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
Can you be a sceptical scientist? Oh yeah, all scientists meant to be sceptics but we are dealing with the CAGW religion.
Let me see strong warming from mid 1970s to 1988 and the alarm was raised by Hansen. Hysteria broke out and spread, windmill sales boomed, people cried, made threats, planted trees etc. and all for nothing. LOL.
During negative PDO, el Ninos are less common and la Ninas more common.
el Nino tends to release heat, traped during la Nina.
Hypothesis: During + PDO frequent el Ninos quickly release heat stored during la Nina. During – PDO, infrequent el Ninos mean that warm water is pooled in the west, deeper, and for longer periods of time, allowing heat to disipated to the deep ocean. So, during – PDO less heat from la Ninas make it back into the atmosphere during el Ninos. Much less.
Does Trenberth really think that “trade winds” are piling the Pacific Ocean 20 centimeters higher in the West than in the East?!? Seriously? Houston, we have a problem, and it’s between the ears.
Hey, one minute, what happened to the dust bowl years, in that “temperature” graph ?
That guy has the nerve to use an “adjusted” version of the temperature graph.
Worthless.
The other thing about the hiatus is that those numbers “include” the warm water in the Indonesian area. So the surface may be warmer here but it has to be colder somewhere else for the flat temperature trend math to work.
Pro-warmers are not very good with numbers you know. That could be the reason why we got in this mess in the first place. Emotional non-math people should not be building climate models and developing feedback theories and explaining what it is happening to temperature numbers.
No mention that the sun is 10 years into performing the perfect natural experiment for distinguishing solar-driven from CO2-driven warming, and that the “hiatus” is strong evidence for the solar theory. All we get is:
No mention of what has been going on with the sun. Then when they discuss natural variability it is implicitly described as an internal oscillation, not externally forced:
And:
They are describing natural variability as weather, not climate, just on a longer time scale than actual weather, which would mean it is unforced, but a solar driver is an external forcing. They just pretend that the leading alternative theory does not exist and that natural variability (when they describe it in detail) is just about internal oscillations.
It is good that Nature and some IPCC scientist are realizing the existence of natural variability and are accepting the fact that this natural variability is not made of random noise but is characterized by cyclical behavior.
However, as DirkH says (January 16, 2014 at 4:10 am) also noted, they still do not get the point that if the models do not get properly the natural cyclical variability of the climate system then the only reasonable conclusion is that the IPCC GCMs are wrong and no useful prediction can be deduced from them.
The existence of a natural cyclical variability, ignored by the IPCC and by the AGW guys, has been addressed in very numerous papers not properly referenced in the Nature article. These include, of course, my own numerous papers since 2010 such as my latest review
Scafetta, N. 2013. Discussion on climate oscillations: CMIP5 general circulation models versus a semi-empirical harmonic model based on astronomical cycles. Earth-Science Reviews 126, 321-357.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825213001402
The physical issue it to understand the origin of these natural oscillations. While some people are trying to convince themselves that this is an “internal climatic variability”, the evidences that I have provided since 2010 is that this variability is astronomically induced because the observed climatic oscillations at multiple scales (not just the “iatus” of the last 15 years) can be linked to specific solar, astronomical and lunar harmonics.
For who might be interested, just yesterday I have published a new paper can clarify the scientific background of the astronomical theory of solar and climate oscillations:
Scafetta, N.: The complex planetary synchronization structure of the solar system, Pattern Recogn. Phys., 2, 1-19, doi:10.5194/prp-2-1-2014, 2014.
http://www.pattern-recogn-phys.net/2/1/2014/prp-2-1-2014.html
Please, download the paper from this link:
http://www.pattern-recogn-phys.net/2/1/2014/prp-2-1-2014.pdf
Abstract. The complex planetary synchronization structure of the solar system, which since Pythagoras of Samos (ca. 570–495 BC) is known as the music of the spheres, is briefly reviewed from the Renaissance up to contemporary research. Copernicus’ heliocentric model from 1543 suggested that the planets of our solar system form a kind of mutually ordered and quasi-synchronized system. From 1596 to 1619 Kepler formulated preliminary mathematical relations of approximate commensurabilities among the planets, which were later reformulated in the Titius–Bode rule (1766–1772), which successfully predicted the orbital position of Ceres and Uranus. Following the discovery of the ~ 11 yr sunspot cycle, in 1859 Wolf suggested that the observed solar variability could be approximately synchronized with the orbital movements of Venus, Earth, Jupiter and Saturn. Modern research has further confirmed that (1) the planetary orbital periods can be approximately deduced from a simple system of resonant frequencies; (2) the solar system oscillates with a specific set of gravitational frequencies, and many of them (e.g., within the range between 3 yr and 100 yr) can be approximately constructed as harmonics of a base period of ~ 178.38 yr; and (3) solar and climate records are also characterized by planetary harmonics from the monthly to the millennial timescales. This short review concludes with an emphasis on the contribution of the author’s research on the empirical evidences and physical modeling of both solar and climate variability based on astronomical harmonics. The general conclusion is that the solar system works as a resonator characterized by a specific harmonic planetary structure that also synchronizes the Sun’s activity and the Earth’s climate. The special issue Pattern in solar variability, their planetary origin and terrestrial impacts (Mörner et al., 2013) further develops the ideas about the planetary–solar–terrestrial interaction with the personal contribution of 10 authors.
Funny how the Sun, PDO and other natural climate changes can help us explain ONLY the hiatus.
Look at the Nature image at the early 20th century warming and PDO. Look at the late 20th century warming and PDO. Yet the PDO can ONLY explain the hiatus.
http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.14906.1389714879!/image/Warming.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_630/Warming.jpg
As a mathematical physics scientist, I find the idea of giving the “climate science” which had models fail with 95% confidence in less than 10 years,
I find the idea of giving “climate science” the status of science outrageous. Its record is certainly much worse than palm reading, which is not generally considered a science.
****
Modern science starts from measurements, builds models which explain these measurements, and makes falsifiable predictions, which are further checked against measurements.
Climate science has failed in each and every respect, with its models not even able to reproduce the last century, let alone the current one.
Climate science is not a science. It is a failed attempt to explain climate, ideologically and financially, through anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
At the mental level of a six year old child, it took the CO2 level curve and tried to read it as past, present and future temperatures. Which resulted in a spectacular failure.
Bob Tisdale is a lesson is persistence and common sense.
Quote ftom the original posting:
“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.”
= = = = = = = = = = = = =
Isn’t it wonderful when you can keep on changing your “batches” of “CO2 trump card” Climate Models (CMs) around to fit in with Climate Observations (COs) instead of having to scrap these CMs which are obviously faulty, useless etc.
And then; Walt Stone (@Cuppacafe) says on January 16, 2014 at 7:00 am:
“- – – – – – – – –. Any global model using the boogie man of “we don’t know how much heat is in the deep ocean” simply can’t be falsified without proving the negative on where the heat is going into the deep ocean.”
= = = = = = = = = = = = = =
If the phrase; “heat is going into the deep ocean” means that the ocean’s warm surface water has sunk to the bottom (well, what else can it possibly mean?) then that situation must be a unique one, a bit like the rabbit pulling the magician out of the hat.
NZ Willy says:
January 16, 2014 at 10:40 am
Does Trenberth really think that “trade winds” are piling the Pacific Ocean 20 centimeters higher in the West than in the East?….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You missed Bob Tisdale’s explanation: An Illustrated Introduction to the Basic Processes that Drive El Niño and La Niña Events
What many people commenting here forget is that we are dealing with “post-normal science”.
The data and observations do not matter – it is a matter of fundamental belief. The so-called scientists believe they are saving the planet and nothing any sceptic can say will change that belief. The policy outcomes are the goal, and while people like David Cameron, Barack Obama (and Ed Davey) clearly show their support, there will be no change of direction.
The timescale has now been extended to 50 – 100 years, rather than the 17 originally suggested as a period difficult to explain – more than enough time for the doomsayers to reach a happy and well-remunerated retirement, having been to a few more conferences in 5-star hotels on first class flights in the interim.
My biggest gripe with this nature piece is that for years we were told that man’s greenhouse gases were now the main climate driver, capable of overwhelming natural climate drivers. The reality of observations says otherwise.
I wonder whether this post will still be online in 2020?
NO SENSE WHATSOEVER
Trenberth’s main paper on oceans
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50382/full
in its main figure, Figure 1,
shows EXACTLY the same ocean warming slope
for 1983-1991, when the atmospheric temps were going up, as
for 2000-2008, when the atmospheric temps were NOT going up.
After 2008, the ocean warming SLOWS DOWN.
So the idea that oceans compensate for lack of atmospheric warming is total nonsense.
Lest we forget…
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 5th July, 2005
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant….”
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 7th May, 2009
“Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.”
Dr Kevin Trenberth – CRU emails, 2009
“The fact is we can’t account for the lack of global warming at the moment and it is a travesty we can’t.”
Oh the odious desperation of politically driven settled science.
“At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” He really did say that … if we are talking a global record what does it matter where the warm water is … it should still effect the “global” average … “sloshes” is a good description on the warmists thought processes …
Adrian O says:
January 16, 2014 at 10:56 am
Adrian please don’t insult six year olds.
Its far to late for Trenberth , he went all in for ‘the cause’ and was more than happy to attack and smear any that that dared to question his silly claims . His merchant of BS title is fixed for life and like Mann when the cause falls he will be lucky if he could get a job at a third rate college teaching basic English .
Lets make sure we never let him forget how happy was to ride AGW gravy train whilst all was going well.
Bob Tisdale writes:
That’s from his last post, ‘An Illustrated Introduction to the Basic Processes that Drive El Niño and La Niña Events’.
Nature writes in this article.
Seems like a meeting of minds to me.
Can you spell vindication?
I have only been following this issue closely for about 5 years. In that time, as short as it is, the warmist crowd has grudgingly been forced to admit that much of what the skeptics have been saying is playing out. If the overwhelming evidence is going against the team now, I can only imagine the strident tones they took 15 years ago when their work was being questioned.
And just think, we may have another 15 years of the same hand wringing by the usual suspects.
My question is:
How many Hiroshima LaBamba’s are now hiding in the ocean.
A little humor is needed
A little humor for me and for you
Faster and faster
Oh, Jimbo (January 16, 2014 at 11:17 am)…
Will anything from SkS still be extant on the internet in 2020?
The children will have had their toys tidied away by then
“sloshed back”, modeled in the bathtub obviously
KNR says:
January 16, 2014 at 11:29 am
Unfortunately Kiwi Trenberth is a US government employee, hence almost impossible to fire, no matter how wrong for so long. Maybe closing down NCAR would do it, but doubtful. Same goes for British subject Schmidt.