Warming pause acknowledged by journal Nature and chief warmist, Trenberth:
The journal Nature embraces ‘the pause’ and ocean cycles as the cause, Trenberth still betting his heat will show up
Posted on January 16, 2014 by Anthony Watts
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.
Excerpts from the article by Jeff Tollefson:
The biggest mystery in climate science today may have begun, unbeknownst to anybody at the time, with a subtle weakening of the tropical trade winds blowing across the Pacific Ocean in late 1997. These winds normally push sun-baked water towards Indonesia. When they slackened, the warm water sloshed back towards South America, resulting in a spectacular example of a phenomenon known as El Niño. Average global temperatures hit a record high in 1998 — and then the warming stalled.
For several years, scientists wrote off the stall as noise in the climate system: the natural variations in the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere that drive warm or cool spells around the globe. But the pause has persisted, sparking a minor crisis of confidence in the field. [ No, no, say koan and Rat, there is no doubt! All the scientists KNOW the warming is continuing. Not only that, but it WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT. ] Although there have been jumps and dips, average atmospheric temperatures have risen little since 1998, in seeming defiance of projections of climate models and the ever-increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. Climate sceptics have seized on the temperature trends as evidence that global warming has ground to a halt. Climate scientists, meanwhile, know that heat must still be building up somewhere [ See, they KNOW it. It's like the Shiite's Hidden Imam. He's just in hiding. ] in the climate system, but they have struggled to explain where it is going, if not into the atmosphere. Some have begun to wonder whether there is something amiss in their models. [ Nooooo .... ]
Now, as the global-warming hiatus enters its sixteenth year, scientists are at last making headway in the case of the missing heat. Some have pointed to the Sun, volcanoes and even pollution from China as potential culprits, but recent studies suggest that the oceans are key to explaining the anomaly. The latest suspect is the El Niño of 1997–98, which pumped prodigious quantities of heat out of the oceans and into the atmosphere — perhaps enough to tip the equatorial Pacific into a prolonged cold state that has suppressed global temperatures ever since.
“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,” says Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. According to this theory, the tropical Pacific should snap out of its prolonged cold spell in the coming years.“Eventually,” Trenberth says, “it will switch back in the other direction.”
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The simplest explanation for both the hiatus and the discrepancy in the models is natural variability. Much like the swings between warm and cold in day-to-day weather, chaotic climate fluctuations can knock global temperatures up or down from year to year and decade to decade. Records of past climate show some long-lasting global heatwaves and cold snaps, and climate models suggest that either of these can occur as the world warms under the influence of greenhouse gases.
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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 warming 3. 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 warming 6. 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 warming 7.
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Scientists may get to test their theories soon enough. At present, strong tropical trade winds are pushing ever more warm water westward towards Indonesia, fuelling storms such as November’s Typhoon Haiyan, and nudging up sea levels in the western Pacific; they are now roughly 20 centimetres higher than those in the eastern Pacific. Sooner or later, the trend will inevitably reverse. “You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.
Read the full article here:
http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-case-of-the-missing-heat-1.14525
philjourdan says:
January 16, 2014 at 4:08 am
It’s sad that real science has to be pried from the alarmists clenched fists. But reality just will not be denied.
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Bill Marsh says:
January 16, 2014 at 5:04 am
The term ‘missing heat’ continues to bother me. It implies that something is there that does not exist. This idea creates a series of natural questions; 1) How much heat is ‘missing’?, 2) How do you know the answer to 1? The ‘heat’ isn’t ‘missing’, it isn’t there, it doesn’t exist. Belief in ‘missing’ heat is akin to belief in the Tooth Fairy and requires a great deal of faith.
To me it would be like a football coach talking about ‘missing points’ after a loss. The team actually scored enough points to win, its just that some of the points they scored are ‘missing’. When those points emerge from wherever they are hiding, the losing team will win.
- Also, I hope I’m not around when all that water ‘sloshes’ back to South America. :)
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time passes, we get colder and the 0.000°K part becomes increasingly obvious.
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Andy West says:
January 16, 2014 at 5:05 am
Trenberth’s ‘explanation’ is not really an explanation, but an excuse. He and many other climate scientists are now so deeply influenced by the CAGW narrative that they cannot shake it off come what come may. Whatever happens in the real world, they still try to serve that narrative as faithfully as they possibly can. This by no means invalidates everything they say, but the warp to a single framing becomes much more obvious, and they are blind to a whole range of possibilities.
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hunter says:
January 16, 2014 at 5:20 am
Dr. Trenberth makes an important admission in the article:
He no longer claims the heat skipped own into the deep ocean, but is instead hiding somewhere near Indonesia, waiting to slosh back into an El Nino mode.
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evanmjones 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 . . .
Steve from Rockwood says:
January 16, 2014 at 5:30 am
Trenberth admits he doesn’t know (why the world hasn’t warmed according to the models) yet he’s doubling down at the same time (eg. the warmth is going to slosh back).
The issue continues to be the fact that scientists don’t know what the range of natural variability is, both in amplitude and time. They under estimate it (natural variability) and it makes their models over-sensitive to other things such as changes in CO2 concentration.
Natural variation is not limited to +/- 0.2 deg C and it doesn’t have to be entirely periodic with the AMO. In 100 years maybe we’ll know why.
- In the meantime Trenberth hopes the world “spikes back up” to save his precious model.
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Leo Smith says:
January 16, 2014 at 5:51 am
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Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.”
Golly. That phrase is so damned scientific it makes my eyers water. :-)
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Speed says:
January 16, 2014 at 5:55 am
These winds normally push sun-baked water towards Indonesia. When they slackened, the warm water sloshed back towards South America
Sun-baked water? Sloshed?
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