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Merged Global Warming Discussion II: Heated Conversation

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DC said:
hehe that was an interesting read .
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There's rather a lot of Pause demolition going on at the moment after just two ENSO-neutral years. Another in 2014 will see it off, just as it was always going to seen off in the near-term. Deniers don't care, of course; they'll grasp at some new short-term expedient. Or that old favourite - Antarctic sea-ice.

And squirrels. Not many of those about recently, my avatar's finding it rather dull.
 
CapelDodger said:
There's rather a lot of Pause demolition going on at the moment after just two ENSO-neutral years.
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Best one yet for me.

Compare the trends for 1950 to the beginning of the pause (whenever anyone wants the pause to be) with the trend from 1950 to now.

Any data set using any statistical method available, say wood for trees or the trend calculator at skeptical science.

It is not unanimous, you can find cherries.

But it is suprising.

and so is this

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/global-temperature-the-post-1998-surprise/#more-6942
 
If we get an El Nino in the Pacific in 2014....ouch.

Mind you tropical cyclones are at a 1400 year low for Australia ( some neat science involved in that paper ) so one wonders if the Pacific is "turning over" more frequently with stronger vertical currents that would bring surface temperatures down a bit.

The Pacific seems to be "air conditioning" the atmosphere a bit and of course SO2 from emerging countries are perhaps keeping the worst at bay.

Interesting times
 
macdoc said:
If we get an El Nino in the Pacific in 2014....ouch.

Mind you tropical cyclones are at a 1400 year low for Australia ( some neat science involved in that paper ) so one wonders if the Pacific is "turning over" more frequently with stronger vertical currents that would bring surface temperatures down a bit.

The Pacific seems to be "air conditioning" the atmosphere a bit and of course SO2 from emerging countries are perhaps keeping the worst at bay.

Interesting times
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Certainly in the short term it's going to Niña -the next weekly value for ENSO3.4 is bouncing down to some about minus 0.8- as this abnormally cool equatorial stripe shows:




Anyway there are several model forecast and no one is forecasting a Niña event nor I'm expecting one. I expect a weak Niño event starting by next September or so. The ocean surface looks cool but the basin-wide equatorial upper-ocean heat anomaly is positive and there's some heat building there. This usually precedes Niño events by six months or so, but not all the times.
 
In a nutshell, during 1900-1977 there was more Niña than Niño, from 1978 to 1998 there was more Niño than Niña, and from 1998 on more Niña than Niño again.

It has always looked logical to me the raise in surface temperatures until an increasing unbalance promotes deep heat storage for a while. That's why models in the early 90s were somewhat wrong in it, by their fixed coefficients of deep storage. Now modelling is increasingly better but it has just undertaken complex whole ocean system modelling. I expect in the future that modelling and more research to reveal that the circumpolar mixed layer is by far the most important structure behind the transient effects in this global warming process, including the so-called "pause", and that ENSO (Niños) is just dependent on that. Studies like those involving Agulhas only skim the surface of it, IMNHEO.
 
aleCcowaN said:
In a nutshell, during 1900-1977 there was more Niña than Niño, from 1978 to 1998 there was more Niño than Niña, and from 1998 on more Niña than Niño again.
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This seems to correlate with the PDO, although I'm still not convinced the two things aren't equivalent. The PDO is said to switch states every 15-30 years so I guess it could happen anytime now. (Curry is banking on the full 30, it seems; we'll see how that works out. The Pause is not something I'd nail my colours to the way she has.)

It has always looked logical to me the raise in surface temperatures until an increasing unbalance promotes deep heat storage for a while. That's why models in the early 90s were somewhat wrong in it, by their fixed coefficients of deep storage.
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The (perhaps unhelpful) image I have is of a lava-lamp. They don't develop a steady circulation; imbalances build up and then large globs of material shift around. Given the vast globs we're talking about it's no surprise the process would operate on decadal timescales.

Now modelling is increasingly better but it has just undertaken complex whole ocean system modelling. I expect in the future that modelling and more research to reveal that the circumpolar mixed layer is by far the most important structure behind the transient effects in this global warming process, including the so-called "pause", and that ENSO (Niños) is just dependent on that. Studies like those involving Agulhas only skim the surface of it, IMNHEO.
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It's about bloody time we make a serious effort to understand the biggest thing on the planet. Apart from the North Atlantic, where the cables run and submarines lurk, the oceans have been paid almost no attention below the surface. It's a travesty, but probably tells us something about human nature :mad:.
 
macdoc said:
You are aware of this???




http://www.livescience.com/39716-breaking-underwater-waves-cause-mixing.html

If there more energy in the ocean structure stands to reason there some additional production of vertical movement.
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That is a process in the depths, not near to surface.

Here's the paper.

I was pointing to the oceanic mixed layer which starts at surface level:

(source)

That structure raising an area similar to North America's north of Isthmus of Panama from June to October is what I meant related to what I suspect to be a climate driver of the utmost importance (meaning, I have a hunch about). When you cross these measurements -still in the making- with other information, like this temperature profile I posted here long time ago:

picture.php


you realise the potential significance of it.

To make a quick and dirty pre-evaluation, suppose we have a layer with an area of 25 million square kilometres and a thickness of 300 metres. Let's suppose we have warmed that layer 0.2°C above what is was before. The extra heat would equal 0.4 W/m2 planet-wide (the current radiative imbalance is estimated to be 0.65 +/-0.4 or so). The question is, is it warming? yes, a bit, but what matters is its potential to influence other region and all the turnover streams, and ocean circulation as a whole.
 
CapelDodger said:
The (perhaps unhelpful) image I have is of a lava-lamp.
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That's also the image I have. As you say, not about the processes themselves but about playing with the possibilities the system offers.

CapelDodger said:
It's about bloody time we make a serious effort to understand the biggest thing on the planet. Apart from the North Atlantic, where the cables run and submarines lurk, the oceans have been paid almost no attention below the surface. It's a travesty, but probably tells us something about human nature :mad:.
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In the last five years there is a lot of data but I fail to see much people using it. I managed to make some measurements about what I told by departing from the Marine Atlas application using periodically updated ARGO information. By informal means (deriving information from renders), I could follow some heat flows but I realized that the error margins of departing from visual information made the work unusable but as a "there is something here worth analysing in a proper way" (I posted in this forum some of the first groups of images about three years ago). That for the "hobbyist" part of it. For the institutional, I'll better keep quiet to avoid falling in what I often criticize.
 
Not in the depths or it would not show on the surface

Below the whitecaps breaking on the sea surface, so-called internal waves ripple through the water. These waves can travel long distances, but rarely does evidence of their existence surface — unless you're looking down from space, that is.

http://i.livescience.com/images/i/000/036/409/i02/trinidad-waves-nasa-EO.jpg?1360086317

This photograph, taken on Jan. 18 by a crewmember on the International Space Station, shows internal waves north of the Caribbean island of Trinidad, as featured by NASA's Earth Observatory. From space, the appearance of the waves is enhanced due to reflected sunlight, or sunglint, aimed back at the space station, making the waves visible to an astronaut's camera.
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Nice photo. It's wide covers about 100 km, so the distance between crests is in the order of one kilometre.

This reminds me the conclusions in the paper about the Samoan Passage you linked:

These observations demonstrate the presence of
extremely strong mixing previously inferred from large
water mass changes in a major choke point in the Pacific
MOC (Figure 1). The majority of these water mass changes
occur over very short distances, O (50 km). High-resolution,
direct measurements of the flow and turbulence (Figures 2
and 3) allow determination of the processes responsible;
namely, shear instability and breaking lee waves associated
with topography. The responses and mixing can be very dif-
ferent over distances over only a few kilometers (Figure 4).
Presently, overflow mixing is parameterized in climate-scale
numerical models by either an arbitrarily enhanced viscosity
and diffusivity or a simple streamtube-like submodel [Legg
et al., 2009; Danabasoglu et al., 2010]. Because the water
emanating from the SP and similar regions is the integral
of all turbulent processes that occur over each of numerous
possible pathways, accurate parameterization of the mixing
in models requires understanding (at least in a statistical
sense) of both the processes and the pathways.
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macdoc said:
Interesting times
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It sure is in our Climate Change times. Notice our variable star is getting much more attention :cool:

"Solar physicists around the world today are wondering: has the Sun fallen silent? In 2013, the Sun began the peak phase of its 11-year sun spot cycle called the Solar Maximum when sun spot production should be at its highest. However, the lack of sun spot activity has left solar physicists startled."

Our Changing Climate and the Variable Sun
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIAp_6FAXCY
 
Haig said:
It sure is in our Climate Change times. Notice our variable star is getting much more attention :cool:
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Why do you keep repeating that ? The sun's power output is not constant but it is not a variable star. You've been explained that already, several times. So why don't you learn ?
 
Belz... said:
Why do you keep repeating that ? The sun's power output is not constant but it is not a variable star. You've been explained that already, several times. So why don't you learn ?
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Some people seem to be incapable of grasping the simplest facts, no matter how many times they are explained to them.

Others seem to be under the impression that if highly complex processes can't be explained to them in simple terms then scientists who've devoted their whole lives to studying them must also not understand them.

It's a funny old world.
 
Add to that "contrary to the fact" plus "weasel words" and wrap it with a thick layer of "epistemological hedonism" and you got that "Solar physicists around the world today are wondering: has the Sun fallen silent? In 2013, the Sun began the peak phase of its 11-year sun spot cycle called the Solar Maximum when sun spot production should be at its highest. However, the lack of sun spot activity has left solar physicists startled."

By the way, I like Haig much. He's the epitome of the naïve denialist, a nice good fellow that is so wrong about this.
 
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That is the ONLY smidgeon of evidence I could find that Haig might mistakenly think the V stands for variable since he continues to claim it's a variable star and frankly it took some search time to pin down the V was for 5.

Hey I'm trying to at least save him a bit of face ;)
 
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