The Cooling Test

[waitforufo]

If these predicted cooling trends prove true, watching the fallout in the global warming community is going to be hilarious. I bet Hanson is "a little concerned." Concerned about his credibility. Natural fluctuations? So let me get this straight, warming is man made and cooling is natural fluctuations. That is what we call science these days?

 

So why don't all you global warming enthusiast show me your hockey stick graphs again?

 

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/can-climate-campaigns-withstand-a-cooling-test/?hp

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/science/earth/01climate.html?em&ex=1209787200&en=ddd0094cc411eb2f&ei=5087%0A

[swansont]

Did you actually read the articles?

 

'“Too many think global warming means monotonic relentless warming everywhere year after year,” Dr. Trenberth said. “It does not happen that way.”'

 

The articles do not say "warming is man made and cooling is natural fluctuations." They say that the natural variability — essentially, noise — is not small compared to the overall warming trend. 1998 would be a prime example of a fluctuation that was warmer than the trend. It works both ways.

[ydoaPs]

Hockey stick graphs?

[Rev Blair]

Hockey stick graphs?

 

Victoriavilles on the X axis and Sherwoods on the Y?

 

(sorry, couldn't help myself...)

[iNow]

Hockey stick graphs?

 

 

 

 

[bascule]

Note: sometimes they go down

[waitforufo]

Yes, I actually read the articles. Now that it's cooling, the warming enthusiast have to hedging their bets. They have everyone worked up into a frenzy then oops, it starts getting cooler.

 

Well of course, cooling trends are natural. They never said occasional cooling wouldn't occur on our ultimate path to a warming doom. That pesky occasional cooling is just natural fluctuation. Just ignore that. No don't turn up your thermostat, you will cook us all. How dare you suggest that the recent warming was also influenced by "natural fluctuations." What are you anti science? Don't you understand there is a consensus? Just read the IPCC….

 

Like a said, hilarious.

[swansont]

Yes, I actually read the articles. Now that it's cooling, the warming enthusiast have to hedging their bets. They have everyone worked up into a frenzy then oops, it starts getting cooler.

 

Well of course, cooling trends are natural. They never said occasional cooling wouldn't occur on our ultimate path to a warming doom. That pesky occasional cooling is just natural fluctuation. Just ignore that. No don't turn up your thermostat, you will cook us all. How dare you suggest that the recent warming was also influenced by "natural fluctuations." What are you anti science? Don't you understand there is a consensus? Just read the IPCC….

 

Like a said, hilarious.

 

If you think it's hedging, you haven't understood what they are saying, and are misrepresenting it. It's a lot closer to "Please don't equate weather and climate. They aren't the same thing."

[waitforufo]

If you think it's hedging, you haven't understood what they are saying, and are misrepresenting it. It's a lot closer to "Please don't equate weather and climate. They aren't the same thing."

 

Yea, yea we have had this weather/climate arguement before. The article talks about "decade long forcasts", "internal climate variability", "a winding climatic journey " and an "overall temporary cooling of the climate." So how many years of weather data does it take to make a climate claim? Sounds to me like they are expecting this "slowly fluctuating oscillation in Pacific Ocean temperatures" to be with us for some time. I'm sure they are hoping long enough for them to move on to other topics.

 

With regard to the hockey stick, read

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy

[JohnB]

waitforufo, you take out all the fun. I was going to wait until better PDO figures were in.

 

Bottom line is that if the next Solar Cycle stays low and if the PDO moves fully into a cooling cycle, then AGW theory is in a lot of trouble. (Douglass et al 2008 already hurts it as the paper demonstrates that the GW "fingerprint" of Tropospheric warming is not happening, but that's another topic.)

 

Keeping it to basics, AGW theory puts the warming of the first part of the 20th C to natural causes, the cooling from 1940 to 1970 to sulphate pollution and the warming in the last part of the century to GHGs. In this thread I asked for papers that showed evidence of the sulphate cooling. Bascule kindly provided 2 links, one was a pay link (and I'm a cheapskate so I didn't read it) but the other was the same as the rest that I've read. While demonstrating that the models do show a decrease in GMST with an increase in sulphates, at no time does it actually compare model inputs to the real world pollutant levels. As I said in that thread, they don't show me the sea gulls.

 

Now comes the PDO.

As can be readily seen, the PDO was in a warming phase from 1900- circa 1945, a cooling phase from 1945-1975 and another warming phase 1975-circa 2000. After that it's been neither one nor the other but had moderate to large La Ninas and El Ninos in no real pattern.

 

This gives rise to the current situation where if we were to look at the tend from 1998 (El Nino) to present we see a cooling trend but if we go from 1997 (La Nina) to present we see a warming trend.

 

I'm sure that there are many here who will immediately point out that "correllation does not prove causation", which is true. However, since you can't have causation without correllation, it's a good place to start. I would also point out that if the PDO is the actual cause of the decadal temperature changes we have seen, it is the simplest hypothesis.

 

Now the fun starts. If the PDO in a cooling phase is enough to "swamp", "mask", "hide" or otherwise obscure the "underlying" GHG warming trend of 1.8⁰/decade then it must also add 1.8⁰/decade when in a warming phase. If this is so, then that leaves sweet FA for the GHGs to be responsible for. Unless one is going to argue that while it has a large effect in a cooling phase it has almost zero effect in a warming phase, but I doubt anyone is that dumb.

 

So where does that leave us? A complete rethink, I think.

 

Climate models generally ignore the NAO and ENSO assuming that they tend to cancel out over long periods (which is fair enough) and don't handle the PDO at all because of it's unpredictability. We will need to find some way to incorporate these into models.

 

The IPCC will need to go right back to the drawing board as their calculations are based solely on external forcings, whereas the PDO is an internal forcing. Internal forcings will have to be given greater weight.

Note: sometimes they go down

Can you provide one model projection that shows this? Is there one model that has a 10 year plateau in it?

 

This is not confusing weather with climate, the PDO operates on multi-decadal cycles. The basic hypothesis is this: When the PDO is in a warming phase, GMST goes up and when in a cooling phase GMST goes down. It is also falsifiable, if the GMST goes up while the PDO is in a cooling phase, the hypothesis is wrong.

 

To summarise. There is a second hypothesis to explain the 20th C temperature trend starting to make the rounds. It fits the data without needing any type of fudge factors and explains the changes with only one primary forcing. It is falsifiable.

 

Compared to AGW theory which requires at least three primary forcings (the sulphates being unquantified and unknown) to explain the changes. It is not falsifiable.

 

Seriously, this is one of my biggest problems with the idea of AGW. If temps go up, then it's AGW, if they go down then it's still AGW but it's "masked". You can't have a bet both ways in science. Short of the onset of a sudden Ice Age and New York being buried under glaciers, (Oh wait, wasn't that one of Hansens "tipping points"?) there is nothing that can't be called "consistent" with AGW theory. IMO any theory that allows for everything from a scorched Earth to a new Ice Age is no theory at all. It is by definition unfalsifiable and therefore not "science" in any meaning of the word.

[waitforufo]

No warming in the last decade. No warming predicted for the next decade. Argos Ocean buoys have actually shown cooling. Hang in there global warming enthusiasts.

 

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=294880707561262

[iNow]

Repeating yourself brings no validity to an invalid point.

[JohnB]

Repeating yourself brings no validity to an invalid point.

What is the invalid point? (If it's "cooling" I would have to agree.) My take is that the last 10 years have been so blah that you can "prove" anything with them. Use 1998 as a start point and you get "cooling", use 1997 and you get "warming", all this shows is that the decade is so statistically neutral that any pattern will superimpose on it.

 

Seriously though, I would like your comment on the close correlation of the PDO to climate trends. I'm not saying the PDO proves anything, but it is certainly interesting.

 

On a purely logical basis, if a strong El Nino will push temps above the trend and a strong La Nina pushes temps below the trend, then one must ask "What is the compounded effect (if any) of a series of moderate El Ninos/La Ninas? Do they define the trend?"

 

"How much of the warming of the last 25 years is attributable to this?"

 

It is often said here that only models incorporating CO2 can model the temp rise, but those same models do not incorporate the PDO. Is this a large forcing that is being ignored?

[Chris C]

What is the invalid point? (If it's "cooling" I would have to agree.) My take is that the last 10 years have been so blah that you can "prove" anything with them. Use 1998 as a start point and you get "cooling", use 1997 and you get "warming", all this shows is that the decade is so statistically neutral that any pattern will superimpose on it.

 

Seriously though, I would like your comment on the close correlation of the PDO to climate trends. I'm not saying the PDO proves anything, but it is certainly interesting.

 

On a purely logical basis, if a strong El Nino will push temps above the trend and a strong La Nina pushes temps below the trend, then one must ask "What is the compounded effect (if any) of a series of moderate El Ninos/La Ninas? Do they define the trend?"

 

"How much of the warming of the last 25 years is attributable to this?"

 

It is often said here that only models incorporating CO2 can model the temp rise, but those same models do not incorporate the PDO. Is this a large forcing that is being ignored?

 

 

The PDO doesn't have any evident signal on the global mean. If you want to explain with internal fluctuations how the heat content of the ocean has increased (globally) over the last century, or the direction of the radiative imbalance at the top of the atmosphere, you'll make some interesting contributions to thermodynamics. This is beside the point, but I also don't see the correlation you're seeing...shouldn't 1940 be just as warm as today if that is all? Any internal fluctutions you're seeing are superimposed on a long-term trend from greenhouse gases. This is just century old physics, I'm really not sure what you're arguing here.

 

Concerning this 1998 stuff, if you were to run a best fit line using any temperature analysis (GISS, HadCRUT, etc) there is warming since then. But, it doesn't really matter if you seen warming or cooling, as any signal over such a short time interval is contaminated by noise.

[iNow]

What is the invalid point?

 

Sentences 1 & 2 in post #11, as well as the inherent implication of sentence 4 in that same post.

[swansont]

No warming in the last decade. No warming predicted for the next decade. Argos Ocean buoys have actually shown cooling. Hang in there global warming enthusiasts.

 

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=294880707561262

 

"According to the greenies, the Earth is supposed to warm continuously and disastrously without taking any rest breaks."

 

Um, no. This is a strawman. Am I surprised that this would appear in the Investor's Business Daily editorials? No. It's almost as far removed from a peer-reviewed journal as you can get. All data will have fluctuations.

 

You can't trust science discussion, especially by scientists outside their area of expertise or nonscientists, that takes place on the editorial page. The penalty for manufacturing or repeating erroneous information and/or omitting other information is incredibly low and it happens a lot, in order to score political points.

[JohnB]

inow, thanks for that.

 

Chris C,

The PDO doesn't have any evident signal on the global mean.

I can't see it. If one large El Nino can push up GMST for a year, then please explain why 30 or so years of them won't effect GMST for the same period. One event has an effect, but many similar events don't?

shouldn't 1940 be just as warm as today if that is all

No, because you are at a different start point in temperature.

Concerning this 1998 stuff, if you were to run a best fit line using any temperature analysis (GISS, HadCRUT, etc) there is warming since then.

So if I were to compare 1998 -2008 with any other 10 year period, say 1985-1995, the slope of the curve would be similar? I don't think so.

There is a definite change in the character of the graph. (And that is all I'm saying, please don't misinterpret this as a "cooling" argument.) We have a conundrum.

Any internal fluctutions you're seeing are superimposed on a long-term trend from greenhouse gases.

Exactly, this gives us a great opportunity to guage CO2 sensitivity. Drop out the PDO and the currently almost non existent Solar Cycle 24 and whatever is left should be a good approximation of the CO2 forcing. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a lot left.

 

We may find out that CO2 forcing is nowhere near as powerful as we thought.

[Chris C]

inow, thanks for that.

 

Chris C,

 

I can't see it. If one large El Nino can push up GMST for a year, then please explain why 30 or so years of them won't effect GMST for the same period. One event has an effect, but many similar events don't?

 

No, because you are at a different start point in temperature.

 

So if I were to compare 1998 -2008 with any other 10 year period, say 1985-1995, the slope of the curve would be similar? I don't think so.

There is a definite change in the character of the graph. (And that is all I'm saying, please don't misinterpret this as a "cooling" argument.) We have a conundrum.

 

Exactly, this gives us a great opportunity to guage CO2 sensitivity. Drop out the PDO and the currently almost non existent Solar Cycle 24 and whatever is left should be a good approximation of the CO2 forcing. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a lot left.

 

We may find out that CO2 forcing is nowhere near as powerful as we thought.

 

 

There’s a decadal vacillation superimposed on an overall warming trend. This isn't incredibly difficult to understand. Over long term scales (climate) you need to change the global mean radiatively at the top of the atmosphere (change solar in, change albedo, change the efficiency of infrared out). There’s a lot of cold water down in the deep ocean, and under certain internal conditions when you can bring it to the surface you can offset some GHG warming, but eventually that's going to heat up, unless you don't believe in thermodynamics. Likewise during an El Nino you're clearly "mining" some heat out of the ocean and putting it into the atmosphere, and that tends to create a spike for a year if you look at a plot of global T vs. time, but there is a small net tropical mean warming associated with most El Nino events. But the 0.1-0.2 K spike is superimposed on a longer-term, and much larger ~0.8 K trend, which is being externally forced. The circulation anomaly in an El Nino year is very different from that for a warmer climate.

 

It's the net SW and LW radiation that change the global climate in equilibrium, but the climate system doesn't need to be an equilibrium on very short timescales. There is year to year variability all the time, and the ocean and atmosphere are always exchanging heat back and forth on time scales which can be more than a year. And changes in ocean circulation can cause changes in atmospheric circulation, which cause changes in clouds and water vapor, which change SW and LW radiation.

 

 

When you increase greenhouse concentrations you create a situation where the planet takes in more radiation on net than it can get rid of at the top of atmosphere, and it will heat up. Without the CO2 increase you’d get warm,cold,warm cold, etc. with no long term trend.

[JohnB]

Chris, I'm not sure, but I think we're talking past each other.

But the 0.1-0.2 K spike is superimposed on a longer-term, and much larger ~0.8 K trend

I'm not talking about an El Nino "year". If a "year" can push up the temperature readings by .1-.2 for that year, then it is only logical that 10 years of El Nino will push up the temp readings for that decade. Yes it is superimposed onto the long term trend. However you must admit that since it has been almost exclusively El Ninos since the late 70s, then every year since then has been warmer than it should be if we were to only consider the underlying trend. I suppose the question is "Is the effect of continuous El Ninos/La Ninas cumulative?" and "Is there a way to tell?"

 

Put it another way. If there were no other forcings involved, what would be the result of continuous El Ninos/La Ninas? Would the temp rise/fall in a "trend" or would it rise/drop at the change and then steady? If it would indeed produce a "trend", then it is only fair to ask how much of the trend of the last 30 years is due to CO2 and how much due to continuous El Ninos?

It's the net SW and LW radiation that change the global climate in equilibrium, but the climate system doesn't need to be an equilibrium on very short timescales.

Here we differ, the Climate has never been in equilibrium and never will be.

Without the CO2 increase you’d get warm,cold,warm cold, etc. with no long term trend.

I'm sure I'm misunderstanding this sentence as there always has been and always will be a warming/cooling trend on decadal or centenial scales. Could you please clarify?

[Chris C]

Just ask yourself "where does the energy go?" to allay confusion to all of your questions. Or ask yourself why El Ninos are different in the last 30 years, then say, over the entire Holocene. I would not expect a climate change with more frequent internal oscillations, I'd expect a more variable climate (it is a statistical difference concerning the trends and the amplitude of variation about the mean). So if you remove El Nino effects over the last century, you don't lose any of the warming. Concerning your last line, if you could hold the incoming solar radiation, albedo, and outgoing longwave radiation constant on centennial timescales, then climate will be stable over that time. I would say that the climate generally is in equilibrium (or at least close enough) on decades to centuries, but new equilibriums will be reached when you externally force something on the system, which is bound to happen. The reason climate does change over those scales is because you can change the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit, tilt it up and down (more sunlight at the poles=lower albedo), change greenhouse gas concentrations and aerosols/dust, etc., long-term variations in solar output