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.
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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
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So, let me see if I have this straight. The data shows no warming or that the warming is paused. I don’t like the term “pause”, which seems to concede the point that the climate is warming but is just interrupted. Nevertheless, the data shows no warming, but the climate IS warming. You just can’t see it because of the data. So by definition……..there is no warming?….according to the data?….but it is warming?…because it contradicts the data….So confusing.
this is the problem/conundrum with “scientists” that make conclusions first and then try and explain any data set to support their predetermined conclusion. You just can’t make this stuff up.
Trenberth says
“The increasing gap between model expectations and observed temperatures provides further grounds for concluding that there has been a hiatus.
GMST varies from year to year (see the figure) and from decade to decade, largely as a result of internal natural variability. Temperatures have mostly increased since about 1920 and the recent rate is not out of step with the 1950–1999 rate (3), but there are two intervals with much lower rates of increase. Only the most recent of these two hiatuses has occurred in the presence of fast-increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. It is thus important to understand its origins and whether or not it indeed indicates a flaw in model projections and thus in climate change theory. ”
Amazingly the establishment is beginning to face up to the idea that their climate theories may be wrong and that maybe another approach is needed.
The climate models on which the entire Catastrophic Global Warming delusion rests are built without regard to the natural 60 and more importantly 1000 year periodicities so obvious in the temperature record. The modelers approach is simply a scientific disaster and lacks even average commonsense .It is exactly like taking the temperature trend from say Feb – July and projecting it ahead linearly for 20 years or so. They back tune their models for less than 100 years when the relevant time scale is millennial. This is scientific malfeasance on a grand scale. The temperature projections of the IPCC – UK Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them have no solid foundation in empirical science being derived from inherently useless and specifically structurally flawed models. They provide no basis for the discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money. As a foundation for Governmental climate and energy policy their forecasts are already seen to be grossly in error and are therefore worse than useless. A new forecasting paradigm needs to be adopted. For forecasts of the timing and extent of the coming cooling based on the natural solar activity cycles – most importantly the millennial cycle – and using the neutron count and 10Be record as the most useful proxy for solar activity check my blog-post at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
The most important factor in climate forecasting is where earth is in regard to the quasi- millennial natural solar activity cycle which has a period in the 960 – 1020 year range. For evidence of this cycle see Figs 5-9. From Fig 9 it is obvious that the earth is just approaching ,just at or just past a peak in the millennial cycle. I suggest that more likely than not the general trends from 1000- 2000 seen in Fig 9 will likely generally repeat from 2000-3000 with the depths of the next LIA at about 2650. The best proxy for solar activity is the neutron monitor count and 10 Be data. My view ,based on the Oulu neutron count – Fig 14 is that the solar activity millennial maximum peaked in Cycle 22 in about 1991. There is a varying lag between the change in the in solar activity and the change in the different temperature metrics. There is a 12 year delay between the neutron peak and the probable millennial cyclic temperature peak seen in the RSS data in 2003. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980.1/plot/rss/from:1980.1/to:2003.6/trend/plot/rss/from:2003.6/trend
There has been a cooling temperature trend since then (Usually interpreted as a “pause”) There is likely to be a steepening of the cooling trend in 2017- 2018 corresponding to the very important Ap index break below all recent base values in 2005-6. Fig 13.
The Polar excursions of the last few winters in North America are harbingers of even more extreme winters to come more frequently in the near future.
The entire UNFCCC circus and the underlying CAGW meme have no basis in empirical science and should be abandoned.
Kudos to Trenberth for implicitly calling into question the Karl et al study saying that there is no “hiatus” in the temperature record.
I happen to agree with Trenberth that natural variability is behind the hiatus, and I also have thought that the next big El Nino will likely cause the first significant increase in temps since 1998. That is simply from observing what happened the last time we got a big El Nino. If there ISN’T a big temp increase this year or next, even with a big El Nino, that will be a REAL headline.
What Trenberth, and reporters, do NOT say is that the hiatus called into question the climate sensitivity of CO2 which is in the models. The temperature increases in the models have all been running way too high, relative to the reality of the hiatus. As WUWT and Climate Etc. and Andy Revkin have reported, there are close to two dozen relatively new studies showing that the temp increases from a doubling of CO2 are likely to be about 1.7 to 2.0 degrees, not the 3 degrees in the models. That is a very big finding — even if some readers of WUWT persist in thinking that CO2 doesn’t warm the climate at all.
Until Trenberth and the reporters come to terms with the lessened temperature sensitivity of a doubling of CO2, they are still not coming clean.
“If there ISN’T a big temp increase this year or next, even with a big El Nino, that will be a REAL headline”
I think that is what is going to happen. The atmospheric response to the current very strong El Nino is going to be much more muted than the 1998 response, though there may be some short term warming.
John August 14, 2015 at 6:45 am says:
“…I happen to agree with Trenberth that natural variability is behind the hiatus, and I also have thought that the next big El Nino will likely cause the first significant increase in temps since 1998.”
First, what do you mean with this nebulous “natural” variability? If you can’t describe it or explain it just admit that you simply don’t know instead of inventing mysterious forces. Trenberth certainly does not know either and invoking an in-explainable mysterious force entity like he does is simply not science. As to your opinion of El Nino, you simply don’t know what it is. It is a resonant oscillation of ocean water from side to side in the equatorial Pacific. Read pages 23 to 29 in my book to fill yourself in about the rest. But the 1998 super El Nino was an exception that may happen perhaps once a century. It was not part of this oscillation but appeared as a singleton and carried much more warm water than was available to ENSO at the time. I do not expect anything like that anytime soon. ENSO seems to have settled down to a residual oscillation like we saw for the first seven years of this century and it is hard to say how long it will last. Those first seven years (twenty-first century high) were punctuated by the 2008 La Nina and 2010 El Nino, after which the residual activity resumed. As to the hiatus, it is not impossible that it may well be the normal resting state of global temperatures if you consider that so far 80 percent of the satellite era has already been involved.
John
It is not possible to make an estimate of ECS until we have a reasonably good empirically based estimate of the timing and amplitude of the natural quasi- periodicities e.g. the 60 year and quasi-millennial periodicity so obvious in the temperature records and reconstructions.
All the bottom up numerical climate models are useless both because they are inherently incomputable and also because we simply do not understand well enough the physics involved in the various processes and we cannot initialize the various parameters with a grid that is of small enough size and sufficiently precise.
Section IPCC AR4 WG1 8.6 deals with forcings, feedbacks and climate sensitivity. The conclusions are in section 8.6.4 it concludes:
“Moreover it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining the future projections, consequently a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed”
What could be clearer. The IPCC in 2007 said itself that we don’t even know what metrics to put into the models to test their reliability (i.e., we don’t know what future temperatures will be and we can’t calculate the climate sensitivity to CO2). This also begs a further question of what erroneous assumptions (e.g., that CO2 is the main climate driver) went into the “plausible” models to be tested any way.
The successive uncertainty estimates in the successive “Summary for Policymakers” take no account of the structural uncertainties in the models and almost the entire the range of model outputs could well lay outside the range of the real world future climate variability. By the time of the AR5 report this is obviously the case.
Readers should note that the IPCC itself has now even given up on estimating CS – the AR5 SPM says ( hidden away in a footnote)
“No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies”
but paradoxically they still claim that we can dial up a desired temperature by controlling CO2 levels .This is cognitive dissonance so extreme as to be crazy.
For a complete discussion of the inutility of the GCMs in forecasting anything or estimating ECS see Section 1 at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
Dr. Page:
All the information is nice and very informative. I do research on the climate in the same direction, involving the resonance of long baroclinic waves. What I call the gyral waves help explain the variation in the effectiveness of forcing by the solar and orbital cycles, involving the extension of the polar caps.
Gyral resonance, which might seem very conceptual or pure intellectual speculation becomes concrete when looking at paleoclimate. It appears relevant as the missing link to explain climate variability and its drivers, providing a physical basis for a resonant phenomenon that many researchers have foreseen for a long time. Among other things it explains how the effectiveness of solar and orbital forcing could vary by a factor of 5 during glacial-interglacial periods, as well as the causes of global warming that prevailed during the second half of the 20th century, which reports a slow cooling that begin to be observed.
http://climatorealist.neowordpress.fr/
Not unlike Prego, the Warming is “in there”. The climate
kooks cooks“scientists” have carefully cooked it in, so not to worry. After all, they are “professionals”. Warming: “It’s in there”.https://www.google.com/search?q=it%27s+in+there+prego&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
I know what you’re thinking; “But, they keep changing the recipe!”
No problem. It is then the “New and improved!” version, now with extra
saucecertainty.before 1950, Mother Nature was in control.
After 1950, man took control of the climate.
In 2015, once again, Mother Nature is in control.
They required the argument that mankind was in control of the climate in order to argue that all the warming was caused by mankind.
Now that the warming has stopped, suddenly, Mother Nature is at work and is in control, to be blamed for the lack of warming.
Dr. Trendberth needs to see a climate variability counselor and talk out his paranoia over hidden warming.
“I see masks… everywhere… they talk to me…
Perhaps it was that internal variable thing which caused the warming between the 1970s and 1998?
Yah, the climate has changed almost consistently for millions of years without any help from humanity,
but now, a changing climate is only because of human CO2 emissions?
Wazzup wid dat?
Trenberth needs to do some math to make sense of a pause, a rise, or a fall in mean global temperature. If you consider all CO2, or even just the increase, as the signal for anthropogenic warming, you make an obvious error. Why? Hell it isn’t even being accurately measured so we don’t know if it is capable of changing weather and by averaging, climate. http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Taro_Takahashi/publication/6049747_Observational_contrains_on_the_global_atmospheric_co2_budget/links/53cfb5500cf2fd75bc59e69d.pdf.
Given that CO2, WE THINK, contributes about 16% of total W/m2 of downwelling LW radiation (water vapor being the larger source), one must estimate the CO2 from human growth activity. In addition, one must translate THAT source of warming into W/m2, and somehow trace its human signal of warming, untraceable from other sources of warming in our current measuring systems, through a very noisy measurement system and data set. As a warning, we can’t even model simple dynamics on Mars, let alone Earth http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1256/qj.03.59/pdf.
Just for starters, here are some algorithms one could use WITH CAUTION.
http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/hodges/site2006/documents/thermodynamics.pdf
Wicked problem with no easy answers, but this much I know, we aren’t talking about catastrophe here. There just isn’t enough TRACEABLE anthropogenic sourced W/m2 energy to force an already energy eating global climate regime to shift to something else. Period and case closed.
Trenberth is either talking through his hat, or truly is a fool idiot who thinks he’s a genius.
Pamela – I second your opinion of Trenberth. Add to the list of his misdeeds using falsified global temperatures to support erroneous conclusions as described in my comment.
How come the IPCC’s “gold standard in climate science” – you know… the settled science that we have been told so much about – never predicted or even considered all these excuses we are now hearing about the reason for the flat global average temperature anomaly trend?
More interestingly, considering these alarmists insist catastrophic man-made global warming is happening, why are they coming up with excuses for why it is not actually happening? Are they just dumb?
In case you haven’t found it yet, the Trenberth article you’re looking for is here: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6249/691.full
Thank you !!!
As I have said for many, many years now: If “internal climate variability” can “mask” climate warming trends, then there is absolutely no way at all that human-emitted CO2 can be the dominant climate driver, because clearly, other drivers are far stronger and can completely overwhelm any effect of human-emitted CO2. This tempest in a teacup of CAGW should have been abandoned as nonsense a long time ago.
PeterB in Indianapolis:
The argument of the global warming climatologists is that natural climate variability “noise” masks an anthropogenic “signal.” The “noise” can be reduced to an arbitrarily low level through signal averaging without reducing the level of the “signal.” Thus, the ratio of the signal power to the noise power can be increased to an arbitrarily high level by averaging the signal plus noise over a sufficiently long period of time.
Under this argument, the level of the noise vary inversely with the averaging period. Your argument assumes the level of the noise to be constant thus being inconsistent with their argument.
If the purpose of their research were to facilitate communication the climatologists would be right. However, the purpose is to facilitate control. For control there can be no signal nor noise as the speed of the signal plus noise would have to exceed the speed of light in a vacuum to reach the controller in time for control. This is impossible under relativity theory.
For control information has to move to the controller at greater than light speed but this is not possible for a signal plus noise as objects possessing mass-energy would have to be moved. To move at greater than light speed is possible for the conceptual objects that Ronald Christensen calls “orderons” in his book “Order and Time: A General Theory of Prediction.” Orderons are moved by a model that is “scientific” in the sense of being falsifiable, validated and supplying information to a controller in time for control. The GCMs possess neither of these features. As the GCMs are not falsifiable they cannot have been falsified contrary to your assertion.
I am an environmental chemist and do a lot of work on GCMS instrumentation. In any VALID branch of science, if the “signal” is not distinguishable from the “noise” then the “signal” is below the detection limit of the method in question, and you CANNOT claim that any signal exists with any level of confidence. Therefore, Trenberth is essentially stating that the signal of CO2 induced warming is not distinguishable from “noise” and is therefore insignificant, and unable to be calculated at a reasonable confidence level.
PeterB in Indianapolis:
Your argument applies the fallacy of argument by assertion: it is asserted that the conclusion of this argument is correct regardless of contradictions to this conclusion.
The ideas go forward. The “Pause” challenges preconceptions about human-induced warming, highlighting the natural climate variability. The PDO is only one aspect of this phenomenon. The observations of the oceans, the reconstruction of solar and orbital forcing as well as the Earth’s global temperature from ice and sediment cores converge in the same direction: the oceans have a major role in climate variability and allow explaining all or part of what we observe while referring to irrefutable physical concepts.
To synthesize:
1) The tropical oceans produce quasi-stationary baroclinic waves (which store or release heat by oscillation of the thermocline) whose mean periods are 1, 4 or 8 years, which resonate with trade winds and ENSO.
2) The western boundary currents (Gulf Stream, Kuroshio …) carry this succession of warm and cold water to the subtropical gyres. Again a resonance phenomenon occurs. But these waves that I call ‘gyral’ in my book and which wind around the 5 subtropical gyres have a remarkable property they do not deaden when the period increases (driver = Earth’s rotation + gravity). They have another property, they resonate with the solar and orbital cycles whose periods coincide with their natural periods. These baroclinic gyral waves store or otherwise release heat resulting from changes in solar irradiance.
3) At mid-latitudes thermal equilibrium occurs between the sea surface temperature anomalies of the subtropical gyres and thermal anomalies of impacted regions of continents (Western Europe is one), due to cyclones and highs (depending on the sign of anomalies, deficit or excess of latent heat withdrawn from the oceans, then restored by condensation of water vapor).
4) Global temperature anomalies are homogenized from the impacted areas, this resulting from the high specific heat of seawater compared to that of continents.
After very complicated models and parameterized so as to explain what is expected of them, simple ideas, even simplistic are not useless…
To know more: http://climatorealist.neowordpress.fr/
Dr. Pinault:
The following might interest you. That ocean waves have frequencies and that waves of long period transfer heat in enormous quantities suggests the possibility of tuning into waves of relatively stable period with a decoder in the hope of predicting climatological outcomes. Circa 1980,Dr. Ronald Christensen and colleagues of his at Entropy Limited tuned into waves of 1 to 3 year periods with an information theoretically optimal decoder. A result was an ability to predict yearly precipitation outcomes in the Sierra Nevada of California with statistical significance 1 to 3 years in advance. Global warming climatologists have thus far spurned the technology that made this possible.
I think climatologists do not look in the right direction. They are interested in complex and very hypothetical atmospheric phenomena while climate variability is mainly based on oceanic resonance. What clouds the effect of the sun is that the main driver of variability acts through the oceans. The amplitude of the forcing is not proportional to variations in the orbital and solar cycles. Some cycles are discrete (11 years) while others are very active (Gleissberg, orbital cycles), and this without any feedback phenomenon. The coupling takes place mainly when the forcing period is close to that of baroclinic waves (within the bandwidth). On the other hand, the effectiveness of forcing of gyral waves depends on the extension of the polar ice caps. Since the end of the Holocene, the forcing effectiveness is 1.0 °C(W/m2)-1 for the band 96-192 years, and 1.2 °C(W/m2)-1 for the following bands.
Under these conditions the climate should be predictable, knowing the magnitude of past solar cycles (baroclinic waves are in quadrature relative to forcing: there is a substantial phase shift between the forcing and its effect). But all is not so simple because of the resonance to 64 years which is a harmonic of 128 years and which is not due to external forcing. However, we are heading towards a slow cooling.
It’s a travesty.