which you are not accounting for, the whole approach is going to drive into a concrete post and crash. Let alone F10 and F25. And if history and the order of events is important, you drive into that post and crash. And if F1 and F2 react with each other, so the effect of F1 depends on whether F2 is high or low, you have another big problem. If there are more than about 2 driving factors, such as N=8, the work to cancel out each set of N-1 factors (here 7 factors at the same time) while wiggling the remaining factor becomes prohibitive, unless you have a nice laboratory and can apply the very orderly techniques of Design of Experiments (DOE).
If you don’t have clean experiments like that (and weather experiments won’t), you can try to analyze naturally occuring data (NOD). This often involves introducing the concept of noise, which means you are trying to find the effects of factor F1 by subtracting out the effects of factor F2, rather than holding it steady (presuming there are no other important factors out there wiggling away by themselves at the same time, and so on.). Crucial assumptions include independence, and that you have successfully kept an eye on every single one of the actual drivers. Otherwise, you have a lovely history, but it is totally useless as far as its predictive value. Good try, but no kewpie doll.
And subtracting out just one of the driving factors is useless, too. You have to account for all of them, or you have no clue what remains. The trifecta is the only game in town, and you missed it.

rgbatduke says:
January 17, 2013 at 9:29 am
My only comment on this description of the heat pump is this. The planet cools more efficiently when the heat absorbed in the tropics is not transported towards the poles. Because the heat is ultimately lost via T^4 radiation, anything that reduces temperature variation on the surface area by transporting hot spot heat elsewhere has a net warming influence.
========================================================
First I second everything you say about a need to directly attack global squalor rather than taking to the pulpit to make blanket condemnations of one’s fellow man and conjuring Doom by greenhouse effect. I’m not sure I follow the argument on how a hotspot not moving poleward nets out as cooling. It seems a hotspot would radiate in the same way regardless of where it was. Do you think that hotspots cool by mixing or is it primarily just radiative? The bone I am picking at is that heat moving elsewhere toward the pole does not improve on the earth’s cooling in and of itself. I think of the earth as cooling the same all the time (absent the effect we’re discussing and water vapor effects.) It’s kind of a circular aspect of the argument; given a hotspot it’s going to end up cooling more effectively no matter where it is, but if it persists longer then it’s true that it’s going to be even more effective. I do agree with the general proposition you present – that the more uniform the temperature of the earth the lower the rate of cooling. This all comes up when thinking about whether a fast spinning planet cools differently than a slow one (like the moon). My answer has always been that it has to do with properties of rock on the surface. If things were such that rocks barely had time to cool before the sun rose again, it wouldn’t make much difference, but if rocks quickly cool down, then yes the average temperature would be cooler because then the planet (or moon) would be less uniform temperature-wise. All this rumination, of course, underlines what you have said, that it’s not a simple model. My suspicion is that the net greenhouse effect of doubled CO2 is probably about as negligible as the effect of all humankind’s impoundment of water on the climate. There is a theoretical effect and a doubling sounds substantial but that doubling is in the context of a much larger and wildly varying greenhouse effect from water vapor.

Willis, you are right of course. The reconstruction is using part of the temperature record (although the ENSO part is three months prior).
But what is it that we are trying to do here?
Remove the noise and see an underlying temperature trend. A big part of the noise can be explained by these variables (even though some are not independent variables). The question was can we remove some of the variability. Yes.
Now forecasting is an issue. I can usually get the ENSO pretty close for at least 3 months out, which means 6 months out (considering the lag).
The AMO seems to be correlated with the ENSO (lagged several months) and with OHC in the north Atlantic going back to 1900 (lagged about 1 year) and OHC in the north Atlantic is going down now.
We can more-or-less tell what the solar cycle TSI is going to do for the next 4 or 5 years, and that is decline from its current +0.33 W/m2 to about -0.4 W/m2 although there really is not much of a solar cycle signal in the residuals.
CO2 is growing at a certain rate which is not difficult to extrapolate. The default is no volcanoes.
So, one can forecast ahead with this. The regression coefficients don’t change through time once you have a few decades of data. The ENSO impact is always the same (except for a multi-year event which looks to be higher), The AMO coefficient is 0.5.
Going farther out, one would assume the ENSO will balance out to Zero as it has since 1871. The AMO might follow its 60 year cycle (maybe not) and balance out to Zero over time.
So, the underlying trend of temperatures is there within +/- 0.2C white noise variation per month.

rgbatduke- exactly I feel there is an element of racism involved also,in the lack of equality in Development. Greenies fear healthy, happy, prosperous , dark skinned people.
(Their son or daughter might marry one..) . I’m all three races,BTW…
I think it not just Green’s, but more like the collusion that used to exist between moonshiners and the church in NC. The church formally opposed drinking, because alcohol was clearly the tool of the devil. For years, it successfully prevented liquor by the drink, created blue laws restricting the sale of alcohol, kept many counties in NC altogether dry. This fit the interests of the moonshiners just fine, as the people of NC were going to drink regardless of what the church claimed from its pulpits (including a lot of the very church goers that by day would piously oppose drinking). A dry county was a godsend for the ‘shiners — huge demand, no other source of supply. Nobody voted more fervently against the freedom to buy commercial liquor than a moonshiner, not even a Baptist preacher.
We see exactly the same unlikely bedfellows in the Green movement. Show me a Green that actually gives up cars, washing machines, electric lights, computers, heated houses, and commercial goods made far away and transported at enormous expense in energy to the stores where they purchased them and I’ll show you a Green that has no voice because they have successfully marginalized themselves to where they cannot even publicly argue for their public stance. Al Gore is just like a Baptist minister who is all hellfire and damnation when it comes to public drinking but who gets regular deliveries from his local moonshiner just the same. The Gores are verbally consistent but behaviorally inconsistent (and wish to control your behavior far more than their own) just like the preacher man.
The real puzzles are the moonshiners. At first glance they look like the ones that should most favor legalization of booze, until you realize just how much they profit from its restriction in a world where opposition to drinking is a lot more posturing and lip service to a mythological ideal than it is any sort of actual universal sentiment. In our modern world, the “moonshiners” that are in bed with the Greens are the very energy companies the publicly defend. After all, nobody will ever vote to cut back their energy usage if it involves lowering their standard of living!
Seriously. Nobody. Ever. If they were going to vote for that they could start by “voting” with their own behavior, by turning their lifestyle back to the 19th century — no electric lights, no electric heat, horses for transportation, hand washing of clothes in cold water carried by hand from a well or stream, growing their own food, refusing to purchase manufactured goods. The Amish manage lives something very much like this, but I don’t see people running en masse to join the Amish.
They are perfectly happy, of course, to lower somebody else’s standard of living. Gore is rich enough that he doesn’t care what the price of gasoline is — he can still afford to drive his SUV and live in an enormous, heated house and fly all over the world and wear expensive, clean clothes and pretty much not be affected, just like the Baptist who is happy to vote against commercial liquor because he’s got his personal moonshiner regardless.
Energy companies, then, love it when Green’s argue for restrictions that raise the cost of energy. The demand for energy is nearly completely inelastic, their profit margins are more or less fixed, so higher energy costs simply apply their margin to an increased revenue base without them having to actually do anything more to earn the money! Hell, we’ve even turned otherwise honest farmers into moonshiners by legally mandating the burning of moonshine in our cars.
The Greens and Energy companies thus work in perfect accord. The more expensive wind power is, the more certain the coal companies are of continued coal profits. Only an alternative energy source that is actually cheaper than coal is to be feared.
Is there racism, conscious or unconscious, in this unspoken agreement? Probably. By chance or design, the 1/3 of the world that is the poorest are mostly of darker skin, mostly live in countries that were long exploited by imperialist European nations, and that became — and to a large extent still are — a source for cheap labor and raw materials that disproportionately profit people half a world away. Freedom, civilization and law are the enemies of the church and the moonshiner alike. A corrupt government where the sheriff’s cousin and preacher’s uncle is also the county moonshiner works far better than ABC stores and uniform laws and taxation with no personal advantage that gives the lie to the church’s cries of sin and damnation simply by “working”.
rgb

Don’t get lost in the trees. Temperatures (and energy) are physical. If you want to know the temprature of the US minus Texas, just subract the Texas data from the total dataset.
If there were 40 thermometers equally distributed around the globe, then one thermometer must represent the 2.5 percent of global surface in the eastern Pacific. Just subtract the data from that one thermometer.

Eschenbach’s statement “The Nino 3.4 region covers about 2.4% of the planet’s surface”
implies a geographically defined subset of the earth’s surface. My solution follows in that context and excludes all other parameters. If you want to define the ENSO “signal” globally in the time domain, then I suggest you just average 30 periods of ENSO signal and subract that. The deconvolution of “signals” from “noise” in the time domain has consumed a large proportion of human endevour. I’d say that the net global ENSO “signal” is zero, thats the null hypothesis.
I see no point in contriving an “index” from the base data and subracting that. It’s like saying what is the effect of subracting the “Dow Jones Industrial Average” from the average stock market. It has no physical meaning. There are large numbers of people who try to detect information from stock charts. That’s a total waste of effort.
If you can’t measure something, then you can’t quantifiy it. Does the ENSO index have a distinctly physical meaning? Can other observers measure it and find the same value?
No one wastes time asking a tibetan guru what effect ENSO has on the global average temperature. If you want to spend your time usefully, then learn more about basic scientific methodology, eg. get a copy of “Introduction to Scientific Research, by E. Bright Wilson, Jr. and read if a couple times.

Did the 1997-98 Super El Nino affect global temperatures? This is what it looked like on December 19, 1997 .
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/1997/anomnight.12.19.1997.gif
Daily UAH temperatures reached +0.843C on April 6, 1998. In December this year, 2012, UAH averaged only +0.202C or 0.641C less than it was on April 6, 1998.
Did the 1997-98 El Nino impact global temperatures? – only by as much as 0.6C.
——
My favorite is the biggest Super-El Nino of all time in 1877-78 which got to about +3.4C in the Nino 3.4 Index.
Hadcrut4 temperatures spiked to +0.395C in February 1878 while the background temperature of the time was just -0.300C.
Did the Super-El Nino of 1877-78 affect global temperatures? – only by as much as 0.7C.
—-
The biggest La Nina of all time was December of 1988 at about -2.4C.
UAH reached a low of -0.309C in March 1989 and Hadcrut4 hit a low of 0.02C in Jan 1989.
Did the Biggest-although-not-Super-La-Nina of 1988 affect global temperatures? – well yeah.
——-
It is clear that the ENSO impacts global temperatures. There is long-winded explanation of how this happens but suffice it to say, there is a physical energy balance explanations for how it happens.
Now the temperature trend in Nino 3.4 is Zero since we have had good reconstructions of its index. It might be the only place on the planet which has Zero trend over the last 140 years. In part, because it has been well-measured by ships, has a long history of relationship to the SOI which has been carefully measured for more than 150 years, has a long relationship with fish catches and ocean temperaturee off of Peru, has a long relationship with its impact on global temperatures, etc. etc.
In short, the climate scientists didn’t think they could get away with adjusting its record up like everywhere else on the planet.
It is the most important region on the planet in terms of weather/climate.

Well, Meteorology and Climatology I do not understand almost nothing but bringing my comfort zone, Mechanics of Turbulence, you can make an analogy.
When studying turbulent flows by numerical methods, it is possible to separate the large vortex swirls small. This is done because large structures dominate the overall flow, and is responsible for most of the energy. But small structures are critical phenomena for power dissipation.
This way filter filtering the signal and simply remove it from the study generally, we are missing mechanisms (energy dissipation, for example) that prevents the explanation of the behavior of the larger whole.
When the buffer enable (eg outside the boundary layer), and it is possible to consider the behavior of small vortices as homogeneous and isotropic. In this case, it overrides the global analysis of sub-grid functions that represent the characteristics of these small dissipative structures.
Let it be clear, it is not necessary to use in calculating the overall development of small spatial-temporal structures, however, from the point of view of its action median overall effect should be considered.
What is the correlation with the post? We have two errors in the filtering of local, first filtering is unduly expanded to a domain of amplitudes that exceed the conditions of homogeneity and isotropy, we are losing signal and resolution capability of the model. Secondly, small perturbations filter without substituílas also known by other function over time lose resolution in large structures.
In short, if you filter a local action (do not use the term cold signal) without boring the above conditions, the model fully committed.

The simple answer is that the political decided UNFCCC doctrine state that humans are driving the global temperature. Hence El Niño and La Niña, or any other circulation system, are not UNFCCC conform and ideological blasphemy?

rgbatduke says:
January 17, 2013 at 9:29 am
“And we will never succeed in doing so at the same time we make energy more expensive and discourage its use. The poverty in question is energy poverty. Fundamentally. With enough, cheap enough, energy, we can make the deserts bloom, create jobs in the heart of Africa or India or South America, bring medicine and electric lights and running water to the world. Cheap, clean energy solves all problems; it is the fundamental scarcity.”
————————————————————————————————————————————
Absolutely correct. The best way to make poor people into rich people is to supply cheap energy. The best way to make rich people into poor people is to make energy more expensive. Energy is work and work not done by a device has to be done by a person. Give people energy and they can spend their time improving their life instead of just living it.
Energy is the golden bullet that will fix everything. Only the power-hungry collectivists want that bullet to stay in the gun.

As an Engineer, I think that it’s a mistake to describe it as a regulating mechanism. Such implies a predetermined target.
It’s a multi-modal system that operates in different quasi-static states depending on the available energy flux (power) entering the system, driving the temperatures of parts of the system to and beyond threshhold levels. That flux is dominated by insolation (solar energy reaching the surface) but the temperature is also (notionally) influenced by thermodynamic state and the magnitude of currents and circulations, both horizontal and vertical.
The strength of circulation is determined by global factors. The dominant polar circulation around Antarctica is moderated after the big chill at the tip of South America by mixing from both Atlantic and Indian Oceans, before entertaining the Pacific. Again, the America’s stand in the way of a free circumpolar circulation and some colder waters must be diverted along the East coast towards the Equator. Fluid mechanics says that the stronger the circulation, the greater the diversion and therefore the mixing in the Pacific. What could “drive” such a stronger circulation are greater contributions of heat from the Atlantic and Indian Oceans; by them being “warmer”. i.e. The consequence of them being warmer is that the Pacific becomes cooler.
One could model such things as multi-body resonances, taking into account the enthalpies involved and the resulting time constants of the various oscillations. But …
The real world is of course far more complicated. There are for example biogenic factors reacting to changes in temperature that cannot be ignored, affecting surface albedo, ozone levels and cloud formation. And thene there’s the moody sun.
I doubt that we’ll ever know enough to be able to model the climate system sufficiently to be reasonably predictive on the decadal scale and longer.

Alan Millar says:
January 17, 2013 at 7:33 am
Succinct post Willis.
However, what causes the 30 year positive and negative PDO cycles which have more El Ninos or La Ninas respectively? We don’t see 30 year cycles in the source of the energy for this heat pump, the Sun.
Alan

Physical resonance? Given the size of the resonant chamber and the speed with which energy flows in the ocean tend to occur (currents, etc.) that’s perhaps the least-energy solution — 30 yrs round trip? When the Pacific was a different size, maybe the resonant period was different, too.

Phil says:January 17, 2013 at 12:22 pm
Several climate scientists note that 90% of AGW warming is going into the oceans. In reality, we can almost neglect what is happening in the atmosphere, and just look at the temperature of the ocean.
================================
Does not compute. Water is opaque to IR radiation. The claim “that 90% of AGW warming is going into the oceans” is the worst sort of junk science.

Dear Willis, I like your articles and I am going to comment on an area about the energy in the ocean that everyone overlooks. I hope that you will look into my comments. There are many chemical reactions in the ocean that are mostly endothermic, although a few are exothermic. I looked into this after your post about a year ago on the Argo float temperatures and how the ocean generally does not heat above 30 degrees C. My knowledge of chemistry is limited; but, I noted these things: Carbon dioxide as well as other gasses in water act like a liquid. If you check the phase diagram for carbon dioxide, you will find that it cannot exist as a liqud at temperatures above 30.3 degrees C. You can heat water to 30 degrees and see the bubbles of gas forming on the side of the container. When the ocean reaches 30.3 degrees, the carbon dioxide changes to a gas and bubble toward the surface. On its way it bubbles through a saturated solution of Calcium oxide. The commerical method of preparing Calcium carbonate is to bubble carbon dioxide through a saturated solution of calcium oxide heated to 40 degrees C. The reaction of the carbon dioxide and Calcium oxide removes approximately 1200 kilo joules of energy from the ocean for each mole of calcium carbonate formed. This is the reason that the ocean does not generally heat above 30.3 degrees.
The calcium carbonate formed is not soluble at the temperatures and pressures found at the surface of the ocean. But as it descends into the ocean depths, it is dissolved. This process is called hydration and occurs when H2O molecules attach themselves to the calcium carbonate. I have forgotten the values for the heat of hydration, but they are similiar to the values in the original reaction. The energy is taken from a cold ocean and occurs when the reactants can find sufficient energy for the reaction to occur. This is one of the reasons that the bottom of the ocean and deep lakes are very cold.
Now we are getting to your current article. The hydration reaction can be reversed. When currents in the ocean bring the hydrated calcium carbonate back to near the surface, the heat of hydration is released and warms the top layers of the ocean. This process is like a heat pump. It appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics, but it does not since thermal energy is changed to chemical energy and back to thermal energy. There was an article about 1-2 years ago where two NOAA researchers were noting that it was not well understood why the intermediate levels of the ocean did not heat up.
I do not know just how these processes work together to produce the results that you see, but I hope that you use this information to put a total picture together.
Some speculation about other processes; there is a possibilty that the ocean on occassion may freeze and produce fraggle ice flows that help to bring the hydrated calcium carbonate to the surface. The presence of carbon dioxide and ice in water can produce formic acid and may be the source of the corrosive upwelling water that has been reported by Hansen and others.
John Owens

“Noise” is the part of the phenomenon under study that your theory can’t explain.

John F. Hultquist says:
January 17, 2013 at 9:44 pm
Greg Goodman says:
January 17, 2013 at 10:56 am
“ . . . the colder waters surface of Peru suggests to me an upwelling of water striking the massive underwater mountain that is South America.”
You might want to investigate things “Ekman” – layer, transport, spiral.
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/ocng_textbook/chapter09/chapter09_04.htm
Thanks John, I was aware of Ekman transport which really only tells us the unexpected direction of which way water moves when blown. Clearly is surface water moves some non surface water is exposed. That does not imply it moves the thermocline, which was my point and what was shown in Willis’ figure 2 that I refered to.
The page you refered me to ends with this:
“… and vertical velocity at 23 m depth was concentrated in narrow jets under the areas of surface convergence (Figure 9.6). Maximum vertical velocity was -0.18 m/ s. The seasonal thermocline was at 50 m, and no downward velocity was observed in or below the thermocline.”
Now El Nino/Nina is shown as an ocean wide tilting of the the thermocline. The link you gave gives me more reason to be doubtful that this is the result of surace winds.
Of course any information is useful, so thanks again.

Philip Bradley says:
January 17, 2013 at 2:20 pm
While I’ve never seen this properly articulated, I can answer your first question, which is really about what is signal and what is noise?
The theory is that net forcings drive atmospheric temperatures (ignoring diurnal and seasonal variations). Absent natural variability, atmospheric temperatures would be a direct function of net forcings with minimum lag.
The signal is the direct and (almost) immediate effect of net forcings. Everything else that affects atmospheric temperatures is noise.
Removing ENSO variability is an attempt to remove what is believed to be a major source of natural variability and so get a clearer picture of the forcings signal.
====================
That is exactly the problem that I think Willis is trying to draw attetion to. The very act of calling something “natural variability” is being used to make an implicit assumption that it is an independant , mean zero process.
That is totally unjustified and arbitrary without proof.
El Nino and La Nina are _opposing_ effects but the heat transfer is each case is very different. This is not just the two phases of a symmetric process.
In the absence of sufficient understanding to model these effects there is a willfil attempt to ignore them by assuming (incorrectly) that they are necessarily mean zero oscillations.
If, as Willis suggests, they are acting as negative feedbacks which make a significant contribution to the stability of the climate system (and it has proved to be remarkably stable to massive changes in conditions historically) then incorreclty assuming it is a random, mean zero process will lead to incorrect conclusions.
There is a certain amount of slight of hand going on when someone pretends that calling something “natural variability” is used as an excuse for not bothering to understand it before saying it does not matter and dismissing it as “noise”.

While I’ve never seen this properly articulated, I can answer your first question, which is really about what is signal and what is noise?
The theory is that net forcings drive atmospheric temperatures (ignoring diurnal and seasonal variations). Absent natural variability, atmospheric temperatures would be a direct function of net forcings with minimum lag.
The signal is the direct and (almost) immediate effect of net forcings. Everything else that affects atmospheric temperatures is noise.
Dear Phil,
Words fail me. The atmosphere is one of four distinct thermal reservoirs — land surface, ocean, the atmosphere, and ice. Each of these reservoirs is structured — the atmosphere has vertical structure as well as transverse structure, and its structure ranges from persistent but variable (e.g. Hadley) to transient and chaotic self-organized structures on many scales (high and low pressure systems that dominate weather, hurricanes, and includes the global decadal oscillations — that is, time scales from hours to decades (at least) are clearly represented.
The ocean is similarly vertically structured with a highly inhomogeneous surface temperature distribution with significant annual variation down to a highly homogeneous temperature distribution at depth. It, too has significant transverse structure and is a global transporter of heat as complex currents move water around based on its temperature, salinity/density, wind direction at the surface, heat sources at depth, evaporation, the coriolis force, the shape of the ocean bottom, and freshwater contributions from e.g. rivers and melting ice. Its relevant timescales again range from days to centuries, and it is strongly coupled to the atmosphere almost everywhere the two are in direct contact.
The land surface is laterally structured with widely differing albedo, and vertically structured so that it intercepts the vertically structured ocean and atmospheric reservoirs at different heights, hence different local mean temperatures. It’s vertical structure has a pronounced and permanent dynamic effect on both of the fluid reservoirs, as e.g. moisture precipitates out on western ocean-facing mountains leaving dry air and often desert conditions to the east of them — and much more. The water content of the surface is an important semi-stable feedback mechanism so that places like the Sahara are self-sustained as desert but could as easily be planted with water-retaining plants and completely change its character, with timescales of variation from days to thousands of years, clearly coupled to things like human and biological forces, atmospheric and other climate variations, and more (and returning the favor).
Ice has a huge albedo compared to everything else, and represents an enormous reservoir of cold fresh water deposited on continent-sized chunks of the globe (not to mention winter snowfall in regions where it isn’t “permanent” and glaciers where it is). Since albedo is a direct factor in global insolation and much of the ice forms annually on top of ocean, ice has multiple effects, coupled at timescales ranging from days to millions of years.
The whole thing is on a tipped ball whirling around a variable sun with an erratically varying orbit with multiple timescales on the order of tens of thousands of years.
The complete set forms a non-Markovian nonlinear, coupled integrodifferential system with timescales stretching from minutes to millions of years. None of this is noise, it is all signal. None of this is separable. To even try to make a Markov approximation (which is basically what you propose) and extract the entire content of the integration over the past is absurd.
Seriously.
rgb

Graeme W says:
January 17, 2013 at 6:56 pm
Bill Illis says:
January 17, 2013 at 1:27 pm
Going farther out, one would assume the ENSO will balance out to Zero as it has since 1871.
Bill, I’ve heard the assumption that ENSO will balance out to zero many times, but I’ve never seen the supporting evidence for that assumption. You’ve made the statement that it has balanced out to zero since 1871.
——————–
It just means that therehas been no trend in the Nino 3.4 sea surface temperatures over time. It is 26.85C and there has been NO increasing or decreasing trend in that average over time. (Almost everywhere else on the planet has some trend, mostly increasing but not the Nino regions).
It does vary in a small seasonal cycle +0.85C/-0.4C and then it varies by +3.4C/-2.4C depending on the state of the El Nino/La Nina.
If you add up all those anomalies over time, it turns out to be close enough to Zero to be called Zero but maybe it would be better to say the Nino 3.4 region has stayed at 26.85C in the long-term and there will be a balance between El Ninos and La Ninas in the long-term. Maybe over a five year period there won’t be, and this has happened many times before, but in the long-term, they have balanced out / will balance out.

Retired Engineer John says: January 17, 2013 at 10:42 pm
A correction to my post. It is calcium hydroxide that reacts with carbon dioxide to form calcium carbonate.
==========================
the reaction I have seen given is HCO3(-) + Ca(++) —> CaCO3 + H(+)
the HCO3 derives from CO2 and HO(-)

Bill Illis says: If you add up all those anomalies over time, it turns out to be close enough to Zero to be called Zero but maybe it would be better to say the Nino 3.4 region has stayed at 26.85C in the long-term and there will be a balance between El Ninos and La Ninas in the long-term.
What is this “balance” you are referring to? Again the key point is that this is not just an oscillation in one variable. There are two very different things happening in terms of energy budget in each phase.
La Nina causes more solar heat to be captured by the ocean, El Nino warms the atmosphere using this heat. If you are implying that because the ocean surface temperature does remains stable at 26.85C there is no change in OHC, then the long term effect is to pump heat into the atmosphere.
So it is not climate neutral. It is not a “balanced” or “internal” variation that can be ignored. Until there is understanding of the processes it can not reasonably be assume not to “matter”.

This is not a post about Willis’s excellent questions, so if you’re not interested in word origins please skip to the next one.
HankHenry asked on January 17, 2013 at 8:31 am:
Anyone know the derivation of the word “jigger?” As in: “Someone has jiggered the numbers to make it work.”
Yes, after a minute or two with the OED. Jigger in this sense is a shortening of “jiggery-pokery” – a term with citations as early as the late 19th century, with the definition “Deceitful or dishonest ‘manipulation’; hocus-pocus, humbug.” In turn, jiggery-pokery comes from an earlier term “joukery-pawkery” (earliest citation 1686) made up of two fairly old words. Joukery (earliest cit. 1593) means “Dodging; ‘underhand dealing, trickery’; ‘deceit’” or “clever trickery, jugglery, legerdemain.” Pawkery, from pawk (earliest cit. 1513), means “Tricky, artful, sly, cunning, crafty, shrewd; esp. humorously tricky or sly.”

Greg Goodman January 18, 2013 at 2:34 am
That is correct about the Nino wave flowing back by gravity. When a Nino wave first runs ashore its kinetic energy of motion is converted into gravitational potential energy of the higher elevsation it has reached. It is this gravitational potential energy that is converted back into kinetic energy of motion of the departing wave. This parting wave leaves a vacuum behind it and sea level drops as a manifestation of this. You can think of it as the vacuum behind it sucking up the cold water from below. This is the physical aspect of ENSO. The temperature variations are variations in time synchronized to the physical motion of ENSO waves. If ENSO were a perfect harmonic oscillator the temperature curve would be a perfect sinusoidal wave train but in reality there are interferences in the ocean that can distort its path and with it the temperature curve. After all, it has to travel the width of the Pacific Ocean where lots of other things are also going on.

rgbatduke says:
January 18, 2013 at 5:20 am
Articulate and lucid as always, but my understanding of the forcings theory (and the predictions out of the climate models) is that the internal complexity of the Earth’s climate doesn’t matter. If you know what the forcings are and their magnitude, you can predict whether the climate will warm or cool in the future and by how much, excepting the effect of natural variability (ie the internal variability of the climate system).
As I said above, I wasn’t expressing an opinion on whether this is correct or not. But this is the basis for the IPCC’s, etc predictions, and the ongoing debate about how long we can have no measured atmospheric warming and still maintain the theory, models and predictions are valid.
I hope I haven’t completely missed your point.

I hope I haven’t completely missed your point.
I’m not sure. The point was that one can’t trivially remove the effect of a single input of a complex nonlinear multivariate function with an equally complex “memory” with a wide range of timescales. My secondary point that if one attempted to do so empirically, the immediate result would be the complete elimination of greenhouse-caused warming as the only apparent lasting “signal” in the satellite record is a burst of warming caused by the 1997-1998 El Nino, not a steady warming associated with smoothly increasing GHG concentration. In fact, over the 33 year satellite data, there is almost no discernible correspondence between the latter and the global temperature(s), e.g. UAH LTT.
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t one, but it does mean that the noise is much larger than this “signal”, and any attempt to remove the signal to extract the noise presumes a knowledge of the noise and signal that a) nobody has; and b) to the extent that it is input in the form of assumptions, begs all questions and proves nothing.
rgb

Willis Eschenbach, Bob Tisdale, richardscourtney,
Thank you for good posts. Bob Tisdale has made a good case that ENSO is a part of a high-dimensional, non-linear, oscillatory, dissipative heat transfer system. Most of the posts here clarify how that affects some of the statistical analyses (treating ENSO as “noise” or a “covariate”.)

rgbatduke January 17, 2013 at 9:29 am
First, I fully agree with you when you point out that “… Somewhere in the world, as I type this, not one but hundreds of millions of people are cooking a sparse day’s meal on animal dung or a small charcoal fire…. We have the technology, we have the wealth, to utterly eliminate global poverty within a few decades. …. And we will never succeed in doing so at the same time we make energy more expensive and discourage its use. The poverty in question is energy poverty…” It is an energy poverty created by pseudoscientific advocates of global warming to fight a non-existent AGW. But then you go on and still say that “….AGW is by no means disproven by the last 15 to 18 years of arguably flat temperatures… Temperature change cannot either prove or disprove the (C)AGW hypothesis….” That is utter nonsense. It can and it does disprove AGW as I will show. First, you have to understand the global temperature curve distributed by the climate science establishment. It is falsified to recruit people into believing that global warming is real. As you mention, there has not been any warming lately. But do you have any idea of what happened before that? If you have been looking at temperature curves put out by NOAA or by the recent draft climate report by NCADAC you will have noticed a large red triangle that includes prominently a “late twentieth century warming” in the eighties and nineties. That is supposedly anthropogenic warming, the very warming that Hansen testified about to the Senate in 1988. That testimony itself was a travesty and my book describes its background. Fortunately this temperature period overlaps satellite temperature measurements and according to the satellites there was no warming at all for 18 years. But Hansen claimed to the Senate that anthropogenic global warming had started and showed computer predictions of future temperature rise up to 2019. His predictions have been proven spectacularly wrong. Six months after he spoke that El Nino was finished and a La Nina that followed had already reduced global temperature by 0.4 degrees Celsius. And now back to the temperature record. There has been no warming whatsoever this century. Satellites show no warming from 1979 to 1997. What happened next was the super El Nino of 1997/98. It was an outlier, an extremely rare and powerful warm peak you might get once in a century. It brought so much warm water across the ocean that it caused a step warming. In four years global temperature rose by a third of a degree Celsius and then stopped. This was the only warming within the last 33 years. It is quite impossible for greenhouse warming to cause any kind of step warming. It, and not any imaginary greenhouse warming, is the cause of the very warm first decade of this century. And with it, we can say that there has been no greenhouse warming at all for the last 33 years. Now lets backtrack to the beginning of the twentieth century. It turns out that for the first ten years of the century we had cooling. Then, in 1910, warming suddenly started, kept going until 1940 and then stopped. There was no sudden increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1910 when the warming started. This immediately rules out greenhouse warming as a cause by the laws of physics. Bjørn Lomborg thinks this warming is of solar origin and I agree with him. The warming ended abruptly with the arrival of the severe World War II cold spell. This is another indication that it cannot be greenhouse warming which cannot be turned on or off like this. With that forty percent of the twentieth century is expelled from the greenhouse. After the war there was no warming in the fifties, sixties and seventies until 1976. That is when the Great Pacific Climate Shift took place that supposedly raised global temperature by 0.2 degrees Celsius. Another step warming which cannot be claimed by any greenhouse effect. It was over by 1980 which overlaps the beginning of the satellite era we already covered. All in all, I cannot see any period within the last 100 years that can legitimately be called a greenhouse warming period. How can you say that temperature change can neither prove nor disprove the existence of AGW? If there has been no greenhouse warming in recorded history are you still going to wait for it to happen? I purposely left out the explanation of why there has been no greenhouse warming. The explanation is that greenhouse theory is just plain wrong as Ferenc Miskolczi has shown. QED

I think some could benefit from seeing the actual Nino 3.4 Index over time.
The trend from 1871 to where Jan 2013 looks to end up is -0.000033C per month or 0.004C per decade. It varies by +/-3.000C so a trend of 0.004C/decade is pretty well lost in the measurement error.
http://s7.postimage.org/5zecegoaz/Nino_3_4_Jan13.png
It goes up and it goes down and it exhibits Zero trend.
And also the AMO index back to 1854 as well the Raw data [red line] it comes from (the AMO is the detrended version of this raw SST data). The AMO charts on the internet are the smoothed version of this which is technically not as useful as the straight monthly data.
http://s8.postimage.org/8mv5m0jnp/AMO_Index_and_Raw_Dec12.png

Willis: If you’re looking for a long-term trend and you believe that you understand the source of some of the noise in the long-term signal, it certainly makes sense to try to subtract some of this noise. Everyone does this almost without thinking when they remove the annual signal and work with temperature anomalies. There are practical, but not theoretical, reasons why you can’t do the same thing with the PDO or AMO. The process of subtracting the noise contributed by any of these processes introduces uncertainty while removing noise. If proper statistical analysis says that you multiply the ENSO or PDO index by a factor of 0.28 +/- 0.19 (95% confidence interval) to estimate the “noise” contributed by these processes, then including them in your analysis doesn’t help much. If the factor is 0.28 +/- 0.9, you can remove some noise without introducing too much uncertainty. The problem with using longer cycles like the PDO or the AMO is that we probably don’t have enough data to accurately estimate how reliably they are correlated with noise in the long term trend. You probably need to do some sort of Monte Carlo calculation to see how much you improve you estimate of the long-term trend by subtracting estimated noise.

The simplified physical models predict an increase in the equilibrium temperature. How is it known that the predicted increase in the equilibrium temperature relates to anything in the actual climate system?
(and a bunch more stuff). Agreed. The Earth is an open highly multivariate dynamical nonlinear non-Markovian chaotic driven system, and statements like “1 to 1.5 degrees of warming” are themselves consequently moderately suspect. As I pointed out to Phil Bradley, the way one must interpret them is with the understood “in a separable Markov approximation”. That is, one makes the twin assumptions that one can speak of what happens if one increases only the CO_2, all other things being/remaining equal. This is more or less making certain assumptions about the partial derivatives of e.g. “global average temperature” with respect to all sorts of stuff that are almost certainly untrue and are very likely not even true enough to be a reasonable short term approximation (the separability).
It is also assumes that the past history of the climate system is more or less irrelevant to its future evolution, that no phenomenon with a time scale longer than a year or two is relevant to whether the global average temperature goes up or down (the Markov approximation). Again, this is almost certainly absurdly wrong, as the entire topic of this post is about removing the “noise” associated with one of the many multidecadal exceptions and I don’t think anybody comes close to understanding things like the ocean and its multiple timescales and effect on everything from CO_2 to the storage and delayed release of heat.
We are clearly still learning things about the climate, things that appear to be a lot more important than they were assumed to be in the earliest all-things-equal, Markov approximation models. Soot, for example, “suddenly” appears to be quite important. Soot is a nearly ubiquitous urban-industrial by-product. Recently evidence has emerged that the sun’s state may affect upper atmosphere chemistry much more powerfully than it was previously believed. The climate effects of those changes (if any) are still poorly understood, especially given that we barely understand what’s going on at the simple electrochemistry level, let alone at the level of complexity of the climate.
There are a number of puzzles that are clearly evident in the historical climate record over the last half billion years. Warm spells, ice ages, sometimes interleaved with “razor sharp” edges, where it is warm and then suddenly it decides to get cold until it equally suddenly warms up again. There is no reasonable way to explain some of the events with any simple picture involving continental drift, axial tilt, or modulation of atmospheric CO_2 — indeed, the Ordovician-Silurian ice age took place with CO_2 levels during the ice age that were ten times the current level.
Attempts to explain things like this, so far, smack of science fiction — things that sound like science but that are unsupported by any evidence (and likely unsupportable by evidence this long after the fact). And yet we can hardly claim to understand the climate system as long as these events not only lie unexplained, but are unexplainable in the one-size-fits-all contemporary Markovian separable model.
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