From the University of Hawaii at Manoa:
El Nino unusually active in the late 20th century
Spawning droughts, floods, and other weather disturbances world-wide, the El Niño – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) impacts the daily life of millions of people. During El Niño, Atlantic hurricane activity wanes and rainfall in Hawaii decreases while Pacific winter storms shift southward, elevating the risk of floods in California.
The ability to forecast how ENSO will respond to global warming thus matters greatly to society. Providing accurate predictions, though, is challenging because ENSO varies naturally over decades and centuries. Instrumental records are too short to determine whether any changes seen recently are simply natural or attributable to man-made greenhouse gases. Reconstructions of ENSO behavior are usually missing adequate records for the tropics where ENSO develops.
Help is now underway in the form of a tree-ring record reflecting ENSO activity over the past seven centuries. Tree-rings have been shown to be very good proxies for temperature and rainfall measurements. An international team of scientists spearheaded by Jinbao Li and Shang-Ping Xie, while working at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, has compiled 2,222 tree-ring chronologies of the past seven centuries from both the tropics and mid-latitudes in both hemispheres. Their work is published in the June 30, 2013 online issue of Nature Climate Change.
The inclusion of tropical tree-ring records enabled the team to generate an archive of ENSO activity of unprecedented accuracy, as attested by the close correspondence with records from equatorial Pacific corals and with an independent Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction that captures well-known teleconnection climate patterns.
These proxy records all indicate that ENSO was unusually active in the late 20th century compared to the past seven centuries, implying that this climate phenomenon is responding to ongoing global warming.
“In the year after a large tropical volcanic eruption, our record shows that the east-central tropical Pacific is unusually cool, followed by unusual warming one year later. Like greenhouse gases, volcanic aerosols perturb the Earth’s radiation balance. This supports the idea that the unusually high ENSO activity in the late 20th century is a footprint of global warming” explains lead author Jinbao Li.
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  IMAGE: Ancient trees, such as Polylepis tarapacana growing in rocky soils in the South American Altiplano, are sensitive to climate anomalies associated with large-scale climate patterns stemming from the El Niño-Southern…
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“Many climate models do not reflect the strong ENSO response to global warming that we found,” says co-author Shang-Ping Xie, meteorology professor at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa and Roger Revelle Professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego. “This suggests that many models underestimate the sensitivity to radiative perturbations in greenhouse gases. Our results now provide a guide to improve the accuracy of climate models and their projections of future ENSO activity. If this trend of increasing ENSO activity continues, we expect to see more weather extremes such as floods and droughts.”
Citation: Li, J., S.-P. Xie, E. R. Cook, M. Morales, D. Christie, N. Johnson, F. Chen, R. D’Arrigo, A. Fowler, X. Gou, and K. Fang (2013): El Niño modulations over the past seven centuries. Nature Climate Change. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1936
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Basic Research Program of China (2012CB955600), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, FONDECYT (No.1120965), CONICYT/FONDAP/15110009, CONICET and IAI (CRN2047).
Looking at 7 centuries of data out of approximately 45 million centuries of geological history doesn’t give much credibility to the claim about being outside of natural variability.
lsvalgaard says:
July 1, 2013 at 3:46 pm
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It’s pretty peculiar how many of your posts dismiss the solar influence without any face value. There are many such studies that conclude a significant solar influence on El Nino.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1134%2FS0016793207010148
From the paper:
“Monthly indices of Southern Atmospheric Oscillation (SOI) and corresponding Wolf numbers, geoeffective solar flares, magnetic AE indices as well as daily average values of the southward component of the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF B z) and data on the wind characteristics at Antarctic stations Vostok, Leningradskaya, and Russkaya are analyzed. It is shown that a sharp decrease in the SOI indices, which corresponds to the beginning of El Nin’o (ENSO), is preceded one or two months before by a 20% increase in the monthly average Wolf numbers. In warm years of Southern Atmospheric Oscillation a linear relationship is observed between the SOI indices and the number of geoeffective solar flares with correlation coefficients p < −0.5. It is shown that in warm years a change in the general direction of the surface wind to anomalous at the above stations is preceded one or two days before by an increase in the daily average values of IMF B z. An increase in the SOI indices is preceded one or two months before by a considerable increase in the monthly average values of the magnetic AE indices."
statistical nonsense. the authors assume that the earth has a constant mean and deviation over a period of 700 years. Where has this been established? Is this what passes for peer review?
Here is the Nino 3.4 Index going back to 1856.
It bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the chart that accompanied the news release.
http://s14.postimg.org/563au2le9/Nino_3_4_1856_2013.png
Obviously, they are just making up fake data again.
There is a long history of ships taking sea temperature measurements in this region. A long history of carefully measured SOI figures which are highly correlated to the Nino 3.4. A long history of rainfall patterns, fishing success, etc. etc. Of all the things that bug me; it is climate scientists trying to muck around with the history of the most important weather phenomenon on the planet.
If the dashed lines are the boundary for natural variability, what caused the temperatures to go significantly outside the dashed lines between 1300 and 1850? Can we take this as evidence of un-natural events? Alien visitations? Deviant sexual practices? Satanic rites?
“These proxy records all indicate that ENSO was unusually active in the late 20th century compared to the past seven centuries, implying that this climate phenomenon is responding to ongoing global warming.”
So a (vague) correlation “implies” causation ? Our learned friends the get to chose which way the correlaiton works. It could just as well be takes as proof of Bob Tisdales hypothesis that it’s ENSO that causes the warming. In fact it’s the first time I’ve seem a graph of ENSO on this time scale and it does seem to concur with Tisdale.
“In the year after a large tropical volcanic eruption, our record shows that the east-central tropical Pacific is unusually cool, followed by unusual warming one year later. Like greenhouse gases, volcanic aerosols perturb the Earth’s radiation balance. This supports the idea that the unusually high ENSO activity in the late 20th century is a footprint of global warming” explains lead author Jinbao Li.
Nice to see mainstream climatologists finally recognising the fact that the tropics auto-regulate after an eruption. This is what I showed by stacking the six biggest events during the themometer record.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=310
It appears the warmists scientists who work for government agencies are trying to come up with a strategy to address global cooling.
They have a problem as sea ice in the Arctic and in the Antarctic has started to increase.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png
To reduce the visual impact of a large increase in sea ice the scale of the sea ice graphs has suddenly changed. Sorry guys, you cannot hide global cooling. Try to imagine the public’s reaction to significant cooling. Think crop failures, coldest winters in 2000 years. Do think people will notice? Media reports? Public demands for explanations?
The gig is up. It is over.
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years
According to our reconstruction, the level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago. We find that during the past 11,400 years the Sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode.
It appears the planet has started to cool which is no surprise as the majority of the warming in the last 70 years was caused by the highest solar magnetic cycle activity in 8000 years.
It is interesting that the warming period that occurred a little more than 8000 years ago was followed by the most abrupt cooling period in the current interglacial period save the Younger Dryas Heinrich event.
William:
I predict the sun will spotless by the end of this year. Where did that one come from? Who what of thought the sun could change and the change to the sun could affect climate on the earth? Weird!!! Freakout!!!
http://one.geol.umd.edu/www/preprints/Bond_et_al.pdf
Persistent Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate During the Holocene
http://www.geo.arizona.edu/palynology/geos462/8200yrevent.html
The 8200-year Climate Event
This figure shows snow accumulation and isotopically inferred temperature records in the Greenland GISP2 ice core and a temperature record derived from oxygen isotope measurements of fossil shells in the sediments of Lake Ammersee, southern Germany. These records all show a major climatic instability event which occurred around 8200 years ago, during the Holocene. The event was large both in magnitude, as reflected by a temperature signal in Greenland of order 5 C, and in its geographical extent, as indicated by the close correlation of the signal in these two locations. The dramatic event is also seen in the methane record from Greenland (not shown here) indicating possible major shifts in hydrology and land cover in lower latitudes. source: Von Grafenstein et al (1998) Climate Dynamics, 14, 73-81.
Abrupt tropical cooling ~8,000 years ago
“We drilled a sequence of exceptionally large, well-preserved Porites corals within an uplifted palaeo-reef in Alor, Indonesia, with Th-230 ages spanning the period 8400 to 7600 calendar years before present (Figure 2). The corals lie within the Western Pacific Warm Pool, which at present has the highest mean annual temperature in the world’s ocean. Measurements of coral Sr/Ca and oxygen 18 isotopes at 5-year sampling increments for five of the fossil corals (310 annual growth increments) have yielded a semi-continuous record spanning the 8.2 ka event. The measurements (Figure 2) show that sea-surface temperatures were essentially the same as today from 8400 to 8100 years ago, followed by an abrupt ~3C cooling over a period of ~100 years, reaching a minimum ~8000 years ago. The cooling calculated from coral oxygen 18 isotopes is similar to that derived from Sr/Ca. The exact timing of the termination of the cooling event is not yet known, but a coral dated as 7600 years shows sea-surface temperatures similar to those of today.”
So true. Here are some of the effects which I claim are “largely beyond natural variability” in our benign Holocene. Bring back the good old days I say.
So the story is that ENSO was a stable process between limits until mankind introduced an assignable cause sometime in the 20th Century.
Well lets have a quick look with our old automotive QA hat on. We note:
There are three prolonged excursions below bottom limit between 1300 and 1700 and 4 prolonged excursions above the upper limit between 1600 and 1900. Giving us no reason to regard that period as stable or typical for the purpose of determining natural variability.
The tree rings significantly differ from the Instrument readings for almost the entire time period where we have both, giving us no reason to place any faith at all in the tree ring record.
You wouldn’t get an order for squat from an Auto maker with work like this.
From their graph, it shows that the high ENSO activity from 1900-1940, comparable to that of the late 20th century, is not captured by their tree-ring proxies. Why should we expect it to reflect previous high ENSO activity in earlier eras?
It seems the demonstrable unreliability of these proxies make them a bad source for historical extrapolation.
Bill Illis says:
Here is the Nino 3.4 Index going back to 1856.
It bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the chart that accompanied the news release.
http://s14.postimg.org/563au2le9/Nino_3_4_1856_2013.png
Obviously, they are just making up fake data again.
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Perhaps it “bears no resemblance” since it is not plotting the same variable.
BTW, _please_ define a background colour for you graphs. Every time you post one I have to open a different browser just to view your graphs, because no background means black. I’d be inclined to ignore such posts normally but unforntunatley you usually something quite informative 😉
Anthony, the doi is broken:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1936
“Tree-rings have been shown to be very good proxies for temperature and rainfall measurements. ”
Unforntunately we can’t separate the two !
ferdberple says:
July 1, 2013 at 4:12 pm
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IMO support for the virgin sacrifice rituals of coastal South American peoples during the pre-Columbian period is much more robust than your deviant sexual practices hypothesis, although the two phenomena could be correlated. However we have abundant physical evidence for the virgin sacrifice hypothesis.
alex says:
July 1, 2013 at 1:00 pm
Gary says:
July 1, 2013 at 12:10 pm
“Our results now provide a guide to improve the accuracy of climate models and their projections of future ENSO activity.”
An admission the current models do not work???
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Yes!
In the sense: it is worse than we thought!
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The failure of climate models is unprecedented!
Except that it’s not really. They also fail when “backcast” to the 1960s, to the prior 20th century, to the prior millennium, the Holocene, the rest of the Cenozoic & the Mesozoic to boot. Then they fail even more miserably for the Paleozoic & Precambrian. Such total failure is unprecedented even in the astonishingly bad history of computer modeling of all complex phenomena with the possible exception of thermonuclear detonations, where the physics is indeed fairly well settled.
Dear Dr. Stalsgaard,
It’s probably been a long time since you had to teach a freshman-level science course, but, here’s your chance to feel nostalgic. I am not a scientist (as you are well aware, I am sure). I have become confused by some of the posts above. My questions are:
1. A. Are you asserting above that sun-warmed oceans do not drive ENSO?
B. If so, what drives ENSO?
2. A. Are you asserting that El Nino’s do not release heat resulting in warming the land?
B. If so, what is the effect of an El Nino event on land temperature?
If I worded my questions above too inaptly to be susceptible of an answer, please help me out and re-frame my queries so that you can answer them. Oh, come, now — they can’t be THAT poorly worded! #[:)]
With high hopes that you will consider my questions worth your time to answer,
Janice
Did I miss it in the comments? … What is the variable that they are measuring?
[Dave W at 3:25PM]
If your question was answered, I missed it, too. I cannot answer your question, but, my GUESS about what those scientists from The [Slaves’] Republic of China are doing is simply creating propaganda to promote the destruction of the economies of the Free World.
Li and Xie say: “These proxy records all indicate that ENSO was unusually active … .”
This is a baldfaced assumption presented as a rational conclusion. Why does it follow from what they saw in the coral that ENSO and not something else is the controlling effect on the coral?
WHAT VARIABLE are they measuring?
My answer: None. They are only assuming.
[RANT alert:]
And (I’m getting angry, now), boy does it remind me of what was done to our P.O.W.’s by the Chinese via their PROXIES, the North Vietnamese: “America hate you. No one care ’bout you. You fight for nothing.” — rotten, lying, snakes! Okay, okay, a crook is a crook whatever country they are from, but, grrrrr, if there’s one thing communists do well, it’s lie. And here come two little communists, lying to the American people (and the free world)….
[End of RANT.]
If the dashed lines are boundaries of variability, I’d say that between 1300 and 1550 it was unusually inactive.
..thanks to SUV’s of course.. 😉
@tallbloke:
Good catch!
@All The Solar Advocates:
There is a ‘confounder’ that is hard to remove. Orbital resonance means that many things involving orbits happen in sync. The sun is “stirred” around by angular momentum changes from the gas giant planets in the same way that the Earth and Moon have their orbits stirred around. “The all go together when they go”. That means that you can not use correlation to show causality. (Yet it can be a clue to a connection…)
In particular, the lunar orbital patterns are driven by the same planetary motions, and the moon drives the ocean tides that stir cold water to the surface of the ocean. The moon orbit has a clear connection to both ocean tidal mixing (thus to surface temperatures) and to planetary positions (via orbital resonance effects). It also has a nice 1800 year cycle that looks like a decent match to long term climate cycles.
In short, showing the planets causing small changes in the sun, and the resultant shifts of temperature shows a connection between planets and temperature cycles, but does not show the sun is the active agent of change; especially given that the moon is demonstrably changing tidal cycles and ocean surface temperatures on the same pattern.
Paper that lays it out: http://www.pnas.org/content/97/8/3814.full
Some of my comments:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/lunar-resonance-and-taurid-storms/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/why-weather-has-a-60-year-lunar-beat/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/d-o-ride-my-see-saw-mr-bond/
@All:
So the authors of “Yet Another Tree Ring Fallacy” (YATRF?) have managed to make many unwarranted “leaps of assumption”. The number of errors per page is quite high (many listed above in comments). But one glaring problem is simply not recognizing that the history of climate is well documented to have 1500 to 1800 year cycles and trends; so their fundamental assumption that the period of their graph is flat is a horrid “brain fart”.
The have leapt off a cliff of conclusion in asserting that present behaviour is outside natural norms. They have leapt again off another cliff of conclusion that any of it has anything to do with CO2. And they have continued to leap with the notion that ENSO is more related to CO2 than to the moon and tide patterns stirring the oceans. (They also seem to have done little or nothing of a literature search to look for other prior art, such as that lunar / tidal paper).
It isn’t about CO2. It likely is only a little related to solar output (that being mostly the UV distribution and not TSI; and some GCR modulation) but those changes happen in sync with tidal ocean mixing changes (and tidal air mass movements…) so solar can show a correlation that is strong, even as the mechanism for solar is weak; since the sun and moon are in orbital resonance with the same gas giant planet movements.
But what is quite clear is “As above, so below”, the wisdom of the ancients, has a strong core of truth to it. It isn’t about us, and our arrogance to think we matter to the planet. It is all about the giant forces of nature, taking geological scale times to change and “do what they will”.
So once again we need to learn that we are not the center of the universe, and not the center of climate changes. We are irrelevant. Natural cycles will be continuing long after we burn all the carbon in the world; and even if we burn none of it.
Seems to me that WE COULD MEASURE THE LAST WARM CYCLE OF THE PDO 1978-2007 better than we did the previous one. Since records are kept since 1950 and even then suspect before the satellite era, this article is cherry picking what was the one warm PDO event we could measure. Cries of the eternal warm enso quickly fell by the wayside as soon as the PDO flipped and instead weaker modiki type ninos have interrupted what has been a dominant cool enso period. This is to be expected in the cold pdo, and a simple look at the cold pdo vs warm pdo that we have the more accurate records for ( again the most accurate was from the late 70s on, which was a warm PDO.. and the warming globally in response.. which unfortunately never hit the AGW proponents as to the real reason for the warming.. the fact that they could measure better the first warm event off a cold one) speaks volumes
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensoyears.shtml
The fact is that the warm enso events until the Pdo flips back will only be as common as they were in the last cold pdo, in the 50s through 70s, and you can look for yourself at that. Its not rocket science, which is probably why many agw proponents are scared. .how long can grant money go out for what is a simple, common sense matter
Snowlover123 says:
July 1, 2013 at 4:00 pm
It’s pretty peculiar how many of your posts dismiss the solar influence without any face value.
On the contrary I supply links and Figures to support my posts. Contrast the vapid comment “It’s the Sun, stupid” with my comment providing a graph http://www.leif.org/research/ENSO-and-SSN.png
Now, there are dozens of papers claiming relationships [some of them contradictory]. There are also more sober assessments like this one: http://www.leif.org/EOS/Causality-SSN-Climate.pdf
Page 25: “No causative link between solar irradiance and tropical climate”
William Astley says:
July 1, 2013 at 4:28 pm
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
“Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years
According to our reconstruction, the level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional”
Consider the possibility that their reconstruction is simply wrong. Recent studies strongly suggest that, as we have already discussed at length.
I predict the sun will spotless by the end of this year.
Fair enough. And if it isn’t, then you must concede that you have been wrong all along. Otherwise such a ‘prediction’ has no merit.
Janice Moore says:
July 1, 2013 at 6:05 pm
1: what drives ENSO?
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/elnino/el-nino-story.html describes what el Nino is. I’ll not cite all of it here, let this suffice:
“In normal, non-El Niño conditions, the trade winds blow towards the west across the tropical Pacific. These winds pile up warm surface water in the west Pacific, so that the sea surface is about 1/2 meter higher at Indonesia than at Ecuador. The sea surface temperature is about 8 degrees C higher in the west, with cool temperatures off South America, due to an upwelling of cold water from deeper levels.
During El Niño, the trade winds relax in the central and western Pacific leading to a depression of the thermocline in the eastern Pacific, and an elevation of the thermocline in the west. This reduces the efficiency of upwelling to cool the surface.”
2: what is the effect of an El Nino event on land temperature?
From the same source: “The eastward displacement of the atmospheric heat source overlaying the warmest water results in large changes in the global atmospheric circulation, which in turn force changes in weather in regions far removed from the tropical Pacific.” Including land areas.
With high hopes that you will consider my questions worth your time to answer
With high hopes that it will be worth your time to study the link I provided.
I simply don’t believe this graph has anything to do with El Nino. I checked both satellites and HadCRUT3 that goes back to 1850 and none of this correlates with any ENSO activity. Furthermore, tree rings from High Sierras do have a thirty year periodicity, and that does not correspond to anything of theirs. This periodicity is likely to relate to happenings in the Pacific Ocean but not to El Nino either because the nominal El Nino periodicity is about five years.
Graph (not so ccherry-picked as some) showing rough correlation of solar cycles with temperatures over the record 162 years. http://bit.ly/12i2xnR
James Cook says:
July 1, 2013 at 8:24 pm
Graph (not so ccherry-picked as some) showing rough correlation of solar cycles with temperatures over the record 162 years. http://bit.ly/12i2xnR
We expect a solar cycle variation of the order of 0.1 degree C. The divergence between the temperature curve and the sunspot number since 1980 cannot be explained by such a correlation.