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.
Solar then?
Pamela Gray says:
“Solar then?”
Planetary Ordered Solar Theory
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/28/another-paper-blames-enso-for-the-warming-hiatus/#comment-1404675
Now don’t go presuming that you already know all about how the planets could possibly effect solar activity.
Being a woman, I know all about cycles and what used to be “divined” through them. I also (background in Audiology) know about harmonics and subharmonics (make my day). I can match a subharmonic of the lunar cycle or tidal cycle with my period. That does not make it connected, though many a women’s retreat tried to connect them. Not sure why they never tried to connect it with solar parameters, possibly because the moon was considered to be female and the Sun male. But back to the debate. This all you got? Come on!
http://www.cyclesresearchinstitute.org/cycles-astronomy/arnold_theory_order.pdf
Good godamighty I feel like I’m at a cowboy shoot and you have a peashooter toy gun holstered in a plastic belt against my Henry’s Golden Boy.
So if you consider yourself to be a scientist, tear the above linked paper apart and try to falsify it. Always, when proposing a theory, you must burn the midnight oil trying to falsify it. What did you do to do that? Please don’t tell me you tried not to falsify your premise. If you did not do that essential step, this proposed theory is being trumpeted by a lightweight.
@Pamela Gray
You are jumping the gun. I can show you many many more cycles than in your link, and do you know what, it’s all completely meaningless unless you can actually show what the planets do at weekly to inter-annual scales, and properly track the sunspot cycles, repeatedly and consistently. All else it is just numerology. I’ll prime you with the fact that what matters is configurations, some augment solar activity, some diminish it, and that a periodic return of a given configuration is not a cycle in effect, but an event string of a variety of configurations. Then by the time I have run you through all my observations on the nature of these configurations, you will have noted that me and my pea shooter were a hologram and no way are you running away from my ICBM lol
Pamela Gray says:
“So if you consider yourself to be a scientist, tear the above linked paper apart and try to falsify it.”
Is that how you waste your time, falsifying others work rather than working on your own research?
I’m definitely not wasting my time on it, it’s archaic. What I do is forecast the weather, I have to explain every mistake and exception, without exception, there is no way I could make the test more severe, it’s scary, are you brave enough for that?
So what we have here is a proposed mechanism without an initial literature review and without an unbiased search for instances where the premise does not hold true. Ulric you have a belief. That is all. No wonder you avoid discussions.
I desired a scientific discussion of the methods known to produce advances in the search for weather pattern variation drivers. Those that join that search must follow standard research practice. Introduction, literature review, problem (something is unsolved), method, results, discussion, conclusion, and future direction. All others are snake oil sellers.
Game. Set. And match.
Pamela Gray says:
“..without an unbiased search for instances where the premise does not hold true.”
Pure fabrication, as I have said the complete is opposite true in my previous comment. You are wasting my time.
“Ulric you have a belief. That is all.”
I have the only deterministic forecast system that exists on the planet, it is the future of long range weather and climate forecasting.
“No wonder you avoid discussions.”
Are you sane? look at the number of comments of ours above! If Anthony changes his mind on planetary discussion, I will present my case fully.
“Game. Set. And match.”
You are trigger happy aren’t you, and I haven’t even shown you the target yet.
I have a comment on the Nature editorial on the paper –http://www.nature.com/news/hidden-heat-1.13608. If you subscribe you should be able to comment as well. Here it is in case you don’t subscribe.
A few years ago, when the temperature hiatus was first seen, the modelers ran their models over and over to see how often 10 year stasis would recur (Science 2 October ’09 pp. 28 – 29). They ran their model 10 times for a total of 700 years and found 17 episodes of stagnating temperature, the longest of which was 15 years — which we now appear to be exceeding. Have they gone back and run the models to see how often such periods occur? If each run was for 70 years any stasis at the beginning and end of the run could have gone on longer (or have been present longer), but they’d never see it.
The paper explaining the stasis using the Pacific as a heat sink is all very nice, but it does raise the question of whether the model is falsifiable, and if so by what.
Ulric, unless you want to discuss your review of the literature that supports and refutes your premise, and your own attempt to falsify your hypothesis (and it sounds like that has happened when you have to explain why a forecast did not come true), then this discussion is done with me. We either stick to discussion of standard scientific method -which you have clearly indicated is archaic- or you are a snake oil seller. Game, set, and match.
Pamela Gray says:
“..unless you want to discuss your review of the literature that supports and refutes your premise..”
There isn’t any, my findings are too unique, though they do stand to refute all other planetary-solar theories.
“We either stick to discussion of standard scientific method -which you have clearly indicated is archaic..”
No it was the research cycles institute paper that you linked to that is archaic. I know all about scientific method, I got my science lessons from age 3 with Dad in the bath: http://bit.ly/17doqb4
So, list your literature review. I easily found one paper. I am sure that you have a list since you have just stated you know all about the scientific method. There are lots of papers. I found one and don’t have one drop of belief in your premise. It doesn’t matter if they support or reject your premise. A proper literature review would highlight both sides of the issue in proposing the problem. So cough it up. Last time I am going to ask you.
Pamela Gray says:
” I easily found one paper. […] There are lots of papers.”
On wiggle matching and numerology, that is not what I do, there are no papers that relate to my findings.
“A proper literature review would highlight both sides of the issue in proposing the problem.”
Look, when I present my findings, that is all I shall do, I’m not wasting pages on discussing other peoples failed hypothesis.
“Last time I am going to ask you.”
And the last time I will tell you the same.
Good luck getting published. What a crock.
Pamela Gray says:
“Good luck getting published. What a crock.”
Oh thanks! and for the emotional projection too. This is what I call crock:
“A system that is steadily charged with energy (which has been observed) at one end and leaks out of the system on the other (which has been observed) with random amounts of the “charge” allowed in and random amounts allowed to leak (which has been observed), combined with random storage and release of that energy within the entire system (which has been observed) will have quite a bit of “noise” and short and long term pattern variations demonstrated (which has been observed).”
It’s so wrong that the only thing that makes any sense is that it describes you rather than the Earth. A different kind of projection, it happens a lot in sciencey things.
Add in a dash of GCR cloud forcing and the wiggle-matching starts to put a real squeeze on the AGW remnant.