In the Canberra Times of 9 January 2012, this letter appeared:
You have to love all those climate-change alarmists.
Only an eye-blink ago they were proclaiming a scorched-earth apocalypse for this wide brown land.
As La Nina wove her enigmatic magic in 2011, with our third-wettest year in memory, the alarmists remain in denial about the overwhelming influence of atmospheric and solar influences that mock, as always, the puny effect of mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions.
The hot air emissions of the climate-change alarmists do more to raise the global temperature than the burning of that old bogeyman, carbon.
As 2012 dawns, the solar gods are truly laughing.
John Bell, Lyneham
I replied with this:
If John Bell (Letters, 9 January) really believes that one La Niña
year represents some kind of disproof of mainstream climate science, I
can only conclude that he’s been reading too many climate denial
blogs. A single wet, cool, hot or dry year is just a blip on the
graph; what matters is the long term trend. Nowhere will you find
mainstream climate science predicting that every single year will be
hotter, or drier, or anything at all; it’s all about the subtle
changes underlying the usual year-to-year roller coaster of El Niño,
La Niña, volcanoes, etc. Globally, the ten warmest years on record
have all occurred since 1998.Since 1970 the world’s average surface temperature has steadily gone
up at a rate of 0.17 degrees per decade, which is entirely in line
with the projections of climate science. During that time, the sun’s
impact on climate, and other non-greenhouse factors, have actually had
a slightly cooling effect. There is currently no plausible cause for
this warming other than the effect of increased greenhouse gases, and
there is a truly vast body of evidence supporting that conclusion.Matt Andrews
Also interesting is that 2011 was the hottest La Niña year on record, and that La Niña years show a distinct warming trend.
#1 by Robert I Ellison on August 5, 2012 - 10:36 am
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I often think that things are potentially worse than people realise. Not slow climate change but the potential for abrupt and non linear change. Changes in temperature of 10’s of degrees in places in as little as a decade. A report was published a decade ago by the US National Academy of Sciences – Abrupt climate change: inevitable surprises – that describes this as the new climate paradigm. But it is a paradigm that is making slow progress despite support in scientific literature, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the Royal Society…
So where might some of these surprises come from? To quote AR4 section 3.4.4.1. ‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’ The earlier satellite data is most reliably ERBS and ISCCP-FD. It shows cooling in the infrared and warming in the short wave – that (if real) must arise as a result of change in cloud cover.
Here is a relationship from Wong et al (2006) – Reexamination of the Observed Decadal Variability of the Earth Radiation Budget. Using Altitude-Corrected ERBE/ERBS Nonscanner WFOV Data – between ocean heat content from sea level measurements and net ERBS data.
It is a pretty good fit. But it is all just data and as good as the instruments and modelling.
We also have CERES – clouds and Earth’s radiant energy system – measuring Earth’s radiant energy out in reflected sw and emitted lw with unprecedented accuracy. It shows that there is some missing energy that should be there in the Earth system when considering the lack of tropospheric warming last decade. Again the big change is in SW. The interannual changes are largely related to ENSO and might provide one clue as to a source of ‘low frequency variability of the climate system.’
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif
More recent work is identifying abrupt climate changes working through the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the Southern Annular Mode, the Artic Oscillation, the Indian Ocean Dipole and other measures of ocean and atmospheric states. These are measurements of sea surface temperature and atmospheric pressure over more than 100 years which show evidence for abrupt change to new climate conditions that persist for up to a few decades before shifting again. Global rainfall and flood records likewise show evidence for abrupt shifts and regimes that persist for decades. In Australia, less frequent flooding from early last century to the mid 1940’s, more frequent flooding to the late 1970’s and again a low rainfall regime to recent times.
Anastasios Tsonis, of the Atmospheric Sciences Group at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and colleagues used a mathematical network approach to analyse abrupt climate change on decadal timescales. Ocean and atmospheric indices – in this case the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation and the North Pacific Oscillation – can be thought of as chaotic oscillators that capture the major modes of climate variability. Tsonis and colleagues calculated the ‘distance’ between the indices. It was found that they would synchronise at certain times and then shift into a new state.
It is no coincidence that shifts in ocean and atmospheric indices occur at the same time as changes in the trajectory of global surface temperature. Our ‘interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,’ Tsonis said.
‘This paper provides an update to an earlier work that showed specific changes
in the aggregate time evolution of major Northern Hemispheric atmospheric and oceanic modes of variability serve as a harbinger of climate shifts. Specifically, when the major modes of Northern Hemisphere climate variability are synchronized, or resonate, and the coupling between those modes simulta neously increases, the climate system appears to be thrown into a new state, marked by a break in the global mean temperature trend and in the character of El Nin˜o/Southern Oscillation variability.’ (Swanson et al 2009 – Has the climate recently shifted)
‘While in the observations such breaks in temperature trend are clearly superimposed upon a century time-scale warming presumably due to anthropogenic forcing, those breaks result in significant departures from that warming over time periods spanning multiple decades. Using a new measure of coupling strength, this update shows that these climate modes have recently synchronized, with synchronization peaking in the year 2001/02. This synchronization has been followed by an increase in coupling. This suggests that the climate system may well have shifted again, with a consequent break in the global mean temperature trend from the post 1976/77 warming to a new period (indeterminate length) of roughly constant global mean temperature.’ (Op. cit.)
‘Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. Albert Einstein
#2 by Robert I Ellison on August 5, 2012 - 10:43 am
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Here is the Wong et al graph – http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=Wong2006figure7.gif