From the AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE and the “if warming can’t overcome Nature, is it really there at all?” department.
Amid climate change debates revolving around limited increases in recent global mean surface temperature (GMST) rates, Kevin Trenberth argues that natural climate fluxes – larger than commonly appreciated – can overwhelm background warming, making plateaued rates, or hiatuses, deceiving in significance. After many years of monitoring, it’s clear that the GMST can vary from year to year, even decade to decade; these differences, Trenberth argues, are largely a result of internal natural variability. For example, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), a phenomenon where the Pacific Ocean goes through periods of warming and cooling, can have a very strong impact on the climate by altering ocean currents, convection, and overturning. The PDO results in more sequestration of heat in the deep ocean during the negative phase of the PDO; therefore GMST tends to stagnate during this negative PDO phase, but increases during the positive phase. Indeed, observations and models show that the PDO is a key player in the two recent hiatus periods. Some other examples of causes behind natural variation include El Niño, volcanic activity, and decreased water vapor in the stratosphere. These natural variations are strong enough to mask steady background warming at any point in time, Trenberth argues. As researchers develop and test climate change models, it’s important to expect these variations and plan for them.
###
Article #7: “Has there been a hiatus?,” by K.E. Trenberth at National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO.
This typical climate lame-o press release (where getting the PR is more important than the paper itself) gives an incomplete citation. No Journal. No DOI, No URL. I’ve looked all over trying to find the citation in the press release and have come up empty. If anyone knows where it is, please leave a comment
Trenberth has yet to figure out that it’s well-nigh impossible to “hide” heat in the deeper ocean. Outside of marginal seas, where natural salinity variations may exert a stronger effect upon the density of seawater, it’s higher temperature that result in lower density; through the action of buoyancy forces, the warmest waters are invariably in the surface layer above the thermocline.
All this is very sinister. Each time they come up with a new excuse the are borrowing probably 3-5 years time and keeping the AGW balls in the air so that there are still those to be conned. Pope Frank being one of the latest marks of the climate carpetbaggers.
We have to have planning to adapt for something which has always occurred?
Trenberth’s bit makes it obvious — The variability of the various climate parameters (all of them) obscures the ability to measure or perceive the change [which is what he said]. So, even if there IS climate change – either warming or cooling – it is impossible to measure any human caused component or to measure any change in that component as a result of changes in human efforts. Therefore any benefits of those efforts cannot, by definition, be determined. That being so, any and all costs, small or large, of those attempts cannot be justified. QED
SKS helpfully translates to the same thing.
It’s both a “travesty” and unsettled science.
” But our observation systems aren’t able to comprehensively keep track of where all the energy is going. ”
More nonsense (does that surprise anyone )
I’ve been showing regional swings in minimum temp for a few years now. The derivative of daily temp by area shows quite distinctly there is no trend in temperature.
If a climate model fails in the middle of the da’hood, and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
No, no, no, The correct question is; “If a husband speaks and his wife is not around to hear him, is he still wrong ????”
If a man says something in a forest and there’s no women around to hear him…Is he still wrong?
Is the Pope catholic?
(Used to be this was a rhetorical question. Now, not so much.)
there’s[there are]“Trenberth says ‘Internal climate variability masks climate-warming trends’”
Or possibly, Internal climate variability create climate-warming trends.
Here is the journal reference:
Science 14 August 2015:
Vol. 349 no. 6249 pp. 691-692
DOI:10.1126/science.aac9225
PERSPECTIVE
Has there been a hiatus?
Kevin E. Trenberth | 0 Comments
Internal climate variability masks climate-warming trends
They were accepting comments which are peer reviewed so I added one which should show up once they have looked it over.
Arno,
I logged in on my tablet to AAAS and didn’t see the normal comments link. Maybe I need to use my desktop computer Friday AM?
Joel
You have to click on “full text” and then go to the bottom end where the references are. At the end of the references there is an invitation to submit a comment.
Like I said, I submitted my comment to Science and was surprised by their quick turnaround time – only two days. Since I did not write one for WUWT I am encclosing a copy of it here, with credit to Science Magazine.
**************************************************************************
Science 14 August 2015:
Vol. 349 no. 6249 pp. 691-692
DOI:10.1126/science.aac9225
“Has there been a hiatus?”
by Kevin E. Trenberth
Comment by Arno Arrak
The answer to the question “Has there been a hiatus?” is yes. And not just one but two of them. The current one started with the twenty-first century. The 1998 super El Nino was followed by a short step warming in 1999. In only three years it raised global temperature by one third of a degree Celsius and then stopped. From 2002 on until the present day a hiatus has existed. Contrary to the Arrhenius greenhouse theory, during a hiatus carbon dioxide increases while temperature does not. This invalidates the Arrhenius theory and it belongs in the waste basket of history. The only greenhouse theory capable of accurately predicting global temperature today is MGT, the Miskolczi greenhouse theory. It has been available since 2007 but it has been blacklisted because of what it predicts, namely today’s climate. According to MGT, carbon dioxide and water vapor in the atmosphere form a joint optimal absorption window in the infrared whose optical thickness is 1.87. This value comes from analysis of radiosonde data. If you now add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere it will start to absorb in the IR just as Arrhenius says. But as soon as this happens water vapor starts to diminish, rain out, and the original optical thickness is restored. The added carbon dioxide will of course keep absorbing but reduction of water vapor has reduced atmospheric absorption so much that no Arrhenius warming is possible. As a result, we observe exactly what is happening now. The second hiatus I mentioned existed in the eighties and nineties. The reason you don’t see it in official temperature curves is that it has been over-written by a fake warming called “late twentieth century warming.” The organizations that co-operated in this criminal act are HadCRUT3, GISS, and NCDC. I discovered that while doing research for my book “What Warming?” in 2008. Using satellite data, the hiatus is shown as figure 15 in my book. It lasted from 1979 to 1997, an 18 year stretch. The existence of two hiatuses makes it almost impossible to argue that hiatuses do not exist. The two together block any greenhouse warming from 80 percent of the time since 1979, the starting date of the satellite era. The remaining 20 percent is taken up by the super El Nino pf 1998 and the step warming of 1999. These are not greenhouse features either and jointly they declare that the satellite era is greenhouse free. Trenberth’s figures are all wrong and still promulgate the false warming five years after I pointed it out.
Submitted on Thu, 08/13/2015 – 23:04
***********************************************************************
Notes. Science Magazine limits the size f comments to 2500 characters. I had to do pruning to fit it in this limit and ended up with 2497 characters. Considerable background had to be left out.
This natural climate variability thingy is worse than we thought and we’ll need lots more grants to study it’s effects on climate change.
That means the warmist groups agree the principle player is the natural variability in temperature. To this added the localized trend in temperature due to urban-heat-island effect and deforestation/mining activities effect. Because of this, the balloon data and satellite data showed a little increase in globaltemperature of about 0.25 oC since 1951 and of which around half is the contribution of global warming component [as per AR5 of IPCC]. Then, why reports and scientific articles are released every now and then on the impact of global warming on ice melt, sea level rise, extreme weather events. All these have a natural variability– the natural variability are not the same over different Oceans. So Arctic ice melt follow the opposite pattern of Antarctica ice melt and thus other factors associated with them. There is a need first to separate natural variability factor as it plays main role on weather systems globally.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
That’s pretty much what many of us have been saying all along. The problem came in when moronic activists oversold MBH98/99, which claimed that natural variability was less than previously thought. Since Moberg 2005, it’s pretty much been accepted that MBH98/99 was wrong on this point (making their claim of “unprecedented warming” meaningless.
Anyway, many of us (certainly myself) say you need 30+ year trends to robustly estimate the secular trend associated with CO2 forcings.
IMO, it’s not really an excuse if it was expected, even Trenberth were busy at the time overselling the “unstoppable global warming”.
Ya,
It might make sense Carrick to show people a couple things.
A) assume some natural cycle
B) Assume some linear trend of AGW.
Show people in a notional way how the amplitude and phase of the natural cycle
and the magnitude of the trend influence the “break out” period, the period of data that is required for the AGW trend to be detectable .
My sense was Santer was wrong by half when he pegged it at 17 years..
Our Kev must be right, he’s a Nobel Laureate don’t you know!
“Nobel Laureate (shared) for Nobel Peace Prize 2007 (as part of IPCC) Oct 2007”
from his cv at http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert/cv.html
If people will remember it was always skeptics who have talked about natural variation. The hotheads denied it. Mann’s hockey stick was designed to show that natural variation did not exist therefore all heat rise in the 20th century was man made. Now suddenly with the pause the hotheads are mouthing off about natural variation if it were always their cause.
To quote Bugs Bunny — What a bunch of maroons!
So has Trenberth dropped his idea that the missing heat teleports into the ocean deeps?
Eugene WR Gallun
Told you so:
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/the-real-link-between-solar-energy-ocean-cycles-and-global-temperature/
“Before it is safe to attribute a global warming or a global cooling effect to any other factor (CO2 in particular) it is necessary to disentangle the simultaneous overlapping positive and negative effects of solar variation, PDO/ENSO and the other oceanic cycles. Sometimes they work in unison, sometimes they work against each other and until a formula has been developed to work in a majority of situations all our guesses about climate change must come to nought.”
Published by Stephen Wilde May 21, 2008
Absolutely right, but anyone with an objective mind could reach that conclusion. The problem is alarmists / advocates / activists / £beneficiaries are not objective.
A temperature rise is man’s interference,
But a cooling trend is a natural occurrence!
So if things don’t go exactly according to plan
It must be Mother Nature interfering with man?
Now think about what I have just said,
Does it smell of the BS were being fed?
Policy driven science is not real science at all
Yet for the hocus pocus we continue to fall.
http://rhymeafterrhyme.net/theres-something-afoot/
Fake, or your career is at stake.
If you lie, stick to it.
Non Nomen
“Fake, or your career is at stake
If you lie, stick to it.”
In prison nobody admits they did it. Both climatology and our prisons are filled with innocent people.
Eugene WR Gallun
+1
That means nature as a whole overrules mankind as a part of it. AGW debunked again.
Earlier in this thread, commenters have noted that Iceland and New England are coldest for many years. Its true also of Ireland, Scotland as well as Finland.
http://www.met.ie/news/display.asp?ID=329
http://yle.fi/uutiset/summer_2015_poised_to_be_chilliest_in_50_years/8188502
Trenberth’s assertion is pretty much what sceptics have been saying right from the start – that any man-made influence (such as it may be) is just noise, overwhelmed within a much stronger natural system.
When we say it, it’s discredited, yet when ‘climate scientist’ Trenberth utters the immortal words it’s like Moses has sent down tablets of stone from Mount Olympus. ‘Catastrophic’ AGW theory really is a completely busted flush.
They invented this word “variability” in order to mask their ignorance before the huge complexity of a system (the climate) which they boast to know with accuracy in its smallest details
The problem for the people of this planet is that climate science stupidity is directly proportional to our politicians greed and gullibility
or the BBC’s Stephen . . . . see below.
I’ve posted this in ‘Tips and Notes’ in case no one picks up on it . . . .
BEST REASON FOR THE PAUSE SO FAR . . . .
It’s Friday morning, 14th August (9:50am UK) and one of todays BBC News features is “Could the smell of the sea help cool a warming planet?”.
This extraordinary article reckons that dimethyl sulfide (a pongy gas produced by bacteria feasting on phytoplankton) is changed chemically to sulphate, which in turn causes brighter white fluffy clouds to form and reflect more sunlight back in to space – which “makes a difference to global warming”.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33690694
Clearly, the BBC are becoming more desperate each day to explain why it’s not getting hotter after all. Perhaps they think the bracing smell of the sea is something we never had 100 years ago!
Never play poker with Trenberth and ‘the Team’ given their luck , and how else can you explain how Internal climate variability perfectly masks climate-warming trends but of course could never be the actual reason for any warming , so you would lose your shirt
Does Dr. Trenberth remember his proposal, that the temperature increase from 1976 onward occured stepwise through the Pacific dekadal shift 1976, and the El Nino Events 1986-89 and 1997/98. Of course these are natural events and having nothing to do with CO2. He has even Joe Romm convinced of that.