Guest essay by Dr. Norman Page
Most climate warming alarmists have recently realized that it is now counterproductive to attribute every and all extreme weather events (even cold snowy winters) to global warming and try to project a judicious objectivity by applying the cliché “weather isn’t climate” to both sides of the climate wars. In fact weather is an almost instantaneous slice through the climate space-time phase space and certain patterns will occur more frequently on a cooling rather than a warming world.
The basic principles are very simple. On a cooler Earth the temperature gradient from the tropics to the Arctic Circle is steeper.
![FS_km5000.sm[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/fs_km5000-sm1.jpg?quality=83)
This increased gradient creates instability and the jet stream swings further North and South as opposed to its more West – East path during warmer periods. According to the season, blocking highs may develop with colder, drier, air penetrating further South and warm moist air reaching further North. There can be enormous temperature and humidity contrasts in the narrow boundary between these masses as warm air is sucked in from the Gulf. Conditions along such a boundary are ideal for developing the wind shear necessary for the tornado swarm development seen recently in Oklahoma.
The blocking highs also push hurricanes to the east so that hurricanes like Sandy are more likely to occur.
Note that Sandy was not a powerful Hurricane in fact it came ashore as a tropical storm. The big storm surge was the result of its long path over open water while a real cooling signal was seen in the development of blizzard conditions in the NW quadrant. This classic weather pattern is shown for today 6/02/13 in Figs 1 and 2 and occurs more often during a cooling phase of the PDO and is often triggered by an E Pacific La Nina cooling, as seen in the 6/01/13 SST anomaly map Fig 3 (h/t to The Weather Channel).
It is worth noting that the pattern seen in Fig 1 is also ideal for steering any Atlantic Hurricane which develops this season in a Sandy type direction.
Fig1
Fig2
Fig3
By contrast on a warmer world tropical SSTs are higher EL Ninos more common and more powerful category 4 and 5 hurricanes e.g. Katrina and Gilbert can develop. Their path is more E-W so that they more frequently hit the Gulf Coast or even Central America.
More generally, a cooling earth is a drier earth because the winds pick up less water vapor from the cooler oceans. In the USA the cool waters off the West Coast (Fig3) will lead to more generalized droughts in the Center, West and SW and when combined with more frequent late and early frosts and snows food crop production will be threatened. What rains do come will paradoxically come from storms leading to flash flooding further restricting food production. In California itself the south will be dryer with more forest fires while in the North more of the rains will come as snow so that increasing snow pack will ameliorate the overall dryer conditions.
Most of the ideas expressed above were included in the post “”30 Years Climate Forecast” in June 2010 on my blog at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com and revisited in June 2012 in the post “30 Year Climate Forecast -2 year update.”
There has been no net warming since 1997 with CO2 up over 8%. The SSTs show a cooling trend since 2003.
The problem with the IPCC and MetOffice Climate models is that, apart from the egregious structural errors in the specific models, (assuming that CO2 is the main driver when it clearly follows temperature and adding water vapor as a feedback onto CO2 to increase the sensitivity) climate science is so complex that the modelling approach is inherently incapable of providing useful forecasts for several reasons; for starters the difficulty of specifying the initial conditions with sufficient precision. All the IPCC model projections and the impact studies and government policies which depend on them are a total waste of time and money.
The only useful approach is to perform power spectrum and wavelet analysis on the temperature and possible climate driver time series to find patterns of repeating periodicities and project them forward. When this is done it is apparent that the earth entered a cooling phase in 2003-4 which will likely last for 20 more years and perhaps for several hundred years beyond that. For the data and references supporting this conclusion check the post “Climate Forecasting Basics for Britains Seven Alarmist Scientists” and several earlier posts on Climate Forecasting and Global Cooling especially “Global Cooling – Climate and Weather Forecasting” from 11/18/13.
Here is a summary of the latest forecast based not on the particular events referred to above but on the data and references linked in the series of posts on the climatesense-norpag site.
It is not a great stretch of the imagination to propose that the 20th century warming peaked in about 2003 and that peak was a peak in both the 60 year and 1000 year cycles. On that basis the conclusions of the posts referred to above were as follows.
- Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
- Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22.
- Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
- Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 – 0.15
- Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 – 0.5
- General Conclusion – by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
- By 2650 earth could be back to the depths of the little ice age.
- The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial – they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and help maintain crop yields.
- There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the Maunder Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent – with a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.
How confident should one be in these predictions? The pattern method doesn’t lend itself easily to statistical measures. However statistical calculations only provide an apparent rigour for the uninitiated and in relation to the IPCC climate models are entirely misleading because they make no allowance for the structural uncertainties in the model set up. This is where scientific judgement comes in – some people are better at pattern recognition than others.
A past record of successful forecasting is a useful but not infallible measure. In this case I am reasonably sure – say 65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that, inevitably, certainty must drop.
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Patrick says:
June 5, 2013 at 2:29 am
Here in Aus on SBS news tonight, one of the Oklahoma tornado broke all records. It was the widest ever at 4.5km wide.
Widest *ever*? How do we know the width of a tornado in 1936, 1925, 1896…?
In the year 2525,
If man is still alive…..
“Eustace Cranch says:
June 5, 2013 at 6:03 am”
That’s my point. How do they know that this years event was the “widest evah”, “A record broken”?! (Should be a broken record) The truth is, “they” don’t. They have no idea. BUT alarmism sells well in Aus. It’s rather funny in fact. It’s like one of those “Say what?!” moments.
@philincalifornia says
“Uh oh, school ma’am’s here again, now lecturing us on the “fact” that Cuba and Jamaica are part of the continental United States and, if you don’t think so, you’re parochial.
That aside Margaret, is this a passive aggressive attempt to say that recent carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere cause increased hurricane activities and strengths ?? If so, please show the data you are working with.”
The first sentence is rather a twisted way of saying what I already know but what the esteemed Dr didn’t spell out. I am certain that Cubans and Jamaicans don’t view coming ashore with the same slackness of meaning.
That aside, I am not the one trying to prove anything here. Dr Page is. There is no necessity for me to do so. He has put up something that is presumably falsifiable. No one has to put up an alternative theory or explanation. I was merely pointing out a sloppy piece of writing, as I am sure others will do in my own language from now on.
Réaumur says:
June 5, 2013 at 5:21 am
“On a cooler Earth the temperature gradient from the tropics to the Arctic Circle is steeper.”
Why?
Reversal of the fact that the poles have warmed more than the tropics with warming.
“The only useful approach is to perform power spectrum and wavelet analysis on the temperature and possible climate driver time series to find patterns of repeating periodicities and project them forward. “
Not really, because you do not know from that analysis the time phases of the periodicity and you do not know the cause of the geometry.
A better approach is taking the real astronomical geometry of all the solar tides:
See Solar tides vs hadcrut3
V.
Patrick,
I did think you were being a bit sarcastic. Glad you confirmed it.
Since CO2 acts like a blanket it spreads the heat more evenly and makes storms less violent.
Jut remember basic thermodynamics. The alarmists hate this simple fact.
The strongest winds in the solar system are on Neptune where temperatures are almost absolute ZERO !
It sounds like what I learned in physics. Its the difference in potential across a boundary that generates energy. Bigger temperature difference=more energy for storms.
“On a cooler Earth the temperature gradient from the tropics to the Arctic Circle is steeper.”
I disagree since the North pole has warmed more than the rest of the planet.
The South pole has cooled slightly !
Eustace Cranch, you are welcome. I admit, I should use the sarc on/off tags, British humour is usually subtle and mine is rather dry (Maybe that’s the Irish, Belgian, Australian, New Zealand and Ethiopian influence? *shrugs*). However, in Aus, we have two, state funded (I love my tax $$’s being “spent wisely”), predominantly and seriously pro-AGW news outlets. One is ABC the other is SBS. Any bad “weather event” is shown. Tornados in the US, floods in Germany etc etc. Although rarely stated, the subtext is AGW driven climate change the cause. It’s there, like the itch you can’t get to (Unless there is a tree nearby. Bear/tree/itch, you get the picture).
It is an election year after all in Aus, and the “Queen” of the most expensive “proice ohn carbohn”, Gillard, will find out how (I hope) most Aussies appreciate that on 14th Sept. If Ford is any example, as well as the 2010 election result, maybe “Aussies” will “wake up”. I won’t hold my breath!
izen says:
June 5, 2013 at 5:57 am
Most of this rise comes from warming of the world’s oceans and melting of mountain glaciers, which have receded dramatically in many places especially during the last few decades.
=========
I spent 20 years offshore, sailing the Pacific and Indian Oceans in small boats. The charts for all the remote islands were drawn 200-300 years ago, during the Age of Exploration. These charts are exceedingly accurate, to 1 foot resolution, drawn by the likes Cook, Bligh, Vancouver and Flinders. They were painstaking in their efforts because their very lives depended on getting it right.
And what do these charts tell us? There has been no significant sea level rise over the past 200-300 years. The rocks awash at low tide are still awash, even after centuries have passed. This would indicate that any changes we are seeing a either local or cyclical in nature, or so slow that the natural accumulation of soils and reefs along with the industry of humans keeps pace.
Worst case, one satellite is showing about 1 foot per century in rise, over a very short period. About what the IPCC itself projects for the next century. And this is reason to worry, to shut down the world’s economy, to deny Africa access to coal to industrialize as we did in the west? Is the world going to once again impose slavery on Africa, slavery to artificially high energy costs? Have we learned so little since 1807?
If the past is a predictor of the future (but wait! We need a mechanism), the rest of this century will see deep intrusions of cold air over the northern hemisphere continents in wintertime. Tropical activity should continue to decrease until 2040, based on a 60 year cycle with the last minimum in 1980 and, based on a 1200 year cycle, after the year 2150 a warm period analogous to the Medieval Warm Period will arrive and last 350 years. The balance of this century could be rough. We should get ready. We have been flummoxed by the warmists into ignoring the past.
“ferd berple says:
June 5, 2013 at 6:41 am”
You are correct. In the hundreds of years of Royal Naval history, and sea “data”, there is no evidence of any significant sea level rise.
Volker Doormann says:
June 5, 2013 at 6:18 am
A better approach is taking the real astronomical geometry of all the solar tides:
=============
correct. it is how we calculate the ocean tides on earth. we don’t do it from first principles the way they try and simulate climate with models, because it doesn’t work. The process is inherently chaotic and you cannot cancel chaos by treating it like a random process. It only appears random due to limited sampling.
Every physical object has natural frequency(s), which will resonate in response to cyclical forcings. This resonance will far exceed the response expected from non-cyclical forcings. Thus, over time cyclical behavior will dominate the system and can be used to make predictions.
For example: The ocean tides on earth would be about 1 foot in height due to the combined gravitational pull of the moon and sun. Yet we routinely see tides much higher than this. It is rare to find any location with a maximum tidal range of only 1 foot. The reason we see higher tides is because the relative motion of the earth, sun and the moon creates an oscillation. In effect the water in the oceans starts swirling around like water in a rocking bowl of water, in phase with the motion, which amplifies the tidal range.
So, we calculate tides very much the way we calculate horoscopes, by using the position of the sun, moon and planets in the sky in relation to historical observation. Who’d have thought. Astrology delivering a more accurate prediction than science.
izen says:
June 5, 2013 at 5:57 am
———————————
To the extent that on some coasts sea level has risen slightly since the end of the Little Ice Age c. 1850, the fantasy of AGW has nothing to do with it. Sea level in NYC is about a foot higher now than during the big 1821 storm, but natural warming of the ocean & sinking land explain that insignificant change with room to spare, without human culpability. Seal level rise is not accelerating, but decelerating.
The ability to do work is not dependent on temperature but on temperature gradient. In fact the hoary old saying “nature hate a vacuum” could be better stated as “nature hates a gradient”.
Patrick says:
June 5, 2013 at 6:53 am
You are correct. In the hundreds of years of Royal Naval history, and sea “data”, there is no evidence of any significant sea level rise.
===========
Which explains why “the Team” uses proxies like sea sediment to judge sea level rise, rather than simply looking at the single most authoritative reference on sea levels in the world. The British Admiralty charts.
Every navy in the world, hundreds of millions of miles in cargo shipping, they all use charts based on the BA charts drawn 200-300 years ago. Most of the worlds oceans has never been resurveyed since then. (there are places still unsurveyed, such as Bligh water in Fiji and parts of the coast of Sarawak in Northern Borneo – from first-hand knowledge). And while we do see datum corrections on the charts for GPS, WGS84, etc. nowhere is there a datum correction for global sea level rise.
Think about it. There is a claim of significant sea level rise. Yet the naval charts, the charts on which so much of the world depends for commerce and safety, these charts have no mention of global sea level rise. Well, if it happening, why isn’t it on the charts? There is a rule in business. If it isn’t written down, it didn’t happen.
“ferd berple says:
June 5, 2013 at 7:15 am
Think about it. There is a claim of significant sea level rise. Yet the naval charts, the charts on which so much of the world depends for commerce and safety, these charts have no mention of global sea level rise. Well, if it happening, why isn’t it on the charts? There is a rule in business. If it isn’t written down, it didn’t happen.”
Exactly! It’s rather a hoot isn’t it and one “alarmists” just don’t get! however, AFAIK, one has to pay to see the RN archives these days. Take Henry the 8th’s Mary Rose…was sunk off Portsmouth…and not “discovered” for ~450 years. No significant SLR in ~450 (Assuming land levels were the same).
Vukcevic@2.13 (Volker Doorman@6.18)
You say
“Making predictions could be a risky enterprise, however calculating extrapolations from existing long term trends may be less so.”
I assume you mean the risk of being wrong. Because I’m retired I don’t have to worry about academic peer pressure,getting published or institutional funding so I can call it as I see it.
Extrapolation from existing trends is really my approach. I agree with the early decadal extrapolations on the graph you linked to. Eyeballing it, it looks like the peaks are suspiciously close to the 60 year PDO cycle which incidently is 3 times the Jupiter Saturn lap period for those like Volker who wish to speculate about mechanisms.(Thats a clue for Leif Svalgaard)
All I do is to make the perfectly reasonable assumption that the recent temperature peak was a peak in both the 60 year and a millenial solar cycle.and that the trends for 2000+/- to 3000+/-
will repeat the 1000- 2000 trends with a little extra cooling because of the longer term decline to the next Big Ice Age. Having some passing acquaintance with the proxy literature I would suggest that the currently most useful compilation for thinking about the record of the last 2000 years is.Fig 5 in Christiansen and Ljungqvist 2012
http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.pdf .
This is Fig 3 in my post at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/05/climate-forecasting-basics-for-britains.html
Those areas on the charts marked “unsurveyed” stick with me years later. Each time you sail through one of them you develop a healthy new respect for the men and ships that went before, when the whole world was marked “unsurveyed”.
Normally the charts show fathoms and feet, nice friendly reassuring numbers that you have enough water under the boat. That there isn’t some hidden danger up ahead, waiting to tear the bottom out of your boat. Then in some remote region, where you are well and truly on your own, the numbers stop and “unsurveyed” appears, signalling the edge of the known world. And there is no way around, except to go forward.
Dr. Page ended his article, saying:
“In this case I am reasonably sure – say 65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that, inevitably, certainty must drop.”
Margaret Hardman alleges @ur momisugly June 5, 2013:
“That aside, I am not the one trying to prove anything here. Dr Page is.”
——
Dr. Page’s comment hardly represents an attestation of “proof”. At best, he simply asserts his way of looking at things.
From memory the “British” (Don’t quote me on this) discovered a “trench/hole” in the Pacific and was found later to be 6 miles deep?
Margaret Hardman says:
June 5, 2013 at 1:39 am
Gawd, Margaret, what do you have for lunch, testosterone sandwiches with a side of frightened schoolchildren?
You said: Sandy hit Cuba as a category 3 hurricane, Jamaica as a category 2.
I say:
… it made landfall near Bull Bay, Jamaica as a moderate Category 1 hurricane …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Atlantic_hurricane_season#Hurricane_Sandy
(please bear in mind the above reference has been approved by the guardian of all things global warming on wiki – William the Weasel)
@Patrick says:
June 5, 2013 at 7:48 am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_Deep#History_of_depth_mapping_from_the_surface