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
Ivor Ward says: @ur momisugly January 16, 2014 at 5:02 am
So essentially he is saying that Bob Tisdale is right and he was wrong. Why does Trenberth not just say that and get it over with?
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Bob does not have a Dr. in front of his name and he doesn’t work in an ivory tower. Expect all his work to show up in some guy’s PhD thesis.
Trenberth is still in the 80s
“The only way is up, baby
For you and me, baby
The only way is up
For you and me”
Yazz – The Only Way Is Up
I wonder if there is a “how to get myself out of this without making those who gave me all that money look foolish for doing so” grant.
Anthony,
I hope ALL the WUWT blog posts are quadruple backed up. WUWT is probably the most detailed documentation of the history of the CAGW boondoggle, and the Climate Science “community” climb down from the hysteria of the last 25 years that we are currently witnessing.
One of the low lights of this massive hoax is the numerous “investigations” into the Climategate emails. Apparently not all of us are as rational or civilized as we would like to think. But some have been more rational than others. Thank you for your perseverance.
Sorry, that was Tom in Florida, don’t know where the T went.
Gail Combs says:
January 16, 2014 at 8:00 am
“Dr. Judith Curry already beat them out the door.”
That’s why they revile her so much. They can’t stand that she was cleverer than them in putting on her life jacket and abandoning ship.
Alan
THe man has the class to say sceptics instead of deniers. Thanks sir.
The PDO was much more strongly negative 50s to 70s than the past decade, why does this one cause so much more cooling? The CO2 greenhouse contribution was about .018C per decate 1950-1970, temperatures were flat. CO2 contribution 2001-2011 was .067C. Yet, with the weaker PDO cool phase, we have the same/slightly more negative temperature trend.
I really don’t care what causes warming, I want to know what causes cooling. Sloshes back, really?
Trenberth is still desperately trying to keep up the pretense of ‘higher knowledge’ where none exists. His latest ‘guesses’ are what others have been pointing out all along, minus the phantom heat A tacit admission of defeat cloaked in unyielding arrogance.
They’ve just changed the hypothesis. Convenient.
Thanks A. Good reporting.
At last. So even those who said it was CO2 that controlled Earth’s climate are now turning to find the PDO?
If they look harder they might even find ENSO.
Here’s a possible mechanism for the MOC driving the PDO.
When the MOC speeds up we get more deep, cold water upwelling around Antarctica. I suspect this is the reason we have seen increased sea ice since the PDO flipped around 2005. This colder water then follows the prevailing current up the west coast of South America towards the tropics. Here it impacts ENSO.
We know that ENSO changes occur with changes to the trade winds. With colder air invading the East Pacific we should see a strengthening of the trade winds. More cold, dense air to rush towards the hot, light air over the Pacific Warm Pool (PWP). The net result will be fewer El Niño events. Nothing in the El Niño mechanism changes but the probability of one forming is reduced.
That’s not all. In the North Pacific we see the warmer surface waters driven faster towards the pole. Since they don’t remain on the surface as long they cannot heat and release as much energy. This changes the circulation pattern above the waters that we see when the PDO flips into negative territory. These circulation changes also lead to a more meridional jet stream that is characteristic of a -PDO.
Everything we see could be the direct result of a simple change in the speed of the MOC. Occam’s razor rules.
aaron says:
January 16, 2014 at 8:09 am
The PDO was much more strongly negative 50s to 70s than the past decade, why does this one cause so much more cooling? The CO2 greenhouse contribution was about .018C per decate 1950-1970, temperatures were flat. CO2 contribution 2001-2011 was .067C. Yet, with the weaker PDO cool phase, we have the same/slightly more negative temperature trend.
Simple, they manipulated the data of the 50s-70s and disappeared the actual cooling. The raw data shows more cooling.
Gail Combs says:
January 16, 2014 at 8:03 am
Bob does not have a Dr. in front of his name and he doesn’t work in an ivory tower. Expect all his work to show up in some guy’s PhD thesis.
Not so sure. Bob’s work is all published in his books. If someone plagiarizes his work it would be obvious and could lead to a career ending scandal for anyone who didn’t properly credit him.
Usage of the word “sloshed” merely indicates that Dr. Trenberth has been reading Tisdale’s writings on SSTs and now agrees, to the extent, he uses exactly the same language. Not only that but he now agrees that natural variation may account for all decadal warming. Even though he does every wiggle to avoid saying so. Quite a day! GK
I agree with several posters above:
“The simplest explanation for both the hiatus and the discrepancy in the models is natural variability. ”
No, the simplest explanation is that the models overestimate GHG forcing and feedbacks, underestimate negative feedbacks and are thereby programmed to run hot. Duh! When models and nature disagree, it is not nature that is wrong.
As for Trenberth’s water piling up in Indonesia and ‘sloshing back’ he should read everything Bob Tisdale has written and then come back with a better mental image. If the winds remain, so will the sloshing be prevented. It could sit there for 30 years. We don’t know.
Counting on ‘stored heat’ that no one can find to pop up in a few years like a dragon that breathes fire all over the world is to ignore climate history. The text in general promotes the view that everything was stable for millennia and we disrupted the gentle stasis of nature with our CO2. What bunk.
Northern Hemisphere SST show a decline since 2003 or the last 10 years. It has been declining during every season and annually as well.
The Southern Hemisphere SST is flat.
The North Atlantic Ocean SST and AMO are declining, the Pacific Ocean SST is flat but the North Pacific Ocean SST has been declining since about 2005 . The PDO index is also declining but PDO is not a direct temperature indicator but only a pattern change indicator and this tells us that there is now colder water at the eastern side of the Pacific than in the western or central part of the Pacific than we had 10 years ago. There are also fewer strong El Ninos. I don’t see another strong El Nino for some time yet . There tend to be fewer strong El Ninos during cooling phases of the oceans and when they do happen , their short term warming is unable to overcome the long term stronger cooling due to deep ocean currents.
.
These factors all have combined to keep the global temperatures flat and now slightly declining as they did 1880 to 1910 and again 1945-1975. The decline in global temperatures is likely to continue as ocean cycles pole to pole tend to be long [65-70 years]
Looks like Professors William Gray and Don Easterbrook got right many years ago in my opinion .
Nice to see Trenberth beginning to understand Tisdale. But Nature dropped the ball on the more fundamental implication. The CMIP3 and CMIP5 models were are tuned during the ‘hot phase’ of the Nature PDO graph above. They cannot help but run hot in the future as a result. Which automatically says the ECS is too high, and any IPCC related prognostications about future AGW problems is significantly overstated.
Even if what is being said is true… which is quite a stretch considering the lack of scientific evidence…
That only means that the alarmists are admitting they were wrong and their models are wrong. Previously they claimed the warming from the 80s to late 90s was entirely caused by greenhouse gases. Now they are claiming that the warming phase of the PDO was partially responsible, and in fact it must be responsible for at least half of all warming, because during the cold phase it stops all warming in its tracks.
So we know they were wrong and they admit it. However, all of this remains nothing more than theory, with very little in the way of evidence or successful predictive power. Yet they still remain wedded to their alarmist ways.
Richard M says…
Bob’s work will be disguised under all the baffle gab and no one will bother to really look at it. Also Bob doesn’t have the finances necessary to sue or the clout to get the problem noticed.
Bob’s work is in e-books that are not in university libraries. Plagarism and cheating is alive and well in our universities: The Shadow Scholar: The man who writes your students’ papers tells his story
Think about Nutti and Dr. Linzen if you want another example. Honesty and integrity is not a hallmark of our university scientists. They have made that abundantly clear.
And yes I am a scientist and yes I have had my work stolen on a few occasions. I even went to a lawyer – No luck.
Absent context and perspective, the Green Gang of Jones, Hansen, Mann, Trenberth et al. will perpetually “shuffle off to Buffalo” as reality hooks them unceremoniously Stage Left. Memo to Klimat Kultists: This ain’t no pause but a 70-year “dead sun” Grand Solar Minimum likely presaging the 1,500-year overdue end of Earth’s current Holocene Interglacial Epoch.
As in Northern Europe’s Great Dearth of c. 1694 – ’66, when populations declined by two-thirds from Scots Highlands to the Polar Urals, Gaia’s coming “cold shock” will make Ireland’s 19th Century Great Hunger seem a ribald festival.
Having purposefully, willfully, sabotaged global coal, oil, nuclear energy economies over forty years; having done everything possible to degrade, immiserate Third World peoples benefited by Norman Borlaug’s seminal Green Revolution, creeps and thugs like Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, Keith Farnish, Kentti Linkola and Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber have all the moral standing of an Auschwitz Commandant.
“That has led sceptics — and some scientists — to the controversial conclusion …”
A bit of a “tell” there about the role Nature thinks scientists should play.
There are 111 replies, but not a single one from Bob Tisdale. I wonder if he is celebrating that his thinking has hit mainstream or commiserating because the mainstream is not acknowledging his sterling work, or perhaps he is working on a reply to appear here shortly.
“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.
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Here we see the real reason for the article: Trenberth is staking out a claim for his “missing heat”.
Believe it. At the next El Nino, he will loudly proclaim that the missing heat is found. Then he will paint doomsday scenarios about ever more severe El Ninos. Anything to keep the ball up in the air.