La Niña or no, nada?

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

• NOAA: No pause in the global surface temperature - June 2015 - with references to papers on the latest updates for NOAA temperature data sets.
• El Niño to La Niña years - May 2016, comparing the years where an El Nino was immediately followed by a La Nina.
• Anthony Watts' #AGU15 poster on US temperature trends - December 2015
• Anthony Watts sticks his neck out and predicts La Niña - March 2016
• Anthony Watts Classic: those baffling temperature anomalies - May 2013
• Confirmation bias and anomalous anomalies at WUWT - June 2013