La Niña may be returning

La Niña, a Pacific atmospheric phenomenon that ended during the summer, to be replaced by ENSO-neutral conditions, shows some signs of life again.



Click the picture above for more maps. The weekly status (click PDF or PPT) indicates that the ENSO region 1+2 has a -0.9 °C anomaly (page 5/30). The regions 3, 3.4, and 4 have -0.4 °C which is close to -0.5 °C, the official cutoff for the La Niña regime (decided according to the 3.4 region).

If La Niña returns, expect more global cooling to be more likely than global warming. Plan for more snow in Colorado and many other things. The cool phase of the PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) could bring more frequent La Niñas in the next 20-30 years and less frequent El Niños and take the global temperature down.

More news about the climate change

The climate conference began in Poznan, Poland. The bureaucrats will try to convince each other that they should negotiate a Kyoto II treaty in Copenhagen in 2009. Pressures from Italian, Polish, German, and other economies are fortunately likely to dilute any proposed plans. 

The Telegraph (U.K.) explains that

President-elect Barack Obama proposes economic suicide for U.S.

Well, if you found out that he is not a real American, it would be homicide, after all. Incidentally, it was recently found that the wind mills and turbines built across the U.S. can substantially alter the character of storms. So far this form of energy generates 1% of the U.S. electricity so any such effect is negligible. But the wind turbine's deadly ice shower could matter.

Two well-known people from the climate science, Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt - who are famous for things very different than accuracy, integrity, and knowledge, but they are famous anyway - have been promoting our very own NIPCC report, written down by Fred Singer et al.

Meanwhile, the same Michael Mann was able to create a perfect reconstruction: the first 6,820 decimal places of the temperature for each moment of the 20th century agree. Congratulations. ;-) Craig Loehle wrote a blog version of his article (TRF) about the problems with tree rings and the divergence problem.

The 2008 Atlantic hurricane season is officially over. By its ACE - the integrated cyclone energy - it was about 1.5 times stronger than the 2006 and 2007 seasons but 1.5 times weaker than the 2005 season. Of course, the total damage was much smaller than in 2005, by a factor of 5 or so, and fatalities respect a similar ratio. It will take roughly a century to beat the 2005 season.

The Sun

November has seen some increase in the solar activity, especially due to sunspots 1007 and 1008 (of the new, cycle 24 magnetic fingerprints) in the first half of the month. Since that time, the Sun became pretty quiet again as the SolarCycle24.com website (that just upgraded its design) shows.