![Hand%2BWaving[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/hand2bwaving1.jpg?quality=83)
Well not exactly #37, but it sure seems like it with all the handwaving we’ve seen lately.
So far, we’ve heard from Climate Science that ‘the pause’ was caused by:
Too much aerosols from volcanoes, ENSO patterns, missing heat that went to the deep ocean, ocean cooling, low solar activity, inappropriately dealt with weather stations in the Arctic, and stadium waves, to name a few. So much for consensus.
Now, it’s trade winds going too fast that are causing abnormal cooling in the Pacific. A new paper from the University of New South Wales says that once the winds return to normal speed, well, look out, the heat is on.
One thing for certain, even though the media is going predictably berserkers over this paper, the paper clearly illustrates that natural variation has been in control, not CO2. So much for control knobs.
Pacific trade winds stall global surface warming — for now
The strongest trade winds have driven more of the heat from global warming into the oceans; but when those winds slow, that heat will rapidly return to the atmosphere causing an abrupt rise in global average temperatures.
Heat stored in the western Pacific Ocean caused by an unprecedented strengthening of the equatorial trade winds appears to be largely responsible for the hiatus in surface warming observed over the past 13 years.
New research published today in the journal Nature Climate Change indicates that the dramatic acceleration in winds has invigorated the circulation of the Pacific Ocean, causing more heat to be taken out of the atmosphere and transferred into the subsurface ocean, while bringing cooler waters to the surface.
“Scientists have long suspected that extra ocean heat uptake has slowed the rise of global average temperatures, but the mechanism behind the hiatus remained unclear” said Professor Matthew England, lead author of the study and a Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.
“But the heat uptake is by no means permanent: when the trade wind strength returns to normal – as it inevitably will – our research suggests heat will quickly accumulate in the atmosphere. So global temperatures look set to rise rapidly out of the hiatus, returning to the levels projected within as little as a decade.”
The strengthening of the Pacific trade winds began during the 1990s and continues today. Previously, no climate models have incorporated a trade wind strengthening of the magnitude observed, and these models failed to capture the hiatus in warming. Once the trade winds were added by the researchers, the global average temperatures very closely resembled the observations during the hiatus.
“The winds lead to extra ocean heat uptake, which stalled warming of the atmosphere. Accounting for this wind intensification in model projections produces a hiatus in global warming that is in striking agreement with observations,” Prof England said.
Credit: For articles on this paper only. Credit: Nature Climate Change. Recent intensification of wind-driven circulation in the Pacific and the ongoing warming hiatus. Prof Matthew H England et al.
“Unfortunately, however, when the hiatus ends, global warming looks set to be rapid.”
The impact of the trade winds on global average temperatures is caused by the winds forcing heat to accumulate below surface of the Western Pacific Ocean.
“This pumping of heat into the ocean is not very deep, however, and once the winds abate, heat is returned rapidly to the atmosphere” England explains.
“Climate scientists have long understood that global average temperatures don’t rise in a continual upward trajectory, instead warming in a series of abrupt steps in between periods with more-or-less steady temperatures. Our work helps explain how this occurs,” said Prof England.
“We should be very clear: the current hiatus offers no comfort – we are just seeing another pause in warming before the next inevitable rise in global temperatures.”
###
The paper:
Recent intensification of wind-driven circulation in the Pacific and the ongoing warming hiatus
Matthew H. England, Shayne McGregor, Paul Spence, Gerald A. Meehl, Axel Timmermann, Wenju Cai, Alex Sen Gupta, Michael J. McPhaden, Ariaan Purich& Agus Santoso
Nature Climate Change (2014) doi:10.1038/nclimate2106
Abstract
Despite ongoing increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases, the Earth’s global average surface air temperature has remained more or less steady since 2001. A variety of mechanisms have been proposed to account for this slowdown in surface warming. A key component of the global hiatus that has been identified is cool eastern Pacific sea surface temperature, but it is unclear how the ocean has remained relatively cool there in spite of ongoing increases in radiative forcing. Here we show that a pronounced strengthening in Pacific trade winds over the past two decades—unprecedented in observations/reanalysis data and not captured by climate models—is sufficient to account for the cooling of the tropical Pacific and a substantial slowdown in surface warming through increased subsurface ocean heat uptake. The extra uptake has come about through increased subduction in the Pacific shallow overturning cells, enhancing heat convergence in the equatorial thermocline. At the same time, the accelerated trade winds have increased equatorial upwelling in the central and eastern Pacific, lowering sea surface temperature there, which drives further cooling in other regions. The net effect of these anomalous winds is a cooling in the 2012 global average surface air temperature of 0.1–0.2 °C, which can account for much of the hiatus in surface warming observed since 2001. This hiatus could persist for much of the present decade if the trade wind trends continue, however rapid warming is expected to resume once the anomalous wind trends abate.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2106.html
And sun disappears shortly before dusk. And reappears after dawn.
Conclusion: Sun is afraid of darkness!
It’s a good job kids at university aren’t being taught this sh*te. Oh, wait…
The 21st century started January 1, 2001.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2001/to:2014/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2001/to:2014/trend
@jai mitchell at 9:00 am
As global coverage of the ARGO buoy data increases, the measured rate of heat content accumulation in the deep ocean goes up.
Your link is to a plot that show Ocean Heat Content from 1956 to 2010 with series of 0-700 m and 0-2000 m. It has an inset graph saying coverage 0-700 m grows from 0% at 1956 to 100% at 1996; at the same time the inset chart implies 50% coverage [50% of what????] from 1956 through 2010. One can only conclude from that chart that we have been measuring 0-2000m ocean temps with ARGO for the past 50 years —- which would be very wrong.
This indicates that the ARGO buoy DIRECT MEASURMENT data of the deep ocean is robust and indisputable
INDISPUTABLE!?!? You show a plot from 1958 to 2010 in support of a program that STARTED in 2003 and only became fully installed in 2008. Linking that plot to ARGO direct measurement is very sloppy at best.
ROBUST? The rate of increase since 2004 is arguably lower than the period before ARGO. And where are the 2010-2013 data?
There are two indisputable points people need to know about DIRECT MEASUREMENT of OCEAN HEAT CONTENT.
1. Ocean Heat Content prior to 1988 is by-guess and by-golly. Worldwide satellite tracked float temperature data started in 1988 with the ALACE program and it only covered 0-1000m. Even then it was 1 float for every 250,000 km^3 of ocean. Frequent measurement below 1000m only started with ARGO in 2003.
2. For the water column 0 – 2000 m, it takes 27.5 ZJ (2.75*10^22 Joules) to raise the temperature 0.01 deg C. So the entire “Indisputable” 50-year warming of the ocean is less than 0.09 deg C. Most of that alleged warming was during a period where we did not have the technology to properly measure it with the precision, accuracy and confidence claimed.
Here is a Chart that show the ocean heat content curves with an overlay of the float program histories.
To give a sense of how poor data prior to 1988 is consider this:
See “Ocean Heat Content and History of Measurement Systems” WUWT 7/24/13 Rasey for more detail on history and coverage of direct ocean measurements and references.
Eric says:
“Let’s clear this up right now.
Has anything the AGW people have predicted 10 years ago come true?”
——————————-
Brilliantly succinct sir. I’ll be thowing that one around at work.
It actually reminds me of the George Carlin sketch about god and money – he’s omniscient, omnipotent, all-seeing, all-hearing; just can’t handle money, always needs more money… Like climate “scientists” can handle anything over a ten year timeframe no problem, it’s just that dang one week to ten year prediction thing that gets them stumped. So they need you to trust. Always need more trust. All seeing and all knowing when it comes to now or 100 years from now but crap at anything in between (on a rolling basis).
So we can add trade-winds to the ever growing list of major climatic features the models do not take into account. Fortunately the climate isn’t very complex so we can pretend superposition applies and just add these missing factors back in. The proof of this supposition is in the beauty of the graphs adherence produces.
Run all new information through three filters:
Common sense filter,
Human nature filter, and,
Prior knowledge filter.
This article fails two of the three and the third does not apply.
It is reassuring that at least a few others understand the concept of a thermodynamic control volume.
Hind-casting average global temperature turned out to be fairly simple. Forecasting, assuming the same drivers is equally simple.
http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com/
I wonder if we have to hang them off a cliff to admit that the weakening of trade winds contributed towards the warming in 1980s and 1990s naturally due to El Ninos. They are desperate and just reminds me of political spin. Apparently only natural mechanisms are in cooler directions, so why isn’t the planet still in a major ice age with 1-2 km of ice above North America? Skeptical scientists were saying this years ago, so why are the so called bright alarmists years behind as usual? I will congratulate them on recognizing natural climate mechanisms for once.
Warming the deep ocean by 0.1 c wont make a jot of difference to surface global temperatures or the deep oceans themselves. How do you know that when the deep oceans were cooling in the past, the energy from it didn’t go to the surface? Climate mechanisms are never one way like the years behind alarmists believe. Have the the alarmists invented the wheel yet?
Stephen Rasey,
You said, “The rate of increase since 2004 is arguably lower than the period before ARGO. And where are the 2010-2013 data?”
and I say, No, Its Not!
figure 15: 3-month average global ocean heat content through 2013.
taken from:
A REVIEW OF GLOBAL OCEAN TEMPERATURE
OBSERVATIONS: IMPLICATIONS FOR OCEAN
HEAT CONTENT ESTIMATES AND
CLIMATE CHANGE
link: here
If this was a sceptical paper it would never get published, as their conclusion is based on a correlation without a proposed mechanism. (It is even worse than that, because their correlation may largely be assumed, i.e., theoretical, rather than actual.
dear England et al., please dig a little deeper next time and please provide reference to Bob T.: increasing trade winds –> la nina’s –> decreasing GSTs. The opposite is also true : decreasing trade winds / shift to westerlies –> el nino’s –> in creasing GSTs. It’s really that simple and pretty much all there is to it in this case. Oh and btw, your 1st sentence in the abstract “Despite ongoing increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases, the Earth’s global average surface air temperature has remained more or less steady since 2001.” already means that the relationship between CO2 and GSTs is weak at the most. Oh and btw were then did all that heat go? We need measurements to very such a claim. Oh and btw, did you not read the papers by Giesse, Toleffson, DiNezio, etc etc in that the ENSO is now in a (~25yr) la nina dominated cycle, PDO in a negative fase etc, etc… The previous el nino cycle peaked early 2000s, as well as the PDO. Btw, wasn’t it predicted a few years ago that more tradewinds actually caused global warming!?!?!
regards,
Stephen Rasey says,
great post, but sadly I am not sure how good it will do – jai mitchell ignores anything that dosent fit his desires. Case in point, I already given him this a few days ago
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6158/617
Observed increases in ocean heat content (OHC) and temperature are robust indicators of global warming during the past several decades. We used high-resolution proxy records from sediment cores to extend these observations in the Pacific 10,000 years beyond the instrumental record. We show that water masses linked to North Pacific and Antarctic intermediate waters were warmer by 2.1 ± 0.4°C and 1.5 ± 0.4°C, respectively, during the middle Holocene Thermal Maximum than over the past century. Both water masses were ~0.9°C warmer during the Medieval Warm period than during the Little Ice Age and ~0.65° warmer than in recent decades. Although documented changes in global surface temperatures during the Holocene and Common era are relatively small, the concomitant changes in OHC are large.
That means
~ 1-2.5°C warmer most of the past 10,000 years
~ 0.65°C warmer during Medieval Warming Period (0-1000AD, dates they give)
~ 0.25°C colder during Little Ice Age (1100-1700, again their dates)
Meaning we have managed all of +0.25°C over the past 315 years. At that pace, we might be back to where we were 1,000 years ago in another 1,000 years!
Even if he wants to believe it has sped up a little bit recently… Well, we need to make up about 0.65°C. Even if the Deep Ocean was warming at the entire 0-2000 rate, which is 0.015°C/Decade, we would need 400+ years to do it. But the Deep Ocean is not warming at that rate, as even his data shows, so we are probably right around where we started; roughly ~1,000 years to get back to where we were ~1,000 years ago
And the sad thing is, the paper that graph was made from even says how miniscule the rise is
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012GL051106/abstract
The heat content of the World Ocean for the 0–2000 m layer increased by 24.0 ± 1.9 × 1022 J (±2S.E.) corresponding to a rate of 0.39 W m−2 (per unit area of the World Ocean) and a volume mean warming of 0.09°C. This warming corresponds to a rate of 0.27 W m−2 per unit area of earth’s surface. The heat content of the World Ocean for the 0–700 m layer increased by 16.7 ± 1.6 × 1022 J corresponding to a rate of 0.27 W m−2(per unit area of the World Ocean) and a volume mean warming of 0.18°C.
Whoever made that graph went out of their way to be deceptive, making it look like it was a sharp rise to fool the public. Had it been done in Celsius and included marks such a 0.02, it just wouldn’t be the evidence they claim it is. And coupled with other known Ocean history, it becomes laughable as ‘evidence of catastrophic warming’ as it is portrayed
ps: just couldn’t help but laugh that we get the usual spiel “still no warming now people, but just wait it will come… soon… how soon? we don’t know, but one of these days…” it’s all ways the same.
btw, I just have to add this in case you wonder how AGW-scientists can think: “[globa] warming from greenhouse gases is driving la nina like conditions … helping to suppress global warming.” Mark Cane in J. Tollefson. 2014, Nature. 505, 276-278.
There you have it: global warming suppresses global warming. Unbelievable. With such a state of mind one can come up with anything, including BS (bad science) papers like this one by England et al.
It is the entertainment phase of CAGW.
Full scale F.U.D.
Anything to buy a few more years, months and then days of feeding on the taxpayers teat.
I wonder what the team plan is when we stop laughing?
Immunity from prosecution from the UN?
Retire to China, to share an apartment with Maurice?
Steven Mosher says:
February 10, 2014 at 9:22 am
“hmm. Well, lets see.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2000/to:2014/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2000/to:2014/trend
Stupidity annoys me.”
I tell you what annoys me. People who claim they count to 100 going from 0 to 99.
I say you are lying and you don’t actually do that. I say that if someone asked you to count to a hundred you would go ‘One, two…….’
So you are prepared to lie to establish some sort of point, just like climate scientists actually.
The century starts in 2001 and Hadcrut shows slight cooling to date.
Alan
WUWT says:
A: Heat capacity of air: 1005 J/kg/K
B: The atmosphere has a mass of about 5×10^18 kg
therefore
B*A = 5.025 x 10^21 Joules/degree Kelvin
Total amount of heat energy differential (warming) measured by the ARGO network since 2005
= 17×10^22Joules – 9×10^22Joules = 8×10^22 Joules
Therefore if all of this heat energy went into the atmosphere instead of the ocean, the total amount of average temperature increase of the atmosphere would be:
=8×10^22Joules/5.025×10^21 Joules per degree Kelvin
= 15.9 degrees Kelvin increase.
go ahead, check my math.
jai mitchell says:
“go ahead, check my math.”
Math is not the problem. In your case, it is your religious belief in the “carbon” scare.
jai mitchell says:
February 10, 2014 at 3:26 pm
go ahead, check my math
This is not a math problem, but a thermodynamics problem. Let us suppose the ocean and air were at the same temperature. Now let us assume the ocean suddenly got 0.1 C warmer. What would happen then? Would the air get 100 C warmer as per your math, or would it get 0.1 C warmer as per thermodynamics?
“Heat stored in the western Pacific Ocean caused by an unprecedented strengthening of the equatorial trade winds appears to be largely responsible for the hiatus in surface warming observed over the past 13 years.”
“New research published today in the journal Nature Climate Change indicates that the dramatic acceleration in winds has invigorated the circulation of the Pacific Ocean, causing more heat to be taken out of the atmosphere and transferred into the subsurface ocean, while bringing cooler waters to the surface.”
Interesting hypothesis Prof. England. Unfortunately it is contradicted by ARGO data. The Pacific ocean heat content (2003-2012) actually decreased. See Figure 19 in the link below http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/is-ocean-heat-content-data-all-its-stacked-up-to-be/
Your missing heat is not in the Pacific ocean. More likely it is imaginary and an artifact of flawed climate models. The discrepancy between what the models say the energy balance ought to be vs. what is actually observed.
Critical moments in the History of Science:
“Hey, Ptolmey! Yer gizmo, she’s a no work! See that planet? It’s-a go backwards!”
“Hey, atsa no problem, atsa no problem! I adds this leetle thingabob I call ‘epi-cycle’ an’a she worksa mos’ fine! Just-a be sure you give it a leetle bit kick every coupla days, sure, an’a you can tell time by the stars, atsa fine!!”
“Hey, uh, Mike? Kevin. I need a favor: take a pause for the cause, and then I need a cause for the pause! Can you help??”
And thus, with the skill of a Trained Climate Scientist, a little Tennesee windage and the luck of an inside straight, Professor England breathed new life into the GCM, by blowing a little harder on the seas… And like good Rube-Goldberg-perpetual-motion-machines everywhere, the GCMs continued to wheeze and clank along for a bit more…
wbrozek
the point is, if we took the actual heat energy absorbed by the ocean since 2005 and added it instead to the atmosphere the temperature would be 28 degrees Fahrenheit warmer every day and night of the year, everywhere in the globe.
In other words, the world’s crops would not reproduce, most mammals in the tropics would die from heat stroke and humanity would die of starvation within 10 years.
If, however, we added the heat energy that was put into the oceans since the beginning of the hiatus period (1999 to 2013) we would get 37 degrees Fahrenheit warmer every day and night.
doesn’t sound like a hiatus or “pause” in global warming if you ask me.
DB Stealey,
when are you going to get the point? the point is that this warming is real, verifiable and destined to continue at an unprecedented rate. You mentioned younger dryas as a period when the climate changed at a more rapid pace than today. well, I rechecked it and you were right. The cooling that happened when the laurentide ice sheet poured into the sea and halted the AMOC caused a sudden drop of almost 3C in the space of about 100 years. However, since the beginning of the Holocene, the GISP2 record shows that there has been no period in the temperature record that had as much or as rapid warming as we have experienced in the last 120 years.
Here is the graph I made, check it out.
8,000 years of temperature data to the end of the GISP2 analysis (1850) and then a break until 1880 and real temperature anomalies through the rest of the period.
Notice how the current temperatures are much higher than even the Minoan warming peak?
also the rate of warming is faster by a factor of 2 than any other warming period in the record.
jai mitchell says:
February 10, 2014 at 8:04 pm
If, however, we added the heat energy that was put into the oceans since the beginning of the hiatus period (1999 to 2013) we would get 37 degrees Fahrenheit warmer every day and night.
I am not disputing that. Look at it this way. Suppose we had a 1.0 kg copper plate that was attached to a 1000 kg copper ball with a copper wire. Suppose both were at 15 C to start with. Then suppose you slowly heated the 1.0 kg plate to 37 F higher than it was. Or at least you tried to do so. What would happen? The wire would conduct the heat to the 1000 kg copper ball and in the end, the plate may be 0.037 C warmer. Of course you realize in this example that the 1000 kg copper ball represents the oceans, but the land would also absorb its share.
So while the numbers may work out, it cannot happen in theory. The oceans are an infinite heat sink for all intents and purposes.
@jai mitchell at 8:04 pm
When are YOU going to get the point?
In order for us to believe than ANY excess heat has been stored in the oceans, we must be convinced we are able to measure every cubic kilometer of the ocean with enough precision to detect a 0.01 deg C change in the “average” temperature of the entire ocean.
I don’t think we can do that with ARGO, particularly since it is limited to the upper 2000 m. But even in the 0 – 2000 m interval, a 0.01 deg C precision is a tall order when we have one ARGO float for every 100,000 km^3. It is a tall order in controlled conditions within a lab. It is certainly beyond our capability prior to ARGO.
So drop the farce that there is 240 ZJ hiding in the ocean. All you have is a cartoon for a graph; round-off error in poorly and insufficiently sampled data after dubious adjustments.
Even if you continue to believe 240 ZJ have been hidden in the oceans over the past 50 years, what can you conclude? That heat cannot leap back out into the atmosphere. All it proves is that the oceans are one hellofa heat sink; atmospheric heat CAN hide in the oceans so that serious atmospheric warming is impossible.
Either way, your argument and arithmetic are the only hot air in evidence.
Key quotes and facts from Abraham, J. P., et al. (2013) (pdf),
Note: 25 authors. (See Vpaper = 1/(numAuth^2) )
It does not say their normal profile depth, but Wikipedia says 285 m.
If you look at the PDF on line, Check out Figure 1 data coverage: plots b=1960, c=1985. Both show very sparse coverage in the southern hemisphere and poor coverage outside of the US Navy submarine patrol areas.
It all supports my contention that we have very little precision on the ocean temperature prior to the ALACE program in 1992 simply because we did not spatially sample it well or evenly enough. Even ALACE only gives us sparse coverage ( one float per 250,000 km^3) down to 1000m (every 10 days?)
“Here is the graph I made, check it out.”
Not sure who gave you that data, but
1) There is no longer a station where the cores were taken from
2) No stations remotely in the area are anywhere near that GISP locations elevation (and we are talking at least 2000 meters difference here) so if you are doing something like using another stations annual average temperature for a proxy, boy are you off base
3) the 2 nearest locations are currently sitting at roughly the same temperatures they held in the 1930s-50s, and the nearest of the two has pretty much been there constantly since the 1910s.
4) The GISP2 cores contain temperatures up till 1993. (not 1850, as you claim)
The two locations nearest seeing no change since a time contained within the original graph means todays temperature is contained in the little red line at the end. The original graph should not be changed, that is how it looks today. What you did up does not match reality in the least.
Also, on your Global Warming paragraph
” the point is that this warming is real, verifiable and destined to continue at an unprecedented rate.”
No, no it’s not.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1850/to:1933/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1850/to:1933/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1934/to:1939/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1934/to:1939/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1940/to:1984/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1940/to:1984/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1985/to:2000/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1985/to:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2001/to:2014/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2001/to:2014/trend
There has been zero global warming since 1850 outside the effects of a pair of Super El Nino events in the 80s-90s and a small 6-year period well before CO2 supposedly started warming the planet. That is just undeniable, you can see it right there for yourself.
We are also following a rather clear path created by the PDO
http://oi59.tinypic.com/9tiw4w.jpg
And that path is merely repeating itself nearly perfectly, as one can see
http://oi57.tinypic.com/av1rev.jpg
And as I keep telling you, it will take us 1,000 years to get back to the Deep Oceans temperature of 1,000 years ago. We are no where near the normal temperatures seen over the last 10,000. Shoot, we are even only 0.25C above the LIA after 400 years of warming to get out of it. Deep Ocean temperatures are currently that low even with whatever recent trend you want to talk yourself into believing is true. Again, the study:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6158/617
I’m sorry, but the things you are saying are just not true at all.