David Middleton is hot and bothered by the spurt and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation

As you know, Anthony Watts (quite wisely) mostly uses guests to write freeby articles for his blog. He gets into too much trouble when he tries to write something all by himself. Anthony doesn't need to determine whether his guests write nonsense or not. His good friend Wondering Willis Eschenbach gave him an "out" writing: "So it is not Anthony’s job to determine whether or not the work of the guest authors will stand the harsh light of public exposure. That’s the job of the peer reviewers, who are you and I and everyone making defensible supported scientific comments. Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece, he couldn’t do that job..." Yes, even his close allies think Anthony's incapable of distinguishing pseudo-scientific waffle from science.

Today Anthony's posted another article by David Middleton. This time David is waffling on about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The PDO is measured by an index. As Kevin Trenberth explained it in a recent Perspective article in Science (my paras):

Bob Tisdale sez "I knew that", 'cept he didn't!

You've probably come across the sort of person who when asked a question gives the wrong answer. Then when told the correct answer will squirm and sulk and say "I knew that". They get scornful looks but it doesn't seem to faze them.

Bob Tisdale is behaving like that today (archived here). He is writing about what he regards as "An Unexpected Admission from Dana Nuccitelli at SkepticalScience". What did Bob not expect? He didn't expect Dana to explain how El Niños lift average surface temperature and La Niñas suppress it. Though he did twist Dana's words. Bob wrote:

Dana admitted that during a decade-long (or multidecadal) period(s) when El Niño events dominate (when El Niños are stronger, last longer and happen more frequently), the El Niños enhance global warming, and during periods when La Niña events dominate (when there are weaker, shorter and fewer El Niño events), the absence of El Niño events suppresses the warming of global surfaces.

Note the use of the word "admitted". Bob has been getting tips from David Rose on the abuse of rhetoric. Bob twisted what Dana wrote a bit. Fortunately he then quoted him directly. There was only one paragraph on ENSO and this is what Dana wrote (from the Guardian):

...average global surface temperatures have warmed between 0.6 and 0.7°C over the past 40 years (lower atmospheric temperatures have also likely warmed more than 0.5°C, though the record hasn’t yet existed for 40 years). During that time, that temperature rise has temporarily both slowed down (during the 2000s, when there was a preponderance of La Niña events) and sped up (during the 1990s, when there was a preponderance of El Niño events). Climate models accurately predicted the long-term global warming trend.

Do you spot the difference? Bob was saying it was the absence of El Niños, whereas Dana was writing it was the preponderance of La Niñas, when surface temperatures didn't rise as quickly were suppressed. That's not splitting hairs. Bob Tisdale wrongly thinks that El Niños cause global warming, which is why he talks about it in that way.

Bob Tisdale gets into a spot of hot water

Today Perennially Puzzled "Bob Tisdale" is puzzling over sea level. He's branching out a bit from his normal sea surface temperature, or SST for those "in the know" like "Bob" :) - but not too far. And, for a change, he's decided to prove that it's not ENSO that's causing global sea levels to rise, sort of. He doesn't go quite as far as admitting that melting ice and thermal expansion of water from the hotter oceans or changing salinity have anything to do with sea level change, let alone that it's got anything to do with human activity. But it's a small step in the right direction.

Of course, he didn't admit to that.

The spot of hot water "Bob" got into (archived here) is near the Philippines. He wrote about "The region east of the Philippines" and said:

For months, I’ve wanted to plot the data for that region, so that I could get a rough idea of its contribution to the global rate of sea level rise.

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation and Australia - plus more

Here is the article about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, with particular reference to Australia. I'll warn you in advance - it's long, a bit meandering, probably could do with more illustrations, and not a complete guide to everything. That's my excuses out of the way. I figure I've spent enough time on it so here it is. Feel free to add what you know and correct what I don't :)

In the previous article, I referred to some comments by a contributor, trying to argue that Australia's record heat of the 2012-13 summer was caused by a (non-existent) spike in the PDO index, or was an advance reaction to a spike that had not yet appeared. His comments were not easy to follow. Thing is, the PDO index wasn't positive during the Australian summer of 2012-13. In fact it did not register as positive until January 2014. There's more to it than that, in any case.

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.

Anthony Watts' Inertia, Incompetence, Malice and Gross Forgetfulness

Today brings a lot more signs that Anthony Watts is fast losing his tenuous grip on reality.  He's posted a press release about a new review paper in Science (without any direct link to either the press release or the paper on which the news item is based, as usual), and then goes bananas (archived here).

Our inertia may cause largest global changes in the past 65 million years but orders of magnitude more rapid

Here is the abstract of the paper by Diffenbaugh and Field in Science (my bold italics):

Terrestrial ecosystems have encountered substantial warming over the past century, with temperatures increasing about twice as rapidly over land as over the oceans. Here, we review the likelihood of continued changes in terrestrial climate, including analyses of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project global climate model ensemble.

Inertia toward continued emissions creates potential 21st-century global warming that is comparable in magnitude to that of the largest global changes in the past 65 million years but is orders of magnitude more rapid. The rate of warming implies a velocity of climate change and required range shifts of up to several kilometers per year, raising the prospect of daunting challenges for ecosystems, especially in the context of extensive land use and degradation, changes in frequency and severity of extreme events, and interactions with other stresses.

This, I believe, is what Anthony most objects to, where paper itself states (my bold italics):

Some changes in extremes already have been observed (64). For example, the fraction of land area experiencing extreme seasonal heat has increased over the past three decades, both globally and over most tropical and some mid-latitude land regions (Fig. 2) (77). The intensity, occurrence, and duration of heat waves have likewise increased globally (78), whereas the occurrence of daily-scale cold extremes has decreased globally and over most extra-tropical land areas (79). The occurrence of extreme wet events has also increased globally (80), although not all regions exhibit uniformly increasing trends (81). Last, droughts have increased in length or intensity in some regions (64), and the hydrologic intensity has increased over many land areas (although the observed signal is less uniform than the simulated response to further global warming) (68).

Anthony posts the press release, which has the following headline:

Global warming has increased risk of record heat, say Stanford scientists

Anthony loses it, and writes his own headline and lead in:

The ‘Diffenbaugh Delusion’ – refuted with a single graph of temperature
From Stanford University,  a claim easily refuted with a single graph of Tmax. See below.

So what is this "single graph of temperature" that Anthony reckons "refutes" the fact that global warming has increased the risk of record heat?  Well let's see.  He writes:

Diffenbaugh is looking at the average temperature, which is sensitive to the effects of heat sinks/UHI in the overnight low temperature (Tmin). A better way to judge if it really is getting hotter is to look at the daily high temperature (Tmax).

Aah - he doesn't like it that average temperature is going up.  He says that it's not fair that overnight lows are rising and it's all down to UHI!  What a dill is Anthony.  I seem to recall him making similarly loopy claims in the past.  He doesn't know what a "heat sink" is (he's finally learnt how to spell it so I guess that's something).

Someone tell Anthony Watts that the USA is not the whole world

He continues and sez, let's forget about the world as a whole - only look at temperatures in the USA:

Even with all the flaws and adjustments of the data, Tmax for the USA (bias corrected by Menne) according to NCDC shows the cyclical 60-70 year ocean/solar wave. The positive trend since 1895 is because we start at a minimum of the cycle and ended up at a maximum, the same as if we started in 1970 or even 1950 as some have done.

Huh?  What's this about the USA?  What happened to global?

And what cyclical 60-70 year ocean/solar wave is he talking about?  Is he trying to say that temperatures now are what they were 60 or 70 years ago?  Oh, he's referring to temperatures in the USA only.  Talk about ethnocentrism.  Anthony leaves off the hottest year ever in the USA, 2012 and writes:

Note that 2010 is not hotter than 1934, though we are often given graphs of Tmean that say 2010 was hotter that 1934.

Yes, global warming means night time temperatures rise more quickly than daytime temperatures.  That's the real reason Anthony wants to use the maximum instead of the minimum or the average.  And hiding 98% of the world and only showing the USA is pretty dumb when the paper was about the entire world, not about the USA.

Then Anthony writes:

Note the pattern of up/down in Tmax, now look at this graph of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, there is a rough correlation:

Well, I don't really think a "rough correlation" with temperatures in the USA is good enough.  Bear in mind that the PDO was down last year when the USA had its hottest year on record.

Let's get away from Anthony's weak attempt to deceive his readers and look at the PDO and global surface temperature on the one chart:

Nope, nothing doing Anthony Watts!

Finally he ends up by saying that there were more heat waves in the USA in previous decades than recently therefore that proves that globally, heat records aren't on the increase.

Yeah, right! How does that work?  The global average surface temperature has been rising rapidly.  Therefore there has to have been more heat records than cold records.  The USA last year had its hottest year on record.  Australia has just had its hottest summer on record and the hottest 12 months on record.  And what about the incredible and deadly heat waves in Russia and Europe in recent years.  Why does Anthony Watts ignore them?

Pacific Decadal Oscillation

Since Anthony raised the subject, here is a description of the PDO and the PDO index, from Jason Amundson

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is a term coined by fisheries scientist Steven Hare in 1996. It describes recurring climate variability seen in the north Pacific that is similar to climate patterns resulting from El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) (Mantua, 2001).

The PDO is often quantified by the use of an index, referred to as the PDO Index. The PDO Index is calculated by spatially averaging the monthly sea surface temperature (SST) of the Pacific Ocean north of 20°N. The global average anomaly is then subtracted to account for global warming (Mantua, 2000). Normally only October to March values are used in calculating the PDO index because year-to-year fluctuations are most apparent during the winter months (Mantua, 2001).

When the PDO Index is positive, waters in the north central Pacific Ocean tend to be cool, and waters along the west coast of North America tend to be warm. The opposite is true when the PDO Index is negative (Null, 2002).

From the WUWT comments

The WUWT comments are archived here with the main article.

Juraj V picks Anthony up on his PDO comparison and says:

September 5, 2013 at 8:58 am
PDO is NOT North Pacific SST. It is a patial pattern of warmer/colder surface waters there.
The US record follows AMO, not PDO. PDO started to go down in 1990, AMO peaked around 2006.

Is Pamela Gray's comment pure coincidence?:

September 5, 2013 at 9:07 am
That larger report sounds like a room full of elephants being made to wriggle their trunks.

Justthinkin's irony meter is broken:

September 5, 2013 at 9:20 am
Yeah well. Ignorance can be taught different with a few facts. You can’t fix stupid, or greedy, narsissitic, pschyo, so-called scientists.

richard telford says something that Anthony objects to so much he deletes it:

September 5, 2013 at 9:27 am
[snip , ah, the ever negative TELFORD - I'm not interested in your labeling of me - Anthony]

hunter says:

September 5, 2013 at 9:35 am
This is the most worrisome symptom of AGW: The fact free drivel that alleged academics push, and seem to get away with. Gleick, Lewandowsky, Hansen, Romm, “Eli Rabbet”, Schmidt, Diffenbaugh, etc. etc. etc. All of them push non-fact based claims, or commit outright fraud, or calls for fraud, and get away with it. And politicians echo their falsities and they get away with it.

REPLY: never attribute malice to what can be explained by simple incompetence. – Anthony

Well, Anthony is simple and incompetent but he is frequently full of malice as well.


Someone at Science mag or Stanford might be copping some very silly emails.  bit chilly says:

September 5, 2013 at 9:37 am
“then using climate models they quantified”
no they didnt,they came up with another alarming headline to grab the attention of the media,then backtracked through the rest of the statement.
Anthony,please tell me you forwarded your rebuttal ? if not,may i ?

REPLY: I had planned to, but go ahead – Anthony

What did I say about Anthony Watts and Elephants?

richard telford tries again and says:

September 5, 2013 at 10:02 am
Do you ever wonder why someone might be negative about the junk you promote here: diatoms from space; insects causing CO2 increase; Greenland ice sheet being 650 years old; no isostasy?  You can censor my comments all you like – you are still wrong.

This time Anthony posts a lengthy reply.  What did I say earlier today about his bad memory?  See if you can pick it:

REPLY: Do you listen to yourself? You must read that liar, Greg Laden, to get your opinions of me. “insects causing CO2 increase” Where? http://www.google.com/search?as_qdr=all&q=insects%20causing%20CO2%20increase+site:wattsupwiththat.com

Don’t make up stuff. The isotasy article was posted to show how ridiculous it was, but apparently all that matters to you is for you to use it as a tool to bash me. Some scientist you are.

See here’s the thing Mr. Telford, I don’t care about your opinion/fabrications, as you’ve got no basis for factual criticism, only hate zingers, like Mr. Laden. And yes, Tmax does refute the issue. Feel free to be as upset as you wish, but do kindly shut the hell up when it comes to hateful zingers in my own home on the Internet.
- Anthony

Anthony tells a fib about his "isostasy" article.  He only decided for sure that it was ridiculous after everyone told him it was.  Until then he wasn't quite sure.

As for the OMG it's insects - Anthony Watts posted not one, not two but three articles about insects causing the CO2 increase.  And it wasn't that long ago either.  Just goes to prove my last article!  Or maybe it demonstrates that he doesn't read or doesn't understand the articles he puts up on his blog.

Regarding his reference to Greg Laden - that was hilarious.  Anthony got so upset at Greg for pointing out his ignorance that Anthony threatened to do a Monckton!

I think that's a very appropriate note to finish up on.  Don't you?

Forgive me, just one more (archived here) - another censored comment from richard telford:

September 5, 2013 at 10:37 am

[Snip. Instead of promoting a blog that is constantly filled with derogatory comments about the intelligent readers here, I suggest you go there and add to the noise. Both their regular readers will welcome your complaints. ~mod]

Hmmm.... "mod" can't be referring to yours truly.  Any comment I might make about a rare appearance of an intelligent reader at WUWT would be most complimentary.

Oh, goody - more WUWT traffic

Ha ha ha - now Anthony has realised that he did post THREE articles about "OMG it's insects" - arguing that we should kill off the insects to save the world from global warming, and failing that we should kill off mammals.  (Don't believe me?  It's true!)

So now he's retrieved Richard's comment and link so he can "name and shame me". (New visitors from WUWT can click here for the back story.) He probably figures it's worth him being seen as a goose and worth sending traffic to HotWhopper!  Welcome WUWT visitors - very little censorship here and the comment policy is short and sweet.

richard telford says (newer archive here):

September 5, 2013 at 10:37 am

I’m surprised you forgot about the insects – it’s a classic WUWT post. If you need reminding about it, head over to Sou’s blog (http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2013/06/omg-its-insects-and-more-farce-from-wuwt.html#Example4) and don’t accuse me of making it up.

Regarding Tmax, there is a high likelihood that you don’t understand what likelihood means.

Poor old Anthony gets it very wrong again - for example in his reply to Richard he first up tries valiantly to justify his "OMG It's Insects" and "kill off insects and mammals" articles waffling on about how termites produce methane so there (Voisin was talking about CO2 but Anthony shifts to CH4)!  Then he writes nonsense like:

REPLY: ...But see, here’s the thing, none of this hateful opinion about how wrong/stupid etc the WUWT article might be matters much, because as we’ve seen, climate sensitivity is lower than predicted, the models and reality diverge, ENSO seems to have a bigger role than CO2, and in terms of maximum temperatures, it isn’t hotter now than in 1934 in the USA.
Not looking good for Telfords of the world.
-Anthony

Glad to know that WUWT being wrong/stupid doesn't matter to Anthony. Explains a lot.

But what's that about climate sensitivity being lower than predicted?  Where does that come from?  How can it be?  Assuming Anthony's referring to a doubling of CO2 then we haven't got there yet so we don't even know the transient response for certain, let alone the long term climate sensitivity!

And ENSO has a "bigger role than CO2" - that's plain nuts!  When, in the past ten thousand years or more has ENSO caused a sustained or any rise of 0.8 degrees Celsius?  Come on Anthony - tell us please. (Even the super event in 1997-98 resulted in a transient spike of only about 0.2 degrees.)

And he really, really wants us to believe that global warming isn't happening because 1934 was hot in the USA?  Really, Anthony!

The heat is getting to Anthony Watts!


Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Christopher B. Field, Changes in Ecologically Critical Terrestrial Climate Conditions, Science 2 August 2013: Vol. 341 no. 6145 pp. 486-492 DOI: 10.1126/science.1237123

Willis wonders about the PDO

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has another article on WUWT, this time he's wondering about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. (I've written about some of his previous 'wonderings' such as here and here and here.)

He doesn't make as much of a fool of himself as he has on other occasions, but it doesn't look like he has bothered much with the scientific literature.  Willis writes:

I’ve hypothesized that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is another one of the complex interlocking emergent mechanisms which regulate the temperature and the heat content of the climate system.

I think that's his fancy way of saying that the PDO is an intricate part of the earth-climate system.  Well, duh! He also thinks he has 'discovered' an association between the PDO and ENSO.  He's right but he's most definitely not the first to do so.

This is from Newman et al:

The PDO is dependent upon ENSO on all timescales. To first order, the PDO can be considered the reddened response to both atmospheric noise and ENSO, resulting in more decadal variability than either. This null hypothesis needs to be considered when diagnosing and modeling ‘‘internal’’ decadal variability in the North Pacific. For example, the observed spatial pattern of Pacific SST decadal variability, with relatively higher amplitude in the extratropics than in the Tropics, should be at least partly a consequence of a reddened ENSO response....

...Finally, this work suggests that predicting the PDO may be directly related to the skill of forecasting ENSO. Given the 2-yr decorrelation timescale of the PDO and the possibility that ENSO may not be predictable beyond about 2 yr, so-called regime shifts of the PDO will not be apparent until years after they have occurred. For example, the recent long-term positive phase of the PDO may have simply resulted from the 1977–98 period being dominated by warm events in the Tropics, and the recent apparent ‘‘change’’ in phase of the PDO is an expected outcome of the cool tropical SST in the east Pacific of the last few years. Thus, with tropical SSTs having returned to warm conditions in 2002, the PDO has likewise become positive again. In the absence of a La Nin˜a this year, the PDO may be expected to remain positive in 2004. 

doi 

Incidentally, the PDO did remain positive through 2004.  Here is a chart showing the PDO (left axis) and global temperature anomaly (right axis), with ENSO years marked from 1950 onwards. (Click for larger version).

Source: JISAO and NASA

Constructal Law?

Willis also mentions the "Constructal Law" which a quick google appears at face value to be a quack attempt to popularise some airy fairy "unifying" notion or other.  The word "Law" in the title is a red flag but am I being unfairly dismissive? Does anyone have any more info on it before I waste time checking it out?

Using pressure to estimate temperature

As another example of how Wondering Willis spends too much time wondering and too little time reading the work of others, he writes:

PS—This discussion of pressure-based indices makes me think that there should be some way to use pressure as a proxy for the temperature. This might aid in such quests as identifying jumps in the temperature record, or UHI in the cities, or the like. So many drummers … so little time.

Pressure is often used as a proxy for temperature, including in various temperature reanalyses.  For example, if Willis had kept up with the literature he might have come across this paper in press, from the abstract (my bold):

We use a completely different approach to investigate global land warming over the 20th century. We have ignored all air temperature observations and instead inferred them from observations of barometric pressure, sea surface temperature, and sea-ice concentration using a physically-based data assimilation system called the 20th Century Reanalysis.

This independent dataset reproduces both annual variations and centennial trends in the temperature datasets, demonstrating the robustness of previous conclusions regarding global warming.

Compo et al (2013) Independent confirmation of global land warming without the use of station temperatures GRL doi: 10.1002/grl.50425

Funnily enough, WUWT put up an article by Bob Tisdale about the Compo paper (during which he has difficulty with anomalies), and this was the first comment - by tadchem  who says:

April 8, 2013 at 11:12 am  “…to investigate global land warming over the 20th century. We have ignored all air temperature observations and instead inferred them from”… (indirect measurements of secondary phenomena).

The exact OPPPOSITE of empirical science!  I’m surprised they didn’t mention the Tea Leaves or Tarot Cards.

Deniers are a peculiar mixed bag of odds and sods.  As I've said before, if people like Willis Eschenbach spent less time wondering and more time building on the knowledge of others, they might actually contribute something worthwhile instead of adding to the confusion of disinformation that is the bread and butter of WUWT.

About PDO, lags, kettles, cycles and hysteria...

...sorry, meant to write "About PDO, Lags, Cycles and Hysteresis"

In another article here, a certain WUWT commenter, Professor JP, took me to task for quoting him.  Quite right too.  But that one line of mine resulted in something of real value.  The Professor obviously forgave me because he was kind enough to give me a lengthy lesson on climate sciency stuff.  For free.  I didn't have to pay a cent.  I was a bit nervous at first because I've heard awful stories about gravy trains and the billions of dollars climate sciency people charge everyone.  For a minute I wondered if I'd end up roast meat under a pile of brown sauce.  But no.  Not a penny did he charge.

Now I wouldn't have written this up as an article, but the Professor was so insistent that I learn and he was so gracious in imparting his years of climate sciency knowledge that I just have to share.  (Don't you just love it when people say "share".  Makes you feel all gooey and warm and fuzzy in your mouth.)

Now I'm always willing to learn new things and I read his comments over and over to make sure I didn't miss a thing.  It's not often I get offered personal tuition.  RealClimate is one place but there are always such a lot of other people in the classes there.  (I've been honoured by other renowned scientists here as well, but none who have written so much detail as Professor JP.)

From kettles and ice blocks to the PDO

After some wonderful lessons on the basics of kettles and ice blocks (I learnt some really good stuff - like ice blocks melt if you take them out of the fridge and water in a kettle won't boil unless you heat it, while seawater doesn't need heat, it expands by magic - did you know that?), the topic shifted to the PDO.  This lesson was so informative I just have to share.  (There's that word again.)  

Here is how it started.  Professor JP was explaining why it took so long for the warmer sun in the 1950s to heat up the earth in the 1970s.  It's called "waiting for homeostasis" and has something to do with boiling kettles.  But then it turns out it wasn't the sun after all that heated up the earth.  It was the PDO.  (I looked that up.  PDO stands for Pacific Decadel Oscillation.  See I'm not as dumb as I look!)  Anyway, Professor JP wrote:

As for why the Earth started heating up in 1978, that is pretty obviously due to the PDO going into its positive phase (the previous 30 year cooling period was coincidentally during the PDO's negative phase).

And this is where lags come in again:

The PDO is clearly one of the long-term lags in climate that I was speaking of.

I got curious about these 'lags' and asked:

Just how long is that "lag" supposed to be? 

To which the Professor replied:

A reasonable guess would be the length of a half-cycle or two - 30-60 years.  

That's wonderful news.  The scientists have narrowed the uncertainty right down to half a cycle or two or 30 years or sixty years. Still, not being at all knowledgeable like the Professor, I had another couple of questions:

And when is the earth going to get back to temperatures of the 1960s? Maybe the PDO only heats the earth but doesn't cool it? Is that what you are arguing?

Unfortunately Professor JP only had time to answer the second question, so there's still a big gap in my knowledge.  Not that I'm complaining, you understand.  Heavens above, it was so generous of him to tutor me at all.  Anyway he scolded me and told me to pay attention (justifiably - I was starting to race ahead a bit) and wrote: 

Not at all, it cooled during the 30 years of the last negative cycle, which I believe I already said. Are you even bothering to read my posts?

The instantaneous laggy PDO

So there you have it.  The PDO warms and cools the earth with either a 30 year lag or a 60 year lag, which I'm told is a half-cycle or two, and instantaneously too like in the previous negative phase.  If you do the sums you'll see the Professor means that the PDO has a 60 year cycle.  In other words the PDO is a 30 or 60 year laggy sciency thing that acts instantaneously. He then generously added more words of wisdom:

I wonder since you haven't mentioned hysteresis, but I assumed someone quietly told you that you were ridiculously wrong on it or you finally realized it yourself.

Oh and please, if you can't see what is wrong with the skeptical science page on it then there is no hope for you. Their graph is so blatantly stupid the way it applies linear trend lines to a cyclical phenomena that a grade school kid could see the error.

Well, I did try to read his posts and I did make a reference to hysteresis, but I can't really blame him for missing that bit.  Professors are very busy at doing PDO climate sciency stuff, and boiling kettles and so forth, I'm sure.

Given Professor JP's insistence that it's now the PDO that is causing global warming, I sat up and took notice.  The way he writes with such certainty, he's obviously a highly qualified expert in the field of hysteresis, PDOs, lags and kettles.  It was with some trepidation that I ventured forth, however.  If a renowned climate expert like JP can't figure out if this PDO lag is 30 years or 60 years, I thought to myself, then what hope does a humble blogger have.  And I couldn't figure out if the lag only applied to the warming phase, because I thought he said the cooling phase brought instant cooling but the warming phase takes 30 or sixty years.  In any case, I put aside my fears and decided to give it a go.

Here's the result.  You can click the animation to enlarge it:

Sources: JISAO and NASA

What do you think?  I reckon Professor JP is incredible.  It sure looks like the negative phase cooled the earth instantly.  Well okay, it didn't cool it exactly but at least it looks like it stopped it getting hotter for a while. Fine, whatever you say.  It didn't completely stop it from getting hotter but you've got to admit it didn't warm quite as much. And 'not warming as much' is pretty close to being the same thing as 'cooling', sort of, if you squint a bit.  Okay, if you squint a lot and shut your eyes and imagine.  Anyway the warming phase really gave such a jolt to the earth that it's still getting hot, even though the PDO has turned negative.  That's pretty powerful stuff.

I figure I'm still much dumber than the Professor though because I can't see the lags working very well. Nor can I see the PDO's 30 year half cycle or the 60 year full cycle.  It goes up and down for sure, but I must have forgotten how to do sums because I just can make them all add up to either 30 or 60, no matter what I do. It's just me I'm sure.  He probably knows as much about climate science as his fellow Professor David Archibald, or even more.  I don't know that he knows as much as Ronald A. "it's the insects" Voisin.  But that's doubtless a matter of opinion.  Whatever, I know I'll never get to the level of any of them.

On "blatant stupidity"

BTW here is the SkepticalScience chart.  As the good professor said, how "blatantly stupid" of them to compare linear trends instead of cycles.

Source: SkepticalScience

I'll send an email to Mr John Cook Esq (proprietor of SkepticalScience) and tell him to change the chart.  Of course he wouldn't listen to a humble blogger.  I'd better tell him Professor JP, the expert in half cycle or two PDO's, hysterical lags and kettles, is personally tutoring me.  That should impress him no end.

As the Professor suggested, all you have to do is show cycles.  I couldn't draw the spokes but I did manage to draw the shape of the wheels.  You can see how bigger and bigger wheels can be made to fit between the lines and are pushing up the temperature.  It's a tri-cycle.  It all makes sense now.  You just wait and see.  I'll bet in no time at all, SkepticalScience will replace their "blatantly stupid" chart with this one below.  It's prettier for one thing.  Don't you like pink?

You had the Marcott wheelchair, now here's the HotWhopper tricycle

I hope every reader has learnt as much as I did from this wonderful lesson.

Gotta go now, the kettle's boiling at last.  (I've only been waiting forty years.  It was only after the tip from the Professor that I figured out you have to apply a source of heat before the water boils.  After I did that, it took no time at all. Nary a lag to be seen.)

Anyone for a nice hot cuppa?

PS While you're sipping your tea (milk and sugar?), you might enjoy reading another version of the PDO, this time with clouds and magic fairy dust.