"…several decades of global cooling"

Strangely absent from the BBC news bulletins (so far) - but headlined by The Daily Telegraph and carried by the major news agencies – is a "shock" finding that global warming is taking a break.

This comes from a report in the journal Nature which concludes, on the basis of computer modelling of changes to the "meridional overturning circulation" (MOC), that global warming "could take a break in the next decade".

Climate scientists at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany, it seems, believe a change in the Gulf Stream is impending. They predict this will temporarily weaken over the next decade, in line with what has happened regularly in the past. This, they say, will lead to slightly cooler temperatures in the North Atlantic and in North America and Europe.

Separately, and apparently unrelated to this study, Watts up with that publishes an analysis offered by Don J. Easterbrook, a retired professor from the Dept. of Geology, Western Washington University, in Bellingham.


This is in response to the news on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation shift, reported yesterday, with Easterbrook concluding that we could be facing "…several decades of global cooling" (the graph shows the historic effects of PDO shifts on temperatures).


Nor do these findings stand on their own. Today we also see a report that March 2008 was clearly an extreme month for sea ice in the Bering Sea. St. Paul Island (see satellite location pic) remained in the sea ice through the month of March. St. George – to the south of St. Paul - was icebound for a total of 18 days during March.


Several captains of fishing/crabbing vessels decided by the third week of March to stop fishing and go home, hoping to return in early April to resume operations in less icy waters (pic below – the Bering Star while crabbing in the Bering Sea during early March 2008. This was one of the ships that suspended operations due to the ice).



Then, from the other end of the world, Science Daily reports that the Antarctic deep sea is getting colder. This is the first result of the Polarstern expedition of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association that has just ended in Punta Arenas/Chile. At the same time, the journal confirms that satellite images from the Antarctic summer have shown the largest sea-ice extent on record.

Putting all that together – bearing in mind that there has been no global warming since 1998, and taking into account the concerns over the lack of sunspot activity and the lateness of solar cycle 24 – one comes to the inescapable conclusion that, whatever the medium to long-term future might hold, we are in for some colder weather in the short-term.

Looking back to the last winter, and the heavy snows, it is also necessary to remind ourselves that, in the short-term, it is weather, not climate, which destroys crops and ruins harvests. With "global warming" seemingly turning to cooling, we also have to remind ourselves that moderate global warming increases food production and that we have been enjoying a "global warming dividend" for some decades.


Cooling, of course, brings with it the possibility of catastrophic winter weather events but, even without any such phenomena, lower crop yields are to be expected. And, with the global food production system under stress, we are relying on record harvests over the next few years to rebuild reserves and take the pressure off commodity prices.

We are thus in a situation where the world is relying not just on maintaining production levels but on record production, at levels never before achieved. These are achievable, but only if weather conditions allow – of which we cannot be certain, and less so now. In short, we really do have a global system "on the edge".

For wealthy countries like the UK, any immediate adverse effects of cooler weather will manifest themselves in food price inflation and occasional local shortages (as they are doing now). These will be more inconvenient than life-threatening. Not so, of course, for impoverished nations, which – as we pointed out earlier – could suffer severely. The knock-on effects for the UK and other developed nations are incalculable – but potentially serious.

For Britain, though, the deterioration in the global food supply is especially serious as, according to latest figures, we are only 60 percent self-sufficient in food – equivalent to four in ten of our population relying on imported food.

A lack of self-sufficiency is not a problem – the UK has always been a trading nation and has, since the Middle Ages, relied on imported food. What matters is whether, in a situation of global food shortage, we can manage our food supplies. The problem is that we cannot – and it gets worse. Our predicament is spelt out here:


Our food policy (including strategic stock management) – is the sole provenance of Brussels (the EU) through the CAP and other policy instruments.

The policy itself is fundamentally flawed in that it is designed to deal with the consequences of agricultural over-production and is neither appropriate for, nor capable of, dealing with structural supply deficits.

Even if the policy was appropriate, it is being managed by the EU commission, which has a record of incompetence and which, in any event, lacks the flexibility to respond effectively to rapidly changing situations.

We no longer have the capability to broker deals with third (non EU) countries, with a view to securing our own supplies, or make bilateral agreements with those countries in order to promote increased production from which we can benefit.


In short, whatever might happen in the short to medium future, we are entirely reliant on the good offices and capabilities of the European Union, to ensure that we as a nation remain well fed.


Furthermore, while the consequences (to us) of mismanagement of our food supplies in an era of food surpluses are primarily financial, in a time of shortages, the consequences are potentially far greater. That is really worrying.

In a sense, we see chickens coming home to roost. With successive governments having handed over their powers to control our food supply to the EU, we are now left at the mercy of Brussels, the commission and the council of ministers, comprising 26 other member states – all of which have their own agendas and their own priorities.

Arguably, would that they knew it, the developing situation is a gift for Eurosceptics. The fact that we are so reliant on the EU for our basic needs is an issue which provides the strongest possible argument for getting clear of that malign organisation and recovering control of our own affairs. This is no longer an academic issue (if it ever was), but one of increasing urgency.

UPDATE: New posting and comments on Watts up with that and an excellent post here.

Global warming may 'stop', scientists predict

Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said.
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Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a "lull" for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged.

This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.

However, the effect of rising fossil fuel emissions will mean that warming will accelerate again after 2015 when natural trends in the oceans veer back towards warming, according to the computer model.

Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany, said: "The IPCC would predict a 0.3°C warming over the next decade. Our prediction is that there will be no warming until 2015 but it will pick up after that."
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He stressed that the results were just the initial findings from a new computer model of how the oceans behave over decades and it would be wholly misleading to infer that global warming, in the sense of the enhanced greenhouse effect from increased carbon emissions, had gone away.

The IPCC currently does not include in its models actual records of such events as the strength of the Gulf Stream and the El Nino cyclical warming event in the Pacific, which are known to have been behind the warmest year ever recorded in 1998.

Today's paper in Nature tries to simulate the variability of these events and longer cycles, such as the giant ocean "conveyor belt" known as the meridional overturning circulation (MOC), which brings warm water north into the North East Atlantic.

This has a 70 to 80-year cycle and when the circulation is strong, it creates warmer temperatures in Europe. When it is weak, as it will be over the next decade, temperatures fall. Scientists think that variations of this kind could partly explain the cooling of global average temperatures between the 1940s and 1970s after which temperatures rose again.
Global warming forecast predicts rise in 2014

Writing in Nature, the scientists said: "Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic [manmade] warming."

The study shows a more pronounced weakening effect than the Met Office's Hadley Centre, which last year predicted that global warming would slow until 2009 and pick up after that, with half the years after 2009 being warmer than the warmest year on record, 1998.

Commenting on the new study, Richard Wood of the Hadley Centre said the model suggested the weakening of the MOC would have a cooling effect around the North Atlantic.

"Such a cooling could temporarily offset the longer-term warming trend from increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

"That emphasises once again the need to consider climate variability and climate change together when making predictions over timescales of decades."

But he said the use of just sea surface temperatures might not accurately reflect the state of the MOC, which was several miles deep and dependent on factors besides temperatures, such as salt content, which were included in the Met Office Hadley Centre model.

If the model could accurately forecast other variables besides temperature, such as rainfall, it would be increasingly useful, but climate predictions for a decade ahead would always be to some extent uncertain, he added.

Nature: AMO will stop warming until 2020

In this dose of peer-reviewed literature about the climate, we look into Nature.
Noel Keenlyside et al. (from Kiel, Germany)
wrote an article called "Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector." Yes, I mean Kiel where Max Planck was born.

They look at the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) influencing the meridional overturning circulation (MOC). The Gulf Stream is the part of the MOC along the East Coast of the U.S., mostly driven by Western winds (i.e. directly by the rotation of Earth). Its extension towards Europe, the North Atlantic Drift, is also supported by thermohaline circulation.
MOC: Warm water flows from the equator to the North and returns at depth in the ocean. The intensity of this circulation depends on the AMO phase. See a detailed picture of Atlantic currents.

The oscillation is a slow quasiperiodic pattern that usually switches into the opposite regime after 60-70 years. It is a slower process than PDO we discussed a few days ago. Because only sea surface temperatures are available for previous decades, they use them to reconstruct the temperatures inside the ocean. The results are incorporated as a new term in their otherwise "conventional" computer model. With this new term, (validation) skill is improved markedly.
Commercial: Prof Roy Spencer: More carbon dioxide, please
Their conclusion? The predictions for a foreseeable future change dramatically. The MOC will weaken to its long-term mean. The Atlantic Ocean, Europe, and America will cool down slightly in the next decade while the Pacific Ocean won't change. In plain English, the AGW hoax may take timeout till 2018.

Their choice of words is a testimony of the political correctness. For example, in Richard Black's article in the BBC, Keenlyside says:
One message from our study is that in the short term, you can see changes in the global mean temperature that you might not expect given the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
If you wonder what this sentence means, it means "Our models, if correct, imply that the IPCC projections for the next 15-20 years are incorrect." Recall the words that are being used when a controversial published article disagrees with a detail of a skeptic's theory: we typically read about one last nail in the coffin of an oil industry stooge. ;-) But when 2,500 hacks are proved wrong in a completely essential aspect of their paper - the projection of temperatures for the whole next decade -, a very different language must be chosen, right?

Even though 1/3 of the people who live today are said to see no more global warming in their lifetime - a problem that is often claimed to be one of the most urgent problems of the current world - and despite the disagreement of their paper with the frantically promoted hysteria about the "settled" catastrophic science, Richard Black writes:
The projection does not come as a surprise to climate scientists, though it may to a public that has perhaps become used to the idea that the rapid temperature rises seen through the 1990s are a permanent phenomenon.
Wow. So the refutation of a prediction of a dangerous warming by the world's top 2,500 scientists ;-) "does not come as a surprise". Note that with no global warming since 1998, the paper predicts 20 years of no warming.

Recall that Al Gore has predicted global destruction in less than 8 years from now. To make you even more certain that scientific papers can have no impact whatsoever on the religious dogmas of the climate debate, Richard Black quotes a Richard Wood from the Hadley Centre:
[Wood] emphasises that even if the Kiel model proves correct, it is not an indication that the longer-term climate projections of the IPCC and many other institutions are wrong.
So a paper showing that a decade of predictions is completely wrong because it has neglected some very important dynamics doesn't even "indicate" that there "might" be something wrong with the projection of the IPCC "and many other institutions" in the long run. Wow. What an amazing [expletive] this Wood is. This is the kind of people who are reviewing articles about climate change to guarantee that "heresies" can't occur. This particular Wood was the reviewer of Keenlyside et al.

The whole validation of all existing climate models is (or should be) mostly based on the data from the previous decades or centuries. If an effect that is argued to be as strong as the greenhouse effect has been neglected while it has the power to change 60-70 years of the temperature dynamics, it implies the existence of a critical flaw in the whole picture. At this moment, no one can really know for sure what will happen with the AMO in 50 years or so. If we add a term whose absolute values is equal to the strength of the greenhouse effect, a term that can exist for 60-70 years, we can get different results for 60-70 years, can't we?

And there might be many other such terms; note that no paper so far has even properly combined the effects of ENSO, PDO, and AMO. Scientists might be ultimately allowed to study these sinful, mostly irrelevant (!!!) terms but they are not allowed to touch the greatness of the holy anthropomorphic God of global warming who is and who must be forever above all of them. ;-)

Amen.

Se pospone la catástrofe

Ya saben ustedes que cada cinco años, por cada cien mil moléculas de aire, la viciosa humanidad añade aproximadamente una de CO2.

Y que esta molécula y otras más de lo mismo que poco a poco iremos añadiendo —aunque son invisibles, inodoras y tóxicamente inofensivas— producirán tal efecto de calentamiento que acabarán destruyéndonos, no sólo a nosotros sino al planeta entero. Algunos, psicólogos del clima, ya lo notan. Dicen que se está volviendo loco.

Pues bien ...

Llevamos ya diez años en los que la temperatura media global no aumenta y esta semana la revista Nature publica un artículo de investigadores alemanes en el que se dice que en la próxima década es posible que tampoco.

La acción del mar, cuya circulación es aún una gran desconocida, puede ser mucho más relevante en los próximos diez años, o veinte, que las moléculas de CO2 que añadamos.

El artículo de Nature, titulado asépticamente "Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector", se refiere a la posibilidad de que el Atlántico Norte se enfríe debido a una ralentización de la corriente del Golfo o de lo que, en jerga científica, se llama MOC (Meridian Overturning Circulation). Ya veremos.

De todas formas, el disimulado título no ha logrado que a la comunidad "negacionista" pase desapercibido el artículo, en el interior del cual se habla de la implicación de la evolución oceánica en la tendencia de la temperatura global, poniendo en entredicho las prisas que nos meten en descarbonizar el mundo.

Pongo arriba la evolución de la temperatura desde Enero de 1990 hasta el pasado Marzo en la troposfera, la capa baja de la atmósfera (de unos 10 km de espesor) en la cual se desarrolla el clima.

Abajo pongo un índice de la supuesta fuerza de la circulación termohalina (THC) (que es otra manera de referirse a lo mismo, MOC) (ver aquí: corrientes oceánicas). Se observa que la tendencia ascendente que se manifiesta desde 1970, y que ha coincidido con el calentamiento que siguió al enfriamiento anterior, puede cambiar a la baja en las próximas décadas y, por lo tanto, provocar de nuevo un enfriamiento.

ref.: N. S. Keenlyside et al., 2008, Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector, Nature, 1 de Mayo, 2008.

figura de arriba en Roy W. Spencer: Global Warming and Nature's Thermostat , interesante artículo que comentaré otro día.

figura de abajo en Jeff Knight et al., A signature of persistent natural thermohaline circulation cycles in observed climate, 2005, Geophysical Research Letters, VOL. 32, L20708, doi:10.1029/2005GL024233, 2005