by Donald Rapp
Why after 400 years of La Niña precedence, did periods of El Niños dominance start in the 20th century? And why did the two periods of strong El Niño dominance in the 20th century occur during a period when the CO2 concentration was rising? Is there a link between rising CO2 and the El Niño – La Niña balance? But if there is such a link, why did El Niños become less prevalent than La Niñas from 1941 to 1976 and be in balance after 1998?
Introduction
Bob Tisdale is noted for his extensive reviews, discussions and analyses of El Niño and La Niña occurrences and their implications for climate change. He emphasized that the Pacific Ocean covers 1/3 of the earth and its condition impacts the climate of the whole earth. The Pacific periodically goes through transitions from El Niño to neutral to La Niña, and vice versa. In an El Niño, warm waters cover a sizable portion of the Pacific, which heats the atmosphere. Tisdale has shown that at least in the 20th century, one can correlate durations of increase in global temperature with periods of El Niño dominance. Actually, the global warming of the 20th century correlates better with Niño indices than it does with CO2 concentration. He has therefore argued that a substantial part (if not all) of the global warming of the past ~120 years can be attributed periods of imbalance in favor of El Niños, rather than the effect of rising CO2 concentration.
Tisdale pointed out that the establishment view is that rising greenhouse gas concentrations over time cause a steadily increasing forcing that tends to drive earth temperatures upward. According to this viewpoint, the sequence of periodic changes in the El Niño – La Niña balance is superimposed on this continuing trend. During periods of El Niño dominance the warming due to El Niños adds to the warming effect due to rising greenhouse gases, and during periods of La Niña dominance the cooling due to La Niñas reduces the warming effect due to rising greenhouse gases.
A common belief in the climate establishment is that El Niño – La Niña sequences will eventually balance out over long periods of time, and warming due to greenhouse gases will be the dominant trend over longer periods of time. However, when one actually examines the data, one finds that the El Niños and La Niñas were not in balance during the 20th century. Starting in year 1900, and continuing to about 1941, El Niños were more prevalent and stronger than La Niñas. Also during this period, the earth warmed significantly. From about 1941 to about 1976, El Niños and La Niñas were fairly balanced, although there was a slight excess of La Niñas. The earth cooled slightly during this period but the prevalence of La Niñas was weak. From 1976 to 1998, El Niños strongly dominated over La Niñas. This 23-year period included the very strong El Niño of 1982-3 and culminated in the very strong El Niño of 1997-8. The earth warmed rapidly during this period from 1976 to 1998. In fact, about half the warming of the 20th century occurred during those 23 years. With the termination of the great El Niño of 1997-8, we entered a period of balance between El Niños and La Niñas and the earth’s temperature remained essentially unchanged from 1998 to 2014.
From the results reported above, one could infer that the climate of the earth has been controlled by the El Niño – La Niña balance during the past 120 years. When El Niños dominate, the earth warms; and when La Niñas dominate, the earth cools. When they are balanced, the earth tends to remain at a constant average temperature. One could possibly go further (as Tisdale has done) and argue that CO2 had little to do with the earth’s climate these past 120 years; only the state of the Pacific Ocean determined the climate. Unfortunately it is difficult to prove this proposition.
Proxies have been used to estimate the El Niño – La Niña balance over the past ~500 years. Proxies are not as reliable as direct temperature measurements, and tree rings in particular have shown some poor correlation with measured temperatures. In general, comparisons of proxies with measured temperatures during the calibration periods tend to show only moderate correlation. Nevertheless, proxies are the only source we have for estimating the El Niño – La Niña balance over the past longer periods of time. The proxies indicate that for 400 years prior to year 1900, the Pacific remained mainly in a La Niña – dominant mode and earth temperatures were lower than in the 20th century.
Thus one could argue that for 400 years, the earth was cool, in some way due to a prevalence of La Niñas, and this reversed in the 20th century during which there were two major periods of El Niño dominance in which all the global warming of the 20th century took place.
But then the question arises: Why after 400 years of La Niña precedence, did periods of El Niños dominance start in the 20th century? And why did the two periods of strong El Niño dominance in the 20th century occur during a period when the CO2 concentration was rising? Is there a link between rising CO2 and the El Niño – La Niña balance? But if there is such a link, why did El Niños become less prevalent than La Niñas from 1941 to 1976 and be in balance after 1998? These periods were periods of rising CO2. What other variables were changing during these periods? These might include solar intensity, cloud cover, wind patterns, etc. The data are sketchy and do not seem to lead to any clear answers.
Is nature teasing us? Coincidental with the period when CO2 started rising rapidly, did nature decide to have two periods of strong El Niños that increased the earth’s average temperature? Or did the occurrence of strong El Niños require some sort of CO2 trigger?
Meanwhile some alarmists are pinning their hopes of a new period of rising earth temperatures on emergence of a new El Niño later this year. But in doing so, are they implicitly admitting that the earth does not warm unless there is an excess of El Niños?
In an NPR interview, Kevin Trenberth was quoted as follows:
“The oceans can at times soak up a lot of heat. Some goes into the deep oceans where it can stay for centuries. But heat absorbed closer to the surface can easily flow back into the air. That happened in 1998, which made it one of the hottest years on record.”
Trenberth says since then, the ocean has mostly been back in one of its soaking-up modes.
“They probably can’t go on much for much longer than maybe 20 years, and what happens at the end of these hiatus periods, is suddenly there’s a big jump [in temperature] up to a whole new level and you never go back to that previous level again,” he says.
You can think of it like a staircase. Temperature is flat when a natural cool spell cancels out the gradual temperature increase caused by human activity. But when there’s a natural warm spell on top of the long-term warming trend, the story is dramatically different.
“When the natural variability or when the weather is going in the same direction as global warming, suddenly we’re breaking records, we’re going outside of the bounds of previous experience, and that is when the real damage occurs,” Trenberth says.
Trenberth’s view is that the earth is out of balance (acquiring more heat from the Sun than it can reject to space) and this excess heat finds its way into the oceans. When enough heat is stored in the surface waters, it eventually comes out as in the form of an El Niño. But, we have had El Niños on and off for hundreds of years without rising greenhouse gases, and there was very significant El Niño activity between 1900 and 1942 when CO2 concentrations were much lower. The regime shift at year 1900 was just as dramatic as the regime shift of 1977, and the persistence of El Niños from 1900 to 1942 was just as pervasive as that from 1977 to 1998. Any proposed explanation would have to deal with this widely ignored early phase of high El Niño activity.
And once the heat is released from the ocean to the atmosphere via an El Niño, why can “you never go back to that previous level again”? In fact, during the long hiatus in El Niño dominance from 1942 to 1976, the earth did cool somewhat. Would a really good dose of La Niñas, such as prevailed prior to 1900, bring earth temperatures down significantly? Or is Trenberth’s “staircase” analogy correct – that we can only go up from here?
Now, Trenberth seems to be pinning his hopes for further warming on the emergence of a new era of El Niño dominance to release all the heat he believes is stored in the surface waters of the Pacific. He might have a good point here but since we are dealing here with the crucial process by which the earth warms as a result of some sort of supposed interaction between rising greenhouse gases and their presumed impact on the El Niño – La Niña balance in the pacific, surely this topic requires a great deal more explanation, explication and filling out of details than these brief sound bites by Trenberth?
Indeed, all the climate scientists in the world ought to halt their myriad little ventures and come to grips with this all consuming aspect of climate change. Is the mechanism for global warming that rising greenhouse gas concentrations produce a heat imbalance that warms surface waters of the Pacific, leading to periodic episodes of El Niño dominance that acts as THE mechanism for warming the earth? If so, why do we have these extended periods (1942-1976 and 1998-2014) where the Pacific is supposedly biding its time while storing up energy?
Wang and Picaut (2004) wrote an excellent review of proposed mechanisms for ENSO phenomena. They pointed out “The issue of ENSO as a self-sustained oscillation mode or a stable mode triggered by random forcing is not settled… Since 1988, four concepts have been proposed for the oscillatory and self-sustained nature of ENSO. They also represent the negative feedbacks of a growing ENSO stable mode triggered by stochastic forcing, and are unified in a single concept. More data and model diagnoses are needed to test these concepts or to discover others.” They also went on to say:
“The relationship between ENSO and global warming is largely unknown. We are not even sure if greenhouse warming will result in an El Niño-like or La Niña-like pattern in the tropical Pacific. To understand the relationship between anthropogenic and natural climate variability, global coupled ocean-atmosphere models must be greatly improved and simulate both ENSO and the response to greenhouse warming.”
They closed with a statement: describing ENSO as a “fascinating puzzle of nature”.
Clearly, Trenberth’s sound bites don’t answer the mail on this puzzle.
Eight years later, Wang et al. (2012) concluded
“The issue of ENSO as a self-sustained oscillation mode or a stable mode triggered by random forcing is not settled. It is possible that ENSO is a self-sustained mode during some periods, a stable mode during others, or a mode that is intermediate or mixed between the former and the latter.”
In regard to the effect of global warming on ENSO, Wang et al. (2012) concluded:
“ENSO changes under global warming are uncertain. The tropical Pacific response to global warming has been suggested to be neither El Niño-like nor La Niña-like since the mechanisms for these changes are different from that of ENSO events – the Bjerknes feedback. Increasing greenhouse gases changes the background mean states in the tropical Pacific Ocean and atmosphere which in turn induce ENSO changes. However, the response of the mean states to increasing greenhouse gases is uncertain. For example, the tropical Pacific zonal SST contrast under global warming is reported to be either strengthened or weakened. The uncertainty in the eastern Pacific warming may be also caused by the Atlantic warming. Due to the fact that the change in tropical mean condition under global warming is quite uncertain even during the past few decades, it is hard to say whether ENSO is going to intensify or weaken, but it is very likely that ENSO will not disappear in the future.”
Cobb et al. (2013) used corals to estimate ENSO variance throughout the Holocene. They concluded:
“Twentieth-century ENSO variance is significantly higher than average fossil coral ENSO variance but is not unprecedented. Our results suggest that forced changes in ENSO, whether natural or anthropogenic, may be difficult to detect against a background of large internal variability.”
1. Nino Indices and Running Sums 1870 – Present
1.1 Cane (2004)
Cane (2004) provided Nino3 data as shown in Figure 1. The data in this figure is “commonly used index of El Niño, the sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly in the NINO3 region of the eastern equatorial Pacific (90°W-150°W, 5°S-5°N)”.
Figure 1. The Nino3 index according to Cane (2004).
This data is presented in slightly different form in Figure 2.
Figure 2. The Nino3 index according to Cane (2004), with color added.
Figure 3 suggests that over the time period 1866 to the present, there have been five eras of El Niño activity:
- From 1866 to 1900, La Niñas were more prevalent and stronger than El Niños. Also during this period, the earth was cooler than it is today..
- Starting in year 1900, and continuing to about 1941, El Niños were more prevalent and stronger than La Niñas. Also during this period, the earth warmed significantly.
- From about 1941 to about 1976, El Niños and La Niñas were fairly balanced, although there was a slight excess of La Niñas. The earth cooled slightly during this period.
- From 1976 to 1998, El Niños strongly dominated over La Niñas. This 23-year period included the very strong El Niño of 1982-3 and culminated in the very strong El Niño of 1997-8. The earth warmed rapidly during this period from 1976 to 1998. In fact, about half the warming of the 20th century occurred during those 23 years.
- With the termination of the great El Nino of 1997-8, we entered a period of balance between El Ninos and La Ninas and the earth’s temperature remained essentially unchanged from 1998 to 2014.
Figure 3. The Nino3 index according to Cane (2004) showing five eras.
To clarify the various periods of time with differing El Nino and La Nina ratios, we plot a running sum of the data from Figure 2 in Figure 4. (Bob Tisdale presents many such running sums in his various postings).
Figure 4. Running sum of Nino3 index according to Cane (2004) showing five eras.
A comparison of the running sum of the Nino3 index and the global average temperature is given in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Comparison of the running sum of the Nino3 index and the global average temperature.
1.6 Douglass (2010)
Douglass (2010) refined the Nino3.4 index. His results are shown in Figure 6. Douglass’ results are very similar to those of Cane (2004).
Figure 6. Nino3.4 index and running sum according to Douglass (2010).
1.3 Wolter and Timlin (2011)
Wolter and Timlin (2011) developed a Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) that combines inputs from six atmosphere–ocean variable fields in the tropical Pacific basin. It is claimed that it provides a more complete and flexible description of the ENSO phenomenon than single variable ENSO indices such as the Niño indices. Their result is shown in Figure 7. The results of Wolter and Timlin (2011) indicate that the entire period from 1872 to 1918 was primarily dominated by La Niñas with a few exceptions (1877-8, 1897-1907). The periods from 1918 to 1942 and from 1977 to 1998 were dominated by El Ninos. While their running sum differs quantitatively from that of Cane (2004) it still suggests cold prior to 1920, roughly neutral from 1942 to 1977, and warm from 1977 to 1998.
1.4 Yu and Kim (2013)
Yu and Kim (2013) distinguished between El Niño events of the Central-Pacific (CP) type, the Eastern-Pacific (EP) type, or the Mixed type. But totaling up all types of events, their results are shown in Figure 8. Their results differ in detail from those of Cain (2004) and Wolter and Timlin (2011). In particular they show the period prior to 1942 to be dominated by La Niñas.
Figure 7. The Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) of Wolter and Timlin (2011).
Figure 8. El Niño events according to Yu and Kim (2013).
1.5 Giese and Ray (2011)
Giese and Ray performed a new ocean reanalysis that assimilated all available hydrographic and sea surface temperature data into a model of the global ocean forced with surface boundary conditions from an atmospheric reanalysis, covering the period from 1871 to 2008. Their result is shown in Figure 9.
Figure 9. El Niño – La Niña balance according to Giese and Ray (2011).
1.6 Minobe et al. (2004)
Minobe et al. presented Figure 10 that gives their estimate of the standard deviation from average of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. This clearly shows the era of El Niño events dominating between 1900 and 1941, except for 1916-1920, La Niña events dominating between 1940 and 1976, and El Niño events again dominating from 1976 to 1998. These results are plotted in Figure 11.
Figure 10. Standard deviation from average of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation according to Minobe et al. (2004).
Figure 11. Standard deviation from average of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation according to Minobe et al. (2004).
2. Regime Shifts in the 20th Century
It has been widely acknowledged in the literature that the Pacific Ocean underwent a rather sudden change in the period around 1976-1977, in which all relevant indices (PDO, SOI, ENSO) turned sharply toward prevalence of El Niño events compared to La Niña events. For example, Minobe et al. (2004) said:
“One of the interesting features of the decadal variability over the Pacific Ocean is the so-called climatic “regime shift”, the 1976/77 regime shift being a prime and well studied example.”
Trenberth and Hoar (1997) concluded that “the tendency for more El Niño and fewer La Niñas events since the late 1970s is highly unusual and very unlikely to be accounted for solely by natural variability.” However they admitted “at present, it is not possible to make such an attribution” [whether this ENSO behavior is linked to or a consequence of global warming due to increased greenhouse gas concentrations].
Frauenfeld et al. (2005) mentioned a “Pacific Climate Shift with negative anomalies prior to 1976/77 and almost exclusively positive anomalies since…”
Guilderson and Schrag (1998) said:
“Several studies have noted that the pattern of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability changed in 1976, with warm (El Niño) events becoming more frequent and more intense. This ‘1976 Pacific climate shift’ has been characterized as a warming in SSTs through much of the eastern tropical Pacific.”
DiLorenzo et al. (2007) said:
“Particularly dramatic physical and biological excursions occurred during the 1976–77 change in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.”
Hare and Mantua (2000) said:
“It is now widely accepted that a climatic regime shift transpired in the North Pacific Ocean in the winter of 1976–77. This regime shift has had far reaching consequences for the large marine ecosystems of the North Pacific. Despite the strength and scope of the changes initiated by the shift, it was 10 to 15 years before it was fully recognized. Subsequent research has suggested that this event was not unique in the historical record but merely the latest in a succession of climatic regime shifts.”
Wu, Lee, and Liu (2005) said:
“The 1970s North Pacific climate regime shift is marked by a notable transition from the persistent warming (cooling) condition over the central (eastern) North Pacific since the late 1960s toward the opposite condition around the mid 1970s…This large-scale decadal climatic regime shift has produced far-reaching impacts on both the physical and biological environment over the North Pacific and downstream over North America.”
Kim and Miller (2007) studied “the 1976/1977 climate regime shift.” They concluded that the thermocline warmed but did not deepen.
Power and Smith (2007) emphasized that “the lowest 30-year average value of the June–December SOI just occurred in 1977–2006” along with “the highest tropical sea-surface temperatures on record [in] what appears to be a concurrent period of unprecedented El Niño dominance.”
Indeed, a casual glance at Figures 1 to 11 would confirm that such a change did indeed take place during the 1976-1977 period.
Other regime shifts have been mentioned in the literature. Minobe et al. (2004) mentioned regime shifts in the 1920s, the 1940s and the late 1990s.
Gedalof and Smith (2001) said: “the step-like climate shift that occurred in 1976-1977 is not a unique event, with similar events having occurred frequently during the past 400 years”. They also concurred that regime shifts occurred in the 1920s (a trend favoring El Niños) and the 1940s (a trend favoring La Niñas). While there are some significant differences in details in the various studies presented in Figures 1-10, all the figures suggest (in one form or another) a trend favoring El Niños starting in the 1920s and a trend favoring La Niñas starting in the 1940s. The ending of the warming trend after the El Niño of 1998 has been a source of extensive discussion on the Blogs, although the IPCC side-stepped it.
Figures 4 and 6 suggest a strong regime shift around year 1900, of about the same magnitude as the regime shift at 1977. This occurred when the CO2 concentration was lower than 300 ppm.
3. The balance Between El Niños and La Niñas Since 1500
D’Arrigo et al. (2005) provided an estimate of the Nino3 index over the past six centuries based on tree ring data but the comparison of their model with data during the calibration period (1860 to 1980) is unimpressive. Nevertheless they found La Niñas dominant in the late 1800s and from about 1940 to 1980, while El Niños were dominant from about 1900 to 1940. From 1400 to about 1800, El Niños and La Niñas were roughly equally balanced.
Li, et al. (2013) produced a seven-century-long ENSO reconstruction based on 2,222 tree-ring chronologies from both the tropics and mid-latitudes in both hemispheres. They claimed that inclusion of tropical records enabled them to achieve unprecedented accuracy in this estimate. Their result is shown in Figure 12. However, one disturbing aspect of this figure is that during the period 1900-1940, the Pacific was predominantly in the El Niño mode, whereas their figure suggests this period to be predominantly in the La Niña mode. Nevertheless, the main point of their result is that it indicates that from 1300 to about the middle of the 20th century, the state of the Pacific meandering between neutral and predominantly La Niña, with El Niños generally less frequent than La Niñas.
Figure 12. Reconstructed sea surface temperatures in the Nino3.4 region. (Li, et al. (2013)).
Gergis and Fowler (2008) used proxies to estimate the number of strength of La Niñas and El Niños from the 1520s to recent times. They categorized these events as extreme, very strong, strong, moderate or weak. They tabulated the number of events for each intensity, per ten-year period, starting in the 1520s. Their results indicate that La Niñas predominated from 1520 to 1900 (with a short period of strong El Niños from 1700 to 1725). After 1900 there was a slight preference for El Niños. Their results for the 20th century do not agree with results of other studies, so their entire set of results is of uncertain veracity.
Gedalof and Smith (2001) found a number of regime shifts during the period 1600-2000. They found:
Preference for El Niños: 1680-1696; 1712-1734; 1758-1796; 1816-1840; 1923-1940; 1977-1998
Preference for La Niñas: 1696-1712; 1798-1816; 1946-1977
Link to References
JC note: This post was submitted to me via email. This is a guest post, please be civil. This is also a technical thread; keep your comments strictly on topic
The El Padre is thought to have dominated during the Eocene, the last time CO2 levels were about as high as today, when the Arctic and Antarctic were about 20C degrees warmer.
An Ooblek-level proof of AGW would be an El Padre: El Nino without end, accompanied by unexpected extremes not normally ascribed to El Nino in terms of intensity, frequency, duration or direction.
The shoaling of the isthmus of Panama changes the ENSO dynamic fundamentally – as well as plunging the planet into repeated glacial/interglacial interludes. A more dominant negative Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation – cooling or warming of the north-east Pacific combined with changes in the frequency and intensity of ENSO events – seems much more likely. More frequent and intense La Nina (El Niño) associated with cool (warm) PDO. These seem likely driven by polar fronts pushing more or less cold polar water into the Peruvian and Californian Currents. These in turn seem associated with solar UV variability and interactions with stratospheric ozone.
The Holocene spanning ENSO proxy by Moy et al (2002) shows a shift from almost total La Nina dominance to more of a balance some 5,000 years ago – corresponding to the drying of the Sahel. As well as quasi 1000 year periodicity in the frequency and intensity of ENSO events, mega droughts and mega floods, periods where La Niña or El Niño all but disappear for hundreds of years.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/ENSO11000.gif.html?sort=3&o=217
‘… a series of intense El Niño events (high red color intensity) begins at about 1450 BC that will last for centuries. In that period normal (La Niña) conditions
have but disappeared. For comparison, the very strong
1998 El Nino event scores 89 in red color intensity. During
the time when the Minoans were fading, El Niño events
reach values in red color intensity over 200.’ http://www.clim-past.net/6/525/2010/cp-6-525-2010.pdf
The high resolution Law Dome ice core salt content proxy by Vance et al 2012 shows – along with the familiar decadal variability – centennial variability with the past hundred years rising to a millennial peak of El Niño frequency.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Vance2012-AntarticaLawDomeicecoresaltcontent.jpg.html?sort=3&o=158
ENSO warming or cooling is not susceptible to simple narrative. That should be a familiar refrain by now.
I am still waiting for experimental confirmation that increasing 10 micrometer illumination of a water body surface where the water is free to evaporate decreases the cooling rate of the water body.
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?
Roy Spencer would like to see that experiment too. I wasn’t aware that after years of asking into it someone in the climate science community finally figured out that no one has actually measured how effective 10um infrared illumination is at retarding heat loss in a body of water free to evaporate.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/04/can-infrared-radiation-warm-a-water-body/
No detectable difference in cooling rate of water bodies in this experiment.
http://i42.tinypic.com/2h6rsoz.jpg
The biggest underlying mistake in global warming pseudoscience is that the ocean is treated as a black body. It’s a selective body that responds differently to different wavelengths of light. CO2 warming is effective as advertised over dry land. Where there is water free to evaporate the effect is greatly diminished.
Why are you using anchor tags without links? This just clutters the threads up and makes your posts look like FOMD’s.
Why are you using anchor tags without links?
BECAUSE I CAN.
‘During positive ENSO phase (El Niño), outgoing LW radiation increases, and decreases during the negative ENSO phase (La Niña). The coldest year during the last decade occurred in 2008, during which strong La Nina conditions persisted throughout most of the year. Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) observations show that the lower temperatures extended throughout much of the troposphere for several months, resulting in a reduction in outgoing LW radiation and an increase in net incoming radiation. At the global scale, outgoing LW flux anomalies are partially compensated for by decreases in midlatitude cloud fraction and cloud height, as observed by Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer, respectively. CERES data show that clouds have a net radiative warming influence during La Niña conditions and a net cooling influence during El Niño, but the magnitude of the
anomalies varies greatly from one ENSO event to another.’
ENSO changes the locations where cloud occurs – but doesn’t seem to change total cloudiness or total rainfall all that noticeably. Total cloudiness seems more clearly associated the north eastern Pacific aspects of the system.
e.g. http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Clementetal2009.png.html?sort=3&o=148
‘In a study that was widely interpreted as a demonstration of a positive global warming cloud feedback, Amy Clement and colleagues (2009) presented observational evidence of decadal change in cloud cover in surface observation of clouds from the Comprehensive Ocean Atmosphere Data Set (COADS). ‘Both COADS and adjusted ISCCP data sets show a shift toward more total cloud cover in the late 1990s, and the shift is dominated by low- level cloud cover in the adjusted ISCCP data. The longer COADS total cloud time series indicates that a similar magnitude shift toward reduced cloud cover occurred in the mid-1970s, and this earlier shift was also dominated by marine stratiform clouds. . . Our observational analysis indicates that increased SST and weaker subtropical highs will act to reduce NE Pacific cloud cover.’ As was clearly stated in the paper, the evidence was for a decadal cloud feedback negatively correlated with SST. The feedbacks correspond exactly to changes in the Pacific multi-decadal pattern.’ http://www.drroyspencer.com/Clement-et-al-cloud-feedback-Science-2009.pdf
Put it all together and this suggests a cloud amplification for solar variability – and a inkling that declining solar UV will result in La Niña dominance for hundreds of years to come.
In your case, Bart, it is El Mierda del Toro. That pretty much sums up the state of climate science.
Oops! That would be La Mierda del Toro.
David Springer wrote: “I am still waiting for experimental confirmation that increasing 10 micrometer illumination of a water body surface where the water is free to evaporate decreases the cooling rate of the water body.”
If the atmosphere over the water already is saturated with water vapor, as often is the case in the tropics, then an increase in the back radiation to the surface will not increase the rate of evaporative cooling since the air can’t hold any more moisture. Now, suppose the increase in back radiation from the atmosphere doesn’t reduce the rate of cooling of the water body. Where would the energy go? First it has to warm the skin until the upwelling radiation from the skin balances the increase in back radiation. This temperature increase of the skin may cause an increase in the rate of convection above the surface. It will thus take some of the heat away. But it will *also* reduce the temperature gradient of the surface layer and hence reduce heat conduction below the skin. Hence, there will be a net gain of heat in the water body, because its ability to get rid of the energy gained by the Sun will be reduced.
Pierre-Normand just makes things up out of thin air. Such as:
“If the atmosphere over the water already is saturated with water vapor, as often is the case in the tropics”
This is almost never the case in the tropics. It’s called fog when that happens, dummy.
I suggest this troll Pierre-Normand be ignored.
“The biggest underlying mistake in global warming pseudoscience is that the ocean is treated as a black body. It’s a selective body that responds differently to different wavelengths of light.”
The ocean surface is close enough to a black body in the IR spectrum. Its emissivity is 0.96 in the 1 to 100 micron range and 0.98 to 0.99 in the 8 to 14 micron range.
No dopey it is not. A black body is a perfect absorber and perfect radiator across all frequencies. The ocean is close to transparent for shortwave from the sun and close to opaque to longwave back-radiated from greenhouse gases and clouds.
Write that down and please stop making me correct your natural science illiterate ass.
All forms of net heat transfer react strongly to changes in temperature differentials at a fixed small (millimeters or less) depth in the water and at a fixed small (meters) altitude in the atmosphere. Changes in the IR balance are compensated so effectively by changes in sensible and latent heat balances that the temperature profile changes very little. The influence of added CO2 does not come from there, it comes from the upper troposphere. When the upper troposphere cannot lose as much heat by IR emission. less heat can be transferred up from the low troposphere. That makes the low troposphere warmer and the surface warmer.
Added CO2 operates always through changes in the radiative balance at the tropopause. What happens at lower altitudes must be derived from that. (What happens in the stratosphere has it’s main effect also through the radiative balance at tropopause.) The effect of CO2 in the troposphere does not influence much the internal net energy fluxes of the troposphere, but CO2 of every altitude has some influence on the flux at tropopause.
Pekka wrote: “Changes in the IR balance are compensated so effectively by changes in sensible and latent heat balances that the temperature profile changes very little. The influence of added CO2 does not come from there, it comes from the upper troposphere.”
I fully agree though this may sound strange to some and may even be a little misleading. That’s because when a persistent imbalance occurs at the tropopause (or equivalently at the TOA) then is must quickly translate as an equal imbalance at the surface since the heat capacity of the troposphere is so low and energy must be conserved. However, if the temperature profiles of the surface layer, and a few meters above it, don’t change at all then the surface fluxes won’t change either. So, this “very little” change that must occur in the temperature profiles close to the surface must be just large enough to create the very same imbalance that occurs at the tropopause, and hence translate this flux imbalance into heat storage into the oceans (and cryosphere). It is the effects of this “very little” change that I attempted to describe though I may not have gotten it exactly right. I’d have to review some relevant articles.
Pierre-Normand,
Right. The imbalance at TOA leads to imbalance at the surface, and that leads to a change in the temperature profile. The change is, however, too small to be observable taking into account the great local and temporal variability in the profiles. My main point was that the changes in IR balance lead also to so small changes in the profile that they are unobservable as well.
What happens at the surface and within the troposphere is regulated by thermodynamics and fluid dynamics. The IR from the atmosphere to the surface is essential as driver of all circulation, but it’s always large enough to leave the regulation to other processes. Solar radiation alone could not maintain the present surface temperatures without the (larger) contribution from downwelling IR.
Pekka, yes, I agree with everything.
Generalssimo Skippy: During
the time when the Minoans were fading, El Niño events
reach values in red color intensity over 200.’ http://www.clim-past.net/6/525/2010/cp-6-525-2010.pdf
…
ENSO warming or cooling is not susceptible to simple narrative. That should be a familiar refrain by now.
Thank you for the link, and the summary statement.
Pierre-Normand: If the atmosphere over the water already is saturated with water vapor, as often is the case in the tropics, then an increase in the back radiation to the surface will not increase the rate of evaporative cooling since the air can’t hold any more moisture.
I doubt that the atmosphere over ocean is ever near saturation on sunny, windy mornings, but if you have a reference I shall certainly download it and read it. It is very common in the tropics to have daily rainfall in the afternoon, but that is merely the return of cool water that evaporated in the am and warmed the troposphere before returning. I think that the possibility that increased downwellng LWIR will increase the am evaporation rates should not be casually dismissed. But if you have a reference, I shall pay attention to it.
Pekka Pirilä
All forms of net heat transfer react strongly to changes in temperature differentials at a fixed small (millimeters or less) depth in the water and at a fixed small (meters) altitude in the atmosphere. Changes in the IR balance are compensated so effectively by changes in sensible and latent heat balances that the temperature profile changes very little.
Not saying your are wrong, but I’d like a reference. This phrase “very little” gets thrown around a lot without definition. The predicted increase in temperature from a doubling of CO2 is “only” 1% or less on the absolute scale, so other changes that are “very little” need to be considered relevant. “Very little” increase in morning cloud cover in the tropics and temperate zones would cancel the warming effects of CO2 increase completely.
Pierre-Normand: I fully agree though this may sound strange to some and may even be a little misleading. That’s because when a persistent imbalance occurs at the tropopause (or equivalently at the TOA) then is must quickly translate as an equal imbalance at the surface since the heat capacity of the troposphere is so low and energy must be conserved. However, if the temperature profiles of the surface layer, and a few meters above it, don’t change at all then the surface fluxes won’t change either. So, this “very little” change that must occur in the temperature profiles close to the surface must be just large enough to create the very same imbalance that occurs at the tropopause, and hence translate this flux imbalance into heat storage into the oceans (and cryosphere). It is the effects of this “very little” change that I attempted to describe though I may not have gotten it exactly right. I’d have to review some relevant articles.
Good reply, but what do you mean by “quickly”? Generally in these climate discussions rates of change of various quantities and gradients have not actually been measured. The transfer of latent heat from surface to upper troposphere can take hours, and be observed as the buildup of “thunder clouds” in the American Midwest and regions in the Pacific. A large temperature gradient without saturation at the surface can be maintained for a long time.
The effective thermal diffusion of water is quite high — that’s why they call it effective eddy diffusion. So much for your theory.
Since the surface layer is colder than the ocean below it any mixing only serves to cool the ocean bulk not warm it. Nice own goal, McFly. LOL
Matthew,
What I mean by small here is something like millikelvins. The overall temperature profile of the atmosphere has maximum changes of the order of 1K. When that happens over a range of many kilometers the changes in the first few meters plus the surface is not many millikelvins, when mechanisms as strong as evaporation and convection are involved.
Pekka, a physicist states
“Changes in the IR balance are compensated so effectively by changes in sensible and latent heat balances that the temperature profile changes very little. ”
Now note that is is completely wrong and Pekka knows it is wrong. Only twice per day is there ever ‘balance’ the system. Treating a complex, open, dynamic system as a closed equilibrium is intellectually deceitful.
“I doubt that the atmosphere over ocean is ever near saturation on sunny, windy mornings, but if you have a reference I shall certainly download it and read it.”
The saturation point is reached whenever the dew point is reached (by definition) and that is a very common occurrence, even at higher latitudes. For sure, it occur more often in the afternoon and evenings than it does in the morning when the temperature rises. The point is to describe mechanisms for an increase in IR back radiation flux to translate in ocean heat storage below the skin. It’s not my point to deny that such an increase doesn’t usually, or never, produce increases in surface latent or sensible heat fluxes. But even when they do, this is also accompanied some warming of the skin layer, and hence by a reduction of the gradient below the skin and thus by a reduction of the cooling rate of the surface layer.
“Good reply, but what do you mean by “quickly”?”
I mean “quickly” relative to the characteristic time for the external forcing change to be applied — after a major volcano, a changing phase of the 11-year solar cycle, or a 10ppm increase in CO2 concentration, say. Whenever such a change in external forcing produces an imbalance at the top of the atmosphere (and hence a net energy flux), there must occur an equivalent energy flux at the surface for else this excess energy would be trapped in the troposphere and cause its temperature to rise very much. But since the temperature profile the the troposphere is tightly constrained by surface temperature and surface/air boundary flux conditions, then the net TOA flux very quickly translates to an equivalent net surface flux.
That is, of course, until the surface and troposphere warm enough to restore the TOA balance.
“This is almost never the case in the tropics. It’s called fog when that happens, dummy.”
It’s true that near surface convection will help reduce the humidity below the dew point. But the dew point is eventually reached higher up and then it rains. When it rains, the surface and low tropospheric layers are cooled (by the rain and downdrafts) and this interrupts near surface convection. It’s easy then for the dew point to be reached above the surface and all the way up to the top of the clouds.
“When the dewpoint is reached higher up, it rains.”
No schit, Sherlock. And the energy is thus transported insensibly as latent heat of vaporization from the ocean to a kilometer or more above the surface. At altitude there are fewer non-condensing greenhouse gases above the cloud to restrict radiation to space and there are non-condensing greenhouse gases below the cloud restricting back radiation from reaching the surface.
Thanks for playing, stupid.
Everything you always wanted to know about clouds but were afraid to ask.
“No schit, Sherlock. And the energy is thus transported insensibly as latent heat of vaporization from the ocean to a kilometer or more above the surface. At altitude there are fewer non-condensing greenhouse gases above the cloud to restrict radiation to space ”
The topic wasn’t whether the increase in downwelling radiation can lead to some negative feedback — an increase in tropospheric water vapor content would actually produce a net positive feedback to the warming — but how energy from the back radiation can be transferred to the ocean below the skin layer. You denied that the dew point ever is reached close to the surface. Now you seen unwilling to acknowledge what you had denied; but you would rather change the subject.
When the water vapor content of the mid troposphere increases, this does not lead to a lessening of the greenhouse effect. On the contrary, it increases it since the emission bands of water vapor now emit from a higher and hence colder altitude. It is rather the reduction in the temperature gradient from the moist adiabatic lapse rate that lead to a negative feedback. But this effect is smaller than the positive effect from the heightening of the effective radiation level. Or else the water vepor feedback would be negative. As Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen or Judith Curry would tell you, it is positive.
Water cycle cools the planet, dopey. The climate type with the highest mean annual temperature is the tropical desert not the tropical ocean nor the tropical rain forest.
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/clouds/question.jsp
More water vapor actually lowers the mean temperature due to high albedo and low radiative restriction presented by low clouds which are an unavoidable consequence of evaporation.
And no I’m not walking back anything about your dumbass assertion that the air over the tropical ocean is often saturated.
So we have two time intervals according to the deniers.
The first time interval is the period in which it took the climate to generate a +33C temperature anomaly. As the CO2 build-up occurred, thus raising the global average temperature, the relative humidity increased, which resulted in an increased water vapor GHG thermal forcing. That is a positive (though limited and non-runaway) positive feedback.
Now turn to the second time interval, which spans from now to the indefinite future. The skeptics would have you conveniently believe that the relative humidity increase will take a huge U-turn and turn from a positive feedback to a negative feedback.
And the magick elixir in all this is “clouds”
You see, the clouds apparently had no overriding negative feedback effect in the past, but just because the deniers say so, the clouds will now stopper up any future warming.
The mind reels at how unwilling they are to reason.
WebHubTelescope is a IPCC denier now. Who knew?
https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6-3-2.html
Read harder, Webby. The key part you missed is “in the current climate”. Low level clouds cover a large fraction of the tropics in the current climate. If the earth were 33C cooler the tropics probably wouldn’t be largely covered by low level clouds. That’s why they say “in the current climate”. Pay more attention to detail. Or be more honest. Or both. In any case stop being stupid.
The first period didn’t exist, as there never was a time when there was zero greenhouse gases and the surface temperature was 33 degrees less.
..and from people who Dr. Curry for some reason doesn’t include in her Blogroll: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/08/3435638/el-nino-global-warming/
That’d be the mainstream view. Y’know, the one requiring fewer assumptions, less exceptions, and having more universal application to all available observations, therefore accurate or very nearly true.
Probably because tp is not a climate site, but merely a looney leftist site.
Pierre-Normand: The saturation point is reached whenever the dew point is reached (by definition) and that is a very common occurrence, even at higher latitudes.
Reaching saturation a few times per day in some locations (e.g. upper troposphere when rainfall starts) is what I call “almost never”. What is it quantitatively: a few minutes up to maybe an hour at most in 1% of the atmosphere? Surface level fogs on fewer than 10% of the days of the year over less than 10% of the ocean?
WebHubTelescope: You see, the clouds apparently had no overriding negative feedback effect in the past, but just because the deniers say so, the clouds will now stopper up any future warming.
Whether future cloud cover increases will block future warming has been much debated in the peer-reviewed literature. Here are a bunch of articles published in the journal Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/search?site_area=sci&y=8&fulltext=cloud%20cover%20and%20global%20warming&x=26&submit=yes
I think the consensus is that the future of cloud cover and its effects is not known.
All the climate models’ parameterization of cloud feedback C have it as a positive except for one.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-8-14.html
Yet it is acknowledged that in the current climate the feedback is negative.
https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6-3-2.html
What’s up with that?
You really should ask me what it is like to hold the keys to the kingdom when it comes to modeling ENSO
Latest
http://imageshack.com/a/img838/973/52d2.gif
Read more here:
http://contextearth.com/2014/05/02/the-soim-substantiating-the-chandler-wobble-and-tidal-connection-to-enso/
And it will only get better, having discovered the keys.
La di da
You deniers are incredibly desperate about your clouds.
The overall feedback is positive with respect to temperature because of water vapor increasing with temperature. The clouds could have a compensating negative or positive feedback on top of this positive feedback, but it will never completely compensate the GHG effect and make it into a net negative feedback. Same goes for lapse rate. Same goes for the diminishing returns of log CO2 sensitivity.
These properties don’t do a U-TURN like your pickup can in the dirt parking lot.
Anybody that believes in a negative feedback is basing it on hope more than on science.
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | May 9, 2014 at 4:31 pm |
“You deniers are incredibly desperate about your clouds.”
Not half as desperate as you warmunists are to shrug off the pause that is killing your cause.
Matthew R Marler: “Whether future cloud cover increases will block future warming has been much debated in the peer-reviewed literature. Here are a bunch of articles published in the journal Science:”
The issue wasn’t whether the cloud feedback might be negative. The issue was whether it might be *overriding* the positive water vapor feedback. *This* is what WHT said was unlikely. If it’s strong enough to override the water vapor feedback then climate sensitivity (ECS) is about 1.2°C/CO2 doubling or lower. That’s certainly not a consensus view that we don’t know whether sensitivity is higher or lower than that. It’s quite a minority view.
But the whole issue arose from Springer’s suggestion that the water vapor feedback itself is negative, because, as he says, water vapor higher up in the atmosphere radiates more effectively through the thinner GHG atmosphere above it. But I explained why this explanation doesn’t work.
Stupid Pierre creates a straw man:
“Springer’s suggestion that the water vapor feedback itself is negative”
I said the water cycle has a net cooling effect and gave as evidence the fact that tropical deserts have the highest mean annual temperature of all climate types. Higher than tropical oceans, higher than tropical rain forests, higher than everything else.
What part of that don’t you understand? Even a stupid person should be able to grasp this simple fact.
Maybe a picture will help get the concept through the exceedingly thick skull of Pierre. Can you see where the highest mean annual temperatures are, dopey? Over land, not over water. In deserts not rain forests. Where there is abundant water available for evaporation the mean annual temperature is lower. Write that down.
http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap16/sealevel_temp.gif
Springer relies on observations of how hot deserts can get to “prove” his theory.
How can anyone compete with that comprehensive an analysis?
I rely on the mean annual temperature of tropical deserts being higher than tropical oceans or tropical rain forests as evidence that abundant surface water and high humidity results in a cooler climate. You’re right to ask how to argue with that. Be creative Webby. You’ve never been prone to let facts get in the way of your beliefs. :-)
WebHubTelescope: The overall feedback is positive with respect to temperature because of water vapor increasing with temperature. The clouds could have a compensating negative or positive feedback on top of this positive feedback, but it will never completely compensate the GHG effect and make it into a net negative feedback. Same goes for lapse rate. Same goes for the diminishing returns of log CO2 sensitivity.
Do you have references to support your certainty?
Pierre-Normand: The issue wasn’t whether the cloud feedback might be negative. The issue was whether it might be *overriding* the positive water vapor feedback. *This* is what WHT said was unlikely.
So supply some pertinent scientific references.
One of the things that I discovered when I started reading up on CO2 effects is the constant repetition of assertions with no scientific basis. In the peer-reviewed literature it is clear that the net effects of clouds are much debated, and a slight increase in daytime cloud cover could block the hypothesized warming effect of downwelling LWIR. That could be a short-term effect of the LWIR increase on the non-dry surface of the Earth, or a longer term effect of warming. When you examine what is known about the flows and rates of flows withing the system, it is very difficult to show any particular result from increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. Conclusions depend on “equuilibrium” and other simplifications that ignore the actual dynamics.
The assumption that H2O has a positive feedback effect at all depends on ignoring the rate at which vaporized H2O transfers sensible and latent heat from the surface to the upper atmosphere; that is in addition to ignoring the potential negative feedbacks of clouds.
You can estimate sensitivity from the data since 1950, and you get 2 C per doubling, adding in all feedbacks and collateral effects like aerosols and other GHGs. This alone is twice the no-feedback response, so it implies a general positive feedback, and this is only the transient response, which underestimates the full response.
WHT: “The overall feedback is positive with respect to temperature because of water vapor increasing with temperature. ”
Hmm…
Dry lapse rate: 10C/km
Moist lapse rate: 6.5C/km
Would seem to indicate that water is a negative feedback on (near) surface temps, not positive.
Yeah JD, the full response is exemplified by observing the land-warming alone. The ECS from this curve is about 3C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration, with water vapor provided by the warming creating a positive GHG feedback above the CO2 base response,
http://contextearth.com/2014/01/25/what-missing-heat/
Whut,
Three guesses (one if you cheat and use google) as to what knuckle headed, science denying skeptic said the following:
By reflecting solar radiation back to space (the albedo effect of clouds) and by trapping infrared radiation emitted by the surface and the lower troposphere (the greenhouse effect of clouds), clouds exert two competing effects on the Earth’s radiation budget. These two effects are usually referred to as the SW and LW components of the cloud radiative forcing (CRF). The balance between these two components depends on many factors, including macrophysical and microphysical cloud properties. In the current climate, clouds exert a cooling effect on climate (the global mean CRF is negative). In response to global warming, the cooling effect of clouds on climate might be enhanced or weakened, thereby producing a radiative feedback to climate warming.
David Springer, I was responding to this claim of yours: “At altitude there are fewer non-condensing greenhouse gases above the cloud to restrict radiation to space and there are non-condensing greenhouse gases below the cloud restricting back radiation from reaching the surface.”
I now realize you were talking about the radiative effect of the cloud on longwave radiation, not the effect of water vapor. But your argument is wrong for the same reason I gave. Furthermore, the clouds increase the back-radiation. They shield the surface from space in the 8 to 14 micron IR atmospheric window.
Boundary layer clouds impede far more incoming shortwave energy than outgoing longwave energy. Why don’t you learn a little about different cloud types instead of continually demonstrating your ignorance?
Matthew R Marler wrote: “The assumption that H2O has a positive feedback effect at all depends on ignoring the rate at which vaporized H2O transfers sensible and latent heat from the surface to the upper atmosphere; that is in addition to ignoring the potential negative feedbacks of clouds.”
I don’t think many people ignore the albedo feedback from clouds. It’s certainly not part of “the consensus” to ignore it. The issue of the magnitude and sign of the total cloud feedback is debated. Very low climate sensitivities make it difficult to account for the ice ages since the Milankovitch forcing isn’t strong enough to explain the large temperature swings between glacial and inter-glacial periods. The snow/ice albedo feedback isn’t strong enough.
Also, the rate of sensible and latent heat fluxes in the troposphere contribute little to the radiative balance at the tropopause. Latent and sensible fluxes can’t carry any energy beyond the tropopause. There only is a small negative feedback associated with the lower gradient of moist adiabatic lapse rate. This is more than compensated by the rise of the effective radiation level.
“Dry lapse rate: 10C/km
Moist lapse rate: 6.5C/km
Would seem to indicate that water is a negative feedback on (near) surface temps, not positive.”
It indicates nothing at all. The gradient of a function of height doesn’t fix its value at the ground level. It is global energy balance considerations that determine the equilibrium average surface temperature, and this varies according to location because of mechanisms of horizontal transport, effects from clouds, etc.
There is a negative lapse rate feedback that slightly reduces the water vapor feedback. This is what the tropical “hot spot” refers to. Unfortunately for skeptics the hot spot negative feedback is being slow to materialize.
“Reaching saturation a few times per day in some locations (e.g. upper troposphere when rainfall starts) is what I call “almost never”. What is it quantitatively: a few minutes up to maybe an hour at most in 1% of the atmosphere? Surface level fogs on fewer than 10% of the days of the year over less than 10% of the ocean?”
You may be right, I don’t know enough about meteorology. But this only is very tangential to the main point. Springer can’t countenance how an increase in the rate of back radiation can lead to an increase in the rate of accumulation of heat in the oceans. That’s because IR radiation doesn’t penetrate beyond the skin and he proposes that and increase in back radiation will be integrally lost to an equal increase of the latent evaporative flux. The mere possibility of saturation above the surface makes trouble for this idea. But I also covered the cases where there *is* an increase in latent and/or sensible flux. This can only occur as a result of an increase of the temperature of the skin. So, if the extra energy from the increased back radiation maintains the skin temperature to a higher level, it also results in a lower temperature gradient below the skin and hence to a lower rate of cooling of the ocean. Something like that has to occur anyway or else the TOA imbalance would not match the surface net heat flux and there would be a very large accumulation of heat in the troposphere.
More straw men from stupid Pierre. Increased DWLIR very likely does slow ocean cooling to some extent. I mean fog does happen just not a lot in the tropical ocean. There’s not much evaporation over freezing cold water. Breaking waves ruin the cool skin layer which takes 10 seconds to reform. Yada yada yada. Is it really too much to ask that this be quantified with experimental science instead of stupid Pierre and those like him waving their hands about making up just-so stories?
“Boundary layer clouds impede far more incoming shortwave energy than outgoing longwave energy.”
I was addressing your claim regarding the effect of the cloud on surface back radiation. Back radiation is shortwave. Incoming shortwave radiation isn’t back radiation. It wouldn’t kill you to acknowledge a mistake once in a while rather throw bunches of insults and pretend you were talking about something else.
“I was addressing your claim regarding the effect of the cloud on surface back radiation. Back radiation is shortwave.”
Back radiation is longwave. You just can’t help demonstrating how little you know about even the simplest physics, can you?
Pierre-Normand, I don’t understand your response to Kneel’s lapse rate statement. You say:
“It is global energy balance considerations that determine the equilibrium average surface temperature …”
Assume this is true: the TOA is in energy balance and the surface is at equilibrum temperature. If the ERL is at, say, 5 Km, the difference in surface temperature between a lapse rate of 6.5C/km and 10C/km is 17.5C. This is not an insubstantial number. You need a better justification than your 11:57pm comment for why “It indicates nothing at all.”
willb, the lapse doesn’t matter to the extent that it doesn’t change. The effective radiative level is changing with CO2. The lapse rate is mostly fixed by temperature and the properties of convection, and it does reduce slightly as it gets warmer, which is a negative feedback much smaller than the positive water vapor feedback. These ideas are discussed by Held and others in some good papers on separating feedbacks.
Pierre-Normand: Also, the rate of sensible and latent heat fluxes in the troposphere contribute little to the radiative balance at the tropopause.
Again with the unquantified “little”. This whole debate is over a “little” temp increase of perhaps 0.5% to 1% over 50 to 150 years, from a (“little”) less than 1% increase in downwelling LWIR from a doubling of CO2.
(the Princeton computational fluid dynamics group estimated a 1.3C increase due to a doubling over 70 years, to pick one example.)
I can’t right now find the citation, but a paper published in Nature showed (by statistical modeling with the generalized extreme value distribution) that extreme rainfall had increased by about 7% from about 1950-2000. How much of an increase in the frequency of dense clouds and the rate of evaporative transport of energy from surface to upper troposphere is represented by that 7% change in rainfall maxima? (assuming for now that the effect is real; other increases in rainfall extremes have also been reported in Nature.) Comparing percents is not straightforward, but that is a larger percentage increase than the hypothesized effects of a doubling of CO2 on the rate of downwelling LWIR and temperature change.
Matthew Marler, there is just that much more water vapor around in a warmer climate. So you don’t have to invoke evaporation to explain more rainfall. It just rains and evaporates more in a warmer climate.
Pierre-Normand: You may be right, I don’t know enough about meteorology. But this only is very tangential to the main point.
It is not tangential to the points that you and I made.
You wrote this: If the atmosphere over the water already is saturated with water vapor, as often is the case in the tropics, then an increase in the back radiation to the surface will not increase the rate of evaporative cooling since the air can’t hold any more moisture.
And I disputed your claim that the atmosphere over the water in the tropics is often saturated with water vapor, though again the non-quantitative “often” is nowhere near accurate enough to resolve the disagreement. For “often” I put in “almost never”, and supplied a few clarifying possibilities (less than 1% of the atmosphere; less than 10% of ocean surface.)
I “may be right” is the point of my posting. If the assertions I make are true, or reasonably accurate, the case for CO2-induced global warming is full of holes. Accurate or not, everything I write has been published in the peer-reviewed literature, except for my exact wording. Almost everything I have written about the inadequacies of the case for future CO2 effects on climate “may be right”.
“Matthew Marler, there is just that much more water vapor around in a warmer climate. So you don’t have to invoke evaporation to explain more rainfall. It just rains and evaporates more in a warmer climate.”
______
Precisely. A generally enhanced hydrological cycle is part of response of more net energy in the climate system. This enhanced cycle leads to more rock weathering which, given enough time, will remove CO2 from the atmosphere. The problem is, this natural negative feedback to increased CO2 takes tens of thousands of years. The HCV overwhelms this natural negative feedback. It will up to humans to turn off the HCV and/or sequester the carbon themselves and not rely on the rock-carbon cycle.
Jim D: Matthew Marler, there is just that much more water vapor around in a warmer climate. So you don’t have to invoke evaporation to explain more rainfall. It just rains and evaporates more in a warmer climate.
Yes. That’s a start. Now tell us, if downwelling LWIR increases by about 3.8 W/m^2, how much of that energy flow gets converted to temperature increase (the sensible heat), and how much to increased vaporization (the latent heat), clouds and rainfall? The answers are necessary to estimating (predicting, etc) the “climate sensitivity”.
“It just rains” is hopelessly inadequate. The hydrological cycle is a heat and mass transport system.
Precisely Matthew. If the water cycle accelerates in response to increased back-radiation from CO2 then wherever there is an abundant supply of surface water to evaporate the surface that becomes warmer is 1-2 kilometers overhead in the form of more boundary layer clouds. We have very little detailed empirical knowledge of amount, average height, and kind of clouds that form on either global average or regional basis, and how they may or may not be changing in subtle ways in response to anthropogenic CO2, land use changes, and so forth. Things related to the water cycle have always been and continue to be the weakness of climate modeling. Radiative physics in a dry atmosphere over dry land are easily modeled. But we live on a world where that’s an exception to the rule especially in the lower latitudes without freezing winters where most of the solar energy enters the system in the first place.
Matthew Marler, from the climate energy balance standpoint, only a temperature increase can offset the radiative increase. It doesn’t matter what evaporation does.
Not quite, Jim. You are right that some surface must exhibit a Planck response to reach equilibrium with incoming energy. But it isn’t necessarily the surface of the earth it can be the surface of clouds instead. Evaporation and condensation is like an elevator that transports energy insensibly from the surface to the cloud deck which is seldom lower than one kilometer. If the elevator starts running faster then we get more clouds and rain and less surface heating. Write that down.
Jim D,
According to Pierre-Normand, the lapse rate “doesn’t fix its value at the ground level. It is global energy balance considerations that determine the equilibrium average surface temperature …”.
Do you agree with Pierre-Normand that the lapse rate isn’t fixed by the ground level temperature? If so, to what temperature are you then referring when you write:
“The lapse rate is mostly fixed by temperature …”??
You also write:
“The lapse rate is mostly fixed by … the properties of convection …”
Do you not consider the moist and dry adiabatic lapse rates to be “properties of convection”?
willb, the lapse rate depends on surface temperature. This has a weak feedback, smaller than the water vapor feedback. As the surface gets warmer that lapse rate decreases and the upper troposphere becomes warmer at a faster rate than the surface. This is the well known negative lapse-rate feedback effect associated with the tropical “hot spot”.
The saturated lapse rate is greatly effected by temperature. The dry lapse is not. Lapse rate is set by enthalpy of the atmosphere. The more water vapor the air can hold the more potential for enthalpy to increase (with no rise in temperature!) due to warmer air having more water vapor holding capacity than colder air.
Given that lapse rate feedback itself is negative and not controversial except in magnitude then it follows that climate sensitivity is temperature dependent due to lapse rate being temperature dependent. So the question is one of how much it changes and how it parses out on regional basis. It is my contention that climate sensitivity is low in the tropics and rises with latitude as the air becomes increasingly colder and hence less able to hold water vapor with increasing latitude.
So the question again boils down to magnitude of the response and where it happens. Milder winters in the higher latitudes along with little warming in the lower latitudes is desirable for most living things including humans. Ice and snow is not very conducive to fecundity as a general rule.
willb, I think you misunderstood the causality in Pierre-Normand’s statement. The lapse rate depends on the surface temperature. It doesn’t set the absolute value, only a gradient. The absolute value comes from the temperature of the ERL.
Dry adiabatic lapse rate doesn’t depend on surface temperature. It’s always 10C per kilometer. Saturated rate varies by temperature as that determines how much water the air can hold. The environmental rate is determined by specific humidity at a given time and place. For a standard atmosphere the saturated rate is 5C/km and the environmental rate is typically considered to be 6.5C/km absent more definitive data.
Yes, I have mentioned this negative lapse rate feedback several times in this thread. What Willb missed is that the effective radiation level rises when water vapor concentration increases in the troposphere. He assumed it fixed. This more than compensates the effect from the true temperature profile moving closer to the moist adiabatic lapse rate. The combined effect still is that the effective radiation level has a lowered temperature.
No. More non-condensing greenhouse gases causes the effective radiating level to rise to a colder level. Higher specific humidity causes the condensation level to rise but not to a colder level because the lapse rate changes with more water vapor. More relative humidity causes the effective radiating level to fall as condensation happens at a warmer temperature.
We don’t have accurate data on global averages for relative and specific humidity so what is actually happening is not known.
Jim D, you write “willb, the lapse rate depends on surface temperature.”
So can I safely conclude that Pierre-Normand’s response to Kneel’s post was gibberish? And can I also conclude your position is that the moist and dry adiabatic lapse rates have no connection to the measured environmental lapse rate?
willb, no I think I can conclude that you misunderstood Kneel’s and Pierre-Normand’s exchange. Kneel pointed out a difference in lapse rates. This difference is actually important for understanding the negative lapse rate feedback because moister atmospheres have a lower lapse rate.
Matthew R Marler, You are focusing on the antecedent of a conditional and ignoring the argument. Springer couldn’t understand that ocean heat storage could increase if back radiation increases. But a back radiation increase that is not accompanied by a surface/troposphere increase is a symptom of a TOA imbalance. If there is accumulation of energy in the system, where will it go? I suggested *two* exhaustive possibilities. The first possibility occur *if* there is no increase in latent heat flux. You only considered half of my post and ignored the “if”. In that case the skin temperature increases and the gradient and heat flux below the skin also decrease. The ocean surface layer cools less effectively. In the second case, if there is an enhancement of the convective or latent fluxes that results from the increased back radiation, this increase must be mediated by an increase of the skin temperature. Infrared energy can’t just peel of water molecules from the first molecule layer without warming the skin. And then we get the same effect on the temperature gradient below the skin. So, even if air never is saturated with water vapor above the skin, you have to explain two things. (1) How can the sensible or latent flux increase as a response to the enhanced back radiation without the skin temperature also increasing. And, secondly, if you manage to explain how this would occur, since you now have a mismatch between the TOA imbalance and the surface imbalance, where is the extra energy going?
If there is a persistent year-over-year TOA imbalance then it’s going into the ocean as that’s the only reservoir that source or sink it.
The problem is that satellites can’t measure outgoing radiation well enough to get closer than plus or minus 4W/m2. Ocean heat content measurements indicate that the imbalance is currently about 0.5W/m2 but that is suspect because ARGO doesn’t dive deep enough to measure the lower half of the ocean, it doesn’t dive beneath ice, and the bouys tend to cluster from gyres and follow ocean currents instead of being evenly distributed. ARGO was active for several years and when it indicated a slight cooling of the ocean it was pencil whipped into a slight warming which also makes it suspect.
But lets say 0.5W/m2 is both accurate and persistent. That’s enough energy to cause global ocean basin temperature to rise by 0.2C in 100 years if it’s evenly distributed. That’s not enough to cause concern so the just-so story is that diffusion of heat from the surface to the bottom is so slow that 100 years isn’t long enough so a smaller volume of water nearer the surface is heated to a larger degree and deep water to a lesser degree. We don’t have any reliable data to determine the actual diffusion rate.
Confounding that even further is that ARGO is indicating that the water below 700 meters is accumulating energy faster than the water above 700 meters. There’s no good explanation for how the deep ocean can warm faster than the upper ocean due to changes in the atmosphere.
This is where the hypotheses about cyclical changes in the hot fluid mantle add more or less heat from the floor of the ocean upwards which handily explains why the lower ocean is warming more than the upper ocean.
Pierre-Normand: (1) How can the sensible or latent flux increase as a response to the enhanced back radiation without the skin temperature also increasing. And, secondly, if you manage to explain how this would occur, since you now have a mismatch between the TOA imbalance and the surface imbalance, where is the extra energy going?
1. I don’t know; I don’t think I have implied that the temperature would necessarily remain the same. I expect there is a combination of “warming in” the upper layer and “evaporation from” the upper layer; on other occasions I have asked if the balance of warming/evaporation was known. Rephrasing your question, Could you have increased temperature of the upper layer of the oceans without increased evaporation? Most times and most places the air above the surface is not saturated, so an increase in temperature should produce and increase in the rate of evaporation.
2. Already the latent heat transferred to the upper troposphere warms it (above what the temperature would be in its absence), and the upper troposphere is a net radiator of energy to space (otherwise it would continue to warm as the radiant and latent energy flow in from below); probably an increase in the latent heat flow would lead to an increase in the rate of radiation into space. Why would you assume that the TOA fluxes remain unchanged?
Jim D: from the climate energy balance standpoint, only a temperature increase can offset the radiative increase. It doesn’t matter what evaporation does.
Suppose that the ratio is 200:1, H2O molecules whose temp goes up 1C vs H2O molecules that fly off as vapor. The energy flow ratio for that is about 1:3, or about 0.9W/m^2 to warming and 2.9W/m^2 to evaporation. It is necessary to account for the amount vaporized compared to the amount warmed. Only under the counterfactual equilibrium assumptions can you ignore these rates and mechanisms; that is clearly stated in Raymond T. Pierrehumbert’s book “Principles of Planetary Climate”.
Matthew Marler, it is equilibrium levels that matter, because warming won’t stop until that is reached. Evaporation doesn’t affect the equilibrium because it doesn’t directly affect the radiated energy. You might argue that it produces latent heating in the air which affects the radiation, and yes, that is taken care of with the lapse rate holding as the surface warms. The convection warms the troposphere mostly because of latent heating.
Matthew R Marler wrote: “1. I don’t know; I don’t think I have implied that the temperature would necessarily remain the same.”
This was implied by David Springer. It is implied, or overlooked, whenever people claim that an increase in the power of black radiation can’t cause ocean warming because infrared radiation doesn’t penetrate below the skin and, as they allege, it would *all* thereby be lost as a compensating increase in latent heat flux.
“Rephrasing your question, Could you have increased temperature of the upper layer of the oceans without increased evaporation? Most times and most places the air above the surface is not saturated, so an increase in temperature should produce and increase in the rate of evaporation.”
Yes, and my point is that this increase of the temperature of the skin layer explains why oceans cool at a reduced rate (because of the reduced gradient below the skin) and therefore account for the increasing rate of heat storage in the oceans.
“2. Already the latent heat transferred to the upper troposphere warms it (above what the temperature would be in its absence), and the upper troposphere is a net radiator of energy to space (otherwise it would continue to warm as the radiant and latent energy flow in from below); probably an increase in the latent heat flow would lead to an increase in the rate of radiation into space. Why would you assume that the TOA fluxes remain unchanged?”
This is the negative moist adiabatic lapse rate feedback. It arises when the water vapor concentration is increased. But the primary effect of this increase is to increase the opacity of the mid-troposphere and hence to raise the effective radiation level to a higher altitude. This is the positive water vapor feedback. The negative lapse rate feedback just offsets this positive feedback a little bit.
You are continually putting words in my mouth that I did not say. Nowhere did I say that DWLIR cannot slow down the rate of ocean cooling at all. I said it may not slow it down very much. I said not all forcing are equal and that an extra Watt of shortwave from the sun is more effective at changing ocean temperature than a Watt of longwave back-radiated from the atmosphere. This intellectual dishonesty is why I call you a stupid phuckwad and you are indeed a stupid phuckwad unable to present cogent arguments without strawmen. Go phuck yourself, asshat.
Jim D wrote: “Evaporation doesn’t affect the equilibrium because it doesn’t directly affect the radiated energy.”
Indeed, that’s also the main point Pekka is making since there is no going around the top of atmosphere imbalance; whatever may happen to the fluxes at the surface.
Pekka Pirilä says, May 8, 2014 at 10:14 am:
“The influence of added CO2 does not come from there, it comes from the upper troposphere. When the upper troposphere cannot lose as much heat by IR emission. less heat can be transferred up from the low troposphere. That makes the low troposphere warmer and the surface warmer.
Added CO2 operates always through changes in the radiative balance at the tropopause. What happens at lower altitudes must be derived from that. (What happens in the stratosphere has it’s main effect also through the radiative balance at tropopause.) The effect of CO2 in the troposphere does not influence much the internal net energy fluxes of the troposphere, but CO2 of every altitude has some influence on the flux at tropopause.” (My emphasis.)
Only it doesn’t, Pekka (referring to the bolded part above). That’s just something you and SoD keep saying. That’s how it SHOULD work in your hypothetical model of the world. That doesn’t mean it’s automatically real. There are no observational data from the real earth system pointing to your proposed radiative mechanism for surface warming to be a real mechanism. We simply don’t see it anywhere.
This is what the data consistently shows: surface temps up (or down) > tropospheric temps up (or down) > OLR at ToA up (or down).
This is how the heat from the sun actually flows through the earth system. Surface warms first, then the troposphere, then, as a consequence of this, the radiative output to space increases. There is NO observational evidence anywhere for the opposite process to occur: OLR at ToA down > tropospheric temps up > surface temps up.
Still, you keep claiming some mysterious, hidden mechanism (never seen, but surely still there, behind somewhere!) where warming (from ToA radiative imbalance) somehow starts at the top and then propagates downwards along the lapse rate ladder.
What you’re promoting is in reality the flawed analogy of the ‘closed glass box’. The ‘GHE’ seen in such experiments is really ‘confined space heating’. It is a result of putting a rigid lid transparent to incoming SW, but opaque to outgoing LW, on top of a heated glass box. The lid does not let the outgoing IR through, it rather absorbs it. As the lid thus get warmer, the temp difference (the gradient) down to the heated bottom of the glass box get smaller and the heat transfer through the air within the box, from bottom to top, is reduced. This will result in the forced ‘extra’ warming of the bottom plate.
To make less heat flow from the surface to the tropopause, Pekka, you need to make the temp profile less steep. And since you claim that surface warming is the END RESULT, then the profile becoming gentler must start from a warming at the top. The top layer can’t let through all the heat it receives from below (as it could before), and as a result it warms. This warming is then propagated down through the underlying air layers until we reach the surface. Like in the ‘closed glass box’.
Apart from being completely and utterly at odds with ALL previous knowledge we have on how the earth system (the circulation of heat) works, this ‘explanation’ of surface warming seemingly prides itself on not having ANY observational backing from the real world at all!
You know what we call propositions like that, Pekka? PSEUDO-SCIENCE.
Jim D says, May 9, 2014 at 9:01 pm:
“You can estimate sensitivity from the data since 1950, and you get 2 C per doubling, adding in all feedbacks and collateral effects like aerosols and other GHGs.”
Only AFTER you’ve just gone on and assumed that all the warming (and more, seemingly) is caused by the rise in atmospheric CO2 + feedbacks, Jim D. That’s your pure circular reasoning displayed to the world once again.
“Back radiation is longwave. You just can’t help demonstrating how little you know about even the simplest physics, can you?”
That was obviously a typo. I’ve written the terms “longwave” and “shortwave” correctly about 200 times in our discussion over the last few days and now the best rejoinder you can come up with is to pick up on one single typo (and ignore my very next sentence in which I say “Incoming shortwave radiation isn’t back radiation.”
That a nice way to duck having to acknowledge the incorrectness of you claim that clouds decrease back radiation though.
Again with the straw men. I didn’t say clouds decrease DWLIR. I said more CO2 between cloud and ground reduces the amount of back-radiation caused by the cloud. CO2 impedes the transmission of LIR. It will impede from the ground going up and it will impede it from a warm cloud going down. Write that down and stop putting words in my mouth you stupid phucking asshat.
Springer, “If the water cycle accelerates in response to increased back-radiation from CO2 then wherever there is an abundant supply of surface water to evaporate the surface that becomes warmer is 1-2 kilometers overhead in the form of more boundary layer clouds.”
More water just raises the dew point temperature so clouds can form at a slight lower altitude or there can be some warming. Based on the radiosonde data the marine cloud base has lowered a few meters (less than 100) and there is little actual warming.
Thanks for quoting me, Dallas. I wish stupid Pierre would do the same but he can’t because he’s stupid and can only argue with straw men.
“Not quite, Jim. You are right that some surface must exhibit a Planck response to reach equilibrium with incoming energy. But it isn’t necessarily the surface of the earth it can be the surface of clouds instead. Evaporation and condensation is like an elevator that transports energy insensibly from the surface to the cloud deck which is seldom lower than one kilometer. If the elevator starts running faster then we get more clouds and rain and less surface heating. Write that down.”
Though clouds will have an restorative effect on the TOA imbalance through increasing the albedo, the effect that you describe here actually increases the TOA imbalance. Even when the clouds are just 1 km up, they are still colder than the surface below and they shield the surface from cold space in the 8 to 14 micron window.
Kristian, it is not circular to say that the data supports the theory. These are independent lines. Consilience.
Jim D says, May 11, 2014 at 12:19 pm:
“Kristian, it is not circular to say that the data supports the theory.”
Jim, the point is, you’re not just saying that the data supports the theory. You’re taking for granted that SINCE the data appears to support your theory, then your proposed theoretical mechanism automatically explains the data.
YOUR explanation is presumably correct simply on the basis of the data being consistent with it.
Problem is, Jim, ANYTHING causing warming from 1950 till today will be supported by the data. YOUR task, then, is to SHOW that it’s CO2 that did it. But you’re not doing that. You’re just starting out ASSUMING that it did. And use the data based on that very assumption to prescribe a climate sensitivity to CO2. As if it WERE already shown that CO2 did indeed cause the warming over the given period.
If this is not circular reasoning, NOTHING is.
The so-called fingerprint of non-condensing greenhouse gas warming is temperature in the tropical troposphere warming more with increasing altitude. That’s because the effective radiating level is rising. This fingerprint cannot be found. The surface is warming the faster indicating that something other than non-condensing greenhouse gas is responsible.
Kristian, maybe you are thinking that I said that the data proves the theory. If you read what I said first, it was that you can estimate the sensitivity from the data. The data has been consistent with a 2 C sensitivity since 1950. It can’t prove the theory but it can support it, as with any data and theory in science. It is very hard to outright prove a theory with data, as most theories (outside mathematics) are approximations of the truth in the first place. On the other hand, the data is not at all consistent with a 1 C sensitivity, and 1.5 C is also somewhat lacking when compared with these observations, because the estimate comes up with 2 C, which is perhaps coincidentally what the theory comes up with.
I’m not thinking it, Jim. I’m observing it. Here are your exact words: “You can estimate sensitivity from the data since 1950, and you get 2 C per doubling, adding in all feedbacks and collateral effects like aerosols and other GHGs.”
‘… and you get 2 C per doubling …’ Gee, I wonder, a doubling of what? The number of unicorns in the world?
Listen, FIRST you need to establish empirically, out there in the real earth system, Jim, that there IS a ‘climate sensitivity’ at all to rising atmospheric CO2 (you know, the causal relationship +CO2 >> +T) and that this sensitivity (including positive feedbacks) is responsible for the ENTIRE temperature rise (in fact, more) that we’ve observed globally between 1950 and today.
You’re not establishing or showing anything, Jim. You’re just assuming (taking for granted) a priori that it is so, because that’s what your ‘theory’ claims.
That is what ‘circular reasoning’ is all about. It the textbook definition of circular reasoning.
Pierre-Normand: Yes, and my point is that this increase of the temperature of the skin layer explains why oceans cool at a reduced rate (because of the reduced gradient below the skin) and therefore account for the increasing rate of heat storage in the oceans.
How the surface can increase in temp without increasing in vaporization and without increasing the rate of heat transport to the air above are mysteries yet to be explicated. Perhaps you have references. If the disparity between surface temp and air temp increases, then the rate of heat transfer from surface to air will increase; if the temp of the surface increases without an increase in air pressure, then the rate of vaporization will increase. So what in the increase in downwelling LWIR warms the surface and air to reduce the rate of transfer, and what increases the air pressure to prevent a rise in the vaporization rate?
This is the negative moist adiabatic lapse rate feedback. It arises when the water vapor concentration is increased. But the primary effect of this increase is to increase the opacity of the mid-troposphere and hence to raise the effective radiation level to a higher altitude. This is the positive water vapor feedback. The negative lapse rate feedback just offsets this positive feedback a little bit.
So what is the negative moist adiabatic lapse rate feedback during the build-up of thunder clouds, the increase in cloud cover, and the subsequent rainfall? Those are processes observed all over the non-dry surfaces of the Earth in hot weather. You are again, it seems to me, trying to use equilibrium concepts for a dynamic system that is never in equilibrium.
Matthew R Marler : “1. I don’t know; I don’t think I have implied that the temperature would necessarily remain the same. I expect there is a combination of “warming in” the upper layer and “evaporation from” the upper layer; on other occasions I have asked if the balance of warming/evaporation was known. Rephrasing your question, Could you have increased temperature of the upper layer of the oceans without increased evaporation?”
My only point was that if the warming of the skin is a result of an increase in downwelling radiation (consequent to a change in TOA balance) then there will be a reduction in the rate of cooling of the ocean. I am not denying that the increase in the temperature of the skin will increase the rate of latent heat flux. But this increase will be smaller than the increase in downwelling radiation that caused it. In any case, in however fashion the net surface flux is distributed between sensible, latent and (net) radiative, the total flux at the surface will have to match the total flux at the tropopause over a long enough period. David Springer now agrees with this.
“Why would you assume that the TOA fluxes remain unchanged?”
I am not assuming this. I was discussing what occurs *while* the downwelling flux has increased as a result of the TOA imbalance. If the TOA flux is reduced, then, of course, the net flux at the surface will also change.
Jim D: Matthew Marler, it is equilibrium levels that matter, because warming won’t stop until that is reached. Evaporation doesn’t affect the equilibrium because it doesn’t directly affect the radiated energy. You might argue that it produces latent heating in the air which affects the radiation, and yes, that is taken care of with the lapse rate holding as the surface warms. The convection warms the troposphere mostly because of latent heating.
Why do you think there is an equilibrium when the dynamical systems theory shows that high dimensional non-linear dissipative systems do not have equilibria?
If the upper troposphere heats because of the increase in the convection of latent heat from the surface then the calculations of increased surface warming as a consequence of increased atmospheric CO2 are too high.
Pierre-Normand: I was discussing what occurs *while* the downwelling flux has increased as a result of the TOA imbalance. If the TOA flux is reduced, then, of course, the net flux at the surface will also change.
This brings us back to the unknown effects of the unpredictable clouds caused by the unpredictable increase in surface evaporation.
David Springer said: “No dopey it is not. A black body is a perfect absorber and perfect radiator across all frequencies.”
I said: “close enough… in the IR spectrum”
Matthew Marler, are you arguing that there is not a top-of-atmosphere energy balance, or that we can’t be out of balance? Well, actually there is, and there is now a long-term imbalance, and the earth has to find a way to radiate more energy to restore it. This is why warming is predicted.
Matthew R Marler: “Why do you think there is an equilibrium when the dynamical systems theory shows that high dimensional non-linear dissipative systems do not have equilibria?”
This is quite point missing. Jim D was obviously referring to a state of flux balance; not thermodynamic equilibrium. It is quite common to use the word “equilibrium” to refer to such steady states.
“If the upper troposphere heats because of the increase in the convection of latent heat from the surface then the calculations of increased surface warming as a consequence of increased atmospheric CO2 are too high.”
No. The calculations of the warming response to the forcing change have *both* the consequences that, after the flux balance will have been restored, then the surface will have warmed, and the upper troposphere also will have warmed back close to its initial temperature.
David Springer: “The so-called fingerprint of non-condensing greenhouse gas warming is temperature in the tropical troposphere warming more with increasing altitude. That’s because the effective radiating level is rising. This fingerprint cannot be found. The surface is warming the faster indicating that something other than non-condensing greenhouse gas is responsible.”
This is the so called tropical hot spot that you are talking about. It is the manifestation of the negative lapse rate feedback, whatever the cause of the surface and troposphere warming might be. So, maybe the lapse rate feedback is less pronounced than we thought. (Though it might just be that observing it is tricky).
David Springer: “You are continually putting words in my mouth that I did not say. Nowhere did I say that DWLIR cannot slow down the rate of ocean cooling at all.”
You had written an insistent challenge thus: “I am still waiting for experimental confirmation that increasing 10 micrometer illumination of a water body surface where the water is free to evaporate decreases the cooling rate of the water body.
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?”
So I had, reasonably enough, inferred that it had seemed problematic to you, as it is constantly claimed by other skeptics as well, that an increase in back radiation can slow down the rate of cooling of the oceans.
David Spinger wrote: “I didn’t say clouds decrease DWLIR. I said more CO2 between cloud and ground reduces the amount of back-radiation caused by the cloud. CO2 impedes the transmission of LIR. It will impede from the ground going up and it will impede it from a warm cloud going down.”
I don’t quite get this argument. The clouds have very high emissivity. CO2 will scatter some of the downwelling radiation from the cloud (just in the CO2 band). The clouds and greenhouse gases provide insulation from the cold outer space through scattering back some fraction of the upwelling radiation from the warmer ground. You can’t reduce the insulating effect (reduce back radiation) from a strong insulator (the cloud) through adding a weak insulator in between (the atmosphere below the cloud). Where would the energy go?
“No. More non-condensing greenhouse gases causes the effective radiating level to rise to a colder level. Higher specific humidity causes the condensation level to rise but not to a colder level because the lapse rate changes with more water vapor. More relative humidity causes the effective radiating level to fall as condensation happens at a warmer temperature.”
OK, what I said may be a bit confusing because, unlike the case for CO2 forcing, it is harder to conceive of the “initial” imbalance from the specific humidity increase since the warming needed to compensate the imbalance is the very cause of the increase. But the two steps can still be conceptually distinguished. Hence you can conceive of the initial CO2 forcing and the water vapor feedback response together prior to considering any change surface and troposphere temperature profile that will restore the TOA balance. This is how you can conceive of the larger water vapor concentration increasing the optical depth of the atmosphere, and hence raising the effective radiation level to a colder altitude, *prior* to the surface temperature and vertical temperature changing to compensate. Hence the warming of the effective radiation level can be seen to occur as a causal result of the greenhouse effect from CO2 and water vapor combined. This just reflects the counterfactual that had this warming not occurred (no change in surface or troposphere temperature) then the imbalance from the CO2 + water vapor increase would have been larger than in the CO2 & no feedback case.
As for the negative lapse rate feedback, it just reduces the water vapor feedback from a value of 1.8W/°Km^2 to about 1W/°Km^2 on a global scale. If my explanation is unclear, check Inamdar and Ramanathan:
http://www-ramanathan.ucsd.edu/files/pr85.pdf
Pierre-Normand says, May 10, 2014 at 10:20 pm:
“Yes, and my point is that this increase of the temperature of the skin layer explains why oceans cool at a reduced rate (because of the reduced gradient below the skin) and therefore account for the increasing rate of heat storage in the oceans.”
Pierre-Normand, you keep postulating as ‘facts’ mechanisms and processes that find no basis or backing in any empirical observations from the real earth system. Just like all warmists do.
Where are the comprehensive global studies showing us all that the temperature gradient through the world ocean’s skin layer has in fact become gradually gentler over the last 4-5 decades? This is your mechanism for rising OHC, isn’t it? The ocean presumably can’t let as much heat out because the temp difference between the skin itself and the bulk layer underneath it decreases with rising content of so-called ‘GHGs’ in the atmosphere, a consequence of the DWLWIR directly HEATING the skin layer somewhat.
First of all, how is the DWLWIR from the COOLER atmosphere able to HEAT the WARMER skin layer at all?!
Secondly, where is the evidence of all this actually happening, globally and progressively over the last decades?!
Yours is JUST an assertion!
This is utter PSEUDO-science!
Pierre-Normand, compare the evolution in global SSTa and global OHC since 2001. No surface warming whatsoever. But apparently a huge increase in OHC.
Now, how would you go about explaining the rise in OHC 2001-14 using your postulated mechanism? You state it in plain words: “(…) this increase of the temperature of the skin layer explains why oceans cool at a reduced rate (because of the reduced gradient below the skin) and therefore account for the increasing rate of heat storage in the oceans.”
This cannot be misunderstood. So how do you explain the rise in OHC since 2001? When the skin hasn’t warmed at all. (Yes, satellites detect IR as well as microwave, thereby ‘reading’ the actual skin layer.)
Pierre-Normand: The calculations of the warming response to the forcing change have *both* the consequences that, after the flux balance will have been restored, then the surface will have warmed, and the upper troposphere also will have warmed back close to its initial temperature.
After a doubling of the CO2 concentration, the upper troposphere will return to “close to its initial temperature”, after the flux balance is restored? How close? Within 0.1C, perhaps? Again with the undefined “close”: after a doubling of CO2 concentration the Earth mean temperature may rise 0.3% to 1%, according to the standard calculations — is that “close to” the initial temperature, by your definition of “close”?
“After a doubling of the CO2 concentration, the upper troposphere will return to “close to its initial temperature”, after the flux balance is restored? How close? Within 0.1C, perhaps? Again with the undefined “close”: after a doubling of CO2 concentration the Earth mean temperature may rise 0.3% to 1%, according to the standard calculations — is that “close to” the initial temperature, by your definition of “close”?”
If you consider the temperature of the “effective radiating level” then “close” means “exactly equal”, for this is the condition for restoring the TOA outgoing flux in balance with the post-albedo solar input. (This neglects the albedo feedbacks). But the temperature of the effective radiation level isn’t the real air temperature at an actual level of the atmosphere. It is defined as the atmospheric level where the temperature is such that a blackbody radiating at that temperature would emit as much IR power as the Earth as a whole does. But this power includes the emissions from the surface through the atmospheric IR window, last emissions from different greenhouse gas bands from different altitudes, emissions in the rest of the spectrum from high emissivity clouds, etc.
But my point just was that even though the troposphere has warmed back after the surface has warmed as an adjustment to the initial forcing (and as a further response to the feedbacks) this doesn’t mean that there never was, at least conceptually, an initial cooling of the effective radiating level. The forcing precisely is defined as the imbalance at the tropopause that would have been caused by this forcing when the stratosphere only is allowed to radiatively adjust but the temperature profile below is held constant.
Kristian wrote: Pierre-Normand says, May 10, 2014 at 10:20 pm:
“Pierre-Normand, you keep postulating as ‘facts’ mechanisms and processes that find no basis or backing in any empirical observations from the real earth system. Just like all warmists do.
Where are the comprehensive global studies showing us all that the temperature gradient through the world ocean’s skin layer has in fact become gradually gentler over the last 4-5 decades?”
What I am postulating is the very same thing that people like Spencer, Curry, Lindzen or David Springer postulate, and this is that the laws of physics, including the law of conservation of energy, must be obeyed by atmospheric processes.
“This is your mechanism for rising OHC, isn’t it? The ocean presumably can’t let as much heat out because the temp difference between the skin itself and the bulk layer underneath it decreases with rising content of so-called ‘GHGs’ in the atmosphere, a consequence of the DWLWIR directly HEATING the skin layer somewhat.
First of all, how is the DWLWIR from the COOLER atmosphere able to HEAT the WARMER skin layer at all?!”
It isn’t. It reduces the rate of *cooling* of the surface layer, including the skin. Likewise the cooler insulation in the walls of your house in winter doesn’t heat the warmer air inside your house. It merely reduces the temperature gradient within the walls and thereby reduces the heat flux, and it reduces the temperature of the surface of the walls outside (the “skin”). In this case the increased downwelling flux merely reduces the *radiative* cooling of the skin layer since this rate of cooling is the difference between the upwelling and downwelling radiative fluxes at the surface.
(You could also shine IR lamps on the outside of your walls in winter and reduce the rate of cooling of your house even though the (reduced) net flux of heat still would be from inside out.)
“Secondly, where is the evidence of all this actually happening, globally and progressively over the last decades?!
Yours is JUST an assertion!”
It is mere deduction from global energy balance considerations. The surface flux must tend to approach the TOA flux since the thermal capacity of the atmosphere isn’t very large.
“Pierre-Normand, compare the evolution in global SSTa and global OHC since 2001. No surface warming whatsoever. But apparently a huge increase in OHC.”
It is entirely to be expected that the least warming (temperature increase) of the surface occurs then the larger the increase in OHC should be. The warming of the surface is the primary way for the TOA balance (from the enhanced external forcing) to be restored. If the surface warming is delayed by ocean circulation and other heat exchanges internal to the climate system, then the imbalance keeps growing and so does the rate of increase of OHC.
“[…] This cannot be misunderstood. So how do you explain the rise in OHC since 2001? When the skin hasn’t warmed at all. (Yes, satellites detect IR as well as microwave, thereby ‘reading’ the actual skin layer.)”
I wasn’t talking about warming of the skin but merely of the consequences that follow from of the skin being warmer than it would have been in the absence of a (partly uncompensated) increase in external forcing. Compare the IR lamps shining on you house from outside in winter, as your house still is being heated internally at a constant rate. The lamps will not heat you house, in a sense, since they don’t produce any net heat flow from outside-in. But they reduce the rate of heat flow through the walls (through reducing the gradient) and hence allow your house to warm until the outside walls will also have warmed enough to cancel the added energy input from the lamps. This will also result in an increase of the heat content of hour house (warmer furniture, etc).
Pierre-Normand says, May 13, 2014 at 12:30 pm:
“What I am postulating is the very same thing that people like Spencer, Curry, Lindzen or David Springer postulate, and this is that the laws of physics, including the law of conservation of energy, must be obeyed by atmospheric processes.”
Nice attempt of redirection, Pierre-Normand.
No, you’re postulating (I’ve quoted you doing so) that the ocean becomes warmer (OHC increases) when CO2 content in the atmosphere rises, because the alleged ‘increased DWLWIR’ warms the skin, making the temp gradient down to the bulk layer underneath it less steep. This is the postulate we’re discussing here, Pierre-Normand.
So I don’t need for you to appeal to other people, no matter what their names, also postulating (other) things.
I need for you to present to us all the comprehensive global studies showing that what you’re postulating has indeed taken place over the last decades, and that this is what has caused the rise in OHC?
You’re just assuming and asserting, Pierre-Normand. That’s not science.
“It isn’t. It reduces the rate of *cooling* of the surface layer, including the skin. Likewise the cooler insulation in the walls of your house in winter doesn’t heat the warmer air inside your house. It merely reduces the temperature gradient within the walls and thereby reduces the heat flux, and it reduces the temperature of the surface of the walls outside (the “skin”).”
Yes, and more CO2 in the atmosphere does NOT reduce the temperature gradient up through the troposphere. So HOW precisely does it reduce the cooling of the ocean surface?
“In this case the increased downwelling flux merely reduces the *radiative* cooling of the skin layer since this rate of cooling is the difference between the upwelling and downwelling radiative fluxes at the surface.”
Does it indeed? You know about the radiative heat transfer equation, Pierre-Normand? P/A = e s (T_1^4 – T_2^4). What must object 2 (say, the atmosphere) here do for P/A (the outgoing radiative HEAT flux from object 1 (say, the surface) to become smaller? It’s temperature must rise. Hence, the atmosphere must WARM relatively to the surface and BEFORE the surface.
Is this something we see a lot in the empirical observational data from the real earth system, Pierre-Normand? Is this how the world works? Warming starting in the troposphere and propagating down to the surface?
Why do ALL data from the real earth system show THIS chain of events?
Surface temps UP (or down) > tropospheric temps UP (or down) > OLR from ToA UP (or down).
Why do we NEVER see THIS chain of events in actual real-world data?
OLR from ToA DOWN > tropospheric temps UP > surface temps UP.
“It is mere deduction from global energy balance considerations. The surface flux must tend to approach the TOA flux since the thermal capacity of the atmosphere isn’t very large.”
OLR from ToA has INcreased over the last 30 years, Pierre-Normand, not DEcreased. It has simply increased with the temperature. So any imbalance between incoming and outgoing at the ToA can NOT have been caused by a decrease in OUTGOING. OLR has been trying its best to close the gap. If there IS in fact a gap, that is. That is also not a definitive truth, after all.
So since OLR from ToA has increased over the last 30 years, then one would, according to your logic, expect OLR from the surface also to have increased during that same period. So no decrease. INcrease. Enhanced cooling. Not suppressed.
“It is entirely to be expected that the least warming (temperature increase) of the surface occurs then the larger the increase in OHC should be. The warming of the surface is the primary way for the TOA balance (from the enhanced external forcing) to be restored. If the surface warming is delayed by ocean circulation and other heat exchanges internal to the climate system, then the imbalance keeps growing and so does the rate of increase of OHC.”
Er, back-paddling, are we? It is of course NOT to be expected that the LEAST warming (you mean NO warming, surely) of the surface would result in the LARGER increase in OHC … when the mechanism postulated for increasing OHC is one of warming the surface. In terms of YOUR mechanism for bulk warming of the oceans, the MOST warming of the surface would cause the LARGEST increase in OHC, Pierre-Normand. You see that also. Everyone sees that.
If solar input remains unchanged and ‘ocean circulation’ happens to keep the surface from warming, then there IS no detectable decrease in the gradient between surface and bulk going on to cause the rise in OHC, Pierre-Normand. Or do you have global measurements showing that the bulk waters underneath the skin have somehow COOLED since 2001, thereby STILL giving a decreasing gradient, so that the ocean could continue warming from your postulated mechanism?
You have assertions and assumptions piling up now, all awaiting documentation by empirical data from the global earth system, Pierre-Normand.
“I wasn’t talking about warming of the skin but merely of the consequences that follow from of the skin being warmer than it would have been in the absence of a (partly uncompensated) increase in external forcing.”
Sigh. Again you’re just making assumptions of something as fact that we can’t observe. Circular reasoning is your modus operandi, it seems. This is nothing more than an assertion: ‘the skin being warmer than it would have been in the absence of a (partly uncompensated) increase in external forcing.’ Mumbo jumbo. How on earth are you planning to show us that the skin is in fact ‘warmer than it would have been’, Pierre-Normand?!
*** PSEUDO-science. ***
(Also, as I wrote above, if the skin isn’t warming, then the subsurface water needs to have COOLED since 2001 for the gradient still to have decreased. Where is the logic? Where is the empirical evidence? Where is the science?)
Kristian wrote:
“Yes, and more CO2 in the atmosphere does NOT reduce the temperature gradient up through the troposphere. So HOW precisely does it reduce the cooling of the ocean surface?”
More CO2 increases the emissivity of the atmosphere and hence the power of the back radiation. This decreases the net upwelling radiative flux from the surface since this net flux is the difference between the (gross) surface radiative emissions (only controlled by temperature) and the back radiation power (controlled by both air temperature *and* emissivity). The change in the temperature gradient below the skin just is a consequence of this.
““In this case the increased downwelling flux merely reduces the *radiative* cooling of the skin layer since this rate of cooling is the difference between the upwelling and downwelling radiative fluxes at the surface.”
Does it indeed? You know about the radiative heat transfer equation, Pierre-Normand? P/A = e s (T_1^4 – T_2^4). What must object 2 (say, the atmosphere) here do for P/A (the outgoing radiative HEAT flux from object 1 (say, the surface) to become smaller? It’s temperature must rise. Hence, the atmosphere must WARM relatively to the surface and BEFORE the surface.”
There is no warming (i.e. there is not downward heat flux) of the surface by the atmosphere. There only is a reduction of the rate of cooling and this reduction is enhanced by the increased emissivity of the lower troposphere as explained above.
“So since OLR from ToA has increased over the last 30 years, then one would, according to your logic, expect OLR from the surface also to have increased during that same period. So no decrease. INcrease. Enhanced cooling. Not suppressed.”
Yes, it should be expected that the total flux from the surface (latent+sensible+net radiative) would have increased unless there has been a compensating albedo change (clouds/snow/ice) of the ORL data isn’t correct.
“Er, back-paddling, are we? It is of course NOT to be expected that the LEAST warming (you mean NO warming, surely) of the surface would result in the LARGER increase in OHC … when the mechanism postulated for increasing OHC is one of warming the surface. In terms of YOUR mechanism for bulk warming of the oceans, the MOST warming of the surface would cause the LARGEST increase in OHC, Pierre-Normand. You see that also. Everyone sees that.”
You misunderstand. If the surface cooling is impeded by the increase in back radiation then this enhances the rate of ocean heat accumulation compared with a case where the back radiation doesn’t increase. But when the surface eventually warms as a result of this imbalance then the upwelling radiation increases and this (together with the consequent warming of the troposphere) eventually cancels the increase in back radiation. (Though there is a positive feedback as the troposphere warms and back radiates more, the increased radiation through the atmospheric window still allows the balance to be restored). So, if the ocean circulation brings the warm surface under depth and replaces it with cold water, the imbalance remains uncompensated and the ocean keeps gaining heat.
You mistake was to run together the effect of warming the skin through increasing the back radiation or through reducing oceans mixing.
“If solar input remains unchanged and ‘ocean circulation’ happens to keep the surface from warming, then there IS no detectable decrease in the gradient between surface and bulk going on to cause the rise in OHC”
In that case the power of the back radiation increases and so does the imbalance. Whereas if the surface had been allowed to warm more (e.g. if there had occurred fewer La Ninas) then there would have been more surface emissions to compensate for the increase in back radiation and hence the rate of ocean cooling would have increased. And hence there wouldn’t have been so much gain in OHC.
“Sigh. Again you’re just making assumptions of something as fact that we can’t observe. Circular reasoning is your modus operandi, it seems.”
Clarifying my thoughts when you misunderstand them isn’t circular.
“(Also, as I wrote above, if the skin isn’t warming, then the subsurface water needs to have COOLED since 2001 for the gradient still to have decreased. Where is the logic? Where is the empirical evidence? Where is the science?)”
Same conflation as above. If the skin doesn’t warm because there doesn’t occur an increase in back radiation, then, yes, the oceans will cool more. If the skin temperature remains low because of an increase in ocean layer mixing, then the oceans will warm more. Search this page for the word “soup” for an analogy.
Let us just take care of the logic. When the logic is straight then you are free to assess the science and data in the way you want.
Marler said:
The oscillations of ENSO are forced and modeled straightforwardly by the Mathieu wave equation:
http://contextearth.com/2014/05/02/the-soim-substantiating-the-chandler-wobble-and-tidal-connection-to-enso/
Bringing up theoretical musings and doing some fancy footwork around this topic is pointless.
It’s like saying an electrical circuit is non-linear and dissipative, while in the meantime some engineer worked out the equations, devised a circuit, and then put it on the market.
You really have to show us the goods or you look like a poseur..
Pierre-Normand says, May 13, 2014 at 6:30 pm:
“More CO2 increases the emissivity of the atmosphere and hence the power of the back radiation. This decreases the net upwelling radiative flux from the surface since this net flux is the difference between the (gross) surface radiative emissions (only controlled by temperature) and the back radiation power (controlled by both air temperature *and* emissivity). The change in the temperature gradient below the skin just is a consequence of this.”
No, Pierre-Normand. You seem to not get at all what I’m trying to tell you. Because you’re just carrying on relentlessly, piling ever more assertions and assumptions onto your old assertions and assumptions, never stopping to wonder “Is this something I’m just saying (regurgitating), or has it in fact been established as empirical truth?”
Listen, what you’re proclaiming above is THE HYPOTHESIS. You have not shown it to be THE REALITY.
I am asking you to VERIFY your hypothesis by presenting global empirical evidence from the real earth system that your postulated mechanism is in fact working and inducing warming. I am not interested in your theorised processes. Everyone and anyone can find some piece of physics and claim that as the basis of one’s claim of a grand effect. But that doesn’t make the claim true until the mechanism has first been detected and then shown to cause the postulated effect … OUT THERE IN THE REAL WORLD.
You people simply don’t see this. And move on with your circular reasoning, just assuming you’re right based solely on the faith in your hypothesis. In your mind, you don’t NEED to show the proposed mechanism to work in nature. Because you already KNOW in your heart from the outset that it does. So you summarily ignore (or find ways to explain it away) data contradicting it and interpret data seemingly going in the same direction as the predictions of your hypothesis immediately and without proper and open assessment as ‘proof’ it’s correct. Circular reasoning. Confirmation bias.
This is not science, Pierre-Normand. This is PSEUDO-science. You have a claim … and that’s it. You’re so deep into your faith that there simply is no talking to you. You will NEVER see this fundamental flaw in your logic.
So, I’m not gonna spend more time replying to the rest of your nonsensical post. It’s just more of the same. I’ve explained very clearly to you what it is that I want from you. But the only way you seem to be able to back up your fanciful (and unsupported) claims is by piling on with even more of them.
That’s clear evidence of someone not having ANYTHING of substance to offer, only smoke and mirrors, huffing and puffing.
The data shows clearly how ENSO caused global warming since 1970. The data does NOT show at all how increased CO2 ‘forcing’ contributed. That’s all just in your heads. And that’s something you can’t get around, Pierre-Normand.
Sorry, but data and observations always trump faith and ideology. In SCIENCE, that is …
Kristian: “Listen, what you’re proclaiming above is THE HYPOTHESIS. You have not shown it to be THE REALITY.”
No. I made no hypothesis. I just told you what the standard explanation of the slowdown in the rate of ocean cooling is and why it differs from what you falsely thought this explanation to be. So, now you can stop trying to shoot down an argument that nobody is making.
WebHubTelescope: It’s like saying an electrical circuit is non-linear and dissipative, while in the meantime some engineer worked out the equations, devised a circuit, and then put it on the market.
Surely you do not deny that the climate is a high-dimensional, non-linear dissipative system. High dimensional, surely; non-linear, surely; dissipative, surely. Furthermore, no one has worked out accurate equations; no one has devised it; and no one has put it on the market. And I never claimed any particular electrical circuit was a high-dimensional, non-linear dissipative system (though some neural circuits are.)
If to you the climate system is “like” an electrical system devised by an engineer and put on the market, you have missed a lot of the climate science.
Pierre-Normand: The forcing precisely is defined as the imbalance at the tropopause that would have been caused by this forcing when the stratosphere only is allowed to radiatively adjust but the temperature profile below is held constant.
If the temperature profile below were known to be held constant while CO2 was increasing we wouldn’t be having this debate. You have now defined the forcing “precisely” as an imbalance at the tropopause measured when something else can not be happening.
I appreciate your long replies. I think if you follow the whole train of events, heat transfers and all, that result from the increase of CO2 concentration in the troposphere, then all of the quantitative consequences can not be calculated based on present knowledge, beginning with how much of the extra radiant energy converts to warmer surface water and how much converts to evaporated surface water. Every attempt depends on counterfactual assumptions of unknown accuracy, like that counterfactual assumption about the temperature profile below the tropopause remaining constant, or the counterfactual assumption that an equilibrium is ever reached.
The Earth absorbs more energy at the Equator, and radiates more energy at the poles; each part of the surface absorbs more energy in day time than at night; each hemisphere absorbs more energy than it loses during part of the year and loses more energy than it gains during a complementary part of the year. Annually there is slight imbalance so that the mean temp increases or decreases; over long time spans there is a rough balance so that the mean temp oscillates within limits (at least it has done so for the last 10,000 years.) But the quantitative effects of increasing CO2 can not be calculated; and the possibility that increased cloud cover will halt warming can not be ruled out on present knowledge; As far as I can tell, you have not shown the contrary.
“If the temperature profile below were known to be held constant while CO2 was increasing we wouldn’t be having this debate. You have now defined the forcing “precisely” as an imbalance at the tropopause measured when something else can not be happening.”
It certainly can happen when the forcing change is small and sudden. That’s because the temperature profile is dominated by convective processes and the surface temperature can’t adjust instantaneously due to thermal inertia. So, if there is a small forcing change, then there occurs a radiative imbalance before the whole surface+troposphere gets a chance to adjust to restore the balance. In any case, there is no hypothesis being made that the troposphere can’t respond at all just because of the way the theoretical concept of a forcing is *defined.*
Even if we assumed that the system could always restore the balance instantaneously, and there would never by any merely transient response and sustained imbalance (as would happen when the variation of the forcing is very slow), the definition of the forcing would still be the same — based on a conditional counterfactual statement with (in this case) a false antecedent. The only presupposition embodied in the definition of the forcing is that some response (change in the surface+troposphere temperature profile) *must* eventually occur for the TOA flux balance to be restored. The definition itself doesn’t entail that the eventual adjustment of the whole system will be slow, or fast, or instantaneous, or will never occur.
Matthew R Marler | May 14, 2014 at 2:00 pm |
Pierre-Normand: The forcing precisely is defined as the imbalance at the tropopause that would have been caused by this forcing when the stratosphere only is allowed to radiatively adjust but the temperature profile below is held constant.
If the temperature profile below were known to be held constant while CO2 was increasing we wouldn’t be having this debate. You have now defined the forcing “precisely” as an imbalance at the tropopause measured when something else can not be happening.
What Pierre-Normand is in effect doing is to deny the correctness and applicability of the general radiative heat transfer equation when it comes to radiatively active gases in the atmosphere vs. the surface. Then temperature apparently doesn’t matter. Then more radiative gases in the atmosphere simply sends down more ratiation to make the surface warmer (by cooling less).
Refer to the exchange him and me had on how radiation from the atmosphere allegedly slows surface cooling.
Pierre-Normand: “In this case the increased downwelling flux merely reduces the *radiative* cooling of the skin layer [i.e., the surface] since this rate of cooling is the difference between the upwelling and downwelling radiative fluxes at the surface.”
My response: “Does it indeed? You know about the radiative heat transfer equation, Pierre-Normand? P/A = e s (T_1^4 – T_2^4). What must object 2 (say, the atmosphere) here do for P/A (the outgoing radiative HEAT flux from object 1 (say, the surface) to become smaller? It’s temperature must rise. Hence, the atmosphere must WARM relatively to the surface and BEFORE the surface.”
Pierre-Normand’s reply to this: “There is no warming (i.e. there is not downward heat flux) of the surface by the atmosphere. There only is a reduction of the rate of cooling and this reduction is enhanced by the increased emissivity of the lower troposphere as explained above.”
First of all, he’s apparently oblivious to what I’m pointing out to him. You can’t just claim ‘increased downwelling flux’ to reduce the NET outgoing (meaning, the upwelling flux has NOT yet increased), without first having atmospheric warming. Again, this is what the radiative heat transfer equation clearly states. It’s only a matter of TEMP DIFFERENCE between the two radiating systems.
Pierre-Normand ignores this. No, it’s just the lower troposphere having its emissivity increased, according to him. Apparently circumventing the ‘atmosphere must warm before the surface’ problem.
But what happens is rather the opposite. The atmosphere is supposed to increase its IR absorptivity with increasing concentration of radiatively active gases like CO2. And the enhanced absorption is supposed to warm the lower troposphere. Everyone knows that the CO2 molecules pretty much NEVER get to reemit their absorbed IR photon from the surface directly. They collide with other air molecules, mostly nitrogen and oxygen ones, ‘long’ before this can happen.
It’s the atmosphere getting WARMER that’s supposed to cause the increased ‘back radiation’. And for this to reduce surface radiative cooling, it has to increase BEFORE anything changes at the surface, meaning tropospheric warming must precede surface warming.
This is also the whole idea behind the ‘effective radiating level’ (ERL) in the troposphere. More radiatively active gases in the atmosphere is supposed to make it more opaque to outgoing terrestrial IR, letting out less of it to space than with less such gases present. The ERL has been moved to a higher and colder layer.
So when just as much radiative heat comes up from the surface, but less is allowed to pass through to space per unit of time, then this will of course force an atmospheric warming – equal heat IN, less heat OUT >> warming system.
Equilibrium is reached when the new and higher ERL has warmed up to the temperature it had when it was lower.
The problem is, there exists no data from the real earth system that exhibits this postulated chain of events: OLR at ToA decreasing >> tropospheric temps increasing >> surface temps increasing. What the data instead consistently shows is this chain of events: surface temps up (or down) >> tropospheric temps up (or down) >> OLR at ToA increasing (or decreasing).
This issue is NEVER addressed. One just takes for granted that the postulated mechanism for surface warming works EVEN WHEN never observed. There is a term for this kind of practice: PSEUDO-science.
Sorry, I got that last post wrong. It should start like this:
Matthew R Marler says, May 14, 2014 at 2:00 pm:
“Pierre-Normand: The forcing precisely is defined as the imbalance at the tropopause that would have been caused by this forcing when the stratosphere only is allowed to radiatively adjust but the temperature profile below is held constant.
If the temperature profile below were known to be held constant while CO2 was increasing we wouldn’t be having this debate. You have now defined the forcing “precisely” as an imbalance at the tropopause measured when something else can not be happening.”
Matthew,
What Pierre-Normand is in effect doing is to deny the correctness and applicability of the general radiative heat transfer equation when it comes to radiatively active gases in the atmosphere vs. the surface. Then temperature apparently doesn’t matter. Then more radiative gases in the atmosphere simply sends down more ratiation to make the surface warmer (by cooling less).
Refer to the exchange him and me had on how radiation from the atmosphere allegedly slows surface cooling.
Pierre-Normand: “In this case the increased downwelling flux merely reduces the *radiative* cooling of the skin layer [i.e., the surface] since this rate of cooling is the difference between the upwelling and downwelling radiative fluxes at the surface.”
My response: “Does it indeed? You know about the radiative heat transfer equation, Pierre-Normand? P/A = e s (T_1^4 – T_2^4). What must object 2 (say, the atmosphere) here do for P/A (the outgoing radiative HEAT flux from object 1 (say, the surface) to become smaller? It’s temperature must rise. Hence, the atmosphere must WARM relatively to the surface and BEFORE the surface.”
Pierre-Normand’s reply to this: “There is no warming (i.e. there is not downward heat flux) of the surface by the atmosphere. There only is a reduction of the rate of cooling and this reduction is enhanced by the increased emissivity of the lower troposphere as explained above.”
First of all, he’s apparently oblivious to what I’m pointing out to him. You can’t just claim ‘increased downwelling flux’ to reduce the NET outgoing (meaning, the upwelling flux has NOT yet increased), without first having atmospheric warming. Again, this is what the radiative heat transfer equation clearly states. It’s only a matter of TEMP DIFFERENCE between the two radiating systems.
Pierre-Normand ignores this. No, it’s just the lower troposphere having its emissivity increased, according to him. Apparently circumventing the ‘atmosphere must warm before the surface’ problem.
But what happens is rather the opposite. The atmosphere is supposed to increase its IR absorptivity with increasing concentration of radiatively active gases like CO2. And the enhanced absorption is supposed to warm the lower troposphere. Everyone knows that the CO2 molecules pretty much NEVER get to reemit their absorbed IR photon from the surface directly. They collide with other air molecules, mostly nitrogen and oxygen ones, ‘long’ before this can happen.
It’s the atmosphere getting WARMER that’s supposed to cause the increased ‘back radiation’. And for this to reduce surface radiative cooling, it has to increase BEFORE anything changes at the surface, meaning tropospheric warming must precede surface warming.
This is also the whole idea behind the ‘effective radiating level’ (ERL) in the troposphere. More radiatively active gases in the atmosphere is supposed to make it more opaque to outgoing terrestrial IR, letting out less of it to space than with less such gases present. The ERL has been moved to a higher and colder layer.
So when just as much radiative heat comes up from the surface, but less is allowed to pass through to space per unit of time, then this will of course force an atmospheric warming – equal heat IN, less heat OUT >> warming system.
Equilibrium is reached when the new and higher ERL has warmed up to the temperature it had when it was lower.
The problem is, there exists no data from the real earth system that exhibits this postulated chain of events: OLR at ToA decreasing >> tropospheric temps increasing >> surface temps increasing. What the data instead consistently shows is this chain of events: surface temps up (or down) >> tropospheric temps up (or down) >> OLR at ToA increasing (or decreasing).
This issue is NEVER addressed. One just takes for granted that the postulated mechanism for surface warming works EVEN WHEN never observed. There is a term for this kind of practice: PSEUDO-science.
Two things must be added to this.
Firstly, the emissivity of the atmosphere in ‘GHE theory’ is already assumed to be 1. It cannot increase. This is the whole basis for the ERL idea. The earth’s mean ERL is supposed to be at the temp of 255K, because this is earth’s black body temperature to space. A 255K black body (with e = 1) radiates 240 W/m^2.
If the emissivity of the atmosphere were to be for instance 0.6, then there would be no traditional ‘GHE’ left (from lifting the ERL off the ground), because you would need a temp of 290K to radiate 240 W/m^2 (which is what is needed to balance the incoming and is also what is measured from space) and this temp is found at the surface.
Secondly, notice how the radiative heat transfer equation only operates with ONE emissivity value. This is the emissivity of the object/system (1) ACTUALLY emitting radiative heat to the other object/system (2).
Kristian, ya got nothing. Those are just words you are stringing together. Unless you translate those words into a formal presentation it is useless verbiage.
Or do you not understand the language of science?
Kristian wrote:
“Firstly, the emissivity of the atmosphere in ‘GHE theory’ is already assumed to be 1. It cannot increase. This is the whole basis for the ERL idea. The earth’s mean ERL is supposed to be at the temp of 255K, because this is earth’s black body temperature to space. A 255K black body (with e = 1) radiates 240 W/m^2.”
The emissivity of the atmosphere averages to about 0.86. Greenhouse gases such as CO2 and water vapor don’t have black body spectra. There is an infrared radiation “window” (multiple windows actually) within which the Earth surface radiates directly to space. An increase in greenhouse gas concentration raise the effective radiation level because it increases the opacity in the vicinity of the absorption lines (raises the level of last emission) but it also narrows the “window” somewhat because of increased saturation in the vicinity of the spectral line, which are widened because of pressure broadening. Thus, the increase in greenhouse gas concentration increases both the emissivity of individual atmospheric layers and also of the atmosphere as a whole. It raises the effective radiation level to a colder one, and it also lowers the “effective back radiation level” to a warmer one. Since the solar input is unaffected and we assume the surface temperature to be constant — and hence the IR emission from the surface also to be constant — this complementary effect (reduced outgoing radiation and increased back radiation) ensures conservation of energy.
“Secondly, notice how the radiative heat transfer equation only operates with ONE emissivity value. This is the emissivity of the object/system (1) ACTUALLY emitting radiative heat to the other object/system (2).”
When two grey bodies are at issue then the two emissivity values figure in the equation. It’s only when one surface is assumed to be a black body that its emissivity is set equal to 1. (What was the source for your equation? I guess it was assumed that one surface is a black body.) In any cases, the net energy exchange is the difference between the two powers received by one surface from the other one. This assumes, though, that both surfaces are opaque and don’t let any of the energy incident to them get through and escape from the other side. So, the equation doesn’t apply to the Earth surface/atmosphere system since some of the upwelling radiation from the ground gets directly through space through the IR atmospheric window. Just knowing the emissivity values doesn’t tell you that. There are four bodied involved — surface, atmosphere, Sun and outer space — not just two.
Pierre-Normand: It certainly can happen when the forcing change is small and sudden. That’s because the temperature profile is dominated by convective processes and the surface temperature can’t adjust instantaneously due to thermal inertia. So, if there is a small forcing change, then there occurs a radiative imbalance before the whole surface+troposphere gets a chance to adjust to restore the balance. In any case, there is no hypothesis being made that the troposphere can’t respond at all just because of the way the theoretical concept of a forcing is *defined.*
I think the debates will end when the rates of the many diverse energy transfer processes are known with sufficient accuracy. The use of unquantitative concepts such as something having a “small and sudden” change when something else does not respond “instantaneously” is as useful as sandcastles on the beach. And I think that we’ll need more accurate information than spatio-temporal averages over large regions and large time spans.
With respect to the rate at which the atmospheric processes can change, the CO2 is increasing “slowly”. With respect to the rate at which the subsurface ocean can get to the hypothetical new “equilibrium” or new “steady state”, or new “range of highs and lows”, perhaps CO2 is increasing “rapidly”.
Meanwhile, if downwelling LWIR increases by 3.7W/m^2 over any length of time, what fraction of that increase goes to increased vaporization of the surface waters, and what goes to the warming of the surface waters? Bearing in mind that winds and vaporization already happen at varying rates in different times of day and regions of the Earth. Along with that, what are the changes in the rate of convection of latent and sensible heat to the upper atmosphere, and what are the changes in the cloud cover? As far as I can tell, the published literature says that those are unknown.
“Meanwhile, if downwelling LWIR increases by 3.7W/m^2 over any length of time, what fraction of that increase goes to increased vaporization of the surface waters, and what goes to the warming of the surface waters?”
For sure some of it goes into enhancing the hydrological cycle. This doesn’t mean that the surface will have to warm any less for the balance to be restored. The enhancement of the hydrological cycle doesn’t contribute to restore the TOA balance since it results in a heat flow that’s internal to the ocean+atmosphere system. The increased specific humidity does contributes to the negative lapse rate feedback but this feedback is smaller (it is about 0.8W/m^2) than the water vapor feedback (1.8W/m^8).
So, in short, the increased latent heat flux reduces the rate of heat gain by the surface but doesn’t reduce the amount of surface and troposphere warming (i.e. temperature increase) needed to restore the TOA balance.
Pierre-Normand, May 15, 2014 at 5:26 pm:
“The emissivity of the atmosphere averages to about 0.86.”
Really? That’s news to me. How convenient. Based on what comprehensive field studies? Can you give me some references? Where oh where are those measurements showing that air (the mean of dry air, wet air, still air, moving air, clear air, cloudy air, rainy air, snowy air) has an emissivity of 0.86? Meaning, such ‘mean air’ at 255K would radiate exactly 206 W/m^2 to its surroundings.
Is that CERES measuring 240 W/m^2 coming up from the earth as a whole, but can simply tell that one part of it comes from the surface (at 289K) and the rest comes from the ERL (at 255K). That’s how you picture this, isn’t it? A gray body with e = 0.86 and 255K emits a radiative flux of 206 W/m^2. That leaves 34 W/m^2. This flux comes directly from the surface and passes through the atmospheric window.
So NO radiation at all between the surface and the ERL (~5 kilometres up in the troposphere) escapes directly to space, like from say the atmospheric layer at 280K or the one at 270K or 260K. And ALL the radiation from the ERL at 255K goes unhindered out to space. NONE of it is reabsorbed and thermally emitted from higher up (from say the 240K level, or the 220K level, or from the tropopause at 210K).
No, the ENTIRE ‘atmospheric flux’ to space is emitted from a gray body layer at 255K and e = 0.86. Do the calculation yourself. That’s 206 W/m^2. Stefan-Boltzmann equation. The rest comes from the surface. There’s no way around it.
When it comes down to it, It’s ALL about the specific temperature and emissivity of ONE specific atmospheric layer. That’s where the ‘GH effect’ is coming from. Not your ‘back radiation’. Where is the ERL? How high above the ground? That’s the only question. The rest is the result of the downward work of the lapse rate.
This is the argument.
If the 255K ERL is ~5 km up, then the lapse-rate caused difference down to the surface is the ‘GH effect’: (288-255=) 33K.
So, why 255K?
The 255K figure is earth’s BLACK BODY temperature to space. It is based on (calculated from) the 240 W/m^2 flux measured from space and with an assumed emissivity of 1. Meaning, IF earth had a solid BB surface in direct contact with space at 255K, then its emitted flux would be 240 W/m^2, equal to the one we measure. That’s how we derive the 255K value.
In no other way.
But we know that earth hasn’t got a solid BB surface in direct contact with space at 255K. And still the flux measured from space is 240 W/m^2. Hmm. How to solve that one?
We don’t.
We just still claim that the mean air layer at 255K is, sort of, the earth’s BB surface to space, corresponding to the measured outgoing flux of 240 W/m^2, even it if isn’t really. This layer, at an average of 5+ kilometres up, in the middle of the convective troposphere, by the lapse rate ladder down, is 33K warmer than the ‘real’ solid surface of the earth, so therefore we can say that that’s the ‘GH effect’. Clever, huh?
But we KNOW that a fair share of the radiation to space comes DIRECTLY from the surface. So the entire 240 W/m^2 flux to space CAN’T come from this postulated atmospheric BB surface.
No problem. We simply say that the emissivity of the ERL (of the air/cloud mixture up there) is a bit lower than unity. Which means it isn’t really the BB surface of the earth. But we still keep it at 255K, AS IF IT WERE.
So, by how much do we reduce the emissivity? Hmm, we still need to keep the 255K (even though it no longer connects with the idea of a BLACK body), so that we can keep the 33K ‘GH effect’, which derives directly from the original BB calculation, after all. Hmm. How big is the surface flux again? 30-40 W/m^2. OK, we simply tune the emissivity down until the flux from the 255K level + the surface flux comes out at 240 W/m^2. Simples! e = 0.86.
Voilà!
So, nothing of this would’ve worked if the emissivity of ‘mean air/cloud mixture’ at the ERL was 1, 0.9, 0.8, 0.7, 0.6, 0.5 or 0.05. It ONLY works if the emissivity is 0.86. Otherwise you need to move away from the 255K level. And we lose the original connection to how it’s derived in the first place, earth being an effective black body in space with a mean flux emitted of 240 W/m^2.
But lo and behold! Wow, the emissivity IS 0.86! According to Pierre-Normand. We’re saved! We get to keep the 255K! The hypothesis stands! It cannot be falsified!
Hurrah!
Pierre-Normand,
Radiatively active gases in the atmosphere do not enable it to WARM. It would’ve warmed with or without them, simply by being directly convectively coupled with the solar-heated surface. This connection is never broken as long as there is air present, a gravity field and sunshine heating the surface.
Radiatively active gases, however, DO enable the atmosphere to adequately COOL to space. Because this can only be done through radiation.
So an atmosphere without radiatively active gases would still WARM from the surface up, but wouldn’t be able to adequately COOL to space.
It’s not the so-called ‘GHGs’ that trap the surface heat, Pierre-Normand. It’s the 99.5% of the atmosphere NOT being significantly radiatively active at ‘earthly’ temperatures that would do that. Because this part can STILL be warmed conductively, convectively and latently, but it can’t to any real extent radiate it away again.
Read this carefully:
The atmosphere is able to warm. Because it has a mass, a heat capacity. Space hasn’t. So space isn’t able to warm. So the atmosphere sets up a finite (‘sub-max’) temperature gradient away from the solar-heated surface, which space won’t. It also exerts a pressure (by its weight, mass x gravity) above 0 on the surface, which space doesn’t. This pressure sets a limit to free evaporation and convection at a certain temperature.
This is why and how the atmosphere forces the surface of the earth to be warmer than a pure radiative equilibrium would do.
Kristian, do you still stand or don’t you still stand by your claim that the emissivity of the Earth’s *atmosphere* is exactly 1 and that therefore (as you were arguing) its emissivity can’t possibly be increased by the addition of more greenhouse gases?
How can the emissivity of the atmosphere be exactly 1 when it emits nothing (or at any rate very much less than a black body) in all those wavelength that comprise the IR window? Isn’t that the very definition of a grey body? The Earth as a whole emits like a black body. But that doesn’t help your argument. The Earth surface doesn’t back radiate onto itself. It’s the atmosphere that back radiates.
Pierre-Normand: For sure some of it goes into enhancing the hydrological cycle. This doesn’t mean that the surface will have to warm any less for the balance to be restored. The enhancement of the hydrological cycle doesn’t contribute to restore the TOA balance since it results in a heat flow that’s internal to the ocean+atmosphere system.
that line about “internal to the ocean + atmosphere system” I think is likely wrong. It would be good to have evidence, but I think it likely that an increase in the hydrological cycle will increase the net rate of transfer of energy from surface to upper troposphere and then radiated to space. In other words, it raises the effective temperature of the Earth as perceived from space, as does the increased Earth surface temperature, but without raising the Earth surface temperature. This is one of the reasons that I think the standard calculations (as in Randall’s book) overestimate the effects of increasing CO2 (even if the cloud cover does not change.)
Emissivity is a red herring. Whether you put on a thick fur coat that is white (low emissivity), or one that is black (high emissivity), in either case you get warmer because you’re well insulated.
It’s the same with CO2. Increasing it thickens the warm coat, thereby raising the surface temperature. What happens at higher altitudes is less relevant.
Venus is a great example. It has a very thick warm coat of CO2, around a hundred kilometers thick. At the top of its atmosphere, TOA, it happens to be very reflective (albedo of around 0.9), but even then its surface temperature is 740K. Reducing its TOA albedo to say 0.5 would not change the surface temperature much because the main determinant thereof is lapse rate in conjunction with the very thick atmosphere, and lapse rate is pretty much independent of albedo.
Matthew R Marler wrote: “that line about “internal to the ocean + atmosphere system” I think is likely wrong. It would be good to have evidence, but I think it likely that an increase in the hydrological cycle will increase the net rate of transfer of energy from surface to upper troposphere and then radiated to space.In other words, it raises the effective temperature of the Earth as perceived from space, as does the increased Earth surface temperature, but without raising the Earth surface temperature.”
The increased specific humidity of the atmosphere enhances the greenhouse effect. It also lowers the lapse rate through bringing it closer to the moist adiabat. That’s a negative feedback. But this negative feedback merely reduces the positive feedback from the enhanced specific humidity. The positive feedback results from the increased opacity of the atmosphere, which raises the effective radiation level. What you think is “likely wrong” — the radiative-convective models — already accounts for the effects of an enhanced hydrological cycle.
This may seem counter-intuitive because the latent heat flux from the surface is increased and it seems that this will result in more heat being carried to a level where it can be radiated to space. But the effect just is to bring the (average) temperature profile closer to the moist adiabat (and also to raise the effective radiating level. The gradient can’t be lower than the moist adiabat since when this gradient is achieved the atmosphere becomes convectively stable. Convection stops until the surface warms more. Since the upper troposphere can’t warm anymore until the surface does, the enhanced latent heat flux simply is compensated by a reduced sensible flux (less convection). The extra heat is essentially trapped — which translates in a reduced rate of ocean cooling — until the surface eventually warms and the sensible/convective flux is thereby allowed to increase (and more heat also escapes through the IR window).
“Emissivity is a red herring. Whether you put on a thick fur coat that is white (low emissivity), or one that is black (high emissivity), in either case you get warmer because you’re well insulated.”
Sure but we got wildly sidetracked into some sky dragon slayer types of arguments. What we were discussing earlier were situations when the forcing increased and the surface+troposphere didn’t *yet* warm to restore the balance. Some people argued that the ocean can’t take any heat from an enhanced back radiation since IR radiation doesn’t penetrate below the skin. Some people also argued that the atmosphere can’t produce anymore back radiation unless it warms first. I was replying to those specific claims.
1. The definition of forcing involves an increase in greenhouse gases without a concurrent increase in tropospheric temperature. It is not physically realistic but provides a basis for comparison.
2. IR doesn’t penetrate water beyond a few hundred micron.
3. Photon absorption and emission in the IR frequencies and kinetic temperature are inseparable processes. A molecule absorbs and emits through quantum vibrational transitions in the infrared. You cant have changes in energy states in this mode without changes in heat.
None of this is ‘skydragon’ but is just fairly basic physics. You are making points at great length and insistence that are simply wrong. The problem as I pointed out is approaching it all through language. That won’t work at all.
Then when you get past baby physics – you can move on to deterministic chaos and nonequilibrium thermodynamics.
GS, you didn’t contradict any claim that I ever made.
Pierre-Normand says, May 16, 2014 at 2:57 am:
“Kristian, do you still stand or don’t you still stand by your claim that the emissivity of the Earth’s *atmosphere* is exactly 1 and that therefore (as you were arguing) its emissivity can’t possibly be increased by the addition of more greenhouse gases?”
Haha, so I see you’re neatly evading the main issue here by grabbing hold of some detail of what I said. If you read my entire post, you would see why the assumption of a emissivity 1 is based in the idea of a BB surface of the earth to space. And after that the contortions one goes through to KEEP the BB surface (the 255K level) but STILL maintain that the atmosphere IN REALITY has an emissivity BELOW 1.
“How can the emissivity of the atmosphere be exactly 1 when it emits nothing (or at any rate very much less than a black body) in all those wavelength that comprise the IR window? Isn’t that the very definition of a grey body? The Earth as a whole emits like a black body.”
Precisely! My point exactly. So now go back to what I actually wrote (on May 16, 2014 at 2:13 am) and realise how stupid the canonical description of the 33K ‘GHE’ really is.
“But that doesn’t help your argument. The Earth surface doesn’t back radiate onto itself. It’s the atmosphere that back radiates.”
There is some strange hole in your logic here. You claim raised atmospheric emissivity. And still the IR from the surface is somehow held back from space to a greater extent than before. Refer to my post above. The so-called ‘GHGs’ don’t enable the atmosphere to warm. It warms primarily because it’s convectively coupled with the solar-heated surface. They enable it to cool (to space). Without their presence, it couldn’t adequately do that. It would still WARM from the surface, though. Through OTHER heat transfer mechanisms than the radiative one.
It follows from this that the more ‘GHGs’ in the atmosphere, the more able it is to cool to space.
You see, Pierre-Normand. Radiation WITHIN the atmosphere doesn’t matter. It is inconsequential. Just like conduction. It is always absorbed by the immediately adjacent air and instantaneously buoyed up as a result. How do you picture yourself downward radiation for instance from a cloud a mile up in the air will EVER reach the surface? Does it have a free line of sight? No. Its energy is absorbed and floats up. Try hold a finger just a few inches to the side from a burning candle and you’ll see what I mean. Can’t feel the heat at all. Where did it go? Up. With the air. Hold your finger at the same distance from the flame, only directly above it. Ouch! The difference? Buoyancy vs. radiation. Convection absolutely RULES energy transport WITHIN the troposphere, NOT radiation. The energy of course comes from conduction, evaporation/condensation and radiation. But convection is what MOVES the energy through the dynamic fluid that is our troposphere. From surface to tropopause. From where it can be radiated freely to space.
Radiative emission only matters where there is no more absorption and convection. From the tropopause and up. Above the troposphere.
So greater atmospheric emissivity will lead to a greater flux from the ToA to space, not a smaller one. Enhanced radiative cooling. Not suppressed.
Pierre-Normand says, May 16, 2014 at 4:14 am:
“Sure but we got wildly sidetracked into some sky dragon slayer types of arguments.”
Hehehe, Pierre-Normand here is pretty desperate to brush off the arguments he can’t counter, I see, by resorting to simple ad hominem. It’s always very easy to throw out the accusation of ‘sky dragon slayer!’ as soon as there’s something you don’t want to discuss, and then hopefully be done with the matter.
How is this ‘sky dragon slayer types of arguments’, Pierre-Normand? Read my comment from May 16, 2014 at 2:29 am above. Especially the boldface part. That’s not a ‘sky dragon slayer’ type of argument. That’s derived from general physical principles on gases in a gravity field on top of a solar-heated surface.
The atmosphere doesn’t need the so-called ‘GHGs’ to warm. It needs them to adequately COOL.
“Haha, so I see you’re neatly evading the main issue here by grabbing hold of some detail of what I said.”
Well, this detail was the basis for your argument that increasing the greenhouse gas concentration can’t increase the power of the back radiation. Without this detain you argument crumbles. So, now, of course, you would rather talk about something else.
It appears CO2 is related to shorter periods of El Nino’s. Which explains why the rate of warming is lower with more CO2 than with less CO2.
Figure 4 appears identical to figure 5. Am I missing something?
fixed
“Now, Trenberth seems to be pinning his hopes for further warming on the emergence of a new era of El Niño dominance to release all the heat he believes is stored in the surface waters of the Pacific. He might have a good point here but since we are dealing here with the crucial process by which the earth warms as a result of some sort of supposed interaction between rising greenhouse gases and their presumed impact on the El Niño – La Niña balance in the pacific, surely this topic requires a great deal more explanation, explication and filling out of details than these brief sound bites by Trenberth…”
Nah, debate settled, all important questions answered. As Victor Venema recently assured us, “Climatology is a mature field and new findings will more likely change the complete picture only little.”
Uh, huh.
http://judithcurry.com/2014/04/27/the-curry-factor-30-to-1/#more-15369
“Climatology is a mature field and new findings will more likely change the complete picture only little.”
Yeah, that’s what the macroeconomists were saying back in 1967. The end of the business cycle and all that.
What is funny is that Trenberth here with his elevator sounds just like Bob Tisdale’s explanation of warming (minus the CO2 explanation) and also resembles the “fake skeptics escalator” found on the SS website.
NW equates economics to a hard science.
I learned that it was a soft discipline in junior high.
YOu should have finished your studies. It is both. And it is unique in that respect.
Web, how much controlled experimentation is going on in this “hard science” versus economics… looks to be the same to me, i.e. none. Sure, people keep looking for new proxies for temperatures that we never measured long, long ago… oh wait, that sounds like economics too.
Go figure.
Bill, it makes me think not so much of a Trenberth elevator as more of a paternoster, (because of the quasi-religious overtones).
Web, I used to be very skeptical of economics, but then looked at the math. They are doing control theory on dynamic, complex, interacting systems. The economists would do a much better job than the current crop of modelers.
They also know what a degree of freedom is.
Yes, an example of a degree of freedom is the atmospheric concentration of CO2. As the level of CO2 concentration rises, this increases the thermal forcing.
This is balanced by other degrees of freedom, such as the oscillations of ENSO that compensate the overall temperature rise.
Economists only think they have laws as strong as the laws of thermodynamics.
The Cause of the Pause is due to thermodynamic Laws. Check it out.
Webby
Yep.
Economics is a soft science.
So is climatology.
Max
Web, you have no understanding of mathematics, kinetics, thermodynamics and most especially, statistics. Other than that, you are doing great.
Why not send you CSALT model into Judy as a ATL post or to a journal?
What is the relevance of the down-in-the-weed’s climate science if we are not focused on answering the key questions relevant for policy analysis and for addressing the rationalists’ concerns.
Policy relevant climate questions
1. What is the value of ECS and TCR?
2. Is ECS and TCR relevant given that climate changes suddenly, not as portrayed by IPCC’s smooth projections?
3. What effect will increasing atmospheric CO2-e concentration have on the climate – will it make the next sudden change happen sooner or later?
• Will it make the next sudden cooling happen sooner or later?
• Or will it cause a sudden warming event?
• What are the probability density functions for each?
4. Will it make the next sudden climate change less or more severe? (e.g. delay the onset of the next cooling and/or reduce its severity OR make the next sudden warming happen sooner and make it more severe)? What is the probability density function?
5. What would be the consequences of warming? What would be the consequences of cooling? What are the probability density functions?
6. What is the probability that the advocated mitigation policies would succeed in delivering the claimed benefits (climate damages avoided), given real world issues with implementing and maintaining such policies (e.g. carbon pricing)?
• To answer this question we need to understand the short- and medium-term economic impacts of the proposed policies for each nation state, and consider how each will respond so as to maximise its advantage (game theory) through the situations that could occur over the next century or so.
7. What is the probability that alternative polices are more likely to succeed (such as removing the political and regulatory impediments that are preventing the world from having low cost nuclear energy and allowing lightly regulated markets to deliver the benefits at least cost)?
Peter, if you are calling the above post “down-in-the-weeds” climate science, then it may be highly relevant. Cf: “Our results suggest that forced changes in ENSO, whether natural or anthropogenic, may be difficult to detect against a background of large internal variability.” If warming and cooling are dominated by El Nino/La Nina fluctuations, and if the CO2 impact on them is little or nothing compared to natural variability, then the whole CO2 story becomes of academic interest only, not warranting a policy response other than to rewind policies based on doomist CO2-driven warming furphies. And we can all go back to sleep until the next “We’re doomed!” scenario is generated.
Hopefully, when that happens, we will recall this one. But probably not.
Faustino,
Thank you. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful to a guest author. I really appreciate all the guest authors’ posts on Climate Etc.
However, I agree with the part of Pekka Pirilas’s comment that started our discussion on the previous thread. Pekka said:
http://judithcurry.com/2014/05/03/lennart-bengtsson-speaks-out/#comment-540029
I agree with Pekka on this. My questions are an attempt to ask the high level questions that I believe need to be answered before we should advocate for anything other than ‘No Regrets’ policies. I agree with all the points you made in the comments that followed from Pekka’s comment.
This paper is just one more of many thousands of inputs to n improved understanding the climate. Many are highly relevant. But, IMO, they need to be focused on answering the questions that roll up through the hierarchy to answer the top level questions, whatever they are.
I’ve suggested some questions that would, if they were answered, allow us to make informed and rational policy. If we had the answers to these questions we would be in a position to define the risk, to break them down into sub components, and to manage the risks differently for the sub components.
So, my question to you and other readers is, how does this paper provide answers to my Questions 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Peter, I’m suggesting that the Rapp paper answers your question (1) in suggesting that CO2 is of very minor significance, and if so, some of the remaining questions are no longer of interest.
I wasn’t suggesting any disrespect on your part, rather that the work presented suggests that some of the policy- important questions re CO2 would be redundant if this analysis is valid. Therefore, don’t knock the analysis, because it does in fact deal with some of your questions by seriously downgrading their importance.
Faustino,
Thank you for your comment. I may be missing what you are seeing in the Rapp paper. But it doesn’t jump out at me that it addresses my Question 1. I think part of the problem may be that I didn’t make clear what I was really trying to ask for in Q1. I’ll add some explanation.
“1. What is the value of ECS and TCR?” I was intending this to ask about the value of ECS and TCR at a particular starting condition – e.g. the planet as it is on 1 January 2014 – if we could actually measure the values precisely. Over the period from the Little Ice Age to now, ECS and TCR may have changed by, say, 0.1C due to changes in vegetation cover, ice cover, cloud cover, water vapour concentration, average surface temperature and whatever else affects ECS and TCR. But IPCC gives the standard deviation as about 1.5 C from memory, i.e. a factor of 15 higher than my example of what might be the true range for the period 1600-2014 if we could measure the values precisely. The IPCC ranges reflect the uncertainty in our understanding of ECS and TCR; the ranges are not the uncertainty in the actual values of ECS and TCR if they could be measured precisely.
Therefore, my Q1 is asking what is the value of ECS and TCR if we could measure it with high precision.
Now moving on to your comment:
I don’t think the paper does deal with my questions. It does not give a new estimate of ECS and TCR. It does not give a PDF for TCR with a lower standard deviation than the IPCC AR5 report (Box 12.2, Figure 2, p1111 http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_Chapter12_FINAL.pdf )
To convince people and gain global support we need good evidence
I am not trying to be pedantic. I think I am looking at the big picture. The reason I am pushing this is because, IMO, to get broad support on a viable and politically and internationally sustainable approach, whatever it may be, we need a persuasive case to support the proposed policies. We need sound evidence that most policy makers and people will accept that either there is a major risk with serious consequences and a significant probability of occurrence or there is limited risk and we can gain the benefits and mitigate the negatives.
I have repeatedly pointed to the Canadian NWMO site as an example of how good evidence to support policy has been produced, assembled and published in a format where everyone can access it and drill down all the way to the test results and methods if they want to. It contains the information needed to support adversarial investigations such as Royal Commissions and other such adversarial proceedings.
http://www.nwmo.ca/home
Peter, Donald Rapp responded to us as follows:
Peter Lang: I don’t think these important questions you raised can be answered until we understand the role of El Niños in climate variability.
Faustino: I was not really suggesting that CO2 is of very minor significance compared to El Niños but I did point out that one could interpret the data that way – ala Tisdale. Yes, we don’t know nuthin about clouds.
Given how policy has been formed to date, I’m not sure that better estimates of ECS and TCR will necessarily be required to change policy. If they are, we might have a long wait. In the meantime, dealing with our fiscal situation etc might drive policy in a more sensible direction – Origin Energy’s CEO Grant King said yesterday that as high-priced gas exports increase, “the use of gas [domestically] will fall and it will be black coal that makes up the difference. (Quick, buy back all those sold coal shares!)
King said that coal would make up 90% of the east coast’s thermal (gas and coal) power generation, up from 80% in 2012 (Aus Business p 19 today).
I’ll check the NWMO site.
Faustino, Thank you for alerting me to Donald Rapp’s response. I’ve been busy saving the planet from bad policy on other sites and missed the reply.
Donald Rapp, Thank you for your reply. All makes sense and believable for the non specialist.
Faustino,
I agree. Hence my other questions; they all need answers. I agree we mustn’t wait around for ECS and TCR because our understanding of it is unlikely to change much in the next 20 or 50 years given that the central estimate and uncertainty have hardly changed in the past 30 years or so.
Grant King, Origin Energy CEO, is very wise and always worth taking notice of.
Regarding coal proportion of electricity generation, I’ll paste below a comment that appeared this morning on The Conversation. It’s unusually sensible for The Conversation. [O/T but I hope acceptable given the context of relevance to climate policy]
“Sean Douglas
Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics – Australian Energy Projections to 2050 • December 2012
http://www.bree.gov.au/publications/australian-energy-technology-assessments and http://www.bree.gov.au/sites/default/files/files//publications/aep/australian-energy-projections-to-2050.pdf
This report presents the latest long-term projections of Australian energy consumption, production and trade over the period to 2049-50. The [very favourable assumptions] projections include existing government policies, including the Renewable Energy Target and carbon pricing […both to be repealed?]. They also incorporate the latest estimates of electricity generation technology costs from the Australian Energy Technology Assessment (BREE 2012 d).
The share of coal in total primary energy consumption is projected to fall sharply from 31 per cent in 2012-13 to just 6 per cent by 2049-50. Renewable energy use [hydro, biomass, biofuels, wind/solar/geo/wave] is projected to nearly quadruple in volume terms over the period to 2049-50 (at 3.6 per cent a year). The share of renewables is projected to increase from 5 per cent of total primary energy consumption in 2012-13 to 14 per cent in 2049-50. [ STILL VERY LOW % includes mainly Hydro plus new wind/solar]
Coal use drops from 31% to 6% and Renewables goes 5% to 14% in 2050 – but what fills the 17% Gap in the drop of coal use? [Assumptions are] Gas fired electricity generation is projected to double over the projection period, to account for 36 per cent of total generation in 2049-50. [meaning Gas use goes from ~20% to 35% of total energy use as it [theoretically] replaces coal fired power stations, almost equivalent to the growth in Renewable energy use – with 80% of it’s growth coming from Wind and Solar from now to 2050; both are expected to offset Coal use in Australia.] Australian energy production (excluding uranium) is projected to grow by 69 per cent (an average annual rate of 1.4 per cent) over the projection period, to reach 27 803 petajoules in 2049-50. Coal and gas are projected to account for 96 per cent of Australia’s energy production in 2049-50. [most of which is to be exported]
James Hansen says globally: “Fossil fuels provide more than 85% of the world’s energy (Fig. 1b). One misconception discussed below concerns the fallacy that renewable energy is rapidly supplanting conventional energy. Total non-hydro renewables today offset only about one year’s growth of energy use. Energy use and carbon emissions in developed countries approximately leveled off over the past 35 years (Fig. 2), where developed countries are defined as Europe, the U.S., the former Soviet Union, Japan, Canada, and Australia. The leveling of emissions from developed countries is in part a result of outsourcing of manufacturing to developing countries.”
George Monbiot, a respected British journalist, explored in detail the sources of Caldicott’s assertions. The resulting article that he wrote begins:
“Over the past fortnight I’ve made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.” Monbiot’s 2-page article, “Evidence Meltdown” http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2014/Monbiot.EvidenceMeltdown.Guardian.5April2011.pdf
GenIV nuclear info Very High Temperature Reactors pg12 eg full scale China HTR-PM demonstration plant under construction operational in 2016-17 – Designed to be “walk away safe” power plants, cannot melt down; several GenIV nuclear plants able to produce Hydrogen from water for MV Fuel Cells see https://www.gen-4.org/gif/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014-03/gif_overview_presentation_v9_final3_web.pdf Safe GenIV nuclear appears to offer a very large Energy possibility for the future from the 2020s.
TCR is defined as the amount the temperature rises during a doubling of CO2 when increasing at 1% per year, that is, during 70 years. From 1960 to 1970 the Keeling curve went from 316.6 to 325.2, a rise of 0.27%. From 2000 to 2010 it went from 368.8 to 388.7, a rise of 0.52%.
At this rate 1% could reasonably turn out to be the average rate of increase of CO2 for some 70-year period of the 21st century, making TCR a worthwhile number for that period. In particular if from 2010 to 2080 the CO2 went from 390 to 780 and the global land-sea temperature rose during that period by 1.87 degrees we would in principle have observed a TCR of 1.87 degrees per doubling. If furthermore the CO2 doubled again to 1560 over the next 70 years then the further temperature rise would provide a second data point for TCR. If that second rise were also 1.87 degrees it would support the notion that TCR is a physically meaningful number like the mass of the earth or the density of iron. I don’t know anyone who seriously believes TCR is anywhere near that meaningful.
When the rate of increase is much lower than 1%, as was surely the case for every century of the last millennium, indeed for almost every century of the last four billion years, a doubling of CO2 will take much longer than 70 years and therefore the associated temperature rise can be expected to be closer to the rise resulting from waiting a great many centuries after a doubling of CO2, which is effectively the definition of ECS. Hence TCR as defined for a 1%/yr rate of increase of CO2 is not relevant to any period in the previous millennium, nor most likely to almost any period in the life of the Earth.
As for ECS, since Earth is currently further from equilibrium than it has been for a long time it is hard to see its relevance to any practical concern today. If we had a reliable value for it we could use it as a (quite weak) upper bound on TCR. However we don’t, and moreover we don’t have any idea of how far below ECS TCR should be (though in a talk at the AGU Fall Meeting in December I gave a method for relating the gap between the two to the effective delay of onset of global warming attributable to the ocean’s heat sink effect).
While TCR is potentially more useful than ECS in that it may well be the right concept for this century’s climate, the absence of any recorded rate of rise higher than 0.5%/yr means that so far we haven’t been in a position to measure TCR, unless the concept is generalized to TCR(r) as a function of rate r of increase. For estimates based on paleoclimate however it’s the other way round: the slow rates of change of CO2 back then imply that any geologically based estimates of climate sensitivity, such as Arrhenius’s 1896 estimates as a function of latitude, are estimating ECS rather than TCR(1%).
VP: a rise of 0.27%
…should have read “a rate of rise of 0.27%/yr” and likewise for the next period.
Donald Rapp
Very interesting summary.
There is a mountain of data in this post, and I have not yet absorbed all the trend lines, references or explanations by Trenberth, etc. but the discussion of Tisdale’s findings raised a basic question in my mind.
Correlation does not provide empirical evidence for causation. But it appears that the correlation between ENSO and global climate over the 20thC has been more robust statistically than the correlation between atmospheric CO2 (which rose gradually at a smooth exponential rate) and global temperature (which rose rapidly and then cooled slightly in multi-decadal cycles of ~30 years each).
“Proving” a proposition is impossible, no matter what. But providing empirical evidence to support or falsify a scientific hypothesis is possible and is done regularly as an integral part of scientific inquiry.
In this particular case it appears that we have two choices.
Let’s say (for sake of argument) that the ENSO hypothesis outlined by Tisdale is the “null hypothesis”. Then it is up to the proponents of the IPCC AGW hypothesis to provide empirical scientific evidence to falsify the Tisdale ENSO hypothesis.
If, on the other hand, we accept the IPCC AGW hypothesis (that AGW has been the principal driver of 20thC climate change) as the “null hypothesis”, then it is up to the proponents of the Tisdale ENSO hypothesis to provide empirical scientific evidence to falsify the IPCC AGW hypothesis.
Who gets to decide which is the “null hypothesis” and on what basis?
Seems to me to be a key question here.
Max
“Who gets to decide which is the “null hypothesis?”
Climate-gate scientists, Al Gore, Barak Obama
“and on what basis?”
Careerism, greed, political expediency.
“There is a mountain of data in this post.” An “ocean-depth of data” might be more appropriate.
“Who gets to decide which is the “null hypothesis” and on what basis?”
Neither side in that debate gets the null.
The null is “noise”.
Can you predict better than noise and better than your rival theories?
Yes?
Great! Yours is the best so far, therefore most likely to be true at this time.
Thank you very much for this review, excellent for a profane such as I am.
No one decides when sardines will come and anchovies go, when whales will change their migration paths or when civilizations wane and fade away.
“During periods of El Niño dominance the warming due to El Niños adds to the warming effect due to rising greenhouse gases, and during periods of La Niña dominance the cooling due to La Niñas reduces the warming effect due to rising greenhouse gases.”
I have asked warmists, skeptics and lukewarmers what the mechanism is by which El Ninos add to global warming/global heat content. The folks at Real Climate and Dr. Curry said the heat released in an El Nino causes more clouds which then retain additional heat from solar radiation.
The problem with this is the consensus scientists themselves admit they don’t know whether the net effect of clouds is net positive or negative. In fact, they don’t really know much about clouds at all. So this is just an assumption. How do they know the net effect of clouds during El Ninos but not otherwise?
Bob Tisdale at WUWT pointed me to another article of his when I asked, but that article also assumed the effect on global heat content of an El Nino, without explaining the mechanism.
Another problem with the cloud mechanism is that there is no doubt an increase in comparatively well measured surface air temperatures during an El Nino, with a corresponding (as far as time, if not amount) decrease in comparatively less well measured sea surface temperatures. But even if it was known that the effect of clouds was net positive during El Ninos, how would you attribute the rise in temperature/heat between the intra-climate event El Nino, with an increase in heat content of the global system from the increased clouds?
I again suggest that in 100 years or more, when we actually know much more about the climate, many of the current hotly contested debates will be viewed with great amusement. Trends in global average temperature of tenths of a degree; rises in global sea surface levels in tenths and even hundredths of millimeters; the unwillingness of both sides of the debate to acknowledge their relative lack of knowledge on the subject as a whole; all based on poor measurement technology, sparse coverage, and statistical models whose outcomes seem to depend more on the expectations of the modeler than any laws of physics.
It would all be a tempest in a tea pot, if there weren’t trillions of dollars and millions of lives at stake, either way.
“I have asked warmists, skeptics and lukewarmers what the mechanism is by which El Ninos add to global warming/global heat content. The folks at Real Climate and Dr. Curry said the heat released in an El Nino causes more clouds which then retain additional heat from solar radiation.”
______
During large El Ninos, there is more than likely a net loss of energy from the system. We certainly saw this during the 97-98 El Niño, as the size, depth, and temperature of the IPWP was reduced as all that energy left the ocean to the atmosphere and much of it went into space. It is that large loss of energy that immediately tipped the system into a “recharge” mode, aka the rather long La Niña period that begin in the fall of 1998 as the IPWP being to once more accumulate energy lost during the El Niño.
R,Gates,
That has always what I would have expected. An El Nino releases heat held in the ocean into the atmosphere where it can radiate out. Global average temperature (or global heat content), properly calculated, should be reduced. The opposite during a La Nina. Heat is accumulated in the ocean, rather than being radiated out of the system, which should if anything raise the global average temperature/heat content.
Yet still the reported temperature averages, without the spurious increase of El Ninos, would never have showed the “alarming” from the 70s to the ’98 El Nino. And most of the consensus types I have read (probably because of this fact) adamantly maintain that El Ninos raise GAT/heat content. Even Tisdale and Dr. Curry have claimed so.
Which is another reason I have always thought the GAT reports were useless for detecting anything as far as global warming.
Consensus? Shoot, as far as I can see, there really isn’t even a consensus, among the consensus, on whether there has been a “pause,” or on whether El Ninos increase or decrease GAT.
” And most of the consensus types I have read (probably because of this fact) adamantly maintain that El Ninos raise GAT/heat content. Even Tisdale and Dr. Curry have claimed so.”
—–
El Niño raises the GAT or sensible heat of the troposphere TEMPORARILY as that energy passes from the ocean through the troposphere on the way to space and to other parts of the climate system. Certainly 100% does not go out into space. But there is certainly no net gain to the climate system, and most likely a net loss.
“they don’t really know much about clouds at all” No advance on Judy Collins in over 40 years, then.
R.Gates,
Don’t tell me, tell your consensus tribesmen.
GaryM says: “I have asked warmists, skeptics and lukewarmers what the mechanism is by which El Ninos add to global warming/global heat content. The folks at Real Climate and Dr. Curry said the heat released in an El Nino causes more clouds which then retain additional heat from solar radiation.”
There are numerous mechanisms. See Trenberth et al. (2002):
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/papers/2000JD000298.pdf
And Wang (2005):
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/docs/Wang_Hadley_Camera.pdf
And Trenberth and Fasullo (2011):
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert/trenberth.papers/ISSI_fulltext.pdf
GaryM says: “Bob Tisdale at WUWT pointed me to another article of his when I asked, but that article also assumed the effect on global heat content of an El Nino, without explaining the mechanism.”
Please rephrase your question and I’ll be happy to provide links to past posts that explain the mechanism(s).
R. Gates says: “El Niño raises the GAT or sensible heat of the troposphere TEMPORARILY as that energy passes from the ocean through the troposphere on the way to space and to other parts of the climate system. Certainly 100% does not go out into space. But there is certainly no net gain to the climate system, and most likely a net loss.”
R. Gates conveniently overlooks the fact that much of the warming of surface temperatures and ocean heat content outside of the tropical Pacific during an El Niño occurs without an exchange of heat from the tropical Pacific. R. Gates conveniently overlooks that, after an El Niño, the leftover warm water from an El Niño is redistributed from the tropical Pacific. These were topics you repeatedly failed to recognize, even though they were blatantly obvious in the data, when you used to comment at WUWT.
Adios!
“R. Gates conveniently overlooks that, after an El Niño, the leftover warm water from an El Niño is redistributed from the tropical Pacific.”
I don’t see what it is that Gates is missing. So long as the leftover warm water causes the SST anomaly to remain above the multi-decadal trend, more heat is lost to space as it is radiated through the atmospheric IR window. This tends to reduce the top of atmosphere imbalance caused be the steadily increasing external forcing. It doesn’t reduce the forcing. So, El Nino episodes (and their aftermaths) merely helps surface temperatures to keep up with the increasing forcing, while La Nina episodes causes them to temporarily lag. This is why La Nina episodes tend not to fully cancel surface warming from previous El Ninos. It’s because the external forcing increased in the meantime.
The disappearance of the IPWP must be mainly redistribution of heat within the ocean as Bob Tisdale wrote. Warmer average surface temperature adds to the heat loss, but increase in surface temperature occurs at another area of the pacific. The heat loss related to that is delayed in comparison to the disappearance of the IPWP.
Pekka, Indeed, it is merely delayed but still lost.
RG is correct and Tisdale cries adios as he exits with his tail between his legs.
Amazing the contortions that one man will go through to try to pull the rug over the WUWTers eyes. It helps that they are so gullible.
That formulation is questionable, because there’s no reason to expect that the extra heat loss would be quantitatively close to the heat content of IPWP.
Bob Tisdale,
Thank you for your response and offer to answer a re-phrased question from me regarding El Ninos. Your response to R.Gates below suggests to me the problem to me is not one of phrasing though.
My question was, and is,
By what mechanism does an El Nino “contribute to global warming?”
That was, I believe, the comment in one of your WUWT posts that I asked about. That El Ninos add to global warming. And in this context, I am using the definition of “global warming” that would be an increase in the total heat content of the global climate system, land, sea and atmosphere, at all levels.
I did read the abstracts and introductions to the three articles you linked to in your response to me, but I don’t see an explanation of the mechanism I am talking about. I do see, as in your WUWT posts, explanations of the mechanism by which an El Nino occurs, and transfers heat from the sea to the atmosphere. But that is not my question.
Put another way:
How does an El Nino add heat to the Earth’s climate, rather than just redistribute it between sea and atmosphere, and between one portion of the sea and others?
I believe, and I think R. Gates does also, that El Ninos are intra-climate transfers of heat, rather than inter-climate additions of heat to the system. In fact I agree with R.Gates that the net effect of an El Nino, absent some other mechanism, would be an ultimate increase in radiation of heat from the atmosphere that was once contained in the ocean, or global cooling.
It seems to me that your comment to R.Gates above does not answer the question.
“R. Gates conveniently overlooks the fact that much of the warming of surface temperatures and ocean heat content outside of the tropical Pacific during an El Niño occurs without an exchange of heat from the tropical Pacific. R. Gates conveniently overlooks that, after an El Niño, the leftover warm water from an El Niño is redistributed from the tropical Pacific.”
“Much of the warming outside the tropical Pacific during El Nino years” refers, by definition, to heat outside the El Nino phenomenon. This does not, without substantially more, describe an addition of heat to the total global heat content by the El Nino.
Similarly, I think it is non-controversial that “the leftover warm water from an El Niño is redistributed from the tropical Pacific.” But this too, without more, is not an addition of heat to the climate system. It is simply the retention of heat that was already there before the El Nino.
The question again then is:
By what mechanism does an El Nino contribute to global warming, ie. cause an increase in total global heat content, rather than a redistribution of heat within the system, and an ultimate release of (or net reduction in) heat from the system?
The explanation of the warmists at RealClimate, and Dr. Curry, was clouds. The release of heat creates more clouds, which then retain more heat.(As far as I can see, it is just assumed that El Nino clouds are a net positive feedback, even though the consensus admits they don’t know whether clouds in general are net positive of negative as far as AGW.)
What is yours?
GaryM, I think the point is that these are things we don’t yet know and really need to eventuallty create useful models.
Dr. Spencer finds that albedo actually decreases during el Ninos. So there is actually warming happening during el Nino. La Nina charges the IPWP, but does not increase the amount of heat entering the system.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/11/our-new-paper-el-nino-warming-reduces-climate-sensitivity-to-1-3-deg-c/
“But the third case (CASE III) is the one we were really interested in, because it addresses the debate we have with Andy Dessler over the role of cloud variations associated with El Nino and La Nina. I maintain that the global atmospheric circulations associated with El Nino lead to a slight reduction in global albedo, and so a portion of El Nino warming is actually due to radiative warming of the system, not just a temporary reduction in upwelling of colder water. “
Aaron,
I agree that these are things we don’t know. I think the list of things we don’t know is longer than anyone knows.
My question was not what we “know” to a metaphysical certainty, but the opinions of those I of whom I asked the question. In this particular case, Bob Tisdale.
I know what I believe and why. I find it informative to find out what others think, and why, in their own words rather than guessing. I think there are large assumptions made by warmists, skeptics and lukewarmers alike in the climate debate. But the only way to determine that is to ask.
Bob Tisdale
You’ve gotten a barrage of questions concerning the “mechanism” by which ENSO affects our climate.
One answer appears to be by changing cloud cover.
During the period of frequent large El Niños (1980s, 1990s) the Earthshine project (Pallé et al.) measured a decrease in the amount of cloud cover, resulting in a decrease of the albedo and reflection of less incoming SW energy, so more reached the surface and warmed our climate system.
Starting in 2000 this trend reversed itself, as ENSO shifted to more La Niñas, and Earthshine measured an increase in cloud cover, resulting in an increase of the albedo and reflection of more incoming SW energy, so less reached the surface and warmed our climate system.
Is this the “mechanism” by which ENSO increases or decreases the amount of energy entering our climate system?
Max
Manacker,
That is the exact opposite of the answer I got at Real Climate, to which none of the other regulars objected. The gentleman who answered me in fact linked to an article showing a strong correlation between El Ninos and increased cloud cover. Hence their belief that that was the mechanism that led to an increase in global heat content.
Here is where the discussion appeared at Real Climate.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/unforced-variations-march-2013/comment-page-5/#comments
My original question was at comment 192 on the previous page.
Answers started at 201 from Kevin McKinney, which includes this:
“Negative OLR are indicative of enhanced convection and hence more cloud coverage typical of El Niño episodes. More convective activity in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific implies higher, colder cloud tops, which emit much less infrared radiation into space.”
Despite everybody thinking everyone else believes the same as they do, I don’t think there is even a consensus among the consensus on whether El Ninos increase global warming/global heat content, or reduce it.
Missed or forgotten is that the old and cold upwelling Pacific cold tongue water must be displacing some of the warm water back into the old and cold current where the energy is very nearly lost or at least made harmless,
I do appreciate the question GaryM
“By what mechanism does an El Nino contribute to global warming, ie. cause an increase in total global heat content, rather than a redistribution of heat within the system, and an ultimate release of (or net reduction in) heat from the system?”
Heating the ocean is why earth has average temperature of 15 C.
Or in the past why Earth has had average temperature of 25 C,
or part of reason that in glacial periods Earth average temperature has
been 5 C.
Mixing the warm surface water with colder deeper water will lower average temperatures. Spreading warmer tropical water to more parts of the world will increases average temperature.
Mixing warm water with cooler water, causes temporary cooler conditions- decrease average temperature, but the mixing of warm water with cool water, over long time periods causes “global warming”- centuries long periods of warmth.
So global warming is not mostly about the atmospheric, but is mostly about the ocean. As Ocean stores [traps] enormous amounts of heat [joules of heat]. El Nino is surge in this process, and is long term [thousands of years] process of warming Earth.
Pekka Pirilä wrote: “That formulation is questionable, because there’s no reason to expect that the extra heat loss would be quantitatively close to the heat content of IPWP.”
Yes, that’s a good point. That means that El Nino could indeed account for a gain in ocean heat content. I had overlooked that possibility.
But the (other) point remains that as the global average SST increases over the decades, then each new El Nino that occurs has a bigger hurdle to overcome, and that is the increasing Planck response that results from this increase. So, in order for some significant fraction of the temperature rise over several decades to be attributed to ENSO/PDO rather than to CO2 (or any other external forcing), one must hypothesize something like a positive cloud feedback that would enhance the effect of sucessive El Nino as the Planck response increases. But this also entails that the feedback amplification to the CO2 forcing ought also to be large (i.e. the TCS ought to be as large or larger than 2°C/CO2 doubling). And one ends up attributing a *larger* total surface warming than has been observed over the multi-decadal period under consideration.
“That is the exact opposite of the answer I got at Real Climate, to which none of the other regulars objected.”
GaryM, keep in mind that a relative increase in the *proportion* of high clouds to low clouds has a warming effect since the latter’s effect on the albedo is proportionally larger than its contribution to the greenhouse effect as compared with high clouds, which contribute proportionally more to the greenhouse effect and less to the albedo.
Pierre,
So, in order for some significant fraction of the temperature rise over several decades to be attributed to ENSO/PDO rather than to CO2 (or any other external forcing), one must hypothesize something like a positive cloud feedback that would enhance the effect of sucessive El Nino as the Planck response increases. But this also entails that the feedback amplification to the CO2 forcing ought also to be large (i.e. the TCS ought to be as large or larger than 2°C/CO2 doubling).
I think you are looking too strongly through the CO2 lense here. You seem to assume all responses are due to temperature/radiative forcing. Responses to el Nino may be largely independent of global average temperature (ie, el Nino drive atmospheric temps up, but that is not what drives albedo down). The processes specific to el Nino and regional responses likely cause the forcing, not response to the change in global average temperature. You seem to be assuming that global average temperature sensitivity to forcing is constant and that radiative budget is in balance outside of anthropogenic forcing and feedbacks.
Aaron wrote: “You seem to assume all responses are due to temperature/radiative forcing. Responses to el Nino may be largely independent of global average temperature (ie, el Nino drive atmospheric temps up, but that is not what drives albedo down). The processes specific to el Nino and regional responses likely cause the forcing, not response to the change in global average temperature. You seem to be assuming that global average temperature sensitivity to forcing is constant and that radiative budget is in balance outside of anthropogenic forcing and feedbacks.”
I am willing to consider that El Nino can warm the surface through causing a forcing that may be local (or global) and is mediated through lowering the cloud albedo independently of the global temperature. However, when the global temperature rises, so does the Plank response. So, the next El Nino has to produce a larger forcing in order to overcome the strengthened Planck response. So, we’d need to explain why El Nino events have this tendency to produce ever stronger effects on the cloud albedo whenever they recur. What is problematic is to make the increase in global surface temperature a contributor to this strengthening. That would indeed be difficult to reconcile with sensitivity to CO2 forcing being low (which is the point of attributing some of the warming to ENSO specific mechanisms). Are you suggesting that there is a locally controlled positive feedback that causes sucessive El Nino events to cause ever stronger cloud albedo forcings?
Also from Dr. Spencer’s post: For example, we find that 1 unit of MEI index (which is 1 standard deviation in the El Nino direction) causes a 0.6 W/m2 of radiative forcing of the climate system.
Again, the model only reproduces the CERES satellite-observed behavior when the radiative budget changes precede the El Nino and La Nina activity, suggesting a cause-and-effect connection. And when that is included, the optimum climate sensitivity chosen by the model is considerably below what the IPCC claims is reasonable for expected warming in our future.
The radiative balance actually changes before el Nino warms the atmosphere, not simply as a response to changes in global average temperature.
Cloud cover increases over the northern hemisphere pacific mid-tropic latitudes, but seems to decrease in other regions. This might suggest a negative feedback in that region of the pacific (as a response to increased temp). But responses outside of that region are probably specific to ENSO processes, not just temperature. The change in wind and moisture distribution are unique to ENSO, and probably unique to each ENSO event. Response to forcings can vary considerably.
“RG is correct and Tisdale cries adios as he exits with his tail between his legs.
Amazing the contortions that one man will go through to try to pull the rug over the WUWTers eyes. It helps that they are so gullible.”
——
The faithful at WUWT tend to WANT to believe Tisdale is correct– the anything but CO2 crowd. Thus, they happily lap up his story without questioning. The problem is, he mixes a little truth with inaccuracies or pieces left out, and that makes it more unfortunate.
RG says of Tisdale:
Yes, he is the master of regurgitating data in the form of charts. The only problem is that data without any analysis behind it is …. just data.
His “ratchet” analysis is especially pitiful. A sine wave plus a warming trend looks like a ratcheting up staircase. It is NOT the case that an El Nino warming pulse will ratchet up the temperature to the next stage. Tisadle’s “analysis” of this behavior is the stuff of fever dreams.
It is a unique kind of myopia that would look at the inevitable spike in tropospheric temperatures that comes from an El Niño, and try to relate this zero net gain in total system energy to an actual forcing on the system. A true positive external forcing, such as we get from GH gas increases, will act over the long-term to increase energy across all parts of the system– ocean, atmosphere, and reduction in global glacial ice.
The Tisdale theory of global warming indeed amounts to a rachet model. While the biosphere has evolved rachets (think of those nasty grass seeds that stick in your socks), examples of rachets are much harder to find in the lithosphere or ocean currents.
The naive reasoning behind the idea that ENSO can ratchet up the temperature of the IPWP simply by distributing the heat over a larger volume is the same sort of reasoning that goes into the design of perpetual motion machines. A more specific description of the proposed rachet mechanism is needed than a mere redistribution of heat.
Right Vaughan.
Ratchets such as Tisdale’s violate rules of statistical entropy. It must reassign volumes of heat into much lower probability configurations, which makes it highly unlikely — not only to get in to that state but to persist.
It is much like having perfume that spreads out in a living room go back into the bottle.
I think they are now saying that this ratchet effect only works when CO2 is rising, so the real cause is slowly dawning on them. They are not fully there yet, but that is progress.
A Ratchet Effect:
Any partly ordered pattern can move in two directions. Either to less ordered patterns, which would be breakdown, or to more ordered patterns, which would be breakthrough. A breakdown is very much more ordered (frequent) while breakthrough is very rare, but this climb to less probable structures is what constitutes climbing Mt. Improbable.
In evolution, natural selection loads the dice against entropic degradation (breakdown) by making the degraded patterns less viable (survivable) by natural selection, and favoring the (much rarer) breakthrough by making it more viable. Natural selection works like a ratchet, against breakdown. Genetic mutations are usually harmful, rarely beneficial. Yet we climb Mount Improbable with their help, while preserving the law of entropy. Natural selection is cruel, but effective. – Hanna Newcombe
http://peacemagazine.org/archive/v24n4p26.htm
Comparing what she wrote to climate regime changes. “…making the degraded patterns less viable (survivable) by natural selection, and favoring the (much rarer) breakthrough by making it more viable.”
Why does the climate break(through) if it does? It may break to the more viable option.
Is evolution linear or does it exhibit breaks? It’s possible that where these evolving animals live, in the climate, also exhibit these evolutionary breaks on varying scales.
I may just be seeing what I want to see. The 1998-2001 temperature step up to a new higher plateau for instance.
Tisdale sometimes references step changes:
http://i25.tinypic.com/35n7lf7.png
I don’t think I am ready to rule out such interpretations.
Ragnaar are you a viking accountant or something?
Please get back to that as climate is not biology and it doesn’t do natural selection.
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | May 11, 2014 at 1:13 am |
Please get back to that as climate is not biology and it doesn’t do natural selection.
Scale doesn’t matter – Professor Robert Sapolsky.
Biblically speaking, What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Do something simple, Repeat.
I think what we are looking for is patterns on all time and size scales.
GaryM says, May 7, 2014 at 9:12 pm:
“I have asked warmists, skeptics and lukewarmers what the mechanism is by which El Ninos add to global warming/global heat content.”
I’m not sure exactly where from you’ve gotten the idea that El Niños add to global heat content, Gary. They sure do cause global warming as it’s normally defined, that is: rising surface and tropospheric temperature anomalies. But global heat content is something entirely different.
As a rule of thumb, El Niños cause global warming but drain global heat (actually, ‘energy’) content. El Niño: global surface/troposphere temps UP, global internal energy DOWN.
Why the distinction? Because most of the stored-up (solar) energy of the earth system is to be found at depth in the oceans, that is, AWAY FROM the surface. What an El Niño does is it pulls a significant amount of this energy up from its hiding place in the deep and instead spreads it out across a huge area on the surface, raising its temperature in the process, laying the energy bare, so to say, to be lost from the ocean to the atmosphere (and ultimately to space) through evaporation (deep/moist convection) (and conduction and radiation, albeit to a much lesser degree).
So, the depths of the ocean – well, basically of the IPWP (the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool) – is drained of energy during an El Niño, it ‘cools’, while the surface in the tropics of the Central and East Pacific (where the NINO3.4 region is located), warms up immensely, the SSTa here shoots up.
Following this significant tropical Central and East Pacific surface warming, the troposphere above it warms from the vastly increased transfer and freeing of latent heat. The warming of the tropical Pacific also affects the atmospheric circulation over the rest of the tropics through so-called ‘atmospheric bridges’, indirectly inducing a lagged warming also in the Atlantic and Indian ocean basins.
From the tropics/subtropics, part of the El Niño released ocean heat is then transported (mostly via the atmosphere) out to the extratropics, eventually ending up in the polar regions (well, in reality it mostly ends up in the Arctic, not in the Antarctic, the reason being a profound difference between northern and southern hemisphere extratropical circulation.)
The massive amount of energy released onto the world during an El Niño event is neither generated by nor absorbed during the event itself. The energy of course originally came from the sun and it was stored up during the La Niña normally preceding the El Niño.
It’s the La Niñas (and often also during neutral ENSO conditions, much more resembling the cool events than the warm events) that builds ‘global heat content’. They soak up the solar energy and stores it at depth. The El Niños subsequently release it again.
– – –
Since 1970 we have seen four ENSO sequences where a strong and solitary El Niño is surrounded by (preceded AND succeeded by) La Niña-events. In each sequence, the storing up of energy during the often extended/prolonged La Niña periods has far outdone the energy depletion during the strong, but mostly short El Niño-events.
# During the period 1970-76 only one year saw an El Niño (1972/73). The rest of the years, 1970-72 and 1973-76, were mostly La Niña-dominated.
# During the period 1983-89, two years back-to-back saw El Niño-conditions (1986-88). The years 1983-86 saw either cold neutral or La Niña-conditions and the year 1988/89 saw one of the strongest La Niñas of modern history.
# During the period 1995-2001 only one year saw an El Niño (1997/98). The rest of the years, 1995-97 and 1998-2001, were mostly La Niña-dominated.
# During the period 2007-12 only one year saw an El Niño (2009/10). The rest of the years, 2007-09 and 2010-12, were mostly La Niña-dominated.
The periods in between these sequences of clustered distinct cool and warm ENSO events, 1976-83, 1989-95 and 2001-07, were all neutral to warmish, with much smaller variations from the mean state and prominently without any clear extended cold events, but also with all the warm events being smaller and/or non-solitary, thus more often than not lacking the strength to create a global signal. (The enormous 1982/83 event appears to have been an anomaly (an abnormality?), especially since there had been no real energy-storing La Niña event leading up to it.)
– – –
If you have a period with four to five years of La Niña-conditions and only one El Niño year, do you really think that the total OHC (Ocean Heat Content) at the end of such a period would NOT have gone up considerably? Is this a zero sum game?
Of course not. The oceans are not some passive reservoir where the solar energy just comes and goes as it wants and always in complete balance. No, they are quite dynamic creatures. They have no problem deciding when the absorbed energy is to be held back and when it is to be released, through ITS OWN internal processes. If the climatic conditions (the coupled ocean/atmosphere system) in the Pacific basin are such that they promote net storage of solar energy over several decades, well, then that is what will happen. Quite naturally. That doesn’t mean that these conditions will prevail forever.
We KNOW that large-scale and fairly abrupt climate shifts occur in the (pan-)Pacific basin at certain intervals. A major one took place in 1976-79, but there were also substantial shifts (although not phase shifts like the first one) in the general regime in 1988/89 and in 1998/99. Strangely (?) these shifts all coincide with global temperatures ratcheting up. And equally strange (?), there has been no additional global warming OUTSIDE of these sudden hikes, from 1970 till today. That means, the ENTIRE modern global warming seen since 1970 is contained within the steps up during the Great Pacific Climate Shift of the late 70s and the two following ones in 1988/89 and 1998/99.
Pierre-Normand says, May 8, 2014 at 5:34 am:
“So long as the leftover warm water causes the SST anomaly to remain above the multi-decadal trend, more heat is lost to space as it is radiated through the atmospheric IR window. This tends to reduce the top of atmosphere imbalance caused be the steadily increasing external forcing. It doesn’t reduce the forcing. So, El Nino episodes (and their aftermaths) merely helps surface temperatures to keep up with the increasing forcing, while La Nina episodes causes them to temporarily lag. This is why La Nina episodes tend not to fully cancel surface warming from previous El Ninos. It’s because the external forcing increased in the meantime.”
The problem here, Pierre, is that you’re just assuming causation without any observational evidence whatsoever from the real earth system to back up your assertions.
If one actually does bother to take a look at what the data says, it very soon becomes evident that your assumption of some increased ‘forcing’ from a larger atmospheric content of CO2 creating some ‘background’ warming trend upon which the ENSO events are simply superimposed, is nothing more than some fanciful theoretical dream. There simply is no sign of it.
Global temperatures do three (3) abrupt and permanent upward shifts relative to the SSTa in the NINO3.4 region (representing the eastern half of the ENSO process) since 1970: one in 1978/79, one in 1988 and one in 1998. And that’s it. Outside of these three distinct global steps, nothing. Global temperatures simply follow in the wake of NINO3.4. No gradual upward divergence.
The ENTIRE modern global warming is found in these three sudden hikes alone, all occurring within the time-span of less than a year.
And we know exactly what happened and where things happened in 1978/79, in 1988 and in 1998. Simply because the data shows us.
It’s plainly there for all to see. If one only bothers …
Kristian,
These supposed El Nino caused “step changes” to the tropospheric temperatures don’t hold up to the actual examination of the record or the physics involved in GH gas induced energy imbalance. More GH gases in the atmosphere allow the ocean to retain more energy (where the majority of the energy is stored). It is not a warmer atmosphere that warms the ocean directly, but allows the ocean to retain more energy over the long-term, hence, it is La Nina conditions that are favored as the oceans warm, not El Nino. If El Nino conditions dominate, the oceans would show longer term decline in heat content and thus, less net energy available to the climate system. It is the net increase in ocean heat content over many decades (and all the related weather and climate effects) that is the surest sign GH gas induced energy imbalance. The ocean is always the dog that wags the atmospheric tail.
R. Gates says, May 11, 2014 at 5:19 pm:
“More GH gases in the atmosphere allow the ocean to retain more energy (where the majority of the energy is stored). It is not a warmer atmosphere that warms the ocean directly, but allows the ocean to retain more energy over the long-term, hence, it is La Nina conditions that are favored as the oceans warm, not El Nino. If El Nino conditions dominate, the oceans would show longer term decline in heat content and thus, less net energy available to the climate system. It is the net increase in ocean heat content over many decades (and all the related weather and climate effects) that is the surest sign GH gas induced energy imbalance. The ocean is always the dog that wags the atmospheric tail.”
What in the world are you on about here? Take off your ‘radiative’ hat, Gates. It is clearly sitting way too tight.
You also say: “These supposed El Nino caused “step changes” to the tropospheric temperatures don’t hold up to the actual examination of the record (…)”
No, that’s exactly what it does. It is precisely through ‘actual examination of the record’ that you see that they are in fact ENSO caused. You just trying to shoo it off doesn’t make reality go away, Gates.
You claim (elsewhere) that the IPWP has warmed steadily with the gradually increasing ‘forcing’ from more atmospheric CO2 over the last 60+ years. Why don’t we see this at all in the normal OHC data from the specific region? Another case of putting alternative (wanted) reality before real reality?
http://i1172.photobucket.com/albums/r565/Keyell/inodc_heat700_90-180E_15–15N_na_zps0d746047.png
That’s pretty much a decline all the way from 1955 down to 1998 and no general rise between 1955 and 2007. All ups and downs coincide neatly with ENSO events, especially since 1970. We see the great upward surge in OHC between 1970 and 1976 with the El Niño 72/73 downward spike not really managing to make up for much. Then we notice how there is no normal La Niña build-up of energy before the very strong El Niño of 82/83 and as a consequence, the general drop in OHC following it. You therefore see the general upsurge between 1983 and 1989, only split by the El Niño 86-88 drain, this period being the exact equivalent sequence of the preceding 1970-76 period, starting from a much lower level, because of ‘abnormal’ El Niño 82/83, and this is why there is no similar upward step here.
Next is the period 1995-2001 where there is another upward surge, only held back by the prodigious drain of El Niño 97/98. And finally we see the same thing happening 2007-12, during yet another La Niña dominated period.
The one thing that will be interesting to see is where the IPWP OHC will go next …
One thing that IS for certain, though, reading that graph, is that there is no trace of any CO2 ‘forcing’ signal to be found. ENSO signal? Oh yeah!
In the above discussion of El Nino/La Nina, the possibility that these phenomena may be forced by volcanic activity on the ocean floor has not been mentioned. The equatorial Pacific contains three regions of subaqueous volcanic activity near the Philippines, the Galapagos and Costa Rica. Like volcanoes on land the activity of these hydrothermal vent fields can be expected to vary randomly over time. Water is trapped on the equator by Kelvin waves which makes this part of the ocean a resonant cavity. That this resonant cavity could be excited by an external forcing due to volcanism is not beyond the realm of possibility. Subaqueous volcanism pumps at least 17 terawatts into the ocean floor globally which is an order of magnitude greater than wind stress and tidal friction combined. Isn’t it about time this was taken into account by oceanographers?
For further discussion, see:
http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2014/05/ocean-vents-faulty-models/
John Reid,
That is the only logical way I can see an El Nino adding heat to the global climate system a a level commensurate with its effect on surface temperatures. But ten it would not be man caused, so the consensus will never go for it. Or even consider it.
The warmists will no doubt say of the ocean vents story, “They are Fawlty models.”
I wonder if the 97% even spent 10 seconds studying this possibility. It all sounds very interesting and in need of at least trying to falsify the hypothesis.
I, too, have wondered whether the arguments about the earth’s “energy budget” for the atmosphere start from any adequate precision about the amounts of energy released upwards from the lithosphere.
Unless such energy releases are quantified within a sufficiently narrow range to exclude fluctuations due to, e.g., undersea vents and volcanoes, arguing about El Nino, La Nina, and all other surface to atmospheric phenomena may be ‘epi-phenomena’ compared to possible fluctuations in energy releases from the lithosphere.
For instance, do we have any precise energy budget for the largest volcanic structure ever found on earth, estimated to be the size of New Mexico?
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/3841/20130905/underwater-volcano-big-new-mexico-largest-earth-scientits-confirm.htm
That is under the Pacific Ocean, along with all the other volcanic vents which may or may not be adequately understood??
I certainly did not mean to imply above that ‘all’ undersea volcanic vents on earth are under the Pacific, only that there are many there and do we understand precisely the energy releases via ‘all’ of that Pacific sub-set of the earth’s undersea volcanic activity??
Heat from the ocean floor is indeed well worth pursuing. This idea is hinted at in my December 2012 AGU poster. In column 4 I wrote “We conjecture that [in effect the AMO] results from seismic events where the inviscid mantle becomes more viscous, due to decreasing temperature above and increasing pressure below. Rotation of the Earth’s core relative to the crust can be expected to generate such events above and/or below the
mantle. Each such event would temporarily redistribute heat so that the
bottom of the crust would experience a sudden temperature increase
followed by a slow return to equilibrium.”
At question time in my December 2013 AGU talk I (very briefly) developed this idea a little more precisely by describing how variations in the respective angular velocities of the Earth’s mantle and inner core, lubricated by the relatively inviscid outer core, might open up slip zones at the ocean crust at times of greatest acceleration, releasing heat into the ocean. If the inner core (which rotates faster than the mantle) accelerated and decelerated with either a 60-year or 120-year period, this could plausibly account for the AMO. Details yet to be fleshed out.
“That this resonant cavity could be excited by an external forcing due to volcanism is not beyond the realm of possibility.”
monkeys flying out of your butt are not beyond the realm of possibility.
Mosher speaks from experience. That’s how new little Moshers come into the world.
My point is that subaqueous volcanoes are likely to have a major effect on ocean circulation and hence climate. Such changes in ocean circulation will effect the transfer of heat, water vapour and CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere in a random way. Hence the variability is just as important as the mean. Skiphil, you are right, it does need to be quantified but at the moment the best we can do is observe the statistical distribution of energy for on-land eruptions and assume a similar distribution describes eruptions on the ocean floor. It may not. If anything the ocean floor may be more active; it is littered with thousands of volcanoes both active and extinct and the crust is thinner.
However the most important point I make is that ocean circulation and climate are stochastic processes and cannot be adequately dealt with by deterministic models. Such models are no more than curve fitting exercises and, as such, will surely fail outside the domain in which the curve was fitted to the data. Furthermore the present observed increase in atmospheric CO2 is just as likely to be the outcome of a random excursion in ocean circulation as to human agency. Next time there is a big eruption in the North Pacific, CO2 may well start to decrease.
Loehle and Scafetta 2011 have much more elegant curve fitting than Pratt using just two simple sinusoids and two linear ramps. They do however reach a similar conclusion about the cyclical components matching regular motions of the sun and gas giants. That these subtle gravitational pushes and tugs might translate into the earth’s fluid interior are not too surprising. The global ocean is but a film compared to the body of the planet.
David, thanks for that L & S reference. They may well have a point; it is likely that there are many other possible forcings and resonances in addition to undersea volcanoes. My point is that there is good reason to take volcanoes into account and once we do take them into account we are dealing with a stochastic model. Nature is not a machine; there are random fluctuations on every time scale. Just because changes in temperature or CO2 concentration cannot be fully accounted for by a particular deterministic model does not imply that such changes are man-made. We should assume all such variations are natural variations until we can demonstrated otherwise. The idea that anything we cannot immediately explain must be due to human agency is similar to a belief in witchcraft.
Steven Mosher | May 10, 2014 at 11:34 pm |
monkeys flying out of your butt are not beyond the realm of possibility.
And far more likely to happen than CAGW.*
*Seriously, it’s more likely that some evil genious has targeted you and something one might describe as a flying monkey will come out of your ass, like something from a Fringe episode, while you read this. Even considering that his more evil and smarter cousin is activily trying to amplify the greenhouse effect and positive feedbacks, with all the resources of Carlos Slim. Of course, maybe genious number two has figured out how to supress warming to lull us into false security.
@Kristian: If one actually does bother to take a look at what the data says, it very soon becomes evident that your assumption of some increased ‘forcing’ from a larger atmospheric content of CO2 creating some ‘background’ warming trend upon which the ENSO events are simply superimposed, is nothing more than some fanciful theoretical dream. There simply is no sign of it.
It seems to me there is a very strong sign of CO2 induced global warming in HadCRUT4 since 1850. Slide 17 of my 2013 AGU Fall Meeting talk in December used Gaussian-based filters to analyze HadCRUT4 as a sum HIGH + MID + LOW of three broadband frequency components. Unlike Loehle and Scafetta (L&S) (see Springer’s reference below) there are no analytic models such as sine waves in this decomposition, which simply separates the temperature signal since 1850 into three spectral components.
HIGH contains those fluctuations corresponding to the time scale of ENSO (3-7 years) and faster. MID can be seen to be remarkably well modeled by L&S’s 20-year sine wave, both in frequency and phase. LOW looks very much like L&S’s 60-year sine wave plus a temperature that has been rising exponentially since at least as far back as 1900, revisited in slide 27 onwards.
Meanwhile slides 21-26 compute the expected contribution of rising CO2 to global temperature since 1820, assuming no delay in observed temperature response to an increase in CO2 (an assumption that slide 30 revisits), based on Arrhenius’s logarithmic dependence of temperature on CO2 at a nominal climate sensitivity of 1 °C/doubling of CO2. This analysis is based on CO2 levels obtained from Law Dome ice cores for 1820-1960 (slide 24) and from Mauna Loa for 1960-2013 (slide 23). Slide 28 performs a least-squares fit of expected CO2-induced temperature rise to observed multidecadal temperature (LOW), yielding a climate sensitivity of 1.92 °C/dbl. The residual from that fit is compared to the AMO index in slide 29.
This analysis reveals a strikingly good match between expected CO2-induced global warming, based on our knowledge of rising CO2, and the exponentially rising component of HadCRUT4.
Loehle and Scafetta arrive at much the same picture, with the main difference being that they use a piecewise linear model of the exponential rise, consisting of two pieces connected at 1940. The pieces can be described as linear regressions over respectively 1850-1940 and 1940-2010. They call the former a “natural” warming and attribute the latter to CO2 on the assumption that CO2 was constant prior to 1940 and in that year suddenly started rising at 1% per year and will continue to do so until 2100.
Thus whereas my expectation of the CO2 contribution to global warming is based on the actual observed CO2 level since 1820, L&S’s is based on an assumption of no CO2 growth prior to 1940 followed by a steady 1%/year rise since 1940, which they subsequently extrapolate to 2100.
A number of objections to the L&S model, e.g. that it hindcasts terribly (not the first time Loehle has been criticized on that ground), are collected in one place at
http://www.skepticalscience.com/loehle-scafetta-60-year-cycle.htm
The main objections I would raise are (i) L&S offer no physical basis for what they call “natural warming” and (ii) the Mauno Loa data since 1958 shows that the CAGR of CO2, far from being a constant 1%, is itself doubling every three decades or so — it was around 0.25% in 1960 and 0.5% in 2000. At the present rate the CAGR of CO2 will reach 1% around mid-century.
Vaughan Pratt says, May 13, 2014 at 6:08 pm:
“It seems to me there is a very strong sign of CO2 induced global warming in HadCRUT4 since 1850. Slide 17 of my 2013 AGU Fall Meeting talk in December used Gaussian-based filters to analyze HadCRUT4 as a sum HIGH + MID + LOW of three broadband frequency components. Unlike Loehle and Scafetta (L&S) (see Springer’s reference below) there are no analytic models such as sine waves in this decomposition, which simply separates the temperature signal since 1850 into three spectral components.”
Vaughan,
William M. Briggs, ‘Statistician to the Stars!, once stated some very true words that definitely more people calling themselves ‘climate scientists’ should take to heart:
“If we want to know if there has been a change from the start to the end dates, all we have to do is look! I’m tempted to add a dozen more exclamation points to that sentence, it is that important. We do not have to model what we can see. No statistical test is needed to say whether the data has changed. We can just look.
I have to stop, lest I become exasperated. We statisticians have pointed out this fact until we have all, one by one, turned blue in the face and passed out, the next statistician in line taking the place of his fallen comrade.
(…) Again, if you want to claim that the data has gone up, down, did a swirl, or any other damn thing, just look at it!”
It appears that ‘climate scientists’ have a habit of don’t liking what the original (actual) data from the real earth system is telling them (or, rather, what it’s NOT telling them). So they consistently insist on applying all sorts of inventive statistical methods to the data with the seeming intention of ‘forcing it to confess’.
But it simply shouldn’t be necessary. We have all the data we need. And it tells its story perfectly well by itself, thank you: No sign anywhere of any distinct ‘CO2 warming’ signal.
– – –
First of all, forget about 1850. Two reasons: 1) even the IPCC do not expect to find a ‘CO2 signal’ on the global temperature evolution prior to ~1950, and 2) there is no way in hell we are ever going to agree that the portrayed evolution in global temperatures between 1850 and 1950 is a correct representation of reality; for that the data basis is far to sparse, the averaging methods far too uncertain and the subsequent (and still ongoing!) adjustments are far too great.
So the only REAL period of interest is the stretch between 1950 and today, well, basically, since there were no general global warming going on between 1950 and 1976, and also none between 2001 and today, the period of interest in effect becomes the one between 1975/76 and 2001/02 – ‘the modern global warming’.
So let’s have a look.
How did global warming progress from 1975/76 to 2001/02? Follow the data. No preconceived ideas about mechanisms.
First of all, there is no question that there is a definite East Pacific signal plastered all over the global temperature series. Compare with NINO3.4:
http://i1172.photobucket.com/albums/r565/Keyell/GWexplained_zps566ab681.png
In fact, global temperatures tend to lag NINO3.4 SSTa by several months. And everyone knows that this particular correlation also speaks causation. Not just from the consistent and tight lead-lag relation, but from the throroughly explicated oceanic/atmospheric mechanisms by which we know the large-scale and integrated ENSO process creates global warming and cooling. I’m talking here about the major swings up and down that we see all along from 1970 till today.
So here’s the question: What is it that caused global temperatures to rise between 1975/76 and 2001/02 and NOT NINO3.4? When the correlation (and hence causal link) between the two series is so tight and consistent when it comes to the major ups and downs.
Don’t jump to conclusions, now. I know you want to shout out in reply: WELL, THE RISE IN ATMOSPHERIC CO2, OF COURSE! But not so fast.
All we can say for now is that the GLOBAL warming must have occurred OUTSIDE the NINO3.4 region. Question is specifically WHERE? And specifically WHEN? And finally, specifically HOW?
For this we simply need to consult the data. What does it say?
First the WHEN. When did global temperatures rise above NINO3.4? Continuously and gradually from start to finish? Nope. Then at what times?
In three distinct jumps alone. One in 1978/79. One in 1988. And one in 1998. Outside of these three abrupt upward GLOBAL shifts relative to NINO3.4 … NOTHING. Global temps simply follow the lead of NINO3.4.
So these three sudden steps are what needs to be explained. There is no global warming above the NINO3.4 lead to be found since 1970 except within these three specific instances.
This is a major find. Why? Because it could potentially lead us to a CAUSE of the global rise in temperatures between 1975/76 and 2001/02.
What went on in 1978/79, in 1988 and in 1998? What was so special about these three short time segments? Why is the ENTIRE ‘modern global warming’ contained within them?
To find out, we need to split up the global curve. We need to find out WHERE the warming outside the NINO3.4 region took place. We’ve established the WHEN. We now need to establish the WHERE.
I won’t bore you with the elaborate, extended, meticulous search process around the world for the WHERE. It’s already been done. It’s right there in the data.
The 1978/79 warming is different from the next two. The 1978/79 warming is clearly centred in the East Pacific AWAY FROM the tropics. The warming in both 1988 and 1998 is very much centred around two OTHER regions of the global ocean. It very clearly ORIGINATES in the ONE before it’s being strengthened and consolidated in the other. But that’s moving ahead too fast.
The two regions in question here is: 1) The West Pacific, and 2) The North Atlantic.
(Refer to the figure above.)
This is a big subject, so I will stop here for now …
Vaughan Pratt
This method of picking cycles in short lengths of data used both by yourself and by L&S and others is based on a misunderstanding of statistics and stochastic process. It is easy enough to find “cycles”; all we need do is examine the Fourier transform of the data and pick the big components. At issue is whether these cycles persist outside the data interval. If this were true these components should be evident in data from much longer time intervals, i.e. in proxy climate data from tree-rings, lake bed sediments, ice cores and so on. They are not.
Also at issue is whether climate is a cyclic or a stochastic process. There are very few truly cyclic phenomena in nature, planetary motions and electromagnetic spectra are the exceptions. Cyclic behaviour is largely a property of man-made things – computers, radio transmitters, machines. Even a musical instrument such as a flute produces band limited noise.
It is possible to test for cyclic behaviour using spectral analysis: stochastic systems have continuous spectra whereas cyclic or deterministic behaviour is manifested as spikes at discrete frequencies. Such spikes can be tested for significance using the usual methods of statistical inference (Null hypothesis, chi-square distributed ordinates).
There is an excellent paper on all this: “Natural variability of atmospheric temperatures and geomagnetic intensity over a wide range of time scales”, Jon D. Pelletier, PNAS, Feb 2002. Once diurnal and annual effects are accounted for, temperature spectra can be seen to vary smoothly over a frequency range of eight orders of magnitude. Even the much vaunted Milankovitch cycles are barely discernible and only the obliquity cycle is marginally significant (e.g. Huybers and Wunsch, 2005). Pelletier’s paper shows different power laws hold in different frequency ranges as differing physical processes dominate.
Once we accept that climate is a stochastic process, then the temperature fluctuations of the last 150 years must be assumed to be random noise unless we can demonstrate otherwise statistically. So far no-one has done this. Proxy data shows that global climate has been remarkably stable for the last 11,000 years. The 0.8 deg C temperature change during the 20th century is a random fluctuation. There is nothing unusual about present day climate. Climate modelling is the modern equivalent of examining chicken entrails.
@John Reid: At issue is whether these cycles persist outside the data interval. If this were true these components should be evident in data from much longer time intervals, i.e. in proxy climate data from tree-rings, lake bed sediments, ice cores and so on. They are not.
To support “they are not” you must first show that your proxies bear at least some resemblance to the temperature data for 1850-2010. If they don’t, then it is to be expected that they don’t show these cycles prior to 1850 either.
To make your argument stick, you need to demonstrate that your proxy for this very reliable 20-year period, which accurately tracks the Sun’s Hale cycle in both frequency and phase, suddenly ceases to do so prior to 1850.
If you can do this you are guaranteed publication in a respectable journal! It would be astonishing that a reliable proxy for the Hale cycle over a period of 160 years ceases to be so earlier than that.
@Kristian: We have all the data we need. And it tells its story perfectly well by itself, thank you: No sign anywhere of any distinct ‘CO2 warming’ signal.
Hey, I’m completely with you there, Kristian. I looked at the function y = x for x from 0 to 1. I had all the data I needed, and there was no sign anywhere of any increase in y over that range. No problem.
1) even the IPCC do not expect to find a ‘CO2 signal’ on the global temperature evolution prior to ~1950
How is knowing which parts of the IPCC report are true and which parts are false any different from knowing that sort of thing about the Holy Bible? Sounds to me like you’re cherry-picking the IPCC report based on secret information that only you are privy to.
2) there is no way in hell we are ever going to agree that the portrayed evolution in global temperatures between 1850 and 1950 is a correct representation of reality; for that the data basis is far to sparse, the averaging methods far too uncertain and the subsequent (and still ongoing!) adjustments are far too great.
Odd then that the 20-year period is just as visible before 1950 as after. Given that the data is so uncertain it must be just a huge coincidence.
I do agree however with your intuition that the temperature since 1950 doesn’t tell us much about global warming. All you need to do to convince me of your position is strengthen your argument that there is no information in the temperature record prior to 1950. So far it has consisted of nothing but unsupported hand-waving.
Vaughan Pratt says, May 16, 2014 at 4:07 am:
“1) even the IPCC do not expect to find a ‘CO2 signal’ on the global temperature evolution prior to ~1950
How is knowing which parts of the IPCC report are true and which parts are false any different from knowing that sort of thing about the Holy Bible? Sounds to me like you’re cherry-picking the IPCC report based on secret information that only you are privy to.”
Really not sure what you’re talking about here, Vaughan.
“2) there is no way in hell we are ever going to agree that the portrayed evolution in global temperatures between 1850 and 1950 is a correct representation of reality; for that the data basis is far to sparse, the averaging methods far too uncertain and the subsequent (and still ongoing!) adjustments are far too great.
Odd then that the 20-year period is just as visible before 1950 as after. Given that the data is so uncertain it must be just a huge coincidence.”
I’m not really talking about ‘periods’ that you might find, Vaughan. I’m sorry if I weren’t clear on that. You will most likely still be able to find a frequency signal in the data. No, I rather primarily refer to the posited general global temperature rise from 1850 to 1950. The trend-estimation over a century. How would we know this with any certainty? The data from 1850 to 1940/50 are far from global in extent, the averaging and homogenisation methods are far from certain and the (still ongoing!) after-the-fact adjustments of old data are rife.
Also, you know of course that the mean solar activity was hugely greater during the cycle 1942-2005 than during the cycle 1878-1941. So why SHOULDN’T the world be a warmer place in 2005 than in 1941? To be frank, I find it actually much stranger to hold the position that it should and could NOT …
http://i1172.photobucket.com/albums/r565/Keyell/TempgldetrvsSSNkumul_zps489f73b0.png
“I do agree however with your intuition that the temperature since 1950 doesn’t tell us much about global warming.”
Er, it tells us EVERYTHING we need to know about global warming. It’s evidently natural and only natural. Sun + ocean.
Reid,
The shorter cycles are just as important. Yet rarely do we get fine resolution on proxy records.
So you set up Vaughan with a strawman that I just burned to the ground.
Where do they find these people?
Vaughan, I am not “trying to make my argument stick”; I am suggesting what you need to do in order to make your argument stick; I am more concerned with the assumptions which underlie climate modelling.
I am not opposed to the concept of there being a Hale cycle signal in climate data. In fact I think it is a really interesting idea but if you wish to establish this, then there are accepted statistical techniques for doing so which would be more convincing than the approach of your poster session.
One method would be to compute a periodogram spectral estimate of the de-trended temperature time series and test to see if there is a significant peak at the precise frequency of the Hale cycle. Another is to perform a multiple regression of the the temperature sequence on the lagged Hale cycle sequence and test the correlation coefficient for significance. The latter method takes phase into account. Both methods require the prior assumption that the temperature sequence is the outcome of a random process as a null hypothesis.
Finding significant cyclic behaviour in a data sequence only a couple of cycles in length is a tough call. Looking for the Hale cycle in less precise but much longer proxy temperature data might be simpler.
BTW a long time ago I did a statistical analysis of the Hale cycle ( J. Geophys. Res. 84, 5289, 1979) and found the Hale cycle to be “more significant” than the 11 year cycle.
WebHubTelescope, the one year resolution of tree rings and recent ice cores should be good enough. Length is more important than precision.
The deniers claim that proxy records do not have resolution and that the local temperature runs are steeper over shorter time intervals than can be discerned.
So it looks like I caught you in an own goal situation Reid.
As far as I can tell, although it is not stated explicitly, this article is trying to attribute all(?) of the warming to El Ninos(?). Or maybe they are saying that the warming is due to CO2, but only through some indirect and not understood effect it has on El Ninos. They haven’t made a suggestion of how much CO2 contributed. They haven’t even talked about how the energy balance fits in, which perhaps they deny is a factor at all. ENSO has no effect on the long-term energy balance. It has no source of energy of its own. Its effect is to delay or accelerate changes that occur in the mean state. Even during the pause, the warming has proceeded uninterrupted over land and especially over the Arctic. This is consistent with an energy balance driver, and not an ocean driver. Lots of holes here makes this look like hopefulness rather than a theory.
Jim D, they seem to be saying that the warming is predominantly attributable to El Nino’s, with any effect of CO2 being swamped by natural variability. Yes, they don’t address issues of energy balance, and I can’t comment on them or alternative mechanisms. But there seems to me to be enough to challenge the emphasis on anthro-CO2 as the pre-dominant warming influence.
This is sheer nonsense, as anyone familiar with the field knows. (Even Trenberth has admitted it, indirectly.)
The default assumption ought to be that the “energy balance” is not “a factor at all.” You can’t have an “energy balance” without a clearly defined system, and the only relevant clearly defined system is one bounded at the top of the atmosphere (TOA).
Changes to albedo produce changes to the fraction of solar SW that makes it into the system (“energy in”). Local changes to albedo are well-documented results of ENSO variation, and any assumption that those local changes “balance out” on a global scale is unwarranted without substantial evidence-based proof.
This means that the default assumption must be that albedo varies to some extent due to ENSO, which in turn means that ENSO probably (default assumption) has a great “effect on the long-term energy balance.” This in addition, of course, to the effects that ENSO-caused variation in cloudiness at different levels and locations has on outgoing IR.
Which variation has also been well-documented, and also cannot be assumed to “balance out” at a global scale.
Thus, ENSO does have a “source of energy of its own.” Solar SW which can vary due to changes in cloudy air conditions driven by ENSO itself (direct “feedback”), as well as other components of the general system that respond, among other things, to ENSO (indirect “feedback”).
AK wrote: “This means that the default assumption must be that albedo varies to some extent due to ENSO, which in turn means that ENSO probably (default assumption) has a great “effect on the long-term energy balance.””
There is no denying that ENSO has an effect on the energy balance through its effect on cloud cover. But that’s the very epitome of short-term effects. When an El Nino is over, and it gave place to a La Nina, then the effect that the El Nino had had on the cloud cover is completely over. That is unless you imagine that a residual El Nino warming will have a cumulative reinforcing effect from one complete ENSO quasi-cycle (i.e. and El Nino/La Nina alternation) to the next. This would effectively constitute a strongly positive cloud feedback that would be expected to respond all the more strongly to the increasing CO2 forcing and hence would make ENSO a contributor to a very high climate sensitivity.
You appear to be making the tacit assumption that there’s some sort of “equilibrium” or “standard” state for cloud cover. Not true (or at least, not demonstrated). The effect of an El Niño on cloud cover is reflected (heh!) in the albedo, and therefore the “energy balance”. While it’s going on, the effect is present. The longer it lasts, the longer the effect lasts. The more El Niños in a time period, the greater the fraction of that time period is in that altered state.
The whole “energy balance” thing is a myth. “Energy in” never equals “energy out”. Trying to define some sort of “average” over time and space wherein they are equal just gets you lost in a semantic fog. Any assumption that they “have to balance” within any specific time period is unwarranted, as indeed the whole “deep ocean ate my global warming” meme demonstrates.
Fact is, IMO, the whole “energy balance” thing is begging the question. Proponents start with the assumption that increased CO2 is going to create an “unbalance”, then go looking for increased heat (“Global Average Temp increases”, “>700meter Joules”, etc.) resulting from that “unbalance”.
As has been widely suggested, the “missing heat” may well be on its way to Arcturus.
AK, very well put.
“Thus, ENSO does have a “source of energy of its own.” Solar SW which can vary due to changes in cloudy air conditions driven by ENSO itself (direct “feedback”), as well as other components of the general system that respond, among other things, to ENSO (indirect “feedback”).”
——
I hope, really hope, that you can see the illogical thought process here. If ENSO was not a zero sum game, then the “feedback” processes would drive the system into some run-away warming or cooling. There is no source of energy.
ENSO as it moves heat around the system is a zero sum game. I don’t think this is the same as saying that what it does to the clouds in the ENSO region and in other regions is a zero sum game. I think that when we say it’s a zero sum game, we may be talking very long time periods. Some heat escapes downward from the Pacific warm pool. We aren’t sure when that heat is coming back.
In modern record, only one El Nina resulted in a net loss of energy: 1997-1998. OHC went down.
Otherwise, SAT goes up; OHC goes up.
Whoops, El Nino.
There’s no such thing as “a zero sum game” when it comes to energy in the weather/climate system. The vast majority of the energy is entering and leaving the system via radiation, and the processes we’re discussing just divert and play with a small part of that energy. Remember that the atmosphere is, relatively speaking, just a thin skin over the planet relative to the overall horizontal extent. Most of the net energy entering the system (via solar SW) just turns around and leaves (via LW radiation at TOA) in roughly the same geographic region.
When you talk about moving “heat around the system” you’re creating a straw man: there’s much more heat moving into and out of the system at any location than is being moved “around the system”.
“As far as I can tell, although it is not stated explicitly, this article is trying to attribute all(?) of the warming to El Ninos(?). ”
I don’t think we read the same piece.
That experts continue to treat rough observation sets as mechanisms or control levers means that a science of climate is still a long way off. Maybe the game console has a lot to answer for, and budding scientists should be encouraged to go rock fishing or otherwise expose themselves to actual climate.
There’s obviously something in ENSO, PDO, IOD etc. Walker and Mantua did not labour in vain. Where I live, you really can think about the possibility of more or less rain on your bamboo when certain indicators line up. But mechanisms? In my part of eastern Oz we had better rainfall in the super El Ninos of 1997-8 and even 1982-3 than in the that double Super La Nina of 1916 to 1918. Eastern Australia (and all Australia, for that matter) had its driest known decade, the 1930s, without any BoM defined El Ninos. The horror heat/fire/drought of 1938-39 occurred in a La Nina.
Back to the old drawing board!
Sorry, can’t do that moso, only advanced electronics are acceptable in the 21st Century.
The preferred advanced instrument in the CAGW tribe is the climate ouija board.
Because of ACO2, modern periods of La Nina dominance warm the oceans rapidly. This means atmospheric temperatures are highly unlikely to go down; even during La Nina dominance. And when an El Nino happens, atmospheric warming is record setting. The energy in the step is not provided by El Nino; it’s provided by ACO2.
Heads Trenberth win; tails Trenberth wins.
Bob, I am speaking about the long-term, 60+ year gain of heat in the IPWP, caused by both the expansion and warming of the pool. You seem to ignore this, perhaps because many studies point to it being related to the external forcing from GH gases and this does sit well with you.
Surely los niños y las niñas . . . . . .
Gordon, it’s a bit like saying “fora” instead of “forums”. You are correct, but…
An expression can sometimes grow so anglicised that you keep the words but ditch the grammar of the originating language. Do you order two cappuccinos or two cappuccini?
Anglicising enables us to refer to an idea rather than a literal boy or girl. Otherwise we’d have to say that were Cuatro Niños in the 1990s, or that 1950 was Una Niña. As for whether you should capitalise or be allowed to put an English article in front of the Spanish article…go figure!
Nope. Let’s exploit our language’s handy ability to agglomerate and adapt.
The ability to agglomerate and adapt of course extends far beyond language, the recognition of which seems to separate optimists from doomists.
R. Gates: “This is not the worst of Tisdale’s errors. While I’m sure he is well aware of the long-term gain in energy the IPWP has been undergoing (during both El Niño and La Niña dominant periods) he seems to conveniently ignore this extremely important fact.”
Thank you, once again, for misrepresenting my work, R. Gates. I began commenting on the heat gain in the tropical Pacific as soon as the NODC OHC data became available through the KNMI Climate Explorer at my request back in 2009. I have presented it and discussed it numerous times since then. Perform a Google image search of “tropical Pacific ocean heat content”, R. Gates. Whose graphs do you see there?
Bob, I am speaking about the long-term, 60+ year gain of heat in the IPWP, caused by both the expansion and warming of the pool. You seem to ignore this, perhaps because many studies point to it being related to the external forcing from GH gases and this does sit well with you
“Actually, the global warming of the 20th century correlates better with Niño indices than it does with CO2 concentration. He has therefore argued that a substantial part (if not all) of the global warming of the past ~120 years can be attributed periods of imbalance in favor of El Niños, rather than the effect of rising CO2 concentration.”
Actually Tisdale never showed this allegedly much higher correlation as far as I know. It is true, and expected, that any ENSO or PDO related index will correlate very well with the *detrended* temperature record of the last 130 years. It is a fallacy to infer that, since something accounts for the features of the detrended record, then it must also account for the trend. One could also note that, in mid-latitudes, the time of the day correlates strongly with local surface temperature. The correlation may be as good or better than the correlation of the day of the year with surface temperature. It would be quite wrong to infer that the Earth rotation therefore explains the seasonal temperature variations better than, or as well as, does the Earth orbital revolution around the Sun.
Further, as the methodology in Kosala and Xie 2013 make clear, an index that is tied to surface temperature in some region of the tropical Pacific will reflect *both* the state of ENSO and the effect from global external forcing. It is an error that Tisdale routinely makes to attribute 100% of the surface temperature change that occurs following an El Nino event to the ENSO cycle as if external forcing could never contribute any fraction of the warming at all during those periods.
Where we have some 70% of the variability of temperature correlated to lagged SOI – it is fair to suggest that extended periods of dominance of one state or the other contribute to the trend. That the Pacific state contributes to decadal warming and cooling of the atmosphere is pretty much mainstream freakin’ climate science.
e.g. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703
Tisdale used a multiple linear regression using cumulative SOI. One of the problems with that technique is co-linearity. It is pretty much a proxy for the Pacific state.
With ENSO the cooling doesn’t change – that relies on water that hasn’t seen the light of day for a 1000 years. With warming – presuming that most of the recent warming wasn’t from cool to warm in 1976/1977 and 1997/98 and that most of the rest wasn’t cloud radiative effects takes some freakin;’ doing. That the minor residual has an impact on ENSO distinguishable from natural variation borders on the insanely ludicrous.
I was in fact willing to be convinced pre 1998. Could we have moved to permanent El Nino since the 1976/77 climate? As ludicrous as that sounds now. The shift back to La Nina – the cooling planet for decades yet – the increased cloud cover – well and truly puts paid to that idea. Does a little warming make any difference to ENSO? Proxies would suggest otherwise. Do El Nino discharge energy in immense quantities? Most certainly.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Loeb2011-Fig1.png.html?sort=3&o=141
And what you offer is vague hand waving about not being able to distinguish natural variability from anthropogenic – but it might be a factor? Do yourself a favour. Stop embarrassing yourself with such vague and simplistic narratives learned on warmist web sites and faithfully and painfully parroted with faux authority.
” It is an error that Tisdale routinely makes to attribute 100% of the surface temperature change that occurs following an El Nino event to the ENSO cycle as if external forcing could never contribute any fraction of the warming at all during those periods.”
_____
This is not the worst of Tisdale’s errors. While I’m sure he is well aware of the long-term gain in energy the IPWP has been undergoing (during both El Niño and La Niña dominant periods) he seems to conveniently ignore this extremely important fact. Both the highest temperatures and the size of the IPWP have been slowly increasing. This fact, combined with other data indicating net energy increases in the climate system are more important that the trivial interesting fact that tropospheric temperatures spike temporarily during El Ninos. No net energy is added to the system, and in fact, a bit more energy is likely lost to space during these events.
“Do El Nino discharge energy in immense quantities? Most certainly.”
——-
At least Skippy and Gates occasionally agree on a few basics.
Pierre-Normand says: “Actually Tisdale never showed this allegedly much higher correlation as far as I know.”
If you don’t know, and obviously you don’t, then there is no reason for you to comment. I suggest you study my work before you make claims about what I have or have not presented and discussed.
“If you don’t know, and obviously you don’t, then there is no reason for you to comment. I suggest you study my work before you make claims about what I have or have not presented and discussed.”
I didn’t read your book but read a couple dozens of your WUWT posts, read many of the comments and most of your responses, and asked a few questions myself. Maybe you somewhere addressed the points I here raised regarding the correlation of CO2 forcing with the underlying signal versus its correlation with the short term noise in the detrended temperature series; but I missed it. So, if you would provide a link that would be appreciated.
The issue not discussed by Tisdale is the longer-term, externally forced expansion and warming of the IPWP. Perhaps he’d like to address this.
New Post: Will there be a super el nino in 2014?
http://xanonymousblog.wordpress.com/2014/05/08/will-there-be-a-super-el-nino-in-2014/
Thanks
Maybe or maybe not. Pretty unimportant in terms of telling us any thing about longer-term climate change.
R.Gates,
ENSO is key to understanding the physics of long term climate change, since it ties in just about every facet of the climate system. ENSO is involved in radiative balance, the hydrological cycle, coupling between the Ocean and the Atmosphere, Ocean Heat Content, Albedo, Sea Level, Wind, Clouds, the monsoon, the cryosphere, Earth’s rotation, etc
And you believe a single event is Nothing of importance? Perhaps you mean the impact of a single event is of no importance to a longer term trend? Hope so.
:/
“Perhaps you mean the impact of a single event is of no importance to a longer term trend? Hope so.”
——
Certainly. It is how the system responds after an El Niño that really interests me. How quickly does the energy begin filling back in in the IPWP and does the longer-term increase continue?
And just to add, one must be very careful with running sums. The stationary series must be properly baselined to zero, since the trend of the cumulative sum is greatly influenced by the average of the entire series (due to arbitrary reference period).
As demonstrated here:
http://xanonymousblog.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/bob-tisdales-step-theory/
This was an interesting post, but what seems lost just a bit is the discussion of the IPWP. The energy released during a typical El Niño comes from the IPWP, and the energy is stored there during La Niña and ENSO neutral periods. A bit more energy is stored in the IPWP during La Niña periods versus ENSO neutral. The IPWP is truly one of the weather making engines of the planet as one of the major climate energy storage regions.
During an El Niño, and during longer periods of more frequent El Ninos, we see that the IPWP discharges more energy to the troposphere, but there is no net energy added to climate system– it is simply moved from one part of the system to another, with the higher latent and sensible heat flux during the El Niño temporarily warming the troposphere. In fact, after the energy has passed as sensible heat through the troposphere, it is very likely that the net energy of the climate system may be slightly less as more is able to leave to space.
The point here is that any discussion of ENSO behavior without a concurrent discussion of the IPWP is meaningless. Moreover, as one of the primary climate energy reservoirs of the planet, the IPWP has been undergoing a long-term increase in energy for over 60+ years, with it rising a bit faster during La Niña dominated periods, and a bit slower during El Niño dominated periods. The steady long-term gain in energy in the IPWP is one of the three key signatures of the long-term gain of energy in Earth’s climate system with the increasing GH gas levels most likely playing a key role in that long-term gain.
“[…] with the higher latent and sensible heat flux during the El Niño temporarily warming the troposphere. In fact, after the energy has passed as sensible heat through the troposphere, it is very likely that the net energy of the climate system may be slightly less as more is able to leave to space.”
Isn’t this effect from the negative moist adiabatic lapse rate feedback more than compensated by the enhanced water vapor feedback? The surface also warms though, and its emissivity is much higher than the emissivity of the troposphere. So, much release of heat will occur through the atmospheric IR window. This is, just like the negative feedback mentioned above, part of the Planck response to the surface/troposphere warming.
If we look at it from a net energy standpoint, the far greater energy storage of the IPWP more than makes up for what can be stored in the atmosphere in any form. Thus, during the large El Niño of 1997-98, the large amount of energy released by the IPWP fluxed as both sensible and latent heat into the atmosphere. Certainly some of this was converted to other forms of energy that remained in the system, but a greater amount than average was lost to space. The system immediately shifted to a La Niña state during the winter of 1998-99 as the IPWP begin “filling back up” after this massive loss. So if you were to measure the net energy of the system in the spring of 1997 and compare it to say the summer or fall of 1998, you find the system had lost energy during that time. But these short term releases from the IPWP that are known as El Ninos must be seen against the backdrop of a longer-term gain in energy of the IPWP, in which the lows never quite reach back to previous low marks in ocean heat content as the IPWP has been both slowly warming and slowly expanding for 60+ years.
“But these short term releases from the IPWP that are known as El Ninos must be seen against the backdrop of a longer-term gain in energy of the IPWP, in which the lows never quite reach back to previous low marks in ocean heat content as the IPWP has been both slowly warming and slowly expanding for 60+ years.”
Now if this were true, and could be demonstrated, it would be much better evidence of global warming than any GCM.
But what measurements of the IPWP go back 60+ years with the coverage and accuracy necessary to really determine that. The land surface air temperature records, with much greater coverage, over a long period, with better instrumentation (I assume), frankly, suck. So why should a skeptic, or anyone for that matter, accept that there are measurements sufficient to support that statement?
If you say GCMs or proxies, I think becomes a much less interesting argument.
“Now if this were true, and could be demonstrated, it would be much better evidence of global warming than any GCM.”
——
Many studies have documented the fact of the IPWP both warming and expanding. It makes interesting study, and a good place to start is here:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-011-0121-x
Or Here:
http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140401/srep04552/full/srep04552.html
The slow warming, expansion, and all related activity of the IPWP deserves a lengthy post all by itself. And again, discussing ENSO without talking about the IPWP is quite short-sighted,
R.Gates,
That article may make interesting study, but it doesn’t hold $39.95 worth of interest for me.
From the abstract – “Using heat budget analysis of several Ocean data assimilation products…” sounds a lot like sparse data and climate models to me.
If you honestly want to understand you can Gary. The probability the IPWP had been showing a long-term expansion and increase in temperature over many decades is quite high as several solidly researched studies have come to the same basic conclusion even though different data sets and approaches were used. Thus merits a post here on CE.
R.Gates,
That’s the same argument Michael Mann makes for his hokey stick. Not a winner with knuckle dragging skeptics like me.
The ‘normal’ ENSO state involves upwelling at the eastern margin. This sets up feedbacks in wind, cloud and current across the central Pacific pushing warm surface water up Australia and Indonesia in the Western Pacific Warm Pool. At some stage the trade winds falter and the water flows eastward.
This quite naturally varies over decades to centuries with changes to the ENSO state.
e.g. https://marine.rutgers.edu/pubs/private/Langton08_KauBay.pdf
The question still comes back to how much of the recent warming was quite natural – how the minor anthropogenic component can possibly be distinguished from large natural variation – and whether the oceans and the planet are – actually – still warming?
A subsidiary problem is how they think that breathless narratives about the latest enthusiasm could be greeted with anything other than incredulity.
Gary, you might find that gloves with wheels on prove very useful: much less drag.
GaryM, for some interesting explanations about ENSO and the IPWP refer to the recent piece by Rob Painting: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Is-a-Powerful-El-Nino-Brewing-in-the-Pacific-Ocean.html
He doesn’t refer to the IPWP by that name, but it really is just the “piling up of [warm] water mass in the western Pacific.”
Cobb et al. (2013) used corals to estimate ENSO variance throughout the Holocene. They concluded:
“Twentieth-century ENSO variance is significantly higher than average fossil coral ENSO variance but is not unprecedented. Our results suggest that forced changes in ENSO, whether natural or anthropogenic, may be difficult to detect against a background of large internal variability.”
same ole same ole
R.Gates,
You went from “Many studies have documented the fact of the IPWP both warming and expanding” to “The probability the IPWP had been showing a long-term expansion and increase in temperature over many decades is quite high…”
From a “documented fact” to a “high probability” in 15 minutes. I see that as progress.
A big El Nino would be out of character for a cool Pacific mode – a moderate El Nino is par for the course – thinking that they can predict beyond the Austral autumn predictability barrier is delusional thinking.
A more interesting thing I’ll be watching should an El Niño actually take place later this year is how low the heat content of the IPWP goes, and how quickly it recharges. This tells us more about the long- term energy accumulation of the system than the temporary spike in tropospheric sensible heat caused by the El Niño.
Pierre-Norman,
I go slumming to Skeptical Science once in a while for a laugh. Not for real research. But I looked at it. I have seen better on Real Climate in the past, and Bob Tisdale’s at WUWT was an easier read.
But tell me, do I see a divergence problem in their figure 5?
They write “this shows that the current blob of warm water is comparable in magnitude, at this stage, to the El Niño event of 1997-1998.” And indeed it does, as to the volume (the blue line) of the “warm water blob” (which is so much more poetic than IPWP). But what does that graph say about the trend in temperature (the red line) of this blob?
“But tell me, do I see a divergence problem in their figure 5?”
This divergence just is the result of a time lag. The volume of the warm pool increases and peaks *before* it is discharged. The Kelvin wave across the tropical Pacific isn’t instantaneous. Notice that the displayed sea surface temperature anomaly is for the Nino 3.4 region. This is East of the warm pool. Look at the earlier discharge episodes (El Nino events) in the graph. The warm pool volume always peaks before the discharge occurs, as it should.
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/elnino/wwv/gif/wwv_e_nino3.gif
By contrast, on this graph you can see the Eastward progress in the Kelvin wave — the “discharge” — in the Nino 3 region (East of the 155W longitude) in sync with the SST anomaly over the same region.
“…the Eastward progress [of] the Kelvin wave”
“Thus, during the large El Niño of 1997-98, the large amount of energy released by the IPWP fluxed as both sensible and latent heat into the atmosphere. Certainly some of this was converted to other forms of energy that remained in the system, but a greater amount than average was lost to space.”
Yes, I agree. My point was a minor one but let me rephrase it. When the latent evaporative flux increases as a result of the sea surface warming, then this increases the water vapor content of the troposphere. This produces an enhancement of the greenhouse effect through raising the effective radiation level. A secondary effect is to reduce the moist adiabatic lapse rate and hence to increase the temperature of the effective radiation level. This effect is much smaller then the first one so the net effect still is a warming effect. Finally, this warming effect, though it enhances the (internal) El Nino surface warming that caused it, is smaller than the Plank response. That is the increase radiative flux from the surface through the atmospheric window (very large) together with the small effect from the moist adiabatic lapse rate feedback. It’s the first effect that has the most impact of the surface energy balance and accounts for most of the decrease of the TOA imbalance and hence the enhanced rate of net radiative cooling of the ocean. This third effect also is magnified by the water vapor positive feedback (which allows the surface temperature to increase more), so it partially offsets its effect on the surface energy balance.
I wrote: “Yes, I agree. My point was a minor one but let me rephrase it. When the latent evaporative flux increases as a result of the sea surface warming, then this increases the water vapor content of the troposphere.”
Though this isn’t entirely accurate since the evaporative material flux (of water vapor molecules) is immediately cancelled by the enhanced precipitation rate. What rather causes the increased water vapor content of the troposphere rather simply is its warming. This of course follows the surface warming.
Pierre-Normand,
I looked for that before posting the comment. And it makes my point. There have indeed been lags between the surge in water and rise in temperatures, but NOT before a large El Nino like 1998. At least no where near the approximate 2 year lag shown in the graph.
I am not saying the divergence does not say anything about the validity of the graph (There are plenty of arguments about such measurements, but I am ignoring them for present purposes.) But I say it speaks volumes about the claim that that graph shows an impending “powerful El Nino.”
In fact, I don;t see another divergence in that graph that is either of equal magnitude, or equal length. (What is it with CAGW advocacy and divergences?)
I am not predicting anything either way. I admit I don’t understand the climate, including being unable to predict El Ninos. But their figure 5 graph does not support their claim.
Rob Painting’s claim is rather modest: “As stated earlier, we only have just over two decades worth of reasonably detailed observations, so it is by no means guaranteed that a powerful El Niño will develop. But, based on what we have observed and our current physical understanding of the phenomenon, the evolution of an intense El Niño event is possible.”
“There have indeed been lags between the surge in water and rise in temperatures, but NOT before a large El Nino like 1998.”
That’s an interesting observation. Note that it could be argues either way: (1) that the anomalous delay in the release of heat from the charging oscillator will make the discharge all the more powerful or (2) that it will likely fizzle out. Whether (1) or (2) is more likely to occur depends on what other escape route there is for this accumulated heat and how the westerlies will behave. I don’t know enough about that so I am agnostic. Rob Painting’s conclusion also seems quite measured.
Oops: “and how the westerlies(sic) will behave.” the easterlies of course.
Another possibility that just occurred to me is that the displayed divergence isn’t real — or nearly as big as it seems — but mostly a statistical artifact caused by the 5-month running mean. Those smoothings often cause funny things to occur at the end of graphs since noise tends to me magnified there for lack of adjacent averaging data points.
R gates,
what you are asserting seems to be just plain wrong.
From KNMI climate explorer this is a graph I generated for OHC (NODA) for IPWP
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/inodc_heat700_80-180E_20–20N_na.png
Sure there has been energy increase since the 1980’s but not “the IPWP has been undergoing a long-term increase in energy for over 60+ years,”
This fits perfectly with the shift from La Nina-dominant to El Nino-dominant phases.
Your two references aren’t really helpful. One is only concerned with the Indian Ocean side and the other starts it’s analysis in 1980.
This is a little dated but shows that rather than some monotonic process that this region of the ocean is dominated by decadal-multidecadal variability which is supported by the KNMI data.
http://www.crces.org/presentations/dmv_ipwp/.
Generalissimo Skippy
Seems to summarize it pretty well.
It would appear to me that
– a significant portion of the observed 20thC warming could well be “quite natural” (lead post)
– the anthropogenic component cannot be empirically distinguished from large natural variation (only possibly by comparing the late 20thC and early 21stC periods with paleo reconstructions covering periods prior to human GHG emissions), and
– it is still to early to tell whether or not the oceans are really still warming (HadSST2 shows sea surface cooling while ARGO shows slight warming but more data needed); the globally and annually averaged land and sea surface temperature (HadCRUT4) as well as the land only surface temperature (CRUTEM4) appear to be cooling slightly.
What do you think?
Max
Gates, we have no idea what is normal for OHC of the IPWP. What is the trend, what are the values, how does it vary? An increase in the warm pool could just be reversion to the mean. It could just be response to clear skies, it could mostly be error or your imagination….
This chart and the accompanying explanation is something that Bob Tisdale and others should discuss.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ONI_change.shtml
The long-term, 60+ year energy gain in the IPWP is something that is not caused by El Niño, but by an external forcing on the system, and the very likely candidate for that external forcing is increasing GH gases.
Some ocean cycles last a thousand years, Gates. This movement of water will move heat around the globe, just like mass movement of any kind. Therefore, there could well be a climate variation due to these longer cycle time causing the decadal variation. This is a plausible explanation that does not involve GHG.
You guys never have solid proof, you just posit this or that and Viola! – global warming. It’s like the CO2 back radiation/increased surface temperature, lapse rate argument. You cite a few links of a complex, non-linear chain, then claim you have proved catastrophic global warming. But a higher radiative balance boundary in the spherical atmosphere also means that the blob of rising air will cover more area. Any clouds that form will likewise cover a larger area providing a negative feedback which will lower the ground temperature and lower the lapse rate. You warmists offer your speculation why more CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming, but in the final analysis, it’s still just speculation and nothing more.
“Some ocean cycles last a thousand years, Gates.”
_____
Please point to the solid scientific research related to this. Call me skeptical of this claim for now.
“You warmists offer your speculation why more CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming, but in the final analysis, it’s still just speculation and nothing more.”
_____
Agreed. Everything that has not happened yet is just speculation with various degrees of probability. It is only speculation that there will be an El Niño later this year. It is only speculation that it will snow somewhere in Vermont next December. It is only speculation that it will rain in Japan sometime during 2015. Each of these has a degree of probability attached to it somewhere less than 100%.
Regarding AGW and CAGW, each of these have their own distinct probabilities. AGW is probably somewhere higher than 95%. CAGW would seem to be lower (based on current knowledge). The HCV (Human Carbon Volcano is a big and rapid forcing being imposed on the climate system and the only thing similar that we have seen in the geological record that represents such a sudden strong forcing would be a large volcanic eruption or an asteroid strike. We are indeed, as one commenter here has noting, “poking a stick” at a wild beast. Should that poke turn out to be catastrophic for human and other life represents a certain speculation with an unknown probability at present.
Rgates said
‘It is only speculation that it will rain in Japan sometime during 2015. Each of these has a degree of probability attached to it somewhere less than 100%. ‘
Would you like to make an evens money bet on that one? You overstate your point.
AGW remains highly speculative . CAGW even more so, and bearing in mind we are getting predictions of up to 10F warming , with many in the middle range expecting around half of that, CAGW is the only term for it.
tonyb
“AGW remains highly speculative.”
______
The majority of the world’s climate experts would disagree with this. The probability that human activity (i.e. the HCV) is forcing the system to add some net energy is quite high. What remains more speculative is how sensitive the system really is to a doubling or tripling of CO2 from preindustrial levels.
Regarding C-AGW, it is here that the term “highly speculative” is more appropriate. There are certainly potential mechanisms whereby the current HCV could lead to truly catastrophic results for human and other life on Earth.
It’s good to know you are skeptical of at least ONE thing! :)
From the article:
…
It is not static, but a slowly southward flowing current. The route of the deep water flow is through the Atlantic Basin around South Africa and into the Indian Ocean and on past Australia into the Pacific Ocean Basin.
If the water is sinking in the North Atlantic Ocean then it must rise somewhere else. This upwelling is relatively widespread. However, water samples taken around the world indicate that most of the upwelling takes place in the North Pacific Ocean.
It is estimated that once the water sinks in the North Atlantic Ocean that it takes 1,000-1,200 years before that deep, salty bottom water rises to the upper levels of the ocean.
…
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/ocean/circulation.htm
Mr. Donald Rapp
El Nino and La Nina are in balance. They were for the first time recognized in the end of 19 century. ”Previous” records are ”fabricated” to fit the mythology of ”suggested” / to fit the warmer / colder years, from the ”Skeptic’s” phony past GLOBAL warming charts.
2] 99% of the volcanoes &hot vents are submarine – tectonic plates are moving same as you: left foot, then right foot = first moves in east pacific and produces El Nino – then moves of west pacific. Indonesia and produces La Nina. Those movements are opening / activate the submarine volcanoes on different places and they warm the water, which warmth the currents spread
It’s the wrong belief that: in El Nino are warmer years that brings the confusion. The truth: in El Nino years is less moisture in the atmosphere; with ”less” moisture the days are warmer, but the nights are colder = overall it cancel itself. the precursor of the whole evil is because: the fanatic/ shonky authorities are only interested in the hottest minute in 24h and ignore the other 1439 minutes
There is also the UFO explanation:
http://digilander.libero.it/guido_1953/pics/shado-3/shado-ufo-girls-moonbase-20.jpg
The author is saying CO2 is not a greenhouse gas?
Maybe he thinks that (maybe not) but he certainly doesn’t say that.
Your free to interpret this post anyway you want but don’t think what you say is the only way to spin this.
If you want to fit this post into the wider climate debate then it’s probably more accurate to say this supports the idea that the climate sensitivity is at the lower end given that a portion of the century or so surface temperature trend is in part explained by internal processes.
Nice post Donald Rapp. Introducing to some of us running sums. You mention Tisdale who’d I say is spending his time in one of the most important places. Thanks for covering what is probably a key area to the issue.
The Pacific equatorial region is one of the most interesting. A long stretch of ocean with a high amount of sun power. It has an interesting feedback behavior. It includes part of South Pacific Gyre which meshes with the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and the North Pacific Gyre. And it seems to be on the same page as the global surface temperatures for the most part.
If we were to ask where on Earth do we find the most sun power combined with the most capacity to store it on longer time scales we’d look here. This region I think has shown it can bring the heat in a short amount of time with an El Nino. As Tisdale has written, it first charges then discharges, with my understanding by using feedbacks. Perhaps it’s one of the largest circulations by area and effect and one of the most reliable. It keeps doing one thing or the other or grabs some middle state. Perhaps with the middle state having negative stability at times which tends to either El Nino or La Nina.
From the posting: “Trenberth’s view is that the earth is out of balance (acquiring more heat from the Sun than it can reject to space) and this excess heat finds its way into the oceans. When enough heat is stored in the surface waters, it eventually comes out as in the form of an El Niño.”
I think it is out of balance. It is acquiring heat. But I think it’s this imbalance that causes the El Nino. That the El Nino is the reaction to the imbalance as the Earth tries to throw off heat by first moving it to the atmosphere. From there it can reject it to space through the TOA. I don’t necessarily agree that this is excess heat in all time frames. Prior to the 1900s we relied on this same mechanism to make places like Minnesota temperature. El Nino and La Ninas were here long before we had anything to do with them.
“They probably can’t go on much for much longer than maybe 20 years, and what happens at the end of these hiatus periods, suddenly there’s a big jump [in temperature] up to a whole new level and you never go back to that previous level again…” – Trenberth says.
Perhaps it’s that warming happens quickly and cooling happens slowly as shown here:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_12/fig1.gif
What Hansen’s graph shows me is that while we may think we are in a brief time of seemingly no going back, 400,000 years of climate history might tell us it’s not time to panic. Hansen’s temperature graph also looks to me like the Pacific equatorial region with its large spikes of heat followed by a slow return to the next El Nino.
The Earth’s atmosphere may slowly emit excess heat through the TOA which seems like a good thing if you’re trying to avoid glacial periods. The kind of atmosphere we want is the kind that can take a lot of ocean heat and hold onto it. I’d also mention that the last cool or flat period was from about 1942 to 1977 or 35 years as I try to use the Tsonis syncing years. The average time between syncing is about 29 years. It’s going to be an interesting year, waiting for the magnitude of the possible El Nino.
“the simplest solution is that the proxies, like tree rings for temperature, aren’t proxies at all”
Or they are simply too noisy as they are extended back to be of any real use
This is the crux of “Hide the Decline” – except the tree rings became too noisy in the modern period for “training”
Faustino @ 2.02 am .
YES.
Waiting for El Godot?
So : During the period that we have measured it, ENSO has varied quite noticeably, producing periods of more El Ninos, and periods of more La Ninas. In the 500 years before we started measuring it, the proxies indicate that it was as flat as the proverbial pancake. The point in time when the pattern suddenly changed was the exact point in time that we started measuring it. Colour me sceptical until there’s something more convincing – the simplest solution is that the proxies, like tree rings for temperature, aren’t proxies at all. [Or maybe quantum physics – The process of observing appears to influence what is being observed – applies in climate too. ie, as soon as we start to observe something it changes its behaviour. There’s evidence to support that theory too : the ozone hole didn’t exist until we started observing it].
Which is why tony b/climatereason’s efforts to understand climate variations over 500-600 years, and to direct attention to the longer period, are so important.
Trees fell long before there were humans to hear them.
“Trees fell long before there were humans to hear them.”
True, but they fell silently.
If you didn’t have wood for brains you’d fall silent too.
I found myself wondering about that too. But proxy data cannot measure the details the same way a satellite or in-situ buoy can.
This sentence was interesting:
“Their results for the 20th century do not agree with results of other studies, so their entire set of results is of uncertain veracity.” (Gergis and Fowler (2008) ).
I feel that this data should be used with caution, but not thrown out. It certainly should not be combined with current data in one long time series.
Regarding the Ozone hole, it was measured from satellite first and can’t be seen from the ground. There is a history behind this discovery that says a lot about scientists’ expectations and emotions.
Pierre-Normand
I doubt that the squirrels, wolves, foxes and other animals of the forest thought they “fell silently”.
Max
Who knew Pierre-Normand was a speciesist?
to make it short, if you don’t understand how oceans works , studying climate is preposterous.
@ Donald Rapp
A very useful and timely post
I liked the “running sum” approach, which gets around the problems of auto-correlation and the various problems with averages. This approximates integration of the variable and is exactly the opposite of taking first differences.
For each of the variables displayed, is the running sum trending or stationary and if it’s stationary in first differences. In at least one of the panels, the running sum looks cyclical.
Stationarity of a climate variable may depend on the time frame.
The running sum method of transforming of the data might provide a tool for further research that would test for polynomial integration of ENSO variables with climate variables.
The running sum approach might be interesting for revisiting the ENSO work of McLean, de Freitas and Carter.
Citations: Beenstock, M., Reingewertz, Y., and Paldor, N.: Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming, Earth Syst. Dynam. Discuss., 3, 561-596, doi:10.5194/esdd-3-561-2012, 2012.
J. D. McLean, C. R. de Freitas and R.. M. Carter. Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (1984–2012) > Vol 114 Issue D14.
Also: Correction to “Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature. Vol. 114, Issue D20,
Faustino
Thanks for your comment. Yes, I like observational evidence and there are two things that stand out loud and clear in the historic record.
The first is that both the MWP and the LIA (the latter in particular) are badly named. Each period can be characterised as predominantly warm or predominantly cool, but there are numerous intriguing periods in each when the overall characteristic was confounded. For example there are many warm periods in the LIA and indeed summers in particular were often at least as warm as todays. So the notion of a 400 year long deep freeze seems to me incorrect, which would possibly fit in with the notion that one or other oceanic state predominates at one time, but that predominating is a different thing to being constant.
The other thing is that it seems to me that there are a lot of things that make up climate. For one climate state or the other to predominate (warm, cool or neutral) probably requires a number of things to happen together. These include ocean currents/ocean temperatures, the jet stream, predominant wind directions, polar ice conditions, solar activity, cloudiness etc etc.
It probably needs ALL factors to come together at the same time to cause notable long term climatic impacts-warm or cool or neutral. This latter state being much overlooked. . If one or other component is missing then the overall effects are likely to be more sporadic and the various warm or cool or neutral climate states will be less dominant.
I don’t think we know ALLL the factors yet, let alone know how they interrelate. Whether co2 is one of these major factors I doubt, as the record shows we have had periods warmer than today and cooler than today suggesting natural variability remains the key component of the ever changing climate.
So, I see Co2 as one of the many passengers in the climate coach but perhaps the drivers swap places at times?
tonyb
My first thirty years co-incide with what people regard as a neg PDO. Certainly, it was different to the climate of my parents’ youth (maybe a little like the climate of my grandparents’ youth). The period from the 1950s to the 1970s made Eastern Oz a different place to what it had been for the previous half century. Yet it was also marked by Australia’s longest drought, the imaginatively named Long Drought. It was in 1960 we recorded the southern hemisphere’s record max temp, and 1967 was one of our great horror years for drought, heat and fire. (Meanwhile, Arctic temps decided to take their big dive for the century – but why do we have to talk about that hemisphere all the time?)
So it is with the longer trends within our trendy, blippy holocene. I’m guessing that it is worth giving a general description of a period as warm or icy but not worth looking for conformity. A climatic period is a like a teenager’s room: you have some idea of the contents, but it’s never tidy.
Tony, your rounded and historical perspective seems much more sensible than fixating on one factor and a short time period. Let’s hope it prevails.
mosomoso
So you think we should go for certainty in naming climatic conditions? Perhaps you are right.
‘The usually pretty warm Medieval period’ and ‘The periodic little ice age with some notably warm bits’ don’t have quite the same ring as the original definitions do they?
tonyb
Tonyb, I remember how in the 1990s those clear winter days with no doubt high maxima gave way to ferocious night time cold and black frosts by morning. Even within a day, warming can bring cooling – or vice versa, depending on which is chicken and which is egg and which came first.
I imagine many record high minima and record low maxima have had more to do with cloud cover than with any sort of regional or global warming/cooling. (Don’t tell the numbers men!) The NSW tableland showed some freakishly high winter minima during 1950, due to the freakish rain all through the winter-spring. (It’s common to have clear skies and freezing nights up in the northern NSW high country in winter. But 1950 threw away the rule book generally!)
If a year or day can bring such contradictions, I’m guessing a century can bring lots. But I’m happy with MWP and LIA. Most people can cop a bit of mystery and inconsistency, even if they’re climate experts. The fewer initials the better. Look at the trouble we’re in just for appending a C to AGW so the subject is worth talking about.
Tonyb:
mosomoso’s comments about the southern hemisphere and the other one always talked about suggest the possibility of a northern/southern hemispheric oscillation (NSHO? SNHO?) to add to all the other climate oscillations. The current global sea ice disparity suggests this possibility as well. Is there any support for this in SST, land, ice core or paleo data?
tony b
Nothing wrong in my mind with “MWP” or “LIA” as designations, any more than “modern warm period”, even if there are exceptional, atypical time “blips” or localized discrepancies within each of these periods.
But your work is extremely important for us to get a better understanding of past periods of generally warmer or colder climate than today, which preceded any human GHG emissions, thus were naturally caused.
The modern computer gurus do not like history, because it messes up their neat, oversimplified hypotheses on what makes our climate do what it does. IPCC, for example, wants us to believe that over 90% of the climate forcing since 1750 (an arbitrarily picked starting point) has come as a result of anthropogenic forcing.
If one looks back at the history of our planet (even the relatively short “blip” since human history began), we see that such a computer-based assumption is ludicrous.
So keep up the good work of shedding real light on the story – light brings truth.
Max
There is no significant CO2-AGW.
The dominance of El Ninos in the 20th Century was because we had a 9,600 year solar grand maximum and this gave high SW heating of the oceans.
Now we have a weakening Sun, Lan Ninas wll dominate as the ocean cools.
… in which case Kirk Douglas might need warmer clothing than in the 1960 film.
We all have our cross to bear……..
Mine is dealing with the fake fizzicks used by the Climate Alchemists to create the imaginary ‘back radiation’, the imaginary ‘positive feedback’ and the imaginary 33 K GHE when it’s really a third this…..
Spartacusisfree | May 8, 2014 at 4:20 said: ”Mine is dealing with the fake fizzicks used by the Climate Alchemists to create the imaginary ‘back radiation”
Spartacus, have look at this post: ’http://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/global-warming-or-climate-change/
Which comes first, the La Nina or the cooling?
The El Nino or the warming?
The answer is that these patterns do not cause the temperature rises and drops, they are part of the rises and drops.
Could everyone stop ascribing causation to weather patterns and try association instead?
The earth is, sigh, heated by the sun. Like a roast on a spit. Round it goes and the skin crackles and pops. Occasionally as it comes round a residue bubble in the skin will pop. Some layers have bone underneath, others deeper fat, think land and water. The temperature will not be quite the same each time. Occasionally one area will overheat for a few rotations.
Because of Coriolis forces and ensuing currents conditions are slightly different each time round.The earth over millenia varies slightly on the spit. The skin moves round, the heat source is turned up or down minutely a 0.1 of a degree.
Patterns of heating repeat in cycles [PDO] and overall The La Nina’s and El Nino’s even out. Any attempt to predict past ENSO conditions on tree rings currently is unfortunately reading entrails, pure guesswork.
Thanks, Judith and Donald Rapp, for bringing this discussion here to Climate, etc.
An important topic overlooked in the post is the source of warm water for an El Niño. Trenberth, who is mentioned in the post, has commented on it a number of times. It was mentioned in Trenberth et al. (2002):
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/papers/2000JD000298.pdf
There, they write:
“The negative feedback between SST and surface fluxes can be interpreted as showing the importance of the discharge of heat during El Niño events and of the recharge of heat during La Niña events. Relatively clear skies in the central and eastern tropical Pacific allow solar radiation to enter the ocean, apparently offsetting the below normal SSTs, but the heat is carried away by Ekman drift, ocean currents, and adjustments through ocean Rossby and Kelvin waves, and the heat is stored in the western Pacific tropics. This is not simply a rearrangement of the ocean heat, but also a restoration of heat in the ocean.”
And there’s Trenberth and Fasullo (2011):
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert/trenberth.papers/ISSI_fulltext.pdf
They write:
“Typically prior to an El Niño, in La Niña conditions, the cold sea waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific create high atmospheric pressure and clear skies, with plentiful sunshine heating the ocean waters. The ocean currents redistribute the ocean heat which builds up in the tropical western Pacific Warm Pool until an El Niño provides relief (Trenberth et al. 2002).”
Thus my repeated characterization of ENSO as a chaotic, sunlight-fueled, coupled ocean-atmosphere, recharge-discharge oscillator, with El Niño acting as the discharge mode and La Niña acting as the recharge and redistribution modes.
No particular problem – but the decadal and longer changes in frequency and intensity need an external agent.
Bob Tisdale wrote: “An important topic overlooked in the post is the source of warm water for an El Niño. Trenberth, who is mentioned in the post, has commented on it a number of times.”
Thanks for those links. I quite agree with your characterization of ENSO. This provides more material for study.
Pierre-Normand, there are a few more related papers link to the post here:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/untruths-falsehoods-fabrications-misrepresentations/
Regards
Thanks, much appreciated.
“An important topic overlooked in the post is the source of warm water for an El Niño”
Pierre it’s the sun, see my post above and Stephen Wilde below
Angech, solar activity didn’t increase since about 1960. It rather declined somewhat, while CO2 forcing increased a whole lot.
No it didn’t increase it remained elevated at the highest level of activity in centuries and came to be called “The Modern Maximum”. Write that down, stupid.
Pierre, we don’t know what the lag time is for solar. And it is only recently that the UV component of TSI was found to fluctuate considerably more than they thought it did.
“In years of low UV activity unusually cold air forms over the tropics in the stratosphere, about 50km up. This is balanced by more easterly flow of air over the mid latitudes – a pattern which then ‘burrows’ its way down to the surface, bringing easterly winds and cold winters to northern Europe.
When solar UV output is higher than usual, the opposite occurs and there are strong westerlies which bring warm air and hence milder winters to Europe.”
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_10-10-2011-10-51-13?newsid=102866
Pierre, not to say that anyone can claim to have measured solar input with any
great reliability. It has solar flares, sunspots and must vary up and down more than it is given credit for. It may be that it is the only real game in town.
Pierre-Normand
The second half of the 20thC saw a more active sun than the first half, based on Peak Wolf Number for each solar cycle. The high level of 20thC solar activity has been referred to as a “Grand Solar Maximum” (highest level of activity for thousands of years)
SC – WN – From – To
14 – 64 – 1902 – 1914
15 – 105 – 1914 – 1925
16 – 80 – 1925 – 1935
17 – 115 – 1935 – 1945
18 – 152 – 1945 – 1955
——————————-
19 – 190 – 1955 – 1965
20 – 108 – 1965 – 1975
21 – 158 – 1975 – 1986
22 – 160 – 1986 – 1996
23 – 120 – 1996 – 2008
——————————-
As can be seen from the above figures, the trend over the entire 20thC was one of increased solar activity. This has now slowed down, beginning with SC 23, but really with SC 24, which is expected to peak at around 60.
Just to set the record straight.
Max
Changes in the balance between La Ninas and El Ninos appear to be a result of solar induced changes in global cloudiness which affects the amount of solar energy able to enter the oceans.
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/new-climate-model/
“The New Climate Model (NCM)
1) Solar activity increases, reducing ozone amounts above the tropopause especially above the poles.
2) The stratosphere cools. The number of chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere increases due to the increased solar effects with faster destruction of ozone.
3) The tropopause rises, especially above the poles altering the equator to pole height gradient.
4) The polar high pressure cells shrink and weaken accompanied by increasingly positive Arctic and Antarctic Oscillations.
5) The air circulation systems in both hemispheres move poleward and the ITCZ moves further north of the equator as the speed of the hydrological cycle increases due to the cooler stratosphere increasing the temperature differential between stratosphere and surface.
6) The main cloud bands move more poleward to regions where solar insolation is less intense and total global albedo declines via a reduction in global cloud cover due to shorter lines of air mass mixing.
7) More solar energy reaches the surface and in particular the oceans as the subtropical high pressure cells expand.
8) Less rain falls on ocean surfaces allowing them to warm more.
9) Solar energy input to the oceans increases but not all is returned to the air. A portion enters the thermohaline circulation to embark on a journey of 1000 to 1500 years. A pulse of slightly warmer water has entered the ocean circulation.
10) The strength of warming El Nino events increases relative to cooling La Nina events and the atmosphere warms.
11) Solar activity passes its peak and starts to decline.
12) Ozone levels start to recover. The stratosphere warms.
13) The tropopause falls, especially above the poles altering the equator to pole height gradient.
14) The polar high pressure cells expand and intensify producing increasingly negative Arctic and Antarctic Oscillations.
15) The air circulation systems in both hemispheres move back equatorward and the ITCZ moves nearer the equator as the speed of the hydrological cycle decreases due to the warming stratosphere reducing the temperature differential between stratosphere and surface.
16) The main cloud bands move more equatorward to regions where insolation is more intense and total global albedo increases once more due to longer lines of air mass mixing.
17) Less solar energy reaches the surface and in particular the oceans as the subtropical high pressure cells contract.
18) More rain falls on ocean surfaces further cooling them.
19) Solar energy input to the oceans decreases
20) The strength of warming El Nino events decreases relative to cooling La Nina events and the atmosphere cools.
21) 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.
We saw the climate zones shift latitudinally as much as 1000 miles in certain regions between the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. It would surprise me if our emissions have shifted them by as much as a mile.”
Stephen Wilde
The model you presented appears to be validated by observed empirical data at least over the period 1980 to today (Pallé et al.).
During the period of large El Niños (1980s/1990s), cloud cover decreased, allowing more SW radiation to enter our climate system – and global average temperature increased
Since around 2000 this trend reversed itself (partially), with more La Niñas, and cloud cover increased, blocking more SW radiation from entering our climate system – and global average temperature decreased slightly.
Could this be the mechanism by which ENSO increases or decreases incoming energy to our system, thereby adding or subtracting from the overall energy budget?
Max
Thumbs up for Bob Tisdale who has brought a lot of light into this occulted chapter of climate science over the past couple of years.
Plus won.
I concur with Beth and Bernd. This is a good discussion on El Nino. And it shows that there are more questions than answers at this point. But it is heartening that at least some in climate science are looking at the phenomenon. While the reason for the rise and falls of El Ninos and La Ninas is not yet known, their effect on over all climate is starting to be studied and documented. And their relationship with the rollercoaster of temperature shows a much stronger correlation than CO2 levels. While correlation does not mean causation, it is a good place to at least investigate for causation.
Bob Tisdale… ENSO a ‘sunlight fueled
re-charge -discharge oscillation.’
And what is it Kim says about clouds?
‘I think I’ve never heard so loud
the quiet message in a cloud?’
… Kinda’ like opening and closing
the venetian blinds.
Looking at fig 5, both Nino3 index & Global Temps have sharp peaks with rapid descents until the latest ‘hiatus’. Are they both behaving differently due to an underlying 3rd cause?
A couple of commenters have mentioned possible linkage to tectonic/volcanic activity in the Indonesian island arc which would affect warm water flow from Indian Ocean to Pacific affecting the El Nino. Also it would be good to know if variation in the Humboldt current can influence the westerly outfow of cold water from S. America. The Humboldt current starts near the Drake Passage. Active volcanos in the Drake passage might affect the flow of the Humboldt. Are there measurement series for flow of an ocean currents such as the drift through Indonesia and/or the Humboldt?
Nice own goal by the deniers.
ENSO is an oscillation and has a property of reversion to the mean, therefore it has a zero-sum property with respect to global warming.
Look at SOI if you want to see the clear oscillation dipole.
Web404, if ENSO is a zero sum game (not proven of course) over what time frame is ENSO a zero sum game?
1,000 years? 130,000 years? 100 years.
The mechanisms and forcings for cooling and warming are different. No zero-sum game. Go read Bob Tisdale again!
The power of denial is strong, even for something as straightforward as a quasiperiodic oscillation with a reversion to a mean value of zero.
Look at the running sum plots that Rapp displayed. Three of the five sum to very close to zero. And the ones that don’t may not have been properly detrended for the global warming signal that always exists for temperature.
That is why one uses the SOI, as that removes the AGW trend. And of course that has a mean of zero as well.
Hilarious that the deniers can not admit to scoring own goals — they essentially explain the pause and don’t even realize it.
Web404, the trend is lower after 1945. Which means the “AGW Trend” is negative.
sunshinehours1
Webby will answer your question as soon as he asks his handy dandy magic 8-ball “CSALT” model.
(My guess is that that question will blow the fuse on Webby’s 8-ball.)
Max
CO2 shows a log sensitivity. Therefore historically early increases in CO2 have a significant impact of warming.
Webby
No doubt, Webby.
But the early 20thC warming cycle and statistically indistinguishable late 20thC warming cycle had significantly different CO2 forcing, while the mid-century cooling cycle was closer to the late 20thC cycle in CO2 impact.
CO2 ppmv
1910: 299
1944: 311
1975: 330
2001: 370
2013: 395
2xCO2 forcing = 3.71 Wm-2
Forcing over multi-decadal cycles:
1910-1944 (warming) = 3.71 * ln (311 / 299) / ln (2) =0.21 Wm-2
1944-1975 (cooling) = 3.71 * ln (330 / 311) / ln (2) = 0.32 Wm-2 (~50% higher than previous period, yet it cooled instead of warming)
1975-2001 (warming) = 3.71 * ln (370 / 330) / ln (2) = 0.61 Wm-2 (~3X as high as early warming period, yet warming was indistinguishable)
2001-2013 (cooling) = 3.71 * ln (395 / 370) / ln (2) = 0.35 Wm-2 (~same as early 20thC cooling period)
So it looks like your hypothesis sucks, when the actual forcing is calculated. There is no robust observed statistical correlation between temperature and CO2, Webby. That’s the problem here.
And, as you know, where there is no robust statistical correlation, the case for causation is very weak (if not non-existent).
Max
Typo
while the mid-century cooling cycle was closer to the
late 20thC cycleearly 21stC pause in CO2 impact.I wouldn’t say it sucks.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1950/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1950/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/from:1950/scale:0.01/offset:-3.3
I’d say it works pretty good for the last 60 years taken as a whole.
Jim D
It only works if you “iron out” the multi-decadal cycles.
Because of these repetitive cycles, the correlation is statistically a random walk, rather than a robust statistical correlation between CO2 and temperature.
There are undoubtedly many superimposed factors (ENSO, PDO, etc., plus GHGs, incl. CO2, plus solar activity, not only solar irradiance, etc.), all of which have played a role in past warming and cooling cycles of both multi-decadal and multi-centennial amplitude.
Unfortunately, we do not fully understand all of these or the mechanisms that could be involved in causing them.
That’s why I find this post so interesting: it opens the door to another (complementary rather than competitive) view of what makes our climate behave as it does.
Max
manacker, it is not really complementary. They say El Nino only works as a warmer when CO2 is rising. The Occam’s Razor principle would shortcut the El Nino stuff and go straight to CO2.
JD, I would say it sucks in the way that deniers don’t know how to deal with it.
The temperature rise in the following chart is due to CO2 and the fit is equally good pre-1950 as post-1950, essentially due to the atmospheric physics obeying the log sensitivity of CO2:
http://imageshack.com/a/img842/2517/r2f8.gif
Jim D
“They?”
Whodat?
Do “they” have any records of El Nino warming before CO2 was rising?
Or do “they” claim there was never any El Nino warming before CO2 started rising?
Please be specific in your response.
Thanks.
Max
Webby
Your handy dandy CSALT magic 8-ball model seems to work well in hindcasting (just like my magic crystal-ball election hindcaster has picked every US presidential election correctly since 1802).
But how good is it at forecasting?
Draw me the temperature curve it “predicts” for the next 3 decades, Webby, so we can give it a real test.
Max
manacker, yes, this is in the main article. “Coincidental with the period when CO2 started rising rapidly, did nature decide to have two periods of strong El Niños that increased the earth’s average temperature? Or did the occurrence of strong El Niños require some sort of CO2 trigger?”
As with everything else they only phrase it as a question, but it is the only idea they put forwards to explain this, and they go over this again in other parts of their article too. I think they are seeing the light here, don’t you?
Maxine,
The forecast is 3C ECS (for land) and 2C TCR (for global transient). Chew on that.
El Nino gives a short term effect (TCR) of raising the surface temperature. but has a longer term effect (ECR) of lowering potential surface temperature as it depletes the upper ocean content.
La Nina has precisely the opposite effect, it causes short term surface cooling, and increases upper OHC, giving the potential for higher surface temperatures during the following neutral or Nino ENSO phases.
I don’t though see much point in translating ENSO phase frequency directly to global mean temperature warming and cooling periods without consideration of AMO phase changes.
ENSO seems to be acting as negative feedback (with a large overshoot) to the shorter term solar signal. Such that El Nino episodes occur at times of declining solar plasma velocity, and La Nina episodes occur at times of higher solar plasma velocity:
http://snag.gy/ppB3v.jpg
I am having trouble in believing that:
“From 1866 to 1900, La Niñas were more prevalent and stronger than El Niños.”
Given the generally lower solar cycles 12-14, there was a higher incidence of negative AO/NAO states, which is associated with slower trade winds and hence more El Nino episodes:
https://sites.google.com/site/medievalwarmperiod/Home/historic-el-nino-events
“From 1976 to 1998, El Niños strongly dominated over La Niñas.”
That’s from Nino to Nino, going two years later from 1976 to 2000, there is barely any difference in total number of months:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensoyears.shtml
Intensity of the events matters too, not just the duration, and I’m sure all the neutral periods where it is close to a Nino/Nina will all add up too.
I find this kind of post here very puzzling. It presents a coherent alternate picture to the standard AGW framework. I’ve seen similar presentations by Bob Tisdale often. But where are the cross-comments? Not one of the commenters that I would expect to be attacking this has said a word. Steve Mosher, David Appell, Pekka, even Judith Curry. [I’m not expecting Trenberth to show up here, but that would be neat.] (Could be the post hasn’t been up for long enough.) How is a beginner supposed to tell if this is a coherent reformulation of the whole picture, or just a mistake with nice graphs? What is the standard AGW response to this presentation?
I noticed an unusual level of civility myself. It was as if the usual suspects were trying to wrap their arms around all the factors at play. For some who won’t show up, it may be that they think making any supportive statement being a sign of holes in the ship.
I guess I should explain, that I think I already recall that Steve Mosher, for instance, is very dismissive of Tisdale’s claims. I’m just not expert enough to understand the issues. This would be a good time for people to clarify. This stuff sounds awesome, but so what? Wrong can still sound awesome.
Ah – the gang’s all here now. Good!
Mosher is dismissive of anything that his lord and master Richard Muller has not told him to accept.
“Not one of the commenters that I would expect to be attacking this has said a word. Steve Mosher,”
read harder.
The standard response would be the one given many times.
Internal variation ( or unforced variability) cancels out over
long time scales. You cant create excess energy ex nihilo.
There are two basic responses to this.
A) Curry has argued that changes in cloud cover might create imbalances.
its unclear how large and how persistent these imbalances would
be. unicorns defense.
B) “balancing” hasnt been demonstrated.
My addition to the standard response is that the attempt to explain the warming by pointing at El Nino is circular. There is no counter argument
to this, because, well, its true. In other words explaining the warming by pointing to a pattern of warming explains nothing. It confuses how and why.
“Mosher is dismissive of anything that his lord and master Richard Muller has not told him to accept.”
I can see you have never been to our weekly science meeting.
Then again, since you don’t know what you are talking about you
can see why we wouldn’t invite you.
here is the team.
http://berkeleyearth.org/team
you can see why you would not add anything
In terms of opinions on the climate. here is the person I would say I agree with the most
http://berkeleyearth.org/team/jonathan-wurtele
here is the person who I have worked with most closely
http://berkeleyearth.org/team/arthur-rosenfeld
I asked these guys if they knew about your work.
none played video games so the answer was no.
I was in laptop R&D at Dell, Mosher. We didn’t write video games. I was a BIOS programmer specifically. If you or any of the academic imbeciles you worship ever used a Dell laptop then you’ve had my work in front of you. LOL
I see you’re listed as a scientist, Mosher, but your education ends with a four year degree in English and Philosophy. Curious. How much are you paid for your work as a “scientist” with BEST? I think the answer to that will illuminate the value of your work in that capacity.
steven mosher
Your logic is good: pointing to a warming factor to explain warming does not provide an argument for its root cause or mechanism.
Occasionally we have to admit that we just do not know everything there is to know about what makes our climate behave the way it does.
This is not invoking “unicorns”, Mosh – it is simply admitting “we do not know”.
To claim we know all there is to know is not only ignorant, it would be arrogant.
We think we know how CO2 theoretically impacts our climate, but Tisdale’s explanation makes about as much sense to me as the IPCC explanation implicating human GHGs as the principal drivers of climate.
There is probably a bit of both going on in the real world, but the two impacts are impossible to separate today based on actual physical observations.
Tisdale simply points out that ENSO gives a more robust correlation with the global temperature record than CO2 (a point that is apparent from the physical observations).
Max
Mosher: Internal variation ( or unforced variability) cancels out over
long time scales.
Where in the literature on high dimensional nonlinear dissipative systems do you find that supported? Over what time span does the internal variation of ENSO cancel out, and where do you find that supported?
By what new laws of physics would the change of energy from one from to another and movement from ocean to atmosphere create new energy? It does not, but remains a fake-skeptics pipe dream to think that it could.
The mechanisms are very simple – energy flux from a warm ocean in warm IPO modes and less so from a cold ocean during cool IPO modes. As well as evident changes in cloud cover. Simple physics of the 2nd law type – combined with cloud correlation.
e.g. http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Clementetal2009.png.html?sort=3&o=149
This is actual science and not just pissing around with obsolete surface temperature data and imagining it’s significant.
Typical straw-man argument. Nobody’s talking about “creat[ing] new energy”. Huge amounts of energy flow into and out of each part of the system every second. What’s being talked about is small changes to the amount of that flow.
Steven Mosher | May 9, 2014 at 1:14 pm |
Internal variation ( or unforced variability) cancels out over long time scales.
ENSO is a timing difference. Heat is stored in the Pacific warm pool for later use. ENSO seems to be one of the better understood timing differences and one of the most important. It has complexity and variability. If the metric most commonly used is the Global Surface Temperature, the Pacific warm pool messes up the timing of that. Under the cash method of accounting, we’d only count the heat of the Global Surface Temperature. Using the better more detailed and more expensive accrual method of accounting, we would count the future heat sitting in the Pacific warm pool. We would make a judgement about how likely we are to collect on that and more importantly when? We know that all timing differences eventually cancel themselves out, but some of them are in the deep oceans. Hard to find and harder to know when they’ll end up in the Global Surface Temperature. Such uncertainty gives us caution. We don’t like to count assets we don’t know when we would actually be able to get our hands on them. We don’t like to say we had heat income related to the Global Surface Temperature if we think we may not be able to see the heat pretty soon. The reason we don’t like doing such things is we are conservative. If we say there are assets and income, they better be there when we said they would be there. None of this is to say that ENSO doesn’t make significant changes to the Earth’s cloud cover or humidity levels. I am wondering if ENSO’s timing differences do effect cloud cover and humidity levels? Man uses timing differences. Many tax breaks accelerate or defer. Bonus depreciation and 401(k) plans are two examples. I wonder how we learned to do that?
R. Gates
Do this experiment, Gates.
Go outside on a day with scattered clouds.
Look up at the sun and feel its warmth on your face (be sure to wear your sunglasses).
Wait until a cloud comes between you and the sun.
Note the cooling off on your face.
[Repeat as many times as necessary to get the picture.]
Try to figure out why your face felt less warmth when the cloud covered the sun.
Being a man of science, you will come to the conclusion that the clouds blocked incoming solar radiation from reaching the surface of our planet, by reflecting this incoming energy back out into space, where it is lost forever to our climate system.
Now imagine cyclical ENSO activity, whereby the amount of cloud cover is increased in one phase and decreased in another for cyclical periods lasting several decades. In the case of PDO and other longer amplitude cycles it might even be centuries.
You will conclude that the ENSO activity resulted in more (or less) energy entering the climate system, IOW it was a “forcing” of the climate. It did not “create energy” (only the sun can do that to our climate system), but it changed the amount of energy entering our climate system.
Max
MaxieBaby,
Remember how often clouds tend to come in during the evening and stay around all night — only to be broken up by the morning sun?
Those clouds at night act as thermal blankets.
Remember?
And yet it warms – and cools…
Cloud albido during daylight
blocks ol’ sol’s energy reaching earth.*
Serfs have found this cloudiness ter have
averse effects on ripening crops ‘n so forth.
Whereas cloudiness at night, serfs find has
reverse effects, no frost, clouds blanketing
the earth, slowing energy out ter space,
‘slowing’ I said, but in the end … it goes.
* And then there’s equatorial effects
of clouds, cumulous mid-day towers
of convection, if that’s what yer call it,
serfs are foggy concerning the science,
but serfs who live at the equator are aware
that in the afternoon down will come
the cooling rain.
Webby
Sho’nuff.
Those clouds that do stick around at nighttime do act as a “blanket”.
BUT the amount of incoming solar energy that they reflect back out to space during the day (around one-fourth of incoming) is several times higher than the amount of outgoing LW energy that clouds absorb and re-radiate at night.
And the energy, which they reflect out into space is gone forever – bye-bye.
And this is important, because the only energy that enters our climate system comes from the sun (not from the “blanket”)
That’s why more cloud cover results in less warming and a slightly cooler planet.
Which was my point all along, Webby.
Max
PS Check Pallé et al. for how changes in cloud cover impact climate on a multi-decadal basis.
Donald Rapp only seems to be aware of the loudest voices on this topic. I found the link between El Nino/La Nina relative frequency and changes in world mean temperature independently of Bob Tisdale back in 2009 – though I acknowledge that Bob has done about 90 % of the work load that has been required to get this idea out to the wider public.
I appreciate Donald’s summary and coverage of this important topic but he fails to recognize the following references:
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/why-do-long-term-periodicities-in-enso.html – March 2010
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/world-mean-temperature-warmscools.html – Dec 2011
Wilson, I.R.G., 2013, Are Global Mean Temperatures
Significantly Affected by Long-Term Lunar Atmospheric
Tides? Energy & Environment, Vol 24,
No. 3 & 4, pp. 497 – 508
http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/03n7mtr482x0r288/?p=e4bc1fd3b6e14fd8ab83a6df24c8a72d&pi=11
Reblogged this on Bob Tisdale – Climate Observations and commented:
Many thanks to Donald Rapp for the honorable mention in this post and to Judith Curry for posting it at Climate, etc.
RE “Wang and Picaut (2004) wrote an excellent review of proposed mechanisms for ENSO phenomena. They pointed out “The issue of ENSO as a self-sustained oscillation mode or a stable mode triggered by random forcing is not settled… Since 1988, four concepts have been proposed for the oscillatory and self-sustained nature of ENSO. They also represent the negative feedbacks of a growing ENSO stable mode triggered by stochastic forcing, and are unified in a single concept.”
David Smith at Oxford has shown that at least some types of complex “chaotic” systems go back and forth between truly chaotic states and ones more deterministic. I’m too old a dog to re-learn the math necessary, but it could be fruitful is someone were to look at whether Smith’s work could be used to make ENSO more predictable.
Have a look at WHT’s recent hypothesis: http://contextearth.com/2014/05/02/the-soim-substantiating-the-chandler-wobble-and-tidal-connection-to-enso/
Pierre-Normand
Personally, I think Webby’s post looks interesting and have tried to encourage him to publish it . However he refuses to do so and consequently it will have to remain as just the theory of another blogger.
tonyb
I think that’s simply because he still is considering it work-in-progress. Indeed it seems to have progressed quite a bit very recently.
More like a mental breakdown in progress.
Webby does some nice curve fitting. But he seems to have lost his fanboy, Dennis.
You may also want to look at:
Wilson, I.R.G., 2011, Are Changes in the Earth’s Rotation
Rate Externally Driven and Do They Affect Climate?
The General Science Journal, Dec 2011, 3811.
http://gsjournal.net/Science-Journals/Essays/View/3811
and
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/do-you-think-that-moon-might-have.html – Feb 2013
The above references are backed up by a talk that I gave in 2009 at Monash University in Melbourne:
El Ninos and Extreme Proxigean Spring Tides
A lecture by Ian Wilson at the Natural Climate Change
Symposium in Melbourne on June 17th 2009.
http://www.naturalclimatechange.info/?q=node/10
When you factor out annual cycles, there are strong correlations between rates of change between ENSO SSTs, tropospheric temperatures, and atmospheric CO2 concentrations. However, the changes in CO2 lag the others by a matter of months. CO2 is a lagging indicator of climate change, not a “force” for changing it. The eastern tropical Pacific is the big source of atmospheric CO2 and the rate of change in SSTs as the water goes from East to West determines the rate of emissions. Changes in anthropogenic emissions are swamped by these natural rates of change.
A thing that bugs me is the 36 years of purported Northern Hemisphere warming [0.34 degrees]. While the Southern Hemisphere has stayed flat [0.0 degrees].
This fits in with Arctic v Antarctic ice but is totally against AGW. It seems difficult to believe that these El Nino’s and La Nina’s choose to only affect one half of the world.
Why is it so?
“A thing that bugs me is the 36 years of purported Northern Hemisphere warming [0.34 degrees]. While the Southern Hemisphere has stayed flat [0.0 degrees].”
The Southern Hemisphere also warmed:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3sh/from:1978/mean:12/mean:48
It warmed less because there is a higher ocean/land ratio and the land has been warming much faster. There also is a stronger ice/snow positive feedback in the Northern Hemisphere. But this all speak against ENSO/PDO being the primary cause of the warming.
There is also a lot of human activity in the northern hemisphere.
This article is very interesting as far as it goes.
Has anyone included solar cycles, effects on prevailing wind systems, resulting jet stream changes, Kelvin waves, and salinity into a model of ENSO events?
Newport_Mac
As I remarked upstream, there are lots of passengers on the climate change coach. How many there are, how big each are and whether the drivers periodically change places is as yet unknown.
So whether this is a cause, or the effect, or something in between remains unclear.
tonyb
Thanks for the response tonyb.
ENSO is a climate event which alters regional weather patterns resulting in climate changes like the drought in the southwest and Africa.
Its very odd that more effort hasn’t been devoted to understanding the triggers for ENSO changes.
If solar cycles are the trigger, as many comments suggest, it should be fairly simple to overlay these cycles on a chart of ENSO events?
Newport_Mac
I think over the last 20 years that we have devoted a disproportionate amount of our time and resources in trying to prove that Co2 is the (only) culprit.
If the resources to try and prove this had instead been more equally spread amongst the many component parts of climate science we might know more than we currently do about causes, effects and correlations.
tonyb
NCAR
July 16, 2009
SOLAR CYCLE LINKED TO GLOBAL CLIMATE, DRIVES EVENTS SIMILAR TO EL NIÑO, LA NIÑA
(note their caps not mine)
https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/news/810/solar-cycle-linked-global-climate-drives-events-similar-el-ni-o-la-ni
excerpts:
As this climatic loop intensifies, the trade winds strengthen. That keeps the eastern Pacific even cooler and drier than usual, producing La Niña-like conditions.
Although this Pacific pattern is produced by the solar maximum, the authors found that its switch to an El Niño-like state is likely triggered by the same kind of processes that normally lead from La Niña to El Niño. The transition starts when changes in the strength of the trade winds produce slow-moving off-equatorial pulses known as Rossby waves in the upper ocean, which take about a year to travel back west across the Pacific.
The energy then reflects from the western boundary of the tropical Pacific and ricochets eastward along the equator, deepening the upper layer of water and warming the ocean surface. As a result, the Pacific experiences an El Niño-like event about two years after solar maximum. The event settles down after about a year, and the system returns to a neutral state.
“El Niño and La Niña seem to have their own separate mechanisms,” says Meehl, “but the solar maximum can come along and tilt the probabilities toward a weak La Niña. If the system were heading toward a La Niña anyway,” he adds, “it would presumably be a larger one.”
I see what you mean tonyb.
Every “passenger” is actually a driver. Every driver has a different control. Each control has a different effect. Changes in the relative magnitude of effects of different controls periodically take place, due to both internal and external variation. What’s unknown, and very poorly constrained, is the size and timing of these changes.
Many thanks for the post.
Donald Rapp: Thanks once again for this post. Two quick points:
You wrote, “Tisdale pointed out that the establishment view is that rising greenhouse gas concentrations over time cause a steadily increasing forcing that tends to drive earth temperatures upward. According to this viewpoint, the sequence of periodic changes in the El Niño – La Niña balance is superimposed on this continuing trend. During periods of El Niño dominance the warming due to El Niños adds to the warming effect due to rising greenhouse gases, and during periods of La Niña dominance the cooling due to La Niñas reduces the warming effect due to rising greenhouse gases.”
The problem: The “establishment” is now claiming that “during periods of La Niña dominance the cooling due to La Niñas reduces the warming effect due to rising greenhouse gases” but they have never, as far as I’m aware, stated that “During periods of El Niño dominance the warming due to El Niños adds to the warming effect due to rising greenhouse gases.” We understand that, but it for the most part has been avoided by the climate science community.
Second: You’ve presented running totals of a number of ENSO-related indices. I’ve always presented that as a curiosity, because, for the sea surface temperature-based indices, the shape of the curve of the running total depends on the base years used for anomalies.
Gotta get back to work. I’ll try to stop back this evening.
Whether El Niños and La Ninas balance exactly in the long term is purely a matter of definition. Choosing the thresholds used to define El Niño and La Nina states determines the long term balance. From detrended data it’s possible to search for correlations between longer term variability in the temperatures and ENSO indicators, but it’s not possible to conclude that ENSO related effects would contribute to the overall warming from 1970s to the present.
I think the broader issue is net energy in the climate system. With both troposphere, oceans, and cryosphere all showing net energy increases over many decades– at least since the 1980’s. ENSO activity is interesting and a major player in the flux of energy from ocean to atmosphere, but the net increase in climate system energy is caused by an external forcing– and the most likely culprit is anthropogenic GH gas increases. ENSO represents internal variability, not an external forcing, and furthermore, ENSO activity might indeed be modulated by external forcings (yes, both solar and increased GH gases).
I wonder if I should be bothered that R. Gates is, as far as I can tell, the only other commenter here with whom I agree on the net effects of El Ninos? :-)
Yes
“Whether El Niños and La Ninas balance exactly in the long term is purely a matter of definition.”
____
Given that there is no net gain of energy to the climate system from ENSO activity, does it really matter anyway? What really matters is what the external forcings are to the system that might alter ENSO behavior as one of the effects.
What makes you think there’s only one dimension to the matter?
Not being a climate scientist, merely an avid follower of the debates surrounding climate and climate change, I will admit that my basic viewpoint about future temperature changes has been that when the next big El Nino comes, and brings with it a trend toward more El Ninos, then the world will resume warming. Part of this mindset is that CO2 and other warming emissions don’t have as much effect as the models suggest, and CO2 sensitivity is lower than the models suggest, but yet that CO2 certainly does have an effect.
But things are probably more complicated. What is the relationship, if any, between rising temperatures and more El Nino regimes?
Where does the stadium wave fit in?
Is there some longer term periodic cause of temperature swings (shorter than Milankovich cycles) — meaning, what caused the Little Ice Age, and what caused the ascent to warmer climate from the Little Ice Age, for example.
These are the longer term issues that have to be addressed, in the context of El Ninos and La Ninas. To what extent do longer period natural variations drive El Ninos, and to what extent is the reverse true?
I have briefly scanned the responses to my posting, and I here are a few short responses:
(1) Gary M: The reason that El Niños heat the atmosphere is that additional water evaporates from the ocean depriving the ocean of heat, and deposits that heat when it condenses as droplets in clouds. Some of this heat is retained by the surrounding air. You are right that we probably won’t have answers for another 100 years, and many of the current discussion will seem inane in retrospect.
(2) Peter Lang: I don’t think these important questions you raised can be answered until we understand the role of El Niños in climate variability.
(3) Faustino: I was not really suggesting that CO2 is of very minor significance compared to El Niños but I did point out that one could interpret the data that way – ala Tisdale. Yes, we don’t know nuthin about clouds.
(4) Manacker: You are quite right that correlation does not prove cause and effect, but it does suggest the possibility of a connection. Your comments on who has the right to assert a null hypothesis is right on target.
(5) Jim D: My article raises questions but answers none. I do not attribute all warming to El Niños. I suggest that the data could be interpreted that way, but that is just a straw in the wind. See pokerguy’s comment.
(6) AK and Pierre-Normand: Every correlation between cloud cover and surface temperature had data points that filled up the whole graph from side to side and top to bottom; ergo there was no correlation. There is so much chaotic variability in cloud cover that it is essentially impossible to correlate cloud cover with anything over decades or less.
(7) Pierre-Normand: See Figure 5 for the correlation between Nino and global avg T. Tisdale has done this numerous times before me.
(9) R.Gates: You raise good points about taking into account variability of the IPWP, but as a AK (9:08 am) pointed out, changes to albedo can change the IPWP in ways we don’t presently understand.
(10) General: If the alarmists are desperately waiting for a new El Niño in 2014 for warming to resume, doesn’t that suggest that CO2 without an El Niño doesn’t do much warming?
(11) stefanthedenier: I can’t figure out what language your posting is written in.
(12) ianl8888, beththeserf and Mike Jonas: I note that the main people who have faith in proxies are the ones who earn their livings and obtain their prestige by using them.
(13) Bob Tisdale: Thanks for making me aware of the importance of El Niños in climate, and for all the data you have provided this past decade. I like the fact that your work is permeated with graphs, not words.
(14) Ian Wilson: I apologize. I was not aware of your work.
Donald Rapp,
Thanks for the explanation. But I think I have fairly understood the El Nino phenomenon, as well as a layman can, for some time. As noted elsewhere in my question to Bob Tisdale, m,y question is not as to how El Ninos function as an intra-climate transfer of heat, but how they add heat to the global climate system, as everyone seems to assume.
I will note that I believe everyone in the consensus believes that because, if El Ninos’ do not add heat to the system, then their effect on “Global Average Temperature,” as it has been reported for decades, is spurious. Without the impact of El Ninos on temps, the reported scary warming of the late 20th century in the reported temperature records goes poof.
If El Nino has a net negative effect on global heat content, the CAGWers have some ‘splainin’ to do.
ENSO is a measured cyclical response to energy received from the sun. The several cycle wave lengths associated with the Hombolt, Panama, and Cromwell current, as well as El-Nino winds and the Kelvin wave are contributors to the ENSO response; and natural CO2 emissions are responding to ENSO. ENSO is not responding to changes in anthropogenic emissions of CO2.
More or less everyone agrees that El Nino has a net negative effect on global heat content.
Pekaa Pirila,
Is that why so many of your fellow warmists are salivating over the prospect of a strong El Nino this year that will send the reported “Global Average Temperature” significantly upward for the first time in 15+ years?
Pekaa Pirila,
And if it were true that the consensus is that El Ninos are a global cooling effect, why have the increases they have caused in reported “global average temperature” been trumpeted for so long as evidence og global warming.
An El Nino, properly understood, should cause no increase in GAT.
GaryM,
Didn’t you know that AGW theory states that Warmer makes it Warmer unto CAGW?
It’s true by declaration, therefore your questions are irrelevant by definition.
Andrew
Gary,
I dislike many of the arguments presented by the “warmist”. It’s quite common that I point out what I consider erroneous in arguments of people with all kind of general attitudes. Erroneous arguments should not be used independently of the correctness of the conclusion.
In this case I don’t think that there’s anything illogical, but people are not always careful when they use the word warming. Sometimes they refer to OHC, sometimes to the temperature of the lower troposphere or the surface. As ENSO seems to have opposite influence on those two measures of the warming, confusing formulations are not surprising.
Pekka Pirilä | May 8, 2014 at 12:29 pm |
More or less everyone agrees that El Nino has a net negative effect on global heat content.
Agreed. Then why as we’ve seen with some of Tisdale’s graphs can we sometimes see a step pattern in global surface temperatures going up?
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/figure-123.png
A major part of the system is throwing off heat using an El Nino. A fast response, which is part of what makes it interesting. If the atmosphere responds to this slowly and retains most of the heat (making up a number, losing 10% of this heat per year) rather than emitting it to space, we do have a regime change of the surface temperatures.
I am not saying there’s enough heat in the Pacific equatorial region to account for all the change. Maybe it’s the effect on global cloud conditions that is the bigger result.
Stepwise pattern is a combination of a trend and an oscillatory behavior. Seeing a stepwise patter tells by itself nothing on the role of the oscillatory phenomenon in the trend.
“If El Nino has a net negative effect on global heat content, the CAGWers have some ‘splainin’ to do.
More or less everyone agrees that El Nino has a net negative effect on global heat content.”
______
I am not sure “everyone” agrees on this point, but the physics and basic thermodynamics are such that it makes sense. If you’ve got certain large pool of warm water at depth in the Pacific, it is a lot harder for the energy to escape to space when it is at deeper levels then when you bring it to the surface where it fluxes to the atmosphere as latent and sensible heat. Simply put, there is no way that there can’t be a higher than average loss of energy to space during an El Nino. But remember, NOT ALL of the energy brought up from ocean depths to the surface and atmosphere during an El Nino is lost to space. Some of it goes into other parts of the climate system, Thus, even though there might be a higher than average amount of energy lost to space during an El Nino, there is also a higher than average amount of energy going form the ocean to other parts of the climate system. But to be sure, there is definitely no net gain to the full system, and likely a net loss for some short period of time.
Donald Rapp wrote: “(7) Pierre-Normand: See Figure 5 for the correlation between Nino and global avg T. Tisdale has done this numerous times before me.”
The figure doesn’t show that the ENSO cycle correlates with anything but the deviations from the underlying warming trend. Maybe ENSO contributes causally to that trend but the figure doesn’t so much as suggest it.
Pierre-Normand says, May 10, 2014 at 10:40 pm:
“The figure doesn’t show that the ENSO cycle correlates with anything but the deviations from the underlying warming trend. Maybe ENSO contributes causally to that trend but the figure doesn’t so much as suggest it.”
What ‘underlying warming trend’?!
A ‘trend’ as in ‘trendline’ is something you apply to a plotted dataset as a statistical tool. It’s not a physical phenomenon.
There would be no upward-tilting trendline to apply if it weren’t for the three sudden upward shifts in global temps since 1970 (1978/79, 1988 and 1998).
The ENTIRE global warming from 1970 till today is contained within those three steps, Philip-Normand. The rest of the time? NOTHING. Global temps simply follow the general lead of NINO3.4.
This is what the DATA from the real world tells us.
Observational data trumps your preconceived ideas of causation any day, Pierre-Normand. The ‘underlying warming trend’ exists only inside your head.
Pekka Pirilä says, May 8, 2014 at 2:39 pm:
“Stepwise pattern is a combination of a trend and an oscillatory behavior. Seeing a stepwise patter tells by itself nothing on the role of the oscillatory phenomenon in the trend.”
Again you get things all backwards, Pekka.
The stepwise pattern is how global temperatures ACTUALLY move forward. That’s what we ACTUALLY see in the data. It’s there right in front of us. No interpretation needed. No ‘analysis’. It’s there. We see it. Directly. The steps are REAL.
No, the ‘trend’ is simply what you mentally project onto the data before you. Something that isn’t really there in the data itself. That we ‘perceive’ rather than ‘see’ directly, and that we must therefore statistically ‘make manifest’ to ourselves. Man’s eternal need for order.
Take it to heart, Pekka.
Kristian wrote: “There would be no upward-tilting trendline to apply if it weren’t for the three sudden upward shifts in global temps since 1970 (1978/79, 1988 and 1998).”
That’s for sure. That’s a bit like saying that were it not for the periods of warming from sunrise until mid afternoon, the warmth of Spring wouldn’t have followed the coldness of Winter. That’s true also. But it doesn’t constitute an argument against the role of axial tilt and terrestrial revolution in seasonal cycles — imputing it all to the Earth rotation alone.
Were it not for the enhanced greenhouse effect, and were the PDO/ENSO cycles, and other causes of natural variability to act alone, then those three warming trend possibly wouldn’t have been as steep, *and* the plateaus that separate them possibly would have been cooling trends. The overall result might have been little or no warming at all. You can’t argue that just because the warming is irregular then it means that whatever is responsible for the long term warming trend only is at work during the periods of fastest warming. It’s a fallacy. The uninterpreted temperature series doesn’t tell you what’s causally responsible for the long term rise or when it is acting.
Pierre-Normand | May 16, 2014 at 12:24 am |
That’s a bit like saying that were it not for the periods of warming from sunrise until mid afternoon, the warmth of Spring wouldn’t have followed the coldness of Winter. That’s true also. But it doesn’t constitute an argument against the role of axial tilt and terrestrial revolution in seasonal cycles — imputing it all to the Earth rotation alone.
Axial tilt and terrestrial revolution have a huge role. But the variations from the average on timescales from a day to a season keeping telling us it’s more than averaging things. Seeing shorter term variations has myself looking for the same thing on longer timescales. A typical Summer day shows a short period of intense heating followed by a cooldown that lasts until the next day where things may repeat. Kind of like the El Ninos causing step shifts.
“Axial tilt and terrestrial revolution have a huge role. But the variations from the average on timescales from a day to a season keeping telling us it’s more than averaging things.”
This point simply was to rebut the facile but flawed inference that since the short term positive slopes only occur during half the high frequency cycles, then whatever causes the high frequency cycle must be entirely responsible for the positive trend (the running sum) over many cycles. Many people seem to make this inference, including the OP, Bob Tisdale and Kristian.
Donald,
No problem, your post is very informative – thanks
I often hear the word “sloshing” used to describe ENSO. And the appearance of a standing wave pattern in pressure between the locations of Tahiti and Darwin in the Pacific leads to the suggestion that modeling the sloshing dynamics would be useful.
This of course is on a large scale, but why not simply scale the well-known physical principles behind sloshing that are known to exist on a small scale?
Frandsen, Jannette B. <a href="http://www.researchgate.net/publication/236155361_Sloshing_motions_in_excited_tanks/file/3deec5167c79c7e329.pdf
“>”Sloshing motions in excited tanks.” Journal of Computational Physics 196.1 (2004): 53-87.
A combination of vertical and horizontal excitation in forcing could certainly lead to the quasiperiodicity seen in the ENSO indices such as SOI. See more of my thoughts here:
http://contextearth.com/2014/05/02/the-soim-substantiating-the-chandler-wobble-and-tidal-connection-to-enso/
I suggest that the vertical excitation arises from tidal forces, and the the horizontal perhaps related to wind patterns such as the QBO.
One thing that is for certain is that these oscillations revert to the mean over the long term, and can not be used to explain a natural secular warming trend, which is what the climate sceptics seem to be running on about recently.
By the way, climate.gov is planning on starting up a blog devoted to ENSO predictions,Check out RC for more info.
“One thing that is for certain is that these oscillations revert to the mean over the long term, and can not be used to explain a natural secular warming trend, which is what the climate sceptics seem to be running on about recently.”
The “oscillations” are just that, water of different temperature oscillating across the ocean. Neither El Nino nor La Nina add energy to the budget. But they provide the mechanism that discharges and recharges energy from/to the ocean by opening and closing the blinders above the ocean: the cloud cover.
Bernd Palmer
“Taint” necessarily so.
If La Niñas cause more cloud cover, which reflects more incoming SW radiation back out to space and hence out of our climate system, they would subtract energy from the budget.
Likewise, if El Niños cause a reduction in cloud cover, which then reflects less incoming SW radiation back out to space and hence allows more to enter our climate system, they would add energy to the budget.
And, while the Earthshine results of Pallé et all point in that direction, the jury is still out on that hypothesis.
Max
Cloud cover is transient.
Webby
So is life, Webby.
And so are the observed multi-decadal climate swings which were a significant portion of the late 20thC IPCC “poster period” of warming.
All fits together, Webby, like the man says.
Max
A simple relationship between the solar cycle and ENSO can be seen by means of the geomagnetic Ap index. The larger drops in the index occur close to the maxima, and around a year or two *after* the minima of each cycle. El Nino episodes are typical at both positions, though solar cycles 22&23 unusually had very little fall in the Ap index around maximum.
ENSO explanations aside, it nevertheless is a key plank in the Democrat platform that American businesses are mainly responsible for global warming and that some of the people who run such businesses are personally responsible–e.g.,
~Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)
Wagathon
Proving that Reid is just about as ignorant about our planet’s climate as Kerry, who opines that it is the greatest terrorist threat that we face.
Birds of a feather.
Turkeys?
Max
For the love of God, will Nevadians please rid us of this disease called Harry Reid? Joined the govt a pauper and now a zillionaire.
A great example of the nature of ENSO is the period around, 1200 BC, which despite being of record warmth in the Greenland proxy, was undeniably a very cold period for the temperate zone, with the collapse of many cultures and civilisations.
“According to Fig. 5, a series of intense El Nino events
(high red color intensity) begins at about 1450 BC that will
last for centuries. In that period normal (La Nina) condi-
tions have but disappeared. For comparison, the very strong
1998 El Nino event scores 89 in red color intensity. Dur-
ing the time when the Minoans were fading, El Nino events
reach values in red color intensity over 200.”
(page 4, see the LIA period on figure 5 too)
http://www.clim-past.net/6/525/2010/cp-6-525-2010.pdf
Here is the latest short post at my blog site on this important topic:
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/historical-el-nino-events-and-extreme.html
Contributing Effects?
Suggest exploring a combination of factors that could trigger these variations. e.g.:
Wyatt and Curry’s Stadium Wave
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)
David Stockwell’s Solar Accumulation
Willis Eschenbach’s Power Stroke
The ten fold variation of UV with solar cycles? e.g. d’Aleo solar cycle variations
IRG Wilson’s Venus-Earth-Jupiter spin-orbit coupling
The Venus–Earth–Jupiter spin–orbit coupling model, I. R. G. Wilson, Pattern Recogn. Phys., 1, 147–158, 2013 http://www.pattern-recogn-phys.net/1/147/2013/ doi:10.5194/prp-1-147-2013
Solar storms/cosmic rays
Henrik Svensmark, Martin B. Enghoff, Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen, Response of cloud condensation nuclei (>50 nm) to changes in ion-nucleation, Physics Letters A, Volume 377, Issue 37, 8 November 2013, Pages 2343–2347
Mekhaldi et al. Signatures of cosmic-ray increase attributed to exceptional solar storms inferred from multiple cosmogenic radionuclide records Geophysical Research Abstracts Vol. 16, EGU2014-15977-2, 2014
EGU General Assembly 2014
For further potential drivers see:
Patterns in Solar Variability, their planetary origin, and terrestrial impacts Morner et al. Pattern Recognition in Physics, Special Edition, 2013
citing garbage doesnt help understanding, especially the solar crap
Steven Mosher
All the Aristotelians dismissed Galileo. An ad hominem “garbage” without basis does little to help understanding. When 19 researchers agree that there are solar / planetary impacts on climate and publish details, and when climate models cannot explain “the pause” then a prudent scientific observer would dig deeper.
Mosh,
They are scoring own goals with this crap. Let them keep on doing it. Science is self-correcting and climate science is mature enough that any evidence will advance the consensus view one step at a time.
WebHubTelescope
Are you saying that the consensus view
is supported by OR
will have to support
papers showing 1.3C transient climate sensitivity? See:
Impact of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) on deriving anthropogenic warming rates from the instrumental temperature record
G. R. van der Werf and A. J. Dolman
Earth Syst. Dynam. Discuss., 5, 529-544, 2014 doi:10.5194/esdd-5-529-201
WebHubTelescope
Otto et al 2013 also found 1.3C transient climate sensitivity.
Do you agree with Albert Einstein that:
The ECS is 3C and TCR is 3C.
http://imageshack.com/a/img842/2517/r2f8.gif
Where is your analysis?
Webby404, someday it might start warming again. It won’t have anything to do with man-made CO2. It will just be the cycle repeating itself as it did 1910 to 1945 and 1980 to 1998.
The really important question wills be:
Will the next warm cycle be shorter or longer?
Will it be 35 years long or 18 or somewhere in between?
Little Miss Sunshine,
Do you know how to read a graph?
http://imageshack.com/a/img842/2517/r2f8.gif
Or are so inept that all you get is a 404?
Webby
In your Csalt link you mention 2001 and a correction factor. Can you clarify them please?
tonyb
The correction factor concerns the WWII years. The temperature still needs to be correctly calibrated during this time.
1998 provides some support for the “staircase” theory. But then there’s 2010, and not so much.
Of course their models actually produce continual heating, not staircase heating, and seem to have discounted the stair step while emphasizing the riser. . .
How do we know that the “missing heat” Trenberth has been looking for wasn’t the heat that was released during the 1998 “super” El Nino, and other El Ninos?
Maybe the excess heat retained as a result of ACO2 emissions accumulated in the oceans as the consensus claims. But rather than scurrying to the deep ocean, it remained in the sea surface, where the La Nina/EL NIno process ultimately released a major portion of it to the atmosphere. From whence most it radiated to space? Wouldn’t the super El Nino thus be a partial explanation for the “pause?”
Maybe CAGW Elvis left the building in 1998.
Good point, Gary. Maybe this, and maybe that, and maybe something else. You can’t tell me these guys aren’t aware of the profound uncertainties. Then again, the human capacity for self-deception is nearly limitless.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
-Upton Sinclair
GaryM | May 8, 2014 at 12:40 pm said: ”Maybe the excess heat retained as a result of ACO2 emissions accumulated in the oceans as the consensus claims. But rather than scurrying to the deep ocean, it remained in the sea surface”
Gary, heat cannot be carried to the dept in the ocean:: Water temp at 4C (39F) is the heaviest – that’s how the learned people of the world invented ‘’kilogram’’ one litre of water /10sm2 of water at 4C is one kg heavy; warmer, or colder water than 4C expands, and is not as heavy per volume. Therefore: water at 4C goes to the bottom and every layer above is by one degree warmer as it goes to the surface water, which is always the warmest.
2] water is ‘’FLUID’’ and that’s why instantly readjusts itself, by temperature; you cannot have ‘’warmer’’ water below the colder, for more than few seconds, because of readjustment per weights / temperature. Water is not as solid object, which means: you can put block of polystyrene on the bottom, then put brick on the top of it, then put a lump of lead on the top, and will stay that way, BUT with fluid water… NOP!
“Gary, heat cannot be carried to the dept in the ocean:: Water temp at 4C (39F) is the heaviest”
Water density also is a function of salinity. When evaporation occurs at the surface of a warm body of oceans water, the the salinity increases. This is something that you ought to consider also. Wind convergence can also can induce surface water to sink. Although thermal stratification usually overrides salinity stratification, there are many factors to consider.
–Pierre-Normand | May 9, 2014 at 12:49 am |
“Gary, heat cannot be carried to the dept in the ocean:: Water temp at 4C (39F) is the heaviest”–
[stefanthedenier: That is fresh water, not sea water]
–Water density also is a function of salinity. When evaporation occurs at the surface of a warm body of oceans water, the the salinity increases. This is something that you ought to consider also. Wind convergence can also can induce surface water to sink. Although thermal stratification usually overrides salinity stratification, there are many factors to consider.–
Wind causes more evaporation, also. A constant wind with sunlight warming should increase salinity and in addition to wave action cause mixing of warmer with cooler water.
stefanthedenier,
I don’t say the heat is transported to the deep ocean, the consensus scientist do. Sometimes my attempts at humor cause people to miss my point.
I think there is nowhere near the consensus, or clarity, on the impact of El Ninos on “global warming” that people seem to believe.
For the umpteenth time. None of my questions or comments have been about how an El Nino functions within the climate system. They have all been about what others see as the impact of El Ninos on globalclimatewarmingchange, aka AGW.
The folks who answered my questions at Real Climate, as well as Dr. Curry when i asked it here, and Bob Tisdale (I think), seem to believe that El Ninos increase global heat content by increasing clouds which decrease radiation of heat from the atmosphere. I saw a NOAA web page to that effect, at least for some El Ninos.
R. Gates, Pekaa Pirila argue that El Ninos reduce global heat content, at least temporarily
Somewhere in this thread Mosher in his typically humble way assured everyone it has no effect whatsoever.
My thoughts are more along the reduction in heat content line ala R.Gates. But I don’t think anyone knows. Yet.
Which was my ultimate point.