The SkepticalScience animation The Escalator has been around for a couple of years, and it has appeared in dozens of their posts and in blog posts by other carbon dioxide-obsessed alarmists. Their intent with The Escalator animation was to show that the instrument temperature record includes many short-term absences of global warming, while, in their minds, manmade greenhouse gases caused the long-term trend of global warming. With Kevin Trenberth now saying strong El Niño events caused global warming to occur in steps, SkepticalScience needs to revise their escalator animation. The steps are not only how skeptics view global warming…one of the leading ENSO and global warming researchers is now presenting global warming in El Niño-caused big jumps, and he also has written in at least two peer-reviewed papers that El Niños are fueled by sunlight.
So here’s my suggested replacement for SkepticalScience’s The Escalator. For lack of a better title, we’ll call it…
THE TRENBERTH GLOBAL WARMING STAIRCASE
Feel free to link it anywhere you like…especially where the CO2-obsessed have presented the SkepticalScience animation “The Escalator”.
For more information about Kevin Trenberth’s discussion of the how the warming of global surface temperatures occurred “instead of having a gradual trend going up, maybe the way to think of it is we have a series of steps, like a staircase” or in “big jumps” see the following posts. The first post also includes quotes from and links to the papers where Trenberth states that sunlight provides the warm water for El Niños:
- The 2014/15 El Niño – Part 9 – Kevin Trenberth is Looking Forward to Another “Big Jump”
- Open Letter to the Royal Meteorological Society Regarding Dr. Trenberth’s Article “Has Global Warming Stalled?”
If this topic is new to you, see the free illustrated essay The Manmade Global Warming Challenge (42MB). And if you’d like more information, my ebook Who Turned on the Heat? is available. It goes into a tremendous amount of detail to explain El Niño and La Niña processes and the long-term aftereffects of strong El Niño events. Who Turned on the Heat? weighs in at a whopping 550+ pages, about 110,000+ words. It contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 380 color illustrations. In pdf form, it’s about 23MB. It includes links to more than a dozen animations, which allow the reader to view ENSO processes and the interactions between variables.
I’ve lowered the price of Who Turned on the Heat? from U.S.$8.00 to U.S.$5.00. Some readers spend more on a cup of coffee. Please buy a copy. You might even learn something. A free preview in pdf format is here. The preview includes the Table of Contents, the Introduction, the first half of section 1 (which was provided complete in the post here), a discussion of the cover, and the Closing. Take a run through the Table of Contents. It is a very-detailed and well-illustrated book—using data from the real world, not models of a virtual world. Who Turned on the Heat? is only available in pdf format…and will only be available in that format. Click here to purchase a copy. Thanks. Book sales and tips will hopefully allow me to return to blogging full-time once again.
@Martin van Etten: “why then is temperature only going up, and not going down” What exactly should/could remove the excess energy from the planet?
In this way the temperature changes in different layers of the stratosphere above the equator. Please check historical data.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_TEMP_ANOM_ALL_EQ_1979.gif
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_TEMP_ANOM_ALL_EQ_1980.gif
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_TEMP_ANOM_ALL_EQ_1979.gif
Sorry.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/
Bernd
It’s the clouds of course. http://virakkraft.com/MEI-tropical-clouds.png
More clouds with falling ENSO, 05 and 07. Less clouds with rising ENSO, 06, 08 and 09
http://virakkraft.com/Nino-clouds-tropics.png
But ENSO can’t drive temp only up up up. Evaporation and LW radiation back to space should increase to restore equilibrium, more ghgs slow down the cooling so it does not happen.
“You have to increase the number of points by a _factor_ to get the reduction of noise by the \sqrt factor.”
This is true for a physics experiment with an apparatus that has a carefully measured error resolution and is measuring the same quantity over and over, for example, the charge of an electron.
I don’t think that’s true for the type of measurement that is done in climate science. Consider the case of a weather station where the thermometer is read to the nearest degree at noon every day. The measured temperature is T +- 0.5 degrees. Suppose we have the data for noon May 30 for the last one hundred years (keep wishing), what is the correct error? It’s not 0.5/10 = 0.05 degrees. Other than the fact that it’s late spring, the temperature in 1947 has no necessary connection to the temperature in 2014 because the weather fluctuates. The fluctuations have to be taken into account when computing an error. The correct way to compute the error is to make a probability distribution of the temperatures and use, say, the full-width at half maximum of the distribution for the error.
The one thing I wish SkS (or someone else) would show is their two charts superimposed (their straightline over the escalator).
Then ask them why the “observed” top step has’t been following the line (it’s been under the straight line for a few years now).
If I was paying someone to install the steps on that staircase, I’d wonder why a new step hasn’t been added for the past 17 years…
Us see the waves that arise in the stratosphere as a result of blockade of the southern polar vortex. The temperature in the stratosphere is highly dependent solar activity, which very decreases (increases GCR).
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/temp10anim.gif
After 32 years of marriage I still don’t know what my wife is thinking, so I am fully convinced that ESP is a myth, and I *never* accept it when person “A” tries to tell me what person “B” is thinking. The AGW alarmists are always trying to do this – misrepresenting ‘deniers’ – and it always comes down to a straw-man argument.
They are also always applying simple linear regression (without variance calculations!) to raw data to produce illusory ‘trend lines’ which only delude them into believing they have discovered something profound. Their comprehension of statistics compares to that of a freshman business major – they barely know what a ‘mean’ or a ‘slope’ is, let alone their significane (if any).
After 32 years of marriage I still don’t know what my wife is thinking, so I am fully convinced that ESP is a myth, and I *never* accept it when person “A” tries to tell me what person “B” is thinking. The AGW alarmists are always trying to do this – misrepresenting ‘deniers’ – and it always comes down to a straw-man argument.
They are also always applying simple linear regression (without variance calculations!) to raw data to produce illusory ‘trend lines’ which only delude them into believing they have discovered something profound. Their comprehension of statistics compares to that of a freshman business major – they barely know what a ‘mean’ or a ‘slope’ is, let alone their significance (if any).
It comes down, in the next several hundred years, into a very very funny thing called a glaciation period where the world cools down to it’s more default,
general-purpose
icebox
condition.
You’re gonna love it, there’ll be lots of youtube vids of ‘people drive so crazy in the ice age’ .
All this “wheat and corn and oats” and “trees growing for lumber” “cotton growing for clothing,” along with “hay growing for beef and horses and goats and camels,” that’s got everyone so annoyed, is gonna finally be over!
And oh, what a relief, all that “perpetual Northern Minnesota”, is gonna be from these sweltering days at the river, and beach, farming outside, fishing, fighting the horrendous insect infestations and doggone turtles, frogs, birds, snakes; those bees clogging everything up’s gonna finally get what it had coming to them, too, by jove!
I can not see how
anyone could possibly
not be worried about:
warm weather!
Am I channeling [sarc]? You betchas.
Really.
You’re gonna love it lol.
Don’t take any wooden catastrophic weather stories kids, you don’t really have to send Al Gore money because you use fire, he’s just mad because he blew the presidential election, and he figures since everybody didn’t do enough for him,
they can do it now by giving their liberty, and sending their livelihoods, to his political friends worldwide.
Who’d have thought the less insane power hungry ego-maniac guy won between Bush and Gore LoL !
Gary Pearse says:
May 29, 2014 at 5:11 am
Bob, the staircase is, however, going up. When does it go down? For those who don’t care where the heat is coming from, could we reach thermageddon just with El NINOS? Something is wrong with this model. If GHG are relatively small in effect, we would have to appeal to the sun to take us to our final end with El NINOS and why would it do that when it appears to even be quieting down or, according to some experts, it is relatively unchanging. How does it come down – that is the missing half of all your stuff. Maybe heating up after the LIA we can expect an equiibrium when sea “catches up”.
Global temperature does not equate to energy of the planet. You can relate the temperature of a glass of water with its energy content because it is a homogeneous system, the planet is not.
Sorry, I should have said homogeneous system in equilibrium
lgl says: “The tropical ocean warms during rising ENSO. The correlation between ENSO and Pacific ocean heat (energy) is positive, not negative.
http://virakkraft.com/Trop-Pacific-OHC-Nino34.png”
Thanks for proving you cannot read graphs.
lgl says: “It’s the clouds of course. http://virakkraft.com/MEI-tropical-clouds.png
More clouds with falling ENSO, 05 and 07. Less clouds with rising ENSO, 06, 08 and 09″
Once again, you illustrate that you can’t read graphs. Cloud amount over the tropical Pacific increased during El Nino events and decreased during La Nina events. You’ve just confirmed one portion of Trenberth’s presentation of how La Nina events recharge the heat discharged during El Ninos.
Thanks.
Aaron Luke says: “For those who don’t care where the heat is coming from, could we reach thermageddon just with El NINOS? Something is wrong with this model.”
Thermageddon?
Also, I haven’t presented a model. I present data…after the fact. In fact, my understandings of ENSO are supported by sea surface temperature data, ocean heat content data, cloud amount data, downward shortwave radiation data, downward longwave radiation data, trade wind data, lower troposphere temperature data, precipitation data, ocean current data, depth-averaged temperature data and warm water volume data for the equatorial Pacific, and sea level data.
Here’s a link to my blog posts about ENSO processes:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/category/el-nino-la-nina-processes/
Aaron Luke says: “How does it come down – that is the missing half of all your stuff.”
The only reason it’s missing, it hasn’t happened in the past three-plus decades. As soon as it does, I’ll be happy to write a blog post about it.
Bob
The funniest part of your inverted world is that if Ninos give a net loss of energy, the globe (and pacific) would have cooled between 1980 and 2000, but that was when it warmed the most.
Ninos neither add nor detract from the earths climate system, as the only energy coming into the system is from the sun’s rays, and the only energy departing the system is infrared thermal radiation from earth to space. Ninos are just weather events driven by the movement of energy within the Earth’s system.
Bob Tisdale asks “Thermageddon?”
IMO thermageddon is just shorthand for a hypothesized condition where there are no negative feedbacks. My understanding is that El Nino not only leads to warming but it leads to enhanced negative feedback by increased convection and polar heat transport. The planet is not in some delicate balance but simply sloughs off solar heat at various rates depending on prevailing planetary weather which essentially determines the amount of net convection. Increased CO2 raises the all-important upper troposphere temperature (or at least it is supposed to according to both theory and models), thus raising the surface temperature by a lesser amount that depends on changes in moist convection.
Thermageddon requires, among other things, little or no increase in moist convection with an increase in surface temperature.