On December 1st, the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology approvingly tweeted a link to a Breitbart piece claiming El Niño, as opposed to climate change, is to blame for the run of record high temperatures observed in 2015/2016.

Their argument appears to be that, because temperatures are now falling as La Niña begins to kick in (and as summer turns to winter in the northern hemisphere where most of the Earth’s land surface is), that we must be settling back into a climate change hiatus (which doesn’t exist – more on this below). They conclude from this that greenhouse gas emissions from human activity don’t cause climate change.

There are many, many problems with this argument. The main one is that greenhouse gas emissions and naturally occurring climate cycles like El Niño aren’t mutually exclusive possible causes of global warming; rather, they can and do interact and co-occur. In other words, to suggest that global warming must be caused either by El Niño OR greenhouse gas emissions is a false dichotomy.

Another problem is that the Breitbart piece cites this Daily Mail piece as its source, which in turn cites a NASA study: “…on its website home page yesterday, Nasa featured a new study which said there was a hiatus in global warming before the recent El Nino, and discussed why this was so.” The Daily Mail didn’t provide a link to the study, so I went to NASA’s website and found the study. Here’s the problem: the study does not say what the Daily Mail says it does. The study provides strong evidence that the observed slowdown in surface warming was not evidence of a “hiatus”; rather, the heat was redistributed in the ocean. Overall, global warming has not slowed or paused. There is no hiatus.

In summary, the United States House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology shared and agreed with a piece on Breitbart (a conservative, white supremacist platform to which the chairman of the Committee is a regular contributor, claiming that a recent temperature drop proves climate change is not caused by human activity, citing the Daily Mail (a conservative British tabloid known for its racist, homophobic, and anti-science tendencies) which misreported the results of a NASA study.

If you agree that the Committee should be listening directly to NASA, and not conservative tabloids who dishonestly twist NASA’s science to support their anti-science politics, you can call the Committee at (202) 225-6371. Ask them to retract the tweet, issue an apology, sever its chairman’s connection to Breitbart, and get their information about climate change directly from NASA and other unbiased government agencies. If your Representative is a member of the committee, you can call them too.

The post An Alarming Tweet From the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology first appeared on Deep Sea News.

My tortured emotions aside, it looks like the recent warming is the result of another, albeit successful, equatorial Kelvin wave that caused downwelling across the equator and letting that warming the waters off South America. And you I would be remiss if I didn’t include that the atmosphere decided to cooperate too. Thanks for being a team player wind anomalies!

But there’s a bit of bad news for California. This wimpy El Niño probably won’t trigger more rain and some relief from the drought they’ve been having. Although I dare say the climate predictions, which do factor in contributions from ENSO along with lots of other variables, are looking pretty for the northwest and hell, even the east coast!  Anyway, we’ll see how this all develops and let’s hope that El Niño won’t break my heart again.

* I’m totally griping about the recent spate of predictions, but I know predicting the fate of El Niño is really a very difficult job. It’s a complex set of interactions between the ocean and atmosphere that we are still learning about. In short, hat’s off to all the scientists trying to figure it out and inform the world about it.

SOURCES:

http://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/march-2015-enso-discussion-el-ni%C3%B1o-here

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.html

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf

http://iri.columbia.edu/our-expertise/climate/forecasts/enso/current/?enso_tab=enso-cpc_plume

The post Are the ocean and atmosphere finally cooperating and is El Niño really here? Probably. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

At the beginning of the summer, climate forecasters were forecasting that 2014 would be the year of another El Niño. And it was ominous, because El Niño will do things to the weather. THINGS I TELL YOU. Here is Chris Farley perfectly capturing how the media wants you to feel about El Niño*.

Since then, the probability that an El Niño will happen has been downgraded to a not-betting-all-the-benjamins-on-it chance of 65%. While there are many factors that cause El Niño, a big reason for the downgrade was the absence of a particular feature….one of my favorites…wait for it…the lack of a wave called the Equatorial Kelvin wave!

But before I go all waxing poetic about a wave, I’ll start with describing what the “normal” state of the Equatorial Pacific is. Equatorial trade winds blow from east to west, driving surface currents that pile up warm water near Indonesia in a big ol’ heap known as the Pacific Warm pool. As the trades blow over the warm western Pacific they pick up warm moist air, sending it high into the sky until it comes raining down in buckets on all those warm tropical islands that lurk there. On the other eastern of the Pacific you get the cold tongue, a protrusion of cold, water that unfurls westward across the Pacific from South America Gene Simmons style.

During El Niño there is a disturbance in the force, the wind force that is. The trade winds weaken allowing warm water to flow eastward to South America like an overflowing kiddie pool, obliterating the cold tongue by stopping deep, nutrient-rich, cold water from rising to the surface along the eastern coast. Rain, which is a not a leader but a follower in this dynamic, shuffles eastward with the warm pool. All this causes problems for countries on the South American coast. Severe flooding in Peru and Ecuador. Crashing fishstock. Even fertilizer production takes a hit. No nutrients means no fish means no sea birds means no poop means no more prize winning roses for grandma. Yes, El Niño makes grandmas cry.

Now that we know what El Niño is and is not, let’s talk about what causes El Niño. And OMG we’re here at the wave part! The EQUATORIAL KELVIN WAVE part that is! These babies are super big, super fast and super awesome. If you watch the video below, you can occasionally see a red streak shooting from left to right across the equator in the Pacific. THOSE ARE KELVIN WAVES.

And this is how these waves help set up the ocean for El Niño to strike!

First there is a trade wind slip…

A brief weakening of the trade winds acts, called a Westerly Anomaly, creates Kelvin Waves. It’s sort of like someone used a giant paddle to push on the western Pacific and start the wave like motion.

causing a Kelvin Wave trip…

They rocket eastward along the equator towards South America. Kelvin waves are strange beasts. Their physics allow them to only propagate along a wall such as the continental slope or in the case of equatorial Kelvin waves, the equator is the wall. The wave crests and troughs spread out both north and south of the equator, but the wave is forced to travel eastward along it by the Coriolis force.

which makes the thermocline dip.

Wait! What’s a thermocline? The thermocline is loosely considered the boundary between the upper and lower ocean. More rigorously, the thermocline is a layer of the ocean where temperature (thermo-) changes (-cline) rapidly (cline). As Kelvin waves pass by, it causes the thermocline to move up and down just like a surface wave, but each undulation takes about 1-2 months. It’s this undulation that depresses the thermocline when Kelvin waves get to the South American coast, weakening upwelling and causes sea surface temperatures to rise. This small change in sea surface temperature actually changes the atmospheric pressure gradient across the Pacific and weakens the westerly trades, setting up conditions ripe for an El Niño.

In February, scientists got really excited because an epic Kelvin Wave shot across the Pacific. It was even larger than those observed before the very strong 1997-1998 El Niño! While a beast, that Kelvin wave couldn’t do it alone. What was needed was a train of several Kelvin waves over the course of a year to get the brew right, but the ocean decided to be a sad panda and just didn’t deliver….until now.

Over the past month another Kelvin Wave has formed and is headed towards South America. So far it is setting up the right conditions: depressing the thermocline, cooling the eastern Pacific. The appearance of this Kelvin wave has certainly upped the probability of an El Niño by a couple of percentage points. But it’s also uncommonly late for these conditions to occur making it unclear whether this wave is *the one* that will start El Niño. This could be a story of a little forcing too late. In any case, I’ll just keep watching these Kelvin waves trying to find an answer.

UPDATE:

The IRI ENSO forecast has just updated the probability of an El Niño to over 70%! And that Kelvin wave that I show above is to blame. I’ll just leave this right here…..

REFERENCES:

Details on the September ENSO diagnostic discussion- late, or never?
ENSO: Recent evolution, current status and Predictions
Kelvin Waves
Equatorial Waves

*Chris Farley has also forever ruined awesomed any mention of El Niño in an academic setting for me, because it’s all I envision once the phrase is muttered. And for the record, El Niño is not a storm. And niño is spanish for the child.

The post To El Niño or not to El Niño, that is the question first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Of course, it may be debatable how this song is all about El Nino, but there is NO DEBATE on whether The Pixies were one of the greatest bands in existence of my generation.

The post Were The Pixies the First Band to Write a Song About El Nino? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

“We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade” and “there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”

The post 12-month running mean global temperature reached new high… first appeared on Deep Sea News.

It’s Friday, learn something. Concentrate on the soothing voice of the narrator. Relax. Breathe deeply. You are floating on a thermocline.

Southern Fried Science has the low-down on this rather hypnotic series of YouTube videos by Taichiro Sakagami explaining the El Niño-La Niña Southern Oscillation phenomenon. This is Part One of Four. Collect them all. At the sound of the bell, you will awaken.

The post TGIF: El Niño on YouTube first appeared on Deep Sea News.