By Andy May
h/t Joachim Seifert
There is a new post by Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, translated by Pierre Gosselin, on the effect of ocean cycles on 20th century warming and the 21st century pause. They had previously written about this in their popular book The Neglected Sun, in English here. Marcia Wyatt and Judith Curry have also written about the effect of ocean cycles here. These roughly 60 to 65-year cycles have the advantage of explaining the warming from about 1910 to 1944 and the warming from 1975 to 2005 with a similar mechanism. This is important, because the two warming events are very similar, as shown here and in figure 1.
Figure 1
In the IPCC WG1 AR5 document (page 887), they have a hard time explaining the earlier 20th century warming. The text is so confusing we will not attempt to paraphrase it:
“Nonetheless, these studies do not challenge the AR4 assessment that external forcing very likely made a contribution to the warming over this period. In conclusion, the early 20th century warming is very unlikely to be due to internal variability alone. It remains difficult to quantify the contribution to this warming from internal variability, natural forcing and anthropogenic forcing, due to forcing and response uncertainties and incomplete observational coverage.”
Why is this warming “difficult to quantify” and the later warming “extremely likely” due mostly to man? The two temperature profiles are nearly identical after removing the secular trend out of the Little Ice Age. But, the first is a mystery and the second is understood? We have a problem with this.
Figure 2
Figure 2 is a portion of FAQ 10.1, Figure 1 in WG1 AR5 (page 895). The bottom graph shows the mean surface temperature in black, the CMIP 3 global climate model in blue and the CMIP 5 climate model in red. All natural and anthropogenic model components are included. The warming trend from 1975 to 2009 is modeled well. But, the similar warming from 1910 to 1945 is not, the models simply slice through the mid-point. The top graph shows the same surface temperature record in black. But, the two models are run with the IPCC assumed natural forcing alone, leaving out the anthropogenic forcing. Since the natural forcing is assumed to be close to zero (see figure 3), except for volcanism, the line is flat with dips at volcanic events. In the top graph neither warming period is modeled well.
Figure 3
Figure 3 is from WG1 AR5 figure 10.5 (page 884). The observed warming (1951-2010) is again shown in black, the greenhouse gas warming (GHG) is shown in green, the combined anthropogenic forcings (ANT) are shown in orange, other anthropogenic forcings (“OA,” mostly reflective aerosol emissions) are shown in yellow, all natural forcings are shown in blue and labeled “NAT.” Internal variability, basically the ocean cycles, is assumed to be zero over the period of 1951-2010. It should be clear from these graphs that something important is left out of the models for this relatively short time period. Lüning, Vahrenholt, Wyatt and Curry and many others would suggest that they have not modeled the ocean cycles correctly.
A summary of Wyatt and Curry’s stadium wave ocean cycle theory can be seen here. As Lüning and Vahrenholt note in their recent post there have been a flood of new papers discussing the role of ocean cycles in recent global warming trends. These include Meehl, et al. in the August 2016 Nature Climate Change. If the link doesn’t work, look up “Contribution of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation to twentieth-century global surface temperature trends” in Google scholar. Meehl, et al. write:
“Here we show that the largest IPO [Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation] contributions occurred in its positive phase during the rapid warming periods from 1910-1941 and 1971-1995, with the IPO contributing 71% and 75% respectively, …”
This directly contradicts the IPCC conclusion that man caused most of the warming between 1951 and 2010. The tropical Pacific Ocean cooling from the early 1990’s to 2013 may have been one of the causes of the “pause” in surface warming observed from 2000 to 2010. This is discussed in more detail in a new paper by Chikamoto, et al, “Potential tropical Atlantic impacts on Pacific decadal climate trends.” The tropical Pacific Ocean cooling was not predicted by the IPCC climate models and it may have had an impact on global warming. Chikamoto, et al. present a new model that does model the pause. It is based, in part, upon Pacific and Atlantic sea surface to 700 meter depth temperature and salinity trends.
Another paper suggesting that the IPCC CMIP5 models do not account for multidecadal ocean cycles was recently published by Peings, et al. in the Journal of Geophysical Research, see here. Monika Barcikowska, et al. suggest in the AMS Journal of Climate, that sea surface and atmospheric temperatures are dominated by a 65 year variability component. This variability suggests that the warming trend from the 1970’s to the 2000’s will be followed by a cooling trend of similar length.
Finally, it is notable that Dai, et al.‘s Nature Climate Change paper: “Decadal modulation of global surface temperature by internal climate variability” suggests that internal climate variability, mainly through the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, was largely responsible for the recent slowdown in global warming (aka the “pause”). If this is true, how can man be responsible for most of the warming and nature responsible for most of the cooling during the pause? We detect a contradiction here.
In conclusion, it seems highly unlikely that natural forcings (“NAT” in figure 3) and internal climate variability are zero or close to zero as claimed by the IPCC in WG1 AR5. That being the case, anthropogenic forcings are overestimated in that study, since they were computed by subtracting the natural forcings. We now have numerous studies, many are cited above, that make it clear that multidecadal ocean cycles of 60 to 65 years have a significant influence and appear to explain most, if not all of the warming seen from 1910-1944 and 1975-2009.
Dr. Lüning and Professor Vahrenholt received a great deal of criticism when they published their book “The Neglected Sun” in 2012. At present, they are accepting apologies for this criticism – if it is from the heart. You can contact them here.
Nick Stokes
Because of the oceans’ higher heat energy compared to energy content of the atmosphere, it is always good to see these types of investigations.
You folks are awesome! I read your posts and I’ll admit that I can’t follow most. I’m college educated but in business, not science. I’m like the knuckle dragging neanderthal watching the homosapiens make a fire. My thing is, we track hurricanes using computer models. Even 12 hours out from landfall the cone for where it’s going to hit is huge. Yet, rubes like me are expected to believe that the planet is going to be x-number of degrees warmer in 50 years based on computer models of global warming. I’m may be stupid but I’m not ignorant. Climate change bs seems like a contrived excuse to redistribute income and keep climate change scientists lavish in grant money.
Neanderthals had larger and equally complex brains. They were less aggressive, hence doomed.
And you know that how? Most of the Neanderthal sites were excavated a rather long time ago, with much less care than recent work, so the only thing we can tell is that they survived a cold climate for a long time, and lost out to immigrants who were not genetically all that different, as the recent discoveries about non-Africans having some small percentage of Neanderthal ancestry shows. Different technology? Different culture? Faster runners? Some disease that left no trace?
Telling why one genetic group replaced another is a stone pain-in-the-ass, if all one has to rely on is archaeology.
And physiologically better adapted to cold weather condition.
To Old Gregg:
YOU WROTE:
“Climate change bs seems like a contrived excuse to redistribute income and keep climate change scientists lavish in grant money.”
MY COMMENT:
I recommend you delete ‘seems like” from your sentence, and replace those words with “is” !
You are a true climate expert (I’m serious).
You have no idea what the future climate will be (nor does anyone else).
You recognize why CO2 has been demonized (many people do not).
And you make your points in a way that’s funny too.
You hit a home run.
Anything you learn beyond what you’ve already stated is just additional details.
The supplementary info on methods for Meehl (2016) is available open access at http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v6/n11/full/nclimate3107.html#supplementary-information
Geoff@large and Nick Stokes. Geoff thanks for pointing out the supplementary material, it does help. Figure S1 does explain what the authors mean by “forced trends” and “observed trends:
The abstract says “the largest IPO contributions occurred in its positive phase during the rapid warming periods from 1910–1941 and 1971–1995, with the IPO contributing 71% and 75%, respectively, to the difference between the median values of the externally forced trends and observed trends…” This graph, from the supplementary material, does not have those periods. But it does have 1954-1963. And it can be seen that the Forced+ipo (in red) does reach toward the observed values (blue, red and yellow dots) from the median forced value (black dot). He is talking about how much of the difference between the climate model result and the observations the IPO corrects for. They are using an IPO model, not the actual IPO. He is saying that up to 71% to 75% of this difference (model to model+IPO model) is corrected for. This means that the IPO ocean cycle (internal variability) is definitely not zero as the IPCC has claimed. We still need the paper to see how this 71% to 75% compares to the “more than 50%” claim for anthropogenic climate change. That was based upon comparing two computer model runs also. We need to remember that the climate models have yet to successfully predict anything to the best of my knowledge.
Hi Andy, cannot find an open access copy but one key paragraph is:
“Here we take the novel approach of addressing the problem from the opposite direction. Rather than inferring `total’ internal variability as a residual, we start with an estimate of internally generated
variability from a specific sourceSSTs associated with the IPO in the Pacific froma long unforced climatemodel control run.We then compare the size of the IPO contribution to the observed time series
of twentieth-century GMST, with the size of the contribution from the externally forced response (estimated from the multi-model average of simulations with combined anthropogenic and natural external forcings; see Methods in Supplementary Information)”.
The IPCC assume that there is effectively no natural climate variation since 1750! Ref. IPCC report AR5 WG1 Figure TS.6 on page 54. Not surprising the models don’t work very well.
Re Dai et al.: If natural variation can ever override ANT, then it is potentially and actually always in charge.
Following this discussion, i dared to make a bet about 2017 temperatures:
http://klimawandler.blogspot.de/2016/12/my-bet-on-global-temperature-2017-meine.html
Bevor man eine Seite über Klima veröffentlicht, sollte man erstmal einige Jahre lang Informationen über das Gebiet sammeln, und lernen, lernen, lernen.
“At present, they are accepting apologies for this criticism…”
________________
Can’t think why anyone would feel the need to apologise to them. Their own predictive model (Figure 7.12 on page 204 of the pdf link) clearly shows a cooling effect from 2012 onward, relative to ‘present day temperatures’ (their book was published in 2012): http://lustiag.pp.fi/data/pdf/bks/2013_vahrt_neglsun.pdf
Even their projected error margins suggest no further warming before some time in the mid 2040s. Four more years of observational data are in since the model was published and Global temperatures have increased by about 0.45C relative to where they were in 2012, which was a relatively cool year in the current context (their choice, remember). That 0.45C increase since 2012 is reflected in the satellite data too, by the way.
This places observations more or less spot on the IPCC AR4 multi-model average at 2016 for scenario A1B; certainly within the error range. By contrast, Lüning & Vahrenholt’s projections at 2016 are woefully low compared to observations. Off by about -0.5C. Miles off both the best estimate and error margin.
So again, people who criticised L&V 2012 should apologise for what, exactly?
If climate writers are judged only on their predictions, the IPCC would not fair well at all! Anyway, they are not alone in thinking that the period between 2020 and 2040 will be cooler than normal. As for 2015 and 2016 being warm, we just had an El Nino in case you missed the news.
Thanks, Andy May,
a clear haven in the torrents of ‘modelling coupled nonlinear chaotic systems.’
involved a reminder on the difficulties of ‘modelling coupled nonlinear chaotic systems’.
the period between 2020 and 2040 will be cooler.
Not really. The summed result of the impact of the sun on climate – between 2020 and 2040 – may be positive – related to grand solar maximum (Steinhilber and Beer, 2011.: “… during the past six decades the Sun has been in a state of high solar activity compared to the entire period of 9300 years.”). A significant impact the Sun (changes in TSI) on climate change, there is always delayed and always much stronger than the variability of TSI. We do not know (satisfactorily) the mechanisms of the amplification. It is not fault the authors of “The Neglected Sun”. “The Neglected Sun” cites many papers talking about these “strengthened” delayed effects, eg.: Swingedouw et al., 2010.: “We argue that this lag is due, in the model, to a northward shift of the tropical atmospheric convection in the Pacific Ocean, which is maximum more than four decades after the solar forcing increase.” “Changes in wind stress, notably due to the NAO, modify the barotropic streamfunction in the Atlantic 50 years after solar variations. This implies a wind-driven modification of the oceanic circulation in the Atlantic sector in response to changes in solar forcing, in addition to the variations of the thermohaline circulation …”; Helama et al., 2010.: “The observed variations may have occurred in association with internal climate amplification (likely, thermohaline circulation and El Niño–Southern Oscillation activity). The near-centennial delay in climate in responding to sunspots indicates that the Sun’s influence on climate arising from the current episode of high sunspot numbers may not yet have manifested itself fully in climate trends.”
Amplifying “lags” (described above) are also described in most recent papers. Eg. regarding basic cycle of 11 years: Andrews, Knight and Gray (2015): “Recent analyses of observations have shown that solar cycle–NAO link becomes clearer approximately three years after solar maximum and minimum.” “We show that the model produces significant NAO responses peaking several years after extrema of the solar cycle, persisting even when the solar forcing becomes neutral.” “This confirms suggestions of a further component to the solar influence on the NAO beyond direct atmospheric heating and its dynamical response. Analysis of simulated upper ocean temperature anomalies confirms that the North Atlantic Ocean provides the memory of the solar forcing required to produce the lagged NAO response.”; Thiéblemont et al. (2015): “In the North Atlantic sector, the 11-year solar signal has been proposed to project on to a pattern resembling the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), with a lag of a few years due to ocean-atmosphere interactions.” “…comparison of both experiments suggests that the 11-year solar cycle synchronizes quasi-decadal NAO variability intrinsic to the model.”
These effects can be cooling for “the period between 2020 and 2040” (this requires further precise analysis).
This is another new evidence as to the accuracy the these authors “The Neglected Sun”: “It is therefore essential to keep asking critical questions whenever sensational climate claims are made.”
“Should apologise for what, exactly?”
There is no need to apologize?
Well, time will tell. At least the prediction that 2020-2040 will be cooler is a testable hypothesis and, thus, scientific. We need more data to work this out, the science is certainly not “settled.”
I still think we are missing the elephant in the room
you will meet this elephant when you go down 1km in one of our goldmines here…amazing how hot it gets when you go down a little into earth….
We know from the measurement of the magnetic north pole that earth’s inner core must be shifting. The movement of the whole of earth’s inner core more northwards would explain to me a lot of things:
first of all, of course the fact that there really has not been any warming here, in southern Africa, agw, or otherwise, as evident from my own results. There are more places in the SH where I found cooling rather than warming. I can check again, but I think, on average, the whole of the SH is cooling whilst the NH is warming.
It would also explain to me why the arctic is melting and other places around the arctic are teeming with water and life, everywhere you look….
[Norway was a nice place to visit ]
Is there no one at WUWT who could give us a lecture on geo magnetism / thermal heating and tell us how it relates to the oceanic cycles?