greggerypeccary wrote on Oct 20^th, 2013 at 7:14pm:


Really? They stay the same over millions of years?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b4/IceAgeEarth.jpg/450px-I...

Australia to see worse drought thanks to intensifying El Niño

https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/32881/wide_article/width926x450/9d2twg...


Compiled in collaboration with Australian Science Media Centre.

New research by the Bureau of Meteorology – published shows El Niño will intensify between 2050 and 2100 thanks to climate change.

El Niño is a complex interaction between air and sea in the tropical Pacific which controls many of our weather patterns. The findings show that eastern Australia will see worse droughts, while the central and eastern Pacific will see increased rainfall.

During an El Niño – properly known as El Niño-Southern Oscillation or ENSO – parts of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean warm more than usual, while the seas off eastern Australia cool. As warm water produces more moisture, the eastern and central Pacific see increased rainfall, while Australia experiences lower-than-average rainfall or drought.

Australia last saw a weak El Niño event over 2009-2010. The previous strong El Niño was 1997-1998.

El Niño’s partner in crime – La Niña – is known for causing opposite effects. The summer of 2010-2011 was one of the strongest La Niña events on record, reflected in rainfall records across eastern Australia, and floods and cyclones in Queensland.

The researchers used four different climate models and found strong agreement between them for decreasing rainfall in eastern Australia.

Currently the Bureau of Meteorology is forecasting neutral El Niño conditions for the remainder of spring and summer.

Dr Scott Power from the Bureau, lead researcher on the paper, told the Australian Science Media Centre that continued global warming has the power to disrupt El Niño and its impacts.

“Until now, there has been great uncertainty about the way in which ENSO [El Niño] might actually change in response to global warming – despite scientists investigating the issue for more than two decades.

“Using the world’s latest generation of climate models we discovered a consistent projection for the future of ENSO. Consistency across models increases confidence in the projections they display.

“Projections produced by the models indicate that global warming interferes with the impact that El Niño sea-surface temperature patterns have on rainfall. This interference causes an intensification of El Niño-driven drying in the western Pacific and rainfall increases in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific.

“The future of ENSO and the disruption it causes to the climate of the earth, its people and its ecosystems are clearer now than ever before.”

Dr Wenju Chai from CSIRO, who did not contribute to the research, said that the paper is significant in that there is a stronger agreement between different climate models in predicting the future impact of El Niño.

“Up until now, there has been a lack of agreement among computer models as to how ENSO will change in the future.”

“During El Niño, Western Pacific countries (Australasia, including Australia) experience unusually low rainfall, while the eastern equatorial Pacific receives more rainfall than usual. This study finds that both the wet and dry anomalies will be greater in future El Niño years. This means that ENSO-induced drought and floods will be more intense in the future.”

Effective sarcasm relies on skill, knowledge and intelligence.

# wrote on Oct 28^th, 2013 at 7:27pm:


Show me the evidence that manmade CO2 emissions are responsible for all the warming in the last 60 years.
...

I'll take that as acknowledgement that global warming does affect ENSO.

As for the other, well, I accept the opinion of the vast majority of the best qualified (plus, as far as I know, every scientific body on the planet). I'm not fool enough to think I know better.

FriYAY wrote on Oct 29^th, 2013 at 3:52pm:

What does doing nothing achieve, apart from ensuring the fulfilment of your prophecy?

# wrote on Oct 29^th, 2013 at 3:09pm:


... how you can come to that conclusion is beyond me,

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So, in your expert opinion, global warming has no impact on ENSO?

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Show me the evidence that manmade CO2 emissions are responsible for all the warming in the last 60 years.
...

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Then show me how this warming would effect ENSO.
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During the last several decades, the number of El Niño events increased, and the number of La Niña events decreased, although observation of ENSO for much longer is needed to detect robust changes. The question is whether this is a random fluctuation or a normal instance of variation for that phenomenon or the result of global climate changes toward global warming.

The studies of historical data show the recent El Niño variation is most likely linked to global warming. For example, one of the most recent results, even after subtracting the positive influence of decadal variation, is shown to be possibly present in the ENSO trend, the amplitude of the ENSO variability in the observed data still increases, by as much as 60% in the last 50 years.

The exact changes happening to ENSO in the future is uncertain: Different models make different predictions. It may be that the observed phenomenon of more frequent and stronger El Niño events occurs only in the initial phase of the global warming, and then (e.g., after the lower layers of the ocean get warmer, as well), El Niño will become whttp://www.ozpolitic.com/yabbfiles/Templates/Forum/default/url.gifeaker than it was. It may also be that the stabilizing and destabilizing forces influencing the phenomenon will eventually compensate for each other. More research is needed to provide a better answer to that question. The ENSO is considered to be a potential tipping element in Earth's climate.

Scientists say they are more certain than ever about the impact of global warming on a critical weather pattern.

The El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) occurs in the Pacific Ocean but plays an important part in the world's climate system.

Researchers have until now been unsure as to how rising temperatures would affect ENSO in the future.

But this new study suggests that droughts and floods driven by ENSO will be more intense

“Due to a warmer and moister atmosphere,” said co-author Baylor Fox-Kemper, of the University of Colorado in a press release, “the impacts of El Niño are changing even though El Niño itself doesn’t change.”

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Would you like me to talk in chinesse, ...