From Penn State: Slowdown of global warming fleeting
By A’ndrea Elyse Messer
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The recent slowdown in the warming rate of the Northern Hemisphere may be a result of internal variability of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation — a natural phenomenon related to sea surface temperatures, according to Penn State researchers.
“Some researchers have in the past attributed a portion of Northern Hemispheric warming to a warm phase of the AMO,” said Michael E. Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology. “The true AMO signal, instead, appears likely to have been in a cooling phase in recent decades, offsetting some of the anthropogenic warming temporarily.”
According to Mann, the problem with the earlier estimates stems from having defined the AMO as the low frequency component that is left after statistically accounting for the long-term temperature trends, referred to as detrending.
“Initial investigations into the multidecadal climate oscillation in the North Atlantic were hampered by the short length of the instrumental climate record which was only about a century long,” said Mann. “And some of the calculations were contaminated by long-term climate trends driven or forced by human factors such as greenhouse gases as well as pollutants known as sulfate aerosols. These trends masqueraded as an apparent oscillation.”
Mann and his colleagues took a different approach in defining the AMO, which they report online in a special “Frontier” paper in Geophysical Research Letters. They compared observed temperature variation with a variety of historic model simulations to create a model for internal variability of the AMO that minimizes the influence of external forcing — including greenhouse gases and aerosols. They call this the differenced-AMO because the internal variability comes from the difference between observations and the models’ estimates of the forced component of North Atlantic temperature change. They found that their results for the most recent decade fall within expected multidecadal variability.
They also constructed plausible synthetic Northern Hemispheric mean temperature histories against which to test the differenced-AMO approaches. Because the researchers know the true AMO signal for their synthetic data from the beginning, they could demonstrate that the differenced-AMO approach yielded the correct signal. They also tested the detrended-AMO approach and found that it did not come up with the known internal variability.
The detrended approach produced an AMO signal with increased amplitude — both high and low peaks were larger than in the differenced-AMO signal and in the synthetic data. They also found that the peaks and troughs of the oscillation were skewed using the detrending approach, causing the maximums and minimums to occur at different times than in the differenced-AMO results. While the detrended-AMO approach produces a spurious temperature increase in recent decades, the differenced approach instead shows a warm peak in the 1990s and a steady cooling since.
Past researchers have consequently attributed too much of the recent North Atlantic warming to the AMO and too little to the forced hemispheric warming, according to the researchers.
Mann and his team also looked at supposed “stadium waves” suggested by some researchers to explain recent climate trends. The putative climate stadium wave is likened to the waves that go through a sports stadium with whole sections of fans rising and sitting together, propagating a wave around the oval. Random motion of individuals suddenly becomes unified action.
The climate stadium wave supposedly occurs when the AMO and other related climate indicators synchronize, peaking and waning together. Mann and his team show that this apparent synchronicity is likely a statistical artifact of using the problematic detrended-AMO approach.
“We conclude that the AMO played at least a modest role in the apparent slowing of warming during the past decade,” said Mann. “As the AMO is an oscillation, this cooling effect is likely fleeting, and when it reverses, the rate of warming increases.”
Others working on this project were Byron A. Steinman, postdoctoral fellow in meteorology, and Sonya K. Miller, programmer/analyst, meteorology, Penn State
The National Science Foundation supported this work.
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The paper:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL059233/abstract
WUWT post on the stadium wave: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/30/climate-stadium-waves-and-traffic-waves/
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But but but Co2 IS the control knob! Right? This is just more tripe in a seemingly now endless stream ! Just a few months/years ago if you EVEN mentioned a relationship between the AMO or PDO and temp increases the “crusher crews” were on you like stink on………These folks are acting like a defeated and retreating army.
Well, to discuss Mann’s “fleeting” monets and trends, we need to decide when the “fleeting” trends started and stopped.
Worthwhile in any case, let us consider the entire recent record as temperatures rise slowly and naturally, not just the last 17 years of a “flat earth society” temperature attacked by the CAGW Lack-of-Inquisition Squad.
So, 1885? Peak?
1915-1920 Dip? (But floods in California, TX, AZ; high waters on the Colorado River certainly are typical of a long El Nino or hotter times.)
1940-1945 – local peak. Or is 1935-1945 more accurate?
When was the most recent dip? 1945-1970 was cooling, but when was the low point: 1970, 1973, 1975?
Was the Modern Warming Period peaking in 1998 during the El Nino, or during the whole 1998 – 2015 period?
Looking backwards: Certainly 1996 -> 2015 is flat-lining the CAGW religion, but does that imply the MWP peak was in the middle at 2005-2006?
This “pause” has been going on for at least 15 years. How “fleeting” is that?
“Synthetic data”……Hmmmmm….could it be that what we’ve been experiencing over the last 25 years or so is synthetic warming?
Speaking on Stadium Waves, “Mann and his team show that this apparent synchronicity is likely a statistical artifact of using the problematic detrended-AMO approach.”
What a minute… Hockey Stick Mann is now the official “statistical artifact” referee?
Is Mann native to the English language? First the claim of the pause being “recent,” now the
characterization of the pause as “fleeting,” which, among those proficient in the English language,
can never be used to describe a 17 year time span
When I saw the use of the word “Distinguished” to describe Mann, I almost barfed. This is the bloke, one who’s main claims to fame is Tiljander, correct me if I am wrong. Please delete that word “Distinguished”.
Then I came across ” As the AMO is an oscillation, this cooling effect is likely fleeting, and when it reverses, the rate of warming increases.”. No chance. If the cooling already built in to the low solar cycle we are in comes to pass in ~10 years time and the expectations of an even lower solar cycle for the next one materialises, then Mann will be shown to have got that beautifully wrong.
The thing that always impresses me about Mann is that he seems to be such a nice bloke. (For those of you that don’t understand the British sense of humour, think /sarc tag).
Right and La la Land really exists.
Oh I can see another Nobel Prize heading his way!!!!!
The trouble is he will get a lot of positive publicity for this because Genius Michael has found the solution to the pause. It really is so frustrating how this stuff is so easily believed and the warmist’s pat themselves on the back and the whole sorry SAGA carries on.
National Science Foundation grant from the Stimulous funds
Michael Mann: $541,184 grant “Toward Improved Projections of the Climate Response to
Anthropogenic Forcing,” to contribute “to the understanding of abrupt climate change.”
Michael Mann $1.9 million to investigate the role of “environmental temperature on the transmission of vector-borne diseases.” Mr. Mann is listed as a “co-principal investigator” on that project. Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Advanced Regional And Decadal Predictions Of Coastal Inundation for the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, NOAA-Improving NOAA’s Climate Services for the Coastal Zone (Special Competition) [Principal Investigators: carious and M.E. Mann: PSU $120,463
“Robust decision-making for South Florida water resources by ecosystem service valuation, hydro-economic optimization, and conflict resolution modeling, NSF-Water Sustainability & Climate Program” [Multi-institution award M.E. Mann] PSU award (J.D. Fuentes/M.E. Mann): $300,514
The Ridiculous list goes on.
Well Mr. Mann, the pause has been “fleeting” for seventeen years…
What a maroon! A look at the hemispheric ocean temperature datasets suggests that Mikey is out to lunch but what else is new? It is a cooling southern hemisphere ocean driving the cooling behind the pause, not the AMO!
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2nh/from:1998/plot/hadsst2nh/from:1998/trend/plot/hadsst2sh/from:1998/plot/hadsst2sh/from:1998/trend
Mann’s lawyer just resigned from the defamation case.
https://twitter.com/JunkScience/status/454000427739385856
So is this now the 11th explanation of the pause?
Oh wow. That is what I would call either breathtaking hypocrisy or complete brain failure.
I would draw Dr Mann’s attention to his own paper, Knight et al 2005 (GRL), where in Figure 1 he graphs the AMO, showing a sharp rise of 0.2 C in the last 5 or 6 years of the 20th Century.
And if you fit a periodic regression curve to the AMO index you see this. Dr Mann’s paper shows the oscillation has been persistent over scale of at least 1,400 years.
Has he forgotten his own work…?
What the AMO shows is that CO2 is not the central control knob.
…ooops.. hit post too fast:
The AMO overwhelms with a modest and typical sort of change and overwhelms what is supposed to be the run away train of CO2.
And it is not fleeting, it is over 17 years.
This is just another bit of post hoc distractive arm waving by the fanatics.
How could the AMO be in a cooling phase if the heat is hiding in the deep, as Trenberth’s excuse asserts?
These guys are now making it up as they go- anything other than admit they need to revisit climate sensitivity.
I understand now. It all makes sense.
this is this is this is noise
signal signal
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Well that didn’t work. Please delete my prior.
“Fleeting” is a very imaginative and flattering term for a pause that has lasted 17 years 8 months. It is very close in length. then. to the “Fleeting” warming period 1979/1980 to 1997 when the globe was warming mildly?
How about “Disstinguished”?
Outside of climatology circles such as this, Mann is a nobody, i.e. undistinguished. Be thankful for that.
Man’s term upon the earth is fleeting, in the geological sense. See – we can extend this time before it changes.
New — Stadium Wave animation extended to sea level pressure (SLP) [background]:
http://s27.postimg.org/46is65usx/MD_Wave_SLP.gif
And where is the data that can be studied and replicated? Oh, wait a minute, the concepts and “data” are created to come up with a preconceived result. Much of the IPCC information falls into the same category. Much information can be interpreted in different ways and many scientists and researchers fall into the trap of looking at data with an objective in mind, and then say “EUREKA, we found what we were looking for!” This is not necessarily a result of any dishonesty but a function of the human condition.
Now, the fact that Mann refuses to release his data and methodology is telling.
But there are many scientists and researchers who do release their information and on studying the information, some people with agree, and others may see something totally different.
This crosses all lines of human endeavour.
For example in a recent article on PBS, it was found that up to 90% of new drugs are found NOT to work the way the researchers expected them to:
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“But when he actually sat down to review more than 50 studies that had come in over the transom, “I was frankly shocked to find that the number was more like 90 percent of papers that we were unable to reproduce.”
Because Amgen and other big pharmaceutical companies know that many animal studies are dubious, they always redo them before deciding whether to go ahead with human studies. So the company did not end up wasting hundreds of millions of dollars or years on a dead end.”
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http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/04/08/298335701/how-mouse-studies-lead-medical-research-down-dead-ends
I believe that many climate studies fail for very reason that people are looking for information that confirms their bias.
I was taught that in engineering, management, and human resources training that what we see is often in the “eye of the beholder”. Mann and others probably believe that what they are doing is “correct” (not necessarily right) since they are confirming what they believe. In my engineering training it was considered necessary to have a second or third and sometimes a fourth set of eyes that were not involved in the project review it as when you are deeply involved you sometimes miss fundamental flaws or better ways to do a thing.
In management and HR we were given tests to show that what we thought we saw was sometimes not what was really there. The human brain will fill in gaps in information or will fit what we have seen to our experience. People can be conditioned to an expectation, then shown flash cards and asked what they saw. Then they are given the cards to look at closely, and discover what they said they saw and what was on the cards were entirely different. A very good lesson in design and understanding of experiments and people.
Many readers will have seen little tests of the human brain on the Internet where we are fooled by our expectations.
When people are involved in testing of new systems and concepts, there is a tendency to use the results that met expectations and throw the ones that did not meet expectations out under the assumption the testing was flawed. However, sometimes those poor results are the key to understanding the system as it may indicate and instability or incorrect assumption; or a flaw in the test procedure.
Having witnessed this over many years, I do believe that many climate scientists firmly believe in their work. However, if they well not produce their data and methodology I suspect they are concerned that others could come to a different conclusion, or as in the pharmaceutical case referenced, others might not even be able to reproduce the results.
Just looking at WUWT. we see many theories of “climate change”. None or all may have some merit.
Only by making the hypotheses, data, and methodology will we move forward with understanding.
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PS- I listened to Flannery being interviewed on CBC (Canada) today. I can only conclude that some researchers are in it for “fame and fortune” but I would assume most are working to support their belief systems. It would be good if they got back in the science game and shared their information. If you want to listen to his interview it is at (warning – you may need an airsickness bag 😠) :
http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/current_20140410_80734.mp3
From 6:55 to OK – 7 years to test his hypothesis. He raised 1 million dollars in 5 days fro crowd sourcing for his Climate Council. Must be a lot of “believers” in Australia.
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http://phys.org/news/2011-04-eyes-brain.html
http://libraries.ucsd.edu/xdre/damsAccess?ds=solr/dams4&subject=bb88750746&file=1-2.pdf
“The mind of the observer is integral to determining the nature of reality.”
~ Alberto Villoldo, “Dance of the Four Winds”
http://voices.yahoo.com/the-blind-spot-does-our-brain-see-things-arent-263147.html
http://www.unlearning101.com/fuhgetaboutit_the_art_of_/2009/09/an-unlearning-strategy-training-your-mind-to-see-what-isnt-there.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2013/06/22/your-brain-sees-even-when-you-dont/