From the University of New South Wales and the “chicken or the egg” department comes this claim that El Niño events will increase in intensity. Meanwhile the milquetoast La Nada of the present continues.
New method shows how historical ENSO activity is affected by external forcings
New research shows El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomena have been more active and intense during the 30-year period between 1979-2009 than at any time during the past 600 years.
At the same time, this result suggests that the intensity and activity of El Niño and La Ninas appears to increase as global average temperatures increase.
The results of this new research, published in Climate of the Past, is a significant step towards understanding where current ENSO activity sits in the context of the past according to researchers from UNSW’s Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, the University of Hawaii International Pacific Research Centre and the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
“Our research suggests in a warming world we are likely to see more extreme El Niño and La Nina events, which over the past decade in Australia have been related to extreme flooding, persistent droughts and dangerous fire seasons,” said lead author Dr Shayne McGregor from UNSW
“Importantly, this study not only tells us how ENSO activity has behaved in the past in relation to global average temperature, it also opens the window for climate models to be able to estimate more accurately how this activity will change in the future.”
The researchers used a newly defined method they had developed and measurements from lake sediment and old coral cores along with tree rings across a wide variety of locations to determine how ENSO events had changed across the Pacific over hundreds of years. From these proxies, the researchers were able to determine the state of the climate over a wide area at the same time, revealing changes in ENSO activity.
As part of the research, the team brought together the different proxy reconstructions of past climate and, where the time periods of these proxies overlapped with current instrumental data, used these periods to determine how accurately they represented contemporary ENSO activity.
Once the effectiveness of the proxies was confirmed the researchers used this information to extrapolate the climate and activity of ENSO over the past 600 years.
They then further tested the robustness of this approach by comparing their real-world data with that produced by two multi-century-long climate model simulations.
“By applying these observations and finding which climate models reproduce past changes, we will have a better idea of which climate models are more likely to reproduce the ENSO response to climate change in the future,” said co-author Prof Matt England from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.
While the research shows how external warming factors have impacted ENSO cycles, one important question remains.
“We still don’t know why. Understanding this relationship will be vital to help us get a clear idea of the future changes to global climate,” said Dr McGregor.
Paper: Inferred changes in El Niño–Southern Oscillation variance over the past six centuries
Abstract:
It is vital to understand how the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has responded to past changes in natural and anthropogenic forcings, in order to better understand and predict its response to future greenhouse warming. To date, however, the instrumental record is too brief to fully characterize natural ENSO variability, while large discrepancies exist amongst paleo-proxy reconstructions of ENSO. These paleo-proxy reconstructions have typically attempted to reconstruct ENSO’s temporal evolution, rather than the variance of these temporal changes. Here a new approach is developed that synthesizes the variance changes from various proxy data sets to provide a unified and updated estimate of past ENSO variance. The method is tested using surrogate data from two coupled general circulation model (CGCM) simulations. It is shown that in the presence of dating uncertainties, synthesizing variance information provides a more robust estimate of ENSO variance than synthesizing the raw data and then identifying its running variance. We also examine whether good temporal correspondence between proxy data and instrumental ENSO records implies a good representation of ENSO variance. In the climate modeling framework we show that a significant improvement in reconstructing ENSO variance changes is found when combining information from diverse ENSO-teleconnected source regions, rather than by relying on a single well-correlated location. This suggests that ENSO variance estimates derived from a single site should be viewed with caution. Finally, synthesizing existing ENSO reconstructions to arrive at a better estimate of past ENSO variance changes, we find robust evidence that the ENSO variance for any 30 yr period during the interval 1590–1880 was considerably lower than that observed during 1979–2009.
For more information or interviews with the researchers contact:
Alvin Stone. Media and Communications Manager.
Phone: 0418 617 366. Email: alvin.stone@unsw.edu.au
Follow us on Facebook or Twitter via @ClimateSystem
http://www.climatescience.org.au/content/397-el-nino-events-get-more-extreme-globe-warms
To me it looks like the wrong data used to get this result. If you make up data to proof your right on global warming and then use this data to do other studies you will find wrong answers.
The researchers admit: “the instrumental record is too brief to fully characterize natural ENSO variability” but still they attempt to predict future ENSO events. Since they don’t have enough data, they cook it up in those famously accurate Global Climate Models. Anyone see a problem with trying to predict the future when you don’t have enough data to understand the past?
Bob Tisdale will be laughing about this one, as will we all.
From the abstract:
It is vital to understand how the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has responded to past changes in natural and anthropogenic forcings, in order to better understand and predict its response to future greenhouse warming. To date, however, the instrumental record is too brief to fully characterize natural ENSO variability, while large discrepancies exist amongst paleo-proxy reconstructions of ENSO.
LMAO
http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/elnino/story.htm
Another example was from Governor Macquarie who in an El Niño related drought in 1814 had to import food to avoid what he called:
“…the heavy calamity of very great scarcity, both of animal feed and of grain, if not in an actual famine.”
The thought of famine in Australia seems quaint, from a 20th century perspective. Famine is what occurs in other countries during droughts, not here. And severe famines have certainly occurred in various parts of the world, during El Niño events. Perhaps the most notorious was the El Niño of 1877. This event resulted in the deaths of over nine million people in China and eight million in India. But this disaster led to the first scientific attempts to understand and predict drought and famine. Henry Blanford, then the head of the India Meteorological Department noticed that atmospheric pressures were higher than usual over India during the drought. He advised meteorologists in other parts of the British Empire of this fact and asked them about atmospheric pressures in their colonies……”
1877 seems pretty extreme to me. What was the CO2 levels then?
And here I thought that empirical data sufficient to calculate global average temperature is a recent phenomenon, ie. since the satellite era. Apparently actual accurate, and thorough, measurements have been gathered for about 600 years. No wonder they’re comfortable making predictions/projections/forecasts/guesses.
/sarc.
Sand castles built on tenuous assumptions.
“…two multi-century-long climate model simulations.”
“…Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science…”
These people are funny!
In a nutshell:we don’t know enough to really know.It seems Australian universities are full of academics like England that peer eternally over their models and “their newly defined method”- whatever it is.
http://www.co2science.org/subject/e/summaries/ensogw.php
This is an interesting blurb on CO2 Science. Research indicates that during warm periods ENSO events are less intense and during cool periods more intense.
Will Nitschke says: “Sand castles built on tenuous assumptions.”
“And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually.”
Then they use models to “reconstruct” something where there’s not enough data to start with and;
It’s the Sun, stupid. It’s called Maunder Minimum for a reason.
On the one hand the warming enthusiasts “know” El Nino warms the planet and even endorse papers that attempt to remove the warming caused to produce an ENSO-free trend (eg Rahmstorf and Foster) and on the other hand they want El Nino intensity to be a feedback to warming.
When you’re on shaky ground about something your logic has to twist and turn to support it.
Our research suggests in a warming world….
great! so if it warms, we’ll know what to expect
To borrow Walter Cronkite’s quip about Australia ‘there are too many reporters, not enough news’, Australia has too many ‘climate researchers’ and not enough (reliable) data.
I guess that applies to climate research in general.
geran says: “Bob Tisdale will be laughing about this one, as will we all.”
Actually, I’m shaking my head in disbelief at the levels of absurdity reached in climate science.
Following the link I can only get the abstract. Not familiar with the clim-past.net site but I don’t see a way to get the full paper. Anyway, the key issue to me is exactly how they “confirmed the effectiveness of the proxies”. Anyone able to comment?
Makes sense to validate observations against computational climate models, known not to capture ENSO adequately, does it?
…in related news, summer warmth is found to cause the sun to shine more intensely.
Reduced global cloudiness induced by high solar activity allows more energy into the oceans to skew ENSO in favour of El Ninos relative to La Ninas.
I sure wish I could find Gavin’s comment on RC where he stated that not only would El Nino’s become more severe, there would be more of them AND the PDO would likely NEVER switch back negative again. It was early on in the life of RC, probably 2004 or 05 at the latest.
Allan Watt @October 30, 2013 at 3:21 pm
Click on the bottom link in the head post:
http://www.clim-past.net/9/2269/2013/cp-9-2269-2013.html
and then click on the pdf button on the right hand side.
I love how CO2 seems to be able to impart a temporal effect to the Earth’s climate processes.
It seems that the big increase in temperatures in 1998 reached back in time to create the very intense El Nino that preceded the increase in temperatures. Cause and effect in action you see!
Everything is so simple and logical when you are a true believer (and when there is money involved!)
Alan
It would be great if this were true. We really need the water here in CA.
“””Our research suggests in a warming world we are likely to see more extreme El Niño and La Nina events, which over the past decade in Australia have been related to extreme flooding, persistent droughts and dangerous fire seasons,” said lead author Dr Shayne McGregor from UNSW””
Now that’s a mouthful.
Let’s see “extreme flooding ‘ That is an alarmist statement. Extemes of water level define “flood”.
Then there’s: “persistent drought” Persistence in dryness defines drought. More alarmism.
And: “dangerous fire seasons”. I’m sure wildfires are never safe.
All this from “extreme” El Nino,La Nina events. All caused by global warming, of course.
Alarmism in the rhetoric renders this tripe, tripe.
It seems that the cause-and-effect may have been put into reverse gear here.
More and stronger ‘ninos’ cause warming to appear, but now we need to determine what causes the balance between ‘ninos’ and ‘ninas’ to switch every thirty years or so.