El Niño Arrives

The early return of El Nino cannot be good news when the previous one happened in 2006 and was followed by the 2007 sea ice reduction. If we make the conjecture that this signals a pending heat release into the Northern hemisphere, then this presages a blow out in the Arctic during 2011. Aren’t I getting brave?

I like the idea of El Nino been the necessary heat pump. It solves a few issues, but the conjecture is bit premature. If right though, then the predicted sea ice collapse which has already begun in earnest this past four years will be easily completed by 2012 as I predicted two full years ago when everyone else was saying seventy years. Right now, Mother Nature is winding up to bat it out of the park.

Once all the ice is gone, the arctic surface water will warm up slightly over several years and have the effect of maximizing the open water season. I may actually get to sail the high Arctic fairly soon.

El Niño Arrives; Expected to Persist through Winter 2009-10

July 9, 2009
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090709_elnino.html

NOAA scientists today announced the arrival of El Niño, a climate phenomenon with a significant influence on global weather, ocean conditions and marine fisheries. El Niño, the periodic warming of central and eastern tropical Pacific waters, occurs on average every two to five years and typically lasts about 12 months.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/images/surfacetemp_lastweek_300.jpg


Sea surface temperatures along the equatorial Eastern Pacific, as of July 1, are at least one degree above average — a sign of El Niño. Animation.

High resolution (Credit: NOAA)

NOAA expects this El Niño to continue developing during the next several months, with further strengthening possible. The event is expected to last through winter 2009-10.

“Advanced climate science allows us to alert industries, governments and emergency managers about the weather conditions El Niño may bring so these can be factored into decision-making and ultimately protect life, property and the economy,” said Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator.

El Niño's impacts depend on a variety of factors, such as intensity and extent of ocean warming, and the time of year. Contrary to popular belief, not all effects are negative. On the positive side, El Niño can help to suppress Atlantic hurricane activity. In the United States, it typically brings beneficial winter precipitation to the arid Southwest, less wintry weather across the North, and a reduced risk of Florida wildfires.

El Niño’s negative impacts have included damaging winter storms in California and increased storminess across the southern United States. Some past El Niños have also produced severe flooding and mudslides in Central and South America, and drought in Indonesia.

An El Niño event may significantly diminish ocean productivity off the west coast by limiting weather patterns that cause upwelling, or nutrient circulation in the ocean. These nutrients are the foundation of a vibrant marine food web and could negatively impact food sources for several types of birds, fish and marine mammals.

In its monthly El Niño diagnostics discussion today, scientists with the NOAA National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center noted weekly eastern equatorial Pacific sea surface temperatures were at least 1.0 degree C above average at the end of June. The most recent El Niño occurred in 2006.

El Niño includes weaker trade winds, increased rainfall over the central tropical Pacific, and decreased rainfall in Indonesia. These vast rainfall patterns in the tropics are responsible for many of El Niño’s global effects on weather patterns.

NOAA will continue to monitor the rapidly evolving situation in the tropical Pacific, and will provide more detailed information on possible Atlantic hurricane impacts in its updated Seasonal Hurricane Outlook scheduled for release on August 6, 2009.

NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.

Inportant Chaos Theory Result on Climate Change

I am particularly pleased with this particular item. As I have posted, the data that we could look at was giving exactly this result but over a more recent range and obviously with less reliability.

Now the synchronized chaos theory net has been thrown over a full century and has been found to nicely match the record. This is fantastic news. We now have a predictive tool for predicting general climate direction for years at a time. Just as we can predict sunspot behavior within narrow parameters, we can now predict climate shifts as well. This will also allow us to refine the conjectured linkage between solar variation and climate variation.

This obviously allows a complete reappraisal of the CO2 linkage theory. If it survives at all, it must be in a sharply reduced form since the magnitude of the forcing was measured against what appears to be a natural climate shift and that is now a provable distortion.

It will be nice to know for sure when long term droughts will occur, so that we can act accordingly to preserve soil moisture well ahead of the actual conditions. That is how important that this nifty bit of modeling is and how important it will become.

Once this is properly integrated into the debate on global warming, scientific support for IPCC dogma will trend to zero, since no scientists will face down a working theory that is nicely and flawlessly explaining the historical data.

UW-Milwaukee Study Could Realign Climate Change Theory
Scientists Claim Earth Is Undergoing Natural Climate Shift

POSTED: 3:18 pm CDT March 15, 2009
UPDATED: 10:37 pm CDT March 15, 2009

http://www.wisn.com/weather/18935841/detail.html

MILWAUKEE -- The bitter cold and record snowfalls from two wicked winters are causing people to ask if the global climate is truly changing.

The climate is known to be variable and, in recent years, more scientific thought and research has been focused on the global temperature and how humanity might be influencing it.

However, a new study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee could turn the climate change world upside down.

Scientists at the university used a math application known as synchronized chaos and applied it to climate data taken over the past 100 years.

"Imagine that you have four synchronized swimmers and they are not holding hands and they do their program and everything is fine; now, if they begin to hold hands and hold hands tightly, most likely a slight error will destroy the synchronization. Well, we applied the same analogy to climate," researcher Dr. Anastasios Tsonis said.

Scientists said that the air and ocean systems of the earth are now showing signs of synchronizing with each other.

Eventually, the systems begin to couple and the synchronous state is destroyed, leading to a climate shift.

"In climate, when this happens, the climate state changes. You go from a cooling regime to a warming regime or a warming regime to a cooling regime. This way we were able to explain all the fluctuations in the global temperature trend in the past century," Tsonis said. "The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001."

The most recent climate shift probably occurred at about the year 2000.

Now the question is how has warming slowed and how much influence does human activity have?

"But if we don't understand what is natural, I don't think we can say much about what the humans are doing. So our interest is to understand -- first the natural variability of climate -- and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural," Tsonis said.

Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs.

Copyright 2009 by WISN.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed

Sea Ice Underestimated

I grabbed this out of Newsmax, and it is more a report on bad luck than anything else. I do not bother to track it that closely I had noticed that the reports made little sense in view of apparent conditions and just ignored them anyway. That just shows that my own confidence in the data is low and that I know it is all subject to correction. This is fine, because the important numbers are final seasonal calculations. This year we should have a substantial sea ice recovery over the past two years.

Our winter was clearly cold and long lasting. The new sea ice is maxed out and will take longer to destroy. I also suspect that spring is coming to the Arctic in its traditional time slot.

As I have been posting, this emphatically ends the 1990 – 2007 Northern Hemispheric warming cycle and returns us to weather comparable to the seventies and the eighties. The remaining open question is whether we are facing further cooling. History says we are, and the ongoing lack of sunspots is not a comfort, because that suggests that we may lose a little bit each year until it finally kicks back in.

In the meantime the global warming fanatics will have their work cut out for themselves as this so far modest cooling cycle asserts itself.

All we need now is a volcano to do its thing and give us a wrecked growing season. It has happened and it will happen again.

If we have learned anything though, it is that a number of factors are really impacting the final climatic output. They include sunspots (reflecting solar output), macroscopic decadal climate shifts, and small doses of little else that folks get excited about.

Those Macroscopic Decadal Shifts are very important because they are the mechanism by which surplus heat is shifted from the equator to the poles for final disposition. The size and duration of these events are such as to make efforts to fine tune the effect of CO2 if any as utterly meaningless.

The effect is reduced to the impact of a wind driven cross current on the tide.

The shifts that are apparent include the Pacific decadal Shift and the forty year hurricane cycle.

Arctic Sea Ice Underestimated Due to Sensor Glitch

www.newsmax.com

Climate change alarmists are quick to point to diminishing Arctic sea ice as an indicator of global warming. But a faulty sensor led scientists to underestimate the extent of the ice — by an area larger than California.

The error began in early January and persisted until mid-February, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado, which releases estimates of Arctic sea ice.

The problem was caused by the malfunction of a satellite sensor used for daily updates on the extent of Arctic sea ice.

The NSIDC explained on its Web site: “On February 16, 2009, as e-mails came in from puzzled readers, it became clear that there was a significant problem — sea-ice-covered regions were showing up as open ocean . . .

“Upon further investigation, we found that data quality had begun to degrade over the month preceding the catastrophic failure.

“As a result, our processes underestimated total sea ice extent for the affected period. Based on comparisons with sea ice extent derived from the NASA Earth Observing System Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer sensor, this underestimation grew from a negligible amount in early January to about 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles) by mid-February.”

The area of California is about 163,700 square miles.

The NSIDC uses Department of Defense satellites to obtain its Arctic sea ice data, rather than more accurate National Aeronautics and Space Administration equipment, Bloomberg.com reported.

The Arctic ice cap retreated to its smallest extent on record in 2007, then posted its second-lowest annual minimum at the end of last year’s melt season, and the NSIDC said the recent error does not change its view that the ice is retreating.

Heat Transport to the Arctic

This last year we saw a warm winter trigger some form of wind oscillation that carried a lot of heat from the lower latitudes into the Arctic, accelerating the melting of the sea ice. With the onset of winter, the clock got fully reset and we have been apparently treated to a cold winter not seen for at least a decade. These are hardly the conditions likely to trigger a movement of warm air into the Arctic this summer. The remaining question is whether or not the melting sea ice this summer will be able to eliminate all the sea ice grown this winter. This is not am exact science, but the wind does matter here in positioning the sea ice for best results and the 2007 season was historically unique in just that.

However. one season is a drop in the bucket against a twenty to forty year reduction in perennial sea ice whose actual history we know nothing. We have only just figured it out that we should have been measuring the changes in the last decade. We may be in for short cycle of ice accumulation lasting until the next solar cycle, upon which we will then get another cycle of major ice reduction.

As I have said yesterday, Solar variation is the major climate driver, small as it is, and it has been operating undisturbed for the last couple of hundred years. And if it were to continue undisturbed, we can expect the Northern climate to optimize around a temperature profile not unlike the middle ages when it was warmer.

Seeing the direct impact of a shift in the wind delivery system at work also reminds me that we have ignored the other great decadal cycle of the hurricane seasons. This weather regime is vastly more energetic than anything which hits the Arctic, yet it too fluctuates significantly over a cycle that may also be linked to solar output. Unfortunately, our data collection will need a whole century or two in order to draw any such conclusions. The necessary satellites went up, I think, in 1969.

In any event last years melt in the Arctic was sharp and dramatic, but as I have posted, does not necessarily mean that much extra heat was applied. As I have pointed out a constant and sufficient imbalance in heat delivery lasting decades will look exactly the same in the last stage of ice destruction. The wind merely shifted it around more than normal.

The question then remains about the source of this imbalance. Is it solar? Or do we have a larger input from the Gulf Stream? This too would be incredibly hard to quantify. Velocity changes have been noted. This was at first interpreted as a reduction of heat flow because the speed had slowed. But that could actually reflect a much larger volume and real heat content.

So the fact that the gulf stream velocity has slowed since 1959, may actually mean an increase in heat transport into the Arctic has occurred. Right now, I don't think we have enough data to trust any conclusions whatsoever. It is just that an apparent change took place over the same time scale as the perennial sea ice was reduced by sixty percent and they really have to be linked.

In any event, the hypothesis that atmospheric heat transport is the primary engine of sea ice removal will get a good test this summer, since we are now running a true cold winter in direct comparison to last year's warm winter and warm summer.

Alex Hutchinson on stopping hurricanes

I read an article this weekend in the globe and mail by Alex Hutchinson who reported on several radical strategies for taming hurricanes. Most can be dismissed out of hand, although I am been perhaps a little unfair. On the other hand, we are really not that desperate to try most of them.

In any event, there has been a recent enthusiasm for linking global warming to a projected sharp increase in hurricane numbers. Of course the past two years gax been making nonsense out of that scheme.

What caught my eye though was his description of a deep water pump. This was an area that I had investigated a couple of decades ago with some interest. It had caught my imagination. The important statement however to me was that the transport pipe needed to be only 150 meters in length in order to have an effect on temperature.

The principal concept is to lift cold deeper water to the surface and using that to slightly lower the ambient temperature of the surface water. A very modest drop in surface temperature, around the equatorial waters of West Africa would kill the formation of hurricanes, which we all agree is a good thing.

There is one other major benefit not described. If the pipe goes deep enough, the water lifted will be mineral rich and will stimulate a a massive bloom of sea life down current. The mere fact of lifting enough cold water to create the appropriate temperature will in itself produce a massive fishery in what becomes the Gulf Stream.

Also not appreciated is that the problem of lifting the water is actually not a problem. Thanks to the difference in salinity there is a hydrostatic pressure difference between deep water and the surface that is positive. Certain enthusiasts even wanted to tap this as a source of power. The point is that if one can suspend a stiff walled pipe in the vertical position so that the inlet is a mile below the surface, it is fairly easy to give it a kick and start and maintain a strong flow to the surface. In fact it will come out as a strong jet at the surface.

The engineering problem then resolves to the problem of building long vertical straws that do not collapse and maintain neutral buoyancy. A large cross section is preferred to avoid very much friction. So our engineers need to make a make a long fat pipe, but perhaps not nearly so long as I anticipated twenty years ago. It would be tilted in the current and anchored to the sea bed with the top or outlet positioned a hundred feet below the ocean surface. Can we make it any simpler? When I was thinking about it I was trying to contemplate having a turbine taking energy out of the exit jet of a deep tube.

Instead, with much shorter tubes, we can tolerate a vastly lower exit velocity and no sub sea engineering. It is only a tube! We gain a control mechanism for the hurricane breeding grounds and a huge fishery linked directly to every tube emplacement that will surely pay for maintenance at least.

The question remaining is how to make the tubes themselves. There are many obvious and expensive methods available that could be used. Perhaps initially we will build a thin concrete shell on land with flotation chambers and then float it out to the anchorage. That may be good enough.

We do have one more tool in our bag of tricks. It is that it is feasible to grow calcium carbonate and manganese sulphate on a metal mesh by the application of a low direct current. This is exactly what shellfish do. Thus we can envisage continuously building a metal tube frame out of even low quality rebar and chicken wire and lowering it into the sea as fabricated with the direct current turned on. A mile long tube is no longer an impossibility if it is desired. It takes several months to fill in and it will become thicker and stronger as it matures. Of course flotation will have to be actively managed, but that will be true for any system.

A simple trick, a monster tropical fishery and no hurricanes or typhoons to wipe out our cities. Maybe it can actually work.