Weather’s unwanted guest: Nasty La Niña keeps popping up, confounding climate modellers

When observations show modellers ‘the opposite of what their best computer model simulations say should be happening with human-caused climate change’, it’s surely time to revisit their assumptions. Meanwhile, much head-scratching.
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Something weird is up with La Nina, the natural but potent weather event linked to more drought and wildfires in the western United States and more Atlantic hurricanes, says Phys.org.

It’s becoming the nation’s unwanted weather guest and meteorologists said the West’s megadrought won’t go away until La Nina does.

The current double-dip La Nina set a record for strength last month and is forecast to likely be around for a rare but not quite unprecedented third straight winter. And it’s not just this one.

Active Hurricane Season Expected in the Atlantic Ocean

Image credit: sanibelrealestateguide.com

Unusually, this is the third year in a row under La Niña.
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La Niña conditions and warm ocean temperatures have set the stage for another busy tropical storm year, says Eos.

If forecasts are correct, this season will mark the seventh consecutive above-normal hurricane season for the Atlantic.

NOAA forecasts out today predict a 65% chance of an above-average season, a 25% chance of a normal season, and a 10% chance of a below-normal season. The ranges account for uncertainty in the data and models of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

Simulations explain Greenland’s slower summer warming, say researchers

Kangerlussuaq Fjord, Greenland [image credit: notsogreen.com]

‘Temperatures and rates of ice sheet melting both peaked in 2012’ – interesting quote from the report. The researchers assume that natural factors are merely impeding the inevitable warming they expect from carbon dioxide emission increases, but assumptions can be risky.
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A puzzling, decade-long slowdown in summer warming across Greenland has been explained by researchers at Hokkaido University in Japan, says Phys.org.

Their observational analysis and computer simulations revealed that changes in sea surface temperature in the tropical Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles to the south, trigger cooler summer temperatures across Greenland.

The results, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, will help improve future predictions of Greenland ice sheet and Arctic sea ice melting in coming decades.

An Atmospheric River of Dust

At least a few times a year, strong and persistent winds from the south drive Saharan dust north toward Europe, as recent research explains. Two such events in 2021 ‘led to snow darkening by dust deposition over the Alps with 40% decrease in snow albedo’, among other effects. NASA says the dust plays a major role in Earth’s climate and biological systems, absorbing and reflecting solar energy and fertilizing ocean ecosystems with iron and other minerals that plants and phytoplankton need to grow. A slight positive trend in the frequency of such events since 1980 is suggested to be related to the El Niños in the period. The research paper hints at the need for climate models to take these events into account.
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On March 15, 2022, a plume of Saharan dust was blown out of North Africa and across the Mediterranean into Western Europe, says NASA’s Earth Observatory.

The dust turned skies orange, blanketed cities, impaired air quality, and stained ski slopes.

The plume was driven by an atmospheric river arising from Storm Celia, which brought strong winds, rain, and snow to the Canary Islands.

Atmospheric rivers, normally associated with extreme moisture, can also carry dust.

Ancient El Niños reveal limits to future climate projections

Unravelling the assumptions and the strange cause/effect logic suggested by the article is a challenge here. They say they’re looking for “clues on how sensitive El Niño is to changes in climate”, but “if there’s another big El Niño, it’s going to be very hard to attribute it to a warming climate or to El Niño’s own internal variations.”
Why invent such a conundrum at all?
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The climate pattern El Niño varies over time to such a degree that scientists will have difficulty detecting signs that it is getting stronger with global warming, says Phys.org.

That’s the conclusion of a study led by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin that analyzed 9,000 years of Earth’s history.

The scientists drew on climate data contained within ancient corals and used one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to conduct their research.

Still No Global Warming, Cool February Land and Sea

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According to NOAA’s ENSO blog triple dip La Ninas are now on the menu of imminent possibilities.

Science Matters

The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean.  But as an overview consider how recent rapid cooling has now completely overcome the warming from the last 3 El Ninos (1998, 2010 and 2016).  The UAH record shows that the effects of the last one were gone as of April 2021, again in November, 2021 and now in January and February 2022. (UAH baseline is now 1991-2020).

For reference I added an overlay of CO2 annual concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa.  While temperatures fluctuated up and down ending flat, CO2 went up steadily by ~55 ppm, a 15% increase.

Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.

The animation is an update of a previous analysis from Dr. Murry Salby.  These graphs use Hadcrut4 and…

View original post 1,147 more words

Solar influences show up in sea level rise, El Niño events and oceanic climatic cycles

This won’t exactly be music to the ears of the climate alarmist tendency, which prefers to claim that people somehow dictate the course of climate variations.
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The Sun’s energy affects our climate but its influence is often ignored as changes in its intensity are very small. Its effect might be subtle but over decadal periods it adds up to being significant as a series of recent papers show, says Net Zero Watch.

Scientists from the University of California, Irvine, the National Taiwan Normal University, and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, find that the 11-year solar cycle has a significant correlation with sea surface temperature variations in the North-eastern Pacific.

They believe that the Sun’s influence is first seen and then amplified in the lower stratosphere, but it then alters the circulation in the troposphere which then affects the temperature of the ocean.

They note that the changes have a structure similar to that of the Pacific meridional mode – an interaction between trade winds and ocean evaporation which is an important trigger of the central Pacific (CP) type of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

Why the southern US is prone to December tornadoes

La Niña, such as the one now occurring, is considered to be conducive to wind shear, a known factor in tornado conditions – as mentioned below.
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On the night of Dec. 10–11, 2021, an outbreak of powerful tornadoes tore through parts of Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee and Illinois, killing dozens of people and leaving wreckage over hundreds of miles, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

Hazard climatologists Alisa Hass and Kelsey Ellis explain the conditions that generated this event—including what may be the first “quad-state tornado” in the U.S.—and why the Southeast is vulnerable to these disasters year-round, especially at night.

What factors came together to cause such a huge outbreak?

On Dec. 10, a powerful storm system approached the central U.S. from the west. While the system brought heavy snow and slick conditions to the colder West and northern Midwest, the South was enjoying near-record breaking warmth, courtesy of warm, moist air flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico.

The storm system ushered in cold, dense air to the region, which interacted with the warm air, creating unstable atmospheric conditions.

Climate cycles create California precipitation uncertainty

Golden Gate Bridge from Fort Point, San Francisco

Inserting unnecessary theories into climate models, in order to invent ways of blaming human activities for the weather, seems to be making life more difficult for the modellers in terms of accuracy of results. Natural variation is getting in the way.
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Over the past 40 years, winters in California have become drier, says Phys.org.

This is a problem for the region’s agricultural operations, as farmers rely on winter precipitation to irrigate their crops.

Determining if California will continue getting drier, or if the trend will reverse, has implications for its millions of residents.

But so far, climate models that account for changes in greenhouse gases and other human activities have had trouble reproducing California’s observed drying trends.

Zero Global Warming This Century

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The next few years with expected lower than ‘normal’ solar cycle activity should be illuminating, one way or another.

Science Matters

The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean.  But as an overview consider how recent rapid cooling has now completely overcome the warming from the last 3 El Ninos (1998, 2010 and 2016).  The UAH record shows that the effects of the last one were gone as of April and now again in November, 2021 (UAH baseline is now 1991-2020).

For reference I added an overlay of CO2 annual concentrations as measured at Moana Loa.  While temperatures fluctuated up and down ending flat, CO2 went up steadily by ~55 ppm, a 15% increase.

Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.

The animation is an update of a previous analysis from Dr. Murry Salby.  These graphs use Hadcrut4 and include the 2016 El Nino warming…

View original post 1,076 more words

Above-average temperatures despite La Niña, predicts UN

The prediction can be reviewed in about mid-2022. The UN of course invariably expects more warming, which it likes to attribute to human activities and then demand ‘action’.
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Temperatures in many parts of the world are expected to be above average in coming months despite the cooling effect of a La Niña weather phenomenon, the United Nations said Tuesday.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said La Niña, which last held the globe in its clutches between August 2020 and May this year, had reappeared and is expected to last into early 2022, reports Phys.org.

This, it said, would influence temperatures and precipitation, but despite the phenomenon’s usual cooling effect, temperatures were likely to remain above average in many places.

Q&A: La Niña’s back

The report speaks of ‘La Niña’s natural cooling’ causing drought and increasing wildfire hazards in some areas. Weren’t such things supposed to be aggravated by alleged human-caused global warming, not by natural cooling effects?
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For the second straight year, the world heads into a new La Niña weather event, says Phys.org.

This would tend to dry out parts of an already parched and fiery American West and boost an already busy Atlantic hurricane season.

Just five months after the end of a La Niña that started in September 2020, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a new cooling of the Pacific is underway.

Climate model shows drought in North and South America at the same time during La Niña events

La Niña pending

Natural climate change has always been around, as this study indicates. Attempts at attribution of weather-related conditions like droughts to recent (in historical terms) fuel-burning activities are full of pitfalls and uncertainties.
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A team of researchers at Columbia University has shown that long-term droughts in southwestern parts of North America and in southwestern parts of South America have occurred at the same time on multiple occasions over the past 1,000 years coinciding with La Niña events, reports Phys.org.

In their paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the group describes how they used archival data and paleoclimate proxies (materials preserved in the geologic record that can be used to estimate climate conditions) to create climate models.

La Niña events are climatic occurrences that are kicked off when trade winds in the Pacific Ocean are pushed toward Asia. This results in a cooling effect in the waters off the coasts of North and South America. It pushes the jet stream northward just enough to create drier conditions across parts of both continents.

Fewer El Niño and La Niña events in a warmer world, says computer model

Credit: concernusa.org

A key premise of most computer models seems to be that the atmosphere, with its 0.04% CO2 content, drives ocean temperatures. As most of the energy is in the oceans, why wouldn’t it be the other way round?
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The cycling between warm El Niño and cold La Niña conditions in the eastern Pacific (commonly referred to as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, ENSO) has persisted without major interruptions for at least the last 11,000 years, says Phys.org.

This may change in the future according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change by a team of scientists from the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea, the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany, and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, U.S.

The team conducted a series of global climate model simulations with an unprecedented spatial resolution of 10 km in the ocean and 25 km in the atmosphere.

La Niña to emerge in Aug-Oct season, U.S. weather service says

No imminent upward pressure on global temperatures resulting from the ENSO phenomenon, judging by the latest analysis. Possibly the opposite, if current trends continue.
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Aug.12 (Reuters) — The La Niña weather pattern could potentially develop during the August-October season, and last through the 2021-22 winter, the U.S. government’s National Weather Service said on Thursday. (Yahoo Finance reporting.)

The La Niña pattern is characterized by unusually low temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean and is linked to floods and drought.

Newly discovered African ‘climate seesaw’ drove human evolution

Generalized Walker Circulation (December-February) during ENSO-neutral conditions. Convection associated with rising branches of the Walker Circulation is found over the Maritime continent, northern South America, and eastern Africa. [Credit: NOAA Climate.gov — drawing by Fiona Martin]

El Niño and 100,000 year glaciation/climate cycles feature prominently in this research. The Walker circulation has been described as ENSO’s atmospheric buddy.
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While it is widely accepted that climate change drove the evolution of our species in Africa, the exact character of that climate change and its impacts are not well understood, says Phys.org.

Glacial-interglacial cycles strongly impact patterns of climate change in many parts of the world, and were also assumed to regulate environmental changes in Africa during the critical period of human evolution over the last ~1 million years.

The ecosystem changes driven by these glacial cycles are thought to have stimulated the evolution and dispersal of early humans.

A paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) this week challenges this view.

Above-average Atlantic hurricane activity again expected in 2021

Typical influence of La Niña on Pacific and Atlantic seasonal hurricane activity. Map by NOAA Climate.gov, based on originals by Gerry Bell.

Prediction time as the 2021 season approaches. The expected impacts of El Niño and La Niña on hurricane seasons in both the Atlantic and Pacific ocean areas are discussed by NOAA here. Hurricane detection has improved over time, so what is considered ‘average’ now is unlikely to be the same as it used to be.
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The year 2020 saw the most active hurricane season on record and marked the fifth consecutive year for above-average activity, says Phys.org.

A University of Arizona-led hurricane forecasting team predicts another year of above-average hurricane activity over the Atlantic Ocean in 2021.

The team predicts 18 named storms, including eight hurricanes, throughout the 2021 North Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.

In comparison, the 30-year average is 13 named storms and seven hurricanes annually.

New study ties solar variability to the onset of decadal La Niña events

Solar activity [image credit: NASA]

What drives the weather can drive the climate. In this case the chances of non-correlation are said to be extremely low.
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A new study shows a correlation between the end of solar cycles and a switch from El Nino to La Nina conditions in the Pacific Ocean, suggesting that solar variability can drive seasonal weather variability on Earth, Phys.org reports.

If the connection outlined in the journal Earth and Space Science holds up, it could significantly improve the predictability of the largest El Nino and La Nina events, which have a number of seasonal climate effects over land.

For example, the southern United States tends to be warmer and drier during a La Nina, while the northern U.S. tends to be colder and wetter.

“Energy from the Sun is the major driver of our entire Earth system and makes life on Earth possible,” said Scott McIntosh, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and co-author of the paper.

Natural variations help resolve a climate puzzle, say researchers

Credit: concernusa.org

Well, knock me down with a feather. Real world data can expose flaws in ‘greenhouse gas’ infected climate models, which are unable to model El Niño and La Niña events, and mostly predict much more warming than actually occurs.
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New research shows that naturally occurring climate variations help to explain a long-standing difference between climate models and satellite observations of global warming, says Phys.org.

Satellite measurements of global-scale changes in atmospheric temperature began in late 1978 and continue to the present.

Relative to most model simulations, satellite data has consistently shown less warming of Earth’s lower atmosphere.

Earth had its coolest February since 2014

Credit: BBC

No correlation between these temperatures and the 0.04% (and rising) of the atmosphere that belongs to carbon dioxide. The low sunspot activity of the last 2-3 years may be starting to have an effect. Reports of ’19th warmest’ month somewhere look a tad desperate, amid all the feverish talk from alarmists of a supposed climate emergency. No doubt a warm spell will give them another doom-mongering opportunity at some point.
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February 2021 was the planet’s coolest February in seven years due to La Niña in the tropical Pacific Ocean and unusually brisk temperatures that enveloped much of North America and northern Asia, reports Phys.org.

But vast temperature contrasts during February—and during the three-month season—were at play in other parts of the world.

In fact, the Northern Hemisphere as a whole experienced its 8th-warmest winter (December through February) in 142 years, according to scientists at NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information.