Add it to the list of over 50 excuses for the pause from climate science now on record…this time its small volcanoes.
Small volcanic eruptions partly explain ‘warming hiatus’
The “warming hiatus” that has occurred over the last 15 years has been partly caused by small volcanic eruptions.
Scientists have long known that volcanoes cool the atmosphere because of the sulfur dioxide that is expelled during eruptions. Droplets of sulfuric acid that form when the gas combines with oxygen in the upper atmosphere can persist for many months, reflecting sunlight away from Earth and lowering temperatures at the surface and in the lower atmosphere.
Previous research suggested that early 21st century eruptions might explain up to a third of the recent “warming hiatus.”
New research available online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) further identifies observational climate signals caused by recent volcanic activity. This new research complements an earlier GRL paper published in November, which relied on a combination of ground, air and satellite measurements, indicated that a series of small 21st century volcanic eruptions deflected substantially more solar radiation than previously estimated.
“This new work shows that the climate signals of late 20th and early 21st century volcanic activity can be detected in a variety of different observational data sets,” said Benjamin Santer, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist and lead author of the study.
The warmest year on record is 1998. After that, the steep climb in global surface temperatures observed over the 20th century appeared to level off. This “hiatus” received considerable attention, despite the fact that the full observational surface temperature record shows many instances of slowing and acceleration in warming rates. Scientists had previously suggested that factors such as weak solar activity and increased heat uptake by the oceans could be responsible for the recent lull in temperature increases. After publication of a 2011 paper in the journal Science by Susan Solomon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), it was recognized that an uptick in volcanic activity might also be implicated in the “warming hiatus.”
Prior to the 2011 Science paper, the prevailing scientific thinking was that only very large eruptions – on the scale of the cataclysmic 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines, which ejected an estimated 20 million metric tons (44 billion pounds) of sulfur – were capable of impacting global climate. This conventional wisdom was largely based on climate model simulations. But according to David Ridley, an atmospheric scientist at MIT and lead author of the November GRL paper, these simulations were missing an important component of volcanic activity.
Ridley and colleagues found the missing piece of the puzzle at the intersection of two atmospheric layers, the stratosphere and the troposphere – the lowest layer of the atmosphere, where all weather takes place. Those layers meet between 10 and 15 kilometers (six to nine miles) above the Earth.
Satellite measurements of the sulfuric acid droplets and aerosols produced by erupting volcanoes are generally restricted to above 15 km. Below 15 km, cirrus clouds can interfere with satellite aerosol measurements. This means that toward the poles, where the lower stratosphere can reach down to 10 km, the satellite measurements miss a significant chunk of the total volcanic aerosol loading.
To get around this problem, the study by Ridley and colleagues combined observations from ground-, air- and space-based instruments to better observe aerosols in the lower portion of the stratosphere. They used these improved estimates of total volcanic aerosols in a simple climate model, and estimated that volcanoes may have caused cooling of 0.05 degrees to 0.12 degrees Celsius since 2000.
The second Livermore-led study shows that the signals of these late 20th and early 21st eruptions can be positively identified in atmospheric temperature, moisture and the reflected solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere. A vital step in detecting these volcanic signals is the removal of the “climate noise” caused by El Niños and La Niñas.
“The fact that these volcanic signatures are apparent in multiple independently measured climate variables really supports the idea that they are influencing climate in spite of their moderate size,” said Mark Zelinka, another Livermore author. “If we wish to accurately simulate recent climate change in models, we cannot neglect the ability of these smaller eruptions to reflect sunlight away from Earth.”
###
To see the full research, go to Geophysical Research Letters. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL061541/abstract?campaign=wlytk-41855.5282060185 and http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1002/2014GL062366/
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
tried to read source but could only get vague abstract – paywall
I’m fairly new here, but maybe you’ve discussed this:
When they say things like may explain up to some amount, what does explain mean? Pretty sure it is not variance of something???
Bubba, paywall is a problem. There are three solutions.
1. pay
2. Search around for a preprint. Most academics are so proud to have been accepted by peer review in whatever journal, that they post an unofficial ‘preprint’ version on their University website.
3. Read my books since I have researched both plus lots more.
My advice is to try #2 first.
Your book is on my list as I am not really that interested in their stuff.
I am curious about methods and decisions in this strange (to me) field.
I wrote to you above too with another question.
Rud, I looked for a preprint, no dice. And JGR paywalls the references so I can’t look for related research either.
It’s worse than we thought. Only more boiling, sulphurous molten lava spewing out of volcanoes is gunna stop us all from burning in Hell but even with lots more grants where are we gunna find enough virgins for the task?
Stay tuned folks for the next nail-biting episode of Calamitous Climatology Capers and will fracking ironically save the planet?
If there are more volcanoes, there is more CO2 being emitted. There’s a video out regarding Mt. Nyiragongo, a volcanic peak towering above Goma City, by Lake Kivu in the D.R. of Congo. It has the largest pool of lava in the world, 282 million cubic feet, lava that flows up to 60 mph. Fast-moving flows have already killed over 1,000 people, not counting those few who have wandered into surface depressions and been asphyxiated by accumulated CO2.
Gas seeps near the city measure as high as 60% CO2. Geologists suspect that some of the seeps enter the bottom of Lake Kivu, possibly presenting a hazard far worse than the Lake Nyos disaster, which killed only 1,700 people. There are about 2,000,000 people in the vicinity of Lake Kivu. Media are faced with a dilemma: publicize the danger (and admit that volcanoes emit huge amounts of CO2) or keep it secret and risk looking complicit when Lake Kivu turns over. Have you heard about Nyiragongo in your favorite newspaper? TV nework news? Anywhere?
goggled it, pics and lava, no CO2, but Virunga – right out of Crichton Congo and, I think not his best.
Have read about Lake Nyos.
Will look further.
Spent last summer at Yellowstone NP and listened to rangers speak to what disasters await the blast of that caldera. I’m convinced that huge park creates its own weather. Hailed on 5 times in July in evening when was 95F during day and only relief was standing in the river.
Santer et al sound like they are discussing this in a bar over a pint where they don’t have access to actual volcano data and are just guessing at stuff in the absence of being able to just check. Hard to believe this could get published when it appears they haven’t done some very basic fact checking.
If the climate science community had more funding for faster supercomputers to run their models they would have predicted all 50 of the causes of ‘the pause’ in advance, unfortunately their computers are too slow and their ‘predictions’ are lagging behind reality which can give the impression that they’re making it up as they go along.
The pause will continue until about 2028 because the 60-year cycle is declining whilst the 934-year cycle is still increasing until about 2058. These cycles are determined and regulated by planetary orbits. Water vapour and carbon dioxide cool.
Did he bother looking at the 2+ decades of SurfRAD data that should clearly show his volcano impact on solar radiation? It has massive problems but should show the deltas he’s trying to insinuate. If so, why have the all been screaming we’re going to fry if they had all the data for their models but all the extra energy is being attenuated in the upper atmosphere? Why do they always manage to “prove” themselves wrong? Inquiring minds want to know.
Philjourdan, I thought the last number I saw was around 58 or so over at Climate Depot. Haven’t looked around for a while and assumed we were easily in the 60’s for the
WAGsexplanations about the ongoing plateau.@Niel Overton – when it gets to 100, sell! 😉
The Models and Historical Temperature Adjustments (which cause GW) vs. 50+ excuses (which cause buffering of GW) seem to be in perfect tension. Be prepared; if the excuses get any better we will be heading for global cooling.
Hi Jimbo,
Do you have any relevant list on this matter?
Thanks, Anthony. Good reporting.
“The warmest year on record is 1998. After that, the steep climb in global surface temperatures observed over the 20th century appeared to level off.”
No, it did not appear to level off; global warming stopped in each and every temperature data base. This demonstrates that at the very least CO2 does not dominate Earth’s climate.
…”Prior to the 2011 Science paper, the prevailing scientific thinking was that only very large eruptions – on the scale of the cataclysmic 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines, which ejected an estimated 20 million metric tons (44 billion pounds) of sulfur – were capable of impacting global climate.”…
========================
Why convert an already unimaginable number, “20 million metric tons”, into one even more so, “44 billion pounds”.
It reads like a sales prospective.
♪♫ “Oh, ya got trouble, trouble, trouble…” ♪♫
There is no doubt that winters have been getting colder in most parts of the world. There is some evidence that the trend of NORTHERN HEMISPHERE LAND ONLY WINTER TEMPERATUREANOMALIES have actually been declining since 1995 or 20 years at (–0.18C/decade) . Since 1998 the NORTHERN HEMISPHERE WINTER LAND ONLY TEMPERATURE ANOMALIES have declined more rapidly at (- 0.35C /decade.) So winters have been cooling in the Northern Hemisphere for 2 decades already, but not word about this from IPCC or NOAA.
Globally, the trend of GLOBAL WINTER LAND ONLY TEMPERATURE ANOMALIES declined at (-0.22C/decade.)
Why are winter temperatures so important?
Because very cold winters lead to cold spring and fall and if sustained over several years, to cold summers and lower annual temperatures as we have seen during 2014.
This pattern of declining temperature anomalies in every season of the year has been quite evident over the last several decades in the Northern Hemisphere. We mentioned previously that the trend of NH Land winter temperature anomalies showed a decline of (-0.18 C /decade) since 1995. By 1998, the trend of NH Land winter temperature anomaly was declining at (-0.35 C/decade). Since 2002 it is (-0.54C/decade) and since 2007 it is (- 0.81C/decade). The decline is steadily increasing.
Since 2000, the NH spring land temperature anomaly also stopped rising and went flat between 2000 and 2007 after which it also started to decline at (-0.08 C/decade)
Since 2005, the trend of the NH fall land temperature anomaly stopped rising and has been declining at (-0.05C/decade)
Finally the trend of the NH summer land temperature anomaly stopped rising in 1998, was flat from 1998 to 2010 and has been declining since 2010 at (-0.7C/decade)
This pattern has led to a 17 year pause in the rise of global temperatures and could lead to 2-3 decades more of colder global temperatures.
Rutgers University record of Northern Hemisphere snow extend since 1967, clearly shows and an increasing snow extent, especially since 1998
So a clue to the global pause — cooling temperatures in Northern Hemisphere. The North Atlantic SST has stopped rising and the SST is in fact levelling off and may likely start to decline
I find the tone of the press release to be quite telling. One could approach the very same issue with a view that reduced eruptions prior to 1998 caused warming and we’ve now returned to a more normal eruption pattern which has stopped the warming. The fact this thought never entered their minds tells us more about climate science than the poor paper itself.
Hotheads and data definitely have a “Fifty Shades Of Grey” relationship.
Eugene WR Gallun
The supposed ace card of The Pause? The one that no one but d*s are bringing up as though it were a thing? Go to any place of science and it’s a non-issue just as much as Roswell.
Yeah all that or CO2 isn’t the primary driver but then that would be a grant and narrative killer.
I have yet to see a paper that established an increase in small volcanic eruptions which is needed to have this paper be relevant.
Presumably, if we take this paper at face value, the warming was due to a lack of small eruptions, not CO2.
The msm keeps perpetuating the CAGW hoax, so proponents like Santer just need to stoke the dying fire occasionally to keep the federal funds flowing. Want to get an idea of the scope of the bIllions involved? Visit the Green Corruption File.
It’s billions of microscopic volcanoes smaller than the eye can see.
Since the late 1990’s, there has been very little warming, let’s say the past 15 years. For 30 years prior to the late 1970’s, there was slight global cooling.
So, what we have that really stands out is a period of warming (with prior cooling and followed by a warming “haitus”) from the late 70’s to the late 90’s.
Why are we looking for dozens of reasons for why the warming stopped????
Instead, we should be looking for the reasons for why it warmed in the 1980’s/90’s and not before or after!
If we never had that 20 years of accelerated warming, CAGW would not exist today in the form that it does. Why are we not focused on that warming as being unique and exceptional, since it was?
Instead, the assumption is that those 20 years of warming were/is expected and there needs to some unusual explanation/mechanism, an aberration, that is offsetting the expected.
Maybe 1946-78 and 1998-2015 are the expected and the period 1978-1998 is the aberration. What happened to cause the warming from 1978-1998 is what we should want to know.
We also warmed for 30 years prior to the mid 40’s. Should we not be looking at what was unique to that period?
Yes, we are holding the heat that increased during those warming periods. Maybe some of this is from increasing CO2 but we should also look at the problem, not just as what is stopping CO2 from warming the earth as it should be but what was causing it to warm more than it should be at times(under lower sensitivity)
Mike Maguire
Sorry, but you are missing the point.
Global cooling existed through the 1970s and scaremongers claimed the cooling was dangerous and caused by sulphur dioxide from fossil-fueled power stations. Clearly, use of fossil fuels should be constrained.
Global warming existed in the 1970s and scaremongers claimed the warming was dangerous and caused by carbon dioxide from fossil-fueled power stations. Clearly, use of fossil fuels should be constrained.
This switch was possible because most people don’t know the difference between sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide; both are ‘chemicals’ so must be bad.
There has been no global warming or global cooling detectable at 95% confidence through the last decade. When either global cooling resumes or global warming resumes we will know which reason to constrain use of fossil fuels will re-adopted. Until then, nonsense papers (such as that being discussed in this thread) are being published as ‘holding action’; they purport to blame nature for masking the dangerous effect of fossil fuel usage but are each so weak that ones which become inconvenient can be rebutted when warming or cooling resumes.
Please note the lack of sarc tags because I am completely serious about this.
Richard
OOPs Sorry I intended
Global warming existed in the 1980s and …
I apologise for the serious misprint.
Richard
Well said Richard. Alarmism summed up in a few paragraphs. Thank you.
Richard,
No, the point I made is that it did cool a bit up before the 80’s/90’s, warmed in the 80’/90’s, then stopped warming. Instead of just looking for why it stopped warming after the 80’s/90’s based on the assumption of CO2 having 2X amount of warming, that has been offset by something new, we should be looking at the problem as CO2 having just X amount of warming or X/2 amount of warming and something in the 80’s/90’s was present to magnify it………………not that all of the missing factors coming from something in the 2000’s that offset the 2x of warming that “would have” occurred, just like it did in the 80’s/90’s.
Richard:
Your phrase “holding action” is a pretty good characterization of this type of science.
Mike Maguire
Thanks for the clarification, but I understood what you were saying.
If you check you will see that my interest in the AGW-scare is because of my revulsion at the damage it is doing to science. Clearly, I wish the investigations were of the causes (if any) of the periods of recovery from the Little Ice Age (LIA) including the most recent.
But my point was that the paper under discussion is not about scientific understanding: it is part of a ‘holding action’ by scaremongers until the present lack of global warming or cooling ends.
Richard
This paper is not for non-believers. It’s for the run of the mill John/Jane Doe. Pause, (no pun or sarc) and reflect; every volcano that has so much as burped has been reported, on the internet.
They see little volcanoes going off right and left. And along comes a paper…
Let’s see if it’s picked up on the msm news. They are once again relying on the population’s lack of good science education.
Yeah, this is preaching to the most gullible choir members.
Santa, you were late. 😉
Will someone please post a chart of active volcanism verses CO2 rises along with a table of geochemical average exhalation gas compositions measured from active volcanoes (every geochem text of the past 50 years has one).
Occam’s razor is selling Amway due to unemployment or something?
I should add, ipso-facto, obviously this does not mean CO2 from volcanoes has warmed earth.
It is my opinion that Santor knows that the claims of this paper would be destroyed by WUWT and other real science. The paper was really just red meat for his believers and to divert them from the data which shows that there has not been any warming for circa 18 years. It is just to perpetrate the myth of CAGW and to support the dumb things the EPA and the Administration want to push like controlling CO2 emissions.
It is like the phony 97% claim which the president still quotes along with the MSM folks like Bob Beckel who has made a career out of spin and is reportedly worth $10 million dollars doing so. Facts don’t matter
perpetuate!!