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Wednesday, June 22, 2016

La Niña or no, nada?

Sou | 5:55 PM Go to the first of 34 comments. Add a comment
Now that El Niño has shut down, people are wondering if a La Niña will develop this year. Anthony Watts has been egging it on. Way back in March, before the El Niño had finished, he was predicting a La Niña. Today he's quoting a report from NOAA from a couple of weeks ago (9 June), in which the prediction was 75% in favour of La Niña:
Overall, ENSO-neutral conditions are present and La Niña is favored to develop during the Northern Hemisphere summer 2016, with about a 75% chance of La Niña during the fall and winter 2016-17.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been much more conservative, with all its forecasts so far being only 50:50 in favour of La Niña. In its latest ENSO wrap-up yesterday, BoM stated:
Recent observations and climate model forecasts continue to suggest La Niña may develop in the coming months, hence the Bureau’s ENSO Outlook remains at La Niña WATCH level. A La Niña WATCH means there is a 50% likelihood of La Niña developing during the second half of 2016.  If La Niña does develop, climate models suggest it is unlikely to reach levels seen in the most recent event of 2010–12, which was one of the strongest La Niña events on record.
On the outlook page, BoM states that the model outlooks are split half and half:
International models have weakened their outlook for La Niña compared to last month. While all models still indicate more cooling in the tropical Pacific Ocean is likely, only four of eight models now suggest La Niña could form in the second half of 2016. The other four models remain neutral. If La Niña does form, models do not suggest it will be as strong as the near-record event of 2010-12.
Below is the overview of the POAMA model forecast:

Figure 1 | POAMA model outlooks Niño 3.4. Source BoM

 The BoM climate model summary states in part:
The tropical Pacific Ocean has cooled significantly since the peak of the 2015-16 El Niño in November, with temperatures dropping into the neutral range in mid-May. However, latest outlooks have eased a little in their estimates of further cooling. Three of the eight models surveyed (Canada, European and US-NASA) now maintain a cool, but neutral, outlook throughout the southern winter and spring. The Bureau's model briefly exceeds the La Niña threshold in July and August before returning back to neutral levels. The remaining four models indicate La Niña thresholds will be met at some point during spring, although the timing varies between models.
So there's still a difference between the model outlooks, with some favouring La Niña and some favouring neutral.

We shall have to wait and see. If there is a La Niña, it might not be sufficiently strong to satisfy deniers who are hanging out for a very large drop in global temperatures, or an ice age.




Deniers are preparing for their long awaited cool-down


Anthony Watts claimed on his blog that deniers weren't surprised, which will come as a surprise to those deniers who keep predicting cooling:
It’s no surprise to us that the “monster” El Niño of 2015/2016 created a very large global temperature spike, after all, that’s what the natural process that creates the phenomenon results in due to the Pacific ocean near the Equator not being able to dissipate heat to space as effectively as it usually does.
What Anthony doesn't admit is that this doesn't fit with all the WUWT articles that used the peak of the 1997/98 El Niño to argue the world is cooling. Nor does he explain why this El Niño made the world so much hotter than any previous El Niño. Anthony can't bring himself to admit that global warming is happening and happening with a vengeance. El Niño temperatures were on top of the long term warming trend.

Anthony went further and put up an image saying that La Niña has already started this month. It hasn't.


Figure 2 | Anthony Watts claims there is a La Niña. There isn't yet. Source: WUWT
Actually, he doesn't seem to know what he's claiming. Just below that image he wrote:
The latest forecasts show La Niña conditions developing this fall, and with it, global temperatures will come down:
So has La Niña started in June or will it not come till September? Anthony doesn't clarify his opinion.


NOAA vs BoM


Anthony did put up a CFS forecast image. I couldn't find the exact same image on the NOAA CFSv2 website but this one's close. The only difference is that it's initialised from 11 to 20 June instead of 10 to 19 June:

Figure 3 | CFSv2 seasonal forecast Niño 3.4. Source: NOAA

So it looks as if NOAA and BoM differ somewhat in regard to whether a La Niña will form this year. The ensemble mean from CFSv2 indicates it will. The models from BoM split 50:50 between a weak La Niña and neutral conditions.


People are contaminating viewsheds :)


Further down, Anthony tried to argue that global surface temperature is all to do with population. He's wrong. He even put up a chart showing the population density at each latitude, just in case his readers didn't know that there are a lot more people living in the northern hemisphere than in Antarctica:)

Anthony wrote a mixed up set of thoughts, about warm oceans, global air currents, and urban pollution (in the warm oceans?):
Note that world population is almost entirely in the northern hemisphere, so will be the infrastructure that accompanies human population.

Since the El Niño event clearly drove global sea surface temperatures, which in turn affect air temperatures with global air currents transporting that heat, and the northern hemisphere showed a peak signal about double that of the southern hemisphere, it is yet another suggestion that the surface temperature record is polluted by the effects of urbanization encroaching on thermometer viewsheds.
I don't know what a thermometer viewshed is. Anyone? I Googled it, but every link traced back to WUWT. Maybe Anthony invented the term. His link pointed back to his article about his AGU15 poster, in which he made claims without supporting them. There's no sign yet of the paper being published any time soon. I expect Anthony will give us plenty of warning if he ever gets a journal to accept it.

By the way, it's not urbanisation that is the cause of the difference between the southern and northern hemisphere. Anthony didn't look hard enough. He just said that the peak signal in the northern hemisphere was double that of the southern. Below is a chart showing the anomaly by latitude so you can see just where it was hottest during El Niño in the first quarter this year. Not so much at the equator, where El Niño lies as from about 53 N to the Arctic, with the highest anomalies right up north, plus a bump near Antarctica.

Figure 4 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly by latitude - average for January to March 2016. The anomaly is from the 1951-1980 mean. Data source: GISS NASA

The map shows this in regard to latitude and longitude:

Figure 5 | Global surface temperature anomalies - Jan to March 2016. Source: GISS NASA


The correlation with Anthony's urban pollution is low. If you doubt that, below is a map from SEDAC showing population density for 2015. The areas with the highest anomalies were sparsely populated:

Figure 6 | Population density 2015. Data source: SEDAC


It's cooling, but not so much yet


Anthony posted lots of charts showing the recent drop in global temperature. He was elated that the temperatures are dropping. What remains to be seen is the extent of any dip. So far, the charts he's shown still have very high temperatures, among the highest on record. About as high as the highest temperatures in the last three El Niños.

Anthony made a big blunder, too. He puts himself forward as some sort of expert on temperature. He's not. He doesn't understand temperature anomalies from baselines, which is pretty well the standard way of reporting changes in global surface temperature. He also doesn't know anything about how the data sets are constructed. He wrongly claimed:
It is important to note that HadCRUT and NASA GISS are interpretd derivatives of the NOAA data.
No they are not. For sea surface temperature:
  • NASA GISTemp uses ERSSTv4, which is also used by NOAA (which developed it).
  • HADCRUT uses HadSSTv3, which is a different product developed by the UK Met Office Hadley Centre.

For the land surface component:
  • NASA GISTemp and NOAA both use GHCNv3, but process it differently. GISTemp also uses SCAR for Antarctic regions.
  • HadCRUT uses CRUTem4.
All of them process the data differently, which is evident when you look at the charts. If they were the same the charts would be identical.

Then without bothering to analyse any data, Anthony wrote:
What’s clear, is that no matter what dataset you look at, global temperatures are headed down, and fast. This may spoil activist plans for a planned celebration of of 2016 being yet another “hottest year ever”. 

What's clear is that the more you look at WUWT, the more you realise that:
  • Anthony Watts doesn't know much at all about global surface temperature
  • Anthony isn't too hot on arithmetic.
  • Anthony makes all sorts of claims without backing them up, and without doing even the most cursory examination to see if they are reasonable claims.
Based on the year to date to May this year, the average monthly GISTemp anomaly for June to December would need to be less than 0.66 °C. I'm told that June is tracking around 0.75 °C so far, which would make the required average of the remaining months even lower at 0.63 °C or less.

Anthony made another prediction, which can't be checked for a while yet. He wrote:
Maybe, but what is equally 99% certain is that 2017 won’t be the “hottest year ever”.
I think it's more likely than not that 2017 won't be another "hottest on record", however I wouldn't lay odds at 99%.


From the WUWT comments


H.R. probably lives in a cold part of the world:
June 21, 2016 at 7:46 am
I’m a strong supporter of global warming. It sure beats the alternative.

ShrNfr is a "global cooling" believer who has made a prediction that can be checked in a few years:
June 21, 2016 at 8:07 am
Too bad, Nature is a dictatorship, not a democracy. It is going to be quite a bit cooler by 2030.

Javier thinks the 2015 record won't be broken for some time. He also mixes up his datasets. 2015 wasn't the hottest year in the RSS TLT v3 dataset although it was in the TTTv4 dataset. I doubt Javier is familiar with that one though.
June 21, 2016 at 7:54 am
Apparently the rate of fall for RSS is the fastest for a 3 month period since measurements begun. If a strong la Niña develops during the summer, it will be difficult that 2016 is a temperature record year. All in all it looks like 2015 will be the year of Peak Warmth for quite some time. 

rah is already preparing to cry "fraud" and "fake" when the full year data comes in for 2016 next January:
June 21, 2016 at 8:20 am
Well they sure are trying hard to give the impression that it is going to be the “hottest evah” this year. The hype fn the heat wave in the desert SW US is getting ridiculous with claims of new “record temperatures” that aren’t actually records all over the weather and news outlets. Tony Heller has been keeping track of some of the lies: [web address redacted: Sou]
Seems to me that globally it will take a great deal of manipulation to claim 2016 as the “hottest evah” if the extreme cold now being experienced in many areas of the southern hemisphere continues. A new record for Vostok and even some places in Brazil have set records for cold. 
I looked up the supposed record cold for Brazil. Turns out the record is only a few years old. One newspaper report stated temperatures were the lowest for more than ten years, and the records began in 2002!
Despite being in the winter season, on Monday, Rio de Janeiro, as well as São Paulo, recorded unusually cold temperatures, the lowest either city had seen in over ten years.

Rio’s residents woke up to a chilly start on Monday morning. According to Rio’s Municipal Operations Center, at about 6AM the city recorded a temperature of 8.6 degrees Celsius (ºC) in Alto da Boa Vista, in Rio’s North Zone. This was the lowest temperature ever recorded in the city since the start of Sistema Alerta Rio (Rio Alert System), a government service which began transmitting real-time weather information in 2002. 

Sparks predicts a major cooling problem:
June 21, 2016 at 2:55 pm
The cooling is taking place in line with the decline in sunspot activity and winter in the northern hemisphere where all these dodgy urban encroached thermometers are. The El Niño conveniently occurred and peaked several months, maybe a year after the suns poles reversed and struck earths oceans… The northern hemisphere is on the verge of a gradual cooling, if you remove all the statistical “trickery” going on that is biased to some warming, we’re left with a major problem of a continued cooling… 

I don't know why Franklin Ormaza-Gonzalez says the PDO is in a cold phase. The index hasn't been negative since January 2014.
June 21, 2016 at 8:52 am
I do much agree with you Mr Watts. I would suggest to work with the PDO, which is now on its cold phase, at least till 2025-2030. Then will come the warm phase, in which El Niño is more frequent and intense. 82-83 and 97-98 El Niño were during a warm phase of PDO; and the PDO is associated to sun spot #. 
Andrew Harding pontificates when it's fairly obvious that he's not familiar with climate and weather. (ENSO events have been known about for a lot longer than two or three years.) He, too, has already prepared his conspiracy theory of fudge and fakery when the world doesn't cool as he thinks it should.
June 21, 2016 at 10:12 am
El Nino was widely predicted to cause an increase in global temperatures two or three years ago (if memory serves, please correct me if I am wrong). La Nina, at the same time, was predicted to lower global temperatures also. On top of that though we have a Sun with zero, to very few sunspots which will also reduce global temperatures. If the warmists keep banging on about CO2 causing ever increasing warming, they will be in for a shock. unless of course they “adjust” historical temperatures.

Bill Illis bucks the WUWT trend and says he doesn't think a La Niña will happen this year:
June 21, 2016 at 10:42 am
I’m starting to think a La Nina is less likely (although temperatures will continue heading downward for at least 3 months).
There was a lot of warm water left over from the El Nino in the eastern equatorial Pacific and the cooler water building in from the developing La Nina was more-or-less neutralized by it.
There isn’t enough cold water in the under-current to provide for a La Nina in 2016 any longer. 

Another Scott hears imaginary voices:
June 21, 2016 at 11:26 am
I can just hear it now, “we got laid off from the global warming industry after the global temperature crash in ’17….” 

markstoval remains convinced that climate science is a hoax, and posts a wistful strawman:
June 21, 2016 at 12:41 pm
A question for the crowd
Suppose for a moment that the climate temperatures over the next 5 years cooled so much that even the government goons could not hide the decline in average temperature. Suppose further that sites like this one kept telling the public about the decline. Heck, suppose some politicians even mentioned the decline.
Question: what would be the alarmists excuse for this decline? 

One of the weirdest things about denier blogs is seeing how the underlying view of the dimwit conspiracy theorists is that WUWT invented climate science. Few commenters are aware that scientists and most of the informed general public understand a lot more about ENSO, weather and climate than Anthony Watts or any of the people who comment at WUWT. It's a hotspot for Dunning-Krugerites. I don't think they know that if not for climate scientists, Bob Tisdale and Anthony Watts wouldn't have the first clue about ENSO events. Take chaamjamal for example, who seems to think that no-one else knew that recent high temperatures have been made higher by El Niño:
June 21, 2016 at 5:57 pm
WUWT has been pointing out all along that the “warmest ever” hype during the El Nino event was itself an El Nino event. This post kind of puts the full stop at the end of that sentence.
That's enough.

References and further reading

The papers below describe how the data sets for HadCRUT, GISTemp and NOAA are put together. All are open access.

Morice, Colin P., John J. Kennedy, Nick A. Rayner, and Phil D. Jones. "Quantifying uncertainties in global and regional temperature change using an ensemble of observational estimates: The HadCRUT4 data set." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 117, no. D8 (2012). DOI: 10.1029/2011JD017187

Hansen, James, Reto Ruedy, Mki Sato, and Ken Lo. "Global surface temperature change." Reviews of Geophysics 48, no. 4 (2010). doi:10.1029/2010RG000345.

Smith, Thomas M., Richard W. Reynolds, Thomas C. Peterson, and Jay Lawrimore. "Improvements to NOAA's historical merged land-ocean surface temperature analysis (1880-2006)." Journal of Climate 21, no. 10 (2008): 2283-2296. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/2007JCLI2100.1


From the HotWhopper archives

34 comments:

  1. Sou, there's no way that figure 4 can be correct. Have a look at the temperature anomaly at about 60S. It's greater than 2K but Figure 5 shows that there is no value along that latitude greater than 2K. Therefore the mean must be less than 2K. I don't know what GISS have done but they have stuffed up royally here.

    R the Anon.

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    1. Sorry, about 70S

      R.

      Delete
    2. Thanks, R. I meant to check that and forgot. I don't know what went wrong with the chart, but it's fixed now.

      Delete
    3. Aha, that new one makes more sense. I have seen a figure like the one you originally posted but can't remember the context.

      R

      Delete
  2. Having a La Nina that sets a new record for being the warmest La Nina event in the record book will restore the pause in global warming. The pause will be back. People need to be very afraid of a red hot La Nina and the devastation it will do it will do to the warmunista's 30-year trend.

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    1. That was a joke, right? You don't really think that a record-warm La Nina will bring back the faux pause do you?

      Or wait -- maybe you're saying that if 2017 is cooler than 2016, the new denier meme will be, No Global Warming Since 2016!. That would be pretty funny!

      Delete
    2. Remember, the poor things will still have a wait if they are wanting to talk in years. They'll have to wait till 2018 to say that, and who knows what will happen between now and then. UAH might skip beta 6 and move up to a beta 7, and RSS might stop updating v3.3 :)

      Delete
    3. There is always a 'pause', only atm. its rather too short even for the dismal taste of climate change deniers.

      Delete
    4. Millicent, I disagree. They've already been crowing about temperature anomalies falling. Even one month is not too short for them -- just as one season proved Arctic sea ice recovery in 2013.

      Delete
  3. A few denier memes this article reminded me of:

    1) Deniers are increasingly of the opinion that global warming is caused by "waste heat". It's a variation of Urban Heat Island myth and the Russian steam pipes. This may also relate to Anthony's contaminated viewsheds. There is a recent paper describing some of the effects of heat generation, and deniers are trying to expand this idea to explain all unusual warming (you know, the stuff that isn't happening at all).

    http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016EF000352/abstract

    2) I've got a denier friend who insists that all the surface data sets (NOAA, NASA, Met Office, JMA, and so on) all use the same set of thermometers, so it's really all the same data. They aren't independently confirming each others' work; they're all just looking at the same gauges. On the other hand, says my friend, RSS and UAH are entirely separate. I tried to break it to him that RSS and UAH both use the same satellites, and there really are only two of them. (This relates to Anthony's comment about all the surface data being ultimately derived from NOAA thermometers.)

    3) The La Nina that is cometh-ing is expected to reinvigorate the faux pause. Never mind that even the strongest recent La Nina years were actually warmer than any previous La Nina. In fact, every La Nina year beginning 2001 has been warmer than every single year -- even El Nino years! -- going back from 1997.

    This last is a point insufficiently appreciated. Beginning in 2001, every single year has been warmer than any year before 1998 (that is, 1997 and before). In fact, with the sole exception of 1998 (which was unusually warm), every single year this century (2001 and later) has been warmer than every single year prior to this century. Even with a strong upward trend, you wouldn't expect that; you'd expect at least a few years to be unusually cool, cool enough to encroach into territory we occupied less than two decades ago. But no. The turn of the millennium has seen a stark change in global temperature.

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    1. My fave is that solar panels cause global warming because solar farms are hotter than the surrounding area (because they have lower albedo).

      Delete
    2. You've hit upon the reasons why the stadium wave is late to wave (waste heat), and why the negative phase of the AMO is yet to arrive (solar panel arrays in the North Atlantic.) I just knew there is a reason I read this bitterly negative blog: hope.

      Delete
    3. It's interesting this new tactic of selecting a pinhole on some detail to generalize. Wouldn't want to waste that Urban Heat Island idea. One born every minute.

      Thanks for the comparison of heat to population. Very useful, if I could only get a fake skeptic to actually, you know, look. Too afraid reality might disillusion them.

      Delete
    4. D.C.Petterson

      "The La Nina that is cometh-ing is expected to reinvigorate the faux pause."
      ____________

      It's a vain hope, I think. At the risk of sounding like Willis Willis Eschenbach (!), I took the 1997/98 El Nino/La Nina transition as a rough model and used the latest UAH (beta) TLT data to do some not-very-scientific calculations.

      UAH TLT peaked in Apr 1998 and bottomed out in January 2000; a 22 mth decline at a rate of -5 C/dec. Taking the same 22 month period and rate of decline as a guide, then UAH would fall from its Feb 2016 peak into slight negative territory by late 2017.

      However, even such a decline would still result in a slight positive trend in UAH at late 2017 for any start month in 1997/98. Temperatures would need to continue to decline at the same rate for a further year or so before a negative trend from 1997/98 would reappear.

      Like I said, not very scientific; but as a rule of thumb, it shows the unlikely scale and duration of cooling required before the 'no warming since 1998' brigade finds its voice again. (Where is His Lordship these days anyway?)

      Delete
    5. DavidR,

      Thank you for doing those calculations. Yes, utterly unscientific, as you say--yet still more impressive than what happens on WUWT. At least we have the scale of what would need to happen.

      Chris "The Fraud" Monckton has lately taken to saying "there has been no significant global warming for the last X months" (where X starts in February of 2016. I kid you not.) This isn't impressive enough to earn him any attention however.

      Delete
    6. "Where is His Lordship these days anyway?"

      Busy campaigning against the EU, along with every other crackpot climate conspiracy theorist.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0GmaDrHuQ0

      He's also trying to set up his own monetary system, and get Texas to leave the US.

      Delete
    7. I woke up to discover the numpties around me have voted in favour of economic suicide.

      Delete
  4. Sou/JCH...surely you know that el Ninos are only discounted when they are to the right of the graph. When they are to the left, they just reflect "normal" climate. Conversely, la Ninas only count when they are on the right. One NEVER starts from la Nina minimum on the left. That would be "alarmist" cheating. One only starts from an el Nino maximum if one is looking at warming.

    Where 'one' = 'potty peer'.

    Denier "logic" at its very best.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Over at the Azimuth Project forum, a few of us with physics and math backgrounds started a project with the goal of modeling the El Nino oscillations. To model El Nino means to be able to reproduce the swings from El Nino to La Nina and back over the years that measurements have been available, using mathematical approaches to capture the physics.

    The tricky part has always been to establish the pattern in the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO as it's called). There has been a group of scientists, lead by the AGW denier Anastosios Tsonis, who have claimed that the behavior was essentially chaotic and immune to modeling and therefore prediction. Tsonis and his close academic colleague Judith Curry have applied this interpretation to assert an Uncertainty Monster argument that any swings in temperature may by due to natural phenomena, and that this makes climate prediction essentially impossible. (incidentally, Tsonis recently joined the board of the GWPF alongside Richard Lindzen to ostensibly push his ideas)

    We all know that assertions in science don't cut it, especially one that involves a negative finding like Tsonis', so we have been working the ENSO problem for a couple of years to find possible patterns. And we have been making some progress, with the latest breakthrough made in simplifying the shallow-water wave equations used in GCM modeling, also known as Laplace's tidal equations. By applying known forcing to the simplified representation, we can get very good agreement.

    Simon-Pierre Laplace was a genius, and would probably leave a blog comment with his famous quote ".. it is therefore obvious that ...", but we all know how tricky nature can be, so I can only invite readers to take a gander on whut the heck we are doing.

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    1. web - I could go back and check, but I believe the leaking bucket that held the water in the water chef's recipe for why the 21st century climate cannot be predicted was his prediction of abrupt climate change in the 21st century.

      Delete
    2. @whut

      (incidentally, Tsonis recently joined the board of the GWPF

      Didn't know that. Thanks for the pointer. Very sad.

      Delete
    3. Used to be an Aussie dude commenting on Curry's blog named the Chief Hydrologist who would push Tsonis's ideas daily. He disappeared about the same time that I stopped commenting there. I really knew that there was something up with Tsonis when he started co-authoring papers with Curry. They are all very savvy on how they push uncertainty as a means to marginalize climate change concerns. One way to beat them at their own game is to remove the uncertainty associated with ENSO and thus marginalize their own arguments.


      And about the leaking bucket, I do think the 1940's WWII years are one of the biggest uncertainties in the temperature record. The buckets may have been shot through leaving machine gun holes :)

      Delete
    4. whut: "One way to beat them at their own game is to remove the uncertainty associated with ENSO and thus marginalize their own arguments."

      Uncertainty led Curry to conclude that climate sensitivity is between 1-10C rather than the more conservative 1.5-4.5 that the IPCC gives. It's not clear to me how uncertainty supports the status quo.

      Delete
    5. Web,

      I've read your various writeups on WWII bucket bias and found them useful. In my own CSALTish regression models, the WWII temperature spike stands out like a sore thumb, especially now with the switch to ERSST v4. (Karl et al. it seems made that even worse.)

      What I don't understand is why that doesn't show up in things like the NINO indices derived from SSTs. SOI I might understand as SSTs aren't its only input. Thoughts?

      Delete
    6. @whut

      Used to be an Aussie dude commenting on Curry's blog named the Chief Hydrologist who would push Tsonis's ideas daily.

      Oh, I remember the Chief and his Tsonis fixation. I had an epic exchange with the clown about it - he completely misrepresented A&T anyway but would *not* admit his error.

      Surprise, surprise.

      Delete
    7. On the idea of chaos and of climate being unpredictable, that is another increasingly-common denier meme. My denier friend frequently insists that "weather is wacky" and so any observed "trends" are really just random variations with no determinable cause.

      He also says that La Ninas inevitably follow El Ninos and cancel out any supposed "warming" (all of which is really an illusion caused by El Ninos) so it's hard to reconcile this supposed pattern with the randomness he insists is the defining term of climate, but whatever.

      So he'll point to past warm periods (the Mesozoic, the Medieval Warm Period, and so on) and say, "See? It randomly got warmer then, too." (Yes, he can't tell the difference between "climate" and "weather".) I tell him that if he can prove the Mesozoic warmth, the MWP warmth, and today's trend all have the same underlying cause, perhaps he'd have a point; and then he repeats, "weather is wacky".

      I try to remind him that the whole purpose of science is to seek to understand causes. That's unimpressive to him.

      I tell this story as an attempt to understand the cause of denialism. (See what I did there?) I'm beginning to suspect it rests in an inability or unwillingness to seek comprehension of the world. Perhaps there is a mindset (or a neural deformity) that prevents certain individuals from understanding the concept of "comprehension."

      This may be the root of the entire science/religion dichotomy.

      Delete
    8. That's why I am working to make these multi-year climate variations such as ENSO more predictable. It gives the Curry contingent that much less ammunition to argue with.

      Curry is also clueless or misrepresenting about variability. Yesterday she said:

      "well in the real world of weather forecasting, most of the interest is in regional forecasts (few individual forecasts wanting global). Some variables are more predictable than others, with temperatures being more predictable than solar, precip.
      There is a big market for local/regional temperature forecasts
      Also, on longer time scales the regimes such as NAO, AO etc have greater predictability than surface variables, so schemes to predict the regimes are of considerable value"


      She doesn't want to place ENSO much higher than those others? As we have seen recently, ENSO is a strong overriding factor in just about every region in the world.

      Also look at the way she contradictorily treats the topic. She is a consultant so acts like only she is able to make predictions, yet she deems it hopeless to make long term predictions, as she call it a "wicked" problem.

      And about Curry's favorite commenter, what I remember most about the Chief Hydrologist was what a whiny baby he ended up being. Whenever he would get owned by BBD and others, he would go belly-aching to mama Curry about how he was being mistreated and asking for them to get banned.

      Delete
    9. BRG said:
      "What I don't understand is why that doesn't show up in things like the NINO indices derived from SSTs. SOI I might understand as SSTs aren't its only input. Thoughts?"

      There is a strong and wide El Nino spike centered around 1941 (best seen in SOI time-series) which contributes to much of that global temperature peak, but not all of it.

      I'd agree that when doing a multiple regression fit with a tool like CSALT, the WWII years stick out like a sore thumb. If there was a case for removal of outliers, I would be tempted to consider that interval an outlier, yet that 1941 El Nino is the sticky point.

      Delete
    10. "Uncertainty led Curry to conclude that climate sensitivity is between 1-10C rather than the more conservative 1.5-4.5 that the IPCC gives. It's not clear to me how uncertainty supports the status quo."

      They really believe in asymmetric uncertainty. Reminds me of the scene from Dumb & Dumber


      Lloyd: What do you think the chances are of a guy like you and a girl like me…ending up together?

      Mary: Not good.

      Lloyd: You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?

      Mary: I’d say more like one out of a million.

      Lloyd: So you’re telling me there’s a chance. Yeah!

      Delete
    11. On the 1940s spike --

      Has anyone really looked at the burning of coal prior to WW2, then the collapse of the European economy and industrial base as a result of the war, followed by the burning of oil and gas (and renewed use of coal) after the war?

      I know coal burning for power and for heating was increasingly prevalent from the early 19th century on. Much of European manufacturing was driven on coal by the early 20 century. Coal-burning locomotives and electric plants were in place throughout America and many places in Europe by the 1930s and early 40s. From what I've read, the effects of coal (which is just about the dirtiest fossil fuel there is) have not been extensively modeled prior to the 1940s.

      I have not heard anyone address this. It could be that the idea is so clearly absurd that no one has bothered to. But is it possible that the increase in temperatures between the third quarter of the 19th century and the 1940s was driven by coal burning? Oil didn't catch on in a big way until WW2, when it became necessary to run massive numbers of vehicles (from tanks to jeeps to ships and aircraft). But the War also saw the (temporary) destruction of most of the world's coal plants.

      So perhaps the dip was a result of the cutback in coal, which was followed by ever-increasing use of oil--that plus the explosion of coal-burning electric plants has obviously been powering the increase since the 1960s and 70s.

      Just some thoughts. Someone knock down the idea please.

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    12. DC said
      "Has anyone really looked at the burning of coal prior to WW2, then the collapse of the European economy and industrial base as a result of the war, followed by the burning of oil and gas (and renewed use of coal) after the war?"

      I think the long term undulations may be natural, as the length-of-day of the earth's rotation shows a similar variation. This undulation is likely redistribution of ocean volume, leading to overturning and therefore gradual temperature changes.

      The variation during WWII is separate from this, as the spike looks almost like a notch that lasts between 1940 and 1945.

      Civilians abandoned MET measurements during this time and the military were left to their own process. Obviously this will create a step difference as the calibration processes wouldn't be the same.

      And yet that could have been an El Nino with a different characteristic, even stronger than the SOI indicates
      http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/catalog/climind/soi2.gif


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  6. Oh hello David it's PG here. Can I please have my money back? David are you there? David?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anthony claims activists are planning a celebration for 2016 being the hottest year? Ain't it activists who are claiming AGW is a world wide disaster in the making that has Tony and his crew up in arms? How can it be both? And yet Tony seems to want it both ways. His clueless mind and thought pattern are straight from the denierspheres upside down Bizarro World.

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    Replies
    1. Being right about a cancer diagnosis does not imply 'celebrating' a cancer diagnosis...except when one uses denier "logic".

      Anthony is one of the chief practitioners of denier "logic".

      Delete

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