This video is the second in the series of videos titled We Now Control Weather – Extreme Heat Events, Dirty Weather, Climate Disasters. The post that introduces Part 1 is here. The series are being prepared in response to James Hansen’s extreme heat events, Al Gore’s dirty weather, and Kevin Trenberth’s climate disasters videos that appear on YouTube. They all claim the weather we’ve been seeing recently can be attributed to manmade global warming. Unfortunately for those three gentlemen, who seem to believe more in climate models than observational data, the global sea surface temperature records do not agree with the models. That is, the global sea surface temperature records for the past 30 years indicate that Mother Nature is responsible for the warming, not manmade greenhouse gases. And that’s the topic of this video—the natural warming of the sea surface temperatures during the past 30 years. This video, like my book, lets the sea surface temperature data indicate and describe how it has warmed.
If you’ve ever run across one of my posts at a WattsUpWithThat or at many other climate change/global warming blogs or have seen me arguing with a proponent of anthropogenic global warming, and you’ve wondered what I was yakking on and on about El Niño this and La Niña that, this is definitely a video for you to watch.
I will be providing a third video in this series to illustrate and explain how we know the warm water released by an El Niño is created naturally. That video will also address questions received in response to this one. If there’s enough time, we’ll take a look at ocean heat content data to show how Mother Nature is responsible for its warming as well. If not, we’ll look at it in the part 4.
This video, Part 2, is less than 25 minutes long, so it’s something you could watch during your lunch break, or over dinner, or during a lull in your normal TV viewing schedule. I’ve decided against allowing YouTube to place advertising before the videos or to include any of those semi-transparent banners that obscure the view, but I have added a quick note about donations/tips at the end. They are very much appreciated.
Enjoy.
Links: I referred to a number of posts toward the end of the video. Here’s a link to the post Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About El Niño and La Niña… It provides a detailed overview of my book Who Turned on the Heat? The Unsuspected Global Warming Culprit, El Niño-Southern Oscillation. And here’s a link to Part 1 of my January 2009 cross post at WattsUpWithThat, which was my first post on this topic, and here’s Part 2. I’ve revised the data presentation since then to make it much easier to understand, primarily with how the oceans are subdivided. The dataset I used in that post has since been discontinued by NOAA, which is why I switched to the NOAA Reynolds OI.v2 data. The third post referred to in the video was The Warming of the Global Oceans – Are Manmade Greenhouse Gases Important or Impotent?
DATA SOURCES
I used the NOAA NOMADS website for the Reynolds OI.v2 data. But it and the HADISST data from video 1, along with the multi-model mean of the CMIP3 and of the CMIP5 climate model outputs (TOS) presented in this video, are available from the KNMI Climate Explorer. They’re provided so you can verify the graphs in this video.
Regards
Bob
Bob Tisdale - Climate Observations 
Thanks for doing these videos Bob. I was wondering as far as the Nino 3.4 data set that you show at 8:33 that shows the swings from the beginning of 1900, why do you think that they seem to get more extreme as you move through the century? Is that more so do to with the instruments of measure or have they been more extreme and if so, why do you think that is?
Richard Fenske, thanks for the question. That’ll be a good one for the next video. You have to keep in mind there’s very little observational data along the equatorial Pacific in the first half of the 20th Century. I’m gonna cut and paste from my book to save a few minutes.
The Giese et al (2009) paper “The 1918/19 El Niño” argued that the 1918/19 portion of the 1918/19/20 El Niño was underestimated in the NINO3.4 sea surface temperature reconstructions, and that it was likely comparable in strength to the 1982/83 and 1997/98 El Niño events. Giese et al (2009) also suggested that the 1912/13 and 1939/40/41/42 El Niño events were also under-rated.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2009BAMS2903.1
Regards
Nice video, thanks… question: in the graph, you explain that for each El Niño event, there is a small jump in sea surface temperature, like a stair case effect. What is the mechanism that this temperature does not come back down?
Simon Filiatrault: Thanks for the question. The short answer is we need an end to the very large El Nino events (have they ended? I don’t know), which cause the upward steps, and we need the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation to peak and then start to cool.
Longer answer: There are three ocean basins we need to consider. First is the East Pacific. If we “volcano adjust” that dataset, we can see that it cooled over the past 30 years, so it is not contributing to the warming:
The South Atlantic-Indian-West Pacific cools between the major El Nino events, so without the major El Nino events, it would not contribute to the warming:
That leaves the North Atlantic and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
Hi Bob. As you know, I’ve been saying for years now that when the Sun goes quiet, heat comes out of the ocean. It’s no coincidence that the last two big el-ninos in ’98 and 2010 started at solar minimum. Now the Sun has gone below normal levels of activity we will get a run of el ninos which diminish ocean heat content. Not that you’ll see evidence of this in ARGO data because the people who collate ARGO data are so convinced by their CO2 driven theory, and it would be so strongly refuted by falling OHC, they will continue to assume that floats showing strong cooling are faulty, and remove them from the record.
The ocean gained a lot of energy during the strong Sun, diminished cloud decades from 1955 to 2005. Since the cloud cover has increased again, and the Sun has gone quiet, temperatures have leveled out and OHC is falling quite fast in the North Atlantic. This indicates to me that more energy is being lost direct to space in the Pacific and less is circulating round to the Atlantic.
There is a big store of heat built up in the oceans and I expect to see ENSO carry on as usual, with some strong el nino events still to come, kicking energy out into the atmosphere. The key point though, is that ocean heat content will be diminished as a result, while the Sun is less active and less able to replenish the energy content.
tallbloke: We’ll watch and see what happens.
Regards
No we don’t control weather> EVidence is to the contrary.
Scientific debate should never be decided by consensus. It should be “decided” by empirical evidence that validates, or otherwise, the hypothesis in question.
Joseph Postma’s new paper (22 October 2012) looks for empirical evidence of a GHE, and finds none. He puts forward cogent arguments as to why this lack of evidence is to be expected. All should read this ground-breaking work, which also cites my paper (March 2012 – see pp 47-49:
Click to access Absence_Measureable_Greenhouse_Effect.pdf
Doug Cotton
Tallbloke and others: The vast majority of thermal energy transfer from the surface to the atmosphere (“heat coming out of the oceans” as you say) is in fact by non-radiative processes. As I explained in my paper published in March, this sensible heat transfer accelerates to compensate for any slowing of radiative cooling. There is a summary of the reasons and physics involved on pp 47 to 49 of Joe Postma’s new (22 Oct 2012) paper http://principia-scientific.org/publications/Absence_Measureable_Greenhouse_Effect.pdf