Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
With the news channels banging on about hot hot hot water – Atlantic water, Gulf of Mexico water, the Caribbean water, Western Pacific water off of Australia — I mean, one would think the seas are boiling.
With the news channels banging on about hot hot hot water – Atlantic water, Gulf of Mexico water, the Caribbean water, Western Pacific water off of Australia — I mean, one would think the seas are boiling.
In the last couple of weeks, the another side of the story has emerged:
“A recent temperature reading off the coast of Crescent City [California] revealed that water temperatures were 47.3 degrees Fahrenheit, more than 3 degrees below normal for this time of year and 4 degrees below winter water temperatures in January.
Meteorologists and weather experts are blaming the temperature plunge on an “intense marine cold spell.””
“”An intense marine cold spell is gripping the Northern and Central California coast, with water temperatures up to 5°F below normal,” storm chaser Colin McCarthy posted on X (formerly Twitter).
He continued: “A buoy near Crescent City reported a water temperature of 46°F yesterday. In waters that cold, hypothermia can occur in as little as 30 minutes. These well below normal water temperatures due to strong upwelling of cold ocean water are enhancing the marine layer or ‘natural AC,’ keeping coastal areas cool while inland areas experience intense heat (100-108°F in the Central Valley Saturday).” [ Newsweek ]
“The U.S. National Weather Service saw nearly 20-degree water temperature drops offshore from Port Sheldon and South Haven since yesterday.”
“”Until the water warms back up, beware of cold water shock (don’t dive into the water… your body may involuntarily inhale), and hypothermia after just 1 hour,” the NWS warned in their Facebook post.”
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Hypothermia:
“Hypothermia, defined as a core body temperature lower than 35 C (95 F), may be classified as acute, sub-acute, or chronic. Acute hypothermia is caused by a rapid loss of body heat, usually from immersion in cold water. Sub-acute hypothermia often occurs from exposure to cool weather (below 10 C (50 F)) outdoors, in combination with wind chill, wet or inadequate clothing, fatigue, and/or inadequate nutrition. Chronic hypothermia in predisposed persons generally occurs from exposure to cold temperatures (below 16 C (60 F)) indoors over a prolonged period. Predisposed persons have an impaired perception of cold; decreased mobility; and inadequate nutrition, clothing, and heating systems.” [ CDC ]
Bottom Line:
Even in sunny southern California, sea water can be cold enough to cause dangerous hypothermia in the unprepared, the old, the very young and those especially susceptible to cold. The same is true of lake water.
Know the water temperature before you swim or let your children enter the water. Surfers and other water sports enthusiasts should wear thermal protection — wet suits — appropriate to the temperature. Thin “skins” ( 1 mm) are not enough protection for water as cold as in these two weather alerts.
Many representations of sea surface temperature report “skin temperature” down to a whopping 1 mm. . Don’t be fooled by the constant drumbeat of “boiling seas” – the temperature of the sea water and lake water is a very local phenomena.
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Author’s Comment:
In the spirit of full disclosure, as a teen, I was a “Southern California Surfer Boy” — right out of a Beach Boys’ song. One calendar year, I calculated that I had spent at least some part of 200 (out of 365) days on the beach — in all weathers — despite attending high school and living more than 5 miles from the beach. But, I was a small, skinny kid and had to have a custom surfboard made short enough for me to handle. Today, that 8’6” board would be considered a “long board”. With no body fat to speak of, I would get hypothermic fairly rapidly and retreat to the sand to warm up in the Sun.
During our decade+ living on our sailing catamaran in the Caribbean, my wife and I discovered that the sea water temperature was wildly variable, horizontally and vertically. Warm, almost hot, at the surface, and quite cold at 20 feet. Cold here but warm 50 feet away in a errant current.
The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST4 starting in 2015 through November 2023. A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016.
The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:
The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
Major El Ninos have been the dominant climate feature in recent years.
HadSST is generally regarded as the best of the global SST data sets, and so the temperature story here comes from that source. Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated. HadSST4 is the same as v.3, except that the older data from ship water intake was re-estimated to be generally lower temperatures than shown in v.3. The effect is that v.4 has lower average anomalies for the baseline period 1961-1990, thereby showing higher current anomalies than v.3. This analysis concerns more recent time periods and depends on very similar differentials as those from v.3 despite higher absolute anomaly values in v.4. More on what distinguishes HadSST3 and 4 from other SST products at the end. The user guide for HadSST4 is here.
The Current Context
The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST4 starting in 2015 through November 2023. A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016.
Note that in 2015-2016 the Tropics and SH peaked in between two summer NH spikes. That pattern repeated in 2019-2020 with a lesser Tropics peak and SH bump, but with higher NH spikes. By end of 2020, cooler SSTs in all regions took the Global anomaly well below the mean for this period. In 2021 the summer NH summer spike was joined by warming in the Tropics but offset by a drop in SH SSTs, which raised the Global anomaly slightly over the mean.
Then in 2022, another strong NH summer spike peaked in August, but this time both the Tropic and SH were countervailing, resulting in only slight Global warming, later receding to the mean. Oct./Nov. temps dropped in NH and the Tropics took the Global anomaly below the average for this period. After an uptick in December, temps in January 2023 dropped everywhere, strongest in NH, with the Global anomaly further below the mean since 2015.
Now comes El Nino as shown by the upward spike in the Tropics since January, the anomaly nearly tripling from 0.38C to 1.07C. In August 2023, all regions rose, especially NH up from 0.70C to 1.37C, pulling up the global anomaly to a new high for this period. September showed a new peak for NH at 1.41, but then in October anomalies in all regions have dropped down 0.1C bringing down the Global anomaly. In November, NH added cooling, offset by slight warming in SH. Tropical ocean temps rose to nearly match 2015 in November, but the Global anomaly changed little and remained lower than the September peak.
Comment:
The climatists have seized on this unusual warming as proof of their Zero Carbon agenda, without addressing how impossible it would be for CO2 warming the air to raise ocean temperatures. It is the ocean that warms the air, not the other way around. Recently Steven Koonin had this to say about the phonomenon confirmed in the graph above:
El Nino is a phenomenon in the climate system that happens once every four or five years. Heat builds up in the equatorial Pacific to the west of Indonesia and so on. Then when enough of it builds up it surges across the Pacific and changes the currents and the winds. As it surges toward South America it was discovered and named in the 19th century It is well understood at this point that the phenomenon has nothing to do with CO2.
Now people talk about changes in that phenomena as a result of CO2 but it’s there in the climate system already and when it happens it influences weather all over the world. We feel it when it gets rainier in Southern California for example. So for the last 3 years we have been in the opposite of an El Nino, a La Nina, part of the reason people think the West Coast has been in drought.
It has now shifted in the last months to an El Nino condition that warms the globe and is thought to contribute to this Spike we have seen. But there are other contributions as well. One of the most surprising ones is that back in January of 2022 an enormous underwater volcano went off in Tonga and it put up a lot of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. It increased the upper atmosphere of water vapor by about 10 percent, and that’s a warming effect, and it may be that is contributing to why the spike is so high.
A longer view of SSTs
The graph above is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations. Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015. This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since. The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies. Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July. 1995 is a reasonable (ENSO neutral) starting point prior to the first El Nino.
The sharp Tropical rise peaking in 1998 is dominant in the record, starting Jan. ’97 to pull up SSTs uniformly before returning to the same level Jan. ’99. There were strong cool periods before and after the 1998 El Nino event. Then SSTs in all regions returned to the mean in 2001-2.
SSTS fluctuate around the mean until 2007, when another, smaller ENSO event occurs. There is cooling 2007-8, a lower peak warming in 2009-10, following by cooling in 2011-12. Again SSTs are average 2013-14.
Now a different pattern appears. The Tropics cooled sharply to Jan 11, then rise steadily for 4 years to Jan 15, at which point the most recent major El Nino takes off. But this time in contrast to ’97-’99, the Northern Hemisphere produces peaks every summer pulling up the Global average. In fact, these NH peaks appear every July starting in 2003, growing stronger to produce 3 massive highs in 2014, 15 and 16. NH July 2017 was only slightly lower, and a fifth NH peak still lower in Sept. 2018.
The highest summer NH peaks came in 2019 and 2020, only this time the Tropics and SH were offsetting rather adding to the warming. (Note: these are high anomalies on top of the highest absolute temps in the NH.) Since 2014 SH has played a moderating role, offsetting the NH warming pulses. After September 2020 temps dropped off down until February 2021. In 2021-22 there were again summer NH spikes, but in 2022 moderated first by cooling Tropics and SH SSTs, then in October to January 2023 by deeper cooling in NH and Tropics.
Now in 2023 the Tropics flipped from below to well above average, while NH has produced a summer peak extending into September higher than any previous year. In fact, October and now November are showing that this number is likely the crest, despite El Nino driving the Tropics anomaly close to 1998 and 2015 peaks.
What to make of all this? The patterns suggest that in addition to El Ninos in the Pacific driving the Tropic SSTs, something else is going on in the NH. The obvious culprit is the North Atlantic, since I have seen this sort of pulsing before. After reading some papers by David Dilley, I confirmed his observation of Atlantic pulses into the Arctic every 8 to 10 years.
Contemporary AMO Observations
Through January 2023 I depended on the Kaplan AMO Index (not smoothed, not detrended) for N. Atlantic observations. But it is no longer being updated, and NOAA says they don’t know its future. So I find that ERSSTv5 AMO dataset has data through October. It differs from Kaplan, which reported average absolute temps measured in N. Atlantic. “ERSST5 AMO follows Trenberth and Shea (2006) proposal to use the NA region EQ-60°N, 0°-80°W and subtract the global rise of SST 60°S-60°N to obtain a measure of the internal variability, arguing that the effect of external forcing on the North Atlantic should be similar to the effect on the other oceans.” So the values represent sst anomaly differences between the N. Atlantic and the Global ocean.
The chart above confirms what Kaplan also showed. As August is the hottest month for the N. Atlantic, its varibility, high and low, drives the annual results for this basin. Note also the peaks in 2010, lows after 2014, and a rise in 2021. Now in 2023 the peak is holding at 1.4C. An annual chart below is informative:
Note the difference between blue/green years, beige/brown, and purple/red years. 2010, 2021, 2022 all peaked strongly in August or September. 1998 and 2007 were mildly warm. 2016 and 2018 were matching or cooler than the global average. 2023 started out slightly warm, then rose steadily to an extraordinary peak in July. August to October were only slightly lower, but now November cooled by ~0.3C.
The pattern suggests the ocean may be demonstrating a stairstep pattern like that we have also seen in HadCRUT4.
The purple line is the average anomaly 1980-1996 inclusive, value 0.18. The orange line the average 1980-202306, value 0.38, also for the period 1997-2012. The red line is 2013-202306, value 0.64. As noted above, these rising stages are driven by the combined warming in the Tropics and NH, including both Pacific and Atlantic basins.
The oceans are driving the warming this century. SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern “Blob.” The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect. The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up? And is the sun adding forcing to this process?
Space weather impacts the ionosphere in this animation. Credits: NASA/GSFC/CIL/Krystofer Kim
Footnote: Why Rely on HadSST4
HadSST is distinguished from other SST products because HadCRU (Hadley Climatic Research Unit) does not engage in SST interpolation, i.e. infilling estimated anomalies into grid cells lacking sufficient sampling in a given month. From reading the documentation and from queries to Met Office, this is their procedure.
HadSST4 imports data from gridcells containing ocean, excluding land cells. From past records, they have calculated daily and monthly average readings for each grid cell for the period 1961 to 1990. Those temperatures form the baseline from which anomalies are calculated.
In a given month, each gridcell with sufficient sampling is averaged for the month and then the baseline value for that cell and that month is subtracted, resulting in the monthly anomaly for that cell. All cells with monthly anomalies are averaged to produce global, hemispheric and tropical anomalies for the month, based on the cells in those locations. For example, Tropics averages include ocean grid cells lying between latitudes 20N and 20S.
Gridcells lacking sufficient sampling that month are left out of the averaging, and the uncertainty from such missing data is estimated. IMO that is more reasonable than inventing data to infill. And it seems that the Global Drifter Array displayed in the top image is providing more uniform coverage of the oceans than in the past.
USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean
The present increase in CO2 concentration and temperature is similar to one 55 million years ago, indicating that the Earth passed a ‘tipping point’ around 1750.
The present increase in CO2 concentration and temperature is similar to one 55 million years ago, indicating that the Earth passed a ‘tipping point’ around 1750.
“…the rate of change in CO2 concentration is controlled, not by emissions, but by the global temperature” – Emrén, 2023
A new study published in the International Journal of Global Warming once again questions the popular narrative that says humans can control the temperatures of the ocean and melt the polar ice sheets by engaging in common, everyday activities like talking on their smartphones or driving a pickup truck.
“The observed correlation between global temperature and rate of growth in atmospheric CO2 concentration shows that the global warming is not caused by increased CO2 concentration. Rather the increase in CO2 concentration is caused by the global warming. This in turn means that neither the increase in CO2 concentration nor global warming can be stopped by reducing combustion.”
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