On Holland and Bruyère (2013) “Recent Intense Hurricane Response to Global Climate Change”

Alternate Title: Climate Science Community Continues to Lose Sight of Reality

SkepticalScience is promoting the Holland and Bruyère (2013) paper Recent Intense Hurricane Response to Global Climate Change as proof positive that hypothetical human-induced global warming has caused more intense hurricanes. See Dana Nuccitelli’s post New Research Shows Humans Causing More Intense Hurricanes. My Figure 1 is Figure 1 from Holland and Bruyère (2013).

Figure 1

The abstract of Holland and Bruyère (2013) begins:

An Anthropogenic Climate Change Index (ACCI) is developed and used to investigate the potential global warming contribution to current tropical cyclone activity. The ACCI is defined as the difference between the means of ensembles of climate simulations with and without anthropogenic gases and aerosols. This index indicates that the bulk of the current anthropogenic warming has occurred in the past four decades, which enables improved confidence in assessing hurricane changes as it removes many of the data issues from previous eras.

That’s right; referring to Figure 1, Holland and Bruyère (2013) created an index by subtracting the multi-model mean of climate models forced by natural factors (variations in solar activity and volcanic aerosols) from the mean of the simulations that are also forced with anthropogenic factors like manmade greenhouse gases—as if the two types of model simulations and their difference represent reality. They then used that model-based index, with little to no basis in the real world, for comparisons to hurricane activity at various hurricane strengths.

PRELIMINARY April 2013 Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly Update

STANDARD OPENING PARAGRAPH

The April 2013 Reynolds OI.v2 Sea Surface Temperature (SST) data through the NOAA NOMADS website won’t be official until Monday, May 6^th 2013. Refer to the schedule on the NOAA Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature Analysis Frequently Asked Questions webpage. The following are the preliminary Global and NINO3.4 SST anomalies for April 2013 that the NOMADS website prepares based on incomplete data for the month. I’ve also included the weekly data through the week centered on April 24, 2013, but I’ve shortened the span of the weekly data. As noted in the recent mid-April update, I’ve started January 2001, so that the variations can be seen AND so that you can see how “flat” global surface temperature anomalies have been since then.

The base years for anomalies are 1971-2000, which are the standard base years from the NOAA NOMADS website for this dataset.

PRELIMINARY MONTHLY DATA

The preliminary global sea surface temperature anomalies warmed a slight amount (+0.025 deg C) in the last month. The global sea surface temperature anomalies are presently at about +0.24 deg C. That of course will change a little when the full month of data is reported in a week.

Monthly Global SST Anomalies

Joe Romm Predicts “…All But Certain Ruin for Modern Civilization…” from a NOAA Fisheries Press Release

You can’t make this stuff up.

The April 25, 2013 NOAA press release Sea Surface Temperatures Reach Highest Level in 150 Years on Northeast Continental Shelf has been getting coverage by the mainstream media, including alarmist websites like Climate Progress. Sea surface temperatures may be the warmest in 150 years in specific regions of the Northeast Continental Shelf, but NOAA advised that they’re comparable to sea surface temperatures experienced in the late 1940s and early 1950s:

Sea surface temperature for the Northeast Shelf Ecosystem reached a record high of 14 degrees Celsius (57.2°F) in 2012, exceeding the previous record high in 1951. Average SST has typically been lower than 12.4 C (54.3 F) over the past three decades.

Figure 1

Climate Progress was foolish enough to prolong a myth and include a reference to Hurricane Sandy in their alarmist twaddle, along with a graph of global ocean heat content from Nuccitelli et al (2012)—as if global ocean heat content represents the sea surface temperatures of the Northeast Continental Shelf and Sandy’s storm track. Joe Romm writes:

No doubt it was purely coincidental that six months ago, in the fall of 2012, the Northeast was hit by the “largest hurricane in Atlantic history measured by diameter of gale force winds (1,040mi).” Or not.

And Romm concludes with the absurd statement (my boldface):

But I guess we’ll need some storms even more destructive than frankenstorm Sandy before the nation wakes up to the reality that climate change is unfolding much as scientists had warned — and that means all but certain ruin for modern civilization if we don’t slash carbon pollution rapidly.

Dana Nuccitelli Misleads and Misinforms in His First Blog Post at The Guardian

The Guardian has a new blog called Climate Consensus – The 97%. The two primary authors are to be Dana Nuccitelli, a regular contributor at SkepticalScience, and John Abraham, Associate Professor at the University of St. Thomas.

Dana Nuccitelli’s first post at his new blog at The Guardian is titled “Why is Reuters puzzled by global warming’s acceleration?” His article is subtitled, “‘Climate scientists struggle to explain warming slowdown,’ said Reuters. But warming is speeding up, and scientists can explain it.” Nuccitelli’s first post at The Guardian is reminiscent of his posts at SkepticalScience—that is, it’s misleading and full of misinformation.

Data contradict the points Dana Nuccitelli is trying to make. In this post, we’ll briefly discuss ocean heat content data, how Mother Nature—not manmade greenhouse gases—creates warm water during La Niña events, how she releases that naturally created warm water during El Niño events and redistributes it around the oceans afterwards, and we’ll discuss Dana Nuccitelli’s misleading animation called “The Escalator”. Data explains how and why the vast majority of global warming occurred naturally…when it warmed.

OCEAN HEAT CONTENT

Nuccitelli begins his post with a picture from space of the Pacific Ocean with the caption:

Oceans, such as the Pacific pictured here from space, are absorbing much of the warming the planet is currently experiencing. NASA/ Roger Ressmeyer/ Corbis

Then the first sentence of his post reads:

The rate of heat building up on Earth over the past decade is equivalent to detonating about 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs per second.

Based on Nuccitelli’s opening illustration and statement, we should expect the ocean heat content of the Pacific Ocean to be showing a monumental amount of warming over the past 10 years. But, as shown in Figure 1, the ocean heat content data for the Pacific Ocean from pole to pole (90S-90N, 120E-80W) shows cooling.  Right from the get go, data disagrees with Nuccitelli’s representations.

Figure 1

El Niño-Southern Oscillation Then and Now

I’m presenting this for those who look for patterns. I see it only as a curiosity—nothing more.  I am not suggesting that future ENSO events will mimic those of the past, but…

El Niño-Southern Oscillation indices are used to monitor the strength, frequency and duration of El Niño and La Niña events. One of the commonly used indices is the sea surface temperature anomalies of an area in the east-central equatorial Pacific called the NINO3.4 region (5S-5N, 170W-120W). A blogger recently advised me in a comment of a curious agreement in the NINO3.4 data for two periods separated by more than 100 years. Thanks, Bob.  That is, the sea surface temperature anomalies of the NINO3.4 region for the period of January 2004 to March 2013 are quite similar to those from January 1883 to March 1892. Refer to Figure 1, which presents NINO3.4 anomaly data for the two periods, from the Kaplan reconstruction of sea surface temperatures. The agreement is reasonably strong for climate data.  The two periods have a correlation coefficient of 0.77.

Figure 1

Mid-April 2013 Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly Update

Note: I’ve extended the weekly data back to 2001. I simply wanted to illustrate how “flat” global sea surface temperatures have been since the end of the 1998-01 La Niña. I’m not sure if I’m going to leave those graphs with the 2001 start or go back to my normal start year of 2004. Suggestions?

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 Wednesday April 17, 2013, they’re at about -0.02 deg C, basically zero. That is, there aren’t El Niño or La Niña conditions.

Weekly NINO3.4

A Quick Comment about the PAGES Continental Temperature Reconstructions

Normally, I don’t bother to discuss paleoclimatological reconstructions. The reason: most try, some through questionable methods, to illustrate that the recent warming is unusual and could only be explained by the increased emissions of manmade greenhouse gases. And that’s the same claim being made for the instrument temperature record by proponents of the hypothesis of human-induced global warming. But as I’ve been illustrating and discussing for 4 years, ocean heat content data and satellite-era sea surface temperature indicate Mother Nature is responsible for the warming of the global oceans, see here [42MB], so I don’t find claims of unprecedented, human-induced global warming to be realistic. However, I noticed something that’s very obvious in an illustration from a recent paper that’s getting some press, and I wanted to make it easier to see, for those who’ve overlooked it.

There have been numerous discussions about the Kaufman et al (2013) paper “Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia”, also known as the PAGES (PAst Global changES) reconstruction. ClimateAudit has been reporting on it for a number of days. See Steve McIntyre’s posts here, here and especially here. WattsUpWithThat has discussed the paper here and here. SkepticalScience responded to the paper as could be expected here. RealClimate’s post includes an interesting illustration, which drew my attention to the paper. It’s a modified version of Figure 2 from Kaufman et al (2013). I’ve included the original version from the paper as my Figure 1. The source of the illustration is here.

Figure 1

Model-Data Difference – Global Surface Temperature Anomalies – GISS, HADCRUT4 & NCDC

I added an update to the end of the recent post Model-Data Comparison with Trend Maps: CMIP5 (IPCC AR5) Models vs New GISS Land-Ocean Temperature Index. That update included two graphs that showed the difference between the multi-model ensemble mean of the CMIP5-archived simulations of global surface temperatures and the GISS Land-Ocean Temperature Index (LOTI) data for the period of 1880 to 2012. The model mean is subtracted from the observations data in the graphs. The first graph in the update was the difference with the base years of 1961-1990, which were the base years for anomalies used by the IPCC in their model-data comparison in Figure 10.1 from the Second Order Draft of AR5. And the second graph, Figure 1, used the base years of 1880-2012 for anomalies. I also included the difference smoothed with a 5-year running-average filter to minimize the year-to-year variations. We’ll use the same base years (1880-2012) and smoothing for the other graphs in this post.

Figure 1

We’ll also present the differences between the models and the other two primary global surface temperature anomaly datasets: the product from the NCDC, and the HADCRUT4 data from the UKMO. I’ve also included comparison graphs of the model-data difference for the 3 datasets using the global data and a second comparison using the latitudes of 60S-60N, for those concerned that the model-data comparisons are biased by how the datasets and models account for the polar regions. Last, I was interested to see how much better the models performed when compared to the old GISS data (before the recent change in that dataset), so I’ve included a comparison of the model-data difference using the old and new GISS LOTI data.

Model-Data Comparison with Trend Maps: CMIP5 (IPCC AR5) Models vs New GISS Land-Ocean Temperature Index

UPDATE: I’ve added graphs of the difference between the observations and the models at the end of the post, under the heading of DIFFERENCE.

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We’ve shown in numerous posts how poorly climate models simulate observed changes in temperature and precipitation. The models prepared for the upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5^th Assessment Report (AR5) can’t simulate observed trends in:

1. satellite-era sea surface temperatures globally or on ocean-basin bases,

2. global satellite-era precipitation,

3. global, hemispheric and regional land surface air temperatures, and

4. global land plus sea surface temperatures when the data is divided into multidecadal warming and cooling periods.

In this post, we’ll compare the multi-model ensemble mean of the CMIP5-archived models, which were prepared for the IPCC’s upcoming AR5, and the new GISS Land-Ocean Temperature Index (LOTI) data. As you’ll recall, GISS recently switched sea surface temperature datasets for their LOTI product.

We have not presented trend maps in earlier comparisons of observed and modeled global land plus sea surface temperature anomalies, so, for the sake of discussion, we’ll provide them with this post. A comparison is shown in Figure 1 for the period of 1880 to 2012. 

Figure 1

A Different Perspective on Trenberth’s Missing Heat: The Warming of the Global Oceans (0 to 2000 Meters) in Deg C

We discussed Dr. Roy Spencer’s post More on Trenberth’s Missing Heat in my recent post and in the cross post at WattsUpWithThat.

One of the points Roy made:  a change in ocean heat content is presented in terms that look impressive:  Joules times 10^22 or Joules with oodles of trailing zeroes. However, in terms that most people are familiar with, temperature, the warming of the global oceans since 1955 was a minute change.  Roy wrote:

Because of the immense heat capacity of the deep ocean, the magnitude of deep warming in Scenario 3 might only be thousandths of a degree. Whether we can measure such tiny levels of warming on the time scales of decades or longer is very questionable, and the new study co-authored by Trenberth is not entirely based upon observations, anyway.

The NODC presents their ocean heat content data through their webpage here. There, they also include a link to the 2012 paper by Levitus et al that introduced their dataset for depths of 0 to 2000 meters World Ocean Heat Content and Thermosteric Sea Level change (0-2000 m),1955-2010. In the abstract, Levitus et al identify the change in temperature of the volume of water that makes up the global oceans to depths of 2000 meters, or about 6560 feet (my boldface):