Another warm El Nino year

by GWPF, Dec 3, 2020


2020 is gearing up to be another warm year, strongly affected by natural and regional weather events

It’s that time of the year again when some meteorological organisations predict what the average global temperature might be for the full, current year. Not that we have all the data for 2020, obviously, for most global temperature datasets haven’t even processed November’s data yet. Making a prediction with only just over 80% of the data available is a risky procedure and most sensible scientists would be very circumspect about doing so. But these premature annual announcements are done for political purposes and, in a typical year, always as a precursor to a UN climate conference.

2020 has been a warm year, one of the warmest – and warm years make many people throw caution to the wind, making claims based on select facts they like, ignoring the ones they don’t like.

Let’s go back a few years to the early part of this decade when global temperature had been stagnating for more than ten years and not increasing significantly, as many had predicted. But then came 2014-15 when they started rising again, peaking in 2016. Many voices proclaimed that this was evidence that global temperatures were now accelerating ‘out of control’, something their models had been predicting all along. The climate was making up for all the unchanging years of the so-called global warming hiatus, it was claimed.

Never mind that the sudden rise between 2015 and 2016 was occurring much faster than could be due to greenhouse forcing alone.

2010 – 2020: HadCrut4 global surface temperature change (green); Oceanic Niño Index (ONI) (red/blues)

However, it was not a coincidence that 2016 experienced a record El Nino. For some commentators, however, an El Nino is a finite event. According to its definition – a specific temperature increase in a certain region of the Pacific – an El Nino is either on or off. Hence, they said that subsequent warm years after 2016 were warm due to greenhouse forcing, not El Nino. They argued that average global temperature since then was not influenced by any El Nino warming.

But that’s clearly not the case. The build-up in temperatures before recent El Ninos is obviously not independent of its peak and neither is the decline afterwards, else why did that increase not continue after the El Nino’s ‘interruption.’ So, a year can still be showing the warming influence of previous El Nino conditions whilst not having an El Nino event, something many journalists and even the General Secretary of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), Prof Taalas, prefer to ignore.

 

Today’s Iceland Colder, Icier Than In Last 8,000 Years (Except the 1800s)

by K. Richard, Dec 15, 2020 in ClimateChange Dispatch


A wealth of new research in glacier and sea ice extent shows modern Iceland is 2-4°C colder than all of the last 8,000 years except for a slightly colder late 19th century.

Even the 1700s were warmer with less ice than today in and around Iceland.

A new study (Geirsdóttir et al., 2020) now affirms peak Holocene warmth at least “∼3–4 °C above modern in Iceland” prevailed throughout much of the last 8,000 years.

Data from tree growth, glacier-induced soil erosion, algae productivity, sea ice biomarker proxies (IP25), and other climate indices affirm these conclusions.

Harning et al., 2020 report an overall 7°C Holocene cooling trend In Iceland’s surrounding sea surface temperatures (SST).

“In terms of foraminifera-reconstructed SST, there is an overall trend of cooling throughout the last 8 ka from ~10 °C to ~3 °C.”

 

It is only in the last few centuries of the modern era that temperatures sharply plummeted to their lowest values of the last 10,000 years (Geirsdóttir et al., 2020).

“The coolest climate of the last 10 ka occurred in the late 1800s CE.”

Consequent to the peak cooling, glaciers and sea ice reached their maximum extents of the Holocene just 150 years ago.

While Iceland’s glaciers and North Shelf sea ice extent did partially recover in the first half of the 20th century, the ice extents are still beyond what they were in the 1700s and earlier.

There is nothing to indicate modern warmth or ice recession in and around Iceland is unprecedented or even unusual.

Read more at No Tricks Zone

HadCRUT5 Adjusts Temperatures Upwards Again

by P. Homewood, Dec 16, 2020 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat


The Morice paper claims the extra warming has come from an improved representation of Arctic warming and a better understanding of evolving biases in sea‐surface temperature measurements from ships.

In fact it is not scientific to average together Arctic temperatures with the rest of the planet, as it is comparing apples with oranges. It all has to do with latent heat and water vapour, as Tony Heller brilliantly explained: