I returned to a recent post at SkepticalScience to examine what the author had to say about two papers: Meehl et al (2011) and Meehl et al (2013). [We discussed Meehl et al (2013) here.] I am now convinced SkepticalScience should be renamed UtterNonsense or TheCluelessLeadingTheClueless. The SkepticalScience post I’m referring to is A Looming Climate Shift: Will Ocean Heat Come Back to Haunt Us?, and the author is Rob Painting.
The first comment on the thread reads:
Can you say how strong the empirical evidence is for rapid warming to start in the near future? As a non-scientist climate change communicator I’d like to let people know what the balance of evidence is without being too alarmist.
The resident expert on coupled ocean-atmosphere circulation at SkepticalScience, the author of the post Rob Painting, replied (my boldface):
Individuals will make their own decision as to whether they find this information alarming or not. The consequences of a shutdown of the wind-driven ocean circulation could be very profound. As for previous behavior of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, given that many readers will not be familiar with this index – I’m writing a follow-up to this post.
“The consequences of a shutdown of the wind-driven ocean circulation could be very profound”????? He has got to be kidding.
The tragedy: The “climate change communicator” who asked the question, someone who by their own admission does not have a scientific background, actually thanked Rob Painting for the answer. Will the “climate change communicator” now broadcast that nonsense through his communication channels?
The most telling part: No one else commenting on the thread questioned Rob Painting’s statement.
How strange is the phrase “shutdown of the wind-driven ocean circulation”? A Google search with that phrase in quotes presented results only from SkepticalScience. (And now results appear in response to this post.)
Anyone who proposes a shutdown of wind-driven ocean circulation has no clue whatsoever about what causes it.
Wind-driven ocean circulation results from the temperature differences between the tropics and the mid-latitudes, and those temperature differences are caused by the sun heating the tropics more than it heats the mid-latitudes. Since the surface of the ocean is warmer in the tropics than at mid-latitudes, more convection occurs in the tropics. In other words, the air is rising in the tropics. Surface winds blow from the mid-latitudes to the tropics to replace the rising air. The other component is the rotation of the Earth. It causes a phenomenon called the Coriolis effect, which deflects the equatorward traveling winds to the west. Those trade winds, as they’re known, blow across the surface of the tropical oceans and cause the currents north and south of the equator to flow from east to west.
Note: To reduce the number of components, I excluded surface pressures from the preceding discussion. But we all know that surface winds blow from areas of higher pressure to those with lower pressures. And I also excluded El Niño- and La Niña-related discussions.
For wind-driven ocean circulation to shut down, is Rob Painting suggesting the waters in the tropics will no longer be warmer than they are in the mid-latitudes? And is he also suggesting the Earth will stop rotating? Those things would have to occur for his proposed shutdown to occur. Considering that SkepticalScience is an alarmist website, is he suggesting that all this will be caused by increases in manmade greenhouse gases?
Oy vey!
For those who’d like a more detailed introduction to what causes the trade winds to blow and for the surface currents to flow, here’s a chapter from my book Who Turned on the Heat? Sometimes a few illustrations help.
3.2 Pacific Trade Winds and Ocean Currents
Trade winds are the prevailing surface winds in the tropics. They’re called easterlies because they blow primarily from east to west. In the Northern Hemisphere, the trade winds travel from the northeast to the southwest, and they travel from southeast to northwest in the Southern Hemisphere.
The trade winds blow because the surface temperature is warmer near the equator than it is at higher latitudes. Refer to Figure 3-2 for the annual 2011 zonal-mean sea surface temperatures for the Pacific Ocean.
Warm, moist air rises near the equator. This upward motion draws replacement surface air from the north in the Northern Hemisphere and from the south in the Southern Hemisphere. In other words, the air at the surface is being drawn toward the equator due to the updraft there. In turn, the equatorward surface winds need to be replaced, and that cool, dry air is drawn down from higher altitudes at about 30N and 30S. Upper winds traveling poleward from the equator complete the circuit. That circuit is called a Hadley Cell. See Figure 3-3. Because the Earth is rotating, the equatorward surface winds are deflected toward the west by the Coriolis force.
We can explain the Hadley Circulation another way, if you prefer. We’ll start again near the equator where warm, moist air rises. It travels poleward at an altitude of 10 to 15 kilometers (32,800 to 45,800 feet) losing heat and moisture along the way. The cooler, dryer air then drops back toward the surface in the subtropics at about 30N and 30S. The surface winds then complete the circulation pattern. If the Earth was not rotating, the tropical surface winds would be out of the north in the Northern Hemisphere and out of the south in the Southern Hemisphere. Because the Earth is rotating, however, the tropical surface winds—the trade winds—are deflected toward the west.
The prevailing tropical winds are, therefore, from east to west. They blow across the surface of the tropical Pacific Ocean, dragging the surface waters along with them. There are two surface currents as a result, traveling from east to west, one per hemisphere. They are logically called the North and South Pacific Equatorial Currents. There is a smaller surface current flowing between them that returns some of the water back to the east and it’s called the Equatorial Countercurrent. See Figure 3-4.
The Equatorial Currents carry the waters across the tropical Pacific. Then they encounter Indonesia, which restricts continued flow to the west. Some of the water is carried through all of the islands to the Indian Ocean by a surface current called the Indonesian Throughflow. As noted above, a little of the water is carried east by the Equatorial Countercurrent. The rest of the water is carried poleward. The overall systems of rotating ocean currents in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres are known as gyres. Gyres exist in all ocean basins. The ones in Figure 3-5 are called the North Pacific Gyre and the South Pacific Gyre.
The NASA Ocean Motion website is a great resource for entry-level discussions of ocean currents. Refer to their Home and Wind Driven Surface Currents: Equatorial Currents Background web pages. Take a tour; there’s lots of interesting information there.
[End of Chapter 3.2 of Who Turned on the Heat?]
Who Turned on the Heat? is a detailed presentation of the coupled ocean-atmosphere processes most persons refer to as El Niño and La Niña. Known collectively as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), they are the second strongest of the natural phenomena that have annual and multiyear effects on global climate—the strongest are explosive volcanic eruptions, which can overwhelm the effects of even the strongest El Niño. The recent example of that is the eruption of El Chichon—it counteracted the very strong 1982/83 El Niño.
The ocean heat content records and the satellite-era sea surface temperature records indicate that the processes of El Niño and La Niña events are responsible for much of the warming of the global oceans. That’s right—the instrument temperature record indicates the oceans warmed naturally. If this topic is new to you, refer to my illustrated essay “The Manmade Global Warming Challenge” [42MB].
Who Turned on the Heat? begins with entry-level discussions, like Chapter 3.2 above. A preview is available here [4MB]. Who Turned on the Heat? is only available in pdf form here, for a price of US$8.00.
I’m working on a new introductory post to Who Turned on the Heat?, because I’m no longer pleased with the original Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About El Niño and La Niña.
CLOSING
In the past, I’ve tried to ignore what SkepticalScience’s resident expert, Rob Painting, has had to say about ENSO and its related coupled ocean-atmosphere processes. Try as I may, I do wind up talking about them occasionally. But I couldn’t overlook his statement, “The consequences of a shutdown of the wind-driven ocean circulation could be very profound.” And I find it quite remarkable that the denizens of SkepticalScience bought it—or just as likely, they elected to ignore it.
Rob Painting ended that comment with:
As for previous behavior of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, given that many readers will not be familiar with this index – I’m writing a follow-up to this post.
We discussed at length what the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation was, and what it wasn’t, in the post Meehl et al (2013) Are Also Looking for Trenberth’s Missing Heat. I’m patiently waiting for Painting’s follow-up post. It should be entertaining.
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Apologies to Coleridge…
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon Rob Painting’s ocean.
I have worked in the inland Pilbara in Western Australia during the southern winter, the time of the southeast trades. I can assure folks that the south easterlies blow and blow and blow. Strong wind warnings are common along the Pilbara coast due to strong offshore winds.People go mad [a bit strong perhaps, but certainly screws loosen] because of the wind.
I’d suggest that a shut down of wind driven ocean currents is probably not imminent..
philjourdan says:
July 1, 2013 at 6:14 am
Chuck Nolan says:
July 1, 2013 at 5:35 am
What’s a non-scientist climate change communicator?
A propaganda minister.
=====================================
I prefer:
“useful idiot”
Bob – I am now convinced SkepticalScience should be renamed UtterNonsense or TheCluelessLeadingTheClueless.
Well, I for one completely agree but I’m afraid you probably won’t convince our host. Anthony still regards SS as merely “unreliable”. I completely accept that it’s his site and he makes the rules but I can’t help but think that, particularly after some of the things that have been said about him there, he is being way more accommodating about them than he should.
On the other hand, he hosts the number one science blog and I don’t.
“Ken Hall says:
July 1, 2013 at 6:14 am
Yeah, as you pointed out, it would mean that the earth has stopped rotating…..
AND that the planet became a flat square all facing the sun at once at the same angle.”
In the 1970s, Larry Niven wrote a series of science fiction stories about a “ringworld”, an artificial
created by superintelligent creatures. The world was an artificial ring about one million miles wide and approximately the diameter of Earth’s orbit (which makes it about 600 million miles in circumference), encircling a sunlike star. It rotates, providing artificial gravity that is 99.2% as strong as Earth’s gravity through the action of centripetal force. The ringworld has a habitable flat inner surface equivalent in area to approximately three million Earth-sized planets. Night is provided by an inner ring of shadow squares which are connected to each other by thin, ultra-strong wire (shadow square wire). What kind of weather would it have? It wouldn’t have hadley circulation, but there would be differential day/night heating and differential land/ocean effects on temperature.
I think the word you’re all looking for is “apostle” – which means “useful idiot”.
First of all, there is no such thing as “upwelling”. Cold deep water is dense, it would never go up on its own. There is vertical turbulent mixing though, which has a similar effect, as surface waters are always warmer than deeper layers, except in polar areas.
This turbulent mixing is driven by tides and winds, their contribution is roughly fifty-fifty. Most of the wind driven part (~80%) happens over the southern ocean (Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties, Screaming Sixties), very far from the trade wind zone.
Vertical turbulent mixing is the process that replenishes buoyancy to the abyss, making polar downwelling possible.
One can clearly see that it is impossible to stop this process, because the Moon would not go away easily. Winds over the southern ocean may vary, but not noo much. It would be utterly foolish to expect them to stop blowing. Anyway, they have only a loose connection to what goes on over the tropics & subtropics.
The most variable part of the system (of Meridional Overturning Circulation) is the ever changing set of spots where downwelling occurs. It always happens somewhere along the ice edge, because density of salt water (unlike that of fresh water) is highest just above freezing. But the exact location depends on a gazillion of factors, so, even if its global flux is set by mechanical energy input (tides & winds), its spatial distribution is not. That’s the way most of climate change is generated. Currently there are two regions where density of surface waters is highest, one around Antarctica and the other is in the North Atlantic. Their relative weight in global downwelling flux determines what trends we see in Europe & North America.
Alan D McIntire says:
July 1, 2013 at 11:27 am
“Ken Hall says:
July 1, 2013 at 6:14 am
Yeah, as you pointed out, it would mean that the earth has stopped rotating…..
AND that the planet became a flat square all facing the sun at once at the same angle.”
In the 1970s, Larry Niven wrote a series of science fiction stories about a “ringworld” [snip] What kind of weather would it have? It wouldn’t have hadley circulation, but there would be differential day/night heating and differential land/ocean effects on temperature.
Actually Niven gave considerable thought to weather patterns on the Ringworld. For one, he realized that Coriolis effects would be vertical (up-down) instead of “east-west.” Hence the Eye Storm, which figures strongly in the story.
Edohiguma says:
July 1, 2013 at 6:09 am
A community organizer is what was called a ward heeler back in mayor Richard J Daley’s (pere) day.; probably in mayor Richard M Daley’s (fil) day, too.
Ah..so the cartoonist makes way for a Painter..
Will a sculptor be next ?
“AND that the planet became a flat square all facing the sun at once at the same angle.””
gees,… have you been looking at Trenberth energy balances again ??
Berényi Péter: You’ve contradicted yourself. First you wrote, “…there is no such thing as ‘upwelling’”. But later you wrote, “The most variable part of the system (of Meridional Overturning Circulation) is the ever changing set of spots where downwelling occurs.”
If there’s downwelling in one part of the ocean, there has to be upwelling somewhere else.
Also decades of research indicates upwelling does occur, as part of ENSO and as part of normal coastal water dynamics:
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/upwelling.html
Well, in the random switching excuse model they can’t always blame a shift in the Gulf Stream and other contrivances.
I gave up reading Skeptical whatever early on as it was readily apparent that a virulent case of Dunning-Kruger effect had infected the main contributors there.
cloa5132013 says:
July 1, 2013 at 6:23 am.
There was no north and south Vietnam until a roomful of China experts none of whom speaks Chinese poked their noses in.
From the department of strange coincidences … as I type this ( Monday July 1st, 6:00pm EDT ) two out of three of those things I’ve seen aired on cable TV.
Godzilla is playing on AMC. That’s the more recent one from 1998 where he tramples NYC and contains a few global warming quips.
The Weather Channel ( never a more perfect oxymoron ) has spent a huge chunk of the day running disaster programs. Everything from Mega-Tsunamis to rogue planets passing through our solar system ( yes, TWC, not NatGeo! ), most with a huge emphasis on human influences and CO2 naturally. The few times they cut away from alarmist programming is when they cover something current that still gets a climate spin, like fires out west. I’m not sure if they have actually shown our local weather ( endless rain ) at all today. To know that I would have to leave it on full-time which I believe is the very point of that channel now, make you watch crap propaganda all day long to get 15 seconds of questionable weather forecasts.
I don’t have time to flip through the rest of the channels, but if I did I could probably locate some unicorns somewhere, no doubt being exterminated by evil oil companies 🙂
I hadn’t been to the Skeptical Science page in quite awhile. My advice is, just ignore them. Reading that stuff will make you stupid. It’s just a load of cherry picking and propaganda masquerading as science. It’s irritating that they have the chutzpah to call themselves skeptical when they are clearly confirmed warmists. It makes skeptics look bad.
Just to remind everyone where we are in this debate, if NBC news Brian Williams gets ahem wind of this statement he will report it as fact. More and more of their news reporting involves some aspect of global warming. Anyone else noticed this?
Jim
The consequences COULD be profound. But in an abstract and theoretical sense! Painting does himself no favours.
Peak stupid is almost reached at SkS, but Will Steffen, Australian Climate Commissioner reaches velocity claiming the cosmos has stopped moving because of carbon (sic).
“Prof Steffen said that this period of climate change caused by humans, known as the ‘anthropocene era’, could ultimately cause the whole system of ice ages followed by warm periods, that has allowed life on Earth to flourish, to be over.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9168055/Compost-bomb-is-latest-climate-change-tipping-point.htm
@edohiguma –
Now we know where der Fuehrer got his six Ph.D.’s in climate science, a la Idi Amin!
Bob Tisdale and Berényi Péter: This “upwelling/downwelling” issue intrigues me. Density differences have much to do with geologic processes, such as subduction, and salt diapirs, and volcanic intrusions and eruptions, and so on. In the ocean, I cannot envision dense cold deep water “upwelling”. I can however envision dense, salty, cooling water from the tropics subsiding or sinking or subducting if you will, into the surrounding, less dense ocean.
It seems to me that “upwelling” is better described as “uncovering” or “exposure” as it appears that the upwelling along the western South American coast is in fact caused by warm, less dense surface waters being moved to the west by the trade winds. In no way however, is there some liquid force field that, given water subsiding in the north Atlantic because of its density, forces dense cold water in the eastern Pacific to rise to the surface. Bob sort of suggested something like this with this comment: “…If there’s downwelling in one part of the ocean, there has to be upwelling somewhere else….” @Bob Tisdale says: July 1, 2013 at 1:27 pm
“Finding a needle in a needle stack…”
Priceless!
Surely none of this was lost on anyone here—from the “Key Points” (the numbering is mine):
1. “A climate model-based study, Meehl (2011), predicted…”
2. “…deep ocean warming in the model occurred during negative phases of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO)… …was most likely in response to intensification of the wind-driven ocean circulation.”
3. “Meehl (2013) is an update to their previous work, and the authors show that…”
4. “This modelling work, combined with current understanding of the wind-driven ocean circulation, implies that…”
Point No. 1 says it all: this is all just so much fantasizing, not even really what you can call guess work, aided and abetted by a silicon-based Ouija Board.
Point No. 2 is nonsensical discussion about the possible implications of a prediction by the Ouija Board, treated as if it actually has any relationship to reality at all (I’m reminded of a Peanuts cartoon, where Lucy has found a butterfly, and starts to go off on Linus about how it’s probably a Monarch Butterfly, and it migrated all the way from Brazil, to which Linus observes, “It’s not a butterfly at all. It’s a potato chip.” Lucy, undeterred—like our not-so-skeptical, alarmist friends—looks at it again and says, “Well what do you know! It IS a potato chip! How do you suppose a potato chip got all the way here from Brazil?!”).
Point No. 3 says they’re using a new, improved Ouija Board or perhaps just an improved shuttle on the Ouija Board (perhaps so that many more “et al” can put fingers into the paper and increase the number of the consensus about the result).
Point No. 4 actually implies that the author doesn’t know the difference between objective reality and video games, and as observed by Bob Tisdale, elsewhere in the article and in his posts, the author proves conclusively that he knows zip about wind circulation.
Regarding the alarmists’ apparently total faith in the veracity of computer models—since they seem to model predictions interchangeably with reality—as a wise man once said to me, “Ain’t nuthin’ wrong with building castles in the clouds. The trouble starts when you try to move in…”
Happy Monday, everyone…
p@ur momisugly
The shutdown of the wind-driven ocean circulation is happening because of macroscopic quantum tunneling in the hypothalmus-pitutary axis. Anyone on a vegan diet has experienced this wind-driven scenario.
@Dudley Horscrofft
Tim Flannery is indeed well-paid. He gets $180,000 a year for 3 days work per week. His effectiveness / credibility is probably best summed up by the cartoon at the end of this o Nova article
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/06/jcu-caves-in-to-badgering-and-groupthink-blackballs-politically-incorrect-bob-carter/
And I’m ashamed to admit that James Cook Uni is my alma mater.