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
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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.
I suggest there is little to be gained in this discussion by being rancorous.
If you have a hypothesis, state it clearly and show all your work – publish on icecap.us including an Excel spreadsheet.
Do not expect people to independently duplicate your work from original data – many here have the skills but few have the time.
Do expect plenty of criticism, even if you are correct.
🙂
phlogiston (September 1, 2013 at 12:14 am)
You’ve conflated different people with completely differing ideas and severely misinterpreted what I have written about “internal”.
That’s not helpful.
David, the anthropogenic addition to naturally occurring CO2 is also not strong enough to measurably change temperature trends. And its water vapor amplification fudge factor is just that, a fudge factor.
The only entity that is able to store and release the energy needed to shift weather patterns from one regime to another is the ocean. Yes the Sun, via shortwave IR supplies the external source of energy but it is Earth’s own highly variable atmosphere that varies the amount of IR getting into the oceans.
Folks, when I talk about amount of energy needed to produce global warming, I am talking about the energy it takes to force the huge semi-permanent pressure systems and jet streams that create weather on our planet to shift to a state that brings about a sustained temperature trend up or down, or to reach a plateau and keep it there. Here is a great site that explains the systems I am talking about. Read through the whole thing. You will get a sense of the massive amounts of energy required to change these systems beyond their natural noise.
http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/docs/rst/Sect14/Sect14_1c.html
For global warming (or cooling) to occur one can imagine the amount of energy needed to force such a change and maintain it on a global scale. Until those calculations are done, all such theories about any single entity or set of entities functioning as a new driver is a wild ass guess.
Pamela Gray says:
” You will get a sense of the massive amounts of energy required to change these systems beyond their natural noise.”
The solar signal is the natural noise. I forecast intense cold for at least 3 weeks for this March, so no surprise to me that the jet was about 1000 miles south of normal, and it moved back up again in a week at most.
david (September 1, 2013 at 4:03 am) wrote:
“So can we take a small area of the earth with the same TSI, as in no change, and get a different energy accumalation that will take centuries to fully manifest? Yes, it is fairly simple. Move a cloud in and basically stop the deep penetrating solar spectrum from entering the ocean. This one change, with no change in input, can take centuries to manifest and fully accumalate within our system.
We know jet streams, and therfore weather systems and clouds move dramatically. This movement affects the residence time of energy within our system dramatically, with cloud cover location having a dramatic affect that may accumlate for decades, and not fully manifest for centuries.”
_ _
You are correct to point out the egregious, totally false, severely misleading assumption repeated deliberately many thousand times here at WUWT that constant TSI means constant surface insolation (tolerating that endlessly repeated bold-faced lie is certainly sharply at odds with dbstealey’s romanticized notion of science), but the data we have do not give the level of specificity to pinpoint clouds alone. Assertions that it’s clouds alone are based on conjecture.
The well-constrained data we have only enable us to say something about coupled solar-paced mechanical processes as a group. This includes ocean gyres, welling (up & down), evaporation, ice-transport — all wind-driven and all originating in equator-pole gradients. We know this from earth orientation observations well-constrained by the law of conservation of angular momentum.
People like PG keep rudely repeating the same bold-faced lie that TSI = surface insolation while demanding an energy calculation based on some mythical dataset that does not exist.
*
So far as I’m aware, there’s no uncontroversial multidecadal dataset representing Earth’s surface energy balance and such a thing is not even on the visible horizon moving forward.
*
That’s why it’s necessary work deductively using HARD observational constraints from the laws of large numbers & conservation of angular momentum. Then when people object, their dark ignorance &/or deception is nakedly clear, as they’re IMPLICITLY (they haven’t thought it through carefully enough to realize this) asserting that a law does not hold. (It’s not just about exploring climate. It’s about exploring human nature.)
Simple exploration is vastly superior to comically-romanticized notions of “science” (which in solar & climate arenas today actually means a toxic mixture of politics & false modeling assumptions, certainly not a worthwhile ideal towards which to aspire – quite the opposite). Formality is severely overrated, as 1+1=2 whether stated formally or not.
No where have I ever said TSI equals surface insolation. Utter nonsense. In fact our atmosphere guarantees that TSI does not ever equal surface insolation.
Ulric, the solar wind correlations with interannual terrestrial oscillations are complex, partial, & multiaxial and therefore not reliable for prediction everywhere on Earth until the multiaxial differential and transient background state are both well-characterized.
I suspect some readers are not familiar with the concept of mirage correlations, which (be careful to understand this) are physically real and arise in the simplest of coupled systems (e.g. see figure 1).
I estimate empirically that the best data reduction achievable will involve a network of 5 to 6 axes (based on equator-pole & land-ocean temperature-gradient geometry and consequent ocean gyre geometry), depending on the time of year (the north indian ocean accounting for the annual change from 5 to 6). I’m confident that a capable team with the right resources could get the job done in a few years.
WUWT is not a good place to discuss this. The primary value here — even if it often flies in the face of what is true — is not raw exploration but rather the appearance of administrative defensibility. I respect this. We can discuss further elsewhere if/when limited time permits.
PG it’s implicit in your narrative.
Paul Vaughan says:
“Ulric, the solar wind correlations with interannual terrestrial oscillations are complex, partial, & multiaxial and therefore not reliable for prediction everywhere on Earth until the multiaxial differential and transient background state are both well-characterized.”
Obviously if you correlate global and inter-annual but that misses all the essential detail that is forecast effectively so your point is spurious.
Oh trust me boys, I much prefer you hang it all out right here. If you want trial by fire -aka raw exploration-, this would be the place for it, not in some mancave where you get to say anything you want to an adoring audience. If your stuff is worth anything at all, it should be able to survive the fire. Leaving because you don’t like scrutiny exposes a significant weakness in your willingness to be taken seriously based solely on the merits of your proposed mechanism. However, if you stay, you would get further down the road to the merits of your arguments if you put some calculations to your work and explain your mechanisms in clear cause and effect language, followed by data analysis where you scrupulously seek observations that falsify your premise. -Word to the wise: In showing us the way you correlate data and connect to the mechanism, avoid making the elephant’s trunk wriggle- That way your work can be tested. Unless you don’t want it tested. In that case, take your ball and retreat to the home mancave.
Paul, how is it implicit? I see nothing implicit in my contention that atmospheric/oceanic teleconnections can produce weather pattern variations on short and long term time scales (well accepted and based on observations) such that SWIR is acted on by the atmosphere to allow in/reflect away different radiation amounts to the ocean surface (also well accepted and based on observations). I explicitly contend, as an extension to these well established systems -1. atmospheric variables acting to vary surface insolation and 2. weather pattern variation over short and long term time scales- that there is a powerful mechanism that guarantees TSI will not equal surface insolution and that this intrinsic natural mechanism can create both short term noise and long term trends in temperature data which I believe is being misinterpreted as being related to anthropogenic CO2. Clear?
To wit: this ancient old article about tropical insolation measurement demonstrated quite clearly that clear sky insolation models did not compare well with observed insolation. However, opaque sky models got within 8% of observed tropical insolation. Imagine that. Putting something that is opaque in your calculation manages to capture real observations as to how much “stuff” in the sky reflects away SWIR. The next best one was inputting precipitation independent variables into the models which resulted in output that came within 12% of actual observations. My, my, our atmosphere is very powerful! It can affect TSI to a MUCH greater degree than the Sun itself can!
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0450(1969)008%3C0205%3AASOSAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2
No, Ulric. The same is observed at high frequency (things move and there’s multi-axial turbulence in the coupling). With more computing resources and a capable team (things I don’t have) it might be possible to isolate the differentially balanced multi-axial attractors.
Okay then. Wriggle that trunk!
Pamela,
The only conclusions I can draw based on your many writings in this thread & elsewhere are:
1. You must be implicitly making some unstated false assumptions that are at sharp odds with observations.
2. You can’t see that your narrative requires violation of at least one of the laws of large numbers & conservation of angular momentum.
Pamela Gray says:
” explain your mechanisms in clear cause and effect language ”
All I can do is to point to the suitable solar metric that satisfies the scale and direction of the changes. Explaining the atmospheric physics takes local observations. I can best prove a solar case with the wealth of correlations from my forecast method, but currently there is a D-notice on planetary talk here. Which is a shame as it opens up a big can of worms on planetary-solar mechanisms.
Paul Vaughan:
I have been following this discussion with interest, but you have completely befuddled me with your post at September 1, 2013 at 11:16 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/28/another-paper-blames-enso-for-the-warming-hiatus/#comment-1405601
You say to Pamela Gray
Say what!?
Where did those assertions come from?
What “unstated false assumptions” are you claiming she “must be implicitly making”? In this thread she has stated the empirical observations which support her argument.
And I am at a complete loss to understand how anything she has said in this thread violates “at least one of the laws of large numbers & conservation of angular momentum”. Which laws and how?
Please explain because you are having a public conversation and we observers need to be given at least the minimum information to understand what you are claiming.
Richard
Paul Vaughan says:
“No, Ulric. The same is observed at high frequency (things move and there’s multi-axial turbulence in the coupling).”
Nonsense, else my forecasts would fail more often.
Ulric, are your forecasts accurate for every point on Earth?
If you review my comments, you’ll find the word “everywhere”.
We don’t all live in the UK. For example, where I live NPI (not NAO) rules. Piers’ forecast for Vancouver July 2013 was a horrendous failure. I warned that he was forecasting something I’ve NEVER seen happen in July here …and it didn’t happen again this year. He was forecasting cool & showery for the whole month and in reality we set a record for number of consecutive dry days on record. The grass was brown everywhere. A year earlier his forecast for that time of year had gone very well and I noted that in comments at WUWT. As I’ve pointed out before, when the methods go wrong they tend to go exactly wrong — that’s an expected feature of the observed nature of the differentially multi-axially-balanced coupling. As I understand, you do forecasting for Piers (but maybe I don’t have accurate info on that).
You bring interesting items to the discussion, but you also sometimes overplay your hand.
Everywhere??
Richard, precisely because they’re unstated there’s no way to know what assumptions are being made implicitly. In sharp contrast to what you say, PG’s abstract assertions are at sharp odds with observations rigidly constrained by the laws of large numbers & angular momentum. The minimal amount of information you need to see this has been given. You are a few columns of assumption-free spreadsheet calculations away from the enlightenment you claim to seek.
The more general problem going on here is that people attempt to reason from abstract theory based on false assumptions rather than being willing and able to duly appreciate and respect assumption-free observations.
Paul Vaughan says:
“Ulric, are your forecasts accurate for every point on Earth?”
You are tiresome Paul. You know that I had to look at your local temperature series to have any clear idea how to forecast for your local region, we discussed this by mail a few years back. Also if the jet moves north, not everywhere may be warm, as we saw in the U.S. this summer, skilful use of analogues can identify these variances.
“As I understand, you do forecasting for Piers”
Not any more since last year. He forecast a cool wet July for the UK too, while I have been talking about this summer being good from four years ago, and specifically said it would be hot from 6/7th July. My forecast was deterministic.
Paul Vaughan:
re your post addressed to me at September 1, 2013 at 12:40 pm.
I understand that answer to say that you cannot justify your assertions.
If you could justify them then you would have answered my questions concerning e.g. which laws were contradicted and how..
I did seek information and – as I have said here – I have obtained it from your answer.
Richard
I also believe the more talk that happens here, the more information about the plausibility of proposed connections, correlations, and mechanisms are exposed for the reader to clearly discern which theories are clear to agree with or disagree with, and which ones are muddled and fuzzy.
No theories.
Just straight observation.