Global Temperature Increase Linked to 1976 Climate Shift in Pacific Ocean
Posted by jennifer, July 24th, 2009 - under News, Opinion.
Tags: Climate & Climate Change
THREE Australasian researchers have shown that natural forces are the dominant influence on climate, in a study just published in the highly-regarded Journal of Geophysical Research. According to this study little or none of the late 20th century global warming and cooling can be attributed to human activity.
The research, by Chris de Freitas, a climate scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, John McLean (Melbourne) and Bob Carter (James Cook University), finds that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a key indicator of global atmospheric temperatures seven months later. As an additional influence, intermittent volcanic activity injects cooling aerosols into the atmosphere and produces significant cooling.
“The surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that made warming El Niño conditions more likely than they were over the previous 30 years and cooling La Niña conditions less likely” says corresponding author de Freitas.
“We have shown that internal global climate-system variability accounts for at least 80% of the observed global climate variation over the past half-century. It may even be more if the period of influence of major volcanoes can be more clearly identified and the corresponding data excluded from the analysis.
“Climate researchers have long been aware that ENSO events influence global temperature, for example causing a high temperature spike in 1998 and a subsequent fall as conditions moved to La Niña. It is also well known that volcanic activity has a cooling influence, and as is well documented by the effects of the 1991 Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption.
The new paper draws these two strands of climate control together and shows, by demonstrating a strong relationship between the Southern Oscillation and lower-atmospheric temperature, that ENSO has been a major temperature influence since continuous measurement of lower-atmospheric temperature first began in 1958.
According to the three researchers, ENSO-related warming during El Niño conditions is caused by a stronger Hadley Cell circulation moving warm tropical air into the mid-latitudes. During La Niña conditions the Pacific Ocean is cooler and the Walker circulation, west to east in the upper atmosphere along the equator, dominates.
“When climate models failed to retrospectively produce the temperatures since 1950 the modellers added some estimated influences of carbon dioxide to make up the shortfall,” says McLean.
“The IPCC acknowledges in its 4th Assessment Report that ENSO conditions cannot be predicted more than about 12 months ahead, so the output of climate models that could not predict ENSO conditions were being compared to temperatures during a period that was dominated by those influences. It’s no wonder that model outputs have been so inaccurate, and it is clear that future modelling must incorporate the ENSO effect if it is to be meaningful.”
Bob Carter, one of four scientists who has recently questioned the justification for the proposed Australian emissions trading scheme, says that this paper has significant consequences for public climate policy.
“The close relationship between ENSO and global temperature, as described in the paper, leaves little room for any warming driven by human carbon dioxide emissions. The available data indicate that future global temperatures will continue to change primarily in response to ENSO cycling, volcanic activity and solar changes.”
“Our paper confirms what many scientists already know: which is that no scientific justification exists for emissions regulation, and that, irrespective of the severity of the cuts proposed, ETS will exert no measurable effect on future climate.”
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Notes and Links
McLean, J. D., C. R. de Freitas, and R. M. Carter (2009), Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature, Journal of Geophysical Research, 114, D14104, doi:10.1029/2008JD011637.
Excerpted Abstract of the Paper appearing in the Journal of Geophysical Research:
Time series for the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) and global tropospheric temperature anomalies (GTTA) are compared for the 1958−2008 period. GTTA are represented by data from satellite microwave sensing units (MSU) for the period 1980–2008 and from radiosondes (RATPAC) for 1958–2008. After the removal from the data set of short periods of temperature perturbation that relate to near-equator volcanic eruption, we use derivatives to document the presence of a 5- to 7-month delayed close relationship between SOI and GTTA. Change in SOI accounts for 72% of the variance in GTTA for the 29-year-long MSU record and 68% of the variance in GTTA for the longer 50-year RATPAC record. Because El Niño−Southern Oscillation is known to exercise a particularly strong influence in the tropics, we also compared the SOI with tropical temperature anomalies between 20°S and 20°N. The results showed that SOI accounted for 81% of the variance in tropospheric temperature anomalies in the tropics. Overall the results suggest that the Southern Oscillation exercises a consistently dominant influence on mean global temperature, with a maximum effect in the tropics, except for periods when equatorial volcanism causes ad hoc cooling. That mean global tropospheric temperature has for the last 50 years fallen and risen in close accord with the SOI of 5–7 months earlier shows the potential of natural forcing mechanisms to account for most of the temperature variation.
Received 16 December 2008; accepted 14 May 2009; published 23 July 2009. [End Abstract Excerpt]
via Climate Depot: http://climatedepot.com/a/2117/PeerReviewed-Study-Rocks-Climate-Debate-Nature-not-man-responsible-for-recent-global-warminglittle-or-none-of-late-20th-century-warming-and-cooling-can-be-attributed-to-humans Thanks Marc!
SJT “Ooops, wrong link.”
The other one would probably have been better. Pierrehumbert would make a good science-fiction writer.
Tell me something, why is a geophysicist writing textbooks on climate science? All he’s doing is writing a story featuring his own opinions, for which he supplies generalities and half-truth as evidence. For example, he claims the satellite data closely follows the GISS data and that mistakes were made with satellite data, presumably by Christy and Spencer. He supplies no proof, only opinions.
Christy and Spencer were awarded medals by NASA for their analysis of the NOAA satellite data. Do you think NASA goes around awarding medals for crap analysis? Don’t think so. The work of Christy and Spencer was fine until a reason was needed to discredit their data. Now we have people like Pierrehumbert spreading that crap. He claims the UAH data is in step with the GISS data. Crap!! The highest average atmospheric temperature recorded by satellites is 0.2 C and it has leveled off and is not retreating.
IMHO, this guy is not qualified to write books on the atmosphere. He makes sweeping allegations about CO2 and the accuracy of proxy data while discounting studies by Roger Revelle, building up Tyndall, Arrenhius and Keeling. Before he died circa 1990, Revelle, a pioneer in CO2 studies, cautioned people not to jump to conclusions about CO2. However, Pierrehumbert ignores that good advice while admitting the CO2 signal is ‘hard to detect’.
No kidding!! John Christy reveals that the satellites can’t detect it at all, and G&T tells you why. THERE ISN”T ENOUGH OF IT IN THE ATMOSPHERE!! What is it Pierrehumbert and the entire realclimate crew don’t understand about that? He makes it sound as though ACO2, at 0.0016% of the atmosphere is an incredibly high density. It was them (the modelers) who put CO2 into the mix, in their models, because their models had strange readings. There was no scientific basis for presuming CO2 is behind warming, although Pierrehumbert refers to good evidence from lab studies.
Here’s a typical example of his rhetoric from page 19:
“We know that our planet journeys through the hard vacuum of outer space, clothed in a thin blanket of air – our atmosphere”.
Is this guy a professor teaching at a university? He’s a geophysicist, surely he has heard of the life work of the astronomer Akasofu? The latter revealed in his book, ‘Exploring the Secrets of the Aurora’, that the space between the Earth and the Sun is full of solar plasma. It’s not a vacuum. I know Louis Hissink gets razzed for bringing that up but it’s not his fault there are so many uniformed people around. It’s true.
From Akasofu’s book:
” In order for this particular field of science to make substantial progress, however,we had to wait for Sydney Chapman and Vincenzo Ferraro (1931) to introduce the concept of confinement of the Earth’s magnetic field in a cavity carved in the solar gas flow. Chapman and Ferraro considered the solar gas to be consisting of an equal number of positive and negative particles (plasma in present terminology) and attempted to understand the behavior of the plasma flow as it approached a dipole field. They inferred that the solar plasma flow forms a comet-like structure around the Earth, extending in the anti-solar direction and confining the Earth and its magnetic field in it.”.
This tail has now been verified by satellite. That plasma comes from the Sun and it is deflected by the Earth’s magnetic field, and here we have a geophysicist who doesn’t know about it. What else doesn’t he know? He also calls the atmosphere a thin layer. Its average mass is 5 quadrillion metric tons. Pierrehumbert over-emphasizes the effect of gigatons of CO2, half of which even he admits goes missing. Gigatons as compared to quadrillion tons are a literal spit in the ocean. ACO2 is 4% of all CO2 which is 0.04% of the atmosphere.
The first paragraph in his book is perhaps the most telling. He says:
“Inevitably, the student who wishes to get launched on significant interdisciplinary problems must begin with a somewhat hazy sketch of the relevant physics, and fill in the gaps as time goes on. It is a lifelong process”.
That’s exactly what G&T have claimed. These people do not understand basic physics. They “fill in the gaps as they go along”.
Correction to my last post. I meant the temperatures from the satellite data is NOW retreating. I said not retreating.
peterd “…atmospheric scientists are well aware that convection is important, at least in the lower atmosphere. I would suspect convection is well accounted for in climate modeling. This suggests that the kind of argument you, following Lindzen, are posing, is a type of straw man”.
No disrespect intended peter, but suspecting isn’t enough. The IPCC’s focus is almost entirely on radiative transfer. Besides, Why would you dismiss the word of someone like Lindzen, who has over 200 papers published over 40 years in studying the atmosphere. He’s not a modeler. They are the one’s with the neat little programs for explaining the atmosphere. Lindzen has done it directly. The least the modelers could do is respect the man for his expertise, and consider his concerns, but they dismiss him as ‘old school’.
It’s not simply accounting for convection in a model, it’s understanding the basics of meteorology, or it’s more modern counterpart, climate science. I am refering to degree programs in climate science, not mathematicians like Gavin Schmidt refering to himself as a climatologist. Roy Spencer, a bona fide, meteorologist, describes the predominant heat transporting systems in the atmosphere as precipitation systems. We haven’t even talked about evapouration and condensation, yet the clouds formed from that process are a major component of heat transfer.
Cloud theory is being described by Lindzen et al as a major weakness in climate models. Even Dr. Joanne Simpson, formerly an expert on cloud models at NASA, claims they are not reliable. That’s not so surprising when you have biologists like Stephen Schneider, mathematicians like Gavin Schmidt and astronomers like James Hansen, writing programs to describe the atmosphere. I have little confidence that they will get it right, and from what I have seen they are way off.
What’s wrong with looking at the 30 year record of satellite data and seeing that no appreciable warming has taken place in the atmosphere? That data is proof that the atmosphere is simply not sensitive to CO2, or at least, not nearly as sensitive as modelers think.
“Cloud theory is being described by Lindzen et al as a major weakness in climate models. Even Dr. Joanne Simpson, formerly an expert on cloud models at NASA, claims they are not reliable. That’s not so surprising when you have biologists like Stephen Schneider, mathematicians like Gavin Schmidt and astronomers like James Hansen, writing programs to describe the atmosphere. I have little confidence that they will get it right, and from what I have seen they are way off.”
The modelers themselves describe clouds as a problem, which is why they are going to start using the new generation super computers that will give them a finer grid resolution that can do more realistic clouds. Lindzen hasn’t made any great announcement on it.
peterd “…and oxygen cannot be the source of infrared radiation escaping to space, as you seem to believe”.
peter…I did not claim that. I said it was radiation from oxygen that the satellite telemetry measures. If CO2 has such a high output of IR why don’t they use that? My guess is because O2 represents nearly 21% of atmospheric gases whereas CO2 represents 0.04%.
Oxygen does radiate in the microwave band. Although typical solar radiation spectra seem to omit the microwave range, I don’t see why. What is it we use in our kitchens to make popcorn? Microwaves produce heat and it is the microwave emissions from O2 that are measured by satellites.
WHAT CO2 forcing?????? http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/2005-08-18/dioxide.htm
SJT,
“performed recently using hyperspectral data from the AVIRIS visible/near IR airborne imager. ”
Try again Louis”
You said it was a database etc. You still do not get it, do you. Even your quote above does not support your initial statement that the site contained a database of etc.
I have not questioned MODTRAN at all, only questioning your statement that the link provided a database etc.
So where is the database of all the measurements then?
Louis, you have no idea. Stick to stuff you can understand.
[...] this at Jennifer Marohasy`s [...]
“Mr. de Freitas is admitting that his paper says nothing of significance about the existence/non-existence of AGW, contra the statements in its press release.”
Oops, it seems his press release kinda sorta overstated what the research found. Typical misleading bs from a paid denier.
Using the monthly data from 1996 to 2009.
I plotted MSU against SOI using various lags .
and found a temperature lag of about 5or 6 months
behind SOI
It is claimed that the fall in temperature in 2008
was due to a La Nina and the rise in 1998 was due
to a super El Nino. These are evident in the SOI data
From these two points the relationship between
SOI and temperature can be obtained.
The effect of SOI on temperature is much greater
than the “climate scientists” at Real Climate tell us.
[...] Picked this up off that JenniferMarohasy site did some further research and found a site with some graphs that help explain it a lot better. 1976-78 climate shift Jennifer Marohasy [...]