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Climatologist: Half Of 21st-Century Warming Due To Record Warm El Nino

by Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D.
May 14, 2019, 4:22 PM
in News and Opinion
Reading Time: 4 mins read
A A
5

tropical pacific oceanA major uncertainty in figuring out how much of recent warming has been human-caused is knowing how much nature has caused.

The IPCC is quite sure that nature is responsible for less than half of the warming since the mid-1900s, but politicians, activists, and various green energy pundits go even further, behaving as if warming is 100% human-caused.

The fact is we really don’t understand the causes of natural climate change on the time scale of an individual lifetime, although theories abound.

For example, there is plenty of evidence that the Little Ice Age was real, and so some of the warming over the last 150 years (especially prior to 1940) was natural — but how much?

The answer makes a huge difference in energy policy. If global warming is only 50% as large as is predicted by the IPCC (which would make it only 20% of the problem portrayed by the media and politicians), then the immense cost of renewable energy can be avoided until we have new cost-competitive energy technologies.

The recently published paper Recent Global Warming as Confirmed by AIRS used 15 years of infrared satellite data to obtain a rather strong global surface warming trend of +0.24 C/decade.

Objections have been made to that study by me (e.g. here) and others, not the least of which is the fact that the 2003-2017 period addressed had a record warm El Nino near the end (2015-16), which means the computed warming trend over that period is not entirely human-caused warming.

If we look at the warming over the 19-year period 2000-2018, we see the record El Nino event during 2015-16 (all monthly anomalies are relative to the 2001-2017 average seasonal cycle):

21st century temperature trends

Fig. 1. 21st Century global-average temperature trends (top) averaged across all CMIP5 climate models (gray), HadCRUT4 observations (green), and UAH tropospheric temperature (purple). The Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI, bottom) shows the upward trend in El Nino activity over the same period, which causes a natural enhancement of the observed warming trend.

We also see that the average of all of the CMIP5 models’ surface temperature trend projections (in which natural variability in the many models is averaged out) has a warmer trend than the observations, despite the trend-enhancing effect of the 2015-16 El Nino event.

So, how much of an influence did that warm event have on the computed trends? The simplest way to address that is to use only the data before that event.

To be somewhat objective about it, we can take the period over which there is no trend in El Nino (and La Nina) activity, which happens to be 2000 through June 2015 (15.5 years):

21st century temp trends 2000-2015

Fig. 2. As in Fig. 1, but for the 15.5 year period 2000 to June 2015, which is the period over which there was no trend in El Nino and La Nina activity.

Note that the observed trend in HadCRUT4 surface temperatures is nearly cut in half compared to the CMIP5 model average warming over the same period, and the UAH tropospheric temperature trend is almost zero.

One might wonder why the UAH LT trend is so low for this period, even though in Fig. 1 it is not that far below the surface temperature observations (+0.12 C/decade versus +0.16 C/decade for the full period through 2018).

So, I examined the RSS version of LT for 2000 through June 2015, which had a +0.10 C/decade trend.

For a more apples-to-apples comparison, the CMIP5 surface-to-500 hPa layer average temperature averaged across all models is +0.20 C/decade, so even RSS LT (which usually has a warmer trend than UAH LT) has only one-half the warming trend as the average CMIP5 model during this period.

So, once again, we see that the observed rate of warming — when we ignore the natural fluctuations in the climate system (which, along with severe weather events dominate “climate change” news) — is only about one-half of that projected by climate models at this point in the 21st century.

This fraction is consistent with the global energy budget study of Lewis & Curry (2018) which analyzed 100 years of global temperatures and ocean heat content changes, and also found that the climate system is only about 1/2 as sensitive to increasing CO2 as climate models assume.

It will be interesting to see if the new climate model assessment (CMIP6) produces warming more in line with the observations. From what I have heard so far, this appears unlikely.

If history is any guide, this means the observations will continue to need adjustments to fit the models, rather than the other way around.

Read more at Dr. Roy’s Blog

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Comments 5

  1. Sonnyhill says:
    6 years ago

    Is it overly simplistic to say that Earth is 70% covered by water, therefore 70% of geothermal heat is hidden from view? It could be more than that.

    • Squidly says:
      6 years ago

      Indeed, and I suspect it most certainly is. 99% of all currently known active volcanism is submariner (under the sea).

  2. Sonnyhill says:
    6 years ago

    Dr. Spencer says that alarmists act as if any and all warming is caused by humans. I’d take that further by saying some politicians act as if it is you, the citizen, causing all the warming. Their “solutions” seem to be local, instead of global. China and India never get a mention .

    • Squidly says:
      6 years ago

      But the worst is when the “scientists” claim that El Nino is caused by CO2 .. are you freaking kidding me? .. who are they trying to fool? .. El Nino is from submariner volcanism along the Marianas Trench. Sadly, there are a whole lot of stupid people out there that do not understand our world and will believe anything.

  3. Spurwing Plover says:
    6 years ago

    And we have the El Minny Effect which is caused by politicians and the various Eco-Wackos as well as the M.S. Media all becoming involved ina crisis that is only in their heads and their cure is Just Send Us More Money

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