Friday, September 12, 2014

It's official: ENSO is fucking with us

We are now in the longest Nino-less period since NOAA record-keeping started:

Source
The last three-month period classified as El Nino was March-April-May of 2010. 51 months have passed since then (with more likely in the pipeline, given a 0.0 anomaly now.) This chart only goes back to 2002, but the full record shows what an anomaly this is. Fifty month gaps occur in 1959-1963 and again in 1978-1982. The present 51 months is longer than either.

So, how is this significant? Most simply, recent temperature trends are likely to under-estimate the long-term trends, unless a suppressed El Nino is a long-term consequence of AGW. That's possible, but most climate models predict El Nino will become more frequent and strong in a warmer world, rather than the converse.