You know El Nino - now meet the Pacific Centennial Oscillation
WHOI scientist Kris Karnauskas and colleagues have found evidence for a natural 100-year cycle that shifts Pacific Ocean temperatures and rearranges rainfall and weather patterns around the globe. (Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
Red and blue colors indicate warmer- and cooler-than-normal temperatures surface ocean temperatures during what scientists call the positive phase of the Pacific Centennial Oscillation (PCO). Changes of even a fraction of a degree Celsius can strongly influence rainfall and storm patterns throughout the Pacific region and beyond. The negative phase of the PCO is below. (Kris Karnauskas, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
Pacific Ocean surface temperatures - and global rainfall patternreverse in the negative phase of the Pacific Centennial Oscillation. (Kris Karnauskas, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Red indicates where more rain falls, and blue indicates where less rain falls during the positive phase of the predicted Pacific Centennial Oscillation (PCO). Rainfall patterns shift when the PCO seesaws into its negative phase. (Kris Karnauskas, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
The El Nino-Southern Oscillation is a natural cycle that recurs over two to seven years. When surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific are warmer than usual (an El Niño event), heavy rains hit East Africa and droughts beset India, Indonesia, and Australia. When ocean conditions flip-flop (a La Nina), so do global rainfall patterns. (Fern Gibbons, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
By Elizabeth Halliday
Scientists have uncovered evidence for another natural cycle that, like El Nino and La Nina, shifts Pacific Ocean winds and currents and rearranges rainfall and weather patterns around the globe. The newly detected cycle recurs every 100 years, less frequently than the two-to-seven year El Nino-Southern Oscillation. But its existence, if confirmed, offers another fundamental cog to understand the ocean-atmosphere machinery that regulates worldwide rain, droughts, wildfires, floods, landslides, fisheries, and storms.
The new cycle, called the Pacific Centennial Oscillation, was reported in the September 2012 issue of Journal of Climate. It provides a deeper understanding of how natural cycles may interact with manmade global warming to produce far-reaching climate impacts emanating from the Pacific region.
“We base many of our conclusions about regional aspects of climate change on instrumental records we’ve obtained over only about 150 years, and so we might just be scratching the surface in terms of what is going on naturally over centennial timescales,” said Kris Karnauskas of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He is lead author of the new study, with colleagues Jason E. Smerdon and Richard Seager of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Jesús Fidel Gonzalez-Rouco of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
With a little more than a century of data gathered with ships, moorings, and satellites, scientists have become well acquainted with El Nino and La Nina, in which water temperatures cycle like a seesaw, becoming warmer and cooler over the course of several years in the eastern tropical Pacific off the coast of South America. Warmer waters in the eastern Pacific (El Niño) disrupt the atmosphere typically found over the cool waters, triggering a reduction or reversal of the westward-blowing trade winds. That, in turn, has far-reaching reverberations: It shifts evaporation patterns over the ocean that transfer moisture to the atmosphere; it reshuffles atmospheric circulation, generating atypical weather from Australia to America; it diminishes upwelling of cooler, nutrient-rich waters that nourish fisheries. La Nina, in which the eastern Pacific gets abnormally cooler, has similar, but opposite impacts.
A new pattern emerges
Understanding Pacific Ocean phenomena such as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation helps forecasters predict how Earth’s climate will respond to global warming. But to investigate patterns that might be at play on longer timescales, Karnauskas and colleagues were interested in how tropical Pacific Ocean temperatures behaved if viewed over 1,000 years, rather than several decades.
To do that, they harnessed the power of computer models used to make projections of future climate. The models weave together a variety of interacting physical processes in the atmosphere, ocean, ice, and land that combine to create climate conditions. The complexity of these models requires intensive computing power and long run times; so the models are usually used to simulate only the last and upcoming centuries - to ensure that the models reliably replicate the past and then to see how they predict future climate scenarios.
Karnauskas and colleagues analyzed three separate global climate models that simulated thousands of years of past ocean and atmospheric dynamics on Earth, with or without human activities factoring into the results. By removing the din of human industrialization, scientists can hear the natural signals of baseline conditions in nature.
All three models produced a strikingly similar pattern: In a 100-year cycle, waters in the western Pacific near Indonesia and in the northeastern Pacific, near the west coast of the United States and around Alaska and Kamchatka in Russia, all became warmer than normal; waters in the eastern tropical Pacific near South America and in the northwestern Pacific (near China and Japan) and the southwestern Pacific (near northern Australia) became cooler. That pattern flip-flopped, then returned roughly each century.
Coral confirmation
The model simulations also revealed important climatic impacts from this Pacific Centennial Oscillation. The pool of warmer water in the eastern tropical Pacific triggered atmospheric waves radiating in both directions toward Earth’s poles, which significantly altered wind patterns over the North and South Pacific. These atmospheric changes strongly influenced storm tracks through mid-latitudes on both sides of the equator, as well as water conditions that affected coastal fisheries in California and Alaska. The Pacific Centennial Oscillation also greatly altered rainfall in the tropics, with important ramifications for agriculture and water supplies in some of the world’s most vulnerable regions, Karnauskas said.
Of course, the model results are theoretical. Karnauskas said he hoped the finding will motivate scientists who study past climates to take the next step: searching for records of past Pacific Ocean temperatures lodged in coral skeletons and seafloor sediments to verify the Pacific Centennial Oscillation predicted by the models. Fortunately, many of the areas that appear to be affected by the Pacific Centennial Oscillation host abundant reefs that may be queried to see if the 100-year cycle exists, and if so, where in that cycle we are today.
This research was funded by the Reuben F. and Elizabeth B. Richards Endowed Fund.
The media and NOAA have been obsessed with the arctic minimum for the satelite era set with the help of the continuing warm Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and a major arctic storm that compressed broken ice.
The ice is recovering on schedule as winter approaches. Meanwhile the Antarctic set a new record high for sea ice extent. Don’t expect to see this in the major mainstream media.
Every year, sea ice forms and melts in the Arctic. The summer melt covers a wide area, and the minimum area occurs sometime during September. From now on, freezing takes place increasingly rapidly as the days shorten and temperatures drop. Looked at over extended periods, there will be trends towards more or less summer melting. So it has always been, and so it always will be. But since 1979 the extent of Arctic ice has been measured and recorded and the current trend is for greater melting. Indeed, by most reckoning, this year has seen a record low for sea ice extent. The question is, how worried should we be?
There is, of course, no simple answer. Believers in the likelihood of dangerous global warming in decades to come say we should be very worried and predict that the Arctic will be ice-free in summer before long. But there are others who see this as part of a longer-term cycle, about which we can do little and which will have at worst only modest consequences. Indeed, some point out that the Earth is overdue for a return to an Ice Age, which would have an enormous negative impact on our species as well as many others.
Greater loss of ice in summer is also not simply caused by higher average temperatures as a direct effect of higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. For a start, there has been no increase in average temperature this century, despite ever-rising CO2 levels. Although the Arctic appears to be warming faster than average, as the enhanced greenhouse hypothesis predicts, other expected effects are not apparent. In particular, the projected warming of the upper troposphere in the tropics has not really materialised, and the Antarctic ice cap has largely continued to grow.
Another factor which has often been cited is black carbon (soot) deposited on the ice, leading to greater absorption of solar radiation and more melting. Some scientists have suggested that this accounts for a large part of the observed melting and overall warming. But weather patterns also have their part to play. Changes in wind direction and the strength or temperature of ocean currents can make a large difference.
The consequences of loss of summer ice are not clear cut, either. Because all Arctic ice is sea ice, its loss makes no difference to sea level, unlike melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, which are on land. But shrinking Arctic ice cover also affects the Earth’s albedo, allowing more heat to be absorbed and contributing to further warming (in the summer only, with ice inevitably reforming during the long polar winter).
Whatever the impacts, what is still not clear is the extent to which this melting is unprecedented. We should remember that satellite measurement only started in 1979, just 33 years ago. Before that, we only have memory, diaries and records of other local observations. It is undeniable that the summer melt is greater than seen by most people in their lifetimes, but there is no direct measurement of the situation much before that.
To set this in context, what we do know is that the world has seen an irregular rise in temperature since the late 19th Century, as it emerged from what is known as the Little Ice Age. It is highly likely that Arctic summer ice was more extensive at this time, but we also know that considerable warming occurred during the early part of the 20th Century, with the 1930s being a particularly warm decade, followed by a gradual drop in temperature until the most recent warming trend started in the mid-1970s. Satellite observation now makes it possible to plot the extent of ice quite accurately, but before that no-one knew for sure.
Going further back, the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods are well documented. It was during the MWP that Vikings established viable colonies on the coast of Greenland and reached the east coast of North America. The prevailing view is that their settlements were abandoned or wiped out when the warm period ended and the downward trend of temperatures began, leading to the Little Ice Age. It seems almost certain that Arctic sea ice would have melted to a greater extent than normal during the warmer times, but we simply can’t quantify this.
What we also don’t know is what drove the climatic variation between these warmer and cooler periods. It was clearly neither large scale use of fossil fuels nor changes in agricultural practice. Solar cycles almost certainly played some role, with observers having recorded the correlation between weather patterns and sunspots over many years.
Whatever the causes, the same drivers are most certainly still at work today, making it virtually impossible to quantify the contribution of increased CO2 with any confidence. We know that, all else being equal, higher levels in the atmosphere should lead to higher average temperatures, but the whole highly polarised and largely unconstructive debate is about the extent of this change. Is there simply the modest impact calculated by spectroscopists or is there a positive feedback as the warmer air carries more water vapour?
We may not know the answer, but for more than a decade the warming effect of carbon dioxide has been cancelled out by other factors, possibly including the negative feedback of increased cloud formation (itself perhaps boosted by greater penetration of cosmic rays into the atmosphere in times of low solar activity, according to the Svensmark hypothesis). Arctic sea ice is melting (and the Antarctic ice cap growing) over a period when there is no trend in average temperatures.
If the ice-free Arctic summers come to pass soon, as some are predicting, the fact is that we will have to live with them, because there really is nothing we can reliably do in the short to medium term to alter the trend, particularly as climate is still so poorly understood. For all practical purposes, adaptation rather than mitigation must be the primary focus of policy.
From NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center (SPC) Facebook page, a silver lining to the heat wave/drought of 2012:
Check out these 2012 numbers from NOAA SPC, showing only 757 confirmed tornadoes as of September 21. That compares to an annual average of 1,300 tornadoes, and 1,692 that touched down last year as of late September.
SPC writes:
:After a busy start, tornado events in the U.S. in 2012 have dropped well below the expected normal. The preliminary total of 757 tornadoes is about 400 tornadoes below what might be expected in a typical year. This chart shows that in late 2011, the annual running total was over 400 tornadoes above normal. This depicts the dramatic variability that can occur in tornado numbers from one year to the next.”
I’d call this an “inconvenient truth” when compared to Al Gore’s latest pay for play bloviation:
Al Gore hopes to show links between climate change and the effects of extreme weather worldwide with an online and social media-fueled event built around the idea of “dirty weather.”
Gore’s advocacy group, the Climate Reality Project, announced Sunday that its second multimedia “24 Hours of Reality” event will occur Nov. 14-15 and bear the title “The Dirty Weather Report.”
Gore still hasn’t fessed up to the “24 hours of reality” lie he foisted on the public last year with his Climate101 video where he faked the results of a CO2 experiment in post production because it couldn’t possibly ever work on its own.
I located all the exact same props and replicated his experiment, and proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the end result of that experiment presented to the viewer was faked.
1. Extreme events, like the recent U.S. drought, will continue to occur, with or without human causation. These recent U.S. “extremes” were exceeded in previous decades.
2. The average warming rate of 38 CMIP5 IPCC models is greater than observations, suggesting models over-react to CO2. Policy based on observations will likely be far more effective than if based on speculative models, no matter what the future climate does. Regarding Arctic sea ice loss, the average model response to CO2 engenders little confidence because the models’ output fails when applied to Antarctic sea ice conditions.
3. New discoveries explain part of the warming found in popular surface temperature datasets which is unrelated to the accumulation of heat due to the extra greenhouse gases, but related to human development around the stations. This means popular surface datasets are limited as proxies for greenhouse warming.
4. Widely publicized consensus reports by “thousands” of scientists rarely represent the range of scientific opinion that attends our murky field of climate research. Funding resources are recommended for “Red Teams” of credentialed investigators, who study low climate sensitivity and the role of natural variability. Policymakers need to be aware of the full range of scientific views, especially when it appears that one-sided-science is the basis for policies which, for example, lead to increased energy costs for citizens.
5. Atmospheric CO2 is food for plants which means it is food for people and animals. More CO2 generally means more food for all. Today, affordable carbon-based energy is a key component for lifting people out of crippling poverty. So, rising CO2 emissions are one indication of poverty-reduction which gives hope for those now living in a marginal existence without basic needs brought by electrification, transportation and industry. Additionally, modern, carbon-based energy reduces the need for deforestation and alleviates other environmental problems such as water and deadly indoor-air pollution. Until affordable and reliable energy is developed from non-carbon sources, the world will continue to use carbon as the main energy source.
The Senate has words on the Administration’s War on Coal here.
Inhofe Applauds House Passage of “Stop the War on Coal Act”
Washington, D.C. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, welcomed the passage today in the House of Representatives of the “Stop the War on Coal Act.” The bill was approved by a bipartisan vote of 233 - 175.
“I applaud the bipartisan House passage of the “Stop the War on Coal Act,"” Senator Inhofe said. “Over the past four years we have witnessed an unrelenting attack by the Obama administration on American energy production one that has resulted in lost jobs, higher energy prices, and lessened energy security.
“Today’s decisive achievement in the House stands in stark contrast to the stalling and inaction of the Senate. Many of my Senate colleagues have talked at length about unleashing American energy production and reining in the Obama-EPA, but when the opportunity arises to do so they hide behind cover votes. As these Senators head home to hit the campaign trail, their record is clear and excuses only go so far: thanks to many of them, the far-left polices of the Obama-EPA remain unchecked and will go forward harming American families with higher energy prices and lost jobs."”
NOAA and their useful idiots have been filling the airwaves with claims that 2012 is the hottest year in US history. They accomplish this by massive cheating. The raw maximum temperature data shows that 2012 (so far) has been the seventh warmest year - with 1934, 1921 and 1925 being the three hottest years
