El Nino Has Finally Arrived, Far Weaker Than Predicted

An anonymous reader writes "The periodic warm weather pattern called El Niño has finally arrived in the mid-equatorial Pacific Ocean, more than a year late and far weaker than predicted by scientists. "The announcement comes a year after forecasters first predicted that a major El Niño could be in the works. At the time, NOAA predicted a 50% chance that an El Niño could develop in the latter half of 2014. The agency also said the wind patterns that were driving water east across the Pacific were similar to those that occurred in the months leading up to the epic El Niño of 1997, which caught scientists by surprise and contributed to flooding, droughts and fires across multiple continents.

In the end, last year's forecasts came up short, in part because the winds that were driving the system petered out. Researchers, who have been working to improve their forecasting models since 1997, are trying to figure out precisely what happened last year and why their models failed to capture it."

Comments

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[sjames]

Weather != climate.

If you flip a coin and get heads twice in a row, do you claim statistics is bunk?

50% wrong or 50% right?

[rmpotter]

"NOAA predicted a 50% chance that an El Niño could develop in the latter half of 2014"

With odds like that, how could they be wrong?

Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[duckintheface]

The real story is a lot more complicated that TFA indicates. The new el nino is just starting and it's six months out of phase with the usual timing. So instead of starting six months late, it could just as well be seen as starting 6 months early in the next cycle. And more importantly, it is now combined with a phase change in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The two cycles combine to produce a much stronger warming effect. The negative PDO was responsible for the impression that warming had slowed. Now that it has reversed the warming will not just return to pre-1998 levels but will be much stronger. This could last for the next 10 to 15 years. Hopefully by then people with short attention spans will have realized that the planet is irrevocably getting hotter.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[cbiltcliffe]

Bullshit. If I have a glass half full of boiling water, and a glass half full of ice water, the two glasses have an average temperature of around 50 degrees C. If I pour one into the other, the hot water will cool, and the ice water will warm; but the average temperature is still 50 degrees.
The heat was redistributed, but the average temperature hasn't changed.

This is exactly what ocean currents do; redistribute heat on the earth. A high El Nino/La Nina year like 1997, while it may warm the Arctic, cools the tropics at the same time, keeping the average temperature the same. Despite the "climate change chicken dancer's" claims, a high El Nino/La Nina year cannot affect the average temperature of the earth to any significant extent. Since, considering 1997, it appears to do so, then our method for measuring the average temperature of the earth is badly flawed. We obviously have more temperature measuring locations in spots that are warmed by El Nino than spots
And before you say these currents are carrying this heat to the bottom of the oceans, remember that study last year that analyzed ocean temperature data from 2005 to 2013, and found the oceans didn't measurably warm during that period. That was the entire time period they analyzed data for.

Despite the climate change proponents claims, the peak global average temperature of 1997 was not, and could not, be caused by ocean currents. And, despite the majority of the northern hemisphere having the coldest year in decades in 2014, in some cases breaking winter cold temperature records that were a century old or more, and a summer that saw people with quilts and comforters on beds, rather than the single sheet or nothing at all that summer sleeping usually requires, the global warming proponents are still saying that 2014 was the warmest year on record. Really? Was the south pole on fire? Because unless it was, the southern hemisphere certainly wasn't warm enough to counteract the 6-10 degrees C cooler than average that the northern hemisphere saw. Sure, Australia had a heat wave at the beginning of 2014, with temperatures a measly 4 degrees higher than normal for a few weeks. Hardly enough to counteract the 9 months of significantly colder than average temperatures that the north saw.

Re:Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

[rgbatduke]

Empirically, ENSO has been tightly associated with bursts of warming -- nearly discrete jumps in global average temperature. The 1997-1998 super-ENSO event was very directly associated with a jump of nearly 0.15 C, and temperatures have remained basically neutral ever since except for peaks in "normal" ENSO years that quickly regressed to a mean. Indeed, if you look at the SST record (arguably more pristine than the heavily processed global temperature record, at least in the recent past) it exhibits a pattern called Hurst-Kolmogorov (punctuated equilibrium) jumps with the transitions often associated with ENSO. This is actually one of the arguments of skeptics -- global temperature is almost certainly regulated by CO_2 concentration, but only weakly/logarithmically and according to radiative theory, the total climate sensitivity (increase per doubling of CO_2) should be between 1 and 1.5 C, which is warming but unlikely to be catastrophic in any reasonable future CO_2 scenario. The unknown factor is how much of the warming is due to shifts in a punctuated, locally stable equilibrium from what amount to natural factors, the biggest of which are the multidecadal oscillations and associated shifts in global atmospheric circulation patterns (where as noted, ENSO especially is an empirical smoking gun in the shifts) but which also include discrete shifts in the thermohaline circulation patterns, especially at certain critical junctions in the Atlantic, and the possibility of nonlinear effects from solar variability. Since the system is highly multivariate, chaotic, nonlinear, and with profound feedback loops and self-organized dissipative structures in abundance, it is incredibly difficult to model and the general circulation models yield almost no useful information beyond "if you increase CO_2, it will more likely warm than cool" which we already knew from radiative theory in the first place and which is built into them in such a way that they can give no other answer. There is little reason to believe that the multimodel ensemble mean of means of the many different models has any real predictive force, however, and in fact that mean is systematically diverging from the observational record just as it has systematic deviations in its hindcast from the historical record.

This is why catastrophic global warming enthusiasts are so excited about the prospects of a new super-ENSO. If it happens, it could cause another Hurst-Kolmogorov jump, bump the average temperature a bit, and validate the models (or at least, rescue them from a richly deserved back-to-the-drawing-board oblivion). It is difficult to escape the feeling that they want this to happen, that they want the world to heat up disastrously to punish the human race for using energy and building civilization. One would think that evidence that TCS was not, in fact, 2 to 3 C but instead was 1-2 C (or even less) would be welcome news, but for them it would be acknowledging that the deliberately created panic, the political manipulation and selling of the catastrophic warming meme, and the associated shifts of enormous amounts of money into ameliorating a hypothetical disaster on the basis of unproven models has been directly responsible for the perpetuation of 1/3 of the world's population in a state of energy poverty.

rgb

Re:But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[sjames]

Nice try, but 15 years of weather statistics is climate. One winter is not. The science has been fairly consistent, only the specifics seem up for grabs.

You might also want to note that El Nino isn't itself part of climate change.

And I wouldn't crow too much about the name change. The term 'global warning' has mostly fallen out of favor due to idiots thinking a slightly chilly morning in the middle of winter meant it couldn't be real.

Re:Awesome Models

[Anonymous Coward]

The best scientists on earth can't tell you how a particular molecule in a balloon will move over the next second, but any kindergartner can tell you what will happen if you keep pumping more and more air into it.

Re:Awesome Models

[penguinoid]

If you're so confident in your political score-pointing criticism, how would you like to make a bet? Let's say, you predict the average temperature and rainfall for each day the next seven days, and I predict the average temperature and rainfall for each year the next seven years. Whoever is off by the lowest percent wins. And I assume you'd be willing to give me odds of approximately 1:365 in my favor since clearly my task is that much harder.

Re:Awesome Models

[Crashmarik]

Lets see a mole of any gas 6.02214x10^23 atoms

Fifteen years has has 5479 days (rounded to the nearest)
a century has 36525 days.

So lets take the other way. What are the odds that a random sample of 10^18 atoms in a gas would have a significantly different temperature than the overall the temperature ?

Virtually zero.

Re:Awesome Models

[riverat1]

The difference between weather models and climate models it that weather models solve initial value problems, given the current conditions how do we expect weather to evolve over time. They're good for maybe 10 or so days usually. Climate models solve boundary value problems, given the forcings involved in climate and their interactions and feedbacks what are the boundaries we expect future weather to vary within. So far globally the weather has remained mostly within the boundaries projected by climate models so they're doing ok.

Re: But, our climate models are perfectly accurate

[itzly]

Of course, there are longer term patterns, but these aren't weather patterns. Glaciation cycles are caused by orbital patterns. On even longer time scales you have things like continental drift, and gradually increasing solar output. These patterns are interesting, and it's good to know they exist when you want to compare climates over similar time spans, but they aren't really relevant for the discussion about climate change.

Re: I feel it in Houston

[93 Escort Wagon]

I am in Portland and this has been one of the warmest and sunniest winters coming ever. Some times the weather gods are nice to us.

SHUT UP.

Do you really want even more of them moving here?

Re: I feel it in Houston

[cbiltcliffe]

I'm not preoccupied with US weather. That was just the map that the poster I replied to used.

Now, in response to yours, it shows that Antarctica is for the most part .5 to 2 degrees colder than the 1951-1980 average, yet the global warmists are saying that massive ice sheets are breaking off and melting because of (record?) high Antarctic temperatures.