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
Trenberth doesn’t realize that El Niño events might not quite work the same during a -PDO. As Tisdale has demonstrated it is the after effects of the El Niño during a +PDO that have a lot to do with the step up warming that occurs even after the following La Niña. I have a feeling that the changes in circulation in a -PDO will eliminate that effect (didn’t see it during the 2009-2010 El Niño). That is probably why the global temperature falls during a -PDO.
I wonder how many copies of Tisdale’s books will find their way to NCAR? Or, should I say …. have found their way?
“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.”
The BS is nauseating. Records of past climate show some long-lasting global heatwaves and cold snaps, period. It’s happened in the past and it will happen in the future. But notice the sly implication that somehow heat waves and cold snaps are evidence of AGW.
And this from a supposedly scientific journal. Sad.
“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.”
Skeptics have been saying this for more than 25 years, over and over again. The very thought was ignored at best and ridiculed more often than ignored. Now, it is an ‘important finding’ by some Meehl-ee guy at NCAR in 2011! What a bunch of crap!
Why can’t they just be truthful and say: “Those skeptics may have been on the right track all along, and you know, we are kinda sorry for all the grief we gave them.”
I probably shouldn’t let it bother me, but when they start taking credit for ‘discovering’ what so many have known all along, it just makes my skin crawl!
Judith Curry already has that slot filled. (With an honorable mention for James Lovelock.) She should get a 3-percenter award. The shame of science is that so few rallied to her flag. (As I like to say, everyone’s a hero, as long as it’s not High Noon.)
What I think will actually happen is less dramatic. If 2014 is a significantly cooling year, contrarians will no longer be able to be marginalized in the MSM as deniers, but will be given a place at the table in media reports, interviews, etc. The “false balance” charge will lose its traction.
One important step in this direction would be a survey of scientists in climatology and in the neighboring disciplines asking well-thought-out (sophisticated) questions about many facets of this controversy, similar to those posed by the past surveys of the AMS and AGU (sp?) by George Mason U. This would cut the 97% consensus claim down to size.
The scientific incompetence of the climate establishment and their capacity to avoid the obvious at all costs is astounding. Having spent countless millions on their useless models they now amazingly discover the PDO. It has been obvious for many years that the IPCC models are structurally incorrect and that there is not sufficient computing power in the world to model future temperature trends in systems with multiple variables with any useful accuracy. All modelers should be forced to watch
Another forecasting method necessarily must be adopted. For forecasts of the timing and amount of the coming cooling based on quasi periodic – quasi repetitive patterns in the temperature and driver data see several posts at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
These forecasts are based on the simple working hypothesis that the recent temperature peak was the result of more or less synchronous peaks in 60 year (PDO) and 1000 year periodicities in the temperature data. This hypothesis is strengthened by the recent decline in solar activity – best seen in the cosmic ray flux ( neutron counts) which also suggests a coming cooling trend.
For those of you who haven’t seen Dr. William Gray’s research this might be a good time to review it.
http://typhoon.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Publications/gray2012.pdf
He provide a slightly different view. He opines that changes in the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) is responsible of the all the ocean cycles including the PDO/AMO and the 400-500 year changes that driven things like the MWP and LIA.
I’ve often wondered if the melt pulses from the last deglaciation could be the driver of the the long term changes. Huge amounts of fresh water found its way into the oceans within a few decades. The density of the fresh water would be less but it would be very cold. This could easily change the form of the MOC and depending on where this pulse was located in the global ocean circulation would affect the speed.
My old John Deere tractor does not have a water pump. Hot water rises to the top of the radiator and the fan cools it. I am not as wise as those science guys but I would say that the oceans would be the same.
The so called “piecing together an explanation” by scientists looks more like a scatter shot of excuses with each passing week. The wider the scatter and the longer the list of excuses the more ridiculous it becomes, especially as the AMO turns over and down and the solar minimum approaches.
DirkH says:
January 16, 2014 at 4:10 am
“The simplest explanation for both the hiatus and the discrepancy in the models is natural variability.”
No, that’s nonsense. The simplest explanation is that the theory is falsified, and that the models are wrong. In fact, EVERYTHING points at the models being wrong, false and useless. Not ONE thing points to the models being right, correct, or useful. There are simply no such reports. We should see thousands of triumphant papers confirming again and again that the models got this right and that right after many years of painstaking development, but we NEVER see any such report.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
As usual, DirkH is right. But some people have had global warming on the brain for so long that it has formed lesions.
The 1998 El Nino was coincidental but not fundamental to the end of the last warming trend, imho.
There is nothing mysterious about the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming. It is a continuation of a consistent pattern of natural warming and cooling that has been going on for at least 500 years (and probably more) as a result of the switch from a warm PDO to a cool PDO in 1999, which, in 1999. led me to predict a period of global cooling beginning after 2000. In several, including papers, “Geologic Evidence of Recurring Climate Cycles and Their Implications for the Cause of Global Climate Changes: The Past is the Key to the Future” (2011) in the Elsevier volume “Evidence-Based Climate Science; Chapter 5 of the 2013 NIPCC Report; in several other papers, I spelled out the evidence for what we are seeing over the past 15 years. The crux of these papers is that the Greenland ice cores, with their excellent chronology and oxygen isotope record, show a recurring pattern of warming and cooling, including the 25-30-yr warming and cooling periods of the past century, the Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period, Dark Ages Cool Period, Roman Warm Period, Bronze Age Cool Period, Minoan Warm Period, and others. I plotted ice core data since 1480 AD and found about 40 periods of warming and cooling with consistent recurring warm/cool intervals averaging 27 years (typical PDO patterns are 25-30 yrs). These overlap with known PDO cycles of the past century and simply a continuation of the recurring pattern over that past 500 years. The PDO-global temp correlation curves shown in the article above are nothing new–you can find them in most of the papers I mentioned above. Extrapolation of these recurring patterns into the future led me to predict in 1999 that we were heading for a period of global cooling after 2000. So far my 1999 prediction seems to be on track and should last for another 20-25 years. Time will tell whether or not my prediction was correct.
So the sudden ‘insight’ of Trenberth in explaining ‘the pause’ is nothing new–if he had read the literature over the past 15 years he would have known it long ago.
I know that the Earth’s cooling is in no way a joke, but I nevertheless cannot help but laugh at this slow-moving train wreck as the delayed feed finally reaches the cerebral cortex of those who have spent so much time and money (mine) screaming from the rooftops that the planet was heating and we’re all gonna die if we don’t change our bad ways RIGHT NOW.
The lengths and depths and widths that they are going through to explain away the “pause” are hilarious and oh-so predictable.
So….natural variation makes it colder but never hotter? I see this new meme everywhere these days!
troe says:
January 16, 2014 at 7:08 am
“US military is second to none in rationalizing funding. Once spent billions on the Pentomic infantry division. ”
Interesting story, thanks, I didn’t know that one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentomic
I think Trenberth is reading Tisdale, but will never give him credit. The AGW crowd will slowly morph their scientific positions as their predictions continue to fail, and no-one will be held accountable for all the money wasted on useless, misguided research. And no-one in the skeptic camp will be acknowledged for having seen the weaknesses in the climate community’s science. There’s no justice in this world.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ changes everything
“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…”
Doesn’t that just say it all? The FACTS show that “global warming” isn’t. But the “Climate scientists” just KNOW …
When did “just knowing” become part of science?
The following comment appeared on the Nature Editorial about Trenberth’s article — Nature 505, 261–262 (16 January 2014) doi:10.1038/505261b
Physicists 100+ years ago were perturbed that the precession of the perihelion of Mercury as predicted by Newtonian mechanics was off by 38 arc seconds (roughly one part in 1/100,000). It took relativity to straighten things out.
None of the climate models mentioned in Science in 2009 [ Science vol. 326 pp. 28 – 29 ’09 (2 Oct ’09 ) ] predicted a pause this long, even when they were run for a total of 700 years. The longest pause found was 15 years. They should be run again for many more years with the faster computers of today, to see if they produce the present pause. If not, the models, and their recommendations should be abandoned.
Adding a new parameter to explain unexpected results is good science when the system being explained is complex. Consider the additions to the central dogma of molecular biology — introns, exons, microRNAs, ceRNAs, reverse transcription etc. etc. Certainly global climate is equally complex. More than a little humility is in order.
Not to embarass him but speaking of couragous scientists…. Don Easterbrook stands tall in those ranks. Thank you sir.
Dr Trenberth really should move on to dispensing aspirin, with the usual request to “see me in the morning”, or perhaps in the next decade. Why cannot these “climate scientists” look at what is actually happening, and form their theories from that, rather than trying to justify the outputs from their failed model simulations? They have strayed so far from science now that I wonder if any of them are retrievable as “scientists”.
The whole problem with the “missing heat” theory is that it requires Maxwell’s Demon to explain it.
Travesty Trenberth sings:
Some day my heat will come
Some day we’ll meet again
And away to the MSM we’ll go
To be funded forever I know
Some day when spring is here
We’ll find our Belief anew
And the birds will sing
And Alarmist bells will ring
Some day when my dreams come true
CAGW always was just a fairy tale.
Chris Marlowe says:
January 16, 2014 at 4:29 am
The smartest of these guys will be looking for an exit strategy and will eventually look the other way if anyone suggests they were once on the bandwagon beating the drum.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Dr. Judith Curry already beat them out the door.
I did a course on climatology at University of Aberdeen about 37 years ago and learned then that The Pacific Ocean controlled Earth’s climate. It is therefore incredible that climate science is only just awakening to this reality and to the reality of natural cycles. Accepting the Nature report as “fact” has consequence that all climate models are wrong (we knew that already) and their replication of past climate change as “fraud” – basically tuning variables to produce the desired outcome and calling it science. Without including natural cycles they can have no predictive power.
The PDO 60 year oscillation is only one of a number of natural cycles that climate models currently lack. A more important one is the 1000±500 year Bond / DO cycle. IF the Bond 2001 data are reliable (and they are contested) then what they describe is periodic ingress of the Labrador current into the N Atlantic and this truncates the Gulf Stream correlating with cold periods in NW Europe. A simplistic view of the consequence would be less evaporation from the Gulf Stream in the N Atlantic leading to reduced GH warming and regional cooling.
I discuss some of this in The Ice Man Cometh and a modified version of the key chart showing Bond cycles is here.
In the end of the article they state:
“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.”
Which is the definition of an El Nino, but we’ve had El Nino’s since 1998 so this has already been tested has it not? There were moderate El Ninos in 2002 and 2009, weak ones in 2004 and 2006. They set up this paragraph to say if the next El Nino brings a temprature spike that proves Trenberth’s theory, which it doesn’t. We all know every El Nino brings a temperature spike. It’s the long-term forecast of multiple El Nino/La Nina cycles which bears out who (if anyone) is corect. And no matter how you slice it, the fact that they ignored ENSO in previous years means they overestimated feedbacks, attribution, and confidence.
Dr. Trenberth, Chief Alchemist & Bogeyman Instigator, starts to come to grips with reality.
“Hello, my name is Kevin and I am a global warming fearmongerer”
“Hello Kevin”