From: Phil Jones To: Michael Mann , Jim Salinger Subject: Re: ENSO blamed over warming - paper in JGR Date: Tue Jul 28 10:15:45 2009 Cc: trenbert@ucar.edu, j.renwick@niwa.co.nz, b.mullan@niwa.co.nz, Gavin Schmidt Jim et al, Having now read the paper in a moment of peace and quiet, there are a few things to bear in mind. The authors of the original will have a right of reply, so need to ensure that they don't have anything to come back on. From doing the attached a year or so ago, there is a word limit and also it is important to concentrate only on a few key points. As we all know there is so much wrong with the paper, it won't be difficult to come up with a few, but it does need to be just two or three. The three aspects I would emphasize are 1. The first difference type filtering. Para 14 implies that they smooth the series with a 12 month running mean, then subtract the value in Jan 1980 from that in Jan 1979, then Feb 1980 from Feb 1979 and so on. As we know this removes any long-term trend. The running mean also probably distorts the phase, so this is possibly why they get different lags from others. Using running means also enhances the explained variance. Perhaps we should repeat the exercise without the smoothing. 2. Figure 4 and Figure 1 show the unsmoothed GTTA series. These clearly have a trend. Perhaps show the residual after extracting the ENSO part. 3. They do the same first difference on the smoothed SOI. The SOI doesn't explain the climate jump in the 1976/77 period. Their arguments in para 30 are all wrong. A few minor points - there are some negative R*R values just after equation 3. - I'm sure Tom Wigley wouldn't have proposed El Nino events occurring after volcanoes! Attached this paper as well. From a quick read it doesn't say what is purported - in fact it seems to show clearly how the analysis should have been done. - there is a paper by Ben Santer (more recent) where he applies the same type of extraction procedure to models. I'll send this separately as it is large. In case it is too large here is the reference. Santer, B.D., Wigley, T.M.L., Doutriaux, C., Boyle, J.S., Hansen, J.E., Jones, P.D., Meehl, G.A., Roeckner, E., Sengupta, S. and Taylor K.E., 2001: Accounting for the effects of volcanoes and ENSO in comparisons of modeled and observed temperature trends. Journal of Geophysical Research 106, 2803328059. Finally I've attached a paper I wrote in 1990, where I did something similar to what they did. I looked at residuals from a Gaussian filter, and I added the smoothed data back afterwards. I was working at the annual timescale and I did have many more years. Cheers Phil At 00:19 25/07/2009, Michael Mann wrote: Hi Jim, Grant Foster ('Tamino') did a nice job in a previous response (attached) we wrote to a similarly bad article by Schwartz which got a lot of play in contrarian circles. since he's already done some of the initial work in debunking this, I sent him an email asking hi if we was interested in spearheading a similar effort w/ this one. let me get back to folks after I've heard back from him, and we can discuss possible strategy for moving this forward, mike On Jul 24, 2009, at 6:11 PM, Jim Salinger wrote: Kia orana All from the Tropical South Pacific Yes, Phil, a bit like 'A midsummer night's dream!'. and Gavin Tamino's bang up job is great, And good that you go up with stuff on Real Climate, Mike. As Kevin is preoccupied, for the scientific record we need a rebuttal somewhere pulled together. Who wants to join in on the multiauthored effort?? I am happy to coordinate it. Return to 'winter' this evening after enjoying a balmy south east trades and sunny dry 24 C in the Cook Islands. Jim Quoting Michael Mann : folks, we're going to go up w/ something brief on RealClimate later today, mostly just linking to other useful deconstructions of the paper already up on other sites, mike On Jul 23, 2009, at 11:01 PM, Jim Salinger wrote: I am tied up next week, but could frame something up the following week which , I hope would be multi-authored. It would be quite good to have a rebuttal from the same Department at Uni of Auckland (which Glenn McGregor of IJC is director of)! I haven't had tne oportunity to download the text here in the Cook Islands, so this would give me the opportunity to do that. Who else wants to join in?? Jim Quoting Kevin Trenberth : I am on vacation today and don't have the time. I have been on travel the past 4 weeks (including AR5 IPCC scoping mtg); the NCAR summer Colloquium is coming up in a week and then I am off to Oz and NZ for 3 weeks (GEWEX/iLeaps, CEOP) and I have an oceanobs'09 plenary paper to do. Kevin a formal comment to JGR seems like a worthwhile undertaking here. contrarians will continue to cite the paper regardless of whether or not its been rebutted, but for the purpose of future scientific assessments, its important that this be formally rebutted in the peer- reviewed literature. mike On Jul 23, 2009, at 9:05 PM, Jim Salinger wrote: Hi All Thanks for the pro-activeness. Is there an opportunity to write a letter to JGR pointing out the junk science in this??....if it is not rebutted, then all sceptics will use this to justify their position. Jim Quoting Michael Mann : 2nd email ________ Thanks Kevin, hadn't even noticed that in my terse initial skim of it. yes--that makes things even worse than my initial impression. this is a truly horrible paper. one wonders who the editor was, and what he/she was thinking (or drinking), m On Jul 23, 2009, at 3:51 PM, Kevin Trenberth wrote: I just looked briefly at the paper. Their relationships use derivatives of the series. Well derivatives are equivalent to a high pass filter, that is to say it filters out all the low frequency variability and trends. If one takes y= A sin wt and does a differentiation one gets dy = Aw cos wt. So the amplitude goes from A to Aw where w is the frequency = 2*pi/ L where L is the period. So the response to this procedure is to reduce periods of 10 years by a factor of 5 compared with periods of 2 years, or 20 and 50 years get reduced by factors of 10 an 25 relative to two year periods. i.e. Their procedure is designed to only analyse the interannual variability not the trends. Kevin hi Seth, you always seem to catch me at airports. only got a few minutes. took a cursory look at the paper, and it has all the worry signs of extremely bad science and scholarship. JGR is a legitimate journal, but some extremely bad papers have slipped through the cracks in recent years, and this is another one of them. first of all, the authors use two deeply flawed datasets that understate the warming trends: the Christy and Spencer MSU data and uncorrected radiosonde temperature estimates. There were a series of three key papers published in Science a few years ago, by Mears et al, Santer et al, and Sherwood et al. see Gavin's excellent RealClimate article on this: [1]http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/08/et-tu- lt/ these papers collectively showed that both datasets were deeply flawed and understate actual tropospheric temperature trends. I find it absolutely remarkable that this paper could get through a serious review w/out referencing any 3 of these critical papers-- papers whose findings render that conclusions of the current article completely invalid! The Christy and Spencer MSU satellite-derived tropospheric temperature estimates contained two errors--a sign error and an algebraic error-- that had the net effect of artificially removing the warming trend. Christy and Spencer continue to produce revised versions of the MSU dataset, but they always seem to show less warming than every other independent assessment, and their estimates are largely disregarded by serious assessments such as that done by the NAS and the IPCC. So these guys have taken biased estimates of tropospheric temperatures that have artificially too little warming trend, and then shown, quite unremarkably, that El Nino dominates much of what is left (the interannual variability). the paper has absolutely no implications that I can see at all for the role of natural variability on the observed warming trend of recent decades. other far more careful analyses (a paper by David Thompson of CSU, Phil Jones, and others published in Nature more than year ago) used proper, widely-accepted surface temperature data to estimate the influence of natural factors (El Nino and volcanos) on the surface temperature record. their analysis was so careful and clever that it detected a post-world war II error in sea surface temperature measurements (that yields artificial cooling during the mid 1940s) that had never before been discovered in the global surface temperature record. needless to say, they removed that error too. and the correct record, removing influences of ENSO, volcanoes, and even this newly detected error, reveal that a robust warming of global mean surface temperature over the past century of a little less than 1C which has nothing to do w/ volcanic influences or ENSO influences. the dominant source of the overall warming, as concluded in every legitimate major scientific assessment, is anthropogenic influences (human greenhouse gas concentrations w/ some offsetting cooling due to sulphate aerosols). this later paper provides absolutely nothing to cast that in doubt. it uses a flawed set of surface temperature measurements for which the trend has been artificially suppressed, to show that whats left over (interannual variability) is due to natural influences. duh! its a joke! and the aptly named Mark "Morano" has fallen for it! m On Jul 23, 2009, at 11:54 AM, Borenstein, Seth wrote: Kevin, Gavin, Mike, It's Seth again. Attached is a paper in JGR today that Marc Morano is hyping wildly. It's in a legit journal. Whatchya think? Seth Seth Borenstein Associated Press Science Writer sborenstein@ap.org The Associated Press, 1100 13th St. NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20005-4076 202-641-9454 The information contained in this communication is intended for the use of the designated recipients named above. If the reader of this communication is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that you have received this communication in error, and that any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify The Associated Press immediately by telephone at +1-212-621-1898 and delete this e-mail. Thank you. [IP_US_DISC] msk dccc60c6d2c3a6438f0cf467d9a4938 On Jul 23, 2009, at 7:57 PM, Jim Salinger wrote: Precisely. Mike Mann: You better rush something up on RealClimate. Jim, Brett, myself and maybe others will have to deal with the local fallout this will cause...oh dear...... Bye the way June was the warmest month on record for the oceans according tro NOAA Jim Quoting Kevin Trenberth : Exactly They use 2 datasets that are deficient in the first place and then they use derivatives: differentiation is a high pass filter, and so they show what we have long known that ENSO accounts for a lot of high frequency variability. It should not have been published Kevin kia orana from Rarotonga How the h... did this get accepted!! Jim Dominion today {24/7/09] Nature blamed over warming - describing recently published paper in JGR by Chris de Freitas, Bob Carter and J McLean, and including comment by J Salinger "little new" McLean J. D., C. R. de Freitas, R. M. Carter (2009), Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature, J. Geophys. Res., 114, D14104, doi:10.1029/2008JD011637. paper at [2]http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2008JD011637.shtml -- Associate Professor Jim Salinger School of Geography and Environmental Science University of Auckland Private Bag 92 019 Auckland, New Zealand Tel: + 64 9 373 7599 ext 88473 ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. ___________________ Kevin Trenberth Climate Analysis Section, NCAR PO Box 3000 Boulder CO 80307 ph 303 497 1318 [3]http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. -- Michael E. Mann Professor Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC) Department of Meteorology Phone: (814) 863-4075 503 Walker Building FAX: (814) 865-3663 The Pennsylvania State University email: mann@psu.edu University Park, PA 16802-5013 website: [4]http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html "Dire Predictions" book site: [5]http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/news/DirePredictions/index.html ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. -- Michael E. Mann Professor Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC) Department of Meteorology Phone: (814) 863-4075 503 Walker Building FAX: (814) 865-3663 The Pennsylvania State University email: mann@psu.edu University Park, PA 16802-5013 website: [6]http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html "Dire Predictions" book site: [7]http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/news/DirePredictions/index.html ___________________ Kevin Trenberth Climate Analysis Section, NCAR PO Box 3000 Boulder CO 80307 ph 303 497 1318 [8]http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. -- Michael E. Mann Professor Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC) Department of Meteorology Phone: (814) 863-4075 503 Walker Building FAX: (814) 865-3663 The Pennsylvania State University email: mann@psu.edu University Park, PA 16802-5013 website: [9]http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html "Dire Predictions" book site: [10]http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/news/DirePredictions/index.html ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. -- Michael E. Mann Professor Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC) Department of Meteorology Phone: (814) 863-4075 503 Walker Building FAX: (814) 865-3663 The Pennsylvania State University email: mann@psu.edu University Park, PA 16802-5013 website: [11]http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html "Dire Predictions" book site: [12]http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/news/DirePredictions/index.html Hi Jim, Grant Foster ('Tamino') did a nice job in a previous response (attached) we wrote to a similarly bad article by Schwartz which got a lot of play in contrarian circles. since he's already done some of the initial work in debunking this, I sent him an email asking hi if we was interested in spearheading a similar effort w/ this one. let me get back to folks after I've heard back from him, and we can discuss possible strategy for moving this forward, mike On Jul 24, 2009, at 6:11 PM, Jim Salinger wrote: Kia orana All from the Tropical South Pacific Yes, Phil, a bit like 'A midsummer night's dream!'. and Gavin Tamino's bang up job is great, And good that you go up with stuff on Real Climate, Mike. As Kevin is preoccupied, for the scientific record we need a rebuttal somewhere pulled together. Who wants to join in on the multiauthored effort?? I am happy to coordinate it. Return to 'winter' this evening after enjoying a balmy south east trades and sunny dry 24 C in the Cook Islands. Jim Quoting Michael Mann <[13]mann@meteo.psu.edu>: folks, we're going to go up w/ something brief on RealClimate later today, mostly just linking to other useful deconstructions of the paper already up on other sites, mike On Jul 23, 2009, at 11:01 PM, Jim Salinger wrote: I am tied up next week, but could frame something up the following week which , I hope would be multi-authored. It would be quite good to have a rebuttal from the same Department at Uni of Auckland (which Glenn McGregor of IJC is director of)! I haven't had tne oportunity to download the text here in the Cook Islands, so this would give me the opportunity to do that. Who else wants to join in?? Jim Quoting Kevin Trenberth <[14]trenbert@ucar.edu>: I am on vacation today and don't have the time. I have been on travel the past 4 weeks (including AR5 IPCC scoping mtg); the NCAR summer Colloquium is coming up in a week and then I am off to Oz and NZ for 3 weeks (GEWEX/iLeaps, CEOP) and I have an oceanobs'09 plenary paper to do. Kevin a formal comment to JGR seems like a worthwhile undertaking here. contrarians will continue to cite the paper regardless of whether or not its been rebutted, but for the purpose of future scientific assessments, its important that this be formally rebutted in the peer- reviewed literature. mike On Jul 23, 2009, at 9:05 PM, Jim Salinger wrote: Hi All Thanks for the pro-activeness. Is there an opportunity to write a letter to JGR pointing out the junk science in this??....if it is not rebutted, then all sceptics will use this to justify their position. Jim Quoting Michael Mann <[15]mann@meteo.psu.edu>: 2nd email ________ Thanks Kevin, hadn't even noticed that in my terse initial skim of it. yes--that makes things even worse than my initial impression. this is a truly horrible paper. one wonders who the editor was, and what he/she was thinking (or drinking), m On Jul 23, 2009, at 3:51 PM, Kevin Trenberth wrote: I just looked briefly at the paper. Their relationships use derivatives of the series. Well derivatives are equivalent to a high pass filter, that is to say it filters out all the low frequency variability and trends. If one takes y= A sin wt and does a differentiation one gets dy = Aw cos wt. So the amplitude goes from A to Aw where w is the frequency = 2*pi/ L where L is the period. So the response to this procedure is to reduce periods of 10 years by a factor of 5 compared with periods of 2 years, or 20 and 50 years get reduced by factors of 10 an 25 relative to two year periods. i.e. Their procedure is designed to only analyse the interannual variability not the trends. Kevin hi Seth, you always seem to catch me at airports. only got a few minutes. took a cursory look at the paper, and it has all the worry signs of extremely bad science and scholarship. JGR is a legitimate journal, but some extremely bad papers have slipped through the cracks in recent years, and this is another one of them. first of all, the authors use two deeply flawed datasets that understate the warming trends: the Christy and Spencer MSU data and uncorrected radiosonde temperature estimates. There were a series of three key papers published in Science a few years ago, by Mears et al, Santer et al, and Sherwood et al. see Gavin's excellent RealClimate article on this: [16]http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/08/et-tu-lt/ these papers collectively showed that both datasets were deeply flawed and understate actual tropospheric temperature trends. I find it absolutely remarkable that this paper could get through a serious review w/out referencing any 3 of these critical papers--papers whose findings render that conclusions of the current article completely invalid! The Christy and Spencer MSU satellite-derived tropospheric temperature estimates contained two errors--a sign error and an algebraic error-- that had the net effect of artificially removing the warming trend. Christy and Spencer continue to produce revised versions of the MSU dataset, but they always seem to show less warming than every other independent assessment, and their estimates are largely disregarded by serious assessments such as that done by the NAS and the IPCC. So these guys have taken biased estimates of tropospheric temperatures that have artificially too little warming trend, and then shown, quite unremarkably, that El Nino dominates much of what is left (the interannual variability). the paper has absolutely no implications that I can see at all for the role of natural variability on the observed warming trend of recent decades. other far more careful analyses (a paper by David Thompson of CSU, Phil Jones, and others published in Nature more than year ago) used proper, widely-accepted surface temperature data to estimate the influence of natural factors (El Nino and volcanos) on the surface temperature record. their analysis was so careful and clever that it detected a post-world war II error in sea surface temperature measurements (that yields artificial cooling during the mid 1940s) that had never before been discovered in the global surface temperature record. needless to say, they removed that error too. and the correct record, removing influences of ENSO, volcanoes, and even this newly detected error, reveal that a robust warming of global mean surface temperature over the past century of a little less than 1C which has nothing to do w/ volcanic influences or ENSO influences. the dominant source of the overall warming, as concluded in every legitimate major scientific assessment, is anthropogenic influences (human greenhouse gas concentrations w/ some offsetting cooling due to sulphate aerosols). this later paper provides absolutely nothing to cast that in doubt. it uses a flawed set of surface temperature measurements for which the trend has been artificially suppressed, to show that whats left over (interannual variability) is due to natural influences. duh! its a joke! and the aptly named Mark "Morano" has fallen for it! m On Jul 23, 2009, at 11:54 AM, Borenstein, Seth wrote: Kevin, Gavin, Mike, It's Seth again. Attached is a paper in JGR today that Marc Morano is hyping wildly. It's in a legit journal. Whatchya think? Seth Seth Borenstein Associated Press Science Writer [17]sborenstein@ap.org The Associated Press, 1100 13th St. NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20005-4076 202-641-9454 The information contained in this communication is intended for the use of the designated recipients named above. If the reader of this communication is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that you have received this communication in error, and that any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify The Associated Press immediately by telephone at +1-212-621-1898 and delete this e-mail. Thank you. [IP_US_DISC] msk dccc60c6d2c3a6438f0cf467d9a4938 On Jul 23, 2009, at 7:57 PM, Jim Salinger wrote: Precisely. Mike Mann: You better rush something up on RealClimate. Jim, Brett, myself and maybe others will have to deal with the local fallout this will cause...oh dear...... Bye the way June was the warmest month on record for the oceans according tro NOAA Jim Quoting Kevin Trenberth <[18]trenbert@ucar.edu>: Exactly They use 2 datasets that are deficient in the first place and then they use derivatives: differentiation is a high pass filter, and so they show what we have long known that ENSO accounts for a lot of high frequency variability. It should not have been published Kevin kia orana from Rarotonga How the h... did this get accepted!! Jim Dominion today {24/7/09] Nature blamed over warming - describing recently published paper in JGR by Chris de Freitas, Bob Carter and J McLean, and including comment by J Salinger "little new" McLean J. D., C. R. de Freitas, R. M. Carter (2009), Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature, J. Geophys. Res., 114, D14104, doi:10.1029/2008JD011637. paper at [19]http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2008JD011637.shtml -- Associate Professor Jim Salinger School of Geography and Environmental Science University of Auckland Private Bag 92 019 Auckland, New Zealand Tel: + 64 9 373 7599 ext 88473 ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. ___________________ Kevin Trenberth Climate Analysis Section, NCAR PO Box 3000 Boulder CO 80307 ph 303 497 1318 [20]http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html ---------------------------------------------------------------- This me