By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow

Joseph Romm, George Soros’s bulldog at the alarmist climate fantasyland web blog called Climate Progress has a post (h/t Climate Depot) ”NOAA puts out “El Nino Watch, so record temperatures are coming and this will be the hottest decade on record”.

Based on the coming El Nino he hints at upcoming disappointment for climate realists with respect to arctic ice and warmer global temperatures for 2009 and for the decade. Of course he used the bogus NOAA temperatures which have taken the lead in being the most contaminated and exaggerated through station dropout globally, no adjustment for urbanization, a purposeful adjustment up of sea surface temperature warming (compare UNISYS with NOAA satellite), and bad siting (Anthony Watts has identified only 10% of the 948 United States stations meet government’s own standards for siting).

The result is nonsense press releases every month like a year ago in June when NOAA proclaimed it to be the 8th warmest June in 129 years with an anomaly of +0.5C, while the satellites that don’t have these surface errors found it to be the 9th coldest in its 30 years of record keeping with an anomaly of -0.11C. This last month University of Alabama MSU global satellite data had an anomaly of just 0.043C. You can count on NOAA, which has become another Mother Goose to tell a different story when they announce the May global numbers with their bogus assessment. Romm who revels in fairy tales, will surely announce the NOAA results.

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THE REAL STORY

El Nino is coming on very much as it did last year at this time.

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But Romm is ignoring it is doing so in a low solar and cool PDO era, with a cooling Atlantic and after a high latitude volcano, all of which project to a cool summer and a cold winter. The cold PDO usually also means a quick and brief El Nino. Years like 1965/66 and 1976/77 had similar conditions. The summer, fall and following winter composite average shown below. BTW, you won’t here mention of the PDO, ENSO is used only because they need it to explain year to year variability, admitting to the PDO would be game set and match for the alarmists as it would me admitting to a factor that explains the two decades of warming from 1979 to 1998, that was used to make CO2 the culprit.

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He is making the same mistake James Hansen and the UK met office made in early 2007 during a brief El Nino spike, predicted 2007 would be the warmest on record eclipsing 1998. It instead as El Nino gave way to La Nina had the most rapid cooling of the entire satellite record.

IRI has compiled the El Nino model forecasts and most forecast a transition through neutral (La Nada) and many to El Nino. Hansen’s NASA climate model is the warmest (must use the Hansen adjustment techniques). Lets look at some El Ninos using the TAO Triton cross-sections and see how they compare to this latest ocean water temperature pattern.

Last year showed a similar summer warming of the tropical Pacific that faded in the fall back to La Nina. Note the similarity in the ocean heat content to June of last year

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The last moderate El Nino in 2002 led to a very cold winter in the eastern United States with 6 months of below normal temperatures. It was very similar to this year in June.

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The ‘big-daddy’ El Nino of 1997 was much warmer underneath with a strong suppression of the thermocline. Anomalies of greater than +7C compare to the 1-2C anomalies this year. The PDO was in its warm mode in 1997 and the sun was coming back to life strongly both giving the ENSO a boost.

The CPC’s prize CFS climate model (Link here CFS.JPG) shows a cool summer, fall and eastern US winter not (winter not unlike 2002/03).

Time will tell (and maybe how much recovery in solar activity) whether we go back to normal or continue El Nino through the winter like 2002/03. La Ninas tend to dominate in low solar winters but El Ninos often pop when the solar activity bounces back.

In any event, it will be Romm who will be talking to himself when the year is over not the climate realists. Adventures in fantasyland can be so entertaining. Recall early this year when Romm lost a debate to Marc Morano who came to argue the science and Romm like most of his ilk simply deferred to authority (railroad engineer Pachauri’s own work of fiction and NOAA’s silly press releases) and went ad hominem, another favorite tactic of those whose science is bankrupt.  See pdf with all images here.