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.”
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…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.
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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.
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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.
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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
NZ Willy says:
January 16, 2014 at 10:33 am
I reckon a major component of the “mysterious” pause is simply that they can’t adjust the recent temperatures because they’re too well documented….
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Not to mention the fact warmists do not have control of the satellite records and they can no longer ‘fudge’ the surface records without it being blatantly obvious.
U. Thorvaldsson says:
January 16, 2014 at 10:41 am
Hey, one minute, what happened to the dust bowl years, in that “temperature” graph ?…
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This is what happened: GISS graphs from 1980, 1987 and 2007 a side by side comparison (H/T Jo Nova.)
I think they need to look at their climate sensitivity argument as I seem to remember that it is based on the following, (as the atmosphere heats up it will cause the oceans to heat up and release more CO2 into the atmosphere which in turn increases the temperature of the atmosphere in a positive feedback loop)
Doesn’t this document bring the positive feedback loop argument into question and thus their climate sensitivity figures?
Trenberth’s take on the water piling up is a tad simplistic, without a full blown La Nina it will not get any higher, nor will it store much heat. With neutral conditions I would be confident that the big tropical thermostat that Willis has described will keep the heat in check. Big La Nina will store heat, but what has been transpiring lately an El Nino would be a big disappointment to Trenberth.
As Bruce Cobb notes that classic line- “Climate sceptics have seized on the temperature trends as evidence that global warming has ground to a halt.”
when it was climate alarmists who pounced upon their treemometers and coremometers with a new kid on the block theory and made their catastrophist forecasts, whereas rational skeptics simply began to observe the real thermometers. It was then that alarmists seized upon disappearing or reducting particular thermometer readings.
Nature article was fairly unbiased other than not understanding that “skeptic” and “scientist” are one and the same.
Trenberth- obviously a genious. He will soon be rewarded with a big $$$ bearing prise for this latest “discovery”. Thereby the CAGW crowd can claim the whole idea as one generated in-house.
Regarding the word description “sloshes”, you know Bob Tisdale and I have used this description for a long time now.
It is more-or-less an accurate description of what occurs. When the trade winds are no longer blowing as fast as they normally do, they are no longer pushing/pulling the water surface from the eastern Pacific to western Pacific as much as they normally do. Then gravity takes over and the surface water moves backward from the western side to the eastern side, opposite to what normally happens .
Is the accurate description “sloshes back”? Well, when we are talking about water, it is just a quick short-version explanation. There is a much longer, perhaps more accurate description, but it takes many words to go through it. Sloshes sounds funny but it is close enough and most people will get the idea in one word, versus the textbook chapter it would normally take.
I’m pretty sure I used this term more than a dozen times going back 5 years.
The one thing this paper is missing is a theme song. Since they failed to provide one, I am going to nominate my choice. Maybe the hockey team could consider this, consider this as a possible career move. I wonder if Gavin can sing?
New Scientist: “The Met Office admits that we still know far too little about how these natural cycles work, and how big they are. ”
In other words they haven’t a clue. Then how come the science is settled? How come we are legislating and taxing ourselves into the dark ages in order to fine tune the Global thermostat?
In an oceanographic context, the term “sloshes” has a seiching (standing wave) connotation that is totally misleading when applied to equatorial ocean dynamics. Variantly wrong interpretations of that term are amply in evidence here. The simple phrase “drains eastward” is a far better description of what actually happens.
“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.
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If they believe this, then why do they constantly report yearly temperatures with their climate models? If yearly fluctuations are unimportant why not show global mean temperatures on a century or half century frequency?
They can report the average global temperature for the entire 21st century and we can all wait to see if they were right.
Will Nitschke says:
January 16, 2014 at 2:58 pm
Trenbeth was for global warming causing more El Ninos before he was for fewer El Ninos causing less global warming. It’s the modified John Kerry doctrine with a twist, applied to Climate Science.
I give it a 9.0 for degree of difficulty and a 6.5 for execution.
So this paper appears to say much the same thing as the Carter, Mclean , DeFreitus one that caused such gnashing of teeth?
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=defreitus+%2C+carter+.+mclean&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&gfe_rd=cr&ei=ZYjYUtXkDamN8Qfb0IDwAQ#q=defreitas+,+carter+.+mclean&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&spell=1
dyugle says:
January 16, 2014 at 3:46 pm
I think they need to look at their climate sensitivity argument as I seem to remember that it is based on the following, (as the atmosphere heats up it will cause the oceans to heat up and release more CO2 into the atmosphere which in turn increases the temperature of the atmosphere in a positive feedback loop)
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Actually it was CO2 cause more IR to heat the oceans causing more water to evaporate. This allows the warmists to claim water as a feed back of CO2.
Here is the ‘BIG LIE’ straight from NASA:
Andrew Dessler has a great career ahead of him as a used car salesman.
ColdinOz says: “Why does Trenberth speak as though recent ElNino’s are anomalous events, which they would have to be to support his assertion/prediction.”
A La Nina is simply an exaggerated ENSO-neutral phase. El Ninos are the anomalous phase of ENSO.
During El Ninos, trade winds reverse in the western tropical Pacific and become westerlies; and the equatorial counter current strengthens and carries huge volumes of warm water eastward. The relocation of that warm water one-quarter to almost halfway around the globe drastically alters the normal weather patterns.
Gentlemen –
It may be of no consequence, but the “FICKLE OCEAN” image of two states of the Pacific – at least one of those is bogus. And I don’t mean bogus as in a model being bogus. If you look carefully at the lower image, it is a Photoshopped version of the upper image, just with the colors changed. To me that is as bad as the Photoshopped polar bear and ice flow image of a few years ago.
“medel” should be “model”
[Fixed. ~mod.]
…not my day… I failed to mention that the FICKLE OCEAN image is in the Nature article.
Regarding the figure. Assuming that the pacific caused negative temp anomalies in the 50’s and 60’s and positive for the 80’s and 90’s, then their models need to be redone because the models assume the warming from the 60’s to the late 90’s was CO2 based. But their own chart shows a bunch of the temperature climb to be natural variablity
It’d be a travesty if Bob T’s work wasn’t recognized as his.
Harold Ambler says:
Still, we argue over fractional degrees of temperature “anomaly,” accepting that there is something special, normative, or magical about temps of the past 30 years, or of the past century.
The entire conversation, particularly in the MSM, takes the up-and-down anomaly discussion way too seriously. Does Kevin Trenberth really believe that the ups and downs of a few tenths of a degree represent hair-raising temperature swings rather than a self-regulating system displaying the minor fluctuations around something very close to homeostasis?
The realists will have to, eventually, argue the warmists down on this one, in the popular media. As long as New York Times readers, USA Today readers, and NBC Nightly News watchers believe that they’re seeing a roller coaster rather than a wiggle, the war will never be won.
^Repeated for effect.^
Prof Richard Lindzen writes:
The climate alarmist camp has been scaring the public with their wild-eyed charts, which blow up 1/10th degree changes into scary looking runaway global warming. But as Lindzen writes, these are small changes with no need for any external cause.
Furthermore, it has been shown that CO2 has, if anything, a negligible effect on global T. It may have no effect at all. We simply do not know, because there are no testable measurements showing any effect from CO2: any effect, even if it exists, is simply too small to measure.
Finally, it is a perversion of the English language to call this a “pause”. It can only be a “pause” if warming resumes.
But as of 17 years ago, global warming has stopped. <–That is the correct use of the language. If Nature editors were honest, they would use the language correctly.
“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 warming.”
No sh**, Sherlock. Actually entering in a real-world and connected phenomenon into the models made them act more like the real world?
Wow. Whodathunk?
The PDO was discovered in 1997. Ten years ago people were already saying that the timing of the PDO’s phases indicated that we were heading into a slowdown and a possible/probable cooling.
By 1990 we were all told that they knew what was happening with the climate and that it was CO2 causing the climate to warm – strongly implying that all the factors were known and all the factors were accounted for in the models and in their overall thinking. When the PDO was discovered, none of them came out and said, “You know, we need to incorporate the PDO into the models, don’t we?”
OBVIOUSLY, ALL of the factors should be in the models. Any twerp with half a brain would know that.
It has taken them since 1997 – coincidentally the beginning of the hiatus – to FINALLY even THINK of putting the PDO into the models. And when they did, VIOLA! the models began to act more like the real world!
Are these guys numb nuts or what?
This is a science with so little science in it that it boggles the mind. Or at least too few actual scientists with brains capable of logic instead of wishful thinking. Not to mention the blatant cherry picking of not only data but also cherry picking of FORCINGS.
Maybe in about 250 years they will figure out that Trenberth’s sequestered heat in the oceans is just a total wishful thinking speculation. For now, they are so illogical that they can’t tell the difference between speculation and evidence. His sequestered heat is an extraordinary claim – something never seen before or thought about before. He pulled it out of his butt, after all. And as an extraordinary claim, IT requires extraordinary proof. Yet, the editors at Nature cannot bring themselves to demand such extraordinary proof. Instead, they accept it at face value as if it is the truth of the matter.
So, once again, the skeptics who DO demand the extraordinary proof are themselves now the ones who will be required to DISPROVE Trenberth’s TOTAL GUESS.
Science, in other words, has been stood on its head.
If non-CO2 natural cycles can interrupt the trend, how do we know that natural cycles didn’t drive the original trend to begin with?
Steve O,
Good point. How many natural ‘hockey stick’ shapes are in this chart? I count more than twenty as steep as Mann’s — during times when CO2 was much lower than it is today.