Climatologists have long suspected that the ENSO might shut down as the climate warms, with the Pacific shifting into a permanent El Niño state. This would be bad news for us. Without the periodic upwelling of cold water associated with La Niña, warm water would cover most of the surface of the Pacific, releasing its heat into an atmosphere already warming because of climate change.
Some evidence that a warming climate might shut down ENSO comes from geological studies. For instance, in 2005 Ana Christina Ravelo of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and colleagues said that there had been a fixed El Niño in the Pliocene, 4.5 to 3 million years ago, when Earth’s climate was 3 °C warmer than today (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1112596).
They haven’t yet heard about that radical new idea, called a “cycle.”
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/klaus.wolter/MEI/table.html
Ineteresting observation/comment attributed to Ros Rickaby of the University of Oxford in the article: “She has also run climate models which suggested that conditions 3 million years ago would have allowed ENSO to function. In fact, she says, climate models have struggled to produce a warm world without an ENSO, and that may simply be because it doesn’t happen.” How did it get past the editors?
According to many researchers, el Nino may lessen in warm eras (including one paper from Overpeck).
http://www.co2science.org/subject/e/summaries/ensogw.htm
But during the middle of the Holocene, when it was considerably warmer than it is today, Overpeck and Webb (2000) report that data from corals suggest that “interannual ENSO variability, as we now know it, was substantially reduced, or perhaps even absent.”
Overpeck, J. and Webb, R. 2000. Nonglacial rapid climate events: Past and future. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 97: 1335-1338
http://www.co2science.org/subject/e/summaries/ensogw.htm
There appears to be fewer and weaker ENSO events during warm periods, and more and stronger ENSO events during cold periods.
Riedinger, M.A., Steinitz-Kannan, M., Last, W.M. and Brenner, M. 2002. A ~6100 14C yr record of El Niño activity from the Galapagos Islands. Journal of Paleolimnology 27: 1-7.
http://www.co2science.org/journal/2003/v6n20c2.htm
These authors compared proxies with their model. In the words of the authors, the model simulations showed “little change in … ENSO, in agreement with proxies.” They also note that other studies “indicate an ENSO shutdown as recently as ~6000 years ago, a period only slightly warmer than the present.”
Huber, M. and Caballero, R. 2003. Eocene El Niño: Evidence for robust tropical dynamics in the “Hothouse.” Science 299: 877-881.
They say:
an atmosphere already warming because of climate change
but the earth has been cooling since 1998. The article is dated “26 May 2011” so they should know the earth has been in a slight cooling trend for 13 years.
So, I cannot see how they are saying the world is warming. It could be they are not checking the data. That would be wrong for them since their magazine has the word “Scientist” on the cover. But it is possible that “new” scientists do not check data, that checking data is not important for the “new” scientist and is only a practice of scientists in the past.
It’s called living in denial.
Why does my BS alarm go off when scientists claim to know what the climate was like xx millions of years ago?
Probably because it is BS.
Oops, once again the CO2 Climate Doomsday Rapture Prophets (http://pathstoknowledge.net/2011/05/25/co2-climate-doomsday-rapture-prophets) are falsified by Nature doing her thing (no sentient entity implied by “Nature” or “her”, it’s just a figure of speech). It’s almost like the CO2 Climate Doomsday Rapture Prophets don’t actually comprehend that Nature often goes in cycles… so many of their soothsaying prognostications seem to be ignorant of that observable fact which you’d think that every climate scientist would need to know to get passing grades for their degree; which raises some disturbing questions.
What is the latest prediction for ENSO NONSENSEO? Is La Nina stil supposed to die by winter?
It looks like cool waters are reforming west of the Galapagos:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_update/sstanim.gif
Time will tell if that continues to go out across the Pacific on the equator—which would be a double dip La Nina.