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
I believe it, I have always thought El ninos were caused by oceans warming (from the modern solar maximum) and La Nina’s will be more prevalent during cooling periods
*…ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.*
Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?
Actually, this is an excellent example of Warmist Method. You find some existing proxy records. You declare all of them comparable. You select some that fit your conclusion. You pal-review publish your paper and conclusion that increasing CO2 causes stronger El Nino and La Nina phases. Voila!
Being a graduate student in climate science must be really easy, except at Tech.
If readers have not already formed a conclusion, note that matt England is among the most alarmist of the Australian clutch, the one that includes Karoly, Lewandowsky, Steffen, Flannery, Pitman to name just a few.
These are like canaries in the mine for me. When they tumble onto the possibility of life in science without reliance on CO2, I’ll say that a tide has turned.
Until then, they seem more like alarmist advocates that scientists.
History shows that the environment always finds a way to adapt http://climal.com/Environmental-Adaptation-Through-Technology.php
The warmists have started with the assumption that 100% of the warming in the last 50 years was due to the increase in atmospheric CO2 and hence when there was an increase in El Niño events for a specific period in time they assumed the increase in El Nino events was caused by the increase in CO2.
Rather than starting with a single hypothesis, just as investigating a crime, suspects (hypotheses) are not eliminated until the case is solved. It would be unthinkable, irrational; to pick one suspect and then ignore logic and observations that exonerates the favourite suspect or that connects another person (hypothesis) with the crime (solution to the physical problem).
Marsh and Svensmark’s cloud research found that the top of cloud temperature in the tropics closely follows cosmic ray flux. The effect is for a belt that encircles the globe centered on the tropics. When there is more cosmic ray flux the clouds tops of the low level clouds become warmer and hence radiate more long wave radiation off to space, intensifying the cooling effect of the cloud. (i.e. Changing the cloud radiative characteristics without necessarily increasing the amount of cloud cover in that particular region or the amount of water in the cloud.)
The hypothesized physical reason for the change in cloud radiative properties is that the increase in ions created by the CRF (or by the electroscavenging effect which is caused by solar wind bursts which creates a charge differential in the ionosphere which removes ions from the tropics) causes an increase in cloud nucleation specks which results in smaller more numerous water droplets in the clouds. The total water in the cloud is the same however the cloud droplet size changes. As a result of this physical change in the cloud droplet size – smaller cloud droplets – cloud properties change such that long wave radiation more readily passes through the cloud. The satellite analysis indicated that 2/3 of the clouds over the oceans are of this type.
So the fact that there is now a sudden increase in La Niña events supports the assertion that the period of higher El Niño events was due to solar magnetic cycle changes rather than the increase in atmospheric CO2. Further evidence to support that assertion is the sudden recovery of sea ice in the Arctic and the sudden increase in sea ice to record levels in the Antarctic for all months of the year.
i.e. The Marsh and Svensmark’s cloud property hypothesis is dependent on the amount of ions in the atmosphere and is hence reversible, variable. The CO2 mechanism on the other hand assumed that CO2 causes warming in the tropics which is assumed to result in more water in the atmosphere in the tropics which in turn amplifies the CO2 warming. A predicted signature of the CO2 tropical amplification warming is higher temperatures in the tropical troposphere at around 5km to 8 km above the surface of the earth which is not observed which indicates something is fundamentally incorrect in the general circulation models (no amplification in addition to significantly less warming than predicted in the tropics)
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/DOUGLASPAPER.pdf
A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions
Bob Tisdale,
I thought of the Jimi Hendrix connection to falling sand castles as well. It also reminds me of another track from that same album (Axis:Bold As Love) called “Up From The Slies.” Interstingly this song about an extra-terrestrial returning to earth has a direct reference to ‘climate change.’ Jimi’s response to changes he encountered as with many things was very relaxed!
“I have lived here before, the days of ice,
And of course this is why I’m so concerned,
And I come back to find the stars misplaced
and the smell of a world that has burned.
The smell of a world that has burned.
Well, uh, maybe it’s just a change of
climate.
I can dig it, I can dig it baby, I just want to see.”
This was in 1967!
Cheers,
Coops.
One thing that concerns me is that these professional researchers can take a pay-cheque after knowing (or not knowing which could be even worse!) that they have ignored the historical record of La Nina flooding in Queensland which shows that the period of 1880-1900 was far more extreme than either 2011 or the even greater event in 1974. The frequency was exceptional and the strength far greater during those two decades than the recent events. How do they get away unchallenged in making these fabricated claims relating to ENSO events?
My car came with climate control as a standard option. So for me, climate starts when I get in the car, and ends when I get to work.
So what is the universally agreed definition of ENSO? What are the S.I. units of ENSO?
michael hart says:
October 30, 2013 at 9:57 pm
So what is the universally agreed definition of ENSO? What are the S.I. units of ENSO?
++++++
It stands for El Nino Southern Oscillation:
The Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), is a measure of the difference in surface air pressure between Darwin, Australia and Tahiti
This pressure can change the prevailing winds and form El Nino or La Nina, I believe
There is an interesting story involving British scientist Sir Gilbert Walker in the 1920’s getting a team of Indian workers to troll through mounds of paperwork to ‘discover’ the Southern Oscillation. I can’t find the original audio story from years ago, but I have this…
More http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/prednino/overview.php
“A lot of climate experts are expecting the global climate to take a step up the next time an El Nino occurs,” Professor England said. “Temperatures that year will break records in a significant way.”
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/global-warming-likely-to-energise-el-nino-effect-research-shows-20131031-2wlgg.html#ixzz2jHPp7m1q
We won’t have too long to wait to have this statement blasted, literally, out of the water!
From the “yes this is complete garbage but at least we got the funding” department….
These guys are statistical idiots:
“Here, as in the model analysis, we focus on the variability in the classical ENSO band of 2–8 yr by filtering each of the 14 ENSO reconstructions with a 10 yr high-pass Butterworth filter.”
A Butterworth filter is a hardware filter widely used in electronics. There is absolutely no reason to use it for filtering time series and a number of reasons not to do so. The Butterworth filter is included in MATLAB in order to permit simulation of electronic circuits. If I remember rightly it happens to be presented as the first alternative when you select filter type.
Or perhaps they aren’t ignorant after all, One of the drawbacks of Butterworth filters is that they have a tendency to cause “ringing” i. e. excessive swings near the end of the filtered data. Might come in handy if you want a hockey-stickish result.
Bob Tisdale says:
October 30, 2013 at 3:13 pm
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.
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+1. These dingbats at UNSW have no credibility in my opinion. They get a big grant and just appear to make things up like much of the crap climate “research”. I’m astonished that NOAA got sucked into this and Uni of Hawaii -well no need to say where they are coming from. Not worth a pinch of the proverbial. “Centre of Excellence” in what exactly? Appalling!
FrankK says:
October 31, 2013 at 3:18 am
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Don’t forget that the “Center of Excellence” is an Orwellian “Center of Excellence”
I guess that applies to climate research in general.
Bob Tisdale says:
October 30, 2013 at 3:13 pm
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.
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Yes, due to CAGW, our grandchildren won’t know what science is!
Stephen Wilde says:
“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.”
Lower solar activity leads to weaker trade winds and El Nino conditions/episodes, e.g. 1997/98 and 2009/10 El Nino’s:
http://snag.gy/nf9SK.jpg
And for the longer term, cooler periods have greater El Nino frequency:
http://www.co2science.org/subject/e/summaries/ensogw.php
Authors might even have some truth on their paper – but opposite of what they are suggesting. Solar activity might trigger more intense ENSO-activity, which distributes warm water to higher latitudes (just as Bon always reminds us). Thus planet as a whole warms.
During low solar activity there is less intense ENSO-activity and planet cools.
Due to tropical thermostat effect, the sea temperatures at tropics do not change on either phases.
More intense ENSO activity is thus the cause, not the result of the warming.
some one said 180 out of phase.
Well , last big El Nino was 1998. When did the world stop warming ???
May be 90 degrees out of phase, if ENSO is the cause of warming, not warm. So they should look at dT/dt vs ENSO. But of course Prof Timmermann & Co. already know what they are going to find because they’ve decided the result when they put in the grant application.
No need to look for other explanations.