Ocean, Atmosphere, Ice, and Land - Bumps and Wiggles (8):
Ocean, Atmosphere, Ice, and Land - Bumps and Wiggles (8):
Introduction: This is the eighth (and last!) in a series on understanding climate variability, global warming, and what we might do about it. The series focuses on the past 30 years and the next 30 years.
From the beginnings of the WU Climate Change Blog there have been entries on “natural variability.” A number of known modes of natural variability have been discussed. The most “famous” source of natural variability is El Nino, which is a warming of the sea surface temperature in the eastern Pacific. This warming changes the atmosphere, with the impact of these changes realized throughout most of the globe. El Nino and its related cold phase, La Nina, are part of an oscillating behavior characterized by several attributes. First, this is an example of the ocean and the atmosphere varying together - in a correlated way. Second, the ups and downs of the oscillation are not “regular.” That is, the time period is not the same from one oscillation to the next and the peak and the duration of the warm and cold phases varies a lot. Third, despite significant observations and the development of useful theories, we do not fully understand the mechanisms that cause the El Nino – La Nina cycle. Hence, our ability to represent El Nino in climate models could be substantially improved. For the purposes of this article these attributes can be summarized as - a not fully quantified example of the oceans and the atmosphere irregularly varying in sync with each other.
There are many such features in the Earth’s climate; that is, not fully quantified examples of the oceans and the atmosphere irregularly varying in sync with each other. Other important ones are the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. (Summary of such variability) When compared with El Nino, these other oscillations are less well quantified, less regular, and the relation between the atmosphere and ocean is more difficult to describe. Another characteristic of these modes is that they slosh back and forth with characteristic times of several years. Hence, these modes contribute to the bumps and wiggles in the observations that are the subject of this series of blogs. Implicitly and intuitively, when people start to think about climate “prediction,” as opposed to “projection,” it is how to account for these sources of natural internal variability. This is and will be a hard problem. There are a few Big Points I would like to make.
Big Point 1: One of the spurious statements about climate change, climate models, and climate projections is that it is impossible to forecast the climate because we know that “weather” is “chaotic,” and cannot be predicted beyond, approximately, 2 weeks. (Chaos and Weather Prediction from National Geographic) This misconception is, perhaps, based on the idea that the climate is “average weather,” and therefore, we have to predict weather before we can predict climate. Several points – 1) We might not be able to predict weather on an event-by-event basis beyond a few days, but we are likely to be able to (and can pretty well) represent the “average” weather and the correct amount of variability. 2) The definition of climate as “average weather” is, in fact, an inadequate definition of climate based on our experience of focusing on the weather and weather prediction and knowing the most about the atmosphere. The climate is all about the ocean and ice sheets and land and how they interact with the atmosphere and impact people. 3) So the details of Lorenz’s famous and powerful theory about chaos and the atmospheric weather is not exactly relevant to the problem of climate prediction – or more concretely ocean prediction. 4) We know from our El Nino experiences that the atmosphere responds in a, more or less, predictable way to changes in the ocean. (El Nino responses La Nina responses) Therefore, if we can predict the ocean better, we can predict, more accurately, what will happen in the atmosphere and how climate change will impact man.
Big Point 2: Sometimes I hear in the criticism of climate change science that climate models and modelers and scientists do not account for El Nino, the North Atlantic Oscillation and all of these sources of natural variability. That models and scientists do not account for these processes is simply an untrue statement. Climate models that include the interaction of the ocean and the atmosphere do contain modes of variability that are “like” El Nino, the North Atlantic Oscillation, etc. They are like the phenomena that are observed on Earth, but they are not an event-by-event representation of the Earth. And while they are like these events, our ability to simulate these events is far from perfect. Remember, I said earlier, these sources of variability are not fully quantified examples of the oceans and the atmosphere irregularly varying in sync with each other. When we look for signals in the models of warming by greenhouse gases, that warming is deemed significant above natural variability in the models that is comparable in magnitude of what is observed. see wiggles on figure in this blog. When all of the models are added together and averaged, as is often done in the IPCC figures, all of this variability averages out; the projection appears smooth. For the purpose of this series of blogs, the real observations of temperature have bumps and wiggles that are not in the projections that are the source of the discrepancies I have been writing about.
Big Point 3: There are certainly other modes of atmosphere-ocean-ice interactions that we have yet to observe. Back in the 1990s while I was at NASA, Arthur Hou and Andrea Molod published a paper looking at the interaction between the tropics and high latitudes. This has been a subject of many papers over the years. There was a result that they found that has stuck with me; namely, they found a high sensitivity of the transport of heat to the Arctic to what was going on with the deep convection in the western Indian Ocean. (Hou and Molod) The “deep convection” is responsible for those incredible and sometimes dangerous storms near the equator that drive the Hadley Cell. (Hadley Cell 1, Hadley Cell 2) The two aspects of Hou and Molod’s study that struck me were first, the high sensitivity mentioned above, and second, how difficult it is to model the western Indian Ocean. In recent years I have been impressed by the body of work that is provided by P. D. Sardeshmukh and his colleagues, in this case, especially Joseph Barsugli. In a two studies focused on tropical sea surface temperature patterns, they find great sensitivity of global weather patterns to, yes, the Indian Ocean. (2002, 2006) (These go along with much more studied sensitivity to patterns in the Pacific.) I, rightly or wrongly, even extract from this work a potential clue about that warm period in the 1930s that gets a mention every now and then. The point, there may be, almost certainly are, ocean-atmosphere patterns that we have yet to observe adequately, much less model. We will need to do this better as we understand the bumps and wiggles in the temperature observations. In my opinion, the most important places to focus to improve our modeling ability are on the West Indian Ocean and the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. These studies need to be process-focused and to explicitly focus of how the ocean and atmosphere (and in the Northwest Atlantic the outflow glaciers of Greenland) couple together. It is a fact of history that we focus most on the atmosphere, next the ocean, and only recently ice sheets and glaciers. We leave the “coupling” to just happen. We must focus on the science of coupling to explain the bumps and wiggles and to develop a predictive capability.
Big Point 4: There are modes of variability that we have not even thought about. We are just beginning to introduce ice sheets into climate models. We already know that there are strong connections between glacial flow, glacial melt, and the presence of warm sea water (Learning Abount Ice, Fast Ice – Redux, Sea Ice in Hot Water). But we have really not had an observing system that would measure all of the components, and those modes of variability would be expected to have long time scales. We are just beginning to get real ice sheet models linked into climate models, and that gives us the opportunity to do some numerical experiments. But even weak-minded modelers, ultimately, rely on data.
Short Summary: What I have posed in this series of blogs on short term variability is that the community of climate scientists need to have a research focus on short-term variability, where short term is a “few” years. By a “few” I mean a couple of years to maybe a few decades. The reason for this focus is not only to develop the foundation for decadal climate prediction, but to also provide the intellectual depth to better use climate model projections, as well as to strengthen the credibility of using climate model projections in applications. It is of critical importance to increase the focus on coupling of components in climate models, with particular attention to the processes important for variability on time scales longer than “weather.”
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Bumps and Wiggles (1): Predictions and Projections
Bumps and Wiggles (2): Some Jobs for Models and Modelers (Sun and Ocean)
Bumps and Wiggles (3): Simple Earth
Bumps and Wiggles (4): Volcanoes and Long Cycles
Bumps and Wiggles (5): Still Following the Heat
Bumps and Wiggles (6): Water, Water, Everywhere
Bumps and Wiggles (7): Blackness in the Air
And here is
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Reader Comments
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Cloud feedbacks are definitely very uncertain given our current knowledge. A better understanding of this will aid in better future climate predictions. Roy Spencer has discussed clouds quite a bit. A few of these are below.
Clouds Cool the Climate System…But Amplify Global Warming?
New Paper from Roy Spencer: PDO and Clouds
Are Clouds The Main Cause Of Climate Change?
And so it begins...
I only see one error attributed to Spencer in that article, and I suspect it is the same one that he has long since corrected and explained on his website. If you want a link, I'll find it for you when I have more time (it was a few years back).
You think pro-AGW scientists never make mistakes?
Many climate scientists' funding is based on finding evidence of AGW. No AGW, no more funding. Do you think this influences the results?
"Lord Oxburgh was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Science and Engineering Research Council, A*STAR, as of 1 January 2002, and is a member of the International Academic Advisory Panel of Singapore and the Hong Kong University Grants Committee.[9] He is honorary president of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association,[10]chairman of Falck Renewables, a wind energy firm,[11] an advisor to Climate Change Capital. He was chairman of D1 Oils, plc, a biodiesel producer, in 2007, and a director of GLOBE, the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment.[12]"
Source is in the article.
Was he a good choice to investigate the Climategate emails? Do you think his ties had an influence on the findings?
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You know, I really detest this side of the AGW debate. I believe that this issue is so politicized that bias exists everywhere. I still think that, on the whole, the science can be evaluated on it's own. If it is bad science it should be rather easy to refute.
CO2 alone cannot be shown to be responsible for current nor projected amounts of warming. The effects of feedbacks in the climate system that are assumed in the climate models is what is in doubt.
Pardon me if I jump in here for just a second. This quote bothers me "If they cant model the basics of their science then what use are they?"
Has it ever occurred to you that some things can't be modeled? I'll tell you what. Show us a proof that all natural phenomena can be modeled. A proof of that should be easy to find if it has been proven.
Florida show us the proof.
LOL. You have no idea of my qualifications. I doubt that most of the people on this board have relevant academic qualifications better than Dr Spencer. Regardless, I don't spend my attacking people's credibility on here as some people do. I try to stay to a discussion of the science. To get into the motivations and politics would be far too contentious for a message board in my opinion. I do hope that you at least don't dispute that funding for climate science has increased exponentially as the concern over AGW has grown, and that it far exceeds any amounts spent on studies skeptical of AGW.
Hmmm...my post was largely meant to be sarcastic, as I'm not sure how much computing power would be required to compile and run some of the computer models anyway.
However, I have looked for this before without success yet apparently some of the IPCC models do seem to have source code available in the last link you posted (most do not). Of course,the last time I recall searching for this was a few years ago at least. Still, as my post implied that none were available, I will admit to being incorrect in this instance (I hate when that happens).
Thanks for the link, regardless. I will probably download/review and compile/run some of these if possible, assuming I am able to find the time.
Out for now; may possibly may be back later.
Led by the University of Colorado at Boulder, the international study indicated that while the mean annual temperature on Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic during the Pliocene Epoch 2.6 to 5.3 million years ago was about 34 degrees Fahrenheit, or 19 degrees Celsius, warmer than today, CO2 levels were only slightly higher than present. The vast majority of climate scientists agree Earth is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping atmospheric gases generated primarily by human activities like fossil fuel burning and deforestation.
Artist’s rendering of the Beaver Pond site on Ellesmere Island, in Canada's High Arctic, as it may have looked about 3 to 5 million years ago.
Link
I find your remark really silly and perhaps a little stupid. Perhaps you didn't understand what I was trying to say.
I certainly didn't say the words or ideas you tried to put in my mouth. But, then you spend a lot of time doing that, don't you, putting words in people's mouths they never spoke. Kind of vile, a tactic like that.
Did you learn that from Karl Marx or Saul Alinsky?
"The oil spill could enhance the size of the hypoxic zone through the microbial breakdown of oil, which consumes oxygen, but the oil could also limit the growth of the hypoxia-fueling algae," said R. Eugene Turner, Ph.D., professor of oceanography at Louisiana State University. "It is clear, however, that the combination of the hypoxic zone and the oil spill is not good for local fisheries."
Link
Why Mercury Is More Dangerous in Oceans
ScienceDaily (June 28, 2010) — Even though freshwater concentrations of mercury are far greater than those found in seawater, it's the saltwater fish like tuna, mackerel and shark that end up posing a more serious health threat to humans who eat them.
Link
time again, after a few months, i come on here and the scientists against fossil fuels still disregard any variation in planet temperatures since the last major ice age. they say that where the money comes from does not affect research but then go on to say spencer and others get their money from energy companies and are thus just 'hacks'.
what 'climate gate' revealed was falsification and manipulation of data to get desired results. is this ok because they were searching for 'truth'? and when the tobacco companies falsified and manipulated data they were criminals? i really do try listen and read everything i get my hands on, looking for the ah ha moment that convinces me one way or the other. unfortunately, from what i have read here and elsewhere, many scientists have thrown in their lot with the man is responsible for all global warming crowd. scientists here bemoan and belittle those that blog with some religious overtones when they themselves follow the religion of man made global warming. yes i say religion because there is no proof. oh there are theories out the ying yang. and there are mountains of statistical data. the majority of regulators all had the same info on wall street before the meltdown and the majority all agreed things were going fine. the science of money flow and economics is different from climate studies but one has to trust that the 'experts' and 'scientists' in their respective fields know some of what they are talking about.
all i am saying, is what if... just what if the man is soley responsible crowd is wrong? what if there is something bigger going on here? what if man is having an effect, like the local effect cities or deforestation has on weather, but the effect itself is nothing more than a mere 'speed bump' in the overall picture. that we are focusing so much attention on the 'speed bump' that we miss what is really going on?
unfortunately, i have a hunch, an unscientific, unmeasurable hunch that i am right. also unfortunate, is that many scientific discoveries where discovered on hunches.
just as i have no respect for a 'frat rat' that looks down on me cause i do not drive the fancy sports car or where the right shirts or have the right girl on my shoulder, i can have no respect for 'scientists' who look down on anybody without the same degree and field of study. and that is just what a group of the 'scientists' on here do. i do not doubt their credentials. i question their belief that theirs' is the only 'right' answer
Don't worry! One only needs to look at the North Arctic ice to see what is happening to the climate. No need to argue or bicker. I have a hunch the sun will rise tomorrow.
How come they don't mention the new corals starting to form in Greenland waters and off Antarctica? They are forming there as those waters heat up, right?
Yes, I know corals take many years to form and the waters mentioned above aren't warm enough yet, but then wouldn't we begin to see more coral formations moving further north over the last 30 years if the oceans are warming?
Please address this topic.
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