From the “settled science” department. It seems even Dr. Kevin Trenberth is now admitting to the cyclic influences of the AMO and PDO on global climate. Neither “carbon” nor “carbon dioxide” is mentioned in this article that cites Trenberth as saying: “The 1997 to ’98 El Niño event was a trigger for the changes in the Pacific, and I think that’s very probably the beginning of the hiatus,”
This is significant, as it represents a coming to terms with “the pause” not only by Nature, but by Trenberth too.
Excerpts from the article by Jeff Tollefson:
The biggest mystery in climate science today may have begun, unbeknownst to anybody at the time, with a subtle weakening of the tropical trade winds blowing across the Pacific Ocean in late 1997. These winds normally push sun-baked water towards Indonesia. When they slackened, the warm water sloshed back towards South America, resulting in a spectacular example of a phenomenon known as El Niño. Average global temperatures hit a record high in 1998 — and then the warming stalled.
For several years, scientists wrote off the stall as noise in the climate system: the natural variations in the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere that drive warm or cool spells around the globe. But the pause has persisted, sparking a minor crisis of confidence in the field. Although there have been jumps and dips, average atmospheric temperatures have risen little since 1998, in seeming defiance of projections of climate models and the ever-increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. Climate sceptics have seized on the temperature trends as evidence that global warming has ground to a halt. Climate scientists, meanwhile, know that heat must still be building up somewhere in the climate system, but they have struggled to explain where it is going, if not into the atmosphere. Some have begun to wonder whether there is something amiss in their models.
Now, as the global-warming hiatus enters its sixteenth year, scientists are at last making headway in the case of the missing heat. Some have pointed to the Sun, volcanoes and even pollution from China as potential culprits, but recent studies suggest that the oceans are key to explaining the anomaly. The latest suspect is the El Niño of 1997–98, which pumped prodigious quantities of heat out of the oceans and into the atmosphere — perhaps enough to tip the equatorial Pacific into a prolonged cold state that has suppressed global temperatures ever since.
“The 1997 to ’98 El Niño event was a trigger for the changes in the Pacific, and I think that’s very probably the beginning of the hiatus,” says Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. According to this theory, the tropical Pacific should snap out of its prolonged cold spell in the coming years.“Eventually,” Trenberth says, “it will switch back in the other direction.”
…
…none of the climate simulations carried out for the IPCC produced this particular hiatus at this particular time. That has led sceptics — and some scientists — to the controversial conclusion that the models might be overestimating the effect of greenhouse gases, and that future warming might not be as strong as is feared. Others say that this conclusion goes against the long-term temperature trends, as well as palaeoclimate data that are used to extend the temperature record far into the past. And many researchers caution against evaluating models on the basis of a relatively short-term blip in the climate. “If you are interested in global climate change, your main focus ought to be on timescales of 50 to 100 years,” says Susan Solomon, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
…
The simplest explanation for both the hiatus and the discrepancy in the models is natural variability. Much like the swings between warm and cold in day-to-day weather, chaotic climate fluctuations can knock global temperatures up or down from year to year and decade to decade. Records of past climate show some long-lasting global heatwaves and cold snaps, and climate models suggest that either of these can occur as the world warms under the influence of greenhouse gases.
…
One important finding came in 2011, when a team of researchers at NCAR led by Gerald Meehl reported that inserting a PDO pattern into global climate models causes decade-scale breaks in global warming3. Ocean-temperature data from the recent hiatus reveal why: in a subsequent study, the NCAR researchers showed that more heat moved into the deep ocean after 1998, which helped to prevent the atmosphere from warming6. In a third paper, the group used computer models to document the flip side of the process: when the PDO switches to its positive phase, it heats up the surface ocean and atmosphere, helping to drive decades of rapid warming7.
…
Scientists may get to test their theories soon enough. At present, strong tropical trade winds are pushing ever more warm water westward towards Indonesia, fuelling storms such as November’s Typhoon Haiyan, and nudging up sea levels in the western Pacific; they are now roughly 20 centimetres higher than those in the eastern Pacific. Sooner or later, the trend will inevitably reverse. “You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.
Read the full article here:
http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-case-of-the-missing-heat-1.14525
“Some have begun to wonder whether there is something amiss in their models.”
Only some? and only begun? Those models were never really validated, and the first real test shows they are wrong.
All they had “valid” in the models was post-hoc validation of the 10-15 years warming. Nothing else.
“Now, as the global-warming hiatus enters its sixteenth year, scientists are at last making headway in the case of the missing heat.”
They needed 16 years to acknowledge the existence of the missing heat!
“…none of the climate simulations carried out for the IPCC produced this particular hiatus at this particular time.”
that bears repeating.
“some scientists — to the controversial conclusion that the models might be overestimating the effect of greenhouse gases”
hear hear. spectacular fail is for the others not good enough?
” palaeoclimate data that are used to extend the temperature record far into the past. ” rotfl. this pseudo science cannot explain any paleoclimate event.
” researchers caution against evaluating models on the basis of a relatively short-term blip in the climate” – but against the 10 years of warming and against the continuously faked history? That 150 years thermometer history has unfortunately so many irreversible adjustments in the data that is useless for science. The continuous barbarisation of the historical data is one major trait of this pseudo science.
This is not science, but pseudo science, where data is fit for theory:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/12/23/giss-busted-by-their-own-data/
“The simplest explanation for both the hiatus and the discrepancy in the models is natural variability. ”
Welcome to the natural variability world. The simplest explanation for the 1980-1998 warming is natural variability.
“You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.”
Well well, not fixing the models is good for skeptics. Keep running the failed models. The way “CO2 forcing” is modelled is wrong and it will not suddenly deliver good results. It is the net heat flows that are real and those are missing in the models.
If the rapid warming from 1976-1998 was positive PDO plus CO2 induced warming, then what was the nearly identical rapid warming between 1912-1944? Positive PDO plus ???
If you accept a PDO influence, then 1912-1976 becomes indistinguishable from 1976-now. Where is there room for a significant CO2 influence?
aaron says:
January 16, 2014 at 5:14 am
So, PDO in. That means Aerosol out for 40s, 50s.
Aerosols have never explained this period, they just wanted people to believe it. Sulfates in the lower atmosphere only last a few days and are washed out of the atmosphere by rain. Remember the acid rain scare too back in the 1980s?
Thank you so much for giving us access to your “The complex planetary synchronization structure of the solar system” paper. This time I am going to get FedExKinkos to print it off for me in living color so I can savor it. I read a Chinese paper a couple of years ago (can’t find it on my computer at the moment) that posited the same thing, and it rang true for me then as well. Again, thanks for thinking of those opus who can’t drop $40 every time a paper is cited.
Ian Schumacher,
Here is the ARGO data from before they made their “adjustments”.
And here is the ARGO data vs models.
Here is the NH ARGO data.
And here is ARGO data from 65N to 65S, up to 2012 — the entire global ocean, for all practical purposes.
Finally, language matters: there is NO “Pause”. Global warming will only be seen to pause, if it resumes at some future time. But so far, global warming has stopped.
The planet may well resume warming. It may also begin to cool. At this point, we simply do not know. What we do know is that all the grant money is geared to global warming. There will have to be a lot of backing and filling if global cooling begins. But by now, the alarmist crowd’s credibility is shot.
Bob Tisdale, take a bow.
“And many researchers caution against evaluating models on the basis of a relatively short-term blip in the climate.” In other words, the models may be wrong over the short term, but the models are correct over the long term – so we will extend this debate into the next century.
The models can’t be wrong, so ignore what the climate is actually doing so we can pick your pockets some more to prepare for catastrophic heating, which is always waiting for us in the distant future.
NZ Willy:
Oceans pile up at every coast line, and on every tidal cycle. We call it waves or high tides.
The ENSO piling is a result of thousands of miles of trade winds, creating a massive fetch. It pushes the warm ocean surface water west, and it is eventually stymied, from continuing further west, by the land masses in the west Pacific.
We know the West Pacific Warm Pool exists, and we know that warm water is stored below the surface there. We also know that it is higher in surface elevation, than the East Pacific, during La Nina, and Neutral phases of ENSO. The only real question is do the phases cancel each other out, or can they add and subtract to the surface temps, over the time periods that were being analyzed?
“Records of past climate show some long-lasting global heatwaves and cold snaps, and climate models suggest that either of these can occur as the world warms under the influence of greenhouse gases.”
What? As the world “warms,” either long-lasting global heatwaves or cold snaps can occur? Talk about covering all your bases. So if the world enters a new ice age, they will simply claim it’s just a long-lasting global cold snap caused by a warming world. If neither warming nor cooling happens and temperatures remain flat, they will claim it is the result of “natural variability.” In other words, they have designed their theory so that it cannot be falsified. That is a clear sign that they are promoting a hoax. True scientists, who are only interested in discovering truth, would point out what events would falsify their theory. Climate alarmists never do that.
DirkH says:
January 16, 2014 at 4:10 am
That’s like celebrating the 100,000th Lancaster bomber built and shipped over the Atlantic while not one of them ever made it through the Kammhuber line.
Could there be a more fatuous and inaccurate ‘analogy’ in the entire history of the internet?
Anyway, looks like us Luke-warmers are winning the argument!
“You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.”
http://morriscourse.com/elements_of_ecology/images/ocean_currents.jpg
http://www.plantsciences.ucdavis.edu/plantsciences_Faculty/Bloom/CAMEL/Art/CurrentsOcean.jpg
The ocean currents above show how energy from the E equatorial Pacific move west with trade winds and spread into 3 different directions from the W equatorial Pacific. One warm current moves N toward the Arctic, the other moves S towards Antarctica and the main one moves energy towards the Indian ocean which joins surface currents that eventually reach the tip of South Africa and move up the Eastern side of North and South America until reach Europe and finally the Arctic. This is how the planet naturally removes energy from a hot tropical regions preventing it from positive feedback.
Yes you can keep piling warm water from solar energy in the w equatorial Pacific. This happens all the time when El Ninos don’t occur and the build up in the W equatorial Pacific doesn’t occur because as above. It is moved in ocean currents away from this region to other parts of the world where it warms them. Trenberth needs to learn the worlds surface ocean currents.
All one has to do is look at their PDO chart and see that the ocean controls the global temperature. What is so hard about that? From 1975-1998 we had warming with positive PDO, and it’s been neutral since with no warming. Prior to 1975 we had cooler temperatures with a negative PDO. Real scientists would simply explain this and move on, instead we waste billions and stupify the population.
Finally, they are on the right track. Much is unknown. And that`s what academia and warmist won`t admit too.
I get it!! It all makes sense now. When there is cooling or a ‘pause’ it’s completely natural, but when its warming, its man made CO2 ..
A do-over (on account of a formatting muff)
He had the “+” and “-” terminals reversed; the resulting ‘short’ (aka ‘shot’) has been heard ’round the world …
.
The “piling up” and “sloshing” of water in bodies of water has a name: seiching.
You can get a good summary here: http://www.cayugafisher.net/pages/water/wind_driven_water.php
Do the Trenberths fully comprehend the amount of water on this planet and the vast density difference between air and water? I truly wonder.
“The latest suspect is the El Niño of 1997–98, which pumped prodigious quantities of heat out of the oceans and into the atmosphere — perhaps enough to tip the equatorial Pacific into a prolonged cold state that has suppressed global temperatures ever since”. So the oceans pumped out so much heat in 1 year it has taken the last 17 years to not yet replace it. Yet the temperature spike was what – a fraction of a degree? Then again the temperature did not fall and slowly rise back to its original level over those 17 years, it simply stopped rising. Hmmm!!!
Then again the cornerstone of AGW is rising CO2 reduces energy loss to space yet the NOAA data shows energy loss to space has been increasing since 1980 not reducing. Hmmm!!!
The cornerstone of CAGW is positive feedback from water vapour the signature of which, so they claim, is a hotspot in the upper tropical troposphere yet thousands of balloon flights have not found such a hotspot. Hmmm!!!!
“If you are interested in global climate change, your main focus ought to be on timescales of 50 to 100 years,” yet the entire period used as the basis of the gloabl warming argument is 1980 to 1998 or 18 years. Between 1940 and 1980 the world was cooling while CO2 was rising and between 1900 and 1940 the world was warming while CO2 wasn’t particularly rising. So we have correlation only between 1980 and 1998 (18 years) with zero or negative correlation over the remaining 96 years but this is enough to prove CAGW deyond doubt? Hmmm!!!
The climate has a very long time constant because of the huge thermal mass of the oceans, so the CO2 already emitted will cause temperatures to continue to rise for decades. Yet the oceans can reverse all that heating in one El Nino year. So the time constant is hugely long when that suits and also extremely short when it suits – a time constant that is both long and short at the same time. Hmmm!!!
You know what, I start to smell a very large rat.
The new narrative now is:
Pause or Freeze :Natural Causes
Warming: Co2
Of course the answer is they don’t have clue.
This si just another PR operation of Damage Limitation.
they are now roughly 20 centimetres higher than those in the eastern Pacific
And from:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/10/an-illustrated-introduction-to-the-basic-processes-that-drive-el-nino-and-la-nina-events/#more-100903
“With all of that warm water being piled up in the western tropical Pacific, and with all of the cool water being drawn from the eastern equatorial Pacific, the surface of the water—the sea level—in the west Pacific Warm Pool is about 0.5 meters (approximately 1.5 feet) higher in elevation than it is in Cold Tongue Region in the east.”
My questions are these:
Does the difference have to rise from 0.2 m to 0.5 m before the next El Nino occurs?
However should an El Nino start now, does that mean it will be a relatively weak one since the rise is only 0.2 m instead of 0.5 m? Thank you.
Notice also how Nature delays, destroy Science.
Nature only makes that article because they have an “answer” not because they have a question.
Russ R. says:
January 16, 2014 at 12:34 pm
“We also know that it is higher in surface elevation, than the East Pacific, during La Nina, and Neutral phases of ENSO. The only real question is do the phases cancel each other out, or can they add and subtract to the surface temps, over the time periods that were being analyzed?”
The ocean currents are always wanting to move the solar heated tropical oceans energy towards the poles. With a La Nina the energy in the tropics is quickly dispersed to other regions via ocean surface currents. With a El Nino it only delays this solar energy from reaching other regions, so that why we get a sudden jump once it is released. This is why it is impossible for them to cancel each other out due to both phases involve moving energy away from the tropical oceans.
Sorry, but it’s still just a stupid alarmist article. It differentiates between sceptics and scientists (surely an insult to all the real scientists out there), and it quotes someone stating in all seriousness that climate should be studied on timescales of 50-100 years. My arse! I mean, let’s not dare mention tens of thousands of years and longer, lest we draw attention to the fact our current times are not unprecedented. It’s a very pathetic article.