By Andy May
Is it just me, or are the climate alarmists more unhinged than usual lately? Al Gore screaming about boiling oceans and rain bombs is just part of it. As Eric Worral has reported, the BBC blamed global warming for the lack of snow, just after they blamed global warming for colder winters. And, who can forget John Kerry’s World War II style mobilization to fight a possible man-made climate change disaster? What disaster? There is no observational evidence today that human activities are causing any climate-related problems and there is considerable evidence that warming and additional CO2 have been beneficial since the so-called “pre-industrial.”
Could they be worried that global warming is slowing down? Are we entering another hiatus or pause in warming (horrors!)? Talk about in-your-face humiliation. They didn’t predict the first “Pause” from 1998-2014, if they miss another one, how does that look? Certainly, CO2 is marching on at a steady pace, as shown in Figure 1. No slowdown there.
If the atmospheric CO2 concentration continues to increase as it has in recent years, it will be 438 ppm in 2032, what if there is no warming, or very little warming, between now and then? How does that look?
We will remember that the first pause occurred after the 1998 super El Niño. The 1998 Niño marked the beginning of a major climate shift that resulted in the Pause in global warming. This is logical, El Niño’s are nature’s way of expelling excess heat from the ocean to the atmosphere so it can be radiated to space. El Niños temporarily warm Earth’s surface but have a long-term cooling effect. The frequency of El Niño events was greatly reduced during the Holocene Climatic Optimum (Moy, Seltzer, & Rodbell, 2002), which ended about 6,500 years ago when the long Neoglacial cooling period began. According to Christopher Moy’s El Niño proxy data, we see that as the world entered the Little Ice Age, the nadir of the Neoglacial Period, the frequency of El Niño’s peaked, then declined as the world got colder. El Niños became very rare in the early 20th century when Moy’s record ends, as shown in Figure 2.
Moy created the dataset plotted in Figure 2 from a sediment core taken in southern Ecuador. See the location map in Figure 3. Red sediment color intensity in this core correlates well to warm ENSO events in modern times since positive precipitation events in Ecuador are strongly related to warm ENSO (El Niño) events. The lighter colored inorganic reddish clastic layers contrast strongly with the very dark colored organic-rich siltier layers from the lower-precipitation ENSO cooler periods. Moy’s examination of the area indicates that his cores only capture moderate to strong El Niño events, weak events may not create the colors he associates with El Niños.
Given this data and history, it is quite possible that the large 2015-2016 El Niño might result in another long-term cooling effect. After all, since the El Niño, we’ve had three La Niñas, which collect and store ocean heat. How are we doing so far? See Figure 4.
After the 1997-1998 Niño we had rapid atmospheric warming as heat was transferred from the ocean to the atmosphere. Then, through meridional transport the heat was moved from the tropics to the higher latitudes and altitudes and expelled to space. This caused the world to cool for a period. Then we had another large El Niño in 2015-2016 and the atmosphere warmed again, only to settle into a new cooling phase. Over the whole record, the secular, or long-term, warming trend is 0.0133°C/year. Figure 4 is constructed using yearly average lower troposphere satellite temperatures.
Figure 2 shows that frequent strong El Niños occurred as the world entered the Little Ice Age, they signal eventual global cooling. El Niños became quite rare as the Little Ice Age ended. We’ve had two very strong El Niños only 18 years apart, are they a sign of cooling ahead?
What else do we see today? As shown in Figure 5, we have exited the Modern Solar Maximum, global temperatures appear to have peaked and are falling, and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) has plateaued and appears to be about to decline. The previous decline (~1957 to ~1977) in the AMO coincided with the unusual cooling period from ~1947 to ~1977.
Figure 5 illustrates the correlation between solar activity, North Atlantic Ocean sea-surface temperature and global average surface temperature. This apparent correlation is ignored by the IPCC, who prefer their climate model calculation of the human contribution to climate change, which is very poorly supported in observational data.
What happens if we project the trends in Figure 5 into the future? See Figures 6 and 7.
Discussion
The AMO is a leading indicator of the climate state since it is a measure of sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic Ocean, a principal avenue of meridional transport of heat from the tropics to the North Polar region. It tends to warm and cool periodically. When it warms, meridional transport is weak, and the polar vortex is strong. This traps cooler air in the Arctic and keeps the rest of the planet warm. When meridional transport strengthens and the polar vortex weakens, more heat is transported to the Arctic, more cold Arctic air escapes to the middle latitudes, and the AMO index becomes more negative due to a cooling North Atlantic.
Changes in solar activity very roughly track changes in the AMO, but the correlation is poor due to the strong effect that the Sun has on the stratosphere. The stratosphere and ENSO affect both polar vortex strength and meridional transport.
Solar activity probably ultimately drives long-term climate change, but in the shorter term, the solar effect is obscured by changes in the meridional transport of energy, which has a lot of drivers. It is the strength of this meridional transport that directly causes global climate changes and the energy it transports provides the energy to change the climate. Variations in solar activity only trigger the changes. Other important factors in natural climate change are climate system inertia, internal ocean variability, and changes in stratospheric ozone and winds. In the very long term, changes in Earth’s orbit play a role.
So, a warning to Al Gore, John Kerry, and the BBC. You need to realize that your now 50-year-old very out-of-date hypothesis that humans dominate climate change through fossil fuel emissions and other human activities is becoming less likely with time. It has not escaped our notice that the IPCC has published 47 reports on the possible dangers of man-made climate change over the past 32 years, and yet polls suggest the public is not convinced climate change is a priority. The next ten years will test your climate change ideas, and the result may not be pretty.
Works Cited
Clilverd, M. A., Clarke, E., Ulich, T., Rishbeth, H., & Jarvis, M. J. (2006). Predicting Solar Cycle 24 and beyond. Space Weather, 4. doi:10.1029/2005SW000207
Moy, C., Seltzer, G., & Rodbell, D. (2002). Variability of El Niño/Southern Oscillation activity at millennial timescales during the Holocene epoch. Nature, 420, 162-165. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01194
Vinós, J. (2022). Climate of the Past, Present and Future, A Scientific Debate, 2nd Edition. Madrid: Critical Science Press. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363669186_Climate_of_the_Past_Present_and_Future_A_scientific_debate_2nd_ed
The boiling oceans have made it 2F here at the moment.
You’ll warm up when those 600,000 Hiroshima bombs go off tomorrow.
It’s -7F now, apparently the arctic is sending us some warm air. Come on sun.
Curiously that is about the same energy as the world burns in a year.
It is, inconsequentially small compared with sunlight
Al Gore has obviously gone off the Deep End. That’s a fanatic if I ever saw one.
Great update. Climate alarmists are in a panic over the current, slight 7-year cooling trend, which is why they are attacking everything from coffee drinkers to gun owners as climate changers. I agree that the AMO should begin cooling anytime. Looks like the PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) is already cooling, which is probably part of the reason why the western US has been cooler then the eastern US — at least for now.
They will do the same thing they have done with the ozone hole, which is as big as ever.
Just act like everything is just as they predicted.
After all, this is a religion, one that pays very well.
What do cult member do when the apocalypse doesn’t come? They just fudge the dates.
Christians are still waiting for Jesus to return.
Gore and Kerry are an embarrassment to America.
Worse than that: They are both a great danger to the United States. What they both advocate would be devastating for the United States, if carried out.
Yes. This.
The only real “crisis” is these delusional idiots getting what they want.
Gore and Kerry are a symptom of a much broader problem. 30-40% of the population believes stuff that is simply not true, while another 20-30% can’t be bothered with anything but TikTok, Instagram, and stadium sports.
Nice discussion.
I am an amateur but I want to make a technical comment.
I made a similar graph and regression analysis of the CO2 data and get the same result as you. However, I find the resulting polynomial to be more intuitive if I subtract from each x datapoint the year the series begins. This gives:
CO2 = 0.013x^2 + .77x + 314.8.
It makes the y-intercept meaningful and also makes the first derivative easier to understand, too.
What’s it look like with the Gregorian calendar and the Jewish year (it’s 5783)?
Hi Joel, I did it that way also and used the year 1 to 63 function to do the extrapolation, but for the equation on the graph I decided to use the equation that uses the actual year. Your method is best for actual work for precision reasons. I just wanted to have the actual years on the graph.
Gore and Kerry should consider themselves fortunate that they do not have the same problem as Disney’s character Pinocchio.
Their noses would stretch halfway to the Moon by now.
It looks like the AMO could move into its cool phase as early as 2025. This would certainly put a damper on the global temperature. It will take some time for the sea ice to expand but it’s unlikely we will see any additional warming outside of El Nino events.
This is probably the reason behind the increasing propaganda from the alarmists. The handwriting is on the wall. Still, they can do a lot of economic damage before the reality of the situation becomes completely obvious.
The CGW Alarmists will find a way to blame increased sea ice and falling temperatures on anthropogenic CO2. You can bet your bottom dollar on that.
Yes, the “trapped heat” will “cause cooling.”
Only in the pretzel logic of the Eco-Nazis can such ludicrous nonsense be considered.
They’ve already done a lot of economic damage. I’m sure they’ll do a lot more before people start waking up.
I have to agree. The blame of every extreme weather event to me just shows a desperate cry for attention. If Allan MacRae’s cooling forecast were to finally manifest itself this decade, it’s game over for them. The arctic sea ice is showing some signs of rebounding, so that’s something to keep an eye on. An El Niño is likely to develop later this year so from here on out we’ll likely see positive anomalies for a while, but what happens after that is definitely going to be interesting. I’d be nervous if I were them.
Agreed, but I would avoid the word ‘extreme’. There’s nothing extreme about the weather I’ve seen this year. For example, flooding, yes. But still within the range I’ve seen in my lifetime. The same can be said of other measures, like temperature.
They work hard to leave the public with the impression that weather events now are extreme or somehow different than weather events of the past.
They have their hand firmly on the Reality Tiller.
The MSM is most happy to help navigate the suggested course.
In the US it has become much easier to select a Captain using mail-in ballots.
Why is it that so few countries use mail-in ballots?
Yes, they count on the laziness of the sheeple and willful deception of so-called “fact checkers.”
Leftists’ silly CAGW scam is screwed.
The PDO is already in its 30-year cool cycle and the AMO will likely reenter its 30-year cool phase within 2~5 years.
Once both the PDO and AMO are in their respective cool phases, we’ll likely have 30+ years of flat/falling global temperatures (despite record annual CO2 emissions for the foreseeable future), as occurred from 1880~1913 and 1945~1980.
Under the rules of the scientific method, if hypothetical projections exceed observations by more than two standard deviations for a statistically significant duration, the hypothesis is disconfirmed.
CMIP6 median climate model projections predicted by the end of 2022, the global temperature would be 1.42C, but the UAH6 December 2022 value was 0.05C…
Sure, we’ll have warming global temperatures over the next 2-year El Niño cycle starting around the end of this year (which Leftists will exploit and blame on CO2), but El Niño’s are always followed by La Niña cycles, there is a good chance the next La Niña will be strong one as we haven’t had a strong one since 2010.
Unfortunately, it will likely take a tragic bitter cold winter event in the US or Europe for wind/solar power to fail, and 100’s~1,000’s will perish from exposure, and citizens will blame politicians for building unreliable and intermittent wind/solar infrastructures that caused the tragedy—it’s not a question if this will happen, it’s when..
Yes, Leftists are terrified of when their silly CAGW scam will end in tragedy..
I see nothing wrong with your crystal ball, but one can actually make the argument that the forcing of carbon dioxide could be having a greater impact now than in the past even when looking at UAH. 2022 was the 7th warmest year despite a La Niña. This goes for 2018, 2020 and 2021 as well. What would your counter argument be? I’m asking just because I’m just curious. Javier Vinos had an interesting explanation for it if I recall but I forgot what it was.
Walter-san:
Ranking years by temperature anomalies is completely meaningless information without reference to warming trend data.
We’ve enjoyed about 1C of global warming recovery since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850, so it’s only natural that current temperature anomalies will be greater than they were over the past 172 years…
For the last 43 years, the warming trend has been around 0.13C/decade, which is about the same as from 1913~1945 warming trend (0.12C;decade) when the PDO and AMO were in their respective warm cycles.
Since 1850~2022, the warming trend has been around 0.06C/decade which isn’t catastrophic global warming.
When the PDO and AMO are both in their respective 30-year cool cycles in a few years, global temperature trends will again fall as the they did from 1945~1980.
By 2050, the 1850~2050 global warming trend will be around 0.07C/decade which, again, isn’t “catastrophic”…
CMIP6 computer models predicted the 30 year warming trend should be around 0.37C/decade, but its only 0.13C/decade meaning CAGW scam is dead and that the computer model projections are worthless and hilarious.
‘2022 was the 7th warmest year’.
Yes, in a 7 year cooling streak.
2022 was the 7th warmest year
Since when?
Yes, as they like to say “the long term trend is still up.”
The part they leave out is “since the LITTLE ICE AGE, THE COLDEST PERIOD DURING MODERN HUMAN CIVILIZATION.”
Since the Holocene Climate OPTIMUM, the warmest AND BEST climate of the current epoch, the “long term trend” IS STILL DOWN.
Wow!!! “2022 was the 7th warmest year despite a La Nina.” Why wasn’t it as warm as the other top 6 years? CO2 volumes are an effect of temperatures, not a cause of them, primarily because of warmer temperatures leading oceans to release CO2 into the atmosphere.
Would the step beyond “unhinged” be “flapping”?
“Waving but not drowning”….
“flapping like a big girl’s blouse”…is the expression, I believe.
The old climate warriors are getting older, nothing has changed, their legacy is falling apart, and their chance to be climate heroes is fading, fading, fading ….
It’s aggravating as all get out. That’s why they are throwing temper tantrums like a 5-year old in the Wal-Mart parking lot who sees his chance of getting that checkout lane candy fading, fading, fading …
While those “old climate warriors” are getting older they have younger brainwashed disciples (Greta) to carry on their rhetoric to manipulate more ignorant people into the future.
Very nice article, the type I’d like to reread and digest more slowly👍🏻 …but I really do hope that the trend(s) do continue with a continued pause of the mildly increasing global temperatures.
Today’s climate alarmism is really dangerous for the national security of the peoples of freedom loving countries!
Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau is hell bent on eliminating Canada’s fossil fuel industry in his “just transition” in the mistaken belief that CO2 released from fossil fuel use is causing catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Why he is doing this is known only to him and his cabal, and he may truly believe that CO2 is causing CAGW.
One take away, right or wrong, from Dr. Lindzen’s recent interview with Jordan Peterson is that western powers-that-be latched onto CO2 driven CAGW as a way to control the west’s energy industry, and retain power. It was never about preventing catastrophic global warming. Articles like this one by Andy May, and his linked article on Meridional Transport, are showing the science behind climate change and that atmospheric CO2 is not the control knob that the IPCC and its acolytes say it is. The trick will be convincing the hoi polloi to stop voting for governments like Canada’s Liberals and America’s Democrats who are destroying our economy on the altar of CAGW.
…and endangering their national security from countries like China who are (rightly) not buying into CAGW. Thank you Rick for your added insights! I pray that our citizenry will wake up and come to their senses.
A major retrospective adjustment came along last time the RSS trend deviated too far below the model range, they got away with it then why wouldn’t the same thing happen again⸮
The time has come, the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.
“We had a turtle to teach us, we called him tortoise”
“Why?”
“Because he taught us! Reeling, writhing and fainting in coils“
Pretty much what I have been saying for the past 15 years save that there is no mention of cloudiness changes associated with changes in meridional transport.
It is that which alters the amount of solar energy entering the oceans which affects the balance between El Niño and La Niña.
The shifts in meridional transport are caused by solar induced changes in ozone in the stratosphere which alter the gradient of tropopause height between equator and poles.
Stephen,
Much of tropospheric meridional transport (MT) is done by storms, so as MT changes cloudiness changes which affects the daytime albedo. Since most storms are in the winter, the changes are mostly to the winter hemisphere and in the higher latitudes. Albedo is highest in the Southern Hemisphere summer, due to ocean clouds and the large Antarctic ice sheet. Long-term global changes in average planetary albedo are small, maybe below the accuracy of our satellite measurements. This is an important area that requires more data and more time to resolve. Current satellite data suggests albedo reached a low point in 1997 and is increasing, and small changes in planetary albedo can make a huge difference.
My point is that albedo and cloudiness are very complicated and how they affect climate on short time scales is also complicated. Further, since clouds keep heat in during the night, they reflect a lot of energy during the day, and the altitude of the cloud changes this ratio. So, we can’t even say what an average change in cloudiness means. Increasing some clouds warms an area, but increasing other cloud types may cool the same area. Clouds and their effect on climate are a huge unknown. They always increase albedo, but only during the daytime.
Solar induced changes in ozone affect stratospheric meridional transport, along with ENSO, the Brewer-Dobson Circulation, the quasi-biennial oscillation, and atmospheric waves. Indirectly, through tropospheric coupling, they can influence tropospheric meridional transport. The attached figure from page 161 of Javier’s book shows the various MT processes at work.
In this essay, I tried to keep it simple and focussed on likely climate trends for the next ten years. Starting a discussion on clouds, albedo, and solar/ozone processes is for other essays. people who want to get in the weeds can start here: The Winter Gatekeeper hypothesis (VII). A summary and some questions – Andy May Petrophysicist
Fair enough but you don’t really need to go into a lot of detail about clouds and albedo.
All you need to realise is that clouds form most readily where air masses of differing characteristics mix and combine so if you have more meridional jets there will be longer lines of air mass mixing and thus more clouds.
I do appreciate that ozone has its primary effects in the stratosphere but a warmer stratosphere pushes the tropopause down and a colder stratosphere allows it to rise.
All you need to increase meridionality is to have a bit more ozone in the stratosphere above the poles so that the tropopause is pushed down and cold air masses can more easily flow outwards into middle latitudes.
SC25 is off to roaring start.
Predicted peak SC25 is summer 2025.
Is it going to blow its magnetic load early and then pack it in early?
Anybody’s guess. Here is the Marshall NASA forecast and data.
Your Marshall plot forecast was made before this past month’s very active Sun.
The butterfly plot through end of 2022 shows many active regions within +/- 10º latitude band. See attached Butterfly plot thru end of 2022.
This rapid march of active regions toward the solar equator so far appears faster than any SC since SC 15.
SC25 so far looks a lot like SC15.
Of note: SC 15 had the 20th Century’s most significant solar storm to hit Earth. The three-day May 1921 geomagnetic storm, also known as the New York Railroad Storm, was the most intense geomagnetic storm of the 20th century.
This is of significance because of the renewed push for manned spaceflights beyond LEO to Lunar landings are planned by NASA over the next 8 years. A May 1921 geomagnetic storm hitting at Earth’s position during these translunar astronauts (beyond LEO) would probably be a lethal radiation event for them.
SC15 had a cycle length of 120 months, a short solar cycle compared to average 132 month cycle length.
If SC25 mimics SC15, this would be end-SC25 on/around December 2029, a full year earlier than currently projected.
But what is interesting find of note is the occurrence of an intense period active regions appearing right around 100 months (+/- 6 months) of SC start, when everyone was expecting the sun to be quietly sliding toward minimum.
For SC25, 100 months (8 years, 4 months) post-start (December 2019) would be Spring of 2028 (April – June 2028). Atemis 4 mission is currently projected 2027, and Artemis5 is set for calendar year 2028.
Artemis 4 mission is currently planned to put the Gateway Space Hab in a Halo orbit around the Moon, a planned lunar space station. Gateway SpaceHab would become a mausoleum if it were to be crewed (manned) during a major Solar Storm striking it.
This is the cropped JPEG I meant to post, instead of the one above.
Of note the Artemis GateWay SpaceHab, being built for insertion by Artemis 4 mission, the Lunar Halo orbit has (currently) NO planned rad-hardened shelter for the crew to retreat to in order to ride-out a major solar energetic particle (SEP) event.
That’s a risk I wouldn’t take if I were a NASA Artemis mission manager.
Andy: I will indeed be interesting to see how the alarmist try to deal with a other lengthy pause or perhaps even a cooling trend.
But I got a bit side-tracked when I looked at your CO2 Mona Loa polynomial fit. I tried to recreate it, but using the formula in your post did not fit the yearly data I downloaded directly from ML. I did my own fit and found, as I suspected, it was mostly a rounding thing. When I used 8 decimal places the fit was very good. In fact the R-squared was 0.99944! That is actually a little too good. I have to wonder how it is possible to measure a natural occurring substance that varies considerably in the environment throughout the year and over the course of 6 decades and have the results match nearly perfectly with a simple 2nd order polynomial function? A skeptical person might suspect some untoward data manipulation.
Rick,
In order to get the best and most precise fit, convert the years to smaller numbers, by subtracting initial year-1. The fit is very good and probably quite predictive, but remember the CO2 concentration is highly autocorrelated, which means each year’s value is highly dependent upon the previous year’s value. Thus, the R^2 value, which assumes each observation is independent of the others is not appropriate here and will be inflated to reality. My spreadsheet is here, I did not correct the statistics for autocorrelation, as I didn’t need that to project the values to 2032. https://andymaypetrophysicist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Mauna-Loa-CO2_2nd-order-fit.xlsx
Thanks, yes autocorrelation explains it, my bad. I still have some concerns that very small year-to-year increases(< 2 ppm) are entirely anthropogenic and not at least partially a result of slight ocean warming. Between uncertainty of measurement and the reliance on a single sampling location it seems like a lot of faith is required to use these measurements to justify spending trillions of dollars to remake our energy infrastructure.
Also recall that in the ice core reconstructions CO2 follows temperature about 800 years behind, and if you deduct 800 years from today you find yourself in the Medieval Warm Period.
So some of today’s rising CO2 levels is an echo of the last CLIMATE OPTIMUM.
One thing which atmospheric CO2 has been proven beyond all doubt to drive, apparently in a square function, is alarmist hyperbole.
You know what gets them really unhinged? Pointing to that CO2 graph and asking them to point out the dip from the 2020 lockdowns.
When they can’t nod sagely and ask them if global economic shutdown didn’t make even a blip, what would it take to actually make a difference and how many people would die if we did?
Strangely, while I’m adept at getting them unhinged, I still don’t win the argument in their minds.
Your logic doesn’t make any headway because CAGW is a religious faith. A medieval one, pre-Enlightenment. And you are talking to True Believers.
See attached 1486 woodcut of anthropogenic climate change. We haven’t advanced much since then.
I think Gore perfectly illustrates what we are up against. In his bubble the Oceans
really are boiling. It really doesn’t matter what the climate does in the next
couple of decades.
Once one has reached that stage then there is no limit to what action is required.
Real time data from the Argo network is just ‘deniers’ being given a platform
that needs to be closed down.
Be afraid, very afraid …
He still has oceanfront property, no? Travels with private jet? Multiple homes? Look at his actions, not his words, to see what he really believes — and it sure ain’t concern about boiling oceans or excessive “carbon”.
Actions, not words, leads to large moolah in the Gore vaults.
If you plot “alarmists’ mental health on the Y axis and time on the X axis, I think you’ll find a hockey stick.
Therefore, there’s a causal relationship between man-made CO2 emissions and alarmists’ mental health.
It’s worse than we thought!
Well the enviro’s seem relaxed about driving the Right Whale to extinction with their offshore wind turbines. Now if they had been Left Whales …
Why Environmentalists May Make This Whale Species Extinct (substack.com)
They are terrified that it will start cooling before they can push their policies on us, hence the MASSIVE ramp up in propaganda in the last four years, with Greta being a good example.
Well it’s not just colder Februaries etc they have to deal with but also the challenges to their lunar prescriptions. Here’s the classic with their EV wet dream and the white gold problem-
https://www.drive.com.au/news/electric-cars-threaten-environmental-disaster-report/
As if there was ever enough reasonably accessible lithium for the task they’re being hoisted on their own Green Nimby petard with exponential extraction and yet facing a timeline of 2035 of their own making to ban ICE cars. Essentially how are we doomsters gunna break it to the deplorables they have to walk cycle or catch the bus with a specific deadline? Bad move doomsters as you should always stick with the ‘very very very…. last chance’ meme and never put a fixed date on the dooming or the fix stoopids.
The Chief Executive of Kia Motors in the UK is very clear. He told the UK Times newspaper
“A mass market in affordable electric cars will not happen because of the difficulty of producing them on a viable basis”
He said Kia has no immediate plans for a mass market vehicle. Times, London Jan23rd 2023.
The President of Toyota, Aiko Toyoda, has been saying similar things for some time now
And if I were Toyoda’s grandson I’d be sticking with the massive queues for Toyota petrol hybrids leaving Tesla to soak the airhead elites and the odd revhead queuing at public chargers-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/markets/australia-adding-green-energy-at-less-than-half-the-required-rate-to-keep-grid-stable-unsw/ar-AA16UWf6
twitter is doing the alarmists no favours. seems sceptic tweets were likely de-amplified while under the control of the left-wing hacks. Now things are more open, the sceptics are starting to run rampant, the alarmists are getting pi$$ed off. most pro alarm tweets I see now get totally bombed by sceptic comments.
Do you actually have a Twatter account? Wow!
It’s a point of pride that I never had one, or a FaecesBook account.
Andy, another excellent and informative article, thank you.
I very much like the thought that came from your closing paragraphs that the AGW hypothesis should have some sort of half life. Moreover, perhaps even a “tipping point” when the half life (50 years?) is reached such that if less than 50% of the public believe the hypothesis it is doomed!
Anyhow, enough of my mind going wild, onto more scientific concepts. I am interested to find out more about the concept that El Ninos ultimately cause cooling. I’m sure they do for the reasons that you state but, just looking at temperature anomaly graphs since, say, 1995, whilst it is clear that temperatures fall and stabilise for years after a major El Niño, it is not clear that they return to pre-El Nino levels. The 1997/8 and 2015/16 events appear to have ramped up temperatures (or at least in so far as we record them) to new and higher levels. Where then are the cooling effects? How long do they take to materialise? Why is the anomaly graph continuing to rise over the 21st century? What am I missing? UHI effects overwhelming ENSO effects for instance?
Apologies for raising such issues and please keep up your truly fantastic work.
magesox,
Very good question. There is an underlying long-term (secular) warming trend since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850 or so and, maybe the long-term trend started earlier, around 1750. Study figure 6 for one possible reason. Notice the powerful Eddy and Bray cycles both had their lows around 1600AD and then began to rise. These cycles rising might explain at least some of the secular increase of about 1.3 degrees per century that we observe. And, I don’t deny that additional CO2 might contribute to the rise. The rise in temperatures from 1910 to 1944 is similar, but slightly less than the rise from 1975-2009, the difference might be the impact of human GHG emissions. If so, then human emissions are about 25% of the temperature increase. See this post and the attached graph.
Comparing early 20th Century warming to late 20th Century warming – Andy May Petrophysicist
I wouldn’t give “emissions” any of that 25%, too much counter evidence in the climate record.
I’d lay that 25% at the feet of urbanization, since thermometer readings have a lot to do with the surroundings, and most changes during the instrument record would make thermometers read higher, even though that infers no actual change.
magesox,
You have to think that over the years the ocean gets about the same amount of energy from the Sun on average because the Sun hasn’t changed much and the albedo of the planet hasn’t changed much. The planet is warming, and if the ocean is warming is because it is ceding less energy to the atmosphere. Because the ocean gets its energy from the Sun, not from the atmosphere. So the warming of the ocean is making the surface warm less than it would if it didn’t exist. The ocean is not only a huge store of energy, but it is also a brake on climate change in any direction. It has huge inertia.
When there is excess energy in the tropical Pacific, an El Niño takes place releasing a big part of it into the atmosphere and some to space. The Atlantic also has its Niño, only smaller. That heat into the atmosphere produces a lot of surface warming, and it has no place to go, as it cannot go back to the ocean. The planet’s surface, being warmer, will radiate more over time. Eventually, a large part of that heat leaves the planet. But if the planet is on a warming trend it will not cool down to the temperature before El Niño took place. So it only “looks” as if El Niño warms the planet, in reality, is moving heat from the ocean to space, so the climate system loses energy. If the planet was cooling, a strong El Niño would be really bad news, as it happened during the descent from the Medieval Warm Period to the LIA, when ENSO went crazy with Niños and people didn’t like the result.
When Cristopher Columbus got to America in 1492, a hurricane destroyed one of his ships. They were already within the LIA, and there was very little CO2. When the Spaniards built the first city in Cuba, a hurricane came and completely leveled it. So complete was the destruction that they moved to a better-protected place to build Santiago. The LIA had a very unruly atmosphere with the highest storminess in at least 6000 years, because a lot of heat was being transported poleward to cool the planet and keep it cold. Comparatively, we get far fewer Niños and storms nowadays, yet our fear is much higher. We’ve got soft.
Joking apart, I personally – and its not a view shared by many here – think that whilst a small degree of post WWI warming has indubitably occurred, there is no single cause and in fact the majority of it is far more explicable as not actually caused by anything. Or rather that the simplistic Student concept of ‘everything has but one cause, external to itself’ is fatally flawed.
In reality in the real world of engineering, where I spent my life, things have a multiplicity of causes, and sometimes the causes are linked to the things themselves. If you would like to see some excellent examples I recommend Mentour Pilot on You tube, whose clinical dissection of aircraft accidents without assigning any blame to any single cause is premium here.
Furthermore, the very very small minority of us who have actually done real system analysis, rather than bloviated mathematical modelling of it, understand that e.g. a complex electronic circuit can start oscillating all by itself if the delay times in the multiple negative feedback paths equate to in fact positive feedback. To say this is ’caused’ by such and such a feedback path is simply not helpful . The ultimate cause is Nature in conjunction with a particular arrangement of interlinked components that allows this to happen. Cf Atlantic decadal oscillation etc etc.
Then if you add in a bit more complexity and some deep non linearity, you arrive at a chaotic system. Which I spent my life avoiding, because engineers like predictable behaviour, and chaotic behaviour is only marginally predictable. E.g a flag flapping in the breeze is unpredictable, except that you know that being tied to a pole limits the exact scope of its oscillations.
It is almost inconceivable given the complexity, multiple negative feedback paths, and non linearity involved in many of them that the Earths climate is not fully chaotic. And te bad news of the people who keep on trying to use simple causality to explain it, is that it can’t be done… In short deviations of up to 5 degrees on a centennial timescale are probably well within the range of ‘natural variation’ and indeed as the ice ages show, far greater variation is possible if the climate system transitions to another ‘attractor’. All without any intervention by humanity, or any prior fluctuation in CO2 levels. And the species extinction and change in sea levels that Nature, unassisted by [man made] CO2 changes at all, managed, dwarfs the wildest predictions of the IPCC.
Since exiting the last ice age sea levels have risen by over 150 meters. In around 10,000 years. So an average of 15mm per year. Today the average has dropped to around 3mm a year.
And all of this happened with a rock solid atmospheric CO2 level and no burning of fossil fuels.
In short we are wasting our time debating what causes climate change. The climate itself overwhelmingly causes climate change. Sure outside influences may affect it, and tip it from one attractor to another, but the system itself is not stable. It is limited, its gone from snowball to hothouse and back to something in between, but it’s never ever stayed the same, and the broad tentative consensus amount paleoclimatologists is that water plays a huge part – continental drift affects ocean currents affects latitudinal heat transport…ice and snow affect albedo. Latent heat of evaporation and freezing represent deep non linear relationships between energy and temperature. And so on.
The real reasons behind the climate change movement lie in geopolitics, greed and corruption.
Climate change is a metaphyiscal proposition that cannot be proven to be either right or wrong, since its modern definition now includes completely natural and pseudo random climate variation.
I.e.. The facts are:
That is all the facts there are.
Linking them as an act of faith is something no one would do without a reason.
Cui bono?
Brilliantly stated. Far too often it is attempted to pin a single causal “tail” of a specific (and often minor or even inconsequential) variable that supposedly “drives” the behavior of the climate “donkey,” when we don’t even know what all the variables are, what each of them does in and of itself, and more importantly in combination with the others, etc. ad nauseum.
What we should unequivocally know by now is that CO2 doesn’t “drive” Jack shit, since claims that it does inevitably involve ignoring most of the Earth’s climate history.
What seems (to me) to be happening, is something I experienced twice working for companies that were about to go into liquidation.
You are facing failure. Nothing but a miracle will save you. What do you do? You announce that the miracle is here, and is saving you, in the hope that the creditors will leave you alone and hey, the miracle might just happen right?
In short the GreenMachine is coming off the rails.
What its protagonists need, is to stave off criticism in the vain hope that something actually remarkable happens, like real indisputable scary global warming.
But since propaganda is all they can do, propaganda is what they are doing, big time.
The truth is irrelevant in politics, what counts is what people believe. Just ask that nice Mr Putin, who his people all believe is winning a righteous fight against neo Nazis and Fascists, by somehow behaving exactly like a neo Nazi and Fascist, and losing…
Joseph Goebbels
From the article: “What else do we see today? As shown in Figure 5, we have exited the Modern Solar Maximum, global temperatures appear to have peaked and are falling, and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) has plateaued and appears to be about to decline. The previous decline (~1957 to ~1977) in the AMO coincided with the unusual cooling period from ~1947 to ~1977.”
Unusual cooling? According to this U.S. surface temperature chart, the cooling from the 1950’s (actually from the 1930’s) was about as normal as it gets. As can be seen from the chart (Hansen 1999), the temperatures cooled from the late 1800’s to the 1910’s, and then the temperatures warmed from the 1910’s to the 1930’s, and then the temperatures cooled from the 1930’s to the 1970’s, and then the temperatures warmed again from the 1980’s to the present.
And the magnitude of the change in temperatures is about 2C from warming to cooling during this whole period, the magnitude of the cooling is the same, and the magnitude of the warming is the same. Hansen said 1934 was 0.5C warmer than 1998, which would also make it warmer than 2016, so the tempertures are warming and cooling within a narrow band, and it looks like a normal climate cycle to me, and more cooling today would just be following the historic cycle.
The ups and downs of the AMO are very similar to the ups and downs of the North American temperature record.
If you had a friend with an above ground pool, you’d remember when everyone would walk in a circle, adding energy, it’d create a smooth, controlled whirlpool. It was when everyone got out or stopped that the water became choppy & chaotic with rogue waves.
Our problem is, facts be damned, as long as the bolshiecrats are in charge, they will continue to preach their warmunist bullcrap, and continue to destroy our energy system.
Guys like Gore and Kerry can never admit they were wrong, so the doubling down will get more and more bazaar. On the other hand, my personal determination that the temp has been moving down is very strong. For the first time since the 70’s I have gotten out the long-johns and flannel lined britches. A big humbug to global warming from here.
The use of the word “bazaar” (meaning marketplace for selling stuff) instead of “bizarre” (erratic, strange) struck me as remarkably apt! Both Gore and Kerry are selling us a pack of goods and are making a lot of money at it, as too are those COP and Davos get-togethers.
Everyone here that thinks Gore and Kerry give 2 schits about the common man, please raise your hand.
Devil is on the stage. TV exec comes in and says, “You’re just too tame. You’ve been cancelled” That is the Alarmist problem: too much competition and we’ve heard it all before and you were wrong.
Andy – I respectfully beg to differ. Not about your analysis of probable imminent cooling; that is interesting and informative, and seems to be spot on. I suspect that the increasingly demented behaviour of the alarmists-in-chief has more to do with recent world affairs.
Just think; if a certain autocrat hadn’t decided to try and re-create his country’s former empire, and chose to start a bloody war to do it, things in Europe would have gone on much as they had for decades past, with the steady march towards a so-called net zero, fuelled by cheap and abundant Russian gas. Folk would grumble, as they are prone to do, but there would be not have been a crisis – yet.
All of a sudden, there is an energy crisis, and a lot of Europeans are starting to wonder if all that propaganda was just – propaganda! It’s vital for the alarmists to double down, and keep on doubling down, to try and keep the European populations in fear of the great climate monster that lurks just round the next corner.
To infer that Kerry, Gore, and their host of fellow-travellers, have the curiosity, insight, and objectivity to be able to be aware of a possible end to the recent warming, is in my opinion, giving them far too much credit. They are politicians – they don’t (or in some cases, can’t) read past the headlines.