Why El Niño and not the AMO?

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.
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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.
rgb