Does The Sea Surface Temperature Record Support The Hypothesis Of Anthropogenic Global Warming?



This post is an expansion on my earlier post Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies – East Pacific Versus The Rest Of The World. In that post, I broke the satellite-era Sea Surface Temperature (SST) anomaly data for the global oceans into two subsets. The volcano-adjusted East Pacific SST anomaly data (90S-90N, 180-80W) shows no rise for the past 30 years and the SST anomalies for the Rest-Of-The-World (90S-90N, 80W-180) rose in two easily discernable steps. I used period average SST anomalies to highlight the steps.

This post is also similar in content to the post How Can Things So Obvious Be Overlooked By The Climate Science Community? But in this one, I provided a better way to divide the decade-plus periods that run from the end of the 1986/87/88 El Niño to the beginning of the 1997/98 El Niño and from end of the 1997/98 El Nino to the beginning of the 2009/10 El Niño. This allows for a more consistent way to illustrate the actual Rest-Of-The-World SST anomaly trends between those significant ENSO events.

THE ONE-WORD ANSWER TO THE TITLE QUESTION IS NO.

The satellite-era Sea Surface Temperature record indicates they rose only in response to significant El Niño events. In other words, the Sea Surface Temperature data contradicts the IPCC hypothesis that most of the rise is caused by an increase in Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gases.

The fact that the satellite-era SST anomalies do not support AGW is very easy to illustrate with two graphs, Figure 1. They show the satellite-based sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies for two subsets of the global oceans, using Reynolds OI.v2 SST data that runs from November 1981 (the start of that dataset) to the current month of May 2011. The graph on the left illustrates the volcano-adjusted Sea Surface Temperature for the eastern Pacific from pole to pole (90S-90N, 180-80W). That area represents about 33% of the global ocean surface area. There are major variations from year to year caused by El Niño and La Niña events, but the linear trend is basically flat at +0.003 deg C per decade.

In other words, there has been no rise in the volcano-adjusted Sea Surface Temperatures for that portion of the global oceans in almost 30 years. The graph on the right illustrates the volcano-adjusted SST anomalies for the rest of the world from pole to pole (90S-90N, 80E-180). The SST anomalies for this portion of the globe show two distinct upward steps with periods of relatively little (if any) rise between those steps.

The upward steps are highlighted by the average SST anomalies for the periods between the upward shifts caused by El Niño-Southern Oscillation events. There is an upward step in 1987 that occurs in response to the 1986/87/88 El Niño, and there is an upward step in 1997, which is a response to the 1997/98 El Niño. Note how the Rest-Of-The-World SST data appears to be in the process of another upward step in response to the 2009/10 El Niño.


Fig. 1

Much more HERE

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