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Credit: NASA climatekids
ENSO-neutral conditions are present, says NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center [pdf].
Equatorial sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are above average across most of
the Pacific Ocean.
The patterns of convection and winds are mostly near average over the tropical Pacific.
The Great Ocean Conveyor Belt – blue = deep cold and saltier water current, red = shallower and warmer current
[credit: NWS / NOAA]
Whereas most of the ocean is responding to modern warming, the deep Pacific may be cooling, say researchers.
The ocean has a long memory. When the water in today’s deep Pacific Ocean last saw sunlight, Charlemagne was the Holy Roman Emperor, the Song Dynasty ruled China and Oxford University had just held its very first class.
During that time, between the 9th and 12th centuries, the earth’s climate was generally warmer before the cold of the Little Ice Age settled in around the 16th century.
Now ocean surface temperatures are back on the rise but the question is, do the deepest parts of the ocean know that?
The last one finished in mid-2016 and was one of the strongest on record.
The World Meteorological Organization says there’s a 75-80% chance of the weather phenomenon forming by next February, BBC News reports.
The naturally occurring event causes changes in the temperature of the Pacific Ocean and has a major influence on weather patterns around the world.
It is linked to floods in South America and droughts in Africa and Asia.
Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy
Global warming has been attributed to persistent increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs), especially in CO2, since 1870, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, say the researchers.
Nevertheless, the upward trend in global mean surface temperature (GMST) slowed or even paused during the first decade of the twenty-first century, even though CO2 levels continued to rise and reached nearly 400 ppm in 2013.
This episode has typically been termed the global warming hiatus or slowdown in warming. The hiatus is characterized as a near-zero trend over a period.
The media’s climate change coverage is even worse than we thought. If told aliens were running round the Arctic zapping icebergs with lasers, many of them would be keen to believe it – or at least that’s the impression often given.
A week ago, we were told that climate change was worse than we thought. But the underlying science contains a major error, reports The GWPF.
Independent climate scientist Nicholas Lewis has uncovered a major error in a recent scientific paper that was given blanket coverage in the English-speaking media.
Update 12/11/2018: Ian Wilson’s 2019 El Nino forecast can be found here.
Cognitive Dissonance: When a person or a group of people have attitudes, beliefs or behaviors that are in conflict with each other. Generally, this produces a feeling of mental discomfort that leads to an alteration in their attitudes, beliefs or behaviors that moderates their mental discomfort and restores balance.
I believe that the level of cognitive dissonance that we have about the influence of lunar tides upon El Nino events has become so large that something has to give.
In a series of blog posts in November 2014:
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com/2014/11/evidence-that-strong-el-nino-events-are_13.html
I showed that between 1870 and 2025, the precise alignments between the lunar synodic [phase] cycle and the 31/62 year Perigean New/Full moon cycle, naturally breaks up into six 31-year epochs each of which has a distinctly different tidal property. Note that the second of these 31-year intervals starts with the precise alignment on the 15th of April 1870, with the subsequent epoch boundaries occurring every 31 years after that:
Epoch 1 – Prior to 15th April 1870
Epoch 2 – 15th April 1870 to 18th April 1901
Epoch 3 – 8th April 1901 to 20th April 1932
Epoch 4 – 20th April 1932 to 23rd April 1963
Epoch 5 – 23rd April 1963 to 25th April 1994
Epoch 6 – 25th April 1994 to 27th April 2025
I claimed that if the 31/62-year seasonal tidal cycle plays a role in sequencing the triggering of El Niño events, it would be reasonable to expect that its effects for the following three epochs:
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Yet another climate superstition gets blown out of the water.
By Andrew Bolt ~
The Pacific nation of Kiribati… is disappearing underwater. Tarawa, the atoll where nearly half the country’s population lives, could soon disappear.
There is no evidence at all for that ABC claim.
Even former Kiribati President Anote Tong, flogging the warming scare on the ABC, could not pretend the ABC claim was true the last time it was trotted out:
Fran Kelly: What is the situation now, how perilous is it?
Tong: …I’ve always been very frank and honest to say I don’t see the sea level rising…
Kelly: Your successor … has been quoted saying climate change is indeed a serious problem, but we don’t believe that Kiribati will sink like the Titanic ship. Our beautiful lands are created by the hands of God. Does it make it difficult for you to criticise governments abroad and campaign on this when you’re own government appears…
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Northwest Passage routes [image credit: NASA @ Wikipedia]
Wikipedia says: ‘She is strengthened for navigation in ice according to the International Association of Classification Societies (IACS) Polar Class 4, which allows year-round operation in thick first-year ice which may include old ice inclusions. Furthermore, she fulfills the requirements for ice class ICE-15 by Det Norske Veritas.’ So hardly the run-of-the-mill cargo ship that the BBC pretends it is.
Having tried to talk up the prospects of opening up this sea route, a note of caution is sounded: ‘However, some Arctic experts are not convinced that the Northwest Passage will ever be a busy commercial trade route.’ As well as unpredictable sea ice, unfavourable geography and disputed territorial claims are among the issues.
Climate change is increasingly opening up the Northwest Passage, an Arctic sea route north of the Canadian mainland, says the BBC.
Could it herald an era of more cargo shipping around the top of the world?
Ocean currents
[image credit: SPL/BBC]
Warming waters in the equatorial Pacific give increasing confidence that El Niño will be here soon, says Discover magazine.
It’s still not here yet, but El Niño sure looks like it’s coming.
In its latest forecast, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center says there is a 70 to 75 percent chance that El Niño will form “in the next couple of months and continue through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2018-19.”
Coriolis Effect [credit: keywordhungry.com]
The earth’s rotation causes the Coriolis effect, which deflects massive air and water flows toward the right in the Northern Hemisphere and toward the left in the Southern Hemisphere.
This phenomenon greatly impacts global wind patterns and ocean currents, and is only significant for large-scale and long-duration geophysical phenomena such as hurricanes.
The magnitude of the Coriolis effect, relative to the magnitude of inertial forces, is expressed by the Rossby number. For over 100 years, scientists have believed that the higher this number, the less likely Coriolis effect influences oceanic or atmospheric events, says Phys.org.
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The blog post title speaks for itself. Alarmists can’t accept natural variation, so use false logic to try and claim that any weather characteristic which wasn’t exactly like the last few hurricanes must be somehow man-made.
By Paul Homewood
https://abcnews.go.com/US/million-people-evacuated-coast-hurricane-florence-bears/story?id=57740845
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45517260
http://time.com/5397241/florence-breaks-rainfall-records-in-north-carolina/
True to form, the media have been whipping up a state of hysteria about Hurricane Florence. Unlike some of their more irresponsible members, I have waited until all of the data is in, instead of rushing to judgment.
So, to the facts:
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Image credit: sanibelrealestateguide.com
Right on cue at the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season, three major storms are barrelling westwards. So far, the first one looks like being the most powerful. Mandatory evacuations for more than a million people near the US east coast have been declared.
North Carolina’s governor warns the state Florence will be a “life-threatening, historic hurricane”, reports BBC News.
Hurricane Florence – the most powerful storm to threaten the Carolinas in nearly three decades – is expected to strengthen, say forecasters.
A new tweak to tidal theory is proposed. The research team hopes that ‘understanding continental configurations and tidal strengths will impact the development of climate models’.
Daily tides are driven primarily by Earth’s rotation and the gravitational force of the moon on oceans, says Earth magazine.
However, in a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers suggest that tidal magnitudes are also influenced, on longer timescales, by the size and shape of the ocean basins, and are therefore driven by plate tectonics.
Plate tectonics gives rise to the formation of supercontinents — massive aggregations of continental lithosphere — which form and break apart in cycles that last about 400 million to 500 million years. With the breakup of the last supercontinent, Pangea, about 180 million years ago, and the projected formation of a new supercontinent, known as Aurica, in about 200 million years, Earth is currently in the middle of a supercontinent cycle.
Because the size and shape of ocean basins impact ocean circulation and tides, researchers led by Mattias Green, a physical oceanographer at Bangor University in England, hypothesized that tides may be linked to the supercontinent cycle in a so-called supertidal cycle.
Current tides, particularly those in the North Atlantic, are very large, Green’s team noted because of tidal resonance, which occurs when ocean basins and continental shelves reinforce and amplify the natural oscillation of tides as they sweep back and forth across oceans. “So the tides are larger at present because the continents are configured the way they are.”
To model Earth’s future oceanic tides, the researchers used predictions of continental configurations for the next 250 million years, through when Aurica is predicted to form. Ocean basin size was the main factor considered in the modeling, but the team also accounted for the moon’s gravitational pull on the oceans, Earth’s axial tilt, and simplified ocean bathymetries for future plate tectonic reconstructions.
Simplification of these fine details does affect the team’s modeling, notes David Waltham, a mathematical geologist at the Royal Holloway University of London, who was not involved in the study. But the simplifications used likely do not change the overall results, he adds.
Green and his colleagues reported that global tides are likely to increase over the next 50 million years “due to an enhanced tide in the North Atlantic and Pacific at 25 million years, followed by a very large Pacific tide at 50 million years.”
Continued here.
Feeding scars of white coral skeleton [image credit: JSLUCAS75 @ Wikipedia]
Robot drones are set to be tested underwater to protect the Great Barrier Reef from crown-of-thorns starfish, reports BT.com.
The autonomous RangerBot is able to spot the coral-eating starfish with 99.4% accuracy and kill them using a fatal injection.
Volcanic eruption
Volcanic eruptions are among the most important natural causes of climate change, playing a leading role over the past millennium, says Phys.org.
Injections of sulfate aerosols into the lower stratosphere reduce the incoming solar radiation, in turn cooling the surface.
As a natural external forcing to the Earth’s climate system, the impact of volcanic aerosols on the climate has been of great concern to the scientific society and the public.
In recent years, scientists have found that there is a relationship between volcanic eruptions and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) based on reconstructions and model simulations, which is manifested in increased/decreased sea surface temperature (SST) gradient over the equatorial Pacific.
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Many believe the forces of climate alarm got Professor Peter Ridd fired for saying what he thought about the recovery powers of the GBR.
By Paul Homewood
A new study finds that coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef is nothing new.
From the Evening Express:
Large-scale coral bleaching has raised concern about the future of the ecosystems and the impact their loss could have on biodiversity.
Dr Sebastian Hennige, researcher
The teams found the frequency of bleaching has increased since the 1800s and, despite corals’ ability to recover, there are fears they could now be approaching a “critical threshold”.
Dr Nick Kamenos from Glasgow’s School of Geographical and Earth Sciences said: “It’s clear in the core data we examined that bleaching has been occurring on the Great Barrier Reef for at least 400 years, but the frequency of bleaching events has increased markedly since the early 1800s and those events have affected 10% more corals since the late 1700s.
“We can see that corals have been able to acclimate and recover from past…
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Antarctica
More than 100 oceanic floats are now diving and drifting in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica during the peak of winter, reports Phys.org.
These instruments are gathering data from a place and season that remains very poorly studied, despite its important role in regulating the global climate.
A new study from the University of Washington, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Princeton University and several other oceanographic institutions uses data gathered by the floating drones over past winters to learn how much carbon dioxide is transferred by the surrounding seas.
Results show that in winter the open water nearest the sea ice surrounding Antarctica releases significantly more carbon dioxide than previously believed.
Credit: concernusa.org
A new study isolates key mechanisms that cause El Niño events to differ, says ScienceDaily.
Researchers found that the complexity and irregular occurrence of El Niño and La Niña events can be traced back to the co-existence of two coupled atmosphere-ocean oscillations, with different spatial characteristics and different frequencies.
A new research study, published this week by an international team of climate scientists in the journal Nature, isolates key mechanisms that cause El Niño events to differ amongst each other.
Question: If I had a container, full with air, and I suddenly decreased the volume of the container, forcing the air into a smaller volume, will it be considered as compression, will it result in an increase in temperature, and why?
Answer on Stack Exchange by Luboš Motl: Yes, it is compression and yes, it will heat up the gas.
If there’s no heat exchange between the gas and the container (or the environment), we call it an adiabatic process. For an adiabatic process involving an ideal gas (which is a very good approximation for most common gases), pVγ is constant where γ is an exponent such as 5/3. Because the temperature is equal to T=pV/nR and pV/pVγ=V1−γ is a decreasing function of V, the temperature will increase when the volume decreases.
Macroscopically, the heating is inevitable because one needs to perform work p|dV| to do the compression, the energy has to be preserved, and the only place where it can go is the interior of the gas given by a formula similar to (3/2)nRT.
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Despite warming due to atmospheric trace gases being a racing certainty according to the IPCC and like-minded theorists, evidence of it is getting ever harder to find.
Presently sea surface temperatures (SST) are the best available indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system. Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy. Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements. In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates. Eventually we will likely have reliable means of recording water temperatures at depth.
Recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST. He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months. This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?
The May update to HadSST3 will appear later this month, but in the meantime we can look at lower troposphere temperatures (TLT) from UAHv6…
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