Misc

Von S has an excellent article on adaption and mitigation (it isn't excellent because it says anything new or interesting - indeed, I'd regard it as the bleedin' obvious - but just as a fairly sane and readable restatement of the obvious). Plus this allows me to "reach out" as I believe the phrase has it to someone I'm supposed to disagree with somewhat.

Deep Climate's look at the "independent" Wegman report is worth a glance. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

DenialDepot as usual is on form to keep the warmist to account. And even drags Lubos into it. Speaking of Lubos, CIP has a nice post about meta-directions in physics.

Nurture says de Boer has gone. Who? You might well ask. Him I'd reply. A sort-of good enough bloke, but not really up to the job. Hearts-in-the-right place kind of stuff but got captured by the conference circuit and ended up doing nothing useful other than causing vast quantities of CO2 to be emitted by the conference glitterati. Pardon?

Yet more Nurture reports that apparently the folk appointed to look into the CRU hacking stuff are obliged to be clueless. Seems a bit odd, but then presumably the idea isn't to get at the truth. Speaking of clueless, CM rips into the media; though I really think that by now Jones ought to know how to answer questions like that without feeding the fools.

The ever-sensible mt is still trying to make us see the obvious about climate change. But no-one wants to know :-(. Perhaps a little accountability might help?

Now I am down to only 51 unread items on my google-reader feed. Will people please stop writing stuff. Did I mention that I finally got back up above 75? 7508, so hardly a triumph, but there I am. Then Tom W did 8240 or something, so I'm sad again.

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I am no expert but for what little it is worth, I thought that it was normal for El Nino conditions to be withering at this time of year at least in temperature terms if not also in SD terms.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/klaus.wolter/MEI/mei.html#discussion

seems to indicate that it is exceeding expectations.

Also
http://iri.columbia.edu/climate/ENSO/currentinfo/technical.html
indicates
"The behavior of the atmosphere has therefore recently begun acting as expected during moderate to strong El Nino events with air-sea coupling, despite that the NINO3.4 SST anomalies have somewhat decreased from their peak levels of between 1.5 and 2 C anomalies observed from November to January. Feedback to the ocean from this recent atmospheric behavior may temporarily slow further decreases in the SST anomaly during late February and early March."

This also seems to be saying don't expect it to wither as much as might be expected for time of year. There also seems to be a Kelvin wave helping out with preventing a 'withering'.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_e…

> can't find Bjerknes [1969]

How are you going about looking for it?

Try this: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Bjerknes+1969

The first hit in the results is the abstract; note it's been
Cited by 1219

The article abstract page has a link to the full text:
http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/097/mwr-097-03-0163.pdf

Note Scholar's link to

Take the result to your library; Interlibrary Loan or the equivalent in almost any country will get it for you.

Can you tell us all about ENSO?

By carrot eater (not verified) on 22 Feb 2010 #permalink

Adding to carrot eater's question:

Are there any scientific papers on ENSO prior to 1969?

How far back can ENSO be accurately plotted?

Is there research correlating global temperature with ENSO?

Is there research correlating ENSO with CO2?

Aha, an ENSO-insurrection. We want to be in the loop, like the lunch table.

My specific question is: Are the swings in global surface mean temp in ENSO events mainly due to a simple redistribution of heat, or are there accompanying changes in clouds/water vapor that change the radiative transfer in the atmosphere?

One of these days, I'm going to get desperate and actually read the literature on the topic.

By carrot eater (not verified) on 23 Feb 2010 #permalink

didn't mean to take the comments in another direction (I did read up on the funny Motl stuff and enjoy sarcasm^2 that is denialdepot, and the people who don't get it being a joke). But all seems a bit quiet. Where was the noise about January being the hottest on record for satellite temp? My main issue with watching the ENSO is that Gavin said that 2010 would likely see a "super" el-nono persist and an end to the "cooling" nonsense. Looks like this won't happen?

Also, looked at the anomally map for february 1998 and compared it to january 2010. Completely different "types" of warm el-nino scenarios.

You're not barbequeing there are you?

(sorry about spellings, el-nono is good, eh)

By thomas hine (not verified) on 23 Feb 2010 #permalink

For Paul Kelly:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=ENSO

Try starting with the first hit on the first page:
ENSO theory

JD Neelin, DS Battisti, AC Hirst, FF Jin, Y Wakata, T ⦠- Journal of Geophysical ⦠- agu.org
Beginning from the hypothesis by Bjerknes [1969] that ocean-atmosphere interaction was essential to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, the Tropical Ocean-Global Atmosphere (TOGA) decade has not only confirmed this but has supplied detailed theory for ...
Cited by 341

E.g., if you want to know what the science was prior to 1969, look at the cites in the Bjerknes (1969) paper.

That's a good way to find out what things _were_ called, as terms change over time.

You'll have to ask a librarian for the older papers, Interlibrary Loan can get them almost anywhere.

[Interesting, thanks. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:El_Ni%C3%B1o-Southern_Os… -W]

Hank, following up on that, Trenberth had a somewhat amusing paper once called 'The definition of El Nino". 1997. Turned out, just defining the term required an entire paper.

By carrot eater (not verified) on 24 Feb 2010 #permalink

Hank Roberts,
Thanks for answering question 1. Can't find Bjerknes [1969] either. All the papers at Google say it was the first. There are very probably no ENSO papers prior.

How about "Is there research correlating global temperature with ENSO?"

[yes, and although I can't immeadiately lay my hands on it I recall stuff from ~10 years ago making the suggestion that *some* of the recent warming was due to there being more El-Nino type time around recently than La-Nina. But then people stopped believing it -W]

One agreed to point in the current Great Awakening is the need for better exposition of uncertainties by climatologists.

By Paul Kelly (not verified) on 26 Feb 2010 #permalink

> Can't find Bjerknes [1969]
Sorry, thought I'd replied to that days ago.

Search using Scholar, thus:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Bjerknes+[1969]+

It's the first hit on the first page.

The Google search result has a hotlink to 1219 citing papers worth a look.

http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F…
Atmospheric teleconnections from the equatorial Pacific
J Bjerknes - Monthly Weather Review, 1969 - ams.allenpress.com
Cited by 1219

(the abstract opens; then click the link for the PDF)

I now concede that Gavin is omniscient and that we are going to be shattering some temp records - El Nino won't wither and die (how did he know?). Does this mean we will never be talking of the "cooling nonsense" again?

And who is Hank? Does the word "scientist" appear in his title, or is he just a web-wizard-google-master who needs to help others get over their bias (while of course having none himself)?

By thomas hine (not verified) on 16 Apr 2010 #permalink

Worth a look:

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/this-weeks-finds-week-3…

Long, thoughtful, beginner's-mind post with animated illustrations.

"Iâm eager to tell you about some papers in the book Tim Palmer helped edit, Stochastic Physics and Climate Modelling. But those papers are highly theoretical, and theories arenât very interesting until you know what theyâre theories of. So today Iâll talk about "El Niño", which is part of a very interesting climate cycle. Next time Iâll get into more of the math....
...
... The short answer is that nobody knows. Or at least thereâs no one story that everyone agrees on. There are actually several stories⦠and perhaps more than one of them is true. But now let me just show you the data:...."