NASA: Could Leftover Heat from Last El Niño Fuel a New One?

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
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Some climate models are suggesting that El Niño may return later this year, but for now, the Pacific Ocean lingers in a neutral “La Nada” state, according to climatologist Bill Patzert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

The latest map of sea level height data from the U.S./European Jason-3 satellite mission shows most of the ocean at neutral heights (green), except for a bulge of high sea level (red) centered along 20 degrees north latitude in the central and eastern Northern Hemisphere tropics, around Hawaii. This high sea level is caused by warm water.

Whether or not El Niño returns will be determined by a number of factors, one of which is the larger stage on which El Niño and La Niña play, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The PDO is a large-scale, long-term pattern of ocean temperature and other changes in the Pacific Ocean. It alternates between two phases, warm (called positive) and cool (negative), at irregular intervals of 5 to 20 years.

The phases of the PDO are known to affect the size and frequency of the shorter-term El Niño and La Niña events. In its positive phase, the PDO encourages and intensifies El Niños. In its negative phase, it does the same for La Niñas. The last PDO phase shift was in 2014, when it turned strongly positive and has remained that way for 37 months.

Patzert says a look back over the three years since the PDO’s 2014 phase shift provides some clues about why the 2015-16 El Niño was so large and long-lasting, and why the 2016 La Niña was so small.

In 2014, Patzert says, the trade winds (the prevailing winds that blow from east to west over Earth’s tropical oceans) in the Pacific Ocean weakened, and a modest El Niño waxed and waned throughout the year. It never fully developed, but it left the equatorial Pacific warmer than normal. In 2015, the trade winds dramatically weakened, triggering a big El Niño with major worldwide impacts. With a large pool of warm equatorial water to draw on, it formed early and strengthened for more than a year, reaching full strength in late January 2016 — unusually late for an El Niño event.

Besides being long-lived, the 2015-16 El Niño was also unusually large in area, with high sea levels and warm water spreading as far north as Hawaii. As the main region of the El Niño waned, this warm bulge north of the equator remained.

During the summer of 2016, a La Niña was thought to be imminent, but it never truly took hold. By November 2016, the equatorial Pacific Ocean was in the neutral condition it remains in now. The high sea level visible as a red area around Hawaii in the new image is caused by warmth left over from the last El Niño.

Patzert postulates that the leftover warm-water bulge was responsible for the lackluster La Niña. “Did the warm bulge suppress the trade winds in the eastern and central Pacific, muting the conditions required for a full-blown La Niña to form?” he asks. “As all El Niño researchers know, no two El Niño or La Niña episodes are exactly the same.”

Patzert and other researchers have additional questions about the PDO’s influence. What role did the 2014 PDO phase shift play in the events of the last three years? Does the ongoing ocean warmth signal that the current positive PDO phase will be long lasting — perhaps decadal — or will it be a shorter-term blip? NASA scientists will continue to monitor the Pacific to see what’s in store next for the world’s climate.

Either way, Patzert notes, the PDO will be a factor in future climate patterns. “A warmer or cooler Pacific Ocean will certainly play a big role in future El Niño and La Niña events. That’s important, because these events modulate drought and deluge patterns in the American West, as well as the rate of climbing global temperatures,” he says.

Full story

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

March 14, 2017 at 12:11PM

Emergency electricity measures ‘never used once’ but still cost £180m

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
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UK taxpayers paid a high price to ensure the government didn’t get egg on its face over its agenda-driven electricity generation policies, as Utility Week reports.

The supplemental balancing reserve (SBR) cost a total of £180 million over the three years it was in operation but was “never once used”, a new report by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit has found. 

The think tank raised concerns that “fearmongering” about the “overblown” risk of blackouts led ministers to purchase an expensive insurance policy that was not needed. It has urged them not to spend “billions” more to bolster the UK’s capacity margin.

“The clear message from this report is that paying to boost spare capacity in Britain’s electricity system can be very expensive, and potentially unnecessary,” said Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) energy analyst Jonathan Marshall.

“The drop in the number of calls by the grid for extra power last winter also suggests that, in an era of smarter technology, balancing supply and demand is becoming easier and cheaper. This begs the question of whether calls to increase our capacity margins in the UK, for example by a new ‘dash for gas’, are sensible, given that doing so comes with a price tag in the billions of pounds.”

The SBR was introduced in 2013 as a stop gap measure to provide backup capacity until the introduction of the capacity market. Under the mechanism, mothballed power stations which may otherwise have closed entirely were paid to remain on standby outside of the wholesale energy market to ensure there were no blackouts.   

The report found that National Grid spent £23.5 million (£15.57/kW) on the SBR in the first year of its operation, £23.1 million (£12.95/kW) in the second year, and £122 million (£34.21/kW) in the third.

Not only was the mechanism “ultimately unused” but warnings to the wholesale market over potential capacity shortfalls also become “less frequent” during the period.

A notice of inadequate system margin (NISM) – now electricity margin notice (EMN) – was issued by National Grid on just three occasions over the last four years. Not a single EMN was issued during the recent winter.

The report said a decade ago they were common, but “now, they are not”. This was despite a “gradual decline” in the UK’s capacity margin in recent years, which fell from 16 per cent in 2011 to just 6.6 per cent in 2016. “The absence of problems relating to a declining capacity margin shows that a narrowing gap between supply and demand is not an issue,” the report said.

Continued here.

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March 14, 2017 at 08:39AM

How Imminent is the RSS Pause? (Now Includes January and February Data)

via Watts Up With That?
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Guest Post by Werner Brozek, Extended Comments from Barry and Edited by Just The Facts UAH (University of Alabama in Huntsville) and RSS (Remote Sensing Systems) are two major satellite groups that provide monthly climate anomalies. From January 1998 to January 2016, the slope was slightly negative, a period which many have referred to as […]

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March 14, 2017 at 07:01AM

Study: Ice age thermostat prevented extreme climate cooling

via Watts Up With That?
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From the UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA and the “department of settled science” comes another global climate thermostat story. Just last week, we were told the Earth had no thermostat. Gotta love it when climate science is so robustly definite, eh?

Ice age thermostat prevented extreme climate cooling

During the ice ages, an unidentified regulatory mechanism prevented atmospheric CO2 concentrations from falling below a level that could have led to runaway cooling, reports a study conducted by researchers of the ICTA-UAB published online in Nature Geoscience this week.

Atmospheric CO2 concentrations swung over a range of 100 ppm (parts per million, by volume) during the ice ages. The exact processes behind this variation have been difficult to pinpoint, but it is known that changes in the storage of carbon by photosynthetic organisms played an important role.

“When we took a close look at measurements from ice cores, we noticed that atmospheric CO2 concentrations hovered close to 190 ppm during much of the past 800,000 years, but very rarely fell any lower,” said Sarah Eggleston, a researcher at the Institut of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and co-author of the study. “This was surprising, because it suggests that these very low CO2 concentrations were quite stable. What’s more, we know that CO2 was often very high in the distant geological past, but we have no evidence that CO2 concentrations were ever lower than 190 ppm.”

“We know that, over hundreds of thousands of years, CO2 is regulated by slowly reacting with exposed rocks” explained Eric Galbraith, lead author of the study and an ICREA professor at ICTA-UAB. “But this would be too slow to explain the stability during periods of only a few thousand years, as we see in the ice cores. So it must have been some other mechanism that kicked in at very low CO2.”

The authors suggest that it was most likely the biosphere that maintained habitable temperatures, since at very low CO2 levels, plants and phytoplankton struggle to photosynthesize. Slower growth of these organisms would have meant less carbon in the soils and deep ocean leaving more in the atmosphere, and preventing CO2 concentrations from falling further. This might have prevented extreme cooling that would have led to Earth freezing over as a ‘snowball’.

However, the study did not reveal a corresponding regulation during the warm portions of the ice age cycles, suggesting that the Earth does not have a similar mechanism to prevent rapid warming.

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A lower limit to atmospheric CO₂ concentrations over the past 800,000 years

Global temperatures and atmospheric CO₂ concentrations varied widely over the glacial cycles of the past 800,000 years. But despite this variability, Antarctic ice cores have shown that CO₂concentrations were very similar during all the coldest points of these cycles. Remarkably, the recurring minimum CO₂ concentrations (190  ±  7 ppm) fall on the lower bound of any known in Earth history. Here we show that although the volume of terrestrial ice sheets was normally distributed over the past 800,000 years, as might be expected from the approximately normal distribution of the orbital forcing that drove the glacial cycles, Antarctic temperatures have a strong cold mode, whereas CO₂ concentrations have both a cold mode and a central mode. Although multiple explanations are possible, the recurring CO₂ minima and pronounced cold modes are consistent with a strong negative feedback to decreasing CO₂ that resisted further cooling on timescales shorter than 10,000 years. We suggest that one possible negative feedback is CO₂-limitation of photosynthesis, either directly or via CO₂-limitation of N₂ fixation, which could have inhibited further lowering of CO₂ by reducing carbon storage.

Full paper: http://ift.tt/2mnSle5 (paywalled)

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March 14, 2017 at 06:04AM