The ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies
Fish and other sea creatures will have to travel large distances to survive climate change, international marine scientists have warned.
Sea life, particularly in the Indian Ocean, the Western and Eastern Pacific and the subarctic oceans will face growing pressures to adapt or relocate to escape extinction, according to a new study by an international team of scientists published in the journal Science.
“Our research shows that species which cannot adapt to the increasingly warm waters they will encounter under climate change will have to swim farther and faster to find a new home,” says team member Professor John Pandolfi of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and The University of Queensland.
Using 50 years’ data of global temperature changes since the 1960s, the researchers analysed the shifting climates and seasonal patterns on land and in the oceans to understand how this will affect life in both over the coming century.
“We examined the velocity of climate change (the geographic shifts of temperature bands over time) and the shift in seasonal temperatures for both land and sea. We found both measures were higher for the ocean at certain latitudes than on land, despite the fact that the oceans tend to warm more slowly than air over the land.”
The finding has serious implications especially for marine biodiversity hotspots - such as the famous Coral Triangle and reefs that flourish in equatorial seas, and for life in polar seas, which will come under rising pressure from other species moving in, the team says.
“Unlike land-dwelling animals, which can just move up a mountain to find a cooler place to live, a sea creature may have to migrate several hundred kilometres to find a new home where the water temperature, seasonal conditions and food supply all suit it,” Prof. Pandolfi says.
Under current global warming, land animals and plants are migrating polewards at a rate of about 6 kilometres a decade - but sea creatures may have to move several times faster to keep in touch with the water temperature and conditions that best suit them. Team member Associate Professor Anthony Richardson from the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Queensland became interested in how species might respond to climate change during his work on a global synthesis of marine climate impacts.
He says, “We have been underestimating the likely impact of climate change on the oceans.” As a general rule, it seems sea life will have to move a lot faster and farther to keep up with temperature shifts in the oceans. This applies especially to fish and marine animals living in the equatorial and subarctic seas, and poses a particular issue both for conservation and fisheries management.
Assoc. Professor Richardson explains, “There is also a complex mosaic of responses globally, related to local warming and cooling. For example, our analysis suggests that life in many areas in the Southern Ocean could move northward.” However, as a rule, they are likely to be as great or greater in the sea than on land, as a result of its more uniform temperature distribution.
The migration is likely to be particularly pronounced among marine species living at or near the sea surface, or subsisting on marine plants and plankton that require sunlight – and less so in the deep oceans.
“Also, as seas around the equator warm more quickly and sea life migrates away - north or south - in search of cooler water, it isn’t clear what, if anything, will replace it,” Prof Pandolfi adds.
“No communities of organisms from even warmer regions currently exist to replace those moving out.”
ICECAP NOTE: This is all model and theory and not data based. Here is the equatorial ocean temperatures down to 300m in the Pacific. There is no warming since 1979.
At the same time, sea life living close to the poles could find itself overwhelmed by marine migrants moving in from warmer regions, in search of cool water.
The team’s future research will focus on how different ocean species respond to climate change and they are compiling a database on this for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
By Steve Goddard, Real Science
Stefan Rahmstorf, Professor of Physics at Potsdam University, pointed out that for the second time in four years the ice cover at the Arctic in September had been reduced to 4.4 million square kilometres, 40 per cent less than it had been three or four decades earlier. In 2007 the reduction had been explained by odd wind patterns. There had been no odd winds this summer. The ice was also rapidly becoming thinner. There was now a prospect of an ice-free Arctic in summer, decades earlier than had once been believed remotely possible. Not only would several species in the area be in danger. The loss of the reflective mirror at the Arctic would further increase temperature in the northern regions. Already the pace of the Greenland ice shelf melt was becoming unnerving. If it was to melt entirely sometime in the future, ocean levels would rise by seven meters.
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3611206.html
Enlarged
Meanwhile, back outside the rabbit hole, NSIDC shows a 50% increase in the extent of thick multi-year ice since 2008, and all satellites show a sharp drop in sea level over the last two years. As far as the “reflective mirror” goes, there is almost no sunshine in the Arctic in September, and the received sunshine is at a very oblique angle. September-March Arctic ice cover has almost zero impact on the earth’s SW radiative balance.
Ethics Alarm
At issue is not whether global warming is occurring, or even whether it is man-made. The issue is how incompetent, biased and astoundingly uncritical the media coverage of the issue has been and continues to be. Now major news publications and respected columnists are participating in yet another global warming ethics train wreck, which helps nobody and nothing.
Here’s is Prof. Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist, toward the conclusion of his 2003 paper on global warming data:
“Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.”
Now here is the Washington Post’s Brad Plumer, on a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Muller announcing the results of his research:
“Back in 2010, Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist and self-proclaimed climate skeptic, decided to launch the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to review the temperature data that underpinned global-warming claims. ...So what are the end results? ...As the team’s two-page summary flatly concludes, “Global warming is real.”
Note that the reason Plumer believes Muller’s study is worthy of special notice, and is elevated to a level of presumed objectivity and credibility, is that he is, Plumer says, a “self-proclaimed skeptic.” Does his 2003 statement sound skeptical to you? Did it seem skeptical to Plumer, or any of the many, many media sources that took his lead- “Climate-change skeptic: ‘You should not be a skeptic.’(Atlanta Constitution-Journal); ‘Climate Skeptic Sponsors New Climate Study, Confirms ‘Global Warming Is Real’ (Popular Science); ‘Skeptic Talking Point Melts Away as an Inconvenient Physicist Confirms Warming’ (New York Times); and many more?
It didn’t seem un-skeptical, because Plumer and the other reporters didn’t read it, so eager are they to show common cause with environmentalist....you know, the good guys. The non-conservatives. Either that, or they did read it, and decided to withhold it from their readers, so their readers couldn’t make up their own minds whether Muller was really a skeptic, or just a canny self-promoter who knows how to move his research to the front of the line. OR perhaps they read it and can’t understand English. Those are really our only options regarding Plumer and the rest of the journalists who aped the “skeptic” misrepresentation. They are:
a) lazy and biased
b) dishonest and biased
c) stupid, or
d) All of the above
They also didn’t read the interview Muller did on the website Grist in 2008, in which he said things like:
“The bottom line is that there is a consensus - the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] - and the president needs to know what the IPCC says. Second, they say that most of the warming of the last 50 years is probably due to humans. You need to know that this is from carbon dioxide, and you need to understand which technologies can reduce this and which can’t. Roughly 1 degree Fahrenheit of global warming has taken place; we’re responsible for one quarter of it. If we cut back so we don’t cause any more, global warming will be delayed by three years and keep on going up...” Back in the early ‘80s, I resigned from the Sierra Club over the issue of global warming. At that time, they were opposing nuclear power. What I wrote them in my letter of resignation was that, if you oppose nuclear power, the U.S. will become much more heavily dependent on fossil fuels, and that this is a pollutant to the atmosphere that is very likely to lead to global warming.”
Does that sound like a skeptic to you? As for Plumer, I repeat: lazy, dishonest, or stupid. Take your pick.
In assessing Eugene Robinson, the Washington Post’s official Obama flack columnist who once won a Pulitzer Prize somehow, I vote for “all of the above.” Three days after blogger Don Surber posted the Grist interview, Robinson offered a column (today) that proclaimed the global warming debate over because a “skeptic” had completed a study that proved “global warming is real.”
Do they have Google over at the Post, Brad? Eugene? Just wondering.
If the journalists who jumped up and down in joy over Muller’s study had bothered to do minimal research - seventh grade level, really - they would have discovered that Muller’s research project BEST has long been viewed among climate change skeptics as a set-up for exactly this. You can read Climate Depot’s extensively documented criticism of Muller in April of this year here. That’s April, Eugene. This is October.
Even this is not the worst of this spectacular display of incompetent reporting. The majority of rational climate change skeptics do not question that the earth’s temperature has been rising, but that the rise has been sufficiently linked to man-made causes, that scientists have the data to accurately predict whether the rise will continue, and that proposed measures to combat it will have the desired effect, or are necessary at all. And what did Muller’s study show on these issues? Oh, just nothing:
“Muller is claiming in a October 21, 2011 OPED that skeptics of man-made global warming fears no longer have any basis to doubt “global warming” because his new study confirms that the Earth has warmed since the 1950s! Muller seems to imply that the terms “global warming” and man-made global warming are interchangeable and any warming is somehow “proof” of human causation.” [Climate Depot]
That’s still good enough for news media climate change flacks, 99.9% of whom couldn’t decipher any of the data if their lives depended on it (and neither could I) but who just know that the global warming advocates are correct. And what about the critical “man-made” part of the equation?
If you say so, Eugene.
By Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar
The latest Nobel Prize for chemistry has confirmed what science students are taught early on: that all scientific theories are intrinsically uncertain; that science progresses through skepticism and attacks on existing theories, and that successful attacks are sometimes rewarded with Nobel Prizes. It follows that skepticism about global warming, far from being antiscience, is in keeping with the standard scientific approach - and could one day fetch a skeptic a Nobel Prize.
The Nobel for chemistry was awarded to the Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman for his discovery of “quasicrystals,” which violate standard theories about crystals. Scientists had believed that all crystals form in repeated periodic patterns, and commercial production of crystals was based on that understanding. But Shechtman exploded the conventional wisdom by discovering quasicrystals, which form regular patterns that never repeat.
When Schechtman first announced his discovery, his superiors were scornful, telling him he should review his basic chemistry textbooks. When he persisted, he was asked to leave his research group. His first paper on the topic was rejected by the Journal of Applied Physics. But Schechtman persevered, and he proved that what 99.9 percent of scientists believed was wrong.
Sound familiar? We keep hearing that 95 percent or 98 percent of scientists believe catastrophic, man-made global warming is proven. Climate skeptics are widely denounced as science deniers. However, as Schechtman showed, 99 percent of scientists can be and have been wrong.
Science proves nothing beyond all doubt. Rather, it progresses by knocking down existing theories in favor of better ones, which in turn are subject to fresh attacks. Skepticism is at the very heart of the scientific method. The scientific approach is at odds not with climate-change skeptics, but with those who claim global warming is completely proven, contestable only by madmen and blackguards paid by oil companies.
A recent experiment at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland is casting doubt on another idea believed by about 100 percent of scientists: Einstein’s theory of relativity. CERN scientists have found particles called neutrinos that seemed to have traveled faster than light, challenging a fundamental plank of modern science. According to the theory of relativity, a particle traveling faster than light will go backward in time.
Environmentalists denounce climate skeptics as science deniers. But have the CERN scientists been denounced as Einstein deniers? No. The scientific community is shocked by the discovery but keeping an open mind - even about something as firmly established as the theory of relativity.
To say 95 percent of scientists believe in global warming suggests, incorrectly, that the skeptics are loonies. In fact, they have included Nobel laureates such as Ivar Giaever, Robert B. Laughlin, and Norman Borlaug. Giaever recently resigned from the American Physical Society in protest against its insistence that global warming is “incontrovertible.” He declared, “The claim ... is that the [global average] temperature changed from 288.0 to 288.8 degrees Kelvin in 150 years, which (if true) means to me . . . that the temperature has been amazingly stable.”
The most scientists know about the climate is not much. They know so little that they can’t predict the next drought or El Niño. When they try to predict temperatures a century hence, it’s a real stretch.
When people know only a little about a topic, they tend to make a lot of the little they know. The little in this case is that rising concentrations of greenhouse gases will raise temperatures if other things remain constant. But other things are not constant; they vary in ways we do not fully understand.
That’s why we cannot say why temperatures were high in the medieval period despite low carbon dioxide concentrations. It’s also why the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not make a definite prediction of future temperatures, instead positing six scenarios ranging from benign to catastrophic.
We know so little about the climate that we can’t rule out the possibility of a catastrophe. So we can discuss how much insurance we should buy to cover a disaster that may never happen. But that’s different from planning for certain disaster.
Answering the insurance question requires massive funding of research not just by proponents of global warming, but also by skeptics - the breed that has repeatedly won Nobel Prizes for overthrowing the existing orthodoxy.
Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar is a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and a columnist for the Times of India.
David Whitehouse
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project has released its preliminary findings though not in a research journal but to the scientific community and the general public. Their trumpeted finding is not surprising - the world has gotten warmer in recent decades - or at least the land has. This is consistent with the other global temperature datasets.
A press release issued by the project said, “Global Warming is real,” adding that it can find no evidence of a heat island effect, and that even weather stations considered to be of doubtful quality still show relative warming over the 1950 - 2010 period in question.
Whilst the results are not that surprising, the findings of the research have been used by some to talk about the nature of climate skepticism bearing in mind that the impetus for the Berkeley initiative came from self-avowed skeptical scientists. But the results, and how they have been portrayed, also says something about the nature of today’s environmental reporting. In particular it reveals a narrow focus on trouncing sceptics at the expense of putting the science into its proper context.
The Guardian is notable not for what it says but for what it doesn’t say. The article has far too narrow an outlook, providing no overall context. It does not even mention that the Berkeley researchers themselves say they cannot determine why the world has warmed. It makes no mention that those sceptics who doubt that the earth is warming are few in number, and that there is a widespread and respectable group of scientists who, in peer reviewed journals, debate the relative mix of influencing factors concerning that warming.
The Guardian also allows Jim Hansen to misrepresent scepticism and go unchallenged. He says, “as I have discussed in the past, the deniers, or contrarians, if you will, do not act as scientists, but rather as lawyers….as soon as they see evidence against their client (the fossil fuel industry and those people making money off business-as-usual), they trash that evidence and bring forth whatever tidbits they can find to confuse the judge and jury.” The number of sceptics included in the article is zero.
The Economist (not in my opinion noted for its deep thinking on climate science) article was clearly written by someone unfamiliar with the subject. Like the Guardian it failed to put this research into its proper perspective. Its sceptic count was also zero.
The report in Nature was much better, in my opinion because it actually included comments from the sceptics in that Steve McIntyre said he has found some problems with the Berkeley research. Given Steve’s track record this is something worth noting. The Berkeley team is posting their raw data on the web and no doubt many statistically adroit bloggers will get to work (for me one of the main things to come out of “Climategate” was that professors of climate science were not in the same league as some on the web when it came to statistical analysis.) Nature’s sceptic count is one.
New Scientist did a good job in that they did provide perspective for the research emphasising just how irrelevant was the Berkeley finding to many sceptical questions today. New Scientist sceptic count, three.
But, for me, the worst treatment came from Forbes. This spiteful article says that the scientific community been saying for decades that the earth is warming up? I don’t think so. It goes on; “Indeed, even most remaining climate change skeptics and deniers have moved away from saying there is no warming. Now, their major talking points are that it isn’t caused by humans, or only a little bit, or it won’t be bad, or we can’t afford to fix it, or… Denial is a moving target.”
This prejudiced, intolerant and inaccurate, article completely misrepresents sceptical views, and is a good example of the problem facing the debate about climate science within and without of the scientific community. We must surely rise above such sour and divisive comments that have no place in scientific discourse. The author is in an old sterile paradigm that is inherently anti-science, and is more of the problem facing progress than some at the extreme end of climate scepticism.
Trivial Headlines
There are very few people who do not believe the world hasn’t warmed, in various episodes, since the instrumental record began about 150 years ago. We are today warmer than the Little Ice Age, warmer than the Victorian Era, indeed warmer than the 1970s. The proper question is, of course, why? The Berkeley team have no conclusions about this.
So all the headlines that basically say sceptics have been trounced because the world really is warming are trivial. The Berkeley team confirm what has been found in three other datasets and what “both sides” of the debate already agree on. I could say “so what,” and “is it news?” Well, news is what reporters print.
There are significant questions about the research however. Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre say they have found some serious issues that will no doubt come out in due course.
The 39,000 or so weather stations cover 29% of the planet and a third of them showed no warming over the 60-year period under consideration, indeed they showed cooling. How does the distribution of these two sub-sets of data compare? One would not expect global warming to be even across the globe (indeed most of it seems to take place in the Arctic) but if the cooling stations were well mixed in with the warming stations geographically then that would be interesting. The Berkeley researchers interpolate temperatures between stations and I wonder if the cooling stations fit into this interpolation? Indeed, perhaps one way to look at the data would be that only a third of weather stations (the difference between the warmers and the coolers) contribute to the final conclusion. To my mind that’s a very different stance from saying that two-thirds of temperature stations show warming.
Other things that emerge from the data is that it confirms that the Nasa Giss dataset is anomalously high with respect to the other datasets especially in the past decade. Thus we should be careful, as I have said previously, about claiming temperature records based on Nasa Giss data alone.
The data also confirm the post-2000 standstill, Nigel Calder has noted this. Looking at the data I do not agree with the study’s lead author that the recent standstill is not present in the data.
The British government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir John Beddington, stressed that the study needed to be peer-reviewed before being factored in to the debate, but that if it was found to be correct, it would conform with US work at NASA and NOAA and that of Phil Jones and his colleagues at the UK Hadley Center-UEA Climatic Research Unit. “This work adds to the evidence about how climate change is happening,” he said.
Actually the researchers say they cannot say how global warming is happening just that it is, though one could be charitable and say that Sir John’s comments about how global warming is happening might refer to geospatial data, but refer to my previous comments about that.
Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, director at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, said he hoped that if and when the study was peer reviewed and published, the focus could shift to “the implications for the future of this warming rather than wrangling over whether the warming is really there.”
I hope not. The implications for the future must be framed in the context of our understanding of what is actually going on. That should be the next focus.
But there is something really important in one of the four papers issued by the Berkeley team, and a considerable irony that it has been missed by all reporters and commentators.
If you do something that most of the reporters haven’t done, and usually never do, study the research paper itself (why bother when there is a press release) you will find something remarkable.
“Human Component Overstated”
The findings of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project are important because they emphasise the growing realisation that science has underplayed the unknowns and uncertainties in the attribution of the causes of recent climate change. Without doubt, the data compiled and the analysis undertaken, by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project is unambiguous evidence that the root causes of global warming are poorly understood.
The researchers find a strong correlation between North Atlantic temperature cycles lasting decades, and the global land surface temperature. They admit that the influence in recent decades of oceanic temperature cycles has been unappreciated and may explain most, if not all, of the global warming that has taken place, stating the possibility that the “human component of global warming may be somewhat overstated.”
There is the headline missed by all: Scientists say human component of global warming may be overstated.
Why isn’t it there? It’s just as valid as the headlines used, scientifically more interesting and journalistically light-years better than what has been reported.
The BBC did mention the North Atlantic decadal oscillation aspect of the story saying, “The Berkeley group says it has also found evidence that changing sea temperatures in the north Atlantic may be a major reason why the Earth’s average temperature varies globally from year to year.” But it then fails to explain what this means and gets itself into a twist and doesn’t mention the conclusion reached by the Berkeley researchers.
Now, here’s the irony, the Berkeley team are actually sceptics about the matter where the real debate lies - the question of the mix of human and natural contributions to the recent warming. Now why didn’t any of these “reporters” pick up on that?
Why was this nugget missed or ignored? It is because environmental reporters are too obsessed with bashing sceptics, and reading press releases, than in reporting science.
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.org
In this segment of NPR’s Talk of the Nation: Science Friday titled ”When Politics Meets Science”. The ‘give and take’ with the first caller is ...well hilarious. Apparently, if you disagree with the IPCC you are anti-science. Full stop.
I think it deserves the appropriate attention. H/T James Kolan, Perth Western Australia viaa Marc Morano
See also this post in Physorg featuring Gavin Schmidt arguing the debate is no longer over cause of climate change only the degree. As long as editors or reporters keep their bliners on and not investigate the alternative viewpoint, we will make no progress towards understanding and planning the real causes of climate change - cycles in the sun and ocean.
By David Limbaugh
If it’s not narcissism, what explains President Obama’s habit of demanding something against the people’s will, being rejected, refusing to take no for an answer and berating the public he is pretending to represent?
We saw it over and over with Obamacare. By now, it’s part of our national lore that he delivered some 54 speeches to sell the public on his scheme yet never made a dent in the public approval numbers. Truth be told, in the end he gave far more than 54.
But that didn’t stop him from pressing forward anyway, and his underhanded methods at cramming his bill through Congress will also be enshrined in our national history.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t he done the same thing with automobile emission standards and other environmental causes? He couldn’t convince the people that he was right, nor could he convince Congress, so he just colluded with his fellow radical autocrats in the Environmental Protection Agency to bypass Congress and impose these regulations unilaterally.
Let’s also not forget his pet project, the sainted high-speed rail, for which he’s determined to spend billions and billions of dollars in brazen defiance of the people’s disinterest in the project, their objection to further deficit spending, and the marked resistance of the individual states.
Obama demands we embrace his misguided fantasy, even though several state governors have essentially said: “Thanks, but no thanks. We can’t afford your federal generosity. We’re the ones who’ll have to maintain the albatrosses.” Congress has also pronounced it dead on arrival.
But Obama won’t give up. He never gives up. Because he knows better than we do. He tells us this technology is the wave of the future, but it’s actually closer to an anachronism. As others have written, it’s not well-suited for the territorially expansive United States. But that doesn’t matter a whit to him, because his real motive is to coerce us out of our automobiles. If he had his way, he’d mandate interstate bike paths.
Need more proof? Look at Solyndra. Have you heard any apologies from this administration about the colossal waste of federal money in pursuit of an environmental goal that Obama—not the public—is demanding? Obama is completely unfazed—so unfazed that he’s just allocated billions more to similarly reckless pipe dreams. He won the election, after all.
We could go on all day with this exercise, but I’ll conclude with reference to his so-called jobs bill, which is just as inappropriately named as his “stimulus” package. He’s never apologized for the immoral waste of $868 billion, which was wholly his baby. Even if the buck for every subordinate’s misstep doesn’t stop on the president’s desk, this one has his name permanently affixed to it.
It was a disaster in every respect. Whether you measure it against Obama’s promises for it or don’t even consider those, it was a miserable failure. He didn’t say he was sorry for adding so much more to the debt without creating the guaranteed jobs; he didn’t say he’d learned from his mistakes. He mocked us, in effect, for trusting him, with his cavalier, disingenuous claim that there were an unlimited number of shovel-ready jobs.
The man is incapable of putting his tail between his legs. If I hadn’t witnessed it, I honestly wouldn’t have believed he had come back for more with the jobs bill. He doesn’t trifle himself to give us any reason that the bastard son of Stimulus would be any different from its licentious father. He just stands at his podium, with his head raised and his tone haughty, and tells us that spending a half-trillion more Monopoly money is the only solution for getting the economy moving.
Seriously? You have to be kidding me. But he’s not.
And when Congress rejected this offensively ill-conceived project, he flinched not, but redoubled his commitment to force it through—piece by piece, benevolent dictator that he is.
Obama attributes opposition to his plan to partisanship, suggesting that Republicans only oppose it because they want to hurt him politically. That’s right; neither the nearly $15 trillion national debt nor the failed track record of Stimulus Sr. could have anything to do with it. And the prominent Democrats opposing it must be driven by partisanship, as well.
Obama is reduced to banging the table like a toddler, demanding he get his way. The only difference in the analogy is that parents correct their toddlers to keep them from hurting themselves; Obama’s opponents oppose him to keep him from further destroying the nation.
America’s 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, recognizing his failure to steer the United States through the Vietnam War period, gracefully did not seek re-election.
You can’t blame me for dreaming.
By Art Horn
El Nino could become a permanent feature of the Equatorial Pacific Ocean. The warm waters of this never ending hot bath in the world’s largest water body would not only warm the entire earth dramatically, it would pump vast amounts of moisture into the air. This additional humidity would act as a positive feedback mechanism that would enhance the warming already being triggered by human burning of fossil fuels and in turn cause global warming to spin out of control. The melting of glaciers would accelerate and sea levels would rise much faster than predicted. The challenges of runaway warming would not be decades away but would be here now.
In 1997 Dr Russ Schnell, a scientist doing atmospheric research at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii said “It appears that we have a very good case for suggesting that the El Ninos are going to become more frequent, and they’re going to become more intense and in a few years, or a decade or so, we’ll go into a permanent El Nino.” He went on to say “So instead of having cool water periods for a year or two, we’ll have El Nino upon El Nino, and that will become the norm. And you’ll have an El Nino, that instead of lasting 18 months, lasts 18 years,” The El Nino of 1997 was blamed for droughts in Australia and New Guinea, A delayed Monsoon in Southeast Asia leading to forest fires that brought choking smoke to human populations, Drought in South Africa and devastating storms on the west coast of South American from Chile to Mexico. Everything that went wrong with the weather was blamed on El Nino. The scary prospect of a permanent El Nino was going to greatly speed up global warming and we had better do something to stop it, now!
At least that was what we were being told in 1997. As it turned out the 1997 El Nino was immediately followed by a La Nina. The cooling of the waters in the Tropical Pacific caused by La Nina dramatically dropped the earth’s temperature in the years following the 1997 El Nino which peaked in 1998. What those who were advocating the emergence of a permanent El Nino ignored was the phase shift of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The what? The 50 to 60 year cycle of warming and cooling that regulates the number of El Nino’s and La Nina’s. The Pacific Ocean had been in the warm phase of the cycle since the mid 1970s. During that time El Nino’s were twice as prevalent as La Nina’s and were much stronger and longer lasting. The result was warming global temperature from the mid 1970’s to the late 1990’s. It was during this warming spell that global warming hysteria blossomed. Many said the warming was due to increased carbon dioxide in the air but in reality the warming was caused by the warm phase of the PDO.
At this point one might ask how do you know the warming of the mid 1970s to the late 1990’s was caused by the warmer Pacific and not increasing amounts of carbon dioxide? Just look at what the global average temperature has done since the 1997/98 Super El Nino. There has been no warming of the earth average temperature since 1998. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased significantly in the last 14 years. In fact 25% of the increase of carbon dioxide since the birth of the industrial revolution has occurred since 1997. If carbon dioxide and its presumed strong water vapor feedback is such a powerful driver of the earth’s climate one would have expected the warming of the previous two and a half decades to have continued unabated after 1998 and into this year, but it has not. The prediction of the “permanent El Nino” has, as we say in the forecasting business, been a bust.
The shift to the cooler phase of the PDO has become more pronounced since 2007. The shift to cooler water in the Pacific is measured by the Southern Oscillation Index or the SOI. Since 2007 the SOI has been primarily in the positive mode indicating the existence of La Nina’s. This is in stark contrast to the predictions from the late 1990s and is indeed opposite of what was expected.
During the cool phase of the Pacific Ocean La Nina’s are twice as prevalent as El Nino’s and the El Nino’s that do occur are weak and short lived. The result is that the chilly waters of La Nina’s cause global cooling. Winters in the United States are becoming rapidly colder and more severe. The average temperature is falling at the rate of 3.0 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 2000. Four of the snowiest months in New York City since 1869 have been since 2003. December of 2010 was the second coldest December in Central England since the temperature records began there in 1659. China had another bitter cold winter in 2011 and had the second coldest January in the last 50 years. Georgia and Florida had their coldest December in 2010 since the weather records began in 1895. The combined December and January period of 2010/11 in Florida was the coldest in 116 years of record keeping. Snowfall in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California was the 4th highest since 1879 and the greatest in some areas since the winter of 1951. With another La Nina this winter the western United States will have another near record amount of snow.
So what’s ahead for global warming? Not much if La Nina has anything to say about it. We are now in the 13th year without measured global warming. The La Nina of 2010/11 faded in the spring of this year. Many expected the return of an El Nino as happened in the years prior to 1997 after a La Nina. The difference now is that the Pacific is cooler and will be cooler for another 20 to 25 years or so. Another La Nina has developed and is forecast to be as cold or colder than the one just departed. This is just what is to be expected in this new era of colder and more frequent La Nina’s.
The consequences of this return engagement will be many and varied. One will be the continued cessation of global warming. La Nina’s typically last about a year but the effects on the atmosphere continue for another 6 to 8 months after the La Nina has departed. There will be no global warming for the remainder of 2011 and none through all of 2012. By then we will be into year 14 with no global warming and even the most ardent of “warmers” will have to start scratching their heads in wonder as carbon dioxide levels continue to rise but the temperature does not.
Historically we know that La Nina is associated with extremes of weather around the world. Some of this extreme weather can be beneficial and some can be destructive. Another winter of heavy snows in the mountains of the Western United States will ensure plentiful water supplies for years to come in a region that has been told to expect drought from global warming. Most La Nina’s are warm and dry in the Southeastern United States and this could be helpful to Florida tourism this Winter. On the other hand the drought in the South Central States will continue through 2012 and may go beyond. Hurricanes proliferate in La Nina conditions so the hurricane season of 2012 will likely be stormy although where the storms will strike, if at all is unknown. Heavy rains can occur in the Ohio Valley during La Nina and the threat of a re-occurrence of floods next spring is a concern. Unfortunately La Nina helps to spawn strong and numerous tornadoes in the American spring and next March, April, May and June will likely see more outbreaks of deadly twisters. Australia can have floods in some parts of the country during La Nina but in many areas the water will be welcome.
Predictions of a permanent El Nino have failed as has the relationship between increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the air and global temperature. The powerful interest groups behind man made global warming will ignore what nature is doing and continue to preach rapid warming. They will pound their fists on the table of public opinion, insisting this will cause melting ice, rising seas levels, drowning polar bears and blame every severe storm, cold wave, heat wave, snowstorm, drought, flood, hurricane and tornado on climate change and our use of fossil fuels. In the real world the new era of colder water in the Pacific Ocean will generate colder and longer lasting La Nina’s and continue to throw cold water on global warming. I wonder when reality will begin to sink in for those invested in man made climate change? The answer for many will be never.