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
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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.