Sea level to accelerate more quickly prompts sea level rise denial at WUWT

There's a new paper out that has been picked up by Anthony Watts. Of course he doesn't like it because it's about one of his pet peeves - rising seas. There are few things he is more afraid of, judging by the frantic attempts he's made over the years to deny that seas will rise as the ice melts.

I don't have time to do the paper justice, so I'll point you to the paper and an article by John Abraham at the Guardian. The paper is by John Fasullo, R. S. Nerem & B. Hamlington and is in Nature's open access journal Scientific Reports. The gist of it is that the volcano, Pinatubo, suppressed sea level rise, and it could be about to jump back up again in the next ten years.

The thing I noticed at WUWT is that Anthony Watts will go to great efforts to hide the data. He put up a wonky chart that Willis Eschenbach drew a few years ago. His chart stops some time in 2010 - right before that big dip in sea level when all the water was shifted from the oceans to Australia, South America and Asia.

David Archibald in a momentus denial of gravity at WUWT

Anthony Watts' blog is where science deniers congregate so they don't feel so alone in the world. Usually they are simply rejecting climate science, the greenhouse effect, rising global surface temperatures and anything else that takes their fancy that's to do with climate. They don't normally get into rejecting biology or not openly at least. They will from time to time reject chemistry, usually in relation to ocean acidification.

Today I see that a guest essayist has decided to reject gravity and probably momentum. He was writing about a paper in Science from last week, which got denier blogs all a twitter. The paper is probably raising some eyebrows among scientists too. It's an interesting take on where the heat is going.

Before I get to that, though, let me show you what David "funny sunny" Archibald wrote about thermohaline circulation (archived here). He posted this image from an article in last week's Science, which Eli Kintisch wrote about the subject:

The Atlantic Ocean may be storing vast amounts of heat (red), keeping global surface temperatures from rising.
Credit: Xianyao Chen, Ka-Kit Tung, Source: Science Vol. 345 no. 6199 pp. 860-861 

David Archibald said it can't be so. He wrote:

The illustration shows heat plunging into the depths as far as 1,500 metres. The oceans don’t work like that. Most of the heat energy of sunlight is absorbed in the first few centimetres of the ocean’s surface. Waves mix the water near the surface layer such that the temperature may be relatively uniform in the top 100 metres. Below that there is almost no mixing and no vertical movement of water.

Some of what he wrote was okay, sort of. Some of it was very wrong. In particular, he he is rejecting thermohaline circulation, arguing there is no vertical movement of water in the ocean. He's wrong of course.  Thermohaline circulation is the convection in the ocean driven by pressure gradients and gravity. Saltier water is denser than fresh water. Cold water is denser than warm water. Colder saltier water sinks in the ocean. This process doesn't stop and start, or not easily and not often. There's a lot of momentum behind the conveyor belt. There's a huge amount of water going through this cycle. Just because some of it is a bit warmer at times doesn't mean the water stops moving.

Unbalanced at WUWT: Earth's Energy Budget

Note: Greig's Thread has been moved to here.

This week WUWT's Serengeti Strategy is aimed fairly and squarely at Kevin Trenberth.   (Archived here.) Anthony Watts targeted Dr Trenberth earlier this week in his recent article about ENSO and the PDO and the impact on global surface temperatures. Now he's decided to have a shot at him over the Earth's energy budget.

I don't imagine Anthony or his followers have much of a clue about how the energy budget is calculated. Anthony posted a link to the Trenberth, Fasullo and Kiehl (2009) paper on the subject, but I imagine his eyes glazed over when they got to the first paragraph.  That's if he even started to read it.  I know my mind went a bit fuzzy trying to work through and remember all the different sources of data and the corrections and adjustments that were made.

In his article, Anthony discusses the differences over time between versions of the Earth's energy budget.  He compares a poster on the NASA website with the budget in the 2007 AR4 IPCC report and Trenberth09.  The AR4 diagram was from Kiehl and Trenberth 2007.

Now I don't have any problem with comparing different energy budgets over time.  It's an interesting exercise.  What Anthony does, though, is try to make out there is something shonky going on (using the word "revisionist") and that Kevin Trenberth at best made mistakes or was deceitful.  All of which is a deliberate disinformation tactic to stir up his loony science denying fans.  And, presumably, to make any normal person who strays to WUWT by accident, doubt the science.  (No normal person would venture to WUWT on purpose if they were seeking information.)

About the differences between AR4 (2007) and Trenberth09 Anthony wrote:

Note that in Trenberth’s 2009 paper, the energy from “back radiation” (from GHG action) value went up from 324 w/square meter cited by the IPCC in 2007 to 333 w/square meter. The net effect of that is increased energy back to Earth’s surface, making it warmer.

It seems odd that would increase so much, so quickly in two years. 

Of course it's not so much that the long wave downwelling radiation increased so much in two years, it's more that in the later paper the data were revised.  Other data were revised too, like the thermal radiation leaving the surface.  What it means is that the net absorption at the surface wasn't anything like 9 W/m² difference. Anthony continues, comparing the two earlier diagrams with the NASA poster:

Even more surprising, is that now, the value has been revised even higher, to 340.3 w/square meter, while at the same time, the “Net Absorbed” value, that extra bit of energy that we get to keep from the sun on Earth, thanks to increased GHG action, has gone DOWN.

Anthony speculated:

Perhaps the recent published works on climate sensitivity, coupled with observations of “the pause” have had some affect on these numbers as well. 

I'd say he's got that backwards.  Observations would help inform estimates of climate sensitivity not the other way around. He got one thing right, though.  Scientists will undoubtedly continue to work on refining estimates of the different components of the energy budget.

The latest IPCC energy balance

For some reason, Anthony didn't refer to AR5.  The diagram there is based on a still newer paper, by Martin Wild, Doris Folini, Christoph Schär, Norman Loeb, Ellsworth G. Dutton, and Gert König-Langlo, which I'll refer to as Wild12.  That paper draws on the work of a whole heap of people, including Kevin Trenberth and his colleagues.  Here is the energy balance diagram from Wild12 as presented in the IPCC report. Click it for a larger version:

Figure 2.11: Global mean energy budget under present day climate conditions. Numbers state magnitudes of the individual energy fluxes in W/m2, adjusted within their uncertainty ranges to close the energy budgets. Numbers in parentheses attached to the energy fluxes cover the range of values in line with observational constraints. Figure adapted from Wild et al. (2013). Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 page 2-127

Here is the chart from the NASA poster for comparison. (Click to enlarge.)

Source: NASA

For the nitpicker, here are the main differences between the NASA poster and the Wild12/IPCC diagrams.  First up, the NASA poster expresses the energy fluxes to one decimal place, but has no ranges.  The IPCC chart expresses the fluxes in whole numbers but includes ranges.  As for the numbers, here is where the diagrams agree (to the nearest whole number):

• Incoming solar TOA 340 W/m². 
• Solar reflected at the top of atmosphere 100 W/m². 
• Thermal up at the surface 398 W/m². 
• Net absorbed at the surface 0.6 W/m². 

And here is where the numbers differ (rounding to whole numbers in the case of the NASA poster):

• Total thermal outgoing 240 W/m² (NASA) vs 239 W/m² (IPCC)  
• Solar absorbed by the atmosphere - 77 W/m²  (NASA) vs 79 W/m²  (IPCC)
• Solar absorbed at the surface - 163 W/m²  (NASA) vs 161 W/m²  (IPCC)
• Solar reflected at the surface - 23 W/m² (NASA) vs 24 W/m² (IPCC)
• Solar reflected by clouds and the atmosphere - 77 W/m²  (NASA) vs 76 W/m²  (IPCC)
• Thermal down at the surface - 340 W/m² (NASA) vs 342 W/m² (IPCC)
• Latent heat of evaporation - 86 W/m²  (NASA) vs 84 W/m²  (IPCC)
• Sensible heat at the surface (conduction and convection) - 18 W/m² (NASA) vs 20 W/m² (IPCC)

When the numbers are summed, the NASA poster has a 0.6 W/m². difference at the top of atmosphere and a 0.6 W/m². net absorbed at the surface.

The IPCC diagram has ranges and uses whole numbers so it sums to 1 W/m² difference at the top of atmosphere.  At the bottom of the IPCC chart it shows 0.6 W/m². net absorbed at the surface.

The energy numbers at the top of atmosphere are the same for both, allowing for rounding. The main difference between the charts is how energy is apportioned.  That is, the apportioning of the energy absorbed and reflected within in the atmosphere vs that absorbed and reflected at the surface. Yet the differences are not that great.

Settled vs Unsettled Science

Like all fake sceptics, Anthony doesn't know what is meant by "settled science". Most particularly not when it comes to climate science but I don't expect he would understand it when it comes to any branch of science.  And like all disinformers, Anthony pretends that if science changes it means that either "all the science is wrong" or the "science is a hoax" or scientists are just making stuff up.  You'd think he'd have figured out by now that the reason people do research is to refine and add to knowledge.  And there will always be new things to learn.

The "more settled science" is the energy flux at the top of atmosphere.  The satellites do a good job of monitoring this.

The "unsettled science" is how energy is apportioned within the atmosphere and between the atmosphere and the surface.  Not only is it difficult to get measurements and use them to calculate the various parts, but I would expect values would vary over time.  Not just on a minute by minute, hour by hour, season by season basis.  It will undoubtedly change as the climate changes - there may be more or less clouds in the future.  Different types of clouds may predominate in future climates. Vegetation patterns change over time.  Ice is certainly melting.  And so on.

Where do the measurements come from?

The source of data used to calculate the various components of the energy budget has changed quite a bit over the years, going by the papers.  Here is what Wild12 states:

In the present study, we do not only rely on satellite observations, but make extensive use of the information contained in radiation measurements taken from the Earth surface, to provide direct observational constraints also for the surface fluxes. Such observations become increasingly available from ground-based radiation networks. We use these observations to assess the radiation budgets as simulated in the latest modeling efforts performed within the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) for the upcoming 5th IPCC assessment report (IPCC-AR5) (Sects. 3, 4). We further combine the surface observations with these models to infer best estimates of the global mean surface radiative components (Sect. 4). 

Anthony and his deniers wouldn't like that much, combining surface observations with models to infer best estimates.  Many of them would prefer their models to come in glossy magazines or perhaps matchboxes (surprisingly, these still exist).

One of the important constraints commonly used is ocean heat content, for example.  Another thing worth noting is that CERES doesn't have a thermal channel (outgoing longwave radiation).  Wild12 states that at the top of atmosphere, "thermal daytime radiances are determined from the difference between the total and solar channel radiances".

There is a lot of detailed explanation in all the papers of just how the energy budget is put together.  It makes for heavy reading, but it's not hard to follow if you take the time and concentrate. The main difficulty I had, not being familiar with the subject, was keeping track of all the components and data sources.  There is a lot of jargon to learn, but the acronyms and terms are well explained in each of the papers.

From the scientists - the ones who work out the energy budget

In regard to working out the details of the energy budget, here are some quotes just from the three papers I've referred to here.

The first quote is from Kiehl and Trenberth (2007), to show that people have been considering this matter for some time - like almost a hundred years.  Also where the biggest hurdles lay at the time.

There is a long history of attempts to construct a global annual mean surface–atmosphere energy budget for the earth. The first such budget was provided by Dines (1917). Over the years improvements in estimating the global annual mean energy budget have resulted from satellite observations. In particular, the narrowed uncertainty in the planetary albedo and outgoing longwave radiation (e.g., Hunt et al. 1986) have greatly improved our understanding of the earth’s energy budget. Recently, global satellite-derived estimates of precipitation have also aided (through conservation of moisture) in determining the annual global mean surface latent heat flux. Despite these important improvements in our understanding, a number of key terms in the energy budget remain uncertain, in particular, the net absorbed shortwave and longwave surface fluxes.

This next one is from Trenberth, Fasullo and Kiehl (2009). I chose this particular passage because it gives a glimpse of the complexities.  There are a lot of things to account for when working out the energy budget in the detail. That's why so many different sources of data are required - including data from satellites and measurements taken at the surface. (My paras).

Weather and climate on Earth are determined by the amount and distribution of incoming radiation from the sun. For an equilibrium climate, OLR [outgoing longwave radiation] necessarily balances the incoming ASR [absorbed solar radiation], although there is a great deal of fascinating atmosphere, ocean, and land phenomena that couple the two.

Incoming radiant energy may be scattered and reflected by clouds and aerosols or absorbed in the atmosphere. The transmitted radiation is then either absorbed or reflected at the Earth’s surface. Radiant solar or shortwave energy is transformed into sensible heat, latent energy (involving different water states), potential energy, and kinetic energy before being emitted as longwave radiant energy.

Energy may be stored for some time, transported in various forms, and converted among the different types, giving rise to a rich variety of weather or turbulent phenomena in the atmosphere and ocean. Moreover, the energy balance can be upset in various ways, changing the climate and associated weather.

The final quote is from Wild12. I've left the references in deliberately to give some idea of the amount of work done over the years and the number of different people doing the work:

Despite the central role of the global energy balance in the climate system, substantial uncertainties exist in the quantification of its different components, and its representation in climate models, as pointed out in numerous studies published over the past decades (e.g., Hartmann and Short 1980; Hartmann et al. 1986; Ramanathan et al. 1989; Gutowski et al. 1991; Ohmura and Gilgen 1993; Pinker et al. 1995; Li et al. 1997; Gleckler and Weare 1997; Kiehl and Trenberth 1997; Wild et al. 1998; Gupta et al. 1999; Hatzianastassiou and Vardavas 1999; Potter and Cess 2004; Raschke and Ohmura 2005; Trenberth et al. 2009; Trager-Chatterjee et al. 2010; Ohmura 2012; Qian et al. 2012; Wild 2012; Stephens et al. 2012a, b). This becomes also evident when comparing different schematic diagrams of the global energy balance published in text books or in the peer-reviewed literature, which often vary greatly in the numbers given therein representing the magnitudes of these energy flows in terms of global means (e.g., Kiehl and Trenberth 1997; Trenberth et al. 2009; Wild et al. 1998; Raschke and Ohmura 2005; Wild 2012; Stephens et al. 2012b).

Anthony Watts thinks that all the data comes from CERES instruments.  (Willis Eschenbach at WUWT plays with CERES data a lot, and because he doesn't understand it makes all sorts of fundamental errors.)  Anthony wrote, for example (my bold italics):

Note that somehow, between 2009 and the present, it was decided (presumably based on CERES measurements) that the Net Absorbed value (which is the extra energy absorbed that would result from increased GHG’s) would go DOWN from 0.9 w/square meter to 0.6w/square meter – an decrease of one third of the 2009 value.

Actually, that figure is the same as that derived by Wild12.  If Anthony wanted to, he could read the paper and see how it was derived. With satellites, the derivation of top of atmosphere energy fluxes is getting very accurate.  It's in the atmosphere and at the surface (including, probably, within the oceans) that it's very difficult to get measurements that can give meaningful numbers at the global level.  Here is how Wild12 explains it:

Knowledge on the energy exchange between Sun, Earth and space has recently been improved through new satellite missions such as the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES, Wielicki et al. 1996) and the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE, Anderson and Cahalan 2005). These allow the determination of the top of atmosphere (TOA) radiative flux exchanges with unprecedented accuracy (Loeb et al. 2012).

Much less is known, however, about the energy distribution within the climate system and at the Earth surface. Unlike the fluxes at the TOA, the surface fluxes cannot be directly measured by satellites. Instead, they have to be inferred from the measurable TOA radiances using empirical or physical models to account for atmospheric attenuation and emission, which introduces additional uncertainties. Uncertainties in the components of the surface radiation budget are thus generally larger and less well quantified than at the TOA. Debated are, for example, the partitioning of solar energy absorption between the atmosphere and surface, as well as the determination of the thermal energy exchanges at the surface/atmosphere interface (e.g., Raschke and Ohmura 2005; Wild 2008, 2012; Trenberth et al. 2009; Stephens et al. 2012b).

The above highlights again just where there is "unsettled science".  Notice particularly how Wild12 refers to the thermal energy exchanges at the surface/atmosphere interface.  Also the reference to how much solar energy is absorbed in the atmosphere before it reaches the surface.

Countering the Serengeti Strategy

Now go back to Anthony Watts mockery of the work that people have been able to do.  He says of the latest changes to the energy budget that: "It seems to be a clear case of observations trumping Trenberth".

There's the Serengeti Strategy in action.  Anthony doesn't mention Kevin Trenberth's co-authors, John Fasullo or J. T. Kiehl.  He doesn't give a hint of all the other people who've worked on this subject over the years, including the team that wrote the paper featured in the IPCC AR5 report.  He doesn't mention the fact that even on the NASA poster itself there is another paper referenced, that of Loeb et al (2009), which has a whole other team.  Nor does he mention the fact that there are papers relating to the energy budget being published all the time.  Some look in depth at different components, other at the global picture all up. Here's a Google search just since 2013.

And since Anthony is just another denier who doesn't even know where the observations come from or anything else about the data, who thinks that all the data for the Earth's energy budget comes from CERES, Anthony comes across as just another nutter when he talks about "observations trumping Trenberth".

---

Kiehl, J. T., and Kevin E. Trenberth. "Earth's annual global mean energy budget." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 78, no. 2 (1997): 197-208.

Loeb, Norman G., Bruce A. Wielicki, David R. Doelling, G. Louis Smith, Dennis F. Keyes, Seiji Kato, Natividad Manalo-Smith, Takmeng Wong, 2009: Toward Optimal Closure of the Earth's Top-of-Atmosphere Radiation Budget. J. Climate, 22, 748–766. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/2008JCLI2637.1

Trenberth, Kevin E., John T. Fasullo, and Jeffrey Kiehl. "Earth's global energy budget." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 90, no. 3 (2009): 311-323.

Wild, Martin, Doris Folini, Christoph Schär, Norman Loeb, Ellsworth G. Dutton, and Gert König-Langlo. "The global energy balance from a surface perspective." Climate Dynamics (2012): 1-28.

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From the WUWT comments

Here is a selection of comments from WUWT (archived here). The first comment is amazingly reasonable. Rob Long says, presumably referring to Anthony scoffing at the changes over time and maybe to his pointing that at the surface, the net absorption changed from 0.9 W/m² to 0.6 W/m²:

January 17, 2014 at 12:22 am
This is not surprising given the tiny fraction of the “imbalance” relative to the total incoming energy.

It would be remarkable if reliable measurements could be made to this level of accuracy given all the variables involved.

Expect to see this number changed again and again.

PetterT hopefully asks if CO2 has stopped working:

January 17, 2014 at 12:24 am
What is the uncertaity of these figures +/- ? Maybe net absorbed due to CO2 is zero?

jim asks, quite a reasonable question - he could find the answer in the papers if he was so inclined:

January 17, 2014 at 1:04 am
How accurate are those measurements?
The result is 0.2% of the measurements.
If each had a 0.1% accuracy, the error could be up to 0.7 w/m2

phillipbratby is a greenhouse effect denier of the "slayer" type and says:

January 17, 2014 at 2:10 am
Yes, and you would have thought by now that they would have realised that recycled radiation (back radiation) cannot add heat to the surface from which it originated in the first place.

Frank adds some value and says:

January 17, 2014 at 2:21 am
Anthony wrote: “Note that somehow, between 2009 and the present, it was decided (presumably based on CERES measurements) that the Net Absorbed value (which is the extra energy absorbed that would result from increased GHG’s) would go DOWN from 0.9 w/square meter to 0.6w/square meter – an decrease of one third of the 2009 value.”

Since most of net absorbed heat ends up warming the ocean (supposedly 93%), the Net Absorbed Energy is probably calculated from the amount of warming of the ocean. Increasing amount of ARGO data has allowed a more accurate calculation for Net Absorbed Energy.
Net Absorbed Energy can not be calculated from the other values shown in these diagrams because the uncertainty in these values is far too high to say whether the net is positive (warming temperature) or negative (cooling temperature). DLR and latent heat have changed by 7 and 6 W/m2 – a changes that are 10-fold the net absorbed energy.

SWR, reflected SWR, and escaping LWR are measured from space reasonably well (+/1 W/m2?).

Downward LWR is being measure at some locations, but we don’t have reliable planet-wide coverage. The value shown probably comes from re-analyses made with climate models forced to fit observations, not direct observation. Latent heat can be easily calculated from precipitation (rain and snow). We have more data on precipitation from satellites which probably accounts for the 8% increase in latent heat. There is relatively little information about the amount of energy leaving the surface via thermals. In his 2009 paper, Trenberth chose this number so that there would be a net +0.9 W/m2 imbalance at the surface. He probably did the same thing here.

Gail Combs decides what the "warmists" do and says (excerpt):

January 17, 2014 at 2:35 am
...The warmists always leave out TIME (nanoseconds) and day and night. As another commenter said they live on a flat earth with the sun always shining at 1/4 energy. They should be careful not to fall of the edge.

I've absolutely no idea what notion johnmarshall has rattling around in his noggin when he says:

January 17, 2014 at 2:41 am
Total rubbish AGAIN.
So NASA believes in a NON rotating planet, seems funny given their experience in space, and insolation at a level that would not drive the water cycle. TOTAL NON-REALITY which means a model that assumes an impossible process, the GHE, and no process to actually start that impossible process or any feedback to control it at the levels claimed.
See me after school Kevin.

timspence10 suffers from personal incredulity and says:

January 17, 2014 at 3:38 am
Maybe it’s just me but these graphics appear to made of ‘wishful thinking’, it’s nice to see their thinking sketched out in that format but the rest (the science part) leaves me with the impression that they are stabbing in the dark. Too many variables are treated as constants and also, the incoming energy is a fuzzy composite of IR, UV and visible spectrum, all of which vary and have different absorption and reflection properties. Too much averaging going on for me.

Joe Chang wants to include photosynthesis.  (He doesn't mention ocean waves or animal metabolism or bacterial growth or insects.) He says:

January 17, 2014 at 8:35 am
I am still curious as to why the energy balance diagram does not show photosynthesis? Is the net absorbed heat go to global warming or to support plant growth? If 186W/m2 of sunlight reaches the surface, say for example if 20% of the surface is involved in photosynthesis (including stuff that grows in the water/ocean) with a conversion of 3-6%, that would work out to 1-2W/m2. Does the global warming model assume no plant growth?

Michael Moon is another "slayer" and "ilker" too, he says:

January 17, 2014 at 8:48 am

“Back Radiation!”

This is a figment of the imagination. The atmosphere does not heat the Earth’s surface, as the atmosphere is cooler than the Earth’s surface virtually everywhere and always. And, more importantly, the atmosphere does not heat itself.

A Pyrgeometer is a very dangerous instrument in the hands of a “Climate Scientist.” Point it at the sky, read some Watts/M2, and conclude that the atmosphere heats the Earth’s surface because you are measuring a flux. Apparently Trenberth and his ilk are ignorant of the Second Law. How they got themselves these jobs, not knowing that, is a failure of our society.

CO2 does absorb and thermalize IR in the 15-micron band. This is not strictly speaking Heat Transfer, but an electrical effect, same way a microwave oven works. The entire atmosphere absorbs and radiates heat, as does all matter above absolute Zero.

I hope everyone on here understands all this, not just one or two of you which is what seems to be a fair assumption after reading these comments…

Which is a suitable note on which to end the comments from the WUWT Illiterati Society.

Anthony Watts takes on Kevin Trenberth and loses big time

I often wonder, as I'm sure you do, if Anthony Watts ever reads any of the articles he puts up at WUWT.  Today he's posted about an article in Nature, which in part draws on a paper by Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo published late last year.

Thing is, Anthony has already posted a number of articles about Trenberth and Fasullo (2013).  There is this one by Bob Tisdale, which I wrote about here. And this one and this one - both also by Bob Tisdale.  Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale was trying to argue that Trenberth and Fasullo were cheating or something silly like that.  (Since I wrote the main article, Anthony has elevated his piece to a "sticky", which just shows what HotWhopper readers know from past experience, Anthony's memory is not that great.)

In this latest WUWT article (archived here), Anthony wrote this, as if it was the first article about the Trenberth Fasullo paper at WUWT, instead of the fourth in a just a little over a month:

From the “settled science” department. It seems even Dr. Kevin Trenberth is now admitting to the cyclic influences of the AMO and PDO on global climate. Neither “carbon” nor “carbon dioxide” is mentioned in this article that cites Trenberth as saying: “The 1997 to ’98 El Niño event was a trigger for the changes in the Pacific, and I think that’s very probably the beginning of the hiatus,”

This is significant, as it represents a coming to terms with “the pause” not only by Nature, but by Trenberth too.

For anyone who knows of Kevin Trenberth's work, to say that first second sentence of Anthony's is ludicrous would be an understatement.

Kevin Trenberth has been publishing papers about the oceans for more than forty years.  He knows more about oceans than all the purported hundreds of thousands of WUWT readers combined. John Fasullo is younger, but if you combine them, they have more than 55 person years of science between them.

If Anthony Watts is interested in tracking the history of discovery of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, he could do a lot worse than starting with the following two seminal papers by Kevin Trenberth, going back nearly 25 years:

Trenberth, Kevin E. "Recent observed interdecadal climate changes in the Northern Hemisphere." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 71, no. 7 (1990): 988-993.

Trenberth, Kevin E., and James W. Hurrell. "Decadal atmosphere-ocean variations in the Pacific." Climate Dynamics 9, no. 6 (1994): 303-319.


Since we're tracking back history, this 1981 paper might be of interest - though it's probably peripheral to the subject, it was cited in Mantua, Hare et al (1997).

Trenberth, Kevin E., and Daniel A. Paolino Jr. "Characteristic patterns of variability of sea level pressure in the Northern Hemisphere." Monthly Weather Review 109, no. 6 (1981): 1169-1189.

What caught my eye was the opening sentence, particularly given Anthony's opening comments about Dr Trenberth "finally admitting to ... cyclic influences":

The atmospheric circulation is characterized by various "centers of action" which are spatially interdependent.

Since I've plugged the references here, I'll add the PDO paper:

Mantua, Nathan J., Steven R. Hare, Yuan Zhang, John M. Wallace, and Robert C. Francis. "A Pacific interdecadal climate oscillation with impacts on salmon production." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 78, no. 6 (1997): 1069-1079.


Back to the Nature article - here are some key excerpts discussing the "hiatus" in surface temperature rise in recent years:

Trenberth, ... estimated that aerosols and solar activity account for just 20% of the hiatus. That leaves the bulk of the hiatus to the oceans, which serve as giant sponges for heat. And here, the spotlight falls on the equatorial Pacific.

...Just before the hiatus took hold, that region had turned unusually warm during the El Niño of 1997–98, which fuelled extreme weather across the planet, from floods in Chile and California to droughts and wildfires in Mexico and Indonesia. But it ended just as quickly as it had begun, and by late 1998 cold waters — a mark of El Niño’s sister effect, La Niña — had returned to the eastern equatorial Pacific with a vengeance. More importantly, the entire eastern Pacific flipped into a cool state that has continued more or less to this day.

This variation in ocean temperature, known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), may be a crucial piece of the hiatus puzzle. The cycle reverses every 15–30 years, and in its positive phase, the oscillation favours El Niño, which tends to warm the atmosphere (see ‘The fickle ocean’). After a couple of decades of releasing heat from the eastern and central Pacific, the region cools and enters the negative phase of the PDO. This state tends towards La Niña, which brings cool waters up from the depths along the Equator and tends to cool the planet. Researchers identified the PDO pattern in 1997, but have only recently begun to understand how it fits in with broader ocean-circulation patterns and how it may help to explain the hiatus.

One important finding came in 2011, when a team of researchers at NCAR led by Gerald Meehl reported that inserting a PDO pattern into global climate models causes decade-scale breaks in global warming3. Ocean-temperature data from the recent hiatus reveal why: in a subsequent study, the NCAR researchers showed that more heat moved into the deep ocean after 1998, which helped to prevent the atmosphere from warming6. In a third paper, the group used computer models to document the flip side of the process: when the PDO switches to its positive phase, it heats up the surface ocean and atmosphere, helping to drive decades of rapid warming7.

A key breakthrough came last year from Shang-Ping Xie and Yu Kosaka at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. The duo took a different tack, by programming a model with actual sea surface temperatures from recent decades in the eastern equatorial Pacific, and then seeing what happened to the rest of the globe8. Their model not only recreated the hiatus in global temperatures, but also reproduced some of the seasonal and regional climate trends that have marked the hiatus, including warming in many areas and cooler northern winters.

...That was investigated by Trenberth and John Fasullo, also at NCAR, who brought in winds and ocean data to explain how the pattern emerges4. Their study documents how tropical trade winds associated with La Niña conditions help to drive warm water westward and, ultimately, deep into the ocean, while promoting the upwelling of cool waters along the eastern equatorial region. In extreme cases, such as the La Niña of 1998, this may be able to push the ocean into a cool phase of the PDO. An analysis of historical data buttressed these conclusions, showing that the cool phase of the PDO coincided with a few decades of cooler temperatures after the Second World War (see ‘The Pacific’s global reach’), and that the warm phase lined up with the sharp spike seen in global temperatures between 1976 and 1998 (ref. 4).

The article goes on to discuss the work of Mark Cane, who proposes that global warming may lead to extended La Ninas.  Other scientists' work suggests that global warming may lead to more El Ninos. Time (and more research) will tell.

Now you'll be wondering why Anthony Watts mentioned the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.  So am I.  It isn't mentioned in the Nature article although it is mentioned in Trenberth and Fasullo (2013).  Maybe Anthony actually read a scientific paper (not likely).

From the WUWT comments

There aren't any stand out comments, so I'll award the comment of the day to Anthony Watts himself for his opening comments about Kevin Trenberth, who was arguably very influential in shaping the understanding of what we know today as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Most WUWT readers will be in for a big shock when the next El Nino arrives.


DirkH doesn't have a clue about climate models and says:

January 16, 2014 at 4:10 am
“The simplest explanation for both the hiatus and the discrepancy in the models is natural variability.”

No, that’s nonsense. The simplest explanation is that the theory is falsified, and that the models are wrong. In fact, EVERYTHING points at the models being wrong, false and useless. Not ONE thing points to the models being right, correct, or useful. There are simply no such reports. We should see thousands of triumphant papers confirming again and again that the models got this right and that right after many years of painstaking development, but we NEVER see any such report.

That’s like celebrating the 100,000th Lancaster bomber built and shipped over the Atlantic while not one of them ever made it through the Kammhuber line.

johnmarshall is a "scientists don't no nuffin'" denier and says:

January 16, 2014 at 4:12 am
Trenberth getting a reality hit?
One of his problems is a complete misunderstanding of latent heat which is where much heat has been used for in cooling at the surface and has stupid graphic in AR4 which uses a flat earth with 24/7 sunlight and no idea from where radiated energy comes from.

Chris Marlowe says:

January 16, 2014 at 4:29 am
The smartest of these guys will be looking for an exit strategy and will eventually look the other way if anyone suggests they were once on the bandwagon beating the drum.

Stephen Richards is a conspiracy nutter and says:

January 16, 2014 at 4:36 am
What I don’t want is for these guys to remain in place when this whole scam is exposed. Like Erlich they will just keep coming back with another scare for money scheme.

M Courtney struggles to understand climate and energy accumulation and says:

January 16, 2014 at 4:46 am
Not sure that this report does fully recognise the impact of natural cycles.
It seems to think that the cooling phase of the PDO exactly balances the warming from Greenhouse gases over several decades when the emissions have varied.

That raises two questions:
1 How come the balancing is so precise – are our emissions coupled to the PDO or is their effect swamped by the PDO?

2 If the PDO can match the magnitude of AGW on th ecool sided, can it match the magnitude of AGW on the warm side? If so, how do we know any of the 20thC warming was manmade?

Ivor Ward misunderstands what's written and thinks that Kevin Trenberth agrees with Bob Tisdale that there are leprechauns burning coal fires in the oceans and says:

January 16, 2014 at 5:02 am
So essentially he is saying that Bob Tisdale is right and he was wrong. Why does Trenberth not just say that and get it over with?

Jim Cripwell is about right (except when it comes to Australia's PM Tony Abbott) when he says (excerpt):

January 16, 2014 at 5:12 am
Unfortunately, what is written on WUWT carries little weight with our politicians and the MSM. 

graphicconception also mistakenly thinks that Kevin Trenberth attributes global warming to leprechauns like Bob Tisdale does, and says:

January 16, 2014 at 5:24 am
The temperature graph is a kind of integration of the PDO Index graph.
(You need to add 0.6 to the Index, cumulate and then scale. Where do I collect my Nobel Prize?)

So as Bob Tisdale has been saying, if I understand it correctly, PDO variations are not just oscillations about a mean. They leave a resultant change.

evanmjones knows nothing about science either.  I bet he thinks a fake sceptic invented the PDO when he says:

January 16, 2014 at 5:29 am
Yeah, they finally discovered the PDO. Sort of like a professional secretary discovering the Shift key. Bloody amateurs.
Now they need to “discover” that their panic was due to a positive PDO and, consequently, their “projections” were at least twice too high. Then maybe they can learn the rest of the alphabet . . .

I can't say I agree with clivebest when he says:

January 16, 2014 at 5:56 am
The graphic above shows that we have only just entered a new 30 year long cool period of the PDO. This means that there will be no further warming until ~2030. Warming may well then resume after 2030, but whichever way you look at it, climate sensitivity looks to be about one half of current IPCC estimates. How is the IPCC going to keep the egg off its face for the next 15 years ?

Source: NOAA

Conspiracy nutter Timothy spawned an idiot in David Ball, who says:

January 16, 2014 at 6:13 am
“Now, after having wasted at least 30 years of public money and time due to our false ideology, we return you to your regularly scheduled viewing,…..”
Idiots.

Resourceguy says:

January 16, 2014 at 6:26 am
At some point the deadenders will attack the wavering warmists and excommunicate them from the treasure hunt known as carbon tax revenue. The only question is whether it will be a peaceful process or a North Korean-style purge.

Clay Marley is mistaken if he thinks Bob Tisdale invented the "sloshing" ENSO.  Unlike Bob, who thinks the oceans will keep warming forever, Clay  is hopeful that Earth's temperatures will one day return to "normal".  He says "it has to end...":

January 16, 2014 at 6:38 am
First I’d heard the term “sloshing” is in Tisdale’s posts and book. It isn’t intended to be a scientifiky term. That Trentberth uses it probably means at least that he is reading Tisdale, which would be a good thing. But he is hoping/praying for another strong El Niño that would start the warming again.

Tisdale is saying that a strong El Niño will cause a rapid SST rise over much of the earth. After the event, SST’s cool slowly. If the El Niño events come frequently enough there isn’t enough time between them to cool completely. Thus we see a stairstep warming with slight cooling between events. This is what has been happening since around 1918.

It has to end though. We can’t keep getting strong El Niños until the oceans boil. So there must be some process that slows and weakens the El Niños and allows the rest-of-world to get back to lower temps.

Richard M says that Dr Trenberth "don't know nuffin'" about oceans and could learn a thing or two from Perennially Puzzled Bob.  This one is runner-up comment of the day - after Anthony's opening comment:

January 16, 2014 at 7:15 am
Trenberth doesn’t realize that El Niño events might not quite work the same during a -PDO. As Tisdale has demonstrated it is the after effects of the El Niño during a +PDO that have a lot to do with the step up warming that occurs even after the following La Niña. I have a feeling that the changes in circulation in a -PDO will eliminate that effect (didn’t see it during the 2009-2010 El Niño). That is probably why the global temperature falls during a -PDO.

I wonder how many copies of Tisdale’s books will find their way to NCAR? Or, should I say …. have found their way?

These WUWT-ers aren't just scientifically illiterate. They are deluded.  Here's another one from  Economic Geologist who says:

January 16, 2014 at 7:42 am
I think Trenberth is reading Tisdale, but will never give him credit. The AGW crowd will slowly morph their scientific positions as their predictions continue to fail, and no-one will be held accountable for all the money wasted on useless, misguided research. And no-one in the skeptic camp will be acknowledged for having seen the weaknesses in the climate community’s science. There’s no justice in this world.

Oh - that's more than enough. I can't be bothered reading the rest. You can read more here if you want to.