Matthew England wins the 2017 Tinker-Muse Prize. Charles Rotter spruiks mistruths @wattsupwiththat

Congratulations to Professor Matthew England of the Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC) at the University of New South Wales. He is this year's winner of the Tinker-Muse Prize for Science and Policy in Antarctica. It's a prestigious award and comes with a prize of $US100,000. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) administers the award process independently of the Tinker Foundation.

A pioneer scientist with a rare ability

Professor England does a huge amount of research covering multiple topics. One subject on which he has made an important contribution is increasing our understanding of the Southern Ocean and the Southern Annular Mode (SAM). As stated on his website, "Quantifying the natural variability of Southern Ocean water masses, including their properties and overturning rates, is vital for detecting anthropogenic climate change."

Figure 1 | Schematic depth-latitude diagram showing the major circulation and water masses of the Southern Ocean. The following water masses are highlighted: (1) Antarctic Bottom Water flowing along the abyssal ocean, (2) Circumpolar Deep Water upwelling into the Antarctic Divergence Zone, (3) Antarctic Intermediate Water in the temperature range 4-6°C, and (4) Subantarctic Mode Water in the upper ocean north of the Subantarctic Front (SAF). Source: Matthew England's website

The water vapour penny precipitates, almost, for Willis Eschenbach at WUWT

There's a new article at WUWT by Willis Eschenbach (archived here, latest here). It took him almost twenty years, but he's finally found the RSS total precipitable water (TPW) record. For years Willis has been arguing that Earth's climate can't change much because of thunderstorms. It seems that he may have finally woken up to the fact that there is more water vapour in a warmer atmosphere than in a cooler one and that this is contributing to the greenhouse effect. He wrote (about the dataset that was reported 20 years ago in 1996): "One of my great pleasures is to come across a new dataset."

I've been meaning to write about global warming, water vapour and precipitation for some time. There have been several papers on the subject (see below). What's happening is:

• the amount of water in the air is increasing as the world warms,
• the water cycle is intensifying,
• therefore there is more rain (and snow), and
• more greenhouse warming because water vapour is a strong greenhouse gas.

Warning: This is a rather long article, with no apologies :)

Global surface warming continues without pause contrary to denier claims

There's another new paper out in Nature Climate Change today that discusses the recent trends on global surface temperature. It's by a rash of notable authors: John C. Fyfe, Gerald A. Meehl, Matthew H. England, Michael E. Mann, Benjamin D. Santer, Gregory M. Flato, Ed Hawkins, Nathan P. Gillett, Shang-Ping Xie, Yu Kosaka, Neil C. Swart. Anthony Watts heralded the paper (archived here), which is unusual because he normally scoffs at the findings of most of these authors. He referred to an article in the Examiner newspaper, which claims that this paper contradicted "another study last June" that stated that the "the hiatus was just an artifact that “vanishes when biases in temperature data are corrected.”

Well it doesn't contradict it. Needless to say Anthony and the Examiner was comparing apples and oranges.

The new paper, Fyfe16, discussed the reality of the slowdown. There was no "hiatus" or stopping of global warming, contrary to Anthony Watts' headline. The rise in global surface temperatures slowed down earlier this century compared to the rate of rise from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s. As Jeff Tollefson of Nature wrote about the lead author: "Fyfe uses the term “slowdown” rather than “hiatus” and stresses that it does not in any way undermine global-warming theory."

More global warming denial from Anthony Watts at WUWT

The denial continues at Anthony Watts' blog WUWT. He's written a few words all by himself, for a change (archived here). (In the past four or five months, Anthony Watts has written almost nothing. He's handed his blog over to his readers to post their nonsense instead of writing his own nonsense. )

Source: Skeptical Science

Today Anthony is denying something that's plain - that the world is warming and climate change is happening. He was writing about a new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change, and he topped and tailed it with some words that he wrote all by himself - in what comes across as frustrated denial that the ice age still hasn't cometh.

Global warming will continue in line with long term projections

The paper is by scientists Matthew H. England, Jules B. Kajtar & Nicola Maher of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales. What they did was examine about 200 climate model projections, separating those that showed the sort of slowdown of the past few years from those that didn't.

Getting a tad excitable at WUWT over the ups and downs of ENSO

The little WUWT-ers have been getting quite worked up lately. I think it's got something to do with the fact that reports from GISS and NOAA and the Hadley Centre and others point to the fact that 2014 was the hottest year on record.

Today Bob Tisdale, who seems to be Anthony Watts' proxy while he's on holidays or whatever he's been doing this past few weeks, has written a very short article about a new paper in Nature Climate Change. Very short for Bob Tisdale, that is. It must be almost another record. And he's broken still another record. There's not a single drawing, diagram or chart of anything, let alone sea surface temperatures.

What Bob did write?  Well you can read it for yourself here if you want to. The paper is more interesting than Bob's article. Wenju Cai et al have written in Nature Climate Change about some work they've been doing on modeling ENSO.

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.

Don't count on hiatus, volcanoes won't help us

If you thought that global warming was bad enough now, just wait.

I was following up an article at WUWT (archived here), where deniers seem to have discovered for the first time that sulphate aerosols have a cooling effect. I thought they'd have known that by now, but no. More on that below.

In doing so, I found a new paper at GRL, which is a bit of a worry. The paper is "Drivers of decadal hiatus periods in the 20th and 21st Centuries" by Nicola Maher, Alexander Sen Gupta and Matthew H. England from the University of New South Wales.

The scientists figure that there won't be too many hiatus in surface temperatures after 2030, even if there's a large volcanic eruption. It's just going to get a lot hotter, and a lot hotter still if we don't cut CO2 emissions.

Here is the abstract:

The latest generation of climate model simulations are used to investigate the occurrence of hiatus periods in global surface air temperature in the past and under two future warming scenarios. Hiatus periods are identified in three categories, (i) those due to volcanic eruptions, (ii) those associated with negative phases of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) and (iii) those affected by anthropogenically released aerosols in the mid 20th Century. The likelihood of future hiatus periods is found to be sensitive to the rate of change of anthropogenic forcing. Under high rates of greenhouse gas emissions there is little chance of a hiatus decade occurring beyond 2030, even in the event of a large volcanic eruption.

We further demonstrate that most non-volcanic hiatuses across CMIP5 models are associated with enhanced cooling in the equatorial Pacific linked to the transition to a negative IPO phase.

If you're around much after 2030, best plan ahead. You can look forward to unrelenting warming with maybe a little relief every now and again (relatively speaking) from negative IPO phases or a big volcanic eruption. Below is a figure from the supporting information, which shows the projected effect of volcanoes on the surface air temperature based on the Access 1-0 climate model. Barely a blip, even if there were an equivalent of Krakatau.

SAT (surface air temperature) for the RCP4.5 (blue) and RCP8.5 (red) future scenarios in the ACCESS1-0 model. The effect of two different sized volcanic eruptions, Santa Maria size (dashed lines) and Krakatau sized (dotted lines) if they occurred in 2032 and 2087 are shown. b) Artificial annual radiative forcing from two volcanic eruptions in 2032 and 2087, Santa Maria (dashed black) and Krakatau (purple) sized.
Source: Maher14 Supporting Information

This finding is consistent with the work that was done over the past couple of years by Feulner and Rahmstorf in 2010 and by Meehl et al in 2013, on the effect of a grand solar minimum. Both papers found that there'd be minimal impact on global warming.

Effects of reduction in anthropogenic sulphate aerosols quantified

There are some similarities with the article referred to at WUWT except that was about human interference by way of first dirtying the air and then cleaning it up, rather than aerosols from volcanoes. The paper was also in GRL and was by Pierre Nabat, Samuel Somot, Marc Mallet, Arturo Sanchez-Lorenzo and Martin Wild. What they found was that reduced sulphate aerosols resulted in 23% of the warming and 81% of the brightening in Europe between 1980 and 2012.

The interesting thing was that this seemed to come as a surprise to Anthony Watts and his crew. His rather odd headline was: "The law of unintended climate consequences at work – study says 23% of warming in Europe since 1980 due to clean air laws". Seems like he didn't know that sulphate aerosols are a cooling force. It was almost as if he'd rather have dirty air than global warming.

The other odd thing was the following paragraph, which was probably directly copied from the denier website where Anthony got his article:

Note: Sulfur dioxide is an actual air pollutant, unlike harmless, essential, & beneficial carbon dioxide, despite the widespread scaremongering propaganda labelling CO2 as “carbon pollution”

Well, it's not really odd given that WUWT rejects science. Still, you more commonly read that sort of nonsense in the comments rather than in the main article, unless the main article is by ratbags like Tim Ball or Christopher Monckton.

From the WUWT comments

DS doesn't know about CO2 or aerosol forcing or solar radation and says:

July 25, 2014 at 11:18 am
But…but…but… I was told (obsessively, I might add) that the sun had nothing to do with Temps!
How can less pollution leading to more sun lead to higher temps if the sun has nothing to do with temps?

philjourdan has a very strange view of the world (and the paper) and says:

July 25, 2014 at 11:42 am
So now they want dirty (real) air! It is not enough to just starve all the poor and freeze them. They have to pollute the planet to save it. 

I don't know what is going through Joe Public's mind when he says:

July 25, 2014 at 11:50 am
Let’s not forget that in the UK (at least) the Clean Air Act led directly to the replacement of millions of domestic coal fires with much-more efficient gas fires.
That ensured far less CO2 & ‘waste’ heat being dumped into the atmosphere.
The net change was probably not proportional across Europe, but did the report’s writers factor that into their model? 

Kelvin Vaughan gets it right, especially for places where there are no clean air regulations enforced, when he says:

July 25, 2014 at 12:06 pm
So shutting down all the coal fired power stations will lead to more warming.

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Nicola Maher, Alexander Sen Gupta and Matthew H. England, (2014) "Drivers of decadal hiatus periods in the 20th and 21st Centuries", Geophys. Res. Lett. doi: 10.1002/2014GL060527

Meehl, Gerald A., Julie M. Arblaster, and Daniel R. Marsh. "Could a future “Grand Solar Minimum” like the Maunder Minimum stop global warming?." Geophysical Research Letters 40, no. 9 (2013): 1789-1793.  DOI: 10.1002/grl.50361

Feulner, Georg, and Stefan Rahmstorf. "On the effect of a new grand minimum of solar activity on the future climate on Earth." Geophysical Research Letters 37, no. 5 (2010).  doi:10.1029/2010GL042710, 2010

Pierre Nabat, Samuel Somot, Marc Mallet, Arturo Sanchez-Lorenzo and Martin Wild (2014). "Contribution of anthropogenic sulfate aerosols to the changing Euro-Mediterranean climate since 1980." Geophys. Res. Lett. doi: 10.1002/2014GL060798

Anthony Watts @wattsupwiththat makes a fool of himself (again), this time in the southern hemisphere

I've often noticed that Anthony Watts doesn't read the articles he puts up on his blog. He doesn't even read the articles he posts himself, let alone his guest articles.

This time he's done it again (archived here), with another "claim" article, getting overexcited thinking he's finally found something that will make scientists look foolish - writing as a preface (my bold underline):

From the Australian National University and the department of “claim anything” comes this reversal over what was said two years ago about Antarctica:

“If this rapid warming that we are now seeing continues, we can expect that ice shelves further south along the peninsula that have been stable for thousands of years will also become vulnerable,” said Nerilie Abram, of the Australian National University.

So which is it? Rapid warming, or not warming as much because the winds are “strengthened by carbon dioxide”? 

Reversal? Not at all. Anthony thinks he's caught the scientist contradicting herself. But it's only Anthony who, as usual, doesn't understand what he's blogged. Compare the above snippet from his two year old article with this excerpt from today's article, which Anthony himself copied and pasted but claims is contradictory (my bold italics):

While most of Antarctica is remaining cold, rapid increases in summer ice melt, glacier retreat and ice shelf collapses are being observed in Antarctic Peninsula, where the stronger winds passing through Drake Passage are making the climate warm exceptionally quickly.

And if Anthony had bothered to read the abstract of the paper that his article was all about (but of course not, Anthony doesn't even link to the press release he copied let alone cite the paper itself), he could hardly have missed this sentence (my bold italics):

We find that the SAM has undergone a progressive shift towards its positive phase since the fifteenth century, causing cooling of the main Antarctic continent at the same time that the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed.  

So there's no "reversal" at all and, as usual, it's Anthony Watts who looks foolish.

As you know, the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica are warming rapidly (think Pine Island Glacier). The east not so much. As well as wondering about his cognitive disorder, you've got to wonder if Anthony Watts realises just how big the continent of Antarctica is. Perhaps he thinks that it's just a tiny island covered in ice. That's if he is aware that Antarctica is a land mass at all, and not floating ice.

The paper itself obviously includes new research, but the fact that the weather patterns in my part of the world (south eastern Australia) are shifting southward has been known for decades. What's new is that scientists have reconstructed the past 1,000 years of annual mean changes in the Southern Annular Mode, using proxy records spanning the full mid-latitude right down to the polar region across the Drake Passage sector. Here's an excerpt from ScienceDaily.com:

Until this study, published in Nature Climate Change, Antarctic climate observations were available only from the middle of last century.

By analysing ice cores from Antarctica, along with data from tree rings and lakes in South America, Dr Abram and her colleagues were able to extend the history of the westerly winds back over the last millennium.

"The Southern Ocean winds are now stronger than at any other time in the past 1,000 years," Abram said.

"The strengthening of these winds has been particularly prominent over the past 70 years, and by combining our observations with climate models we can clearly link this to rising greenhouse gas levels."

Study co-authors Dr Robert Mulvaney and Professor Matthew England said the study answered key questions about climate change in Antarctica.

"Strengthening of these westerly winds helps us to explain why large parts of the Antarctic continent are not yet showing evidence of climate warming," said Dr Mulvaney, from the British Antarctic Survey.

"This new research suggests that climate models do a good job of capturing how the westerly winds respond to increasing greenhouse gases," added Professor England, from the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW.

"This isn't good news for farmers reliant on winter rainfall over the southern part of Australia." 

From the WUWT comments

There aren't many yet and those that are there are largely incoherent nonsense. None of the people commenting so far have read the press release either, just like Anthony. One thing is for sure, no-one goes to WUWT to learn anything from people commenting. (Why do people go there? Is it to have a laugh at the crazy science deniers?)

climatereason as usual shows no ability to live up to his nickname and says:

May 12, 2014 at 12:16 am
Dear Anthony
Sigh…
I would like some funding to continue my research into historical climates.
I am willing to put anything into the title of the submission in order to secure some funding, no matter how fanciful.
However, official researchers seek to be cornering the market in all possible explanations of what co2 can do. We need a brainstorming session with readers here so they can submit some plausible titles, no matter how daft they are on closer examination. The only rules are that the words ‘co2′ ’1000 years’, ‘escalating’ and ‘alarming’ should be somewhere in the title.
tonyb

LevelGaze could be an admirer of Professor Matthew England's work but, more likely, he is just another WUWT science denier, and says:

May 12, 2014 at 12:18 am
Oh, Matthew England is a co-author.
That tells you everything you need to know.

Jeff thinks the research can't be true, not because he has other evidence, but because he's been told that the world as a whole is warming. He can't conceive that some places might warm more quickly than other parts of the globe. I guess he's never travelled more than a mile in either direction from his front door (and doesn't have a radio or television and doesn't know how to get anywhere on the internet except WUWT).

May 12, 2014 at 12:28 am
If this were true we wouldn’t be worrying about global warming at all. It would be ice age time. The problem is, despite this so-called “consensus,” these people can’t keep their stories straight and literally say opposite things which contradict each other. It’s obvious many of these people have no clue what they are talking about.

Otter (ClimateOtter on Twitter) mutters something meaningless adding, for some reason known only to Otter, lots and lots of dots followed by an interrogation mark:

May 12, 2014 at 12:54 am
Wait… CO2 is trapping cold air over the Antarctic…. but CO2 is causing cold air to break free and flow all over, from the Arctic……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………?

Jones manages only one word. Wonder of wonders, s/he even manages to spell it correctly.

May 12, 2014 at 1:06 am
Magical

I missed a few but you get the gist. That's pretty much it.  The sum total of wisdom and intelligence at the scientific illiterati society aka WUWT.

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Nerilie J. Abram, Robert Mulvaney, Françoise Vimeux, Steven J. Phipps, John Turner, Matthew H. England. Evolution of the Southern Annular Mode during the past millennium. Nature Climate Change, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2235