Causes of the Rapid Warming of the North Atlantic Ocean in the Mid-1990s

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Pointing to any natural factors is frowned on by climate alarmists. But these factors have always been in play and always will be, and some researchers at least will find and discuss them.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover_30y.uk.php

Most of us are probably familiar with the pattern of Arctic sea ice decline between 1979 and 2007, followed by a period of relative stability. Most of the decline took place after the mid 1990s.

The decline is nearly always explained away as the result of global warming, but a couple of old studies show this not to be the case.

In 2011, Robson & Sutton found that the sub polar gyre underwent remarkable and rapid warming in the mid 1990s, and that this was linked to changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation:

https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00443.1

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NASA study adds a pinch of salt to El Niño models

Credit: concernusa.org

Accurate ENSO forecasts without salinity data only extend out 4 months, while those with it cover 7 months, researchers believe.
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When modeling the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) ocean-climate cycle, adding satellite sea surface salinity—or saltiness—data significantly improves model accuracy, according to a new NASA study.

ENSO is an irregular cycle of warm and cold climate events called El Niño and La Niña, says Phys.org.

In normal years, strong easterly trade winds blow from the Americas toward southeast Asia, but in an El Niño year, those winds are reduced and sometimes even reversed.

Warm water that was “piled up” in the western Pacific flows back toward the Americas, changing atmospheric pressure and moisture to produce droughts in Asia and more frequent storms and floods in the Americas.

The reverse pattern is called a La Niña, in which the ocean in the eastern Pacific is cooler than normal.

The ocean’s ‘biological pump’ captures twice as much carbon as expected

The ocean carbon cycle [credit: IAEA]

The Woods Hole researchers find ‘the efficiency of the ocean’s “biological carbon pump” has been drastically underestimated’, with inevitable implications for climate modelling and assessments. Given that the oceans hold 50 times more CO2 than the atmosphere, this must matter.
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Every spring in the Northern Hemisphere, the ocean surface erupts in a massive bloom of phytoplankton, says Phys.org.

Like plants, these single-celled floating organisms use photosynthesis to turn light into energy, consuming carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen in the process.

When phytoplankton die or are eaten by zooplankton, the carbon-rich fragments sinks deeper into the ocean, where it is, in turn, eaten by other creatures or buried in sediments.

This process is key to the “biological carbon pump,” an important part of the global carbon cycle.

Like Polar Bears, Coral Reefs Are Doing Fine

Posted on PAPundits
By Dr. Jay Lehr ~

Corals are animals, actually closely related to jelly fish but of course differing in that they have a limestone skeleton made up of calcium carbonate. Their growth rates can be studied to give us knowledge of the ocean and its sea level over thousands of years.

They have lived throughout the oceans of our planet for many thousand years. Over those many years they have experienced both much warmer and much colder periods of geologic time. The bleaching that they have experienced in the view of many climate alarmists is not a sign of their destruction or in fact ill health. It is not a sign that the end of the world as we know it is in sight.

Geologic heat linked to East Coast ocean warming trend

Hydrothermal vent [image credit: USGS]

The author argues: “In summary, evidence substantiates that a well-defined, persistent and non-moving ocean warm trend originating off the East Coast of the United States is the result of super-heated and methane enriched fluids emitted from numerous seafloor hydrothermal vents/hot springs. This has far-reaching implications concerning the root cause of current worldwide ocean warming.”
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A well-defined ocean warming trend originating off the United States East Coast is likely from super-heated and methane-enriched fluids emitted from numerous seafloor hydrothermal vents/hot springs, says James Kamis at Climate Change Dispatch.

Supporting evidence:

This trend has shown up on shallow Sea Surface (SST) maps since their advent in 1997 and has likely been present for thousands of years.

Study shows acceleration of global mean ocean circulation since 1990s

Map of prevailing trade winds over Earth [credit: Wikipedia]

A change to about 0.01% of the atmosphere is now claimed to be speeding up the oceans by making winds stronger. Really? They used to claim global warming was weakening the Pacific trade winds:
“The researchers predict another 10 percent decrease by the end of the 21st century. The effect, attributed at least in part to human-induced climate change, could disrupt food chains and reduce the biological productivity of the Pacific Ocean, scientists said.” (2006 report)

A study published today in the journal Science Advances, suggests global ocean circulation has accelerated during the past two decades, reports Phys.org.

The research team found that oceanic kinetic energy shows a statistically significant increase since early 1990s, calculating a 36-percent acceleration of global mean ocean circulation.

The trend is particularly prominent in the global tropical oceans, reaching depths of thousands of meters.

The deep-reaching acceleration of the ocean circulation is mainly induced by a planetary intensification of surface winds, authors said.

How did life survive in the Snowball Earth? Scientists might have cracked the mystery

The researchers do admit that ‘Snowball Earth is just a hypothesis’, but that period seems to have been an era of the most extreme long-term cold spell(s) ever detected on Earth.

There is very little life in Arctic tundras and glaciers. However that was the situation in a big portion of the world during Ice Ages, says Technology.org.

How did life survive these difficult periods? How didn’t everything just die, being cut off from any kind of sources of nutrition and oxygen?

Scientists examined the chemistry of the iron formations in Australia, Namibia, and California to get a window into the environmental conditions during the ice age. They selected rocks left there by the ice age, because they are representative of the conditions during that difficult period for life.

By analysing these rocks scientists from the McGill University were able to estimate the amount of oxygen in the oceans around 700 million years ago.

Atlantic and Pacific oscillations lost in the noise, say Mann & co.

Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) [credit: NASA-JPL]

AMO & PDO – RIP. That’s the claim here anyway. Might be news to NASA and others.

Recently, meteorologists report that the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) do not appear to exist, says Tech Explorist.

The discovery could have implications for both the validity of previous studies attributing past trends to these hypothetical natural oscillations and for the prospects of decade-scale climate predictability.

The discovery is based on observational data and climate model simulations, that shows there was no reliable proof for decadal or longer-term internal oscillatory signals that could be separated from climatic noise— arbitrary year to year variation.

The apparent main swaying is the well-known El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

Indo-Pacific Ocean warming is changing global rainfall patterns, say researchers

It’s ‘according to a new study’ time again, as the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) goes under the microscope. Another causes and effects puzzle.

New research by NOAA and a visiting scientist from India shows that warming of the Indo-Pacific Ocean is altering rainfall patterns from the tropics to the United States, contributing to declines in rainfall on the United States west and east coasts, reports Phys.org.

In a study published this week in the journal Nature, researchers report a doubling in the size of a warm pool of water spanning the western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean in recent years.

This Indo-Pacific warm pool in what is already the warmest part of the global ocean is expanding each year by an area the size of California.

El Niños stronger in the industrial age, say researchers

More than a hint of assuming what they would like to prove here, by implying El Niños are now influenced by ‘the industrial age’. But at the end of the report a researcher says: “Maybe El Niño can just enter a mode and get stuck in it for a millennium.” Who gets to define what is or isn’t ‘natural variation’?

El Niños have become more intense in the industrial age, which stands to worsen storms, drought, and coral bleaching in El Niño years, reports Phys.org.

A new study has found compelling evidence in the Pacific Ocean that the stronger El Niños are part of a climate pattern that is new and strange.

It is the first known time that enough physical evidence spanning millennia has come together to allow researchers to say definitively that: El Niños, La Niñas, and the climate phenomenon that drives them have become more extreme in the times of human-induced climate change.

“What we’re seeing in the last 50 years is outside any natural variability. It leaps off the baseline. Actually, we even see this for the entire period of the industrial age,” said Kim Cobb, the study’s principal investigator and professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

“There were three extremely strong El Niño-La Niña events in the 50-year period, but it wasn’t just these events. The entire pattern stuck out.”

COLD WATER? The Oceans and Climate Change – Dr David Whitehouse

The full GWPF paper is here. Needless to say, it offers little comfort to ‘man-made warming’ climate dogmatists. The author concludes that what is happening to the oceans today is not unusual, in historical terms.

Executive summary

• The study of ocean heat content (OHC) is a subject struggling with inadequate data, but exposed in a public forum.

• Only since the introduction of data from the Argo array have there been convincing estimates of errors. The inhomogeneity of different data sets is a major problem.

• There is no real understanding of the difference between random and systematic errors in OHC data.

• Changes in OHC are at the limits of our ability to measure, and made with much uncertainty and many unknowns.

Changes in high-altitude winds over the South Pacific produce long-term effects

‘Long-term’ here means really long-term. The 21k year precession period quoted looks like that of the perihelion.

In the past million years, the high-altitude winds of the southern westerly wind belt, which spans nearly half the globe, didn’t behave as uniformly over the Southern Pacific as previously assumed.

Instead, they varied cyclically over periods of ca. 21,000 years, reports ScienceDaily.

A new study has now confirmed close ties between the climate of the mid and high latitudes and that of the tropics in the South Pacific, which has consequences for the carbon budget of the Pacific Southern Ocean and the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Explosion in Antarctic sea ice levels may cause another ice age

Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica

Is there an element of circular reasoning here? Carbon dioxide levels have historically followed temperature changes, bringing any supposed causation into question.

Upside-down “rivers” of warm ocean water may be one of the causes of Antarctica’s ice shelves breaking up, leading to a rise in sea levels.

But a new study suggests an increase in sea ice may lead to a much more devastating change in the Earth’s climate — another ice age, reports Fox News.

Using computer simulations, the research suggests that an increase in sea ice could significantly alter the circulation of the ocean, ultimately leading to a reverse greenhouse effect as carbon dioxide levels in the ocean increase and levels in the air decrease.

“One key question in the field is still what caused the Earth to periodically cycle in and out of ice ages,” University of Chicago professor and the study’s co-author, Malte Jansen, said in a statement. “We are pretty confident that the carbon balance between the atmosphere and ocean must have changed, but we don’t quite know how or why.”

New method gives first global picture of mutual predictability of atmosphere and ocean

Stating the obvious, but most of the heat is in the oceans if compared to the heat in the atmosphere. Wikipedia says ‘the top 2.5 m of the ocean holds as much heat as the entire atmosphere above it.’ If improved predictions are expected, evidence of that will be needed.

University of Maryland (UMD) scientists have carried out a novel statistical analysis to determine for the first time a global picture of how the ocean helps predict the low-level atmosphere and vice versa, reports Phys.org.

They observed ubiquitous influence of the ocean on the atmosphere in the extratropics, which has been difficult to demonstrate with dynamic models of atmospheric and oceanic circulation.

Is theory on earth’s climate in the last 15 million years wrong?

Himalayan region

The report says: ‘Many scientists believe that ocean acidification from high carbon dioxide levels will reduce the calcium carbonate in algae, especially in the near future. The data, however, suggest the opposite occurred over the 15 million years before the current global warming spell.’ Evidence meets ‘greenhouse gas’ based climate theory, which struggles. Time for a re-think?

A key theory that attributes the climate evolution of the Earth to the breakdown of Himalayan rocks may not explain the cooling over the past 15 million years, according to a Rutgers-led study.

The study in the journal Nature Geoscience could shed more light on the causes of long-term climate change, says Phys.org.

Climate change: Arctic expedition to drift in sea-ice for a year

Arctic sea ice [image credit: cbc.ca]

This time researchers plan to get stuck on purpose, unlike several earlier notoriously over-ambitious climate-themed ship fiascos in the supposedly ‘vanishing’ polar sea ice in recent years, like this one. With such a massive budget this time, what could possibly go wrong? (That’s rhetorical of course.)

It’s being described as the biggest Arctic science expedition of all time, says BBC News.

The German Research Vessel Polarstern is about to head for the far north where it intends to drift in the sea-ice for an entire year.

Hundreds of scientists will visit the ship in that time to use it as a base from which to study the climate.

The MOSAiC (Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate) project is expected to cost about €130m (£120m/$150m).

Dense Antarctic water returning to the Atlantic surprises experts

Antarctica

The lead oceanographer in this research says: “The deep oceans have been warming across much of the world for decades, so we were surprised to suddenly see this trend reversing and stabilizing in the Scotia Sea.”
Carbon dioxide up, warming down – surprising to some it seems.

The supply of dense Antarctic water from the bottom of the ocean to the Atlantic has declined in recent years, says Phys.org.

However, a new study explains for the first time how since 2014 this has stabilized and slightly recovered due to the variability in upstream dense waters, with implications for the global climate.

The study, led by British Antarctic Survey, is published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Giant pumice raft from underwater volcanic eruption makes its way to Great Barrier Reef

Coral reef [image credit: Toby Hudson / Wikipedia]

An example of how a volcano can help replenish coral reefs. Great Barrier Reef doomsters take note: ‘Associate Professor Bryan said this sort of event was occurring every five years.’

Drifting through the ocean, the sailors suddenly lost sight of water as The New Daily reports.

Surrounding their boat was a floating mass of pumice rocks — the result of an an underwater volcanic eruption near Tonga two weeks ago.

Queensland University of Technology geologist Associate Professor Scott Bryan said it “would have been a really eerie experience sailing into this sea of floating rock”.

“No longer seeing water and hearing the scratching of the pumice against the hull,” he said.

Known as a pumice raft, this so-called island of floating rock is gradually heading for Australian shores and is so expansive it can be tracked via satellite.

Shockingly thick first year ice between Barents Sea and the North Pole in mid-July

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But not as shockingly thick as those who claim the sea ice is all melting rapidly and assorted drastic measures must be taken, no expense spared.

polarbearscience

In late June, one of the most powerful icebreakers in the world encountered such extraordinarily thick ice on-route to the North Pole (with a polar bear specialist and deep-pocketed, Attenborough-class tourists onboard) that it took a day and a half longer than expected to get there. A few weeks later, in mid-July, a Norwegian icebreaker also bound for the North Pole (with scientific researchers on board) was forced to turn back north of Svalbard when it unexpectedly encountered impenetrable pack ice.

A polar bear on hummocked sea ice in Franz Josef Land. Photo by Michael Hambrey, date not specified but estimated based on tour dates to be 22 or 23 June 2019.

Apparently, the ice charts the Norwegian captain consulted showed ‘first year ice‘ – ice that formed the previous fall, defined as less than 2 m thick (6.6 ft) – which is often much broken…

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Tropical Pacific is major player in global ocean heat transport

The Great Ocean Conveyor Belt – blue = deep cold and saltier water current, red = shallower and warmer current
[credit: NWS / NOAA]

Researchers put forward the idea that the role of the global ocean conveyor belt may be overrated in the grand scheme of ocean dynamics, and offer alternative ideas.

Far from the vast, fixed bodies of water oceanographers thought they were a century ago, oceans today are known to be interconnected, highly influential agents in Earth’s climate system, says Phys.org.

A major turning point in our understanding of ocean circulation came in the early 1980s, when research began to indicate that water flowed between remote regions, a concept later termed the “great ocean conveyor belt.”

The theory holds that warm, shallow water from the South Pacific flows to the Indian and Atlantic oceans, where, upon encountering frigid Arctic water, it cools and sinks to great depth.

This cold water then cycles back to the Pacific, where it reheats and rises to the surface, beginning the cycle again.