In Warmist World, the cooling Pacific is surely caused by too much heat
(Judith Curry) My mind has been blown by a new paper just published in Nature.
Just when I least expected it, after a busy day when I took a few minutes to respond to a query from a journalist about a new paper just published in Nature [link to abstract]:
Recent global warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling
Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie
Abstract.  Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity. Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations.We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r 50.97 for 1970–2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter cooling in northwestern North America and the prolonged drought in the southernUSA. Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to aLa-Nina-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase.
This area accounts for 8.2% of the Earth’s surface. The paper seems to take part of the Warmist view that any warming is caused by Mankind, but any cooling or pause is caused by nature. Bob Tisdale notes
Anyone with a little common sense who’s reading the abstract and the hype around the blogosphere and the Meehl et al papers will logically now be asking: if La Niña events can stop global warming, then how much do El Niño events contribute? 50%? The climate science community is actually hurting itself when they fail to answer the obvious questions.
Warmists will continue to say that warming is mostly/solely caused by Mankind’s output of greenhouse gases, specifically you, dear reader, for driving a fossil fueled vehicle and using hair spray. They will either ignore this paper, or simply find a way to, again, blame the cooling on GHGs from Mankind, much like the blame snow and cold on warming, and say that the heat is doing a Where’s Waldo? in the deep oceans. It’s a cult, not a science.
Warmist leaning Climate Central highlights just how they plan on treating the paper.
In other words, natural climate variability affects the rate of global warming like a dial controlling the sound on a speaker — at some points the volume is turned up, and the planet warms faster, while at other times it is dialed back down, with a slower rate of warming. Scientists have also warned that at some point, the speaker may go all the way to 11, with warming at rates never before seen in human history, depending how high greenhouse gases climb.
And by GHGs, they mean Mankind-released ones. Because natural variability can never account for warming in their world. And, because you charged your iPhone and leave the charger plugged into the wall, the temperatures are soon going to go all Spinal Tap and boil the face of the Earth or something.
Both Ms. Curry and Mr. Tisdale delve into the science of the paper, if you want to dig deep.
