Note: Dr. Judith Curry also has an essay on this important paper. She writes:
My mind has been blown by a new paper just published in Nature.
Just when I least expected it, after a busy day when I took a few minutes to respond to a query from a journalist about a new paper just published in Nature [link to abstract]:
This has important implications for IPCC’s upcoming AR5 report, where they will attempt to give attribution to the warming, which now looks more and more like a natural cycle. See updates below. – Anthony
================================================================
Guest essay by Bob Tisdale
The recently published climate model-based paper Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling [Paywalled] by Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie has gained a lot of attention around the blogosphere. Like Meehl et al (2012) and Meehl et al (2013), Kosaka and Xie blame the warming stoppage on the recent domination of La Niña events. The last two sentences of Kosaka and Xie (2013) read:
Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Niña-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase.
Anyone with a little common sense who’s reading the abstract and the hype around the blogosphere and the Meehl et al papers will logically now be asking: if La Niña events can stop global warming, then how much do El Niño events contribute? 50%? The climate science community is actually hurting itself when they fail to answer the obvious questions.
And what about the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO)? What happens to global surface temperatures when the AMO also peaks and no longer contributes to the warming?
The climate science community skirts the common-sense questions, so no one takes them seriously.
UPDATE
Another two comments:
Kosaka and Xie (2013) appear to believe the correlation between their model and observed temperatures adds to the credibility of their findings. They write in the abstract:
Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r = 0.97 for 1970–2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming).
Kosaka and Xie (2013) used the observed sea surface temperatures of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific as an input to their climate model. By doing so they captured the actual El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) signal. ENSO is the dominant mode of natural variability on the planet. In layman terms, El Niño and La Niña events are responsible for the year-to-year wiggles. It’s therefore not surprising that when they added the source of the wiggles, the models included the wiggles, which raised the correlation coefficient.
Table 1 from Kosaka and Xie (2013) is also revealing. The “HIST” experiment is for the climate model forced by manmade greenhouse gases and other forcings, and the “POGA-H” adds the tropical Pacific sea surface temperature data to the “HIST” forcings. For the modeled period of 1971-1997, adding the ENSO signal increased the linear trend by 34%. Maybe that’s why modeling groups exclude the multidecadal variability of ENSO by skewing ENSO to zero. That way El Niños and La Niñas don’t contribute to or detract from the warming. Unfortunately, by doing so, the models have limited use as tools to project future climate.
UPDATE2 (Anthony): From Dr. Judith Curry’s essay – she writes at her blog:
The results in terms of global-average surface temperature are shown in Fig 1 below:
In Fig 1 a, you can see how well the POGA H global average surface temperature matches the observations particularly since about 1965 (note central Pacific Ocean temperatures have increasing and significant uncertainty prior to 1980).
What is mind blowing is Figure 1b, which gives the POGA C simulations (natural internal variability only). The main ’fingerprint’ of AGW has been the detection of a separation between climate model runs with natural plus anthropogenic forcing, versus natural variability only. The detection of AGW has emerged sometime in the late 1970′s , early 1980′s.
Compare the temperature increase between 1975-1998 (main warming period in the latter part of the 20th century) for both POGA H and POGA C:
- POGA H: 0.68C (natural plus anthropogenic)
- POGA C: 0.4C (natural internal variability only)
I’m not sure how good my eyeball estimates are, and you can pick other start/end dates. But no matter what, I am coming up with natural internal variability associated accounting for significantly MORE than half of the observed warming.
The paper abstract:
Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling
Yu Kosaka & Shang-Ping Xie Nature (2013) doi:10.1038/nature12534
Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century1, 2, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming3, 4, 5, 6, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity. Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations. We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r = 0.97 for 1970–2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter cooling in northwestern North America and the prolonged drought in the southern USA. Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Niña-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase.
James Cross Just read my comment above at 28/9.34 and check the complete forecast at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
Pamela Gray says:
August 28, 2013 at 8:32 pm
We are still with the Solar stuff. And absolutely no mechanism. The Earth itself allows/blocks a relatively steady state Sun to shine on us. The cool waters of wind-blown La Nina/La Nada keeps clouds at bay allowing deep penetration of full strength shortwave IR radiation. The warm still waters of El Nino/El Nado builds clouds to block some of the radiation. It is the Earth that varies the input of the relatively stable sunshine.
Pamela, this begs the questions, what is the mechanism for decadal shifts in the prevalence of El Ninos? What was the mechanism for the Roman Warm Period, the Dark Ages Cold Period, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age? What is the mechanism for long ice ages with short warm periods in between? Are these all due to a variable Earth? How can you say that with absolutely no proven mechanism?
It seems to me that the GCR Theory is more of a mechanism than anything we know about the ‘variable Earth’. It is illogical to disregard it in favor of a ‘variable Earth theory’, when we do not have a proven mechanism for either one of them!
Chances are that both the sun and the variable Earth are playing a role in our climate history. We don’t understand either one of them enough to rule out the other.
rgbatduke says:
August 29, 2013 at 3:41 pm
Excellent little essay. Now tell us which items among those you listed have the Alarmists chosen not to study. And why wasn’t the Kosaka and Xie study done decages ago? Unless the Alarmists throw Kosaka and Xie under the bus they have a lot of explaining to do. They could have focused on natural regularities such as ENSO decades ago and they could have come to some reasonable assignment of a fraction of warming to natural variation. They must explain why they chose not to do so.
James Cross says:
” I haven’t seen anyone give a solid prediction of when we will be back to close to 1910 temperature levels and some who think AGW is negligible actually seem to think warming will continue because of some unknown warming factor in a rebound from the LIA.”
You have to be a troll. First, you are way way off topic. Second, your statement above is really dumb. Of course warming will continue from the LIA, until it doesn’t. No one can predict anything more illuminating than that,because we still have no explaination for why it is warming. So.. one might as well accept the trend.
Just to report back on my contribution to Wikipedia on Pathological Science my comments regarding CAGW, while conforming to the definition, only lasted about 8 hours before being disappeared…..no real surprise there but this particular backwater of pseudoscience does appear presciently apt.
I admit I’m not the sharpest tool in the box, but I think I see a problem…
How can they claim that large natural cooling now (since 2000) defeats large CO2 warming now when the previous natural cooling period (1950 – 1975) (with less CO2 warming) doesn’t show any cooling?
James Cross says:
August 29, 2013 at 4:33 pm
Gail Combs,
I have never considered glaciers to be particularly good evidence for either side of the argument since they can be affected enormously by precipitation as much as temperature.
My general point is that there is some AGW effect….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
First I threw in the glaciers since that, like polar bears is one of the emotional tugs. And yes precipitation as well as temperature effect growth. In that way they are like tree rings as proxies of temperature, poor. Unless they are sitting a mile high on top of NYC.
As far as an AGW effect. I think it is minor.
First I do not trust the CO2 numbers any more than I do the temperature numbers. The first ASSumption ‘Well mixed in the atmosphere’ rings my B.S. alarms since I spent a lot of my career as an industrial chemist trying to get the @ur momisugly#$^& blasted chemicals in batches/ continuous processes to mix and the rest of my career trying to figure a way get a representative sample.
Second the amount of CO2 from human processes is small compare with the amount going into and coming out of nature. Therefore while I can see CO2 having a greenhouse effect the human component is minor. Second it is WATER that is the elephant in the climate room not CO2. If you want to talk human influences then talk farming, irrigation, cutting down forests, paving over land for cities. My SWAG is those have a much larger effect than human generated CO2.
Last we are at the tail end of the Holocene. The solar energy hitting the earth has been reduced by ~10% compared to the Holocene optimum. link The only real question that should be asked is do we head into glaciation or are we going to luck out with a double long interglacial. “Catastrophic Global Warming” is just not on the table.
With papers like those why in heck would anyone in their right mind not want to produce more CO2?
Jim, there are lots of oceanic/atmospheric oscillations that have decades-long varying time spans. Heck, the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave takes 8 years to go around the Antarctic. And when these various oscillations rarely coincide such that they amplify each other, you can have even longer, more extreme regime shifts. That is till the energy required to maintain that double whammy shift gets bled off and we move into another regime of some kind.
And no I don’t think it violates conservation of energy to say that. We have a complicated planet with life in many layers with a leaky roof. Energy gets transferred into the ground, into the oceans, up into the atmosphere, and even escapes Earth altogether. The cartoon models of how solar energy transfer works plus weather and thus climate work are just that, cartoons. It is way more complicated and variable. That’s why I believe the null hypothesis is still King. The highly variable planet we live on has not been ruled out as the source of long and short term weather pattern variation. Heck even the ice ages are theorized to be caused by a wobbly Earth (granted, caused by gravitational pulls). The Sun just keeps beaming.
@ur momisugly Niff — Bummer, but good for you to try. Yes, indeed (only EIGHT HOURS?), it does appear that someone’s beady little eyes are either constantly on that Wiki thing or….. they are lurking about WUWT (Good — hope they learn something!).
richardscourtney
While I understand and generally accept your explanation, I strongly disagree with this point.
“4.
If heat is transferred from the ‘hot’ to the cooler area then
(a) the temperature of the ‘hot’ region will fall by an amount
and
(b) the temperature of the cooler region will rise by the same amount
”
That has no basis in science as temperature is not equal to heat nor is it a measurement(unit) of heat, furthermore there is not even a linear correlation between the two.
This to me is where the whole AGW fails. When CO2 is discussed it is in regards to heat retention, and AGW is about “warming” which again is heat, however, the heat is being measured using temperature, which is not a measurement of heat, as if the entire earth is a sealed system and always at standard and uniform pressure, humidity etc. Worse, now that the chosen measurement i.e. temperature is no longer rising, all of a sudden the climate scientist want to discuss heat instead. Logic dictates that if the climate system can change the “heat” of the earth in one direction by creating a more uniform temperature gradient, that it can change the “heat” of the earth in the opposite direction by creating a less uniform one.
“7.
Any variation in the heat transfer from ‘hot’ locations to cooler locations will alter the removal rate of energy from the Earth (because the rate is proportional to T^4 at every location).”
So what you are saying then is that the temperature of the earth is controlled by the weather, not CO2, since a simple change in the weather patterns can so drastically effect heat lost to space.
UnfrozenCavemanMD says:
August 29, 2013 at 2:31 am
ironargonaut says:
August 28, 2013 at 5:42 pm
Energy is neither created nor destroyed. How does moving it from one location one the planet to another remove the energy?
What if I use a flow of water to move heat energy from my car’s engine block to my car’s radiator? The planet is like that.
Earth’s radiator is the atmosphere, are you saying moving water from one location in you radiator to another changes the energy content? Where not talking about moving the atmosphere from the sun(engine) to the earth. We are talking about the water that is already in the radiator.
@ur momisugly Gail Combs — THANK YOU for all your great research cited above at 10:16am, today. You were much more responsive and more meaningfully and coherently so than Ulric with his “solar signal”s and “teleconnections,” lol.
I was actually hoping to see Svalgaard come over here and debate Ulric, but, now, I can see why he did not! Others above have made meaningful arguments that I’m sure Svalgaard would willingly address, but I only quoted Ulric in my “Clean-up on aisle Mind-Blowing!” call for help (on another thread) and Dr. S. knew U. wasn’t worth bothering with.
Thanks, Ian W for trying to help me understand. I don’t deny there may be a solar mechanism, but, I haven’t (yet) seen it proven to a degree that I feel at all confident that it exists. It SOUNDS logical, but, truth is so often counterintuitive that I’m not at all certain (given Dr. Svalgaard’s convincing though not absolutely conclusive arguments).
Of one thing I am CERTAIN. There is NO KNOWN EVIDENCE (only conjecture) that human CO2 emissions cause ANY change in the climate of the earth.
The ABC have been informed in an email about their probable transcript error.
Same certainty crap as the warmists. We don’t know how and how many variables has the climate(s).
davidmhoffer:
Thankyou for your informative comment at August 29, 2013 at 5:44 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/28/another-paper-blames-enso-for-the-warming-hiatus/#comment-1403295
I write to correct a misunderstanding.
You say
I genuinely appreciate your advice that “anything similar in complexity to the existing models, regardless of the underlying physics, would be problematic to run across the internet.”
That is a clear answer to my request that you have quoted from my post at August 29, 2013 at 3:23 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/28/another-paper-blames-enso-for-the-warming-hiatus/#comment-1403194
However, I was answering a suggestion from HarveyS (n.b. not me) which – as I repeatedly said – I lack sufficient pertinent knowledge to assess.
In the – you say unlikely – event that the suggestion were to become reality then I would not want it thought I was its originator when the credit for the original suggestion belongs to HarveyS.
Richard
Sleepalot:
Your post at August 29, 2013 at 8:13 pm says in total
Their “claim” may or may not be right, but your question does not falsify it.
You are assuming the magnitude of the cooling effect was the same in the two cooling periods. There is no reason to assume this.
Richard
ironargonaut:
I am sorry that my attempt at an explanation for you at August 29, 2013 at 2:14 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/28/another-paper-blames-enso-for-the-warming-hiatus/#comment-1402675
was not adequately clear.
Your reply at August 29, 2013 at 9:44 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/28/another-paper-blames-enso-for-the-warming-hiatus/#comment-1403424
says
It seems you missed my having written
If the two regions have “the same area” and are “similar” (e.g. they are both ocean surface layer) then my statement which you dispute is correct (e.g. because the thermal capacity of sea water is the same in both places).
And you say
No, I did not say that and I did not imply that!
Weather will have some effect notably by altering cloud cover which alters albedo. But nothing I said in reply to your question suggests that “the temperature of the earth is controlled by the weather” or suggests that “weather patterns” … “drastically effect heat lost to space”.
Surface radiative absorbtion and emission do have large effect on global temperature. For example, global temperature rises by 3.8°C from January to June each year and falls by 3.8°C from June to January during each year. And this fluctuation results from the different areas of land and ocean over the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
I hope I have clarified matters.
Richard
Gail,
Generally agree with solar energy assessment and fact we are well past peak of the Holocene.
Regarding CO2, of course, the cycles are complex and not all of the increase is from human activity. A good bit, however, is from humans as the isotope evidence shows. Water vapor and clouds are the big feedback mechanisms that will determine whether we have low, medium, or high sensitivity.
I don’t consider my posts to be off-topic at all.
A key finding of this paper is that much variability is accounted for by natural cycles in the oceans, especially the Pacific. The PDO is shifting back to a cool phase. For anyone who wants to make a solar argument, the sun is in or is shifting to a low sunspot number phase. In other words, for the two most popular alternative explanations of late 20th century warming, the conditions are changing to states that should produce cooling.
If we do not cool and temperatures continue to rise (what is not happening), then this would suggest high sensitivity.
If we cool significantly, this would suggest very low or negative sensitivity.
If we cool slightly or pause, this would suggest low or medium sensitivity.
Does the concept of “Climate Sensitivity to CO2” even exist at current atmospheric concentrations?
Please consider my statement from earlier threads that:
“Atmospheric dCO2/dt varies almost contemporaneously with global temperature T, and CO2 lags T at all measured time scales, from about 9 months in the modern data record to about 800 years in the ice core record. Is there any logical explanation for this factual observation, other than the conclusion that Temperature DOES Primarily Drive CO2, and CO2 DOES NOT Primarily Drive Temperature?”
As supporting evidence, I suggest with some confidence that the future cannot cause the past.
I further suggest that the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 could be primarily humanmade (from one or more sources including the combustion of fossil fuels, deforestation, etc.) or it could be primarily natural, but the evidence suggests that the climate system is indifferent to increased atmospheric CO2 – it is only a certain subset of humanity that is all fussed about it. Clearly, the plant community loves more CO2 and they vastly outnumber us. 🙂
I further suggest that atmospheric CO2 is at or near dangerously low concentrations. Over geologic time, atmospheric CO2 has been sequestered and continues to be sequestered in carbonate rocks, peats, coals and petroleum. Carbonate beds thousands of feet thick are distributed all over our planet.
Is it not probable that all carbon-based life on Earth will cease when, due to natural sequestration, atmospheric CO2 concentration drops below certain critical levels?
Could T. S. Eliot have been thinking about CO2 starvation when he wrote:
“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Regards to all, Allan
James Cross:
I do not know if the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration is natural or anthropogenic in part or in whole, but I want to know.
Resolving this issue is hindered by the spread of untrue myths such as you provide in your post August 30, 2013 at 3:35 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/28/another-paper-blames-enso-for-the-warming-hiatus/#comment-1403584
where you mistakenly assert
No, the isotope evidence does NOT show that.
The change in the isotope ratio is in the direction expected if it is caused by the human emission. There is a 50:50 chance that the change would be in that direction or the other.
Importantly, the magnitude of the change is NOT as expected if it is caused by the human emission: the magnitude differs by a factor of 3 from what would have occurred if it were caused by the human emission. This indicates that most of the isotope change must be from some undetermined cause which is NOT the human emission.
The undetermined cause other than the human emission could be responsible for ALL the isotope ratio change when most of the change is known to be from that undetermined cause.
This does not mean the human emission has not induced some of the isotope ratio change, but there is no reason to think it has.
Richard
* Janice Moore says:
August 29, 2013 at 9:59 pm
“@ur momisugly Gail Combs — THANK YOU for all your great research cited above at 10:16am, today. You were much more responsive and more meaningfully and coherently so than Ulric with his “solar signal”s and “teleconnections,” lol”
My reply to you was:
“Plasma speed, El Nino conditions and negative AO/NAO occur at lower speeds, La Nina conditions and positive AO/NAO at higher speeds. The solar wind speed has a direct effect on polar lower atmospheric pressure. This has been studied at least in the Antarctic following CME impacts.”
Concise, coherent, and because I can see that ENSO is externally forced, and behaves as a negative feedback, I can predict it too. I am forecasting a very cold ~7 weeks from around January 7th 2014, going by the very simple rules above, you’ll see the AO/NAO go negative, and ENSO shift towards weak Nino conditions.
Of course I could be over estimating the complexity of the model that Richard proposes to build. But anything similar in complexity to the existing models, regardless of the underlying physics, would be problematic to run across the internet.
I think that a much more practical approach to the same problem would be to set up an open source global climate model project (note that I did not say general circulation model). Without analyzing the problem a lot more than I have I could not say whether or not it is sufficiently granular and/or loosely coupled that a crowdsourced compuational resource would work, but if one ended up with a model that would run on a normal personal computer (even over a few days) then one could certainly distribute a monte carlo perturbation of initial conditions and have a master collect back the results once a day or thereabouts to accumulate them and do the statistics. That, in turn, would probably depend on how the problem was coded.
There are lots of things I’ve wanted to do IN such a project, such as cover the earth not with latitude/longitude, which is a terribly nonuniform mapping of S_2 (the surface of a sphere) for purposes of unbiased quadrature or interpolation, but rather with a scalable icosahedral tessellation. By scalable, I mean that if the code were appropriately written one could e.g. divide the scale by two and rerun it to see if the granularity matters and to seek convergence. However, I absolutely, positively do not have time to either set it up or participate in it. I am heavily overcommitted and have multiple projects (not the least of which is making a batch of ale) that are languishing because of lack of time. Climate is a hobby, not a profession, for me, and the current “climate” of its funding pretty much ensures that I wouldn’t get any funding to pursue it more deeply. In the meantime, I gotta eat (and brew, and support kids in college, and teach a huge, very time consuming class, and help support my startup company, and keep dieharder afloat, and write/finish my many book projects that are underway). I shouldn’t even be posting on WUWT, but I view my participation as a sort of contribution to public education in physics and science.
Still, even with all of that, I would be willing to help SET UP an open source climate model project, simply because I have some experience with it, and perhaps provide a development template for the code as long as it were to be written in C as I have no interest in working in anything else. Somebody else — in particular somebody else with some mad programming skills and a serious knowledge of physics, at least — would need to spearhead the actual programming. There would also need to be some ground rules, or the project will quickly devolve into people seeking to “prove” AGW, or “disprove” AGW, instead of developing a swiss-army-knife universal global climate model that can, by altering its parameters, explore a vast terra incognita of input variable terrain to answer “what if” questions while recognizing the non-uniqueness of its answers.
rgb
James Cross says: @ur momisugly August 30, 2013 at 3:35 am
Regarding CO2, of course, the cycles are complex and not all of the increase is from human activity. A good bit, however, is from humans as the isotope evidence shows. Water vapor and clouds are the big feedback mechanisms that will determine whether we have low, medium, or high sensitivity…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The problem with CAGW/AGW is the arguments are superficial and once you dig they fall apart. So here are some of the results from the digging.
Re: the isotope evidence. I suggest reading this The Trouble with C12 – C13 Ratios This rather long article then goes into lots of ways the C12/C13 ratio is different from different sources natural and petrochemical showing the C12/C13 ratio pointing fingers at mankind does not stand up under close scrutiny.
………….
One of the big problems with the CO2 theory is trying to make the influence on climate bigger by bundling the effects of water into the CO2 Forcing by calling them ‘Feedbacks’ of CO2. This triples or more the effect of CO2.
Unfortunately for that conjecture CO2 FOLLOWS temperature so the oceans effected by that temperature are going to determine the CO2 level. CO2 dissolves in rain droplets and is continually washed out of the atmosphere (This is why caves form) The energy going into the oceans (and raising the surface temperature) is not from CO2 but from a combination of ozone, cloud cover and sunlight. graph Solar Energy (NASA disappeared the graph I actually wanted) and graph: Solar Radiation Intensity at various ocean depths and graph: Global Cloudiness
From Bob Tisdale: A graph of Modeled Precipitation vs Observed shows the amount of Precipitation has DECLINED from 1980 to 2010 not increased as the theory that CO2 drives water mandates. It also shows the decline is in no way linear as the graph of CO2 is.
This study also says there was a decline in cloud cover from 1979 to 2009 and a poleward shift in the jets. This would allow more solar energy into the oceans.
And this study says that change in cloud cover is due to Cosmic Rays (not CO2)
Graph of Short Wave Radiation and Graph of Long Wave Radiation
Discription:
Note that the graphs show the long wave (IR from earth?) is decreasing while the short wave (Solar?) is increasing until about the year 2000 where it levels off/(decreases?)
And then there are the humidity graphs that blow the whole notion that CO2 is connected to water completely out of the water. (pun intended.)
Earth Albedo from the Earthshine project from Project Earthshine
GRAPH: Global Relative Humidity
GRAPH: Specific Humidity at different pressures
WUWT: NASA satellite data shows a decline in water vapor
Janice Moore, Ulric Lyons
You are looking at a massive system with many forcings (I really hate that word) and feedbacks. The oceans alone act as a huge capacitor/dampener (Thank goodness)
Pamela and Svalgaard do not ‘see’ a solar mechanism for that reason and the fact the mechanism is not straight forward and direct. As I said, you have clouds, ozone, cosmic rays, wind (solar and earth), the movement of the jets, the amount of energy at various wavelengths going into the oceans at different latitudes…. And that doesn’t even take into account the gravitational pull of the sun/moon. Think of Sandy and the problems caused by the King Tide “King Tides occur when the Earth, Moon and Sun line up and maximize the gravitational forces that produce tides…” Then search all the papers on lunar cycles climate change
Here is another paper:
I think of it as a ‘child on a swing’ once the ocean oscillations get going it only takes a little bit of energy to keep it going and it is a combination of factors not just the sun that does the influencing.
Right now we are no where near ‘finding a mechanism’ we are still looking for all the pieces of the puzzle and the CO2 greenhouse effect is just a tiny piece. That is why the information on Drakes Passage intrigues me. It is another piece of the puzzle.
Pamela and Svalgaard never go the step further to ask what is causing the ocean oscillations or they put it down as ‘Chaos’ or maybe they just believe in perpetual motion machines. Me? I want to know where the energy comes from that fuels those oscillations. Sun, Moon, unicorn farts?
This is soooo simple anyone could see it years ago after the discovery of the PDO, AMO cycles it became apparent that if this accounts for the pause as seemed the most likely explanation long ago then it must also be a portion of the increase. The IPCC more or less admitted this when it said that natural variability was more pronounced than they had previously thought (duh, 18 years of pause…) last year. It’s impossible to escape the conclusions.
1) They concluded in 2000 that since their models accounted for the temperature record so accurately that natural variability was not significant effect and they had 98% certainty CO2 was responsible for the temp increase from 1979-1998. When the models no longer accurately account for the temperature record (post 2000) then obviously that means that their surety about the predictions declines. So, then the accuracy of the models is clouded significantly. It’s no longer 98% and is much lower.
2) It’s clear they had modeled the period 1979-1998 without PDO AMO and when you put that in it halves the contribution from co2. Halving the contribution from co2 means the short term response from co2 is halved. Instead of 3C by 2100 it is more likely 1.5C by 2100.
The above article simply states what was obvious from the data years ago.
1.5C is definitely more in line with how things are moving and have moved over the last 2 centuries. We don’t see 3C happening. For it to happen now would require the disappearance of the PDO AMO cycle. I asked a climate modeler from Lawrence Livermore and he said he believed AMO PDO cycles would disappear with rising temperatures. I asked what is the basis for such a prediction and he couldn’t provide an answer. So, they don’t believe the PDO AMO will continue. It’s going to disappear however I’ve never seen a paper that would explain why the PDO AMO would disappear. The fact it is currently blunting all increase from CO2 is showing that it is not currently in the process of lessening or disappearing that is obvious.
1.5C for a doubling of CO2 is the most logical and for me seems the only possible conclusion. To continue to predict 3.0C or higher sensitivity to a doubling presumes what seems like an impossible scenario which is temperatures climbing at double the rate of the 1979-1998 period for 8 consecutive decades without halt. Considering we are now in a halt that has gone on for 18 years predicting the end of halting is highly speculative and I’ve seen no scientific argument for why the cycles would change. If we take the data from the article the increase in temperature over the two decades from 1979-1998 attributable to CO2 is .28 or .14C/decade. For 80 years at .3C/decade we could get to 3C for the record rolling in the previous gains last century. However, getting double the increase rate we got during the 1979-1998 period for 8 consecutive decades seems like an outlier prediction to me. The more likely scenario is we get the .14C more or less continuously over the next 8 decades (removing the ENSO part) and that translates to about 1.8C by 2100.
The problem with this is it assumes that the .14C is entirely caused by CO2. Again, we don’t know this. It is an assumption based on removing the ENSO portion from the record. We also know the sun was at a high amplitude during the period of the 20th century in question. Other factors unknown may have contributed. If it turns out we find that other factors contributed to that .14C increase from 1979-1998 then the increase could be less than 0.14C. I personally believe .14C is the HIGH end possibility of what CO2 is doing. It is very likely that the sun had some effect as well independent of ENSO.
People will argue that other data show that CO2 doubling should have this high 3C impact. However, I have found those analysis to be flawed because I don’t know how they attribute CO2 and other factors. Looking at the historical record it is not clear to me without having more data how you can be sure that CO2 had the majority of the impact for past oscillations. This is because that depends on assumptions about the impact of everything else. With ENSO we clearly see that the modelers don’t understand the impact of everything therefore the argument about historical sensitivity is a circular logic argument. If we assume CO2 is the main and only cause of such possible variations then we calculate the effect as being the main cause. Surprise surprise.
Gail Combs says:
“Right now we are no where near ‘finding a mechanism..”
I am regularly forecasting the state of the NAO/AO at the scale of weather, so I would search for a relevant solar metric, also at the scale of weather. The next step is to identify what phenomena leads, does the jet stream move first, or does the AO change pressure first, or do tropical stratospheric winds alter first. I would suspect the solar wind speed has a direct influence on polar air pressure.