My Essay and eBooks

This is a sticky post for the top of the main page.  It’s for visitors looking for links to my essay and ebooks about the natural warming of the global oceans.

ESSAY (Free)

“The Manmade Global Warming Challenge” is an overview of how sea surface temperature and ocean heat content data point to a natural, not anthropogenic, warming of the global oceans.  Refer to the introduction here.

eBOOKS (Not Free But Inexpensive)

Who Turned on the Heat? is a detailed discussion of El Niño and La Niña events and their natural contribution to the warming of the global oceans. Other factors are also presented during the discussion of the natural warming of ocean heat content outside of the tropics. The contribution of El Niño and La Niña to lower troposphere temperature anomalies and combine land-plus-sea surface temperature anomalies are also presented. Who Turned on the Heat? was introduced in the post “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About El Niño and La Niña”.

If the IPCC was Selling Manmade Global Warming as a Product, Would the FTC Stop their Deceptive Ads? is my first ebook. It is a collection of model-data comparisons that illustrate how poorly climate models simulate global temperatures since 1900 and sea surface temperature anomalies over the past 30 years.  It was introduced in the blog post here, and the Amazon Kindle edition was introduced here.

SkepticalScience Now Argues Against Foster & Rahmsorf (2011)

SkepticalScience recently produced a YouTube video which claimed to show that the rate of global warming has not slowed in recent years. See their post here, which states:

This replicates the result of a study by Foster and Rahmstorf (2011) under slightly different assumptions.

I later produced a video that explained one of the flaws in their approach. Basically, I’ve illustrated and discussed why they cannot use linear regression analyses to remove the effects of El Niño and La Niña events.

Now blogger Clyde informs WattsUpWithThat that SkepticalScience is saying they will be removing their video because it does “…not represent a consensus in the peer-reviewed results…” See the SkepticalScience post Has the rate of surface warming changed? 16 years revisited. (Thanks, Clyde.)

Mid-May 2013 Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly Update

The sea surface temperature anomalies of the NINO3.4 region in the equatorial Pacific (5S-5N, 170W-120W) are a commonly used metric for the frequency, strength and duration of El Niño and La Niña events. For the week centered on May 15, 2013, they’ve dropped well below zero but have not reached the threshold of a La Niña (-0.5 deg C). They’re at about -0.28 deg C.

Weekly NINO3.4

Global sea surface temperatures are at +0.195 deg C for the week centered on May 15^th. As noted in earlier updates, a global sea surface temperature anomaly of +0.2 deg C appears to have become the “new normal”. Other than the rises and falls in response to El Niño and La Niña events, it doesn’t look as though they’ve wandered very far from that value over the past 11-plus years.

Weekly Global

INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE ABOUT THE EL NIÑO AND LA NIÑA AND THEIR LONG-TERM EFFECTS ON GLOBAL SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES?

Why should you be interested? Sea surface temperature records indicate El Niño and La Niña events are responsible for the warming of global sea surface temperature anomalies over the past 30 years, not manmade greenhouse gases. I’ve searched sea surface temperature records for more than 4 years, and I’ve searched ocean heat content records for more than 3 years, and I can find no evidence of an anthropogenic greenhouse gas signal. That is, the data indicates the warming of the global oceans has been caused by Mother Nature, not anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

For a further discussion, see the essay (pdf) titled The Manmade Global Warming Challenge. (It’s 42MB, but it’s free and worth the download time.)

I’ve recently published my e-book (pdf) about the phenomena called El Niño and La Niña. It’s titled Who Turned on the Heat? with the subtitle The Unsuspected Global Warming Culprit, El Niño Southern Oscillation. It is intended for persons (with or without technical backgrounds) interested in learning about El Niño and La Niña events and in understanding the natural causes of the warming of our global oceans for the past 30 years. Because land surface air temperatures simply exaggerate the natural warming of the global oceans over annual and multidecadal time periods, the vast majority of the warming taking place on land is natural as well. The book is the product of years of research of the satellite-era sea surface temperature data that’s available to the public via the internet. It presents how the data accounts for its warming—and there are no indications the warming was caused by manmade greenhouse gases. None at all.

Who Turned on the Heat? was introduced in the blog post Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about El Niño and La Niña… …Well Just about Everything. The Updated Free Preview includes the Table of Contents; the Introduction; the beginning of Section 1, with the cartoon-like illustrations; the discussion About the Cover; and the Closing. The book was updated recently to correct a few typos.

Please buy a copy. (Credit/Debit Card through PayPal. You do NOT need to open a PayPal account.) Simply scroll down to the “Don’t Have a PayPal Account” purchase option. It’s only US$8.00.

VIDEOS

For those who’d like a more detailed preview of Who Turned on the Heat?, see Parts 1 and 2 of the video series The Natural Warming of the Global Oceans.

SOURCES

The Sea Surface Temperature anomaly data used in this post is available through the NOAA NOMADS website:

http://nomad1.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh

or:

http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh?lite=

Hurricane Main Development Region Sea Surface Temperatures & Anomalies – Plus a Couple of Other Regions

OVERVIEW

This post presents the annual cycle in sea surface temperatures for the hurricane main development region in the North Atlantic.  It also presents the sea surface temperature anomalies for three regions: (1) the Main Development Region, (2) the Gulf of Mexico and (3) the Coastal Waters north of the tropics along the East Coast of the United States, which is the extratropical portion of Hurricane Sandy’s path.  Those three subsets are presented in weekly and monthly formats using the satellite-based Reynolds OI.v2 sea surface temperature dataset, and I’ve also shown them based on NOAA’s ERSST.v3b long-term sea surface temperature reconstruction.   And since tropical storm development is inhibited by El Niño events, I’ve also presented the weekly NINO3.4 sea surface temperature anomalies.  As an afterthought, I’ve added the weekly data for the Caribbean.

INTRODUCTION

The 2013 hurricane season is fast approaching.  Last month, Klotzbach and Gray of Colorado State University published their Extended Range Forecast of Atlantic Seasonal Hurricane Activity and Landfall Strike Probability for 2013. The opening page reads:

We anticipate that the 2013 Atlantic basin hurricane season will have enhanced activity compared with the 1981-2010 climatology. The tropical Atlantic has anomalously warmed over the past several months, and it appears that the chances of an El Niño event this summer and fall are unlikely. We anticipate an above-average probability for major hurricanes making landfall along the United States coastline and in the Caribbean. Coastal residents are reminded that it only takes one hurricane making landfall to make it an active season for them, and they need to prepare the same for every season, regardless of how much or how little activity is predicted.

Figure 1 – Annual Cycle in Main Development Region Sea Surface Temperatures

Washington Post Headline: “Worlds fish have been moving to cooler waters for decades, study finds”

This is an addition to the post Fishy Temperature Proxy by Anthony Watts.

INTRODUCTION

A new paper about fish migration patterns from 1970 to 2006 is getting some attention by the press. My Figure 1 is Figure 2 from Cheung et al (2013). Click it to enlarge it.

Figure 1

As usual, global warming enthusiasts in the press overlook some basic issues—like the sea surface temperatures for the Indian and Pacific Oceans from pole to pole haven’t warmed in 19+ years, and the Atlantic data show little warming for more than a decade. Further, the tropical Indian and Pacific sea surface temperatures haven’t warmed since 1986. It’s therefore difficult to make claims like “more evidence of a rapidly warming planet”, but that doesn’t stop proponents of hypothetical human-induced global warming.

On Hartmann and Wendler 2005 “The Significance of the 1976 Pacific Climate Shift in the Climatology of Alaska.”

This post was first posted at WattsUpWithThat here a few days ago.

HHHHHHHH

This post presents a number of problems the 2005 Hartmann and Wendler paper “The Significance of the 1976 Pacific Climate Shift in the Climatology of Alaska.” These include the misuse of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) index and the erroneous conclusions derived from that misuse.

On page 14 of the 16-page paper, Hartmann and Wendler (2005) note:

This current debate presents the fact that more work is needed to further define North Pacific climate indices and implications.

Much of the obvious confusion could be eliminated if researchers stopped using abstract forms of sea surface temperature data like the PDO and began to use actual sea surface temperature anomalies. In other words, they should use the right tool for the job.

Multidecadal Variations and Sea Surface Temperature Reconstructions

UPDATE:  I’ve added a link at the end of the post for those interested in a copy of it in .pdf format.

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OVERVIEW

This is a somewhat lengthy blog post. There’s lots of information for newcomers, and there are new presentations of data (new for me) for those who have already examined multidecadal variations in sea surface temperatures.

This post presents the multidecadal variations in sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic, the North Pacific and in the Southern Hemisphere. It presents those multidecadal variations using the three primary sea surface temperature reconstructions—NOAA’s ERSST.v3b, and the UKMO Hadley Centre’s HADISST and HADSST3 datasets—to highlight the subtle differences in the timings and magnitudes of those variations. Last, this post reminds the reader that the long-term sea surface temperature dataset are reconstructions and that they differ quite drastically from the source data.

Figure 1

This post does not comment on peer-reviewed journal articles. It presents data, and it will hopefully give you a better background in long-term sea surface temperature data. That way you can have a deeper understanding of the topic when you read a paper or blog post about multidecadal variability.

Introduction to the Hadley Centre’s HadCRUH Specific Humidity Dataset

Note: After initially posting this, I rearranged the text and Figure 1 to reduce the space on the front page.
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UPDATE: I’ve added an animation to the end of the post.  It illustrates the changes in specific humidity anomalies in response to  the 1997/98 El Niño and the 1998-01 La Niña.

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The UKMO Hadley Centre created a global surface (ocean and land) humidity dataset that runs from 1973 to 2003. It’s known as HadCRUH. This humidity dataset was introduced in Katharine Willett’s PhD thesis, Creation and Analysis of HadCRUH: a New Global Surface Humidity Dataset, and further documented in the 2008 Willett et al paper Recent Changes in Surface Humidity: Development of the HadCRUH Dataset. It was also the observations-based dataset used in Willett et al (2007) Attribution of Observed Surface Humidity Changes to Human Influence. We’ll call the last paper the “Willett et al attribution paper” to differentiate it from the others.

The HadCRUH data are available through the KNMI Climate Explorer in specific humidity (g/kg), Figure 1, and relative humidity (%) forms. I have not presented the relative humidity data in this post.

Figure 1

The abstract for the Willett et al attribution paper reads:

Water vapour is the most important contributor to the natural greenhouse effect, and the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere is expected to increase under conditions of greenhouse-gas induced warming, leading to a significant feedback on anthropogenic climate change.

Even More about Trenberth’s Missing Heat – An Eye Opening Comment by Roger Pielke Sr.

Roger Pielke Sr. was quoted in David Appell’s recent article Whither global warming?  Has global warming slowed down? over at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media. That portion of the article reads:

About 90 percent of this extra energy goes into the oceans. But meteorologist Roger Pielke Sr. of the University of Colorado in Boulder says he would like to understand why more heat is going into the deep ocean. “Until we understand how this fundamental shift in the climate system occurred,” says Pielke, “and if this change in vertical heat transfer really happened, and is not just due to the different areal coverage and data quality in the earlier years, we have a large gap in our understanding of the climate system.”

These large changes in ocean content reveal that the Earth’s surface is not a great place to look for a planetary energy imbalance. “This means this heat is not being sampled by the global average surface temperature trend,” he says. “Since that metric is being used as the icon to report to policymakers on climate change, it illustrates a defect in using the two-dimensional field of surface temperature to diagnose global warming.”

David Appell’s entire article about the recent pause in global warming is worth a read. It was also the topic of Judith Curry’s post more on the ‘pause’. There, in a comment yesterday, Roger Pielke Sr. provided his complete answer to David Appell’s interview question. Roger was also kind enough to email me his full reply with the italics, underlined and boldface text intact.  It’s as follows:

April 2013 Sea Surface Temperature (SST) Anomaly Update

MONTHLY SST ANOMALY MAP

The following is a Global map of Reynolds OI.v2 Sea Surface Temperature (SST) anomalies for April 2013. It was downloaded from the NOMADS website. The contour levels are set at 0.5 deg C, and white is set at zero.

April 2013 Sea Surface Temperature (SST) Anomalies Map

(Global SST Anomaly = +0.234 deg C)

SkepticalScience Still Misunderstands or Misrepresents the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)

The author of the recent SkepticalScience post Distinguishing Between Short-Term Variability and Long-Term Trends, Dana Nuccitelli, still misunderstands or misrepresents El Niño and La Niña processes.  Either way, he’s missed something. The instrument temperature record indicates that La Niñas and El Niños serve as a natural recharge-discharge oscillator, with La Niñas acting as the recharge mode and El Niños serving as the discharge and distribution phase. As such, the data indicate that El Niño and La Niña events are responsible for the natural warming of global sea surface temperatures over the past 31 years and that they’re the cause of a portion of the warming of ocean heat content since 1955. If this subject is new to you, refer to my illustrated essay “The Manmade Global Warming Challenge” [42MB]. Also, we’ve discussed time and again that an El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) index only represents the impacts of ENSO on the variable being measured, and that an ENSO index does not represent all of the ENSO processes or their aftereffects, but the SkepticalScience author Dana Nuccitelli continues to present myths about ENSO indices—and, in turn, about global warming.

I have not read the recent post by Dana Nuccitelli in its entirety. Based on the opening paragraph, it looks to be a comment on the McLean et al (2009) paper Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature. This post is not a defense of that paper. It’s about the closing statement of Dana Nuccitelli’s post, which is clearly a falsehood. Nuccitelli writes:

If we remove the long-term warming trends, we can see once again that the short-term wiggles in the temperature data are strongly influenced by changes in ENSO.  However, the long-term global warming trends are not – they are due to the human-caused greenhouse effect.

Here’s a challenge to Dana Nuccitelli and other bloggers from SkepticalScience. You and your associates at SkepticalScience claim to have analyzed more than 12,000 peer-reviewed papers about global warming and climate change. What I present in the following should be a really easy task, because lower troposphere temperature anomalies for the mid-to-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere warmed in a very specific way. Surely, out of the 12,000 papers, a few of them must have addressed how lower troposphere temperatures have actually warmed.

If you believe that manmade greenhouse gases are responsible for the recent bout of global warming, please provide links to the climate model-based, peer-reviewed papers that explain: