Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
The new 2015 paper by Cai et al Increased frequency of extreme La Niña events under greenhouse warming has been getting a lot of alarmist attention recently. Examples: see the CBS News story Climate change expected to bring more La Niñas, and the BBC News article Study: Global warming ‘doubles risk’ of extreme weather, and, for those of you who are multilingual, see the German journal Bild der Wissenschaft post Mehr Besuche der kalten Schwester von „El Niño”. [Thanks to bloggers Alec aka Daffy Duck, Paul Homewood and Werner Kohl for the heads-up.] Also see Paul Homewood’s post BBC – Global Warming Doubles Risk Of Extreme Weather at NotALotOfPeopleKnowThat.<.
Cai et al. (2015) 14 co-authors are a who’s-who of climate scientists, including Michael McPhaden of NOAA’s PMEL, who’s written numerous papers about ENSO; and Eric Guilyardi, who’s the lead author of Guilyardi et al. (2009) Understanding El Niño in Ocean-Atmosphere General Circulation Models: progress and challenges.
We discussed Guilyardi et al. (2009) back in July 2012 in the post here. As you may recall, it was a study of how poorly the CMIP3-archived climate models simulated ENSO…that the models basically simulated no ENSO processes correctly. Thus one of their conclusions was:
Because ENSO is the dominant mode of climate variability at interannual time scales, the lack of consistency in the model predictions of the response of ENSO to global warming currently limits our confidence in using these predictions to address adaptive societal concerns, such as regional impacts or extremes (Joseph and Nigam 2006; Power et al. 2006).
Cai et al (2015) Increased frequency of extreme La Niña events under greenhouse warming is a companion paper to Cai et al (2013) Increasing frequency of extreme El Niño events due to greenhouse warming. We discussed the earlier paper in the post Our Climate Models Are Aglow with Whirling, Transient Nodes of Thought Careening through a Cosmic Vapor of Invention. It included a link to and discussion of Bellenger et al. (2012), which described how poorly the CMIP5-archived models simulated ENSO. Once again, the models simulate little if anything correctly. The same arguments apply to the newer paper Cai et al (2015), so there’s no need to repeat them, so please see the “Climate Models are Aglow” post.
The following is from an update to the “Climate Models are Aglow” post about the earlier paper. It should also apply to the newer paper:
Brian Kahn also covered Cai et al. (2013) in his ClimateCentral post Climate Change Could Double Likelihood of Super El Ninos. (Thanks again Andrew for the link to the post at HockeySchtick.) Brian Kahn’s article included the following and a remarkable quote from Kevin Trenberth:
The core of Cai’s results, that more super El Ninos are likely, was disputed by Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Corporation [sic] for Atmospheric Research.
He said some of the models used in the study overestimate the past number of El Nino events by a wide margin and do a poor job of representing them and their impacts.
“This seriously undermines the confidence that the models do an adequate job in ENSO (El Nino-Southern Oscillation) simulations and so why should we trust their future projections?” he said in an email.
Trenberth also said that some long-range climate models also fail to adequately simulate other natural climate patterns that influence El Nino let alone how they might also shift in a warming world.
Trenberth asked,“…so why should we trust their [climate models’] future projections?”
The obvious answer is ____________________ [I’ll let you fill in the blank].
Negative phases of the PDO are associated with increased La Ninas.
We are entering a negative phase of the PDO.
Sounds like they know more La Ninas are coming and want to pro-actively claim that CO2 is responsible.
Bob, thanks for reading this paper and summarizing it for us. I went to the Nature link for the abstract, and after plowing through 4 sentences got this:
“Here we present climate modelling evidence…”
at which point I figured my time wouid be better spent reading about deflated footballs.
Or reading about all those asteroids of late (now that’s interesting stuff!).
Yeah, I heard that this latest asteroid had its own satellite. I would bet that explains the major coincidence in 2013 with the asteroid flyby and the Russian meteor.
Aahh, They’re just desperately hoping for a reverse Gore effect.
Two reverse Gores and pike, then flat on their faces pool side.
I keep waiting for the extreme environmentalists to punch themselves out, but they are relentless and without boundaries. I’m glad there are people like Mr. Tisdale, and several others who post on WUWT, who can match their energy and are equally relentless.
Here is an idea for generating Global Warming articles.
Just take the sheet below and put in Global Warming/Climate change cliches.
DO-IT-YOURSELF COUNTRY & WESTERN SONG
I met her __________ _____; I can still recall _________
(1) (2) (3)
1. 2. 3.
on the highway in September that purple dress
in Sheboygan at McDonald’s that little hat
outside Fresno ridin’ shotgun that burlap bra
at a truck stop wrestlin’ gators those training pants
on probation all hunched over the stolen goods
in a jail cell poppin’ uppers that plastic nose
in a nightmare sort of pregnant the Stassin pin
incognito with joggers the neon sign
in the Stone Age stoned on oatmeal that creepy smile
in a treehouse with Merv Griffin the hearing aid
in a gay bar dead all over the boxer shorts
she wore; She was ______ _____,
(4) (5)
4. 5
sobbin’ at the toll booth in the twilight
drinkin’ Dr. Pepper but I loved her
weighted down with Twinkies by the off-ramp
breakin’ out with acne near Poughkeepsie
crawlin’ through the prairie with her cobra
smellin’ kind of funny when she shot me
crashin’ through the guardrail on her elbows
chewin’ on a hangnail with Led-Zeppelin
talkin’ in Swahili with Miss Piggy
drownin’ in the quicksand with a wetback
slurpin’ up linguini in her muu-muu
and I knew _______; _______ I’d ______ forever;
(6) (7) (8)
6. 7. 8.
no guy would ever love her more I promised her stay with her
that she would be an easy score I knew deep down warp her mind
she’d bought her dentures in a store She asked me if swear off booze
that she would be a crashing bore I told her shrink change my sex
I’d never rate her more than “4” The judge declared punch her out
they’d hate her guts in Baltimore My Pooh Bear said live off her
it was a raven, nothing more I shrieked in pain have my rash
we really lost the last World War The painters knew stay a dwarf
I’d have to scrape her off the floor A Klingon said hate her dog
what strong deodorants were for My hamster thought pick my nose
that she was rotten to the core The blood test showed play “Go Fish”
that I would upchuck on the floor Her rabbi said salivate
She said to me ____; But who’d have thought she’d _____
(9) (10)
9. 10.
our love would never die run off
there was no other guy wind up
man wasn’t meant to fly boogie
that Nixon didn’t lie yodel
her basset hound was shy sky dive
that Rolaids made her high turn green
she’d have a swiss on rye freak out
she loved my one blue eye blast off
her brother’s name was Hy make it
she liked “Spy vs. Spy” black out
that birthdays made her cry bobsled
she couldn’t stand my tie grovel
___________; _________ goodbye.
(11) (12)
11. 12.
with my best friend You’d think at least that she’d have said
in my Edsel I never had the chance to say
on a surfboard She told her fat friend Grace to say
on “The Gong Show” I now can kiss my credit cards
with her dentist I guess I was too smashed to say
on her “Workmate” I watched her melt away and sobbed
with a robot She fell beneath the wheels and cried
with no clothes on She sent a hired thug to say
at her health club She freaked out on the lawn and screamed
in her Maytag I pushed her off the bridge and waved
with her guru But that’s the way that pygmies say
while in labor She sealed me in the vault and smirked.
Actually no, I don’t agree, I think there is more to climate than solar cycles and magnetic fields.
I see where this is going. Its going to get colder over the next few decades and he wants to be able to say I told you so!!! The global warming is taken for granted.
So, I gotta ask, Global warming will bring more extreme La Niña events AND Global Warming will bring more extreme „El Niño” events?
Does this mean we will have more La Niña events or more El Niño” events?
Or does it mean that there will be greater La Niña event peaks followed by stronger El Niño” event peaks with a greatly increased oscillation between and occurrences of peaks?
yes
As noted before these climate modelers act more like clueless day traders betting on each new trend with every change in the weather. Declining trade winds then rising trade winds, more El Ninos then more La NInas. Its good propaganda, but bad science
Based on the response of the oceans to lower solar irradiation during the Little Ice Age and the current drop in solar output, I would predict a more El Nino-like Pacific. That means a decrease in the east-west temperature gradient, not a change in frequency or intensity. The Intertropical Convergence Zone moved southward and that can affect the trade winds and El Nino frequency. HOwever there was a decrease in upwelling during the LIA, and ocean temperatures dropped as identified by Rosenthal 2013. During the LIA southeast Asia suffered more droughts, and that is the opposite of what is expected during heavy La Nina years
All told, those conditions suggest more moderate La Nina-like conditions over the next 2 decades if solar output remains low. So time will test the latest in the wave of climate fear mongering models.
Frequency of El Nino would increase in the weakest part of a solar minimum. During the coldest years on CET in the Dalton minimum (1807-1817), there may have been five El Nino episodes:
https://sites.google.com/site/medievalwarmperiod/Home/historic-el-nino-events
Michael Mann said the same in his book, referring to a possible Pacific Thermostat Hypothesis.
The result is less warming, as these La Ninas are long term negative feedback.
To Sun Spot’s question above on Foxy Loxy: that would be UNconscionable for me to comment on.
“This seriously undermines the confidence that the models do an adequate job in ENSO (El Nino-Southern Oscillation) simulations and so why should we trust their future projections?” he said in an email.
=
Given the 2014 El Nino prediction success…
6CH4 + 12O2 ——— >6 CO2 + 12 H2O ———- > 6CO2 + 6H2O ——> C6H12O6 + 6O2
End of Story.
Great story, Brian. To re-establish the balance Pachauri’s administration should perhaps first open the windows and, because it’s around 0°C in Geneva now, continue by watering their plants.
It’s only a matter of time before the inevitable paper title: ” Global warming doubles the risk of extreme La Nada events!”
”Global warming doubles the risk of extreme La Nada events!”
OR; Global warming studied have shown to cut the risk of extreme La Nada events, film at 11…
Bob, you must be sick to the back teeth of these clowns. You explained in your book and, here, a long time before that; the sequence of events following an El Niño.
While attempting to explain the long plateau in temperatures, they keep coming up with more negative feedbacks to global warming. It used to be that all the feedbacks were positive and would lead to runaway warming. But now, if they come up with any more negative feedbacks, they’ll have to admit that the planet’s climate is self-regulating and that more CO2 is not going to be a major problem.
We pay them a fortune just so they can come to the same conclusion as we, only 5 years later.
Defund them all and sue them to reclaim the money.
Bob,
I urge you to take a look at this gret new blog if you have not yet done so:
http://climatechangepredictions.org/category/hardest_hit
I believe you especially might enjoy the work they do there.
Thanks, by the way, for another great look at the idiocratic nature of the the climate obsessed movement.
When El Nino returns, we will certainly be reading serious peer reviewed articles claiming that El Nino is expected and predicted to be more frequent in ‘climate change’.
And Jo Nova commented a couple of days ago
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/01/climate-change-will-hit-australia-and-asia-africa-arctic-eu-pacific-harder-than-rest-of-world/
Looked at the site – deadpan recital of contradictory alarmist claims over the years .
They have a page that includes past stories such as the “Ship of Fools ” expedition a year ago.
One news snippet is a quote from Chris Turney :
“He said the expedition was not a “jolly tourist trip” as some had claimed and that it will be judged by its peer-reviewed publications on the scientists’ return, according to the Mercury News, 7 January.”
So naturally one is curious: have the peer reviewed scientific papers appeared yet ?
The state of “science” and “scientists” in the US.
I had a question about dark energy which I put to “Ask a ‘scientist'” in the UK and at Newton, run by The US DOE.
As a matter of curiousity I looked at their “Question of the week”. A girl asked how can we get rid of pollution already in the air.
The answers the stalwart “scientists” gave this poor girl was all about getting rid of CO2. Nothing about air pollution as defined in Wikipedia or the main air pollutants identified there, CO2 being conspicuous by its absence.
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/week.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution
I was reading an academic dissertation not so long ago that proposed a “persistent La Nina” condition during the LIA.
Thanks Bob.
Interestingly, last evening, I just re-read “An Introduction To ENSO, AMO, and PDO — Part 3” posted on WUWT on 3 Sept 2010. My re-read was a response to material I was reading elsewhere. Despite all your posts about such things I see a lot of misunderstandings. I did suggest that the person find and read that post.
~~~~~~~
Richard at 11:53
I just went to the newton link and read the response to Carrie, the young lady. Someone that knows someone in the DOE Office of Science ought to get in touch.
Unless Carrie mentioned CO2 in her question (it does not appear so) then the responses are pathetic. Carrie is 12 or 13 and the first writer includes this in parenthesis: “(and you cannot cause a new problem while fixing another)”. I know what the meaning is of this – did Carrie? The DOE should be ashamed of this set of answers.
I would have told her that in the US, much has been done and for her to look at some of the things, such as
http://www.popularpittsburgh.com/pittsburgh-info/pittsburgh-history/darkhistory.aspx
This is off topic, so I won’t go on.
It’s all part of the ‘extreme’ meme that is replacing AGW, Climate Change, Climate Pollution (I loved that one).
Since they have failed miserably to prove that the globe is warming measurably or dangerously, they are falling back to an ‘unprovable’ and ‘unfalsifiable’ claim of CO2 causing ‘extreme climate’. Very difficult to falsify a claim that something will become more ‘extreme’ in the future, given that ‘extreme’ isn’t quantifiable like ‘temperature rise’ is.
There seems no escape from global warming angst.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edvard_Munch_-_The_Scream_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
Bob,
No, as you quoted directly above, Trenberth actually wrote: “This seriously undermines the confidence that the models do an adequate job in ENSO (El Nino-Southern Oscillation) simulations and so why should we trust their future projections?” Why would you incorrectly paraphrase him so blatantly directly after quoting him directly?
The obvious answer is ____________________ [I’ll let you fill in the blank].
For thinking readers I offer the following points:
1) The whole idea of CO2 mitigation is to reduce reliance on foward-looking models which are obviously wrong, and always will be.
2) Climate researchers, and indeed anyone who is rational and has some basic understanding of thermodynamics, understand that processes like ENSO, AMO, PDO, etcetero, do not create or destroy energy. All they do is move it around. Think, “What goes up must come down,” and run it both ways. Hence the word “oscillation”, which is a very different concept from “secular trend”.
”Climate researchers, and indeed anyone who is rational and has some basic understanding of thermodynamics…”
Brandon,
that would be your problem right there, climastrologists have little understanding of thermodynamics, let alone radiative physics. Our radiatively cooled atmosphere is increasing the cooling rate of our solar heated oceans. Climastrologists claim the reverse, saying that IR from the atmosphere is slowing the cooling rate of the oceans. This is ridiculous. So too is their claim that the oceans would freeze without IR from the atmosphere.
In the first case empirical experiment proves that incident LWIR has no effect on the cooling rate of liquid water that is free to evaporatively cool. In the second case empirical experiment proves that liquid water is a SW selective surface not a near blackbody. It is sunlight alone that heats our oceans. LWIR plays no role.
How could climastrologists who have gotten the “basic physics” of the “settled science” so breathtakingly wrong with regard to our oceans ever have anything useful to say about ENSO, AMO or PDO?
Konrad,
Well yes, that would explain why both the surface and oceans have warmed since 1880.
A popular argument here. Problem is, evaporation doesn’t remove latent heat from the atmosphere so lab bench experiments which don’t take that into account won’t cut it.
Ditto everything. IR doesn’t penetrate dirt either. Neither does sunlight for that matter.
You don’t actually expect me to give you a serious answer to that question …
Brandon Gates
January 29, 2015 at 12:47 am
/////////////////////////////////////////////
”Well yes, that would explain why both the surface and oceans have warmed since 1880.”
Wrong. Cloud and solar variation is all that’s required. What frequencies vary most in component TSI? Which frequencies penetrate deepest into the deep selective surface of the ocean?
”A popular argument here. Problem is, evaporation doesn’t remove latent heat from the atmosphere so lab bench experiments which don’t take that into account won’t cut it.”
Popular argument? More like results of repeatable empirical experiment. Evaporation doesn’t remove energy from the atmosphere. Radiative gases do that. But you diversion is irrelevant. Climastologists claimed that the oceans would freeze without DWLWIR. Empirical experiment proves them utterly wrong.
”Ditto everything. IR doesn’t penetrate dirt either. Neither does sunlight for that matter.”
But incident LWIR can slow the cooling rate of dirt, it just doesn’t work for 71% of the planet’s surface. And sunlight does penetrate water, which is the whole point. This makes water a UV/SW/SWIR selective surface, and climastrologists provably treated the oceans as a “near blackbody”.
”You don’t actually expect me to give you a serious answer to that question …”
I got pretty much what I expected. Your physics is woeful. Let me get you up to speed –
http://i59.tinypic.com/10pdqur.jpg
Which of these five rules apply to our oceans?
Where is the evidence that climastrologists used these five rules when claiming 255K for surface without atmosphere?
This fist-biting error is at the very foundation of the AGW hoax. No amount of hand waving about fudged surface station records or heat hiding in the oceans will ever make it go away. The is no net atmospheric radiative GHE on this planet. AGW is therefore a physical impossibility. The 255K “surface without radiative atmosphere” claim can never be erased. It is foundation dogma of the Church of Radiative Climastrology. They tried to use standard S-B equations on a material that was SW translucent and IR opaque. Their shame will burn forever.
Brandon
How do you distinguish a long term oscillation from a secular trend?
Remember that Lorenz showed that nonlinear oscillation has no long term mean to return to but always jumps to different temporary “means” even with no change to system parameters.
All that is needed for climate change is cloud cover change driven by nonlinear thermodynamics and the Lyapunov stability of clouds.
Phlogiston,
Since correlations will fool us in such scenarios, it’s best to look to first principles of physics for plausible causal mechanisms.
True. He also said nothing about observable, measurable, physical systems being magical.
“All that is needed” is the first step toward oversimplifying a complex system. One then risks making a single agent or mechanism responsible for all change. I’m surprised a WUWT reader would do such a thing.
At what point do the scientists become embarrassed by all this nonsense.
The latest is that male polar bear parts are at risk.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/01/26/pollution-is-weakening-polar-bear-penises/
From an actual study published in the journal Environmental Research.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935114004770
Be kind Bill,. Perhaps those scientists are just desperately searching for reasons to excuse their own shrinking genitalia.
Hasn’t the last decade or so been dominated by La Nada?
La Nada will rule going forward this decade.