by Judith Curry
This paper will change the way you think about natural internal variability.
And it provides a very different view from Mora et al.’s ‘we are toast by 2047‘ paper.
Role for Eurasian Arctic shelf sea ice in a secularly varying hemispheric climate signal during the 20th century
Marcia Glaze Wyatt and Judith A. Curry
Abstract: A hypothesized low-frequency climate signal propagating across the Northern Hemisphere through a network of synchronized climate indices was identified in previous analyses of instrumental and proxy data. The tempo of signal propagation is rationalized in terms of the multidecadal component of Atlantic Ocean variability – the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. Through multivariate statistical analysis of an expanded database, we further investigate this hypothesized signal to elucidate propagation dynamics. The Eurasian Arctic Shelf-Sea Region, where sea ice is uniquely exposed to open ocean in the Northern Hemisphere, emerges as a strong contender for generating and sustaining propagation of the hemispheric signal. Ocean-ice-atmosphere coupling spawns a sequence of positive and negative feedbacks that convey persistence and quasi-oscillatory features to the signal. Further stabilizing the system are anomalies of co-varying Pacific-centered atmospheric circulations. Indirectly related to dynamics in the Eurasian Arctic, these anomalies appear to negatively feed back onto the Atlantic‘s freshwater balance. Earth’s rotational rate and other proxies encode traces of this signal as it makes its way across the Northern Hemisphere.
Citation: M.G. Wyatt and J.A. Curry, “Role for Eurasian Arctic shelf sea ice in a secularly varying hemispheric climate signal during the 20th century,” (Climate Dynamics, 2013). The full manuscript can be downloaded here [ stadium wave].
Below is the complete press release being issued by Georgia Tech:
‘Stadium Waves’ Could Explain Lull In Global Warming
One of the most controversial issues emerging from the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is the failure of global climate models to predict a hiatus in warming of global surface temperatures since 1998. Several ideas have been put forward to explain this hiatus, including what the IPCC refers to as ‘unpredictable climate variability’ that is associated with large-scale circulation regimes in the atmosphere and ocean. The most familiar of these regimes is El Niño/La Niña. On longer multi-decadal time scales, there is a network of atmospheric and oceanic circulation regimes, including the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
A new paper published in the journal Climate Dynamics suggests that this ‘unpredictable climate variability’ behaves in a more predictable way than previously assumed. The paper’s authors, Marcia Wyatt and Judith Curry, point to the so-called ‘stadium-wave’ signal that propagates like the cheer at sporting events whereby sections of sports fans seated in a stadium stand and sit as a ‘wave’ propagates through the audience. In like manner, the ‘stadium wave’ climate signal propagates across the Northern Hemisphere through a network of ocean, ice, and atmospheric circulation regimes that self-organize into a collective tempo.
The stadium wave hypothesis provides a plausible explanation for the hiatus in warming and helps explain why climate models did not predict this hiatus. Further, the new hypothesis suggests how long the hiatus might last.
Building upon Wyatt’s Ph.D. thesis at the University of Colorado, Wyatt and Curry identified two key ingredients to the propagation and maintenance of this stadium wave signal: the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and sea ice extent in the Eurasian Arctic shelf seas. The AMO sets the signal’s tempo, while the sea ice bridges communication between ocean and atmosphere. The oscillatory nature of the signal can be thought of in terms of ‘braking,’ whereby positive and negative feedbacks interact in such a way as to support reversals of the circulation regimes. As a result, climate regimes — multiple-decade intervals of warming or cooling — evolve in a spatially and temporally ordered manner. While not strictly periodic in occurrence, their repetition is regular — the order of quasi-oscillatory events remains consistent. Wyatt’s thesis found that the stadium wave signal has existed for at least 300 years.
The new study analyzed indices derived from atmospheric, oceanic and sea ice data since 1900. The linear trend was removed from all indices to focus only the multi-decadal component of natural variability. A multivariate statistical technique called Multi-channel Singular Spectrum Analysis (MSSA) was used to identify patterns of variability shared by all indices analyzed, which characterizes the ‘stadium wave.’ The removal of the long-term trend from the data effectively removes the response from long term climate forcing such as anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
The stadium wave periodically enhances or dampens the trend of long-term rising temperatures, which may explain the recent hiatus in rising global surface temperatures.
“The stadium wave signal predicts that the current pause in global warming could extend into the 2030s,” Wyatt said, the paper’s lead author.
Curry added, “This prediction is in contrast to the recently released IPCC AR5 Report that projects an imminent resumption of the warming, likely to be in the range of a 0.3 to 0.7 degree Celsius rise in global mean surface temperature from 2016 to 2035.” Curry is the chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Previous work done by Wyatt on the ‘wave’ shows that climate models fail to capture the stadium-wave signal. That this signal is not seen in climate model simulations may partially explain the models’ inability to simulate the current stagnation in global surface temperatures.
“Current climate models are overly damped and deterministic, focusing on the impacts of external forcing rather than simulating the natural internal variability associated with nonlinear interactions of the coupled atmosphere-ocean system,” Curry said.
The study also provides an explanation for seemingly incongruous climate trends, such as how sea ice can continue to decline during this period of stalled warming, and when the sea ice decline might reverse. After temperatures peaked in the late 1990s, hemispheric surface temperatures began to decrease, while the high latitudes of the North Atlantic Ocean continued to warm and Arctic sea ice extent continued to decline. According to the ‘stadium wave’ hypothesis, these trends mark a transition period whereby the future decades will see the North Atlantic Ocean begin to cool and sea ice in the Eurasian Arctic region begin to rebound.
Most interpretations of the recent decline in Arctic sea ice extent have focused on the role of anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing, with some allowance for natural variability. Declining sea ice extent over the last decade is consistent with the stadium wave signal, and the wave’s continued evolution portends a reversal of this trend of declining sea ice.
“The stadium wave forecasts that sea ice will recover from its recent minimum, first in the West Eurasian Arctic, followed by recovery in the Siberian Arctic,” Wyatt said. “Hence, the sea ice minimum observed in 2012, followed by an increase of sea ice in 2013, is suggestive of consistency with the timing of evolution of the stadium-wave signal.”
The stadium wave holds promise in putting into perspective numerous observations of climate behavior, such as regional patterns of decadal variability in drought and hurricane activity, the researchers say, but a complete understanding of past climate variability and projections of future climate change requires integrating the stadium-wave signal with external climate forcing from the sun, volcanoes and anthropogenic forcing.
“How external forcing projects onto the stadium wave, and whether it influences signal tempo or affects timing or magnitude of regime shifts, is unknown and requires further investigation,” Wyatt said. “While the results of this study appear to have implications regarding the hiatus in warming, the stadium wave signal does not support or refute anthropogenic global warming. The stadium wave hypothesis seeks to explain the natural multi-decadal component of climate variability.”
———-
We have also simplified an annotated one of the main figures in the paper for the public:
Illustration of the progression of the stadium wave. The stadium-wave ‘wheel’ is divided into segments (from center to perimeter): the light gray ring identifies the segment number; the dark gray ring indicates key hemispheric indices; sea ice indices are in the yellow ring; and the outer green ring provides peak dates for the segment. Segment I begins with a cold North Atlantic (-AMO), maximum sea ice extent in the European Arctic shelf seas (+WIE). Segments II through IV show evolution of the climate signal initiated in the cold Atlantic. As sea ice growth increases eastward into the Siberian Arctic (+ArcSib), strong winds develop that convert an initially cold ocean-ice signal into a warming atmospheric one (Segment II). Events proceed, carrying the signal across Eurasia and into the Pacific (+PDO; Segment III), ultimately culminating in maximum Arctic and NH surface temperatures in Segment IV. Segment –I follows with maximum warmth in the North Atlantic and minimal sea ice in the European Arctic shelf seas. This marks a shift whereby trends of AMO and WIE decrease and increase, respectively. An initial warm signal converts to a cooling one until reaching Segment –IV, where temperatures dip to their minima, followed soon after by shift to a warming regime (I). (adapted from Wyatt and Curry, 2013).
Well done!
As a modeling approach to improve climate simulations we will know more if we can show improved skill of climate models in reproducing known past climate.
I am afraid I must discount any conclusions this paper comes to as it is co-authored by suspected denialist Judith Curry. I will not actually read it before discounting it, and I will now quote old discredited papers by James Hansen and Michael Mann as my reasons for doing so. Finally, I will link to politicized IPCC conclusions.
You denialists, won’t you ever learn?
****
Without having perused this thread, I am merely predicting the actions of FOMTrolling – now let’s see how close to the truth I am.
LOL … let’s you and I (and the great majority of Climate Etc folks) unite in public repudiation of abusive language and willful ignorance!
That would be a *terrific* expression of solidarity, eh tomdesabla?
“LOL … let’s you and I (and the great majority of Climate Etc folks) unite in public repudiation of abusive language and willful ignorance.
Dear Fan, I know you’re well intended, but perhaps you could look to your own house WRT abusive language.
I find the timing of this blog most interesting, particularly:
“One of the most controversial issues emerging from the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is the failure of global climate models to predict a hiatus in warming of global surface temperatures since 1998.” Which conveniently ignores Science News’ Oct. 5th article: Global warming hiatus tied to cooler temps in Pacific, which states “The recent pause in global warming has resulted from cooling in the tropical Pacific Ocean, new simulations find. “
FOMD : let’s you and I (and the great majority of Climate Etc folks) unite in public repudiation of abusive language and willful ignorance!
The most noble suicide note I’ve ever seen.
I agree, Congratulations!
Judith, congrats if you have made headway in understanding internal variability, but if my skimming is on target, this paper specifically ignores external forcing effects (and hence the long-term CO2 induced trends). Eg (from Georgia Tech blurb): “The linear trend was removed from all indices to focus only the multi-decadal component of natural variability.”
So this paper is neither for nor against AGW. I don’t know why so many denier/skeptic sites are selling it as against AGW.
Actually let me ask an actual question.
Do you think the rate of the wave is based on thermal input from the sun over time?
We did some analyses related to solar, but depending on which data set we used, got different answer. Subject of future research.
My theory is that a cycle like you described evolves as a nautral temperature regulation system. I’m looking forward to your research.
Dr. Curry congratulations to both you and Dr. Wyatt.
Nice to see brave and intelligent people take the path seldom taken and lead. I imagine you have set some hair on fire in many climatology departments around the world.
Very happy for you!!!
Those analyses were based on assumptions that are not consistent with hard-constrained observations.
The foundation was way too small and really wouldn’t have supported a small shack so the entire building project was scrapped. HOWEVER, I would like to have an in-depth and intelligent argument that the wood trim on the North-South hallway on the East side of the building’s 82nd floor should have been painted a lighter shade of ivory.
The original theory that all of this was based on, the model that CO2 produced a greenhouse effect, was wrong from the start. Why not address this first instead of wasting brain power on articles that assume it was correct?
Congrats Dr. C. 2030’s. Not an IPCC friendly number..
Press release: “Stadium Waves’ Could Explain Lull In Global Warming”
Right. “Could.” And yet I note DR. Wyatt’s statement: “While the results of this study appear to have implications regarding the hiatus in warming, the stadium wave signal does not support or refute anthropogenic global warming.”
Of course it doesn’t. But it may help determining how strong it really is.
Now imagine a climate system consisting of a large network of such interacting factors, with various delays, interactions, and teleconnections.
AK
Good comment, but lets add the words; ‘ large network, of such interacting factors many UNKNOWN as yet….’..
I suspect the ultimate effect of all these component parts on the climate would be akin to the sounds of a 40 piece music harmony group. As yet only two are singing and until the rest join in at various stages we won’t know the full effect, but the whole will certainly sound very different to the two.
tonyb
@tonyb…
As yet we can only hear two singing. An important distinction, between what’s really going on and our models of what’s really going on, mental and otherwise.
reminds of Syun Akasofu’s work, doesn’t it? http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/09/syun-akasofus-work-provokes-journal-resignation/
Not new.
See here:
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/the-real-link-between-solar-energy-ocean-cycles-and-global-temperature/
“from time to time the other oceanic cycles can operate in the opposite mode to PDO/ENSO thereby offsetting it until any lag is worked through.
It logically follows that, from time to time, the other oceanic cycles can operate in conjunction with PDO/ENSO to emphasise the effect on the global temperature.
Before it is safe to attribute a global warming or a global cooling effect to any other factor (CO2 in particular) it is necessary to disentangle the simultaneous overlapping positive and negative effects of solar variation, PDO/ENSO and the other oceanic cycles. Sometimes they work in unison, sometimes they work against each other and until a formula has been developed to work in a majority of situations all our guesses about climate change must come to nought.
So, to be able to monitor and predict changes in global temperature we need more than information about the past, current and expected future level of solar activity.
We also need to identify all the separate oceanic cycles around the globe and ascertain both the current state of their respective warming or cooling modes and, moreover, the intensity of each, both at the time of measurement and in the future.
Once we have a suitable formula I believe that changes in global temperature will no longer be a confusing phenomenon and we will be able to apportion the proper weight to other influencing factors such as the greenhouse effect of CO2.”
May 21, 2008
The contributions of sea ice, volcanic events and any anthropogenic component are all subsumed into the interaction between the ocean oscillations in each basin so the ‘stadium wave’ concept is just a fancy name for the net interaction between the various oceanic oscillations.
Except the stadium wave is a specific model, hence new. That someone previously said I bet there are a bunch of overlapping cycles does not make this paper not new.
How is a stadium wave different from what I described ?
The model may be new but the concept is not. Did anyone else describe the concept before 2008 ?
Their paper is like a new design of bicycle. They didn’t invent the wheel.
By the same token the people who invented the wheel did not invent the bicycle. In the wave case it is the different between a vague concept and a specific formulation.
You should note that having identified the concept I recommended attempts at measurement and modelling.
Anyway,this is just what we all know as the PDO is it not ?
What extra knowledge is derived from calling it a stadium wave ?
Categorising it as such might help in making a model that is amenable to prediction but we already knew it was 30 years warm and 30 years cool didn’t we ?
The PDO positive phase warmed the world in the late 20th century.
The negative phase cooled it in the mid 20th century and has caused the ‘pause’ thus far with potential cooling to follow.
This paper does not deserve the levels of positive response being given to it though I suppose it is understandable from those who were unaware of the climate significance of that 60 year oceanic oscillation.
actually Nostradamus beat you to it
When the fish that travels over both land and sea
is cast up on to the shore by a great wave,
its shape foreign, smooth and frightful.
From the sea the enemies soon reach the walls.
how is that any different from you have described?
Cool!
never forget that Wilde is a lawyer and is trained to lie, mislead, reframe, and suggest that some other culprit other than C02 commits the crime.
Isn’t Mosher a nice fellow ?
The more he dislikes what he hears the nicer he gets.
Damn near choked reading Mosher complaining about others who “mislead and reframe”.
The degree of one’s obscurantism is highly dependent on the initial conditions of one’s integrity and humility.
Because Nostradamus was describing an amphibious attack craft you Nostradumass!!
Be nice!!
Whereas others are self-taught?
What drives the AMO do you suppose?
Vellinga and Wu from the Hadley Centre modeled a 60-year cycle based on changes in the MOC. This occurred as the inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ) moved north as a result of a higher temperature gradient (some 0.5°C) caused by a stronger THC. The extra tropical rainfall into the Atlantic reduced the salinity and were slowly propagated north over a period of decades. The lower salinity water slowed the MOC, and the oscillation then enters the opposite phase.
Low-Latitude Freshwater Influence on Centennial Variability of the Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/3219.1
Neptune
I think it’s mostly solar and maybe coupled with some kind of internal variability. Orbital and lunar correlations are also very interesting.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GKNFRyHt-6Q/T3QRqFm-KpI/AAAAAAAAAHE/_Ojic7Iws6o/s1600/Solarcycle_forcing_temp_comparison.jpg
The late 20th century divergence is partly due to local anthropogenic warming and partly to other factors, such as longterm multicentennial linear trend in solar cycle frequency (thermal inertia of oceans and ice).
The identification of the link between these features as part of “natural variability” is fascinating.
Do you have any idea about the mechanisms that drive the stadium wave, or is this work purely a description of the spatio-temporal relationship between different effects (important though this is?)
Well that is the big question. Conceivable that this is linked to some sort of external forcing, e.g. solar sets the tempo in some way. An alternative view is that this is pure internal variability, whose character could change any time.
I have suggested the following:
i) The basic ENSO cycle is a result of the mean position of the ITCZ being north of the equator. The solar input is therefore unbalanced on either side of the equator and ocean heat builds up to the south of it resulting in periodical discharges along and across the equator in the ‘sloshing’ movement described by Bob Tisdale. Influences such as winds and the moon have some influence on the timing.
ii) The 60 year PDO Oscillation appears to be internal to the ocean system as the initial ENSO effects carry into the other ocean basins and then feed back to the Pacific by way of what you call a stadium wave but which I previously called he net interaction between the various ocean oscillations.
iii) The periodicity from MWP to LIA to date is probably induced by the solar millennial cycle as described by me elsewhere. Basically an active sun reduces global cloudiness to allow more solar energy into the oceans which skews ENSO in favour of stronger El Ninos relative to La Ninas. A quiet sun does the opposite.
So, as you suggest, a combination of external solar forcing and internal variability.
The specifics are seemingly tied explicitly to geography; i.e., how the continents are currently arranged, the shape of the Arctic Basin, etc. I wonder if the particulars of the Wave could be derived from a more general theory, which would treat the current geography as a set of values of an independent variable array.
It is a step-wise cycle where occupancy of a site disfavors occupancy of a previous site and promotes occupancy of the next site; it is global Othello or the ATP, ADP+Pi and open sites on ATP-synthase
See the Boyer cycle
http://employees.csbsju.edu/hjakubowski/classes/ch331/oxphos/atpaseboyerr.GIF
laws of large numbers & conservation of angular momentum = hard constraints (nowhere to hide)
Simply to say that the “internal variability” reminds me the convective movements in the mantle, which make continents move, separate themselves, come together again, in a sort of very, very long cycles. It requires a different sort of modelling comparing with the deterministic ones that are being used by IPCC.
I don’t know what the mystery is; what drives this is just the 61-year solar barycenter motion.
1000frolly from YouTube
The existence of such phenomena, along with the fact that all climate models appear to fail so reproduce them, is very good evidence that the entire selection of climate models sample only a tiny fraction of the space of earth-system emulations available. IOW, the models are bunk.
If it holds up, it looks really spectacular. Congrats.
I wonder if what is described is just one of the “fractals” or cycles in a multi fractual system. Similar to Chaos Theory or even Elliott Wave Theory. Do you find fibannaci relationships and ratios in the waves or cycles?
Fibonacci
I see fibonacci relationships right off the bat in the Expanded Stadium Wave (Fig. 3). Although it is hard to see exactly what the years are. Also fibonacci needs to be calculated in natural years with months measured in moons of 29.5 days for a month approximately. Anyway Waves I, II, III, IV peak consecutively somewhere between 1915 and 1936. In normal years it would have to be the fibo 21years in natural years (Fn 75025) 273.91 moons or 22.1 years. Then the Stadium Waves bottom out consecutively between 1940 and 1974. Normal years has fibonacci 34 normal years in natural years (that is the next number in the sequence after 21) but in natural years (Fn 196418) 443.19 moons or 35.8 years and that skips 28.2 in the sequence. Then once again the Stadium waves Peak consecutively between 1974 and 1996. So it looks like the peaks are 21 and the valleys are 34. It looks like the next valley started in 1996? So that takes us to 2030.
So 21 and 34 it is!
P.S. Please don’t tell David Appell about this hocus pocus unscientific bs it will forever taint the Stadium Waves and make Dr. Curry and Dr. Wyatt into diving rod laughingstock.
That is (21 and 34) BTW the perfect pi relationship of .382 to .618 that is the essence of fibonacci of adding the two previous numbers to get the next number. That appears everywhere in nature:
https://www.google.com/search?q=fibonacci&client=firefox-a&hs=UuC&rls=com.floodgap:en-US:unofficial&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=n5dXUoz2OIqqigLJ74HoDg&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1126&bih=603&dpr=1
This looks extremely interesting Judith. Thanks for linking the free version!
I will be most interested to read this (several times through) and then also to see what other PhD level experts give as feedback. Who were your reviewers on this?
One additional question- what would make your “stadium wave” hypothesis falsifiable?
observations over the next three decades
More important, what would falsify anthro induced catastrophic climate change?
“observations over the next three decades”
not necessarily — that answer is based on an assumption…
The reviewers were anonymous. One reviewer was particularly industrious writing 10+ page reviews (during 3 rounds of reviews). I think the editor did a good job of handling the paper.
did any of them count averbs?
Adverbs, even. Very industriously, undoubtedly.
Averbs are important to science.
Steve, I count self-citations and investigate of they are above 30%.
Very good remembering Klyashtorin and Lyubushin. The only ones who had any predictive skills, and forgotten by everybody.
KL was a big key in unraveling this
When I first encountered it, it became a kind of touchstone. Anything which didn’t align with KL looked “fishy”.
Cyclic Climate Changes and Fish Productivity
http://alexeylyubushin.narod.ru/Climate_Changes_and_Fish_Productivity.pdf?
Dr. Curry — It would be interesting to hear about the process of generating the press release. How did the authors interact with the press office in writing and revising the document. How many revisions? Etc.
Good question. MW did a draft, then I did a draft. We then sent this to GT press office. They did a draft, which MW in particular did not like. I redid the PR, with some edits from MW, which was pretty much the final version used in the press release.
These are challenging to write; needs to be interesting, understandable, yet accurate and not misleading. I hope we succeeded in making this an effective press release.
‘Stadium Waves’ Could Explain Lull In Global Warming
I think the biased reader of an alarmist/warmist persuasion will interpret that to mean AGW is assumed. That said, I believe it’s a fair and reasonable header…
That PR is far more technical than usual. It must have popped journalistic skulls around the world.
Did you send a press release to the Washington Post and NYT Dr Curry. It would be nice to see this up in lights like the Mora paper.
Perhaps they may post something tomorrow then.
I am at a loss as to why The Washington Post does not have this up by now. Perhaps you needed a catchier title.
I am skeptical. It is not hard to argue that the phenomenology is far too complex to be so repeatably cyclic, especially under perturbed radiative forcing.
The physics being dubious and the graphs (to the extent I can read them – the figures seem somewhat garbled in the PDF as rendered on my machine) being altogether too pretty, I suspect a statistical artifact. (Perhaps Mr McIntyre will cast his eagle eye and his caustic wit on these results. Or not.)
I could be wrong, though. However, assuming it all holds up, I see a “convenient” (i.e., consensus-bashing) misinterpretation brewing here.
Clearly, as Wyatt says, the result is uninformative regarding AGW; the trend is removed before the analysis even starts, (line 215 of the draft) so it really tells us nothing about that trend. To the contrary, it allows attribution of a prolonged hiatus to internal system variability, superimposed upon and obscuring a background trend.
Indeed, this seems the most likely implication of the result, if it holds up. If valid, it indicates that the mean surface temperature trend hiatus in no way refutes the core conclusions of IPCC, and will not have the power to do so even if it continues for some decades to come.
This is not a cycle in terms of a regular period. It is an oscillation. At most we are projecting forward 30 years.
The paper is about natural internal variability, it says absolutely nothing about AGW. The IPCC treats natural internal variability as ‘noise’; we argue that it is the fundamental climate signal on decadal to century time scales, with external forcing projecting onto these modes. Our paper does make a projection about the duration of the current pause, which does have implications for attribution, sensitivity, etc. And certainly makes one think twice about the Mora et al. we are toast in 2047
Judith said:
“it says absolutely nothing about AGW…”
—-
Then what was the “anthropogenic footprint” that was filtered from the data beginning in the 1930’s?
I am not saying Mora holds up in the event of previously unidentified quasiperiodic phenomena such as the one you propose.
I agree that it is in the class of impacts paper that tends to take the models a bit too literally. As for the “duration of the pause”, I didn’t see any attempt to link your oscillation to a temperature amplitude.
At this point, even without the Stadium Wave the GMST hiatus stands as over-explained. We have 1) ENSO masking (possibly related to) 2) heat accumulation in intermediate ocean depths 3) weak solar forcing and 4) volcanoes. If all five of these things hold up, we’d need a heck of a background signal to just hold T steady. Further, most of them are temporary, and none are in the GCMs, so that would mean the models are underpredicting warming, not overpredicting it.
Which means that while (I agree) Mora et al was overprecise regarding dates, it would be understating impacts.
Dr. Curry, technically I think you are only looking on the multi-decadal scale not the century scale. The century long trend that you removed might well be due to century scale oscillations. This is why your analysis is neutral with respect to AGW.
Mtobis: When there are five or six competing hypotheses it is unlikely that all are true. What is far more likely is that we do not know what happened. So concluding that warming is worse than we thought solely on the basis of there being multiple hypotheses is unwarranted, to say the least.
Yes.
The Pacific Multidecadal Oscillation of 60 years or so with the millennial solar cycle superimposed giving stepwise warming on each successive positive phase from LIA to date and probably the opposite from MWP to LIA.
It is the fact that we just entered a 30 year cooling phase (even without the contribution of a less active sun) which demolishes Mora et al.
“At this point, even without the Stadium Wave the GMST hiatus stands as over-explained. ”
have you ever noticed that there are many many kinds of wine cork pullers?
wonder why such a simple problem has so many tools to solve it?
err, cause none of them works perfectly.
Changing the paradigm. You’re at Ga. Tech! YOU CAN DO THAT!
The ENSO cycle HAS leaned to the cool phase. The extra volcanic activity DOES exist. The sun HAS been quiet. People confidently tell me the deep ocean heat HAS been detected (I am not 100% convinced but I am not betting against them either). And I forgot to mention that the aerosol load from Chinese industry and transportation HAS increased. So stadium wave or no, these cooling forcings, unpredictable by models, have occurred. (Much as we may wish that ENSO were predictable, so far it isn’t, so for GCM projections on current knowledge it is best treated as a roll of the dice.)
Those aren’t hypotheses, they are observed forcings. Observations. Of things that ought to cause cooling. And yet the climate stubbornly refuses to cool off.
ENSO alone accounts for most of the variance from the trend.
It seems to me the wrong side of this argument is being asked to do the explaining.
You are too modest. The power of The Wave will sweep away the sandcastles of the IPCC.
The Figure 5 states that NINO3.4 contributes about 1% to the stadium wave effect.
Yet, it is very obvious that the SOI time series contributes the most to global temperature variability, along with volcanic activity. The SOI has the opposite sign of NINO SST.
So what really needs to be done is redo all this work with those corrections added. You will have a much cleaner signal with which to reason with. And the oscillation may disappear as well.
Just saying. The tell is that there are no references to Foster&Rahmstorf or Kosaka&Xie.
That’s what happens with a paper in the pipeline in that it misses the latest findings.
I thought that recent research had significantly decreased the plausible impact of aerosols, removing that from the list of model savers.
“with external forcing projecting onto these modes”
needs conceptual revision — i’m willing and able to help marcia…
mtobis said:
Can’t argue with this as a measure as simple as SOI is able to account for the majority of the sub-decadal wiggles in the global temperature curve such as GISS. The rest are adequately explained by volcanic eroptions and a slight amount by TSI sun-spot cycles.
The wild card is to account for the minor 0.1 C slower fluctuation in the GISS curve. The stadium wave post mentions the LOD measure as a proxy for these decadal fluctuations, and I think that there may be something to it. It is a perfect component to use because it doesn’t have the temperature dependence “baked in” from detrending a signal, which is a problem with AMO based on SST measurements.
After incorporating corrections due to SOI, volcanos, TSI, and LOD, we get this:
http://img543.imageshack.us/img543/6837/vlq.gif
This looks highly de-fluctuated, except for one warming spike that lasts the duration of WWII and then drops back. This happened in the midst of the lengthy 1939-1942 El Nino which the SOI spike centered at 1941-1942 was not wide enough to compensate for.
Global interannual does not exactly equal SOI. Calling global interannual variations “ENSO” is not strictly technically accurate; it’s just a communicatively-practical colloquial conceptual approximation. Break the interannual down by region to learn something important ~1910-1940. Look for mirage correlations that indicate a balanced multi-axial differential. “ENSO” is just a loud primarily-east-west bounce around a quiet equator-pole externally-governed attractor that only shows it’s cumulative dominance at MD timescale. I suggest reporting the partial variance breakdown — i.e. with global interannual removed before partitioning. If you’re ready to get serious, I’ll put aside past transgressions on a trial basis (i.e. without yet disarming). MD LOD is a function of solar cycle acceleration. Be careful to avoid SOI overfitting, which is a hazard of naively-ignorant decomposition due to the mirage coupling, which gives rise to occasional harsh interannual failures (literally 180 degrees out of phase = straight-up diagnostic HARD-FAIL revealing patently false model assumptions and associated misconception that needs to be promptly discarded).
Huh? Citations?
You have to appreciate this Vaughan character.
Lots of sound and fury to account for a +/- 0.05C fluctuation.
There’s something seriously wrong with that number — e.g. maybe it’s based on air temperature rather than SST.
When I began university-based paid work on MD variability in late November 2007, no one from the climate establishment could answer my questions. I decided to take personal responsibility. That has been my focus all along, something I continued on the side after I moved to the private sector. Late 2010 marked a sharp turning point in my awareness of what was going wrong with solar-terrestrial-climate conception in mainstream academia. The centennial timescale partitioning cannot be sensibly addressed without deeply lucid prerequisite understanding of STW & MD by all parties involved.
Knowledge is a beautiful thing. It’s what people do with knowledge that is ugly.
Maybe is a first step in getting the “carbon-phobic” climatology aside, and advance the understanding. After 30 years. Who cares what it says or doesn’t say about the “carbon-phobia”? The question is what it says about the climate system, and if it works.
This is funny. How do you define “carbon-phobic” climatology?How do you distinguish it from “non-carbon-phobic” climatology? Can you explain more on that? I never found such a definition when studying for my degree in AtSci. Please, tell us a little more about such a deep thought…
Dr. Tobis, I don’t understand enough of the details here, but might not there be implications on calculating the CO2 TCS? if a lot of what was happening 1970-2000 was the heat “sloshing” into the surface temperature phase, and in the periods before and after, sloshing somewhere else. Not that I know which way it would affect the estimates.
I’m also interested in how this might affect all the second half of the IPCC’s work, how AGW affects climate and ecology and stuff. Seems like this would be a game-changer, leading to very different expectations on what will result. Again, I don’t know which effects would disappear, which appear or become much more severe, which change around… Perhaps that massive half of the report could be totally obsolete and have to be entirely redone to get useful information.
Anyhow, if this work implies another couple of decades to the “pause”, I think that would indeed have massive implications to both the economics and the politics. If it would turn out that real negative consequences are far down the road, more economists might agree with Bjorn Lomborg and such that it’s much more effective to gather and distribute wealth now and pay for adaptation later.
Early days, though; we’ll see what happens with this. In the meantime, I think it’s fascinating. If it works out.
Judith,
You state that indices have been detrended using least square fits to determine the linear trends. That sounds reasonable and may well be the best choice in practice, but that brings in a possible problem. If the trends are mainly due to CO2 based AGW they are not likely to be linear over the period considered. That would lead to spurious variability with extreme values at both ends and at some moment in the latter half of the period. Have you tried to estimate, how this kind on non-linearity would affect the results?
One way of testing, how strong the effect could be would be to fit a quadratic trend with a zero derivative at the beginning of the period and comparing the results obtained through that approach to the present ones.
I agree that the long term pattern is nearer quadratic than linear, though I dislike ‘detrending’ generally.
In fact if you objectively fit a quadratic is will zero out around 1910 and fit the negative trend to late 19th c. quite nicely.
Starting from an a priori assumption that the long term variation is primarily due to CO2 and imposing a suitable function is to bias the result before you start.
If the aim is to remove longer term variation that can be done without prejudice by high-pass filters. A convenient one is dT/dt. Or d2/dt2 if you want a stronger one.
The latter would effectively reduce a quadratic to a constant but avoids imposing a model on the data from the outset and setting arbitrary boundary conditions like a zero slope at the beginning of the record.
Derivatives have the advantage of being linear operations that preserve the information content of the data without introducing spurious non observational functions and assumption driven adjustments into the record.
Greg,
Quadratic trend with zero initial derivative does introduce bias, but so does also the linear trend. Therefore I didn’t propose replacing the linear trend by the quadratic in detrending, but to use the comparison of the two choices as a simple sensitivity test.
With many different indices and an overall period not very long in comparison with the variability being studied it’s quite possible that filtering leads to very low statistical significance of the results. That would be an indication that the results obtained by any selected way of detrending may be biased, but doing exploratory research using simple detrending may be of interest even in such a case.
If you remove the variability via the SOI correction, the cubic will zero out before 1880.
“If the trends are mainly due to CO2 based AGW they are not likely to be linear over the period considered.”
Why ?
Over what period may this “trend” be linear ?
Please try to answer without shuffling sideways
If the warming response to CO2 is logarithmic while CO2 emissions grow approximately exponentially then you would expect a linear response. The presence of non-linear feedbacks will however mess this simple relationship up. The climate system has a whole mess of non-linear feedbacks.
Wheel in the Sky- Journey
‘Winter is here, again, Oh Lord
Haven’t been home in a year or more
I hope she holds on a little longer
Sent a letter on a long summer day
Made of silver, not of clay
Ooh I’ve been runnin’ down this dusty road
The wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’
I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’…”
Well, I prefer the wheel by jerry Garcia,
The wheel is turning and you can slow it down,
You can’t let go and you can’t hold on
You can’t go back and you can’t stand still,
If the thunder don’t get you then the lightning will
Q: What does a dead-head say when he runs out of pot?
A: Oh my God, what is that horrible music!
1. The best concert I ever saw was three hours of Grateful Dead at Empire Pool, Wembley, 1972. Not my favourite group, but terrific that night, and only two hours was scheduled.
2. “This Wheel’s on Fire” … remasters of The Band’s 1971 Rock of Ages concert have just been released, played it earlier today.
(sigh) the great days of rock ‘n’ roll …
The “stadium wave” is a terrific idea, and the authors are to be congratulated (especially young scientist Marcia Glaze Wyatt). Well done!
The two studies to be discussed are: Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and Northern Hemisphere’s climate variability (2012) and Role for Eurasian Arctic shelf sea ice in a secularly varying hemispheric climate signal during the 20th century (2013)
Q What’s next?
A The weakest aspect of this work is that it is statistical as contrasted with mechanistic. It is natural to wonder: Are these patterns accidental? If they are not accidental, what is the detailed mechanism of their action?
Here the advice of George E. P. Box is relevant:
Conclusion If we follow George Box’s scientific advice, then a logical, unifying, next step for “stadium wave” models is to collaborate with computational/mechanistic global climate models to answer this simple question: By appropriate adjustment of parameters, can mechanistic climate models exhibit stadium waves?
If the answer is “yes” *and* if the stadium wave continues to be observed in coming decades, then the Wyatt/Curry work will be be regarded as a seminal & enduring contribution to climate-science. That would be *terrific*! Otherwise the work risks being regarded as one more statistics-driven model, of innumerably many already published in the literature, that in the long run (for the reasons that George Box explains) have yielded little in the way of deeper climate understanding and predictive confidence. Ouch.
Congratulations and best wishes for further “stadium wave” success are extended to you both, Marcia Glaze Wyatt and Judith Curry!
Judith, can you expound on this a bit more, from your paper:
“Examination of a 140-year record of observed and modeled temperature data revealed strong correlation between the two indices until the 1930s, after which the surface temperature trend increased much more than that of ngLOD. DM removed the estimated anthropogenic footprint from the surface
average temperature to generate a ‘corrected’ temperature, one assumed to reflect only natural variability. Correlation between ngLOD and the ‘corrected’ temperature was strong.”
___
Are we to gather that the anthropogenic footprint was actually “detected” by this analysis as early as the 1930’s?
I specifically would like to know how you judged what the “estimated anthropogenic footprint” in surface average temperature was. As is so often the case in landmark discoveries (which this could well be, time will tell) that you start off looking for one thing, and find something quite different. What I’m getting at is your stadium-wave analysis was telling you that surface average temperatures should have been doing one thing in the 1930’s, yet they started to diverge from that. The assumption that seems to be made in the paper is that this divergence was the “anthropogenic footprint”. Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t, but how did your team decide it was? If it turns out that it was, your analysis would be the earliest detecting the anthropogenic footprint.
R.Gates –
“…your stadium-wave analysis was telling you that surface average temperatures should have been doing one thing in the 1930s, yet they started to diverge from that.”
Not sure that this is the case. Wyatt & Curry say “DM [Dickey and Marcus] removed the estimated anthropogenic footprint from the surface average temperature…”. Did Wyatt and Curry use the ‘uncorrected’ ngLOD or the ‘corrected’ data? Not clear.
Also, Wyatt and Curry say that they detrended “..to remove the centennial scale trend…”, not to remove the “estimated anthropogenic footprint”. Thus they appear to maintain an agnostic attitude regarding the cause of the trend.
Clarifications welcome.
Biddle said:
“Did Wyatt and Curry use the ‘uncorrected’ ngLOD or the ‘corrected’ data? Not clear.”
___
Right, not clear at all. And if they did, what was the basis for that corrected data? What exactly what used as the criteria to detect the “anthropogenic footprint” starting in the 1930’s? Did that footprint grow (i.e. the correction scaled) with time as anthropogenic forcing increased.
The Dickey & Marcus 2010 paper related to the ngLOD relationship with average surface temperature is interesting in itself (and this seems to be the origin of the observbed 1930’s divergence between the two):
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JCLI3500.1
Yes, but I don’t quite get the essential argument from the abstract; do you?
I have requested a copy of the full paper from Dickey.
I love much of Dickey’s work, but I have to report that there’s a serious error in the paper on LOD and global warming.
Paul V –
“…a serious error in the paper on LOD and global warming..”
Care to elaborate?
“The study also provides an explanation for seemingly incongruous climate trends, such as how sea ice can continue to decline during this period of stalled warming, and when the sea ice decline might reverse.”
I don’t see this as incongruous. If the temperature (SST?) driving melting at or just past its peak ice will still be trying to equilibrate. Typical phase lag of most response systems.
Now if we were to read ” how sea ice can continue to decline” to mean keep accelerating , well it isn’t. It’s ‘decline’ its slowing:
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/on-identifying-inter-decadal-variation-in-nh-sea-ice/
The idea on incongrenuity comes from not processing the data to sufficiently remove the annual well enough to see the recent trend is easing.
A plateau will lead to ice settling a little lower than its current state. Cooling since 2005 suggest it may turn to recovery.
This is in accord with JC’s new paper.
The huge mass of arctic ice has been responding to the mexican wave since we started watching just after PDO flipped in 1975. This much does not even need a non-linear response, a simple relaxation response is enough.
However, the Tsonis idea of linked oscillators is appealing globally.
Judith
Interesting work. . For those that didn’t read beyond the acknowledgements in the paper there are numerous interesting diagrams that appear AFTER that section.
The text says the effect has existed for at least 300 years.
Several questions;
Why can you only see this effect in the last 300 years? Is this as far back as the data goes? How was it different in the 1930’s which required the AGW content to be isolated?
Can you pinpoint roughly when the stadium wave would have generated periods of cold/warmth with the resultant sea ice changes beyond the dates given in the graphic?
Can you identify the EXTENT of the historic melting in relation to say 2012?
tonyb
Tony asked:
“How was it different in the 1930′s which required the AGW content to be isolated?”
___
You picked up on exactly the same thing I did Tony. Depending on what their criteria were for isolating the “anthropogenic footprint” (their term from the paper), it could well be that they inadvertently discovered the earliest anthropogenic “signal” from the background noise of the stadium-wave.
RGates
Great minds…At least it shows we read the paper. Lets hope we get an ‘official’ response.
BTW I posted the 1257 volcano material twice but don’t know if you saw it?
If you didn’t I will post it on a different thread as I don’t want to cause diversions on this one.
tonyb
Tony,
I’m hopeful Judith will respond, but I think it will need to be carefully crafted on her part. On one hand, she can’t deny they filtered out the “anthropogenic footprint”, but on the other hand, she probably doesn’t want the focus on being that they found that signal amongst the noise way back in the 1930’s! I feel her pain in crafting a “just so” response…
Regarding the data from the 1257AD volcano. Yes, I did see it. Thank you for that post. Quite fascinating. Being an honest skeptic, I love this kind of data. Really keeps the “truths” I hold provisional…all lthe more provisional!
Rates
Yes, it will be intriguing to see her reply.
The stadium wave is an interesting idea especially as various waves starting at different times and combining sometimes into one,thereby amplifying the effect, is a reasonable analogy for why the effects could vary at times from limited to extreme.
We have the same effect with flooding in our part of the word, an extreme event is very unlikely if it just rains, but the chances Increase of something serious happening when all the elements conspire at the same time, which means a strong wind from a certain direction, an especially high tide combined with low pressure centred close by, high water in the river from days of rain. Miss all the factors by an hour or two and the tide will not be high enough to cause flooding. Similarly I suspect all the component parts of greater or lesser amounts of sea ice need to be in place, from currents to jet stream to water warmth etc
Will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Glad you enjoyed the volcano stuff, I personally think their effect can last a season but am dubious about any more than that.
Tonyb
R Gates
Sorry, my iPad keeps changing your name to ‘rates.’
To make my life easier you wouldn’t consider changing it to that I suppose…
Tonyb
“…it could well be that they inadvertently discovered the earliest anthropogenic “signal” from the background noise of the stadium-wave.”
___
And I’m not suggesting Judith would be pleased if this turns out to be a result from this analysis!
I have not had the advantage of paying to read the whole paper , however…
Linear detrending, though ubiquitous is not without problems. As Prikka noted above the temp data is closer to quadratic. I added that the quadratic (if you don’t force it look like CO2) will bottom out around 1915 and rise back into lat 19th c.
Now if you fit a linear trend to that early down trend becomes steeper, the min moves later and you still get an excess rise in the later period.
this may give the impression of something starting in 1930.
Sorry, I have to reply without having access to the full text.
Hi Greg,
Judith gives the link to the full free version in her post above. They specifically started filetering out for the “anthropogenic footprint” (interesting they chose not to call it a fingerprint) in the 1930’s.
I’d be curious to know if this filtering was standardized on a specific size in the 1930’s filtering, or if they allowed that filtering to grow as the anthropogenic “footprint” increased in shoe size in the subsequent decades.
Have now read the paper twice, once as purchased and once as posted. Fascinating. A few initial thoughts. First a roughly 60 full cycle like Akasofu, but here in a more complex host of networked physical features rather than just a temperature curve fit. Lends more credence to his projections. Second, there are strong features of resonance in the way this stadium wave propagates. Whatever might have set it off, it will echo around until the underlying physical mechanisms dissipate. Centuries. Makes me wonder if there are not even longer scale, lower frequency resonances like RWP/MWP and their counterparts DA/LIA driven by slower ocean/ ice/ halocline cycles. I read somewhere that the deep halocline circulation is on this order of time scale. Third, the stadium wave features a much stronger lagged coupling between ocean/ice/atmosphere than I had previously appreciated, including the importance of halocline variation. Since the CMIP3 (has CMIP5 been checked?) models did not show this wave, it strongly suggests that a major deficiency in coupled AOGCMs is in these interactions on these 7-8 year phase lags, a strong direction for future model work.
Based on where the stadium wave now is, it sure looks like the pause will continue and Arctic sea ice wil come back to the point where even the IPCC will have to acknowledge model falsification.
Congratulations on some neat systems dynamics.
There should be a signature in the mud beneath the seas where there is oscillating ice cover. The layers should be different when ice covered than without ice; you could 14C age the organic matter in the layers and see if the widths in adjacent seas should be observable.
A testable hypothesis for once.
Doc, great thought. I suspect there are other tests that can be derived from this marvelous paper. Opens up whole venues for observational research.
The Wyatt/Curry Wave is the first good explanation I’ve seen for the 60-year cycle aparent in the Global Temperature records. It takes courage to publish something which is obviously at odds with the bulk of the climate science community and which can be measured in the relatively short term. I’m also glad to see that you have resisted any temptation to tie this wave to the sun or planets or whatever without clear evidence. The wave should not go unnoticed because its root cause cannot be explained.
The root cause can and has been reported.
I don’t think that this paper will prompt any job offers for the courageous Dr. Wyatt.
Too bad if that is the case…an excellent job she did and she would be great addition to any climate modelling team!
marcia’s too good for modeling
I too will respectfully disagree!
The Wyatt/Curry work requires only a quantitative mechanistic explanation to be regarded as seminal. The two articles in question have between them only three equations (all trivial, none dynamical). Collaboration with climate-modelers is the logical next step.
Q1 What is the simplest dynamical climate-model that yields stadium waves?
Q2 Can the parameters of existing large-scale dynamical climate models be adjusted to exhibit stadium waves?
Good answers to these questions would galvanize all of climate-change science; this would be a *terrific* start to any young scientists career.
Conversely, in the absence of answers to these questions, the work is destined to languish as one more purely statistical/phenomenological climate model that cannot readily be distinguished from hundreds of such climate models already in the literature.
Best wishes for continued progress are extended to Marcia Wyatt and Judith Curry!
not modeling — rather more duly careful attention to key lessons from hard-constrained earth rotation & atmospheric angular momentum records (there’s nowhere to hide from this stuff…)
Waiting for JOsh to cherry pick something he’s as usual misunderstood and use it to attack the authors’ character,,,
3,2,1…..
Excellent!!
Congrats to Dr. Curry and Dr. Wyatt!!!
I can’t wait to download and read the paper. Something to look forward to.
Judith, you say “This paper will change the way you think about natural internal variability.”. Sorry, but that’s quite wrong. For many years, Blind Freddie and I have been able to see that there’s a cyclical effect that the IPCC has ignored. http://tinyurl.com/lzktru7
Nice.
This might lead to climate models being somewhat accurate.
I would guess this is a warming mechanism, in terms of global temperature
over long periods. Or this is what happens when globally it is warming- the ocean is warming and sea levels are rising.
How long this has been occurring? Would there be this pattern through most of the Holocene. Is a pattern of warming periods [Medieval warm] and changes/weaken during cooler {LIA}?
Dr. Curry,
In the cooling phase of the stadium wave, where heat is supposed to go? Is it pushed out to space or sequestered in the deep ocean? Should the latter case hold, which part of the ocean is affected?
Perhaps it is like the case of the Baker who was electrocuted at work, during a power cut. Careful forensic investigation indicated that he had stepped on a bun and a current had run up his leg.
As ice expands it will change ice and sea currents.
Judith
I just read your and Wyatt’s paper and it is quite interesting. I am skeptical, but the conclusions seem very reasonable. It will be very interesting to see what develops over the next few years. It will also be interesting to see what the theortical impact might be to ECS if this proves to be true. It does not make AGW untrue at all, but it would appear to alter the timing and intensity of any changes that result from it.
It removes the “C” from CAGW. The climate models assign all of the late 20thC warming to CO2, bar a very small amount for the sun. Blind Freddie has long been able to see that in fact much of it was from a ~60-year cycle. I was very disappointed to see that Judith did not give Blind Freddie any credit in her paper.
Mike
I do not think the paper takes the “c” out of cAGW. It would seem to be explaining that the system operates differently than was thought. The wave would seem to impact the various other inputs into the system and might dampen some and enhance others at different points in time. It would seem to depend on how and where the different variables interact and when. This paper would seem to be a concept that may need to be incorporated into future climate models to see if observed conditions can be more accurately forecasted for specific location around the globe. That would be how we would be able to determine where this concept makes AGW more or less of a concern…and to who, where and when.
If others disagree with my summary let me know.
Rob Starkey – It takes the “C” out of CAGW because it alters the trend of the part of 20thC temperature that can be ascribed to CO2. I would like to give a proper analysis , but I leave in 2 hours’ time for a 2 week holiday. I’ll try to get it done after I get back.
Wave propagation requires energy exchange between domains. In radio: it is between electrostatic and magnetic, sound: compression and velocity/kinetic and structural it is strain and velocity/kinetic.
What is the climate energy exchange? Thermal and what?
+1
What is the climate energy exchange? Thermal and what?
Pressure ie weather systems such as Enso ,Nam and Sam, are essentially redistribution of Mass hence the accompanying teleconnections.
Dan, your other examples (electrostatic/magnetic, compression/velocity/kinetic, strain/velocity/kinetic) all involve conserved quantities. Thermal is not conserved, see here for example. Energy, sure, but not thermal.
Or was that your point?
Not sure I understand the question. Lots of energy exchanges in the climate. Potential and kinetic would be one. Thermal energy lifts water out of the ocean and puts it at higher elevations where it has potential energy which is turned into work as water flows through rivers moving sediments around and such. Same thing happens with winds and ocean currents and convective cells.
Dan makes an excellent point about the lack of physical basis for any hemispheric WAVE PROPAGATION of thermal energy such as implied by the “stadium wave.” Any physical wave should manifest a characteristic phase speed and direction. As shown by the cross-spectral results for a dozen high-latitude stations that I posted on the “Trust, but don’t verify” thread, the idea of a thermal wave circumnavigating the NH hemisphere from a Siberian Arctic source is largely inconsistent with actual measurements.
Whatever wide-ranging coherence one finds at multi-decadal frequencies is more likely the result of global-scale variations in cloud-regulated thermalization of solar irradiance and the lagged advection of heat from the tropics by winds and ocean currents.
Whoops! You’ve proposed a falsifiable hypothesis. That’s a schoolboy error in climate science.
/sarc
Interesting!
“The stadium wave periodically enhances or dampens the trend of long-term rising temperatures, which may explain the recent hiatus in rising global surface temperatures.”
So, I can’t help wondering, how might this impact the purported AGW driven warming of the 80’s and 90’s. The IPCC insists they’re 95 percent certain man is the primary cause (words to that effect). To my scientifically untrained mind, this would seem to enhance the natural variability factor as an explanation of at least a portion of the warming.
If on the one hand, it might explain the pause, doesn’t it OTH possible explain some/much of the previous warming?
Now that they failed co2 sensitivity we are to roll over and let them redefine natural variability? Create another plausible argument they are fundamentally right on co2 but explain the apparent observable failure of the basic AGW claim?
Pokerguy, I have to go down the the creek now and fetch some more water for Dr. Curry, I’ll get back to you.
Exactly. The squeeze is on.
Dr. Curry is a TEAM member and don’t forget it.
This is just what we all know as the PDO is it not ?
What extra knowledge is derived from calling it a stadium wave ?
Categorising it as such might help in making a model that is amenable to prediction but we already knew it was 30 years warm and 30 years cool didn’t we ?
The PDO positive phase warmed the world in the late 20th century.
The negative phase cooled it in the mid 20th century and has caused the ‘pause’ thus far with potential cooling to follow.
This paper does not deserve the levels of positive response being given to it though I suppose it is understandable from those who were unaware of the climate significance of that 60 year oceanic oscillation.
Judith Curry,
Stadium Waves remind me of “Rogue Waves” when in the ocean are standing waves as multiples of the regular wind driven waves.
Query: Would you expect a “Rogue Wave” in your hypothesis, and if so would it be detected?
Very neat idea. Has my head spinning.
I like your analogy those waves are huge too!
+1 The concept of a smoothed stadium wave would seem to permit intermittent spikes from external forcings.
Did the budget for this stadium wave research come from the Georgia Tech Earth Sciences account, or its cheerleading squad accounts?
And why no image credits to http://library.thinkquest.org/08aug/01606/zodiac.html ?
Let’s deconstruct the abstract:
A hypothesized low-frequency climate signal propagating across the Northern Hemisphere through a network of synchronized climate indices was identified in previous analyses of instrumental and proxy data.
A made-up random collection of imagined messages from some higher power embedded by magic in weather previously cherry-picked to fit our preconceived ideas let us contrive coincidences however loosely related until we got what we wanted.
The tempo of signal propagation is rationalized in terms of the multidecadal component of Atlantic Ocean variability – the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
We had to massage the data a lot.
Through multivariate statistical analysis of an expanded database, we further investigate this hypothesized signal to elucidate propagation dynamics.
We really had to massage the data a lot.
The Eurasian Arctic Shelf-Sea Region, where sea ice is uniquely exposed to open ocean in the Northern Hemisphere, emerges as a strong contender for generating and sustaining propagation of the hemispheric signal.
We literally had to go to the ends of the Earth to massage the data.
Ocean-ice-atmosphere coupling spawns a sequence of positive and negative feedbacks that convey persistence and quasi-oscillatory features to the signal.
And even then, we still had to fudge a lot and reduce the strength of our claims.
Further stabilizing the system are anomalies of co-varying Pacific-centered atmospheric circulations. Indirectly related to dynamics in the Eurasian Arctic, these anomalies appear to negatively feed back onto the Atlantic‘s freshwater balance. Earth’s rotational rate and other proxies encode traces of this signal as it makes its way across the Northern Hemisphere.
Ending up with nothing that challenges or requires amendment to AGW, the IPCC, the clear and unambiguous influence of moderate volcanoes, or the vastly rationally superior views expressed by Jennifer Francis about the influence of AGW on the Jet Stream as supported by direct high quality unfiltered evidence, and through the Jet Stream on extreme weather: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY0RdXmLGdU
Typically juvenile and stupid.
Brian H | October 10, 2013 at 5:28 pm |
I wouldn’t call it typical; it’s really extraordinary, like Sokal Hoax level at least.
Falsifiable in 30 years depending on observations, maybe, but in some vague and undefined way known only to the authors?
No mechanism postulated?
No simulation on GCMs of any sort?
Three simple equations framing the entire Northern Hemisphere climate system?
What would any good skeptic ask before accepting such trumpery?
Please, please tell me this is a joke meant to find holes in the peer review system and show how gullible some people are.
Bart, please enlighten us as to what would falsify the IPCC’s findings.
k scott denison | October 10, 2013 at 7:10 pm |
Which ones in particular?
Be specific.
Explain the issues you see.
Illustrate how they fail to meet a valid requirement of falsifiability in some significant way?
Summarize the literature search you did to confirm your claims, where the author had not been so available as the principles of this paper as to handwave some vagueness about 30 decades out in the future?
Oh, and if you can, this time please restrain yourself from making crap up.
How about starting with these Bart:
Greenhouse gases contributed a global mean surface warming likely to be in the range of 0.5°C to 1.3°C over the period 1951−2010, with the contributions from other anthropogenic forcings, including the cooling effect of aerosols, likely to be in the range of −0.6°C to 0.1°C. The contribution from natural forcings is likely to be in the range of −0.1°C to 0.1°C, and from internal variability is likely to be in the range of −0.1°C to 0.1°C. Together these assessed contributions are consistent with the observed warming of approximately 0.6°C to 0.7°C over this period. {10.3}
k scott denison | October 11, 2013 at 6:03 am |
Greenhouse gases contributed a global mean surface warming likely to be in the range of 0.5°C to 1.3°C over the period 1951−2010, with the contributions from other anthropogenic forcings, including the cooling effect of aerosols, likely to be in the range of −0.6°C to 0.1°C. The contribution from natural forcings is likely to be in the range of −0.1°C to 0.1°C, and from internal variability is likely to be in the range of −0.1°C to 0.1°C. Together these assessed contributions are consistent with the observed warming of approximately 0.6°C to 0.7°C over this period. {10.3}
Well, I’d start by checking their math. If their figures didn’t add up, the IPCC claim would be falsified. Hey, guess what? The math works out.
Would be nice if Wyatt & Curry went to that much trouble for us or provided enough of their notes so we could do it ourselves, like the IPCC did.
Does that mean the mathematically robust claims can’t be further falsified? No, not at all.
You could randomly partition or supplement the input data and repeat the tests, to show the effect is not an artifact of selection. Hey, guess what? The IPCC meets this test, and Wyatt & Curry fail to do it, or fail to pass it at a significant level.
There’s limitless levels of falsifiability, and Wyatt & Curry don’t appear to be concerned with addressing any of them, while the IPCC has taken on all challengers to date successfully, or have reflected on their past errors and changed to be more accurate.
Ok, I’ll try once more. What would falsify the statement on what greenhouse gasses have contribute Bart? Because what they report is not math as you seem to imply. It is an assertion because they have not measured the effects of greenhouse gasses therefore checking their math is insufficient.
k scott denison | October 11, 2013 at 5:31 pm |
Please refer to the part about not making crap up.
If you have somehow missed the IPCC proposing its own strong tests of falsifiability, competently and stringently meeting validation and verification at the highest standard of diligence, then you’ve been very careful to read nothing off the WUWT reading list, or without the WUWT interpretive filter blinkering your perceptions.
You asked. I answered. You went into defibrilations of denial that while not periodic, is regular, for here, and intolerably disfunctional in the real world.
Through multivariate statistical analysis of an expanded database,
It is a legitimate methodology used in the literature eg Keppenne and Ghil 1993.Ghil 2002.
maksimovich | October 10, 2013 at 8:26 pm |
Here’s a typical paper from the social sciences that makes more or less apt use of multivariate analyses of datawarehouses: http://www.mii.vu.lt/informatica/pdf/INFO515.pdf
Do you see the difference?
No? Then let’s try something more germane: http://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/1114019
Do you get a feel for the difference between what we’re presented with, and what it takes to validate such analyses?
Does it start to dawn how far short pinwheel pie charts fall?
Bart R, are you familiar with Tsonis & Kravtsov’s earlier work with Wyatt on this? I suggest you do a sober rethink.
Paul Vaughan | October 11, 2013 at 12:11 am |
Are you familiar with Clark Stanley (http://books.google.ca/books?id=Aiw-KntGPrgC&pg=PA75&lpg=PA75&dq=hopi+indians+clark+stanley&source=bl&ots=qYqJJ_wh-E&sig=ACSXlxs6wjTuUY_3d4Rdv9-gU-s&hl=en&sa=X&ei=eKMXUoHIIvf_4AO6v4DoCg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=hopi%20indians%20clark%20stanley&f=false)?
At its bare bones, the paper is magical reasoning pretending to be logic, a claim that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and that difference between the sum and the whole is materially real and meaningful, rather than an emergent transitory effect.
If Dr. Wyatt were claiming to have found the fractal dimensionality of the lagged Northern Hemisphere climate system, that would be absolutely awesome. Instead all she does is repeats Girma’s Curry Trick writ large.
I suggest you practice more scepticism of irrational claims.
Bart, understand figure 4 of WKT2011.
Paul Vaughan | October 11, 2013 at 6:28 pm |
Are you still pretending to understand and agree with this junk?
Wow. So does that mean you’re now endorsing the Skydragon Slayers, too?
How about Postma? Girma? Perpetual Motion? Scafetta? Astrology?
Bart, let’s leave it at that. I’ve nothing further to discuss with you today or any other day moving forward.
Bart R,
To quote Fast Eddie Felson in The Color of Money- “You’re acting like some girl who got felt up at the drive-in.”
GaryM | October 12, 2013 at 5:11 pm |
To quote Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs, “You ever listen to K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the Seventies weekend? It’s my personal favorite.”
It’s the Internet. You can bark that anybody sounds like anything you want. It still doesn’t address the content of what’s been said. And if it doesn’t address the huge gaps in the paper, its gross lapses, its just plain awfulness that in no way sets it above Skydragon Slaying, who cares?
Bart
That was a really dumb comment. The paper may well lead climate scientists to understand how the system operates differently than was initially believed. It could lead to conclusions that arctic ice will stabilize for several years but then could actually start a period of greatly accelerated melting in a few decades.
You’re not being charitable, Rob.
Rob Starkey | October 11, 2013 at 11:02 am |
It could cause pigs to fly.
It certainly causes hot air to fly from Bart’s mouth.
This paper will change the way you think about natural internal variability.
Let me recommend Nonlinear Physical Oceanography by Henk Dijkstra, and papers by Ghiil Certainly, your paper adds to the knowledge. Well done.
well done, nice idea
Interesting that close to 0 of the stadium wave factor effects the NINO index.
The NINO or SOI contributes most of the variability to the global temperature record, so remove that and volcanos and what is left is the global warming and a low level long term variability.
Foster&Rahmstorf, Kosaka&Xie do this correction and come up with the global warming trend.
That’s what my money is on
Yes, take away the fluctuations and no pause is apparent. That is typical of what happens when one removes the signal from the noise.
You too, Judy, have ignored Occam’s razor and turned your eyes away from the simplest and most believable explanation of the hiatus/pause/whatever. Namely, that the greenhouse effect simply does not exist and OLR is not absorbed by that cloud of carbon dioxide on its way to outer space. We do know that there is no warming now despite the highest level of carbon dioxide in recorded history. But this is still an incomplete view of atmospheric absorption history. The current pause is not the only one or even the longest one on record. This honor belongs to an 18 year stretch of no-warming that preceded the arrival of the super El Nino of 1998. You don’t see it on temperature curves used by IPCC for the simple reason that they have covered it up by a fake warming in the eighties and nineties. I warned about this fakery in the preface to my book [1] in 2010 that you have a copy of. But nothing was done for two years. Then, suddenly last fall, GISTEMP, HadCRUT, and NCDC, all in unison, decided to stop showing this fakery and aligned their data with satellites that do not show warming. This requires trans-Atlantic coordination. It was done secretly and no explanation was offered. It is obvious that they did not want to draw attention to their past machinations whose traces they wish to erase. When you add these two no-warming segments together you get 33 green-house-free years out of the last 34. The extra year belongs to the super El Nino. With this track record, how can you possibly believe that carbon dioxide has anything to do with global warming? It is obvious that the greenhouse effect is dead and that any previous warming identified as greenhouse warming is just misidentified natural warming. You should know that the greenhouse effect has never been measured directly in the atmosphere and that the theory is based entirely on laboratory measurements on gases. This has now changed because Ferenc Miskolczi’s 2010 paper [2] is in effect also a measurement of the greenhouse effect in situ. He used NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948 to study the absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere over time. And discovered that absorption had been constant for 61 years while at the same time carbon dioxide went up by 21.6 percent. This means that the addition of this substantial amount of CO2 to air had no effect whatsoever on the absorption of IR by the atmosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. He had predicted this outcome [3] in 2007 but was shouted down in the blogosphere. This has consequences. First and foremost it cuts the legs right out from under the claim that anthropogenic greenhouse warming even exists. All doomsday warming predictions based on the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide likewise are invalid. And any emission control laws and regulations passed with the aid of such predictions were passed under false premises and must be voided. Furthermore, IPCC was originally set up to monitor human influence on the climate. Since we can now say that there is none they have nothing more to do and should be disbanded..
References:
[1] Arno Arrak, “What Warming? Satellite view of global temperature change” (CreateSpace 2010)
[2] Ferenc M. Miskolczi, “The stable stationary value of the Earth’s global average atmospheric greenhouse-gas optical thickness” E&E 21(4):243-262 (2010)
[3] Ferenc M. Miskolczi, “Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres” Quarterly Journal of Hungarian Meteorological Service 111(1):1-40 (January-March 2007)
“Arno Arrak | October 10, 2013 at 4:30 pm | Reply
You too, Judy, have ignored Occam’s razor and turned your eyes away from the simplest and most believable explanation of the hiatus/pause/whatever.”
The important aspect of climate is being able to predict it in the future- this has nothing to do with AGW or CAGW.
This has to do with farming or city planning, regional planning, etc.
So if cattle farming in Dakota you might have some clue regarding how to manage your herd.
People normally avoid risk even if 10% or 20%, if their livelihood or life is depending on, but they instead generally think that it’s generally warming every year- and it isn’t- it doesn’t help them with plans they can make for weeks or months ahead of local weather daily forecast.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/thousands-of-cattle-dead-in-south-dakota-blizzard/
gbaikie | October 10, 2013 at 5:18 pm | says:
“The important aspect of climate is being able to predict it in the future- this has nothing to do with AGW or CAGW.” If so, why is the press release entitled: “Stadium Waves’ Could Explain Lull In Global Warming?”
Of course they don’t but they are as hopeful as any other group that their work will explain it. Fortunately the search for an explanation of the lull is over because I have already explained it above. I am not particularly fond of long-period, ill-defined global cycles that are hard to pin down or even to detect. The only cycle that is reasonably well understood is the El Nino/La Nina or ENSO cycle in the Pacific. It is an harmonic oscillation of ocean water from side to side along the equator. It is powered by trade winds that constantly pile up warm water in the west. When the water level at the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool is high enough reverse gravity flow begins along the equatorial counter-current. It takes the form of an El Nino wave that runs ashore in South America and spreads out along the coast north and south. Its warm water now warms the air above it, warm air rises, interferes with the trade winds, joins the westerlies, and we notice the start of an El Nino. But any wave that runs ashore must also retreat. As the El Nino wave retreats water level behind it drops half a meter, cool water from below wells up, and a La Nina has started. As much as the El Nino warmed the atmosphere so much will the La Nina that follows now cool it. They always go in pairs and it is impossible to generate a pure El Nino state like Hansen has hypothesized. The resulting temperature curve is a sine wave but it is distorted because of interactions with other phenomena in the ocean. One complete period takes about five years to complete but because of interactions with the ocean it can vary from two to seven years. It has existed as long as the current equatorial current system in the Pacific has existed, which is to say since the Panamanian Seaway closed. I am aware of the existence of PDO, AMO and various other long-period oscillations but find them too nebulous to be useful. What fascinates me however is that an oscillation can be out in front of the eyes of the whole world but climate scientists don’t have cue that it even exists. Specifically, I am talklng of a giant damped oscillation of global temperature that began about 1750 and did not end until 1900. It appears in a publication by Muller about the BEST global temperature project. It has a period of 25 years and between 1750 and 1900 there were six easily observed wave peaks, each successively smaller than the previous one. Clearly some cataclysmic event in the early eighteenth century set it in motion. 25 years is five times as long as the ENSO period of 5 years. If we are dealing with an oscillation of ocean water its path length has to be five times longer than the width of the Pacific at equator. This points to the thermohaline circulation as almost the only likely oscillation path. We know that its terminus is somewhere in the Northern Pacific so a Pacific event could be the cause of the oscillation. Perhaps a tsunami or a landslide in the Hawaiian islands would fit. More I cannot say but someone with a few extra million to spend could follow it up. Just say you are on the track of an extreme extreme event and they will fund you for sure.
“I am not particularly fond of long-period, ill-defined global cycles that are hard to pin down or even to detect. The only cycle that is reasonably well understood is the El Nino/La Nina or ENSO cycle in the Pacific. It is an harmonic oscillation of ocean water from side to side along the equator.”
But can you predict when El Nino/La Nina will occur?
There doesn’t seems to me, that there is much skill at doing this at the
moment.
So, if you are not fond of “Stadium Waves’ then perhaps the answer is no.
Yes, it’s fascinating how much of a the “training period” warming beginning about 1979 occurred in 1998. And that a 1.4K step change in the global average coincided with the 1990 Dying (Ignoring) of The Thermometers (cut from 6000 to 1600). The thumb on the scale was especially weighty.
Judith, congratulations to you and Marcia Wyatt on the publication. I look forward to reading it in depth.
Wonderful work Dr. Curry and Dr. Wyatt. I hope it fosters an avalanche of discussion throughout the media.
Hi Bob T. Marcia indeed was a Ph.d student that I co-advised. She introduced, developed and performed the analysis on the concepts in her dissertation and papers. I first was introduced with her innovative thinking in a class I had at CU-Boulder, where she introduced her concepts which has matured into world class research.
I was very pleased to being able to facilitate her study!
Best Regards
Roger Sr.
Kudos to all.
Roger A. Pielke Sr. | October 10, 2013 at 4:49 pm |
Shame on you.
Threadwinner for pertinence and civility.
===========
How’s the popcorn going, Bart?
Well done sir! She was indeed fortunate to have found such an excellent adviser.
Roger Sr.,
Just a side note/question: to your knowledge has any effort been made over the past decade to measure or even estimate global moist enthalpy? I read your 2006 paper on this and found it quite interesting.
R. Gates,
One number that can be calculated is that the total heat of evaporation of water vapor in atmosphere is about the same as that needed to increase the temperature of the whole atmosphere by about 5.5 C. This number is based on the commonly presented estimate that 0.25% of the mass of the atmosphere is water vapor, heat of evaporation of water, and specific heat of air at constant pressure.
Wyatt chiming in here. There are many good points and questions – far too many to fairly address with only a quick peek. I will attempt to give feedback, but please be patient. I am new at this blogging format. I will address some points, as best I can. I’m happy to post something more formal, but first, a bit of background regarding timing of this hypothesis.
This ‘stadium wave’ idea came to me back in 2006. I began work on it and my first presentation to my original dissertation committee brought blank stares, confused looks, and a ‘go-back-and-find-something-we-all-know-about’ response. The data were ‘saying’ not just that one or two oceanic processes were interacting and influencing temperature, but rather that there was a distinct sequence and lag-time between phasings of the indices that made this hypothesis different. I could not ignore this compelling observation; I simply found those in the field who thought similarly and were willing to go this path with me. Additions to my committee included Roger Pielke, Sr, who directly helped guide me at CU. Then there were Sergey Kravtsov and Anastasios Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Judy Curry (GA Tech). That explains where the ideas (for me) started and how they kept going. Getting footing was slow, at best. Peer reviews quite rigorous and unforgiving.
Yes, people have looked at the effect of interacting processes on temperature, but this is not the stadium-wave hypothesis. The hypothesis is based on the idea that indices constitute a network. The network provides communication and stability – in essence, self-organizing. The local coupling allows for signal propagation. And, much like cells working in our intestines, this network communicates by passing along the signal in a very orderly and predictable spatio-temporal format. This basic tenet of the ‘wave’ was presented in the Wyatt et al. paper co-authored with Kravtsov and Tsonis, first available in April 2011. In that paper, we worked with the original indices – the common indices including AMO, NAO, PDO, NINO and a few others. Work on this found and documented the ‘wave’. Statistics can only show relationships; a mechanism was necessary to add credibility. That paper presented findings from numerous other studies, some mentioned by others in this blog, that helped bolster our statistical evaluation/documentation. The current paper with Judy explores the mechanism in great detail. That is the paper’s essence.
To continue the timeline and discoveries: then it was important to see if models could capture the wave. CMIP raw data (SSTs, SLP, etc) were then used to reconstruct those indices we’d used in WKT 2012 (actual publication year in hard copy (Climate Dynamics)). Same procedures used (Wyatt and Peters 2012). Not a single stadium wave was generated. AMO’s low-frequency component was evident, but no connections hemispherically. No index-to-index communication! This is the critical piece of the wave.
What about the past? Then I employed proxy data, caveats acknowledged. I used 300 years worth. There was the wave! Even in the necessarily abridged networks (as not all indices are well represented by available proxies). Now, caveats recognized, but how could this signal keep popping up in all observational/proxy sets but not sets with model-simulated indices? In the proxy sets of 300 years, a very interesting observation surfaced. The amplitude and tempo of the wave changed radically prior to 1800. 1780 seemed to be the most typical dividing line (I used many different proxy data sets). What happened prior to that date? Could be the sun. I don’t know. I can only speculate. But it is interesting that the tempo is what it is now (and since ~1800). Is that purely due to intrinsic mechanisms or could an external source entrain the frequency and nudge it? One could invoke network theory to surmise: if the solar variability does indeed pulse with a multidecadal cadence (as has been suggested by many on these blogs and in recent papers), due to planetary gravitational fields tugging on the barycenter of the solar system, for example, and if the internal variability of the climate network were paced at a similar beat, could solar’s rhythm entrain that of the intrinsic system and nudge the tempo accordingly? And maybe if the solar output is too weak to couple with components of the network, it maybe is unable to entrain the frequency and the system reverts to its intrinsic pace (see Pikovsky for info on networks).
Now Judy mentioned that we got different results based on the solar reconstruction used. That is true, but an important distinction should be made. Using the different Lean and then Wang reconstructions, where the solar constant changes magnitude, did NOT change the results. That is b/c tempo is all that matters in this analysis. To be specific, SHARED tempo. What differed was when we used the updated Hoyt/Schatten, based on five proxies. It pulses similarly to the other reconstruction and to our wave and as the other solar reconstructions, but WHERE it co-varies differs. Phasing differs with this reconstruction. This is a matter for further investigation.
It is noteworthy that the tempo and amplitude of the wave have been relatively consistent over the industrial era, so it is not apparent if or how a CO2-forcing signal might manifest. Again, further investigation required.
And then regarding the detrending: our point in doing so was to highlight MD variability. It may or may not have removed the exact CO2 signature, but with all else noted here (analysis to 1850, to 1700, with models, etc), there is nothing to tell us that CO2 is doing much to change things. But more testing might tell.
When Judy and I worked on this paper, we wanted to really understand dynamics propagating and sustaining the wave. That is the essence of the paper. Please read before presuming. The PR piece was good, but could not capture the full findings of the paper. Evolution of climate regimes through the progression of the stadium wave through the climate network is what is featured in our work.
When I stated for the PR that this neither supports or refutes AGW, that is true. This many-year project has been motivated solely by curiosity about natural variability at this time scale. The fact that the surface temperature is a product of this wave ‘orchestra’ allows us to see that natural component evolve. Combining the wave outcome with an external radiative component, we have an obvious damping or enhancing of the temperature. That is how our work ties in to the AGW controversy.
And answering the PDO question, PDO is ONE component only. The ‘wave’ papers show how PDO on this timescale tends to behave in the regime evolution.
For now, that’s it. I realize this is a string of spontaneous thinking, trying to help clarify what a PR piece inevitably will miss – nature of the format, nothing more. I hope this helps. Our efforts are built upon those of many before us, and we hope we have not omitted any in our lengthy reference list. By not working toward an agenda, we have the liberty to be truly curious and awed!
> By not working toward an agenda, we have the liberty to be truly curious and awed!
This last sentence blows Marcia’s cover.
Working toward a noble cause might be the oldest agenda there is.
Sometimes, criticizing unmentioned others while doing so corrupts.
Be nice!
And there I thought that their agenda was to produce good research to further the understanding of climate change.
I hate to come across naive and romantic but sometimes being noble is just being noble.
Just curious – can you give any examples of “just being noble” that don’t align with your opinions? Or is nobility (coincidentally?) only found in those you agree with?
count the adverbs. check it twice
” …but sometimes being noble is just being noble.
Just curious – can you give any examples of “just being noble” that don’t align with your opinions? Or is nobility (coincidentally?) only found in those you agree with?”
Saving a kitten from drowning?
Particularly, if it scratches you.
This paper could save IPCC’s hide, but they will probably will scratch you.
> This paper could save IPCC’s hide […]
How so?
Not that I would mind much, if only for irony’s sake:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/28/ipcc-diagnosis-permanent-paradigm-paralysis/
Joshua,
Just staying with the climate debate I have no issue with the integrity of Ed Hawkins or Neven or Issac Held while probably disagreeing with some of their assumptions. I enjoy Roy Spencers’ contributions and don’t particularly worry about his integrity while vehemently disagreeing with some of his politics. I’m appalled by Andy Revkin’s misanthropy but don’t think of him as a bad person and think there is the possibility to have an honest debate with him. Does that answer your question Joshua?
Which part of “we need to put down the IPCC as soon as possible” provides the liberty to be truly curious and awed?
– > This paper could save IPCC’s hide […]
How so?-
How are the damned saved?
Always an interesting question.
If paper was good effort, but is ultimately a dead end- any significant salvation due to it, seems very weak.
Rather my statement is based on the assumption the paper is
a path forward. And in that case there seems many ways this is can be a plus for IPCC {I don’t mean, I’m predicting IPCC would actually capitalize on any future opportunities- I would tend to predict the opposite.}.
First it doesn’t *prove* IPCC is wrong. It’s providing an answer
to the “pause”- it even, sort of fits their ocean heat hiding narrative.
Though not too helpful to the narrative that world is certainly doomed.
{But that is like the kitten whining about being wet}
Having something “recently discovered” helps.
How could anyone have know before, this?
{And doesn’t even sort, of kind of, maybe, make skeptics wrong.}
And if makes progress in greater understanding of climate, it
cleans the slate, so to speak.
Why talk about the past fumblings, when the future is promising in terms of getting more complete understanding of climate science?
So it could be a convenient way to forget things, therefore, the main hide saving mechanism. It can be a reset. Even a distraction.
What happen if more scientist had even more confidence in the future
prediction of climate- it can be a win for organization which has been trying to do this for decades.
As far doom, this paper could involve black swan events- so it’s
even a bone to the doomsayers.
> Why talk about the past fumblings, when the future is promising in terms of getting more complete understanding of climate science?
Perhaps because what was claimed was that “this paper could save IPCC’s hide”.
Anyway, gbaikie’s last comment echoes the topic of this song:
I don’t recall the paper stating that “excess?” heat is begin absorbed by the ocean. I do recall something about cosmic rays, however.
HR –
Yes, it answers my question. Apologies for the bad faith.
– > Why talk about the past fumblings, when the future is promising in terms of getting more complete understanding of climate science?
Perhaps because what was claimed was that “this paper could save IPCC’s hide”.-
I don’t think IPCC is facing an immediate death.
IPCC will probably be around for another decade, and might even manage to do another report. But the future results coming from this particular paper could lead to longer IPCC future than this.
That’s what I meant by “this paper could save IPCC’s hide”.
So say in five years time [2018] and there has been more examination and refining of this paper, there could a higher confidence in modeling future climate.
And at such a point in time whatever failures IPCC has had in past, would not viewed as significant. This is what I mean by “Why talk about the past fumblings, when the future is promising in terms of getting more complete understanding of climate science?”
Or one would at that point in time have a perception [and perhaps reality] of an “New and Improved IPCC”.
Thank you for your response, gbaikie:
We must KILL the IPCC
For a new IPCC to be reborn.
Let’s just hope it won’t turn into a swarm of climate zombies.
sometimes we over interpret.
who is this ‘we’ kimosabi?
You see Joshua and willard have to believe that the ‘we’ in the sentence
refers to the two ladies. For me, I read it differently. sometimes we see what we are primed to see. I think it is quite impossible for either Joshua or willard to see that the ‘we’ in the sentence refers to anything but the two ladies. why? because it allows willard and joshua to maintain their view of things and their view of themselves. The text, like all texts and signs, is ambiguous and uncertainty, so watching how a person reduces the uncertainty in a text is more about them than it is about the text.
> refers to the two ladies.
Oh, ladies.
That changes everything.
Oh, and a small nit:
> Then there were Sergey Kravtsov and Anastasios Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
I believe both Kravtsov & Tsonis are at UW-Milwaukee:
http://www4.uwm.edu/letsci/math/people/faculty/tsonis.cfm
http://www4.uwm.edu/letsci/math/people/faculty/kravtsov.cfm
***
OTOH, Michael Tobis’ alma mater was Madison:
http://planet3.org/author/mtobis/
MT attended Northwestern with me, undergrad of course.
“there is nothing to tell us that CO2 is doing much to change things.” As the real processes of climate variability are identified, CO2 influence will be squeezed out of all the equations. My projection. >:)
Marcia – Thanks for that long explanation. At present, your hypothesis is model-based. What you now need is verifiable, testable scientific evidence. That doesn’t mean waiting several decades to see if the pattern repeats, and in fact that would still not be sufficient as it does not address the underlying mechanism. You need to identify features – components or by-products of the supposed mechanism – that can be tested for in the real world, and which are incompatible with other possible causes. For example, you say “this network communicates by passing along the signal in a very orderly and predictable spatio-temporal format”. OK, demonstrate it. Detect the signal in the real world.
Mike Jonas: Before commenting, actually look at the stuff you’re commenting about! ridiculous
Paul Vaughan. The authors of this paper have done a tremendous amount of work, and much of it is likely to prove very valuable, but at this stage it consists of observations that show the behaviour of certain features are related, and hypotheses as to what the mechanisms behind those behaviours might be. But as far as I can tell, there is no real-world demonstration that the hypothesised mechanisms actually do operate in the expected way. In other words, the data has been put into a model, massaged with a lot of parameters, and a coherent picture has been generated. Without real-world verification of the mechanisms which eliminates other possible mechanisms, we cannot tell if it is correct. As the paper says “We suggest that the stadium wave hypothesis holds promise in putting in perspective the numerous observations of climate behavior; offers potential attribution and predictive capacity; and that through use of its associated proxies, may facilitate investigation of past behavior that may better inform our view of future behavior. […] While evidence strongly supports our hypothesis of a secularly varying climate signal propagating through a hemispheric network of synchronized ocean, atmosphere, and ice indices during the 20th century, we cannot know if this variability, tempo, and sequential chronology will continue into the future.”.
In other words, it looks like there is a signal, it looks promising in the model, but it hasn’t been tested outside the model, and it as yet has no predictive capability.
My comment may have been a bit too brusque, but I don’t think it was all that far off the mark.
Mike, I’m not convinced that you understand what you’re commenting about, but I respect your freedom to think whatever you want and I’m content to leave our exchange at that. All the best.
Wonderful. Please soldier on no matter what.
Great paper Marcia! One (not quite) nit regarding your comment here: it’s probably not the indices that “constitute a network“, rather they point to some more basic factors, perhaps by providing a rough measure of them. Examples of such factors (“mechanisms“) might include:
I made a suggestion a while back regarding modelling using objects of roughly this sort, as an alternative to cell-based GCM’s. This paper seems an excellent step on the road to identifying such objects, in terms that could be defined and programmed.
Hi Ms. Wyatt
Congratulations on an interesting addition to the topics to be explored and volunteering a mechanism to look at.
A couple of naive questions come to mind: How does your network differ/compare to the idea of teleconnections previously posited in climate discussions? Also, would you expect to find harmonics of propagated waves, and what medium would be most congenial for any harmonics that might result?
Thanks
marcia drops by to discuss some fascinating stuff. response from the locals: another opportunity to rant about ipcc — whoops! they didn’t even notice marcia had commented. welcome to online climate discussion marcia!
[ :
goes nowhere – real fast too…
much to discuss not enough time
new results to share with you ozone gradients when time/resources permit
cryptic no apologies time/resource limited…
cheers! (trust you get the idea…)
Thanks for your thoughts Marcia. Your research has yielded many testable hypotheses which is a significant improvement on what has been on offer from orhodox climate science so far.
The stadium wave effect seems most plausible to me because on the surface of the globe this effect will be felt at the regional level and rippling to neighboring regions (spatial networking) over oscillation time scales of around 60 years.
Paleo evidence have indeed shown quite strong spikes in temperature anomolies which gets back to the most important point of your paper with Judith: the extent of natural internal variability needs to be disentangled from anthropogenic and other forcings before we can make any conclusions about the future course of climate.
Marcia, new to blogs? That must be the best-ever first-post, cogent, coherent, compact, lucid and dealing with many points raised. Thanks very much.
Marcia is a full flow fire hydrant of climate information. Her critics lift a hind leg, and tuck their tails for balance.
===========
Kim, as Mike Flynn would say, “Live long and prosper!” And keep raising the quality of this blog.
The wave approaches, full flood of feedbacks.
================
Our resident turd inspector leaves no errant poop unstudied.
“This many-year project has been motivated solely by curiosity about natural variability at this time scale”
Marcia- A scientist cannot go wrong being motivated by curiosity, about any subject. You will never go wrong with that as a guiding light. Congratulations on some terrific work.
Drs. Curry and Wyatt: Kudos! Much-needed viewpoint!
Willard, Joshua: Some comments remind me of a document security stamp spoof: “burn before reading”.
gbaikie: “How are the damned saved?” Many call it “conversion”.
Joshua: “… their agenda was to produce good research to further the understanding of climate change.” Check out the current charter/objective of the IPCC and UNFCCC where it refers to human influences.
Mike (re quote “his network communicates by passing along the signal in a very orderly and predictable spatio-temporal format”): A forlorn hope according to Lorenz, Ed. “Chaos, Spontaneous Climatic Variations and Detection of the Greenhouse Effect.” Scientific. MIT, August 21, 2008. http://eaps4.mit.edu/research/Lorenz/Chaos_spontaneous_greenhouse_1991.pdf
While it is interesting to study waves with an amplitude of 0.1 degrees C, in the context of the conservative 2 C rise from CO2 or the less conservative 4 C rise by 2100, these amount to wiggles in a larger and growing trend that is playing out anyway. The IPCC 0.3-0.7 C by 2035 factors in this and other kinds of wiggles that may add to the background trend.
JimD, Even more so when they didn’t defluctuate with an ENSO index and volcanic disturbances.
Those right there would reduce the variability further.
It’s still an interesting approach but not meaningful in the context of a relentless warming trend. For example, what would the stadium wave correction term be approximately?
Webby
The “relentless warming trend” to which you make reference started back in 1850, when the modern record started (or earlier).
This was long before there were any significant human GHG emissions, so this “relentless warming trend” was obviously not caused by human GHG emissions.
Right?
Plain logic, Webby.
Max
Max,
I read these posts because skeptics and deniers give the farm away. The more they try to use some piece of information to obscure or deflect, the more likely that piece of information is important when applied properly.
So the key piece of info here is the correlation of dT to length of day (LOD), and how the LOD is representing changes in mass density in the earth — potentially the ocean’s density balance. For example, upwelling cold water will change the moment of inertia of the earth as the colder water has a different density than warmer water
So what we do is apply the LOD as a correction to the global temperature anomaly and see how that removes more of the fluctuations observed.
The following figure corrects for SOI, volcanic aerosols, TSI, and LOD:
http://img203.imageshack.us/img203/9609/8j9.gif
This is really cool stuff of course. Figure out the spikes at 1940 and 1944 and the mystery lessens even more.
Web, If you want to look into LOD’s connection to temp anomaly, you need to look at Daily average temp numbers by year and examine the rate of change in temp as the seasons progress. You have to select stations by lat, say only north/south of the tropical zones and all longitudes to isolate the signal.
I looked into what turned out to be daily max temp changes, and there is a rate change.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/clip_image028_thumb.jpg?w=963&h=725
micro
I am using what Curry provided in this paper, which is the LOD as a fluctuation.
Since all work here is normalised to unity variance, I assume you are inferring you 0.1 K amplitude from global mean records. (Where that would seem about right).
If you look at figure 3 in the paper , we can by looking at 1940 that group i and group IV are almost in anti-phase.
This points out that the obsession with global averages masks the scale of the variation.
This is the fundamental flaw in AGW thinking: the _assumption_ that everything averages out so all long term change MUST BE co2.
Quick technical question. On the wheel of fortune does
EIE = WIE + ArcSib
and if WIE reaches a minimum ?2010 and ArcSib reaches a minimum ?2014 then why does it take until ?2024 for EIE to reach a minimum?
Hi HR, EIE is a collection of sea ice extent in the three most eastern seas of the Eurasian Arctic : the Laptev, East Siberian, and Chukchi shelf seas. The ArcSib is sea ice of the Arctic Siberian region. It includes sea ice extent of the Kara Sea and the seas of EIE. WIE comprises the Greenland, Barents, and Kara sea ice. The overlaps of regions are explained in the data section. In short, division between WIE and EIE is based on dominant time scale of variability: 60 year for WIE. The same time scale characterizes EIE, but higher frequencies dominate in EIE. ArcSib, on the other hand, comprises sea ice that varies interannually (almost) only during the summer; while sea ice of Greenland and Barents can be ice free even in winter.
These categorizations also relate to the hypothesized dynamics of the ‘wave’ as it propagates. The dates extrapolate into the future and are estimates based on the lags and the pacing of the signal.
Interesting – how to reconcile this:
with this:
and this:
Does understanding natural internal variability and understanding the “lull in global warming” “have nothing to do with AGW?”
Oh, and regarding that last quote – why promote the misperception that land surface air temperatures equals “global warming.”
Why do scientists that focus on precision and careful analysis make such sloppy statements?
Why stick to picking apart hidden meanings and agendas when there is a plate full of delicious science to rip into?
The “agenda” I see is people intending to do good science.
What I find implausible are the selective ideas people have about how to identify agendas in others.
Because that’s what he does for reasons known only to Josh and his team of therapists…
> his team of therapists…
How courageous of you, Poker.
What Joshua observes is there for everyone to read.
As you well know, he’s only here to be truly awed by Denizens, that’s all.
Yes Will, It’s entirely evident that Joshua’s nasty nitpicking, most often based on a pitiable lack of reading comprehension, is entirely noble.
I get 5 bucks for every time I use the word “entirely.”
> a pitiable lack of reading comprehension […]
You’re on: show me an example, Poker.
Picky eaters, strangely malnourished.
=========
“it says absolutely nothing about AGW…”
the way I read this was with charity.
“its says nothing about the greenhouse effect”
But then Im not Looking to find problems. If one is motivated to find problems, then that bias will be fulfilled.
> its says nothing about the greenhouse effect
Indeed, as Marcia just said:
(Nevermind the few sentences just before that for the moment.)
No CO2 forcing, but AGW is alive and kicking, or at least kicking.
Willard, “No CO2 forcing, but AGW is alive and kicking, or at least kicking.”
Kicking??-must be 17 years on its back kicking fruitlessly at the heavens.
What about dropkicking, Bob?
Nothing wrong with being precise, IMO
A lack of precision, on the other hand, is problematic.
Delay of the game penalty. Don’t you guys practice?
============
Steve,
Well said. Her preface was appreciated. Dr.Wyatt seems to be have an amble talent. I bet those days presenting her work at CU made her strong?
What do you consider the challenge of entering these types of factors (there will be more) into the discussion and final the final work products?
Well let’s see Joshua.
It changed the way I think about internal/natural variability. Check.
It could explain why the warming, which isn’t necessarily from AGW, has disappeared. Check.
Does the AGW have to be true for the above to be true? Nope. Check.
Joshua, your arrival was both inevitable and regrettable. What you have just posted shows your gross cognitive deficit. Did you even bother to read the actual paper? Evidently from your own words, not. Please go away.
Is this your blog, Sir Rud?
No Willard. Istvan is only asking for some cleanliness in the place. Me too, and I suggest you reread your commentaries with some perspective – if you are capable to.
People is trying to understand the implications of the paper for climatology, and have to jump over your opinions on author’s intentions, and your childish attacks on other commenters. Literaly, over the trash you leave behind you.
Willard
It’s neither Rud’s nor yours, Wee Willie.
Max
> and have to jump over your opinions on author’s intentions […]
I don’t. My point is that she should keep them to herself. For instance:
So here’s the test: does deleting the sentence removes anything from that explanation?
If it does, there’s a problem with the explanation.
If it doesn’t, then remove it.
Simple, isn’t it?
Why the hell are we having all this white knighting?
“So here’s the test: does deleting the sentence removes anything from that explanation?
If it does, there’s a problem with the explanation.
If it doesn’t, then remove it.
Simple, isn’t it?
Why the hell are we having all this white knighting?
###########################################
the purpose of the sentence can be charitably construed but you have to be less of a prick. can you do that? I dont think so.
Today when you propose to look at something people will ask you what your agenda is. They just will. gavin asked my agenda when I proposed looking at the temperature record again. Do you want to prove us wrong? is your purpose only to find errors? Think of Jones and warwick. When I replied that my purpose was to have fun and satisfy my curiosity, he remarked that I wouldnt find anything of scientific value. That wasnt my goal. But somehow he thought my behavior should be governed or constrained or informed by his ethics: thou shalt not amuse thyself or satisfy ones personal curiousity.
The governing assumption in the vast majority of GCM/climate studies is that natural variability is a) small, b)integrates to zero over time
and therefore its un interesting when it comes to answering the questions we care about: How much warming will human forcing cause.
We folks then want to look at natural variability ( say Peter or Judith or Marcia) then I can well imagine people asking them the question: why are you interested in that when the current paradigm assumes it integrates to zero and is small? Are you an oil shill or what?. why would anyone want to study natural variability when the agreements to form the IPCC channel investigations to the human forcings, to the things we can control. Why play in the margin. I hear these questions all the time. why collect stamps?
I imagine Marcia had to answer these types of questions as she persued her Phd. I know I did.. mosher why are you applying math to poetry why are you trying to measure novelty in texts. it makes no sense, the paradigm says so. And, of course, anytime you publish science people want to know.. how does this help our side or hurt our side ? and who the hell are you working for? and where did your money come from? and are you a republican? or retired white guy.
Bottom line. the lady gets to answer the nasty questions she will be asked before they are asked. having now done work just because it interested me and having done work to support a cause, I can say there is quite a difference between the two modes of behavior. But then I only speak for myself.
> the lady gets to answer the nasty questions she will be asked before they are asked.
The lady.
That changes everything.
+100 Rud.
Dr Wyatt comes in to provide further information and the two dickwads create negative comment from almost nothing. It is a talent. Just not of any value.
Well Josh, I am no surprised you don’t understand and understanding tends to come from reading and thinking, rather than reading and sneering. However, allow to to assist
AGW via ‘green house gasses’ occurs on op of postulated natural cycles of heat allocation and albedo changes. Many people have postulated that there are cyclical changes in heat transfer from the oceans to the atmosphere which causes rhythmic cycles of warming/cooling. Now, as any AGW can lay on top of these postulated cycles, if one is attempting to calculate the amount of heating a rising GHG like CO2 is causing, one can overestimate the effect during a GHG+warming period and underestimate it during a GHG+cooling period.
So you see, looking at natural processes, in the absence of AGW, can allow one to accurately estimate the effect of AGW.
Now pick on someone your own size or go play in traffic; either will do .
> you don’t understand […]
Curve fitting does not take that much understanding.
It is not just ‘curve fitting’ it is an attempt to formulate a testable hypothesis for cyclical changes in temperature.
It is an act of imagination to formulate a new type of step-wise sequential model
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/scientist-uses-brainwaves-to-test-ideal-prices-for-products-a-926807.html
> It is not just ‘curve fitting’ it is an attempt to formulate a testable hypothesis for cyclical changes in temperature.
Curve fitting is seldom done for curve fitting’s sake.
Joshua,
I read the replies to your comment and noticed that everyone seemed to accept your premise. I think it is legitimate for you to look at those statements and imply what you did. However, I don’t agree with your analysis.
The first two sentences you reference are mutually exclusive and therefore easy to reconcile. “It says nothing about AGW” is accurate. The whole reasoning behind the paper was to take everything else out and just look at variability. “This paper will change the way you think about natural internal variability” is a postulate based on their belief that they have presented fresh material in a new light. From everything I’ve seen it appears that way to me as well but that’s a rather uninformed opinion since I haven’t seen everything. The statement does not mention AGW and only suggests that you will see natural internal variability in a new light. The first statement has absolutely nothing to do with the second statement.
The third sentence, “Stadium Waves’ Could Explain Lull In Global Warming” is also a postulate based on their belief that the current downward trend in the Stadium waves COULD cause A LULL in global warming. Notice they did NOT say ANTHROPOGENIC Global warming. Since they show with this study that Stadium waves will probably moderate temperature up and down you could assume the previous upward waves contributed to warming and therefore COULD contribute to cooling or A LULL in the warming.
Dude the whole purpose of this paper is to isolate variability and see what it does. The temperature charts from 1860 all show periods of time where the temperature rises and in the case of the last one it seemed to be at a pretty good clip. The charts also show sideways trend and somewhat downward trends as in the late 19th century. The Stadium Waves seem to be in sync with the temperature trends of the 20th century. They do not necessarily explain the rise in temperature. If that were the case the waves would trend upward and they don’t. They could explain periods of rising and periods of leveling or falling but not on a prevailing upward trend. The waves simply go up and down exactly like the folks at the sports stadium.
So you can easily have the CO2 factor to whatever degree you want to explain rising temperatures regardless of what this study shows! You could even completely accept the Hawaii study in light of this study depending on how hot the next upward trend would be. So they are perfectly accurate in stating, “It says nothing about AGW”
In my opinion your premise is wrong!
ordvic –
I get your point.
But I still have a hard time reconciling the different statements with each other – despite the logic of your comment.
How it is possible to completely change how you view natural internal variability and argue that the change in your view has nothing to do with (your view of) AGW? Wouldn’t changing your view of internal natural variability force a different view about AGW ? For example, let’s say that evidence convinced me (in a way that I wasn’t convinced previously) that all recent changes in land surface temperatures and sea surface temperatures and atmospheric temperatures and deep sea temperatures and sea ice extent and sea ice volume and sea ice density and moisture content in the air and cloud coverage and rainfall and measures of extreme weather were all directly tied to internal natural variability, and that I can now see that as the result of a statistical modeling of the trends as associated with natural phenomena. Wouldn’t that, necessarily, have implications towards my views about AGW (assuming that I didn’t previously attribute changes in all those measures to be directly tied to internal natural variability, but felt that at least some of them, to some extent, were an outgrowth of AGW)?
Likewise, if the current “lull” were fully explained by internal natural variability, wouldn’t that necessarily have something to do with AGW? Say I previously thought that the current “lull” is not simply a product of variability (which, presumably, could be lost, or considered noise, within a longer-term signal of ACO2) – but a direct indication that ACO2 has no effect on the climate (as the “lull” has coincided with rapid growth in ACO2 emissions). Wouldn’t, then, if I were convinced by new evidence that the current “lull” is explainable by internal natural variability, I have to change my view of AGW (to one that accepts that the current “lull” does not indicate a lack of GHE from AGW)?
Well, yes. That is how I understand the implications of the paper. But nonetheless, I don’t see how explaining periods of rising and leveling-off or falling would not have direct implications to AGW. Even if it simply an explanation for shorter-term patterns that get, essentially, lost in longer-term trends, it is relevant information for understanding AGW
What was my premise?
Had the statement read as mosher suggested as a modification (that it says nothing about the GHE), then I think that your logic would be spot on. IMO, his suggestion for a modification reconciles the different statements.
So let me ask you, by way of better understanding your point. Can you describe a (hypothetical?) set of views on AGW whereby a paper attributing recent trends to internal natural variability would result in no changes?
Joshua,
Thanks for the courteous, thoughtful and thought provoking reply. Your implied premise in trying to reconcile those statements is that one can’t have a changed view of variability (and a new model)without it affecting in some (any) way the model(s) or reality of AGW. This is where I thought you were coming from and I sought to refute.
You did give me pause with your question. I also better understand your view as explained by your first and second paragraphs. You interlock AGW with all the natural phenomena in a dual cause and affect relationship. You can’t have a change in AGW without it affecting natural phenomena and visa versa. So if this paper says natural phenomena behaves differently than we previously believed then by implication it has to affect the way AGW works. I think we’re close to the old circular argument here but I think we’re still in sensical land.
Conversely, I’m saying, as is stated in the post, that you can have a changed explanation for natural phenomena’s effect on climate without any implication to what AGW might mean. In the simpelist terms I can state that based on historical evidence x amount of increase in CO2 will equal y amount of temperature increase as for instance IPCC models. It’s like they warn you in financial advise, ‘previous results do not necessarily equal future performance.’ Now along comes the new paper that refutes our historical basis; now x >y. The noise was greater than expected and actually affected the trend line. It sounds like I’m making your argument. What I am refuting is that there is not enough evidence with this paper to say x is now greater than y and that it does not differ greatly with historical evidence, There may be an error, on the hot side (in the models), but the actual historical trend line didn’t really change. I can’t help it if the IPCC models suck.
Now to your question and the crux of my point of view. This has been done before by others I saw this post but it is blocked to me now, maybe you can see it:
http://chartsgraphs.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/excel-chart-misrepresents-co2-temperature-relationship/
It basically shows how a short term chart misrepresents the long(er) term relationship of CO2 to temperature. There is also long long term charts that show no correlation at all but that is another story. I have two charts (I keep showing) that demonstrate an expansion of trend line with a longer time period. The first chart shows the current pause just starting (just barely) to break trend. The second chart shows historical trend that not only encompasses the current pause but would accommodate a sideways trend as far as the Stadium Wave could take it. As was demonstrated by the previous sideways (stadium affected) wave starting in the forties. So what I’m saying is that this paper does not change the noise it just explains it better. The IPCC computers may have not been able to show trend changing within an overall trend but it doesn’t ultimately necessarily change the overall trend. So my hypothetical is actually reality as the second chart completely accommodates the Stadium Wave affect within it’s broad trend line. Notice the thinner purple trend lines (above and below) especially on the second chart:
http://s1275.photobucket.com/user/philipnord/media/GMT4_zps45cae57f.jpg.html?sort=3&o=2
http://s1275.photobucket.com/user/philipnord/media/GMT1973TREND_zpsb18d7538.jpg.html?sort=3&o=1
Simply put this paper does not refute or prove AGW!
…and my head hurts. (stole that one from Dr Curry)
opps I pasted my charts in the wrong order the first should have been second.
Dr. Curry implies (as far as I understood it)
The ‘stadium wave’ hypothesis is based by interplay between North Atlantic Ocean temperatures oscillation (AMO) and the changes in the sea ice volumes in the Siberian Arctic Ocean region.
But why could it be so ?
Siberian Arctic shelf ice volumes is partially function of the ratio of fresh water inflow from great Siberian rivers (Ob & Yenisei & Lena) and the saline Arctic sea waters.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SHL.htm
The strongest magnetic field in the N. Hemisphere is to be found in the basin of these rivers, Central Siberia. Now let’s consider possibility that mixing of fresh water (poor conductor of electricity) and saline water (good conductor of electricity) could be affected by the Earth’s magnetic field variability. Here is graph of the AMO compared to the geomagnetic field of Ob-Yenisei estuaries area
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SibArc.htm
Elsewhere it was shown that the AMO also closely follows combined oscillations of the sunspot magnetic cycle and the decadal changes in the Earth’s magnetic field.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GSC1.htm
Geomagnetic oscillations: are they coincidence, proxy or causation?
Either way it appears that Dr. Curry’s and Dr Wyatt’s stadium wave hypothesis could strengthen the case for proxy or possible causation.
vukcevic, a lot of your observations fit the stadium wave. i checked a few years ago. (we disagree on why)
devils advocate, why couldn’t one of the really big volcanoes in the early 19th century have set this off? is the evidence for that clearly not in the data?
Congrats, Judith, to you and Marcia.
I found the use of sea ice indices to be very interesting, including the coupling between ocean-ice-atmosphere. And I await the reversal of sea ice trends. In the event that happens, there will be lots of but-but-but……
Some day I’ll figure out why the climate science community insists on using abstract forms of sea surface temperature data as indices, like the PDO, when detrending the sea surface temperatures of the KOE (which dominate the North Pacific) would provide the same basic information (only inverted) and would be less confusing for most persons.
Regards
Bob, you had a great graph in 1 of your articles showing a very high correlation between n. atlantic T & sea ice — got a handy link to that??
Paul: High latitude North Atlantic sea surface temperature anomaly vs Northern Hemisphere sea ice:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/figure-62.png
From the post here:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/how-much-of-an-impact-does-the-atlantic-multidecadal-oscillation-have-on-arctic-sea-ice-extent/
Regards
That’s the 1 I had in mind.
Appreciated like usual Bob.
Cheers
The pieces of the puzzle are all coming together for me today. Thank you Paul and Bob for the education over time that you two and now Marcia and others have given to me.
It’s nice to see lights coming on.
Sorry couldn’t resist! Well done, a paper that makes and allows the reader to think!
+100
Thank you Dr Curry, a very illuminating blog post and paper.
We now have a plausible mechanism for the propagation of variability and climate shifts through the decades and centuries. If true then it would appear to undermine the IPCC hypothesis of low internal variability and high climate sensitivity; instead the pre IPCC SAR perspective that the climate signal contains both internal variability and forcings (including CO2) on decadal time scales, with the Swanson and Tsonis elaboration of that, would appear to offer a more useful model.
Dr Wyatts’s posting above concerning the cadence of this variability, and perhaps it’s interaction with solar cycles is in itself illuminating. One of the objections to the solar climate influence is the weakness of the forcing, but when that forcing is in phase with the climates own cycles then the effect could be amplified: a child on a swing is resistance to small forcings from many directions, in fact in many respects is very stable in its pattern, but small pushes in the direction of travel near the height of the swing have a significant effect.
+100 Excellent.
…but small pushes in the direction of travel near the height of the swing have a significant effect.
Am I supposed to conjure up the image here of a waifish child in the sling as opposed to java the hut?
?????
What is the relationship between inertia and mass?
Is what is happening here the reclassification of a component of natural variability as explained variability? Seems that way to me and if that is the case it is most welcome.
natural need not mean unexplained tom
My apologies. Yes, Kravtsov and Tsonis at Milwaukee. Marcia
No need to apologize. Twas just a nit.
Not every nit needs picked. Rather than a simple correction, you framed it as a criticism, even though you added the nit qualifier.
remarkable how many are unfamiliar with your earlier work with kravtsov & tsonis marcia
nature = fascinating
(including the human variety)
I’m a big fan, Dr Curry, but I have a problem with this contention. The stadium-wave effect works because the quanitities are vectors, with opposite direction of the constituent quantities adding up to cancellation. Energy, by definition, is a quantity without direction. The addition of extra energy will, on balance, only increase the quantity of energy. Additional energy will not work to “cancel out” other quantities of energy, as energy has no direction.
If the stadium-wave effect is to work in the climate system, it can only do so by analogy at best. That is to say, some energy may appear positive (by adding to the temperature signal) and others energy may appear negative (by, for example, being absorbed by the ocean deeps). But, on balance, contributions of energy will only increase the overall net energy balance. However, I don’t understand that the proposition is being put by way of analogy.
I am, of course, more than happy to be corrected on this point. Ch
Similar I think to what you said — i.e., like an analogy — I took it to be in the nature of suggesting GCM-specific parametrizations that might help capture slow changes in large scale interactions among myriad factors about which we have little or no real understanding. And, of course I too am happy to be corrected.
I there a bias to the direction, E to W or W to E, in the movement of warm dense brines towards the north polar region?
I the answer is yes, then you can think of he ice pack being sculpted by the vectorial ocean flow in the same way sand dune are.
The ice would move in a circle like an aerofoil with deposition on the sheltered side and ablation on the flow side,
Think of it like a giant Wankel Engine
I am zooming through the posts, so I miss some names of who posted. Sorry. Someone mentioned Klyashtorin and Lyubushin: The amazing work of Klyashtorin and Lyubushin and the many, many Russian researchers are highlighted in our paper. They observed many of the MD patterns in climate and in fish populations. Well worth reading K&L’s book: Cyclic Climate Changes and Fish Productivity and Frolov et al’s new book on the Arctic: Climate Change in Eurasian Arctic Shelf Seas. As I said, our work is built upon the shoulders of many! We need more Russian literature translated into English. Great works.
And btw, my statement about ‘agenda’ was innocent about the liberty to investigate out of curiosity. I feel fortunate to have the opportunity. I came into this arena after most have retired. Furthermore, Earth’s workings are forever a fascination. That’s all! If I could find evidence for CO2 forcing, I’d be the first to report it. So far I haven’t. But that’s not to say anything more or less.
Re: the ‘find the signal in the real world’, our results do. Modeling it is the problem, and those potential issues are discussed in the Wyatt and Peters paper. I hope someone can design a model that captures the dynamics. The KOE temps would be helpful. They are not available since before ~1950 though, as I recall. Ocean heat content fluxing from that area (not the SSTs) are what appear to really make that area a key ‘link’ in the climate network. Again, more study needed (see Kelly and Dong; Dong and Kelly; and Kelly (all 2004, I believe). Am in a rush. Sorry can’t be more complete. Errors (such as Madison vs Milwaukee) are inadvertent. Just a product of rushing. Over an out for a while…
there are certain words when uttered here initiate a stadium wave of comments. “Agenda” is one of them. For other people using adverbs is a problem. hehe.
> “Agenda” is one of them.
Not just “agenda”, but in this sentence:
We can count one special pleading adverb (“truly”), one unclear pronoun (“we”), one negative action (“not working”), and two intentional concepts (“agenda”, “curious and awed”).
“By not working toward an agenda” is opposed to “working toward an agenda”, a possibility that is predicated of all those who are not as truly curious and awed as the persons referred by the we.
To this we can add: “innocent “.
All this can be true of Marcia, as far as I can tell. Is it true of anyone else to which the “we” can refer?
***
> For other people using adverbs is a problem.
Adverbs indicate a lack of precise verbs. But there’s nothing special about adverbs. It’s just one way Nic Lewis weaseled his way out of his mission to throw red mean without seeming so too much.
Sometimes, adjectives are better indicators:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2013/02/06/lewandowsky-strike-two/#comment-92030
why are there adverbs? think
Don’t shoot the indicators.
willard
“By not working toward an agenda, we have the liberty to be truly curious and awed!”
rather than parsing to find issue’s practice some charity and translate what she says into something true and interesting. you know practice charity.
for example you surely have experienced awe when you find something you were not looking for or looking without a conscious intention or plan.
The feeling is joyful. And haven’y you ever walk through a library and picked up a strange looking book, opened it, and read it just out of curiousity.
in short she is just talking about the difference between search and browsing.. Of course it get draped in moralistic language, but you know exactly what distinction she is making. If not, then read read read.. randomly follow links.. I do it every day
And don’t what ever you do say “Popper” or the demons of science will be released.
> The feeling is joyful.
Let’s grand that it is. Who’s feeling it is, in our case?
Who is this We?
Could be “Marcia”.
Could be “the authors of the paper”.
Could be “me and anyone who does not work toward an agenda”.
***
Only the first case could be charitably interpreted as innocent.
There are adverbs because it is not nearly as cool for Capt. Kirk to just “go where no man has gone before.”
“why are there adverbs? think”
Because advertising would be lifeless without them.
willard I read it as a royal ‘we’
you have to be prick to read it otherwise
willard cannot answer why there are adverbs otherwise his point will be lost.
instead we discus we.
at this point I suggest random accusations about things willard has said in the past and when he asks for links send him on wild goose chases.
willard-check.
Bag-check
The woods are full of snipes, but you have to be very still and quiet.
================
> willard cannot answer why there are adverbs otherwise his point will be lost.
Which point that would be?
Our white knight’s baits and switches never work, but he still uses them.
> I read it as a royal ‘we’
Indeed, and in fact this royal “we” offers a striking contrast with:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/10/the-stadium-wave/#comment-396434
This certainly makes one think twice about promoting one’s own noble cause.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/10/qa-former-un-climate-chief-perils-2013101011191590761.html
Mosher seems an intuitive thinker. I also find that my reading tends towards randomness and the funny thing is that answers to questions often pop up in most unexpected ways.
Dr. Wyatt, your paper with Dr. Curry is an edification. Many thanks.
I have found from much lesser edified posts here that there is little ( but not no) need for apology, since much of the critical comment stems from bias or ignorance. Or both. Highest regards on a very well documented and most thought provoking paper. Wishing you the best.
> I have found from much lesser edified posts […]
Me too, for instance:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/03/19/playing-hockey-blowing-the-whistle/
Rud –
I would suggest that you use Marcia’s comments as a lesson for how to clarify ambiguities. Name-calling is far less effective – if the goal is clarification.
Marcia,
Willard is our local Smart Ass, i.e., an oxymoron, an intelligent donkey. Please disregard his cynical brayings, they are not personal but just the reflex reaction of a certain kind of mind.
To claim that “we’re have no other agenda except awe and wonderment” begs the question why it is claimed and whom we should distinguish this “we”.
In fact, just knowing to whom this “we” refer might be nice.
Yes. Words to live by. Never go to the donkey show.
We have a stable full of them.
Who would have imagined so many talking donkeys
I blame Mr. Ed.
Great paper Marsha. I look forward to future work. Since your new to this blog, watch out for a few characters. Willard will have you on the sofa forcing you to confess it was your mother who insisted on adverbs.. Mosher will fly by and occasionally hurl a dry ice ball at you. FOMD will have you begging for Xanax. Joshua, well Joshua will make you question your femininity. Web just played too much football.
huh? anytime somebody posts their actual paper and shows up to answer questions. I try read their paper first before asking them questions.
Dr Wyatt,
Having someone come to talk about their paper and research is greatly appreciated. Let the cat calls and criticisms from the cheap seats roll off your back.
To keep a wave propagating in a lossy medium requires a continuous application of energy to sustain the oscillation, The most likely source of energy in both N and S hemispheres are the jet streams,
However my own view of the o,n/off nature the present and earlier pauses lies deep in the properties of the many varieties of the CO2 molecule. So I regard the quantum physics of CO2 as providing a necessary and sufficient conditions for the 20th and 21st century pauses.
Right, the stadium wave pattern extends to roughly the valley of the LIA. Warming from the LIA and possibly beyond would drive the wave whatever the actual cause of the warming might be. That I believe is kind of the point, there would be a recurrent warming pattern of natural variability. There would likely be a recurrent cooling pattern that should be similar plus there would likely be a neutral pattern.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/lvWaBy0wlOrtIIXqdBxZcoIbYmiRkogfJXXjyTMywKU=w330-h209-p-no
“normal” to ~1200, cooling pattern to ~1700, mirror image warming pattern to present.
If you know what pattern is most likely, then you can predict a little more accurately what a future trend should be. No guarantees, but a step in the right direction if I understand their approach.
Choppy waters with reversed waves. I wonder if that’s what’s tugging on the line, now.
========
Oops, capsized that little teacup of a metaphor. I wonder how these waves work in a millenial scale cooling trend.
==============
Kim, it is very easy to have the same amount of heat in the system and have different ‘average temperatures’, it all depends where the warm equatorial goes,
DocMartyn
Yes, Two if by land one if by sea to some degree.
This is exactly what the models need to resolve first – ocean behavior – the dog of terrestrial climate components. This work is pointed in the right direction.
Rather than “stadium wave” I would think that a mobile (as in kinetic art) would be a better analogy for a number of oscillators that oscillate individually and interact in such a way as to create a chaotic action.
Thanks. I make this kinetic art analogy myself and think it’s very useful.
But that is not what this paper does. Here we have eight complex nonlinear phenomena that somehow are complicit in forming a single resonance.
It’s not chaos at all. Rather it appears astonishingly coherent.
Coming soon to a theater near you: The Tides of Climate versus the Coriolis Effect…
Marcia,
Although my paper is not aimed at the 60 year cycle, you may be intersested in other “waves” that are linked to solar system dynamics that control the Sun.
http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=36513&
The paper is open access.
Judith, congratulations on a job well done.
The Wyatt/Curry work has already received the FOMD Certificate of Appreciation and Thanks (here and here). Especially, this work provides terrific foundations for further investigations leading to broader climate-change understanding.
Regrettably, there’s a vocal subset of denialists who vehemently *oppose* further research along the Wyatt/Curry lines:
Please let me say to Drs. Wyatt and Curry, that the great majority of skeptics, scientists, and just plain ordinary Climate Etc, are united in rejecting cwon’s false claims, and in rejecting cwon’s abusive language, and in rejecting the ideology-of-ignorance that drives those falsehoods and abuse.
So please keep working with a good heart and inquisitive spirit, Marcia Glaze Wyatt and Judith Curry! Let the scientific chips fall where they may, and please have fun *continuing* to do good work!
Applause, Applause! Well said.
+1 FOMD. I agree with you entirely this time, a most welcome change!
Fan I quite often find myself at odds with your perceptions, but in this case I am in complete agreement with your assesment. The particular poster you mention antics are beyond the pale and without merit. I appreciate that you have documented this atrocious behavior.
Fan,
you have been a credible commentator on this one. I would like to point out that cwon is an outlier and representative of nothing except his own opinions.
Refreshing!
From the paper: We also introduce transformed time series to convey insight into forcings and responses among indices whose behaviors are interconnected within a network. Transformed time series include two types: time-integrated, such as ACI and PCI, and time-differentiated values. The former yields anomaly trends of an index’s time series; while the latter converts time series of indices into incremental values – an approximation of the time-derivative of a trend (e.g. AT is the approximate time-derivative of ACI). Transformed indices are useful in detecting potential cause-and-effect relationships. We focus on the time-integrated transformation in this study.
Can we expect a paper with a focus on the time-differentiated transformations?
Matthew, at the last minute, we decided to cull out the use of time-differentials. I used them quite a bit in my dissertation work, finding that they helped uncover incremental forcings on some of the systems with greater memory, or persistence. Their inclusion was not necessary for this paper, but just to address your question, there will probably be no future paper of ours with those. While not highlighted, time differentials are alluded to in this paper with respect to some of the wind patterns.
Marcia, is your dissertation available for downloading?
I want to congratulate Dr. Curry and Dr. Wyatt on achieving their goal of explaining natural variability as well as it can be explained without leaving entirely the framework of mainstream climate science. They did leave the framework of climate models, though they did not say as much. But no climate modeler will admit the possibility that there can be a natural process that partially determines temperatures in the NH over a period of 300 years; that is, a natural process, somewhat cyclic, independent of the effects of radiation. Modelers countenance “internal variability” rather than natural variability and regularly confuse the two. “Internal variability” is a programming restriction placed on natural processes such as ENSO to guarantee that they do not violate conservation of energy. Curry and Wyatt have for the first time given meaning to the concept of “natural variability” that will bear the weight of serious science within the community of climate scientists.
Curry and Wyatt do face a huge backlash from mainstream climate scientists. No doubt they expected it. They will prevail.
They did not escape the framework of multivariate statistical analysis. But that is to be expected because climate science remains in its infancy. The outline that they have drawn can be filled with the results of empirical research as time permits.
I see from the comments that the article has elicited much confusion and opened speculation on many blind alleys. I am far from surprised. Thinking outside the modeling box is very difficult especially because it is punished. Finding long-term processes in nature, natural processes, that partially determine temperatures over a hemisphere and showing that these processes can be identified independently of the action of manmade CO2 amounts to an astounding breakthrough for scientists trained in the prevailing paradigm of climate science.
Breakthrough made! Mission accomplished! Well Done!
Thank you, Theo, on the insightful distinction between natural variability and internal variability. Your points are well taken and appreciated.
Prof Curry: In the version at the link, the figures have migrated out of their boxes. I have checked multiple times, and downloaded.
I find that too. I viewed in Okular so I thought it may be a compatibility issue.
It seems the document was created on Mac version of Word.
I haven’t read through all the posts since last look, but I want to address a few: the Dickey and Marcus piece, a bit about NINO, and some of the comments on AGW.
First, DM removed their estimation of the CO2 footprint from the global surface temperature. They used an algorithm, but I do not know what it is. I’m sure they would supply it. They did nothing to the ngLOD. The ngLOD strongly correlated positively with their ‘corrected’ global average temperature. This provided a sense of credibility to the use of ngLOD in this work. In our work, the same ngLOD that DM used was employed. Our results show that three indices were strongly correlated; the phasings of ngLOD, anomaly trends of large-scale winds in Atlantic-Eurasian region, and the Arctic T were almost identical. In contrast, NHT followed by a couple of years.
Boreal winter-NINO’s role in the wave’s low-frequency component of the surface avg T (NHT) is slim and not similarly phased; although the anomaly trend of NINO (low-frequency component) coincides closely with NHT, as does the anomaly trend of winds related to Pacific circulations (among them, PDO).
Again, the ‘wave’ does not imply anything about AGW other than to provide insight into a possible reason contributing to the two ‘lulls’ in temperature increase over the last 115 years. Finding the wave’s relationship to the CO2 footprint on temperature was not a goal of the study. But, findings do suggest an influence, damping or enhancing the T on multi-decadal timescales, nevertheless. It may not be the full answer to the observation, but perhaps a strong contributing factor. This may give insight into climate sensitivity. And yes, let the scientific chips fall where they may. There is no preferred outcome or answer on our part.
And for goodness sakes, can we please drop discussion regarding my clumsiness with the language. All I can say is that I meant none of what is being assigned to the statement. I have no judgments on others, despite how the statement might have come across. I see your point that there were better choices of wording. I too often fall short of effective communication. Blogs are not my preferred mode of scientific dialogue, as this weakness becomes apparent. I hope not to fuel any more flames. If I do, again, it is not intentional. I’m merely trying to help convey our work to those who might be interested.
“And for goodness sakes, can we please drop discussion regarding my clumsiness with the language.”
Sorry, but that can’t be allowed. There are commenters here who would have absolutely nothing to say if they weren’t quibbling about semantics.
Calling Willard.
> There are commenters here who would have absolutely nothing to say if they weren’t quibbling about semantics.
Speaking of which, here’s an example of semantics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems
I deal with pragmatics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics
There are commenters here who would have absolutely nothing to say if they weren’t white knighting for Judy, whining about other commenters, or ranting about Progressives.
Willard,
First, thanks for responding to my wisecrack with a semantic argument. You’re a fun guy, albeit not always intentionally.
And at least I have three topics according to you. Triple your selection.
> You’re a funny guy, albeit not always intentionally.
Do you think my “speaking of which” was unintentional, GaryM?
My point is not semantical, you know.
willard what GaryM means by semantics is not what you as a professional mean by semantics. Please show more charity.
Profess my ass; confess more apt.
============
> Triple your selection.
I did not know GaryM white knighted.
http://www.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/content/20131009-democratic-candidate-va.-gov.-ex-ri-justice-s-law-firm-among-caramadre-s.ece
” I’m merely trying to help convey our work to those who might be interested.”
1. no good deed will go un punished
2. The uncharitable will do what they do.
3. If you had published with anyone but Judith, willard and Joshua would
say nothing.
4. Don’t mind them, they are mostly talking to us not you, but they are
using you to talk to us.
Thanks for showing up. I’m about halfway through your paper, may have some ? later
> Don’t mind them, they are mostly talking to us not you, but they are
using you to talk to us.
This comment would be an excellent example of doing this.
steven –
Oy. What a drama queen.
Who is being “punished?”
joshua
anyone interested in the actual science is punished when you show up.
now in the grand scheme of things its a very slight puunishment but willard has outlawed averbs and adjectives. so we are stuck.
finally there is a thing called a cliche. you know how they function right?
maybe i should have said it this way.
If you make a good faith effort to show up and answer questions about your science, rest assured that the prick named Joshua will show up and waste pixels. He has to. he cannot help himself
yes willard. it is an example. keep reading.
That would be a plausible explanation, steven, if the drama queening weren’t so constant with you. I think that my explanation is more likely. You over-dramatize many aspects of these discussions, selectively. And in particularly, If someone criticizes the reasoning or even the wording of someone you feel loyal to, you get very emotional.
You forget, steven, that I have a “window into your soul,” and I know your opinions better than you know your opinions.
It’s not the wording that is questioned, but the act and its scope.
The wording only provides hints.
Thank you for the kind words, Timg.
Can you check why the figures are coming out of the boxes for me? Is it something about my network, my computer, my version of AdobeAcrobatReader?
With increased measurement of parts of the system, and with increased analytical and computational abilities, I think that more and more waves like this will be found, and more and more interactions among parts/places of the system. As everyone always reminds everyone, it is hard to tell how much of this result represents a real dynamical system operating into the future, but I think it’s good work. I prefer to see vector autoregressive methods used, but that’s kind of a personal quirk.
> I’m merely trying to help convey our work to those who might be interested.
Then talk about your work and not about the nobility of your intentions, Marcia. Considering the advertisement that this paper previously had at Judy’s, the activism of your co-author, and the inevitable politization of your results, you just can’t open yourself to discuss them.
Let your work stand on its own.
Good thing she and Dr. Curry aren’t claiming they are on a mission from Gaia to save all mankind from Thermageddon. Then Willard would really let her have it.
The truth is out there, GaryM.
nobility? gosh, you are over reading tonight.
use some charity willard. you know the crap you lectured others about.
or count adverbs.
This climate endeavour drained his cup of charity, and the dregs drip all over his front, like the gentle rain.
=====================
willard lecturing others about charity? Got a link? That’s something I’d like to see. W/ Context. Prima Facie it sounds like an extreme of hypocrisy.
> nobility?
Yes, like in “noble cause”, you know what not working with an agenda can provide, awe and whatnot.
Yes, but semantics, but charity.
I shudder to think what the result would be if we focused on willard’s work instead of his intentions.
AK.
there are many places.. part of the fun is looking
start here. read the whole thing
http://init.planet3.org/2010/10/willard-on-curry.html
and then do searches on willard and the principle of charity on this blog.
Of course you will find that willard almost never follows the principle. That’s not his fault.
When will willard wonder well?
===========
@Steven Mosher…
I’m still browsing through “willard-on-curry”, found this gem:
by Steve Bloom November 1, 2010 at 2:20 am. Hm…
Here’s something about the principle of charity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
Denizens should own the point I made. It was formulated with ordinary words. It rests on truthful claims. It’s a valid point. It takes into account that Marcia wished to express something genuine.
Moshpit’s claim that I never practice charity is false, and his overall slurs despicable.
***
And since Grounskeeper Willie made an appearance:
http://thelukewarmersway.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/if-you-only-see-half-the-debate-youre-in-church-listening-to-a-sermon/comment-page-1/#comment-3491
***
Oh, and speaking of semantics:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/08/28/overestimated-global-warming-over-the-past-20-years/#comment-372687
***
The principle of charity only applies as provisos. Serial misrepresenters like Moshpit, Groundskeeper Willie can’t escape their untruthful claims, invalid arguments and dismissive slurs by asking their victims for mercy, a concept we should not conflate with charity anyway.
Let’s hope AK won’t follow on the same path.
PS: BTW, “Willard on Curry” is not supposed to make any sense, because Judy said so.
@willard…
I’m quite familiar with the principle of charity, and even posted a link to a discussion of it on John S. Wilkins’ (old) blog a year or two (IIRC) ago. If you have an index of my comments here, perhaps you have that one.
My point was exactly the same as Steven’s: you never (seem, IMO, to) practice it. In fact, you appear to deliberately find ways to not understand what ought to be perfectly clear meanings, for little purpose other than to waste people’s time clarifying things for you. Almost always, here, aimed at people who don’t defend the consensus.
Since you bring up my statement ““Climate” is also a myth“, especially in terms of semantics, I’ll point out that the use of the word “myth” as a synonym for “lie” is secondary. The scientific study of myth has progressed far beyond the nonsense (IMO) of Graves or Campbell: I’d recommend When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth by Barber and Barber, if you need a starting point. A myth is a story conceived as metaphorically true in some sense that functioned (originally in pre-literate evolutionary terms) as a form of cultural memory, incenting some sort of action.
The word “climate” has two operative meanings, that are not identical! Using them interchangeably is tantamount to an untruth, Done deliberately for the sake of deception, as IMO the IPCC does, is a lie. I guess this thread is an excellent venue to pursue this, as Wyatt and Curry 2013 represents (IMO) a milestone on the road to actually understanding the mechanism behind how climate works.
Dear AK,
Thank you for playing the Red Shirt of our weekly episode of Climateball. Before we play, though, I’ll simply note that this:
shows how to inflate semantical argument into a search for the “truth that is out there”.
This example also shows that you, dear AK, have some kind of taste for semantic quibbling, which starts with a quite commonplace claim that scientific entities like “climate” belong to the realm of fictions:
If you ever are interested into fictionalism, there’s a whole bunch of papers awaiting you:
http://philpapers.org/browse/ontological-fictionalism
How this can be turned into another KILL THE IPCC slogan is a thing of beauty. The result of thousands of years of evolution.
***
Thank you for your overall concerns, to which we’ll return sooner than later.
Due diligence,
w
Willard,
why the long post on charity? A few readings from the bible do far more at explaining the concept than any or all of your references.
> A few readings from the bible do far more at explaining the concept than any or all of your references.
Do you have a specific passage in mind, timg? If you don’t pick one, I will choose Matthew 6:1 and you will lose.
Some day, people might get the hint why Moshpit keeps injecting this theme. And then he could wash his hands, like Pontius Pilate did.
Since when has reading the bible become a completion Willard?
And how does one possibly lose?
(I do have one from Corinthians I like. Let me find it and I’ll post it for you.)
Marsha,
Thanks for answering my questions about anthropogenic footprint that DM removed beginning with their 1930’s ngLOD/average surface temperature correlation. It seems you are saying this had absolutely no impact on your stadium-wave hypothesis. Is that correct? You don’t use the corrected data? In any case, what do you make of their supposition that they detected the anthropogenic footprint that early?
Overall, a nice bit of creative puzzle solving– or puzzle creating– as time will tell if the stadium-wave is real or imagined.
Sorry…Marcia not Marsha!
RG,
The LOD correction is quite interesting. It’s an independent, factor that apparently has no effect on the underlying trend according to Dickey.
So instead of correcting for SOI and AMO, we just correct for SOI and LOD (plus volcanic and the small TSI). The fit is quite pleasant, and all cycles and plateaus are removed, with just a few spikes remaining
http://img203.imageshack.us/img203/9609/8j9.gif
We did not use the “corrected” temperature used by DM. We used the boreal-winter month average surface temperature for the Northern Hemisphere with the linear trend removed. This allowed for two things: it met the MSSA requirement of using a mean of zero and it allowed greater ability to focus on multidecadal-scale variability. When the stadium wave work began years ago, I was not thinking about removing the CO2 footprint, I was thinking about removing the linear trend so I could examine what was hidden beneath it! It became assumed later that much of that CO2 footprint had likely been removed with the detrend, but we do not refer to this assumption in the paper. We try to stick with what we know. All we know is we removed the linear trend. Again, its association with CO2 was only a product of the press release content.
Regarding my opinion on the DM work, I find it interesting. I’m not in a position to really opine about their findings of the divergence in 1930s. It is interesting that extremely high Arctic Ts and low ice cover occurred then. Could this mean other things at play. I don’t know enough of their research details. But, I do find it interesting that in our research (and some done during my dissertation work), that the ngLOD co-varied strongly with Arctic T (which slightly precedes NHT) and the East Asian surface temperature. I think great promise lies in the information ngLOD can reveal.
As Pekka has said elsewhere in this thread, the underlying trend is likely not linear. It is somewhere between a quadratic (n=2) or cubic dependence (n=3) with time. He has a very important point to make in that if you assume linear then the underlying profile will need to curve to compensate for the forced linearity.
I use the Cornell U tool Eureqa to do the fitting over the time series and choose data starting from 1880, as this is the earliest date to get data for all the interesting data sets. Running Eureqa usually ends up giving a linear combination of the components
Temperature= c1* LOD+ c2*Time^n + c3*Volcanic + c4*SOI+ c5*TSI+ offset
The correlation coefficient that Eureqa finds for good solutions exceeds 0.97 for values of n between 2 and 3. It never seems to find sine or cosine solutions with time, which indicates that there are no unidentified oscillatory components not related to either SOI, LOD, or TSI. The volcanic is sporadic for certain, and not oscillatory.
WebHubTelescope: I use the Cornell U tool Eureqa to do the fitting over the time series and choose data starting from 1880, as this is the earliest date to get data for all the interesting data sets. Running Eureqa usually ends up giving a linear combination of the components
Temperature= c1* LOD+ c2*Time^n + c3*Volcanic + c4*SOI+ c5*TSI+ offset
That looks extremely interesting. Is it available online? Published?
I just added the LOD today so I can’t imagine it getting published already.
This shows the composition:
http://img543.imageshack.us/img543/6837/vlq.gif
and the main page is here
http://contextearth.com/2013/10/04/climate-variability-and-inferring-global-warming/
After harassing people who pointed to LOD for years, suddenly formerly-ignorant people here are developing an appreciation for what’s richly encoded in LOD. Let me assure you folks who are just beginning to appreciate and revel in LOD: You’re just getting started. If you look at other statistical properties of the LOD record (use the daily record 1962+) you’re going to see lunisolar & solar. I’ve been pointing to Dickey’s work here for years. No one here thought it was important. It seems that suddenly that has changed. Now analyze daily LOD for Schwabe-resolved cyclic volatility at semiannual timescale for a seriously-needed wake-up call on westerly winds (jet streams). It’s a small step from there to understanding the MD waves in LOD & NH circulation. Are you folks finally ready to get serious here? I sure hope so. There must have been divine intervention to stir up this 180 degree change in attitude.
Vaughan,
To the articulate go the spoils. To the nebulous, nothing.
Seriously, the LOD is a small amount in the greater scheme of things. It appears to be adding about +/- 0.05 C to the temperature signal, which is already at +0.8C to +0.9C due to AGW.
It appears to be adding about +/- 0.05 C to the temperature signal
Which is a around the gain of the so called 40 yr increase in OHC so what are you saying?
Something very seriously wrong with those numbers. You must be working with air temperatures. Were I not working so many hours leaving so little time, what I wouldn’t do to correct the solar-terrestrial-climate distortion. I suspect a lot of the contributors around here must be retired, unemployed, independently wealthy, &/or working with the support of the extreme luxuries I once enjoyed during my ivory tower days. Remain objective WHT. The 2nd order central difference coherence is significant and its governed by solar cycle acceleration (its simple circulatory geometry). Your initial excitement about your awakening conveyed due appreciation of nature. Refreshing. Don’t falsely assume I’m resistant to the idea of warming — but you’re going to have to convince me that you deeply understand externally-driven MD NH natural climate before I’ll even be willing to discuss the partitioning of centennial warming into natural & anthropogenic components. The “internal” narrative was stillborn. It’s strictly ruled out by the geometric proof I’ve minimally outlined for advanced parties (all I have time for).
WebHubTelescope, those links are interesting. Thanks.
WebHubTelescope: Temperature= c1* LOD+ c2*Time^n + c3*Volcanic + c4*SOI+ c5*TSI+ offset
I didn’t notice this before I read the post at the other link: you have a cubic polynomial for the fundamental time trend of temp from 1900 – 2010+. How good is that really for planning for, say, 2047?
I’ll add this to the collection of “live” models (those not yet clearly discrepant from data) and see how well it does over the rest of my alert life.
Marler, It’s getting tiresome to reach the bar that you keep raising. The power law function is essentially duplicating the CO2 growth rate. In other words, we get an equivalent fit if we replace time^n with ln(CO2).
I imagine the spoon-feeding will continue until you tire of getting pummeled by MNFTIU.
Matthew R Marler | October 12, 2013 at 10:00 pm | wrote “WebHubTelescope, those links are interesting. Thanks.”
Agree. They’re very interesting. So interesting I went out of my way to report them at Tallbloke’s Talkshop. I had written WHT off for repeatedly and very rudely making statements strictly inconsistent with data in the past, but something of this nature causes pause for reconsideration. We have witnessed here a deep awakening — a rare event in the climate discussion. Definitely the top highlight of this thread and probably the most interesting & noteworthy development I’ve seen at (usually stagnant & crusty sorry to say) CE in months.
WebHubTelescope: In other words, we get an equivalent fit if we replace time^n with ln(CO2).
Then show it: time^3 is different from ln(CO2) over the past 100+ years.
It’s nice to see a reference to a “power function law” but the particular power, time cubed, is unbelievable. It’s extrapolation to the near future is more extreme than the IPCC GCM simulation means.
What do you mean resetting the bar? I added your model to the set of “live” models to be tested by future data. That’s the same “bar” I “set” (so to speak) for Vaughan Pratt’s model, and I have mentioned it for all models.
oops. That’s “Its extrapolation”
Paul Vaughan: Definitely the top highlight of this thread and probably the most interesting & noteworthy development I’ve seen at (usually stagnant & crusty sorry to say) CE in months.
The highlight of this thread for me was the initiating paper by Wyatt and Curry. Second to that was the series of responses by Wyatt.
Comparing Vaughan Pratt’s model and the WebHubTelescope model with the cubic time trend for temperature, I think that Vaughan Pratt produced a more credible model for the overall temperature trend, and WebHubTelescope has produce a more credible model for the residual variation. But there are lots of “live” models, that is, models that fit the recent past; which survive the testing of the next few decades I hope to find out.
WHT’s LOD revelation was triggered by passage of Marcia Wyatt’s stadium wave through CE. It moved him, whereas little else has. So I would say we’re not in disagreement MRM.
Thank you, Dr. Wyatt, for your paper and comments. You are discovering that some of the denizens suffer from blog versions of OCD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive%E2%80%93compulsive_personality_disorder
It is healthy to ignore those who cavil about items which do not interest you.
Marcia –
Thanks for the clarification, and I apologize for my misreading.
I hope that you understand that there are many here who selectively identify agendas on (only) one side of the climate change debate. For that reason, I think that clarity in language is called for, and when wording is ambiguous, clarification (as you gave) is also called for.
Flames can be fueled by either the writer or the reader (as we can see in this case). And they can also easily be doused, as you have demonstrated.
“But, findings do suggest an influence, damping or enhancing the T on multi-decadal timescales, nevertheless.”
Such an important point
“And yes, let the scientific chips fall where they may.”
Bravo, and as it should be
Marcia
There are those here who parse every word. It is exasperating and best ignored unless it is germane to the understanding of your paper.
You said
‘”First, DM removed their estimation of the CO2 footprint from the global surface temperature. They used an algorithm, but I do not know what it is. I’m sure they would supply it.’
I will go through all the comments (morning here in the UK and this was the first comment I saw) but yesterday I asked if you could identify the periods of low/high ice and what extent they might have grown/shrunk to.
As you know there are many periods of low ice, for example, that stretch through the 1920-1940 period. the 1820 to 1850 period, the 1710 to 1740 era the early 1500’s and for several hundred years on and off during the Viking colonisation. We have many good Russian references to several of these periods and I am currently researching the apparent opening up of the Northern Sea route during the 1530’s. Scientific Literature since the 1920’s has been hampered due to the cold war and subsequent antagonism to Russian research.
So I would like to know why there were these extended periods which clearly predated enhanced co2?. A start could be made on this conundrum if we could know WHY DM decided to remove the CO2 footprint, how they care to their ‘estimate’ and the algorithm used.
Thanks for your time here. The vast majority of us do appreciate your engaging in such an open manner.
tonyb
Marcia,
You say:
> And for goodness sakes, can we please drop discussion regarding my clumsiness with the language. All I can say is that I meant none of what is being assigned to the statement.
Perhaps I was not clear enough.
I could not care less about how you spell out your motivations. The fact is that you do spell them out. It is the fact that you appeal to your motivation that is suboptimal.
However you will try to portray your motivations, they will contrast with your co-author’s. You’ve just published a paper with a climate warrior, with non-negligible PR facilities.
This is not a point about your clumsiness with language.
Wait until you meet the climate warriors that Judy combats until you judge if I’m being mean right now.
***
Congratulations for your paper. I hope this is the first one of many.
“I could not care less about how you spell out your motivations. The fact is that you do spell them out. It is the fact that you appeal to your motivation that is suboptimal.”
But willard you DID CARE about how she spelled out her motivations.
you cared that she used the word ‘we’ and liberty, for example.
And its not a fact that she appealed to her motivations. she spelled them out. In fact its impossible not to spell out your motivations, al beit sometimes folks do this vaguely. The very ACT of communicating spells out a motivation.
Show some integrity Willard.
Your comments were BS, you were called on them and no matter how well you articulate, you are still on the wrong side with regard to your behavior. An honest actor would at least acknowledge they stepped out of bounds, if not actually offering an apology. A prick keeps offering up justifications.
> [Y]ou DID CARE about how she spelled out her motivations.
Only because she DID use a way to spell it out, which means that my criticism is not specific to a single wording of what expressed. Had she chosen ANOTHER WAY to spell out her motivations, the criticism would have been the same. Even the means to substantiate that claim would be the same: look at was said to see what is being done. The motivations need not be accessed via a Ouija board or other over-charitable means.
Words lead to deeds. Deeds matter more than words. Alternative words matter little if the deed is the same.
A white knight armour may not be the best accoutrement for a black hat marketer.
Thank you for your kind words, timg. Please continue. We’ll talk about behaviours in due time.
Since I’m here, and to illustrate what I said earlier:
> you cared that she used the word ‘we’.
Had she used “I”, the question would have been: why not “we”, since this a co-authored paper? Authorship extends beyond pronouns.
One does not bring on the table something one does not wish to discuss.
Judith and Marcia,
The following diagram shows the merging of the two “waves” that control climate. I think it meshes very nicely with your theories.
Whether the two waves are always in sync is debatable, but answers are coming fast.
http://www.landscheidt.info/images/powerwave3.png
ps. disregard the “landscheidt” reference in the link, the science is very different.
Very interesting, Geoff. Just a quick mention re: terminology. Not to take away from what you’ve presented, and likely you know this, but sometimes synch, synchronous, and synchronize can get confusing. I’ll take the opportunity you’ve inadvertently afforded me here in order to clarify. Synch loosely implies synchronous, i.e.occurring at the same time. Synchronization is often misinterpreted as meaning the same thing. It is not, or at least not necessarily. Instead, synchronization means ‘matched rhythms’. Indices in the stadium wave are synchronized, but not synchronous, thus the signal can propagate through them.
Figure 3 “Annotated Expanded ‘Stadium Wave’ shows 20th-century signal propagation through a 15-index-member network…” (page 53)
It is a work of art. If I am reading it correctly, the IV to opposing sign I, are the regime changes. And the same slope lines at that time are the couplings. Thanks!
It is a jumble, figure 3. Subsequent figures and text are intended to disentangle it. Yes, the climate-regime transitions occur b/n IV and -I and -IV and +I. The trend reversal of the AMO index coincides with the incipient stage of a new regime. A regime is used in our work to indicate an multidecadal interval of time during which surface temps (our NHT) are increasing (a warming regime) or decreasing (a cooling regime). The stadium-wave signal propagates through four stages of regime evolution, each stage characterized by a certain type of coupling, and typically coupling occurring in a specific region. For example, giving a skeletal and brief overview: at stage one, a cold AMO coincides with increased sea ice extent in the West Eurasian Arctic. At stage two, ice growth has expanded eastward, peaking in the Kara Sea region. The sea ice in the Siberian Arctic is peaking, its effect on the meridional temperature gradient strong, promoting increased zonal flow of large-scale winds, which advect warm air and moisture over the Eurasian continent from the Atlantic and disrupt vertical stratification near the surface and promote high cloudiness, both of which lead to increasing temperatures – greatest at low altitudes and high latitudes. Stage two is where the initial cold signal of the Atlantic in stage one is converted to an atmospheric warming signal. You can see in section four and related figures that the progression continues, next including the Pacific and ice in the East Eurasian Arctic in stage three, and then anomaly trends come to a close in stage four, with cumulative effects on ice, heat flux, atmospheric response, etc. Arctic T peaks here, marking the coming end of the warming regime. Transition to the reverse regime, likely promoted in part by anomalies of Pacific circulations negatively feeds back onto the Atlantic, allow the wave to go around for the reversed climate regime evolution.
I hope this helps. Figure 12 might help in conjunction with figures 3 and 13.
Marcia, one thing I find interesting in figure 3 is the way subsequent positive phases have different index behavior: in the 1910-1940 positive phase the index peaks are rising (relative to what I suppose is normalized numbers), while in the 1970-2000 positive phase they appear to be decreasing.
Is there a simple explanation of what this represents that can help me as I study the text, by providing a starting analogy? Are there hypotheses regarding the reason for this difference?
In the UK (and I think this true of the entire North Atlantic basin) there appeared to be a very marked regional climate shift during 2008. In general terms a reversal of the PJS northward migration, with the PJS often south of the BI, a greater incidence of meridonal synoptic patterns, the ending of our regime of “barbecue summers” and mild winters, replaced with monsoon summers and cold winters, and the cessation of the almost continuous above average montly CET trend (which now appears to be cooling).
So perhaps this was the boundary between stage IV and -1 ?
AK, I find your observation very interesting, too. I noticed the same paired shifts of amplitude in proxy data. I have no explanation to offer. Anyone with ideas?
Well, my default thought was the sun, but now I’ll have to think.
===============
It will not mater what models you use.
If you use data during a warming period to populate your models you will get out of bounds warming forecasts.
If you use well bounded temperature for the past then thousand years to populate your models, you would get well bounded forecasts.
Try to guess which of these you did choose to do.
Try to guess which is really happening.
Looking over some of the comments on this thread is occurred to me we may see a two tracked approach, which of course is a simplification because there are many other tracks.
If the question is, Did we see the CO2 forcings or not? That’s one track. With the other track being, We might see the CO2 but that’s really not the focus here.
I don’t see anything wrong with having two tracks. It’s a diversified approach. Two teams working on the same problem with different approaches. I suppose there are many other reasons why it’s a good idea to have at least two tracks. And we can probably find some problems with having a one track approach.
Does anyone else see what they are doing?
They know they don’t have data to support their alarmism.
They know they will not get data to support their alarmism.
They keep pushing the Alarmist date into the future so actual data that does not support their alarmism does not matter yet.
Now they have pushed it out to 2047.
That is thirty five more years. thirty five plus the current 17 is more than fifty years.
They promised they did not need more than 17 years and now they are demanding 50 years.
Does anyone see a problem here? I do!
Icarus didn’t expect the wax to melt.
============
Judith, and Marcia,
Natural variability is the key to progress in climatology. The simplistic groupthink of climate alarmism has no place in science.
+1
Yes indeed. This is where climate science should have started. But as it is a political exercise it started where it intended to end up – by finding CO2 guilty as charged.
In case this hasn’t been mentioned, throughout most of the world this is known as a “Mexican wave,” having first sprung to prominence there during the 1970 World Cup.
Marcia,
Please ignore some of the sniping comments. Like any natural system, a blog is likely to have varying degrees of noise.
What a fascinating concept and congratulations on publication! I have read your posts and I think I broadly understand the concept. I look forward to reading the paper in more detail. It’s the sort of concept that I can grasp easily as it is close to areas in my line of work.
I have some questions if you don’t mind:
1. Would the relative high extent of antarctic sea ice be a sign of a wave trough compared to the arctic, and might we then expect it decline as the arctic increases? Or am I being too literal with the concept being spatial-temporal?
2. Related to the previous question; is the reason you didn’t cover much of the southern hemisphere due to a lack of proxy data? What about instrumental data, albeit limited? Does what data you have correlate with what you expect?
3. I note that you worked with Tsonis on this, how does this theory integrate with the idea of ‘climate shifts’? Is it complimentary, ancillary? I am imagining higher frequency waves on a lower frequency swell, but I don’t know if that is the right way to think about it.
Agnostic, there is speculation that there is a bi-polar see-saw b/n the Arctic and Antarctic, likely related to the AMOC, which in its traverse across the equatorial region in the Atlantic, carries ocean heat from the Southern Hemisphere to the northern. This does not happen in the Pacific. When AMOC is strong, more heat goes northward; when AMOC is weak, less SH heat is redistributed northward. Downwelling intensities off the Antarctic are further influenced by activity of NINO. You are right that a study of the SH as it pertains to the wave is needed. Data are sparse, but perhaps doable. Worth looking into to!
Here are a few articles related to that ‘see-saw’ that might be of interest:
Severinghaus, Jeffrey P. (26 February 2009). “Climate change: Southern see-saw seen”. Nature 457 (7233): 1093–4. doi:10.1038/4571093a.
Chylek, Petr; Folland, C.K.; Lesins, G.; Dubey, M.K. (2010). “Twentieth century bipolar seesaw of the Arctic and Antarctic surface air temperatures”. Geophysical Research Letters 37: L08703. doi:10.1029/2010GL042793.
Jung, Simon J.A.; et al. (April 2010). “Southern Hemisphere intermediate water formation and the bi-polar seesaw”
Re: point 3. Yes, it was my meeting with Tsonis that kicked off the stadium-wave research. I contacted him with my idea and he took interest. It was a tremendous learning opportunity for me. His climate shifts are further explored in the Wyatt, Kravtsov, Tsonis 2012 paper (WKT: first online in 2011). The ‘synchronizations’ to which they refer can be thought of as strong correlations between four major indices in time. In the WKT piece, higher frequency components of 15 indices are analyzed for cross-correlation. Results of both studies show strong correlations in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1950s, and 1970s. You are not wrong in visualizing this as higher frequency components influencing, or being influenced by, the multidecadal component.
According to the Tsonis et al. work, when coupling strength increases after synchronizing (in this case, correlating strongly), synchronization is destroyed and a regime shift occurs. When coupling strength decreases post ‘synchronization’, no regime shift. The work by Judy and me relates to this, but is separate. We do note that these ‘Tsonis synchronizations’ (both types) appear to roughly coincide with our ‘stages’ I, II, and III of regime evolution. Only at times that coincide with our stage I (or -I) does a regime shift occur (~1918, 1944, 1976). We (Judy, Tsonis, Kravtsov, and I) have not discussed this, nor have we explored whether our results are two sides of the same coin or not. On the ‘to-do’ list.
I’d appreciate a direct response from Marcia or Judith on the points that I have made in this thread.
I very much support and appreciate their paper even though it is a reworking of propositions already published by me.
However it is only a start.
One next needs to integrate the finding into a more complete climate change description which follows the observations from beginning to end as they alternately cause warming or cooling of the climate system around the basic level of energy content determined by mass, gravity and ToA insolation.
In fact, I have already attempted that and my New Climate Model not only incorporates that ‘stadium’ wave’ as it works through the ocean basins but also places it within an overall climate change description.
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/new-climate-model/
Inter alia:
“It should be borne in mind that internal ocean oscillations substantially modulate the solar induced effects by inducing a similar atmospheric response but from the bottom up (and primarily from the equator) sometimes offsetting and sometimes compounding the top down (and primarily from the poles) solar effects but over multi-decadal periods of time the solar influence becomes clear enough in the historical records. The entire history of climate change is simply a record of the constant interplay between the top down solar and bottom up oceanic influences with any contribution from our emissions being indistinguishable from zero.”
It’s never tasted quite so loud,
The sandwich meat that is a cloud.
========================
Stephen, I have read some of your work and also Nicola Scaffeta’s, and I have long thought there was real merit in these ideas, and the CO2 control knob hypotheses too simplistic.
The idea/concept/paradigm/model of a stadium wave is a good one and helps to grasp the complexity by drawing a clear analogy that is not only familiar and relatable, but helps conceptualise similar processes.
What I particularly like is that they are focussed on describing the natural processes independently of anthropogenic forcing, or in fact forcing of any kind, with the possible nod to the sun as a perturbance that might in fact tempo. In this way, they are visibly not approaching the analysis with an agenda. If there was any forcing it would be superimposed on this natural phenomena, albeit there might be some uncertain kind of influence, and signs are there is not.
The problem with where we are now is that any suggestion of motivation behind an analysis makes it easy for the paper to be discredited by those whose motivation is in the other direction, which isn’t useful for our advancement of science. It’s my belief that side stepping the question of CO2 forcing and simply trying to better characterise other factors, regardless of whether CO2 has any role to play, will lead to a fuller understanding of the climate and thus a better platform from which to view what role manmade emissions does have, if any.
In other words, trying to find another ‘reason’ for why the climate has changed other than CO2 leads to dismissal from those who are convinced it does, without the research being discussed on their merit.
The CO2 control knob has had a Procrustean effect, forcibly fitting phenomena to the paradigm.
Free the science, for the sake of all of us.
===========
Agnostic, agreed.
I very much admire Marcia and Judith for putting their heads over the parapet in this way.
As soon as one starts to properly identify and quantify the scale of natural variability as against the likely effects of our emissions the stable door is kicked wide open.
What did it for me was noting that natural climate variability shifted the jets and climate zones by 1000 miles or more from MWP to LIA to date.
I could not envisage our emissions shifting them by as much as a mile.
The Alarmists must have their feet held to the fire until they can demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt how far our emissions would shift the global air circulation.
About a decade ago I saw a ‘science’ programme pointing to the more zonal jets, saying it was permanent and on going and all our fault.
But I had already noted the trend back towards meridionality around 2000 whilst our emissions kept rising.
Around 2000 a wide range of climate phenomena changed trend and it correlated with the decline from the high peaks of cycle 23 towards the low peaks of cycle 24.
Stephen Wilde
I think Jet stream positions are a fundamental part of the climate conundrum. I think I said to you that during the research for my article in CET it was evident that the position of the jet stream was affecting the climate, most notably with droughts and excessive rain.
tonyb
Stephen Wilde
You say
‘Around 2000 a wide range of climate phenomena changed trend and it correlated with the decline from the high peaks of cycle 23 towards the low peaks of cycle 24.’
I think CET is a reasonable proxy for the historic Northern Hemisphere temperature and it appears to be often a precursor for other areas.
I don’t need to tell you about the decline in our climate and intriguingly that can be traced to 2000.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
What is the nature of the climate phenomena you mention?
tonyb
Looks like the knob has dropped off into Marcia’s hand.
Bravo!
Stephen, your model is very interesting. Our two discussions of cascading events are certainly compatible, but not one in the same. They augment one another. Ideas are hard to pin down. When I go through old writings of mine, I realize “my ideas” long pre-dated my return to formal education. We all find information along the way that we integrate into our developing paradigms – building great ideas upon great ideas. I’ve learned that in the world of science, ‘idea’ means little. It’s a long road from idea to getting it to the next level. I apologize that I had never seen your work before. There seems to be an implication that your idea has been subsumed in the WC hypothesis. I may be misinterpreting, so forgive me if that is the case, but if that is what you are troubled by, please note that the first stadium wave was in publication in 2011; although its formal start began in 2006. And my musings on the linkages prior to that began years before.Our (WC) work here takes away nothing from you or your work. I think you’ve got great points. I hope our work can enhance one another’s.
Okay. A few more comments to your comments. First, I must correct a possible misunderstanding of my own causing. About ‘CO2 changing nothing’. This was brought up in the WUWT blog. I answered it there. I saw it here too. This was taken out of context, but I will take full responsibility for not being precise. We had been talking about possible effects of external forcing on the wave’s behavior. Here and on WUWT I expounded upon my speculations on how the multidecadal tempo of solar variability appears to play a role through frequency entrainment. Explained on other long posts is why that info was not kept in this paper, instead delayed for a future one.
We wondered about what prompted the change in amplitude and slight change in tempo prior to about 1800. Maybe solar, due to frquency entrainment, played a role in setting wave tempo and amplitude. but with changes in output around the LIA, maybe the coupling was too weak and the intrinsic tempo and amplitude of the wave kicked in, decoupling from sun. Speculation for now. But what about that I’ll-composed statement on CO2? Read on.
Tonyb, you ask Why didn’t i look prior to 1700? i had proxy data for enough indices to run the MSSA on index networks, but the longest shared time frame I had access to was for 300 years. Now, how that now infamous CO2 statement was intended to read was within context of the observations of no change in amplitude or tempo of the wave since at least 1850. CO2 emissions have gone up throughout this time. But wave character is pretty consistent throughout. No evidence suggests that CO2 is making any changes (to the stadium wave character) over this increasing linear or quadratic forcing. That was the intended message of that statement. What CO2 is doing to the linear or quadratic T trends is not what this work is about. But few would doubt it is doing nothing. Of course it, along with land use change, impacts climate. Life always has. How much, how fast, and how best to address the presumed answers are questions with more divergent views and NOT ones that this work addresses.
As far as the DM AGW footprint removal, yes, tonyb, they found ngLOD began to diverge from the uncorrected GST in 1930s. Might be worth contacting them.
i am happy to consider your questions in greater depth, tonyb, via email, if I could facilitate your research goals. Regarding the Northern Passage. What I can share from our findings is that the freshwater balance, and therefore the halocline, is largely responsible for the winter time trends of sea ice growth. The change and distribution in halocline character on longterm timescales is pretty consistent with the wave. Studying the figures and diagrams, along with text, might enhance your insight and help your research.
Our goal was to identify proxies, one for each of four stages of climate-regime evolution. Each stage features peak or trough inventories of sea ice in a region. Thus, ideally, we can use these proxies to reveal when these four stages occurred in the past. Some values of proxies are limited temporally. I can give you ideas from unpublished results on what indices you might use to extrapolate back that far. Read the paper. My email is on it. Email me and I’ll share those potential tools.
A shout out to Gary Sharp. I’ll mull over the graphs you sent on the blog a bit more and contact you. Everyone should know, if they don’t already, that it was Gary who got the Klyashtorin/Lyubushin work translated from Russian to English.
Thanks to many of you for the blog tips. I doubt I’ll do this for long, but while questions are plentiful, I’ll keep checking back.
Geoff.
Leif may find the grail of a dampable amplifier here.
=======
Marcia, a very nice job you and Judith did with mechanisms and sequencing. Great job with the puzzle. I expect it will be a hot reference for some time.
Just like that !
Marcia
Thank you. I will contact you by email as suggested.
tonyb
I hope you realize what a joy it is to see an example of what science looks like Marcia. You are a breath of fresh air. I would love to get you in front of the students I get to work with out in the field.
Oops. Geoff Sharp posted the graphs, not Gary.
Quicker nor me. This sun attracts me strangely.
==================
Marcia,
I assume your post was prepared before you saw mine.
You say:
“how the multidecadal tempo of solar variability appears to play a role through frequency entrainment. Explained on other long posts is why that info was not kept in this paper, instead delayed for a future one.
We wondered about what prompted the change in amplitude and slight change in tempo prior to about 1800. Maybe solar, due to frquency entrainment, played a role in setting wave tempo and amplitude. but with changes in output around the LIA, maybe the coupling was too weak and the intrinsic tempo and amplitude of the wave kicked in, decoupling from sun.”
Exactly what I have been saying for years in that the net effect of the various ocean oscillations in each basin (your ‘stadium wave’) modulates the solar effects sometimes supplementing and sometimes offsetting them.
Are you on the cusp of duplicating my New Climate Model ?
To be clear, the solar piece is not in any stadium wave paper. My mention of it here is pure speculation based on trial research.
Regarding duplicating your model: Maybe the points are similar, but no, what you are saying is not what I am saying. I’m simply talking about the possibility that the solar tempo may set the tempo of the wave – frequency entraiment – like an orchestra conductor setting the tempo of the piece played. I’ve said nothing about the net effect of ocean oscillations in each basin modulating the solar effects. And the stadium wave is far more than ocean oscillations in each basin.
But if I understand correctly, there is no central ‘conductor’ (pacemaker, timekeeper, central clock, etc.), and no precise frequency of oscillation, but rather the “wave” frequency is irregular and emerges from the individual frequencies of the component phenomena. Please elaborate if I’m wrong.
Thank you Marcia.
You seem to be suggesting that a 60 year solar variation induces a 60 year waveform within the oceans.
I agree that that does not duplicate my model because it does not deal with the millennial solar cycle which induced the MWP, LIA and current warm period.
Nor does it deal with the upward or downward stepping of temperatures from one positive or negative ocean phase to the next.
On that basis I respectfully submit that I am still ahead of you.
As regards the stadium wave being ‘far more’ than the netted out global effect of all the oscillations in each ocean basis combined, would you care to be specific ?
Stephen, your narrative doesn’t even address the coupled bundle illustrated in figure 4 of WKT2011. They point to the piece you missed. They didn’t have an original find, but no one has summarized it so concisely. I can guarantee you that MD NH solar-terrestrial-climate relations don’t work the way Marcia is speculating. We all have something different to bring to the table…
Hi Paul.
Could you summarise what you see as the implications of that ‘bundle’ and say why it is inconsistent with my overarching concept ?
Thanks.
Stephen, you will find that I have done so elsewhere on this page. Sorry for the scattered approach. It’s all I have time for. With adequate time/resources, I assure you I would do communications radically differently. Regards.
Loehle and Scafetta (2011) describe the stadium wave without calling it that. The entire HadCRUT4 record can be reconstructed with four simple components.
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/loehlescafettawuwtfigures01_page_2.jpg
Two components are harmonic sine waves that run constantly through the record one with period of 20 years and magnitude of 0.1C and the other a 60 year period and magnitude of 0.2C. Another component is a linear trend of 0.1C per century that runs through the record and the last is a linear trend of 0.66C per century that begins in 1950.
The sines are known to be connected with motions in the earth’s core which manifest in ways other than surface temperature fluctuations such as length of day. These core motions have also been associated with gravitational forces caused by the orbital mechanics of gas giant Jupiter.
I’m thus not sure what is new about this paper. Many people, myself included, have simply eyeballed the temperature record (any of them they all show it) since 1850 and seen a 60-year cycle which, if it repeated reliably, was due to roll over from warming to cooling near the beginning of the 21st century. The only question (which still remains) is whether the magnitude of the repeating cycle is less than or greater than anthropogenic warming. The next several years should answer that question.
Note, original work on stadium wave published in 2011. No sine waves used. Look at graphs: RCs not sine waves. Our work: Identification of patterns of variability shared by each index in network. Stadium wave describes the sequential, orderly propagation of a signal through network of synchronized indices, not identification of oscillations.
The stadium wave is a traveling wave. It takes the shape of a sine. There’s an animation of a stadium wave below where the sinusoidal shape is clear.
http://www.physics.louisville.edu/public/courses/phys111/davis/notes/travwaves.html
But thanks anyway for explaining the new part of the paper is basically teleconnections between various physical components.
wrong. the wave is spatio temporal.
scaffetta’s toy model says nothing about ice extent, nothing about drought, nothing about the sequencing and the triggers.
read the paper
write that down
Loehle & Scafetta 2011 touches a nerve there, Steverino?
Let me guess why. Because the four simple “toy” components reproduce the BEST temperature record with high fidelity where the ballyhooed climate models cannot. If a toy model can reproduce BEST I guess that makes BEST an even simpler toy. LOL
Good to see the ‘skeptics’ abandoning their reflexive rejection of models.
And not even a murmur on the invoking of Gaia.
“All models are wrong,” Michael, except when I like what they show.
Really? I see a lot of carping and a lot of: “it’s a good start or it’s interesting” The IPCC said that natural variability is not well understood and more work needs to be done on it. Do you disagree with the IPCC? Because that would make you a denier and an oil-company shill.
Joshua
Sounds like you are talking for IPCC.
Max
The consensus climate models are largely based on conjecture and focusing on GHG and anthropogenic ‘forcings’. Everything else is noise, more or less. That’s where they are very wrong. They model only known knowns and even that poorly, it seems. Atmospheric energy fluxes are complex and maybe not solvable at this point or in the near future.
Furthermore they predict warming and other evidence (oscillations/solar) suggests multidecadal cooling. Correlational evidence can help. There are two important scientific points about correlations. A correlation does not establish causality. The correlation may be due to some other causal factor. Nevertheless, a correlation is useful to make predictions. It makes no difference why the events are correlated, if they vary together, you can use one to predict the other.
huh?
their conclusion depends upon models being wrong. basically wrong models cant reproduce the synchronizing indices.
Here is the sad fact micheal. Models dont get the TIMING (in absolute time), the FREQUENCY, or the AMPLITUDE of known cycles correct. They dont.
They cant. And to handle this we average over multiple runs under the assumption that cycles will integrate to zero.
Since the models cannot get the individual cycles right, they cannot reproduce any synchronization. That’s intuitively obvious and the paper just confirms that.
So, one not need switch attitudes toward models to accept the findings since the findings confirm that models are wrong.
read harder
write that down.
that is all
Marcia: “No evidence suggests that CO2 is making any changes (to the stadium wave character) over this increasing linear or quadratic forcing. That was the intended message of that statement. What CO2 is doing to the linear or quadratic T trends is not what this work is about.”
My bold. I think that is what you meant but did not express earlier, that has caused much discussion Thanks for clarifying.
I see much use of the word “tempo” which I find vague, could you clarify that in more precise, technical language? You seem to have found something but I don’t understand what it is.
Here are a couple of telerconnections you may find interesting;
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=259
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=233
There’s more to CO2 than meets the eye. The AO CO2 link I find surprising at the global level and maybe emphasises the reach of AO.
Also as an alternative to a rather crude linear trend removal in the presence of a recognised quadratic like long term pattern , could I suggest differentiation.
d/dt has a 1/f frequency attenuation so acts as a kind of high pass filter.
d2/dt2 is 1/f^2 and will reduce a quadratic rise to a constant.
Both of these are linear operations that use all the data without inserting (or subtracting) some essentially arbitrary linear model.
They do favour high frequency noise so in some respects decrease signal to noise ratio , this can be countered with filtering.
In figure 3 we see a progression from group I to group IV that covers almost half a cycle of your fundamental pattern . Is that the end of the line? The idea of a stadium wave , I would have thought, was it goes all the way round and repeats.
You also mention the gut somewhere.
Figure 3 leads me to ask: stadium wave or peristalsis ?
That is interesting, the AO/CO2 relationship. I will note that indices such as AO and NAO showed extremely low channel fraction variance of the signal. In other words, variability in AO and NAO due to the ‘wave’ signal was minimal (see channel-fraction variance plot in paper), despite the observation that they co-varied with the other indices. But despite the minimal apparent involvement of AO/NAO in the wave propagation, this point that you present may have significant implications. Kathryn A.Kelly at U. Wash has done a lot of great work on ocean-heat flux from western boundary currents in relation to the winds related to AO. Check out her 2004 series of publications (some w/ Dong). As this decadally varying degree of heat flux from the wbc and extension region appears to play a critical role in connecting regional processes via its influence on the jet, etc, this may be one avenue through which CO2 does have potential to affect the variability pattern of the wave. Ocean heat in wbc and extensions is extremely poorly modeled – a topic Kelly (and others) discuss in detail.
Re: ‘tempo’, in paper’s the usage is “secularly varying trend”.
Stadium wave ‘goes around’ and repeats. See text for more detailed explanation. Note: Groups + I through + IV are followed by Groups -I, etc. In short, we define indices of these groups, but as noted on figure 3, the troughs on plot reflect the negative group values, so to speak.
How does this wave get ‘back around’: Anomaly trends of Pacific circulations (Pacific Circulation Index (PCI)) coincide with AMO. The skeletal sequence goes thusly: -AMO to +AT and +NPGO to +NAO to +NINO to +NPO/PDO to +Arctic T and then +NHT. The basin-scale winds over the Pacific/NA region (PCI) represent anomaly intervals of general flow direction and intensity (related to ALPI, NPO, and indirectly to PDO). PCI coincides with AMO (same polarity). The sequence continues: +NHT followed by +PCI and +AMO, -AT/-NAO, etc…Based on literature, we speculate that the freshwater anomalies generated in the Atlantic per consequence of modified precipitation patterns resulting from the Pacific circulations (work by Latif, Shmittner (see our paper for citations)) may explain, or at least partly contribute to driving this apparent negative feedback that keeps the stadium wave ‘circulating’.
Peristalsis allows a visual of signal propagation, but stadium wave accounts for the continued propagation – i.e. no end…(no pun intended).
Re: removal of CO2 trend via your suggestions would be an interesting addition to this and related studies. Future dabbling. Will keep you posted.
Kathryn A.Kelly’s publications may be found on her page at UW.
Stadium waves and von Kármán vortex sheets: lessons from self-organizing dynamical oscillations
Theodore von Kármán’s vortex sheets are perhaps the single most celebrated example of self-organizing dynamical oscillation in fluid dynamics. Their fame rests upon three foundations:
• Kármán vortex sheets are seen in nature, and
• Kármán vortex sheets are predicted analytically, and
• Kármán vortex sheets are seen computationally.
A key question Wyatt/Curry stadium waves have been observed statistically. What advances are required for stadium waves to be seen computationally and analytically?
A stern lesson from history Wyatt/Curry stadium waves require confirmation from analysis and computation; otherwise they risk being regarded as one more statistics-driven model, of which the climate literature already contains innumerably many … this large corpus of cycle-seeking pure-statistics climate models is (rightly) ignored by most scientists, due to the dismal track record of cycle-seeking science in regard to explanatory and predictive power.
Conclusion In coming years, Wyatt/Curry stadium waves will prosper or perish in proportion to the analytic explanations, computational verifications, and predictive verifications that can be associated to them. The statistical detection is a promising start … but it is *only* a start.
Best wishes for successful passage through the analytic/computational/predictive gantlet of climate-change science, Marcia Wyatt and Judith Curry!
We still don’t know who fan is, and that is a travesty.
I hereby open a campaign to identify fan.
Readers are invited to contribute their knowledge and intuition toward this important task.
Here is my contribution (an educated guess): he is none other than Dr. James Hansen.
No, because Hansen is an excellent writer and can make logical connections. And I don’t believe he is vain enough to praise himself that effusively.
jacobpress
I think David Springer identified him. However if Fan wishes to remain anonymous that is fine provided he does not become an abusive troll.
tonyb
A question on commenting etiquette: if you identify someone, without using insider knowledge, is it fair to post it ? (Not saying that it applies here).
Nowadays corporations, special interests, ideologues, religious fanatics, and abusers all want us to believe that “privacy is theft™“
But is it? Common Sense tells us “no”.
jacobress:: I hereby open a campaign to identify fan.
Let me recommend otherwise. Read his links instead. In this instance, they are very worthwhile.
https://www.google.com/search?q=john+sidles&btnG=Search&rlz=1T4LENN_enUS461US461
tony no I didn’t identify him he was identified on another blog, I forget which, where he was posting comments as “a physicist” and inadvertantly in a blog comment put his email address in the “name” field and his name (‘a physicist’) in the email field. Thus his email address appeared instead of his name in the comment. His email address included his real name and University of Washington’s domain name.
Fanny
I think the proof of the pudding will be empirical (based on real-time observations), rather than theoretical (based on statistical analyses).
If the current “pause” (i.e. cooling) ends imminently and warming resumes, reaching 0.3C to 0.7C by 2035, as IPCC predicts in AR5, then Wyatt/Curry has most likely been falsified.
If the “pause” continues into the 2030s, as predicted by Wyatt/Curry, then the “stadium wave” hypothesis has been corroborated as a plausible explanation for (at least) a significant portion of the past warming and current slight cooling – and, while not falsifying AGW itself, it will most likely have falsified the IPCC hypothesis of CAGW (as outlined specifically in its AR4 and AR5 reports).
Max
Manacker, please keep in mind that the Wyatt/Curry stadium-wave model is entirely silent (AFAICT) in regard to sea-level rise, for which the *only* credible, in-depth, published, scientific explanation (at present) is CO2-driven energy imbalance (which predicts that sea-level rise will continue and eventually accelerate).
If the seas stopped rising for 20 years, that would indeed overturn pretty much all the IPCC5 models. It’s not clear what (if anything) Wyatt/Curry stadium-wave models have to say regarding this possibility.
If the rate of sea level rise does not increase over the next 20 years what will that mean to you?
Stable rates of sea-level rise, sustained in the next 20 years, would mean melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice-caps has not yet accelerated significantly.
Thank you for your question Manacker!
If the seas stopped rising it would be scary indeed for we’d likely be headed into the next ice age. Meantime the CO2 hypothesis has no predictive power either; likely less so than all the others; the main problem being that it is only a heating mechanism: To cause a cooling event you need a massive carbon sink to appear out of nowhere. Consensus scientists wax lyrically about heating events and CO2 but remain silent on cooling events – because they don’t have any useful theory with numbers or timescales; just a collection of contradictory and often unphysical, hand-waves.
“Manacker, please keep in mind that the Wyatt/Curry stadium-wave model is entirely silent (AFAICT) in regard to sea-level rise, for which the *only* credible, in-depth, published, scientific explanation (at present) is CO2-driven energy imbalance (which predicts that sea-level rise will continue and eventually accelerate).”
Sea level rise, Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trends_in_global_average_absolute_sea_level,_1870-2008_%28US_EPA%29.png
So I would stadium-wave model is not entirely silent, as one simply needs to compared it, vs the the existing seal level record.
“If the seas stopped rising for 20 years, that would indeed overturn pretty much all the IPCC5 models. It’s not clear what (if anything) Wyatt/Curry stadium-wave models have to say regarding this possibility.”
According to stadium-wave model sea level may pause, but it continue for next 20 year or longer.
I would say unlike global air temperature, the ocean has thousands of years of warming ahead of it. A warmed ocean will warm the air, but not quickly, and not in a CAGW fashion.
Is the long-term rate of SL rise accelerating?
Sea Level Reconstruction 1700-2100
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8117/8619344687_83fbf22c19_b.jpg
The first chart shows a SL reconstruction from 1700 to today. This shows an apparent decreasing SL over the 18thC, shifting in the early 19thC to a long-term rate of rise of 1.7 to 2.0 mm/year since then. The authors postulate an increasing rate of SL rise, following a second order polynomial trend starting back in 1700, but this could just as easily be explained by (the simpler solution of) a declining linear trend until the early 1800’s, followed by an increasing linear trend since then.
20thC Sea Level Trends
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3206/3144596227_545227fbae_b.jpg
The second chart shows that over the 20thC the SL record was marked by significant decadal oscillations in the rate of rise, varying from -1mm/year to +5mm/year, but no apparent acceleration over the period.
The rate of SL rise over the first half of the 20thC averaged around 2.0mm/year and 1.4mm/year over the second half, averaging around 1.7mm/year over the entire 20thC.
Most recently this rate appears to have stayed within the 20thC range at around 3mm/year.
The biggest change occurred in measurement methodology and scope, with the switch from tide gauges (which measure SL at various shorelines, where humans live) to satellite altimetry (which measures the entire ocean except polar regions and coastlines, which cannot be captured by satellites).
(Obviously, as can be seen from the 20thC chart, these two methods give different results.)
The “take-home” from all this is that any claims of “accelerating SL rise due to AGW” should be taken with a large grain of (sea) salt.
Max
Oooh! Oooh! Methodological points! Could you please set out your criteria for analytic explanations and computational verifications?
Theo Goodwin: Could you please set out your criteria for analytic explanations and computational verifications?
The highest standard was set by Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s laws.
More contemporary and pertinent examples can be found in Henk Dijkstra’s books: “Nonlinear Physical Oceanography” and “Nonlinear Climate Dynamics”. Other good examples can be found on Isaac Held’s blog.
Not to mention fomd’s links.
Did somebody hijack Fanny’s login? That was actually rational and insightful (and probably correct). Something’s wrong.
A fan of *MORE* discourse: Kármán vortex sheets are seen in nature, and
Not exactly the same, but vortexes have been seen on the edges of the Gulf Current, and they have been produced by analysis and simulation: “Nonlinear Physical Oceanography” by Henk A Dijkstra, pp 245-253.
In my opinion, this has been your best post ever. I second your message that this statistical analysis is a very good foundation for some dynamic modeler to follow up.
Sensible interpretation of careful exploration is by far the most crucial step on the path to enlightenment. I volunteer to help Marcia improve interpretations. As the interpretations currently stand, I politely caution again (as I have before) that the interpretations are not ready for modeling. For example, the key periods are 6 months, 1 year, QBO, & Schwabe (no “60 year”). There’s something about the way the solar cycle affects circulatory geometry that’s not being understood (AT ALL) by the majority of people speculating (in a manner inconsistent with hard-constrained wind & rotation observations unfortunately) about “60 year” cycles. It’s not yet clear exactly what. It’s hard to tell how much more contributor commentary will be necessary before it’s clear specifically what false assumptions underpin derailing misconceptualization (that untenably demands violation of the laws of large numbers &/or conservation of angular momentum). I’ll keep watching for the exposure of clues… (It would save a lot of time if folks would state their false assumptions upfront, but it seems a lot of the time people make their false assumptions unconsciously.)
Paul Vaughan, ” There’s something about the way the solar cycle affects circulatory geometry that’s not being understood (AT ALL) by the majority of people speculating (in a manner inconsistent with hard-constrained wind & rotation observations unfortunately) about “60 year” cycles. It’s not yet clear exactly what.”
A lot of it is noise. Not system noise, but metric noise. The AMO pattern is almost exactly repeated in the 30N-60N ocean area. That area is 46.8 million square kilometers or about 15% of the global ocean surface. If you convert the absolute temperature to approximately Watts/m-2, the “Global” impact of the AMO and PDO combined is about +/- 0.25 Wm-2. That fluctuation is amplified by land surface temperatures in the same latitude band of about the same area, because the land surface temperatures are at a higher average altitude with a lower average specific heat capacity and the (Tmax+Tmin)/2 method of determining “average” amplifies the variance.
Kind of funny huh? Warm tropical water forced by tides and Coriolis effect into a bottleneck created by a land mass funnel causes a small sensible energy fluctuation that drives folks absolutely nuts trying to figure it out. All the wile the real climate change action is in the southern hemisphere :)
not interested in your attempted obfuscation
“A lot of it is noise.”
On second thought, if you drop just this one quoted sentence, I’m not so offended.
[ :
Cheers!
Paul, you need to read what kind of noise. Surface temperature measured 2 meters above the surface combined with surface temperature measured 5 meters below the surface with a range of temperatures from 35C to -60C ain’t a great metric. It generates a lot of noise.
Dallas, the source of the NH MD wave is KNOWN. Upon 3rd check, you’ve misinterpreted. The musing was about ferreting out concealed false human assumptions, not the already-known cause of the MD NH wave.
btw I’m impressed with your notes about ENSO scrambling. Indeed it’s just the variance either side of the attractor, but Earth’s current geometry (land-ocean distribution) encrypts the simplicity, making it unrecognizable to most. I suggest you brush up on NH MD.
Noise isn’t a problem for well-constrained records. Most people don’t understand aggregation criteria well-enough to realize the sources of the constraints. With the right, carefully-tuned tools, you can see right through even the most severe noise. It’s a simple matter of understanding the hierarchical arrangement of the spatiotemporal constraints. I suspect we’re talking about 2 different things. Such cross-talk is a waste of time…
Paul, ” I suggest you brush up on NH MD.”
I am more into data acquisition. Measurements can lie to you. Because of that the ocean temperature data, sparse as it may be is the more reliable and most easily compared to paleo. Once you get reasonable error margins for the data, then you can take off on fine tuning, but the land surface temperature data while it has repeatable precision, just ain’t got the accuracy for an energy balance hunting for a 1Wm-2 of two over a few decades.
My results are based on SST dallas — no 2mT, so we’ve definitely just had a misunderstanding…
Paul, “My results are based on SST dallas — no 2mT, so we’ve definitely just had a misunderstanding…”
Which data set? I have been using ERSST bands with Reynolds to approximate absolute SST. The souhtern hemisphere prior to 1950 is horrible and both poles include approximates for ice area. Limiting things to 60S-60N helps, but 30S-30N reduces the bottleneck amplification and covers 70% of the ocean surface. The closer you get to the poles you get the more interesting the noise gets.
Dr Curry, and what about the southern hemisphere? Both half worlds are part on one, as you know, so there must be some interaction somewhere, somehow.
I usually avoid reading FMD’s posts but ” von Kármán vortex sheets”
[it’s streets , not sheets, BTW]
Thanks for the links and thanks for making sense for once.
Thanks Greg! “Sheets” and “Streets” both appear in the literature; either way vortex-shedding dynamics can be awesomely scary. Could a CO2-driven stadium wave ever builds to this kind of amplitude? We hope not!
On a kinder, gentler note:
The sound of the wind in the trees …
is the shedding of vortices.
The above poem (by “anonymous”) is for Beth!
So sensible that the emoticons can be ignored.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/10/suicide-rates-high-brazil-tribe
Marcia, congratulations on the publication of your and Judith Curry’s paper. I’m not a scientist, and this stuff is way beyond the limited knowledge I am endeavouring to build on by reading this blog (among others).
But, I can comment on your conduct in this thread, which has been calm, transparent and civil. You say that blogging is not your thing, but I beg to differ. If more scientists engaged with the public about their research in the way that you and Judith do, we would all be much better off.
I can’t comment on the science, but you get an A+ for science communication!
That’s very kind. I hope to live up to your generous characterization. Judy’s style is a great example to follow!
Is the “stadium wave” (personally I prefer to think of such geologic systems as Rube Goldberg mechanisms) strictly a Northern Hemisphere phenomenon?
Also, how do these coupled interactions influence, modify, reduce or enhance feedbacks?
I don’t know about the wave, but the oscillations are very similar.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4nh/plot/hadcrut4sh/plot/hadcrut4tr
Other series too (land, SST…).
Thx. When you blow up some time periods, there are out of phase intervals. Moreover, since these are lumped temperatures, the internal “waves” that may be present within local regions of the NH, SH and tropics are collapsed into one “signal”.
It is doubtful that the ‘wave’ is exclusive to the NH, as processes related to NH circulations directly affect the SH. Your point is well taken. We have not investigated the SH; thus I can only speculate that the SH participates. Data is not as abundant from the SH, but ultimately this should be explored. No doubt.
As far as coupled interactions influence, modify, reduce, or enhance feedbacks, that is a HUGE question. We do attempt to address this quite thoroughly in the discussion in the paper. I urge you to take a peek. If there are aspects that you don’t understand after having read (see section 4) it, then we can try to go through your specific questions.
Thanks. Really appreciate your feedback here and elsewhere. Also, you seem to be catching on to the blogging signal to noise ratio.
MD wave fades moving deeper into SH due to lack of land mass & land impediment to antarctic circumpolar (southern ocean) flow — (need midlatitude zonal land-sea contrast for meridional deflection of westerlies = differential land-sea equator-pole column-integrated-temperature gradient response to solar forcing, easily measured using a simple wavelet tachometer, which detects externally governed universal constraint)
Excellent!
This seems like a very plausible explanation for (at least a major portion of) the Arctic sea ice decline, and the global warming, which has been attributed by IPCC to date principally to AGW.
It seems more plausible at first glance than the IPCC explanation for two reasons:
– It would explain not only the current decline in Arctic sea ice, but also earlier periods of decline and recovery (which are not explained by the AGW attribution).
– The same goes for the earlier multi-decadal period of slight cooling (~1940-1970) and especially for the early 20thC period of rapid warming (1910-1940), which occurred prior to significant human GHG emissions.
– It would explain why only the Arctic sea ice is declining, and not also the sea ice in the Antarctic (which is growing), since the basic mechanism described is limited to the Northern high latitudes (and not global, as is AGW).
The authors write:
This will be “the proof of the pudding”.
If the “current pause in global warming” does extend into the 2030s, then Wyatt and Curry have identified the most likely “culprit”.
If the “current pause” reverses imminently, resulting in “a 0.3 to 0.7 degree Celsius rise in global mean surface temperature from 2016 to 2035”, then IPCC’s AGW hypothesis is more likely to be the reason.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
But in the meantime, while we are still uncertain that AGW is causing the warming and Arctic sea ice loss, let’s do more work to reduce uncertainties, but hold off on any costly mitigation actions that may be a total waste of resources and effort.
Max
The Hockey Team should hang heads in shame. Repent! Repent!
Actually, this may offer many of them an excuse to jump ship. At least conditionally.
I think it would be great if they abandoned their current ship and came aboard with Judy and Marcia and others who share their ken. Researching patterns in climate based on data have the potential to build a solid base for modeling. The problem with current models is that researchers have modeled without an understanding of the parts and interactions of same of the climate. Understand how the system is built before you jump to a model.
Making waves in the climate
debate,
another brick in the wall
falls.
Congrats to Marcia and Judith
on publication of your paper.
Marcia
Let me add my congratulations and thanks to the many that have already been expressed here.
Max
97% of alarmists are not impressed with the Stadium-Wave hypothesis. They are sticking with the Arm-Wave thing. According to Dana Nutticelli. Watch for the post on his goofy Guardian blog.
Wyatt/Curry stadium wave study is surely interesting and important. It clarifies and put together the work of several teams that have provided climate data and highlighted the existence of large oscillations such as the quasi 60-year oscillation observed in the climate.
The result is important because the models used by the IPCC do not reproduce this variability and, consequently, their interpretation of climate changes need to be severely revised.
A also Wyatt stated above, what is missing in Wyatt/Curry stadium wave study is what causes it in the first place.
As also some readers have noted above, several authors have noted this wave in the data. And numerous papers have been already published on similar topic. For example, David Springer cite Loehle and Scafetta (2011).
Indeed, I published much on the topic (about 20 works) since 2009 where on February I presented my results at a seminar at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington
http://yosemite.epa.gov/ee/epa/eed.nsf/vwpsw/360796B06E48EA0485257601005982A1#video
and later in 2010 at the 12th Japanese-American Kavli Frontiers of Science (JAFoS) Symposium organized by the U.S. National Academy of Science (NAS) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Japan.
iframe=true&width=80%25&height=80%25
And every year I presented these results at the AGU meetings.
However, there is not just the 60-year modulation. There are other specific cycles as well (decadal, bidecadal, secular and millennial ). These are discussed in details in my papers. And these cycle can be easily recognized in specific solar/astronomical and lunar oscillations which points toward the astronomical origin of these cycles.
Full models have been developed to reconstruct the temperature records based on these oscillations and full comparison with both CMIP3 and CMIP5 models have been already done.
For those interested in knowing more about this research, please visit my web-site
http://people.duke.edu/~ns2002/#astronomical_model
http://people.duke.edu/~ns2002/#astronomical_model_1
and also read my latest work
Scafetta, N. 2013. Discussion on climate oscillations: CMIP5 general circulation models versus a semi-empirical harmonic model based on astronomical cycles. Earth-Science Reviews 126, 321-357.
DOI: 10.1016/j.earscirev.2013.08.008
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825213001402
My papers can be downloaded also from my web-site.
Another Dukie.
Between you and Robert Brown, I am beginning to believe all those Blue Devils I’ve had to suffer may actually have a point.
In all seriousness, I consider you both to be a testament to the quality of Duke’s faculty.
Amen to that, brother. Duke is one of the three vertices of “Research Triangle” out of which has come innumerable advances in my own field of computer science.
http://www.cs.unc.edu/cms/about-us/the-research-triangle-area
A cherry picked anecdote:
The Nenana Ice Classic has interested me, as it is a continuous record since 1917 of the breakup of ice in the Tanana River near Nenana, Alaska.
In the 1980s and 1990s the trend was of breakups earlier in the year, and acivists pointed to that as evidence of AGW.
The tipping point was 1998, after which the trend has been later ice breakups, at a rate of about half of a day per year. This year the breakup was on May 20, a tie for the latest breakup date. The activists have been silent.
My eyeball sees a correlation between the day of breakup and Bob Tisdale’s graph of North Pacific SST.
I am anticipating the reversal of Arctic sea ice alarmism. Someday.
LOL … heck, why not pick a much BIGGER cherry, Don B?
Shrinking ice worries Great Lakes scientists
Winter ice cover has decreased 70% since 1970s
Fan, I live 25 miles south of Lake Erie, and yes our winters have been very mild lately, and I heard stories from my Dad of driving a car on the ice in the 50’s.
But the weather this summer reminds me of the weather of my childhood the 60’s and 70’s, not the 90’s and 00’s. Living in an area that get’s both sides of the jet stream (warm humid tropic air, and cool dry arctic air), we had a lot more cool air this year than we’ve had in a long time.
Let see how the ice does this winter. Personally I think we’ll have more early snow this year, and winters going to be colder than it has for a long time. Which should put the ice cutter to work.
A fan of *MORE* discourse: LOL … heck, why not pick a much BIGGER cherry, Don B? Shrinking ice worries Great Lakes scientists
Winter ice cover has decreased 70% since 1970s
If you have read all of Marcia Wyatt’s responses, you know that the ice shrank previously in the 30s, and it shrank before that as well. She referred to the 30s shrinkage as part of a 1930s discontinuity. Besides her post above, you can find alarmist newspaper reports from the 30s on the web.
Once the government turns their servers back on, you can 40+ years of arctic ice maps here http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/arctic/rediscover/dmi_sea_ice_maps/
Oh, I should have noted that the ice maps are from 1895-1939 and then some coverage of the 40’s and 50’s.
Cherry-picking indeed.
What you deniers have to learn is statistical analysis. You take a set of lakes such as you can find on the Minnesota DNR web site. Track the ice-out dates over ranges of latitude and then try to make sense of the huge variance intrinsic in such a measure as ice-out day.
Here is how to do it right:
http://contextearth.com/2013/09/15/ice-out/
The last year was quite late, but the year before was quite early. However, the long term trends say the calendar day ice-out is getting statistically earlier every year.
For several years the most plausible overall picture of the temperature development has been that it’s a combination of AGW and natural variability strong enough to cancel the warming over the last decade. It has also been known that a component of the variability seems to have a full period of about 60 years although the evidence has not been strong on any real periodicity or even quasi-periodicity.
What’s very interesting in this paper is that it present evidence for a succession of changes in various indices that seem to indicate that the variability has, indeed, properties typical for periodic phenomena where change in some properties drive changes in the next property and that the chain of such influences closes.
In my view that’s not to the least inconsistent with the main results of AR5 as the recent estimates of TCR and further of ECS allow for such a role of natural variability in the temperature development. How far to the future we should wait before the warming trend becomes visible again is a further question. My own guess is that we don’t need to wait for long to see some warming again, but reaching the maximal rate related to the next positive contribution of natural variability could take longer.
The effect of AGW has grown while the rate of cooling due to the natural variability may be close to its maximum. That leads me to expect that AGW will soon be the stronger influence. There are, however, also other factors that cause shorter term variability, and these factors may cause significant surprises in either direction in the shorter term trends.
All the above is speculative, and only what appears most plausible to me. Hopefully research like that of the present paper will allow in time for more informed guesses, if not real predictions.
Pekka
When you write- “The effect of AGW has grown while the rate of cooling due to the natural variability may be close to its maximum.” I congradulate you for adding “All the above is speculative, and only what appears most plausible to me.”
There is much to learn and it is funny to read the comments here from people so certain that their personal pet theory is positively correct.
Pekka
Your reasoning is sound.
It could well be that AGW will soon become the stronger warming signal than the cooling signal from natural factors.
It could also be, as Wyatt and Curry have suggested, that this might not occur until the mid 2030s (or two decades from now), as a result of the described “stadium wave” phenomenon.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
And, even if there is a delay of two more decades before warming resumes, this would not falsify AGW (nor do the authors claim this).
It simply raises serious doubts concerning CAGW based on high climate sensitivity (as outlined by IPCC in its AR4 and, more recently, AR5 reports).
Max
PS I should have written: ” your reasoning is im-pekka-ble”
Excellent points Pekka. I do like that the “stadium-wave” hypothesis is falsifiable in a fairly short period. It could also be the case that the characteristics of the wave could be impacted by anthropogenic factors, and thus the general hypotheses could be right but difficult to confirm as the Earth systems undergo such rapid change.
Pekka Pirilä October 11, 2013 at 10:21 am says:
“For several years the most plausible overall picture of the temperature development has been that it’s a combination of AGW and natural variability strong enough to cancel the warming over the last decade.”
No such combination of unrelated tendencies can be stable enough to last for 33 years. That is the combined total length of the no-warming period when the eighties and the nineties are added. That is 33 out of 34 years green-house-free. The extra year belongs to the super El Nino. Basically, there is no hope of resuscitating the IPCC version of the greenhouse effect. Ferenc Miskolczi predicted this in 2007 but was ignored. In 2010 he had experimental proof. Using NOAA database of weather balloon observations that goes back to 1948 he studied the absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere over time. And discovered that absorption had been constant for 61 years while carbon dioxide at the same time went up by 21.6 percent. This means that he addition of this substantial amount of CO2 to the air had no effect on the absorption of IR by the atmosphere/ And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. This has consequences. First, it cuts the legs right out from under the claim that greenhouse warming exists. Secondly, all doomsday predictions of warming that depend on the greenhouse effect are invalid. And third, any emission control laws passed with the aid of such predictions were passed under false premises and should be voided.
Mora et al. (which was cited in an earlier thread) project the timing when climate “departs from recent variability” as 2047 if no mitigation actions are undertaken, and 2069 if actions are implemented.
The authors add:
In its first summary report (1990), IPCC predicted that the enhanced greenhouse effect was not yet apparent, due to uncertainties relating to natural variability, but that this should occur by 2047, at the latest. This was defined as the date when the “globally and annually averaged land and sea surface temperature anomaly” (HadCRUT3 at the time) would exceed that of 1990 by 0.5ºC.
The anomaly was around 0.25ºC in 1990, so this would mean that the enhanced GH effect would be apparent when this indicator reached 0.75ºC.
This has not yet happened. We are now at around 0.45ºC, so an added 0.3ºC would be required in order to clearly identify the enhanced GH signal.
If IPCC are right, and the current “pause” will reverse itself at the end of this year, back to the observed warming trend (0.11ºC per decade since 1990), it will take 27 years for this to happen, i.e. by 2041, or a bit sooner than predicted by IPCC in 1990.
If Wyatt and Curry are right, and the current pause (or slight cooling at 0.05ºC per decade) continues until 2035, it will take until 2072 until the “magic number” is reached and we have a clear enhanced greenhouse signal.
This, plus the Mora et al. conclusion that mitigation would only delay things by 21 years, make their conclusion on the “urgency of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions if climates potentially harmful to biodiversity and society are to be prevented” sound a bit silly to me.
Have I got something wrong here?
Max
“Fig. 4. M-SSA spectrum of expanded stadium-wave network shown in figure 3. Error bars are based on North et al. (1982) criterion, with the number of degrees-of-freedom set to 40, based on decorrelation time of ~2.5 years. Red-dashed lines in panel represent the 95% spread of M-SSA eigenvalues based on 1000 simulations of the 15-valued red-noise model (1), which assumes zero true correlations between the members of the 15-index set.”
Something I was recently alerted to was that the appropriate error model for ice area is pink, not red because its 2D variable.
I was able to confirm this since I was looking at the sub 60 days periodogram of ice area and was wondering why 1/f (red) noise did not really fit. OTOH, 1/f^2 was a perfect fit to the very broadband noise. I’ll try to find a graph of this.
It hit me that maybe the same thing applies to these gridded temp time series. They are effectively a measure of the energy of an area of ocean. That in turn is the integral of all incoming and outgoing fluxes (be it radiative , convective or whatever). These are also areal measurements.
If we measure the temperature of an object it is a simple scalar quantity but what SST gridded temperature is measuring is actually an areal quantity.
Pink was certainly correct for ice area, would it be the correct error model for gridded SST ?
Red noise is based on a first order auto-regressive model : AR1 where each value is the previous value plus a white noise increment. Its red because it’s the integral of white noise. To make such an AR1 dataset stationary we can take d/dt This removes the random walk and red noise becomes white again.
Pink noise requires second diff to render it stationary, unbiased white noise.
A visual example may help:
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/hadsst3_median-triple1.png
Doesn’t that mean that a quadratic rise could be the result of a random walk in the presence of pink noise? That could have some very interesting implications.
Now Mosh’ seems well informed on this kind of stuff perhaps he will comment if he’s still following.
I’m doing what I always do. start back at the data, then walk it forward.
BTW hat tip and thanks to Tim Shannon for pointing out my error on ice noise model.
Getting my colours mixed up. Red is 1/f2 ; pink 1/f (per dimension) so 1/f2 for 2D. So red is probably correct for 2D temp data. Perhaps someone better as stats can comment.
My point is that it needs second diff to render it stationary, a typical precondition for spectral analysis (eg like SSA). A linear detrend won’t do this correctly.
This comes back to Pekka’s early point that a quadratic detrend would be better. That would seem roughly equivalent, though care is needed imposing assumptions.
It also raises the question that a random walk would be quadratic unless I’m mistaken.
Fan, we did analyze sea-level rise and its acceleration in our work. We culled it out b/c too many variables became potentially confusing and distracting of message. We had very interesting results regarding the ‘secularly varying’ trend of the SLR and SLR acceleration and its apparent participation in the wave.
The MD wave in SLR doesn’t come out cleanly with linear detrending (which makes false assumptions).
Did your ‘secularly varying’ trends in SLR resemble something like this:
https://sites.google.com/site/climateadj/multiscale-trend-analysis—hadcrut4
A ~60yr cycle was apparent the both the plots of hadcrut4 and gmsl. The gmsl data was taken from Jevrejeva et al (2006). I don’t believe the recent Church and White data aligns as nicely.
AJ, I did use the Jevrejeva et al data, as you suspected. I became aware of the dataset after reading one of Scafetta’s recent papers (2013) on oscillations in SL. You probably know this, but for those that might not, while Jevrejeva et al.’s data is presented in their 2008 paper as globally representative, the three sites whose measurements were used come from the North Atlantic, if I remember correctly. This was not an issue, and does not distract from their argument, but a point worth keeping in mind when attempting to dissect the dynamics at play.
The 60-year pattern is definitely there, as Scafetta showed, but the stadium wave signal was weak in the SLR. Variance in the SL acceleration was strong. The negative SLR co-varied with Group I; negative SL acceleration with ALPI in Group III. We chose not to include the index. While interesting, it was not crucial to our hypothesis.
Btw, very interesting work you’ve done, shown on that link.
Thanks Marcia… if you don’t like the available sea level data, you can always roll your own:
https://sites.google.com/site/climateadj/nh-sea-level-reconstruction
FYI you are cited
http://www.technology.org/2013/10/11/stadium-waves-explain-lull-global-warming/
from
http://phys.org/news/2013-10-stadium-lull-global.html
it seems that they interpret your proposal as an explanation for the pause, not as a questioning on the amplitude of glowal warming…
Taleb call that “history being written by the losers”… Pravda called information.
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Marcia,
I have questions about Frolov 2009. #http://wdc.aari.ru/datasets/d0005/txt/
appears to be ice extent, but that table of data refers to this collection as
also containing SAT.
Their ‘SAT’ refers to mean annual surface air temperature in the zone from 70 to 85 degrees N for the years 1900 to 2007
yes, looking at the data files, Its unclear what SAT is.
Some notes to explain the data set would help as well as headers. I know it’s not yours, Dr. Wyatt.
Steve, I apologize for not answering the actual question you asked. I did to you what I don’t like people to do to me! So sorry. I went to that link tonight and was embarrassed to see it was only the ice extent. Mea culpa. Personally, I got the data directly from one of the scientists at AARI. I later purchased their book, where it is given in the appendix. I have sent the data collection to Judy. You can email her or me for that document. I apologize!
The way the data were treated was specifically to extract the coherent part of the collective signal. We do not get a quantitative assessment of how much of the variance is accounted for in this way as far as I noticed. It may be quite small, which would reduce the importance of the result.
Regardless, the fact that a signal must emerge from the data because of the way the data was treated does not explain the extremely smooth curves. The paper implicitly acknowledges that it is the low frequency of these curves that is the core result, and one that might not be expected a priori.
The 5% chance of obtaining the result is perhaps something of a green jellybean – http://xkcd.com/882/ – presumably for instance the southern hemisphere data doesn’t show a comparable oscillation or we’d have heard about it. And perhaps some other indices were tried and not shown.
Still, the smoothness of the curves is striking enough to require some explanation.
What would McIntyre say? I am not ready to rule out an artifact of the processing. It would be nice if the entire calculation, from raw data to displayed curves, were available online for inspection and replication.
The method itself seems like it may have broad application, so that’s another reason to publish the code.
I am concerned by
“… Modeled results are often invoked to guide projected climate trends, yet WP found no
680 decadal to multidecadal-scale hemispherically propagating signal in networks of indices
681 simulated from data generated by runs of the CMIP3 suite of models, leading to the inference
682 that 21st-century model simulations may not accurately capture dynamics necessary to
683 reconstruct stadium-wave behavior.”
Can I infer that you looked at 21st century CMIP runs, not 20th century ones?
Clearly, one of the first things to look for here is whether what you have found is simply the departure of twentieth-century forcing from linear-with-time. To compare with 21st century simulations without looking at 20th century simulations seems to me to avoid that issue.
The channel fraction variance reflects the degree to which the ‘wave’ signal accounts for each index’s variability. See figure 5 of manuscript. Discussion included in section 3.
Earliest analysis worked with raw indices, first smoothed five-year. Then replaced with plots using 13-year. The ‘propagation’ was evident. The next step was to assess if MSSA could identify patterns of co-variability shared by all indices in a given network.
The results showed no patterns of co-variability among the collected indices at time scales less than this multi-decadal time scale. I can see about posting some of my raw-data plots. Give me a little time on that though (this blogging stuff is time consuming!!!). I’ll make a note-to-self.
No, looked only at CMIP3 20th century runs (and some to 1850). The purpose was to duplicate all methods in WKT2012, using identical indices, to see if results b/n the two studies were the same. We used runs that included CO2 increases and runs that were ‘pre-industial’, with no CO2 added. No propagation signal in any. No sense in extrapolating to 21st century if 20th century models don’t mimic what is found in instrumental data. No avoidance.