 |
| Counts of in situ measurements taken from 1800 to 2025 and recorded in the World Ocean Database |
Yes, the definition of El Niño is "up in the air", and so is the "science" it is allegedly based upon (The Definition of El Niño).
I say that because when small-boat fishermen circa 1892 called their surface water experience El Niño, there weren't many in situ measurements of the ocean's characteristics there available.
Especially not to them, but even to oceanographers of the day either (see the HTML table to the right; cf. The World According To Measurements - 28).
From Wikipedia:
"An early recorded mention of the term "El Niño" ("The Boy" in Spanish) to refer to climate occurred in 1892, when Captain Camilo Carrillo told the geographical society congress in Lima that Peruvian sailors named the warm south-flowing current "El Niño" because it was most noticeable around Christmas.
The capitalized term El Niño refers to the Christ Child, Jesus, because periodic warming in the Pacific near South America is usually noticed around Christmas.
Originally, the term El Niño applied to an annual weak warm ocean current that ran southwards along the coast of Peru and Ecuador at about Christmas time. Over time the term has evolved and now refers to the warm and negative phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The original phrase, El Niño de Navidad, arose centuries ago, when Peruvian fishermen named the weather phenomenon after the newborn Christ."
(El Niño–Southern Oscillation). From RealClimate:
"The name ‘El Niño’ originally was given to a change in the coastal current (usually flowing from south to north) near the Peruvian coast during anos de abundancia. Paita sailors who used to sail north-south direction along the coast called the counter-current ‘El Niño’, after the Child Jesus because it had a tendency to appear soon after Christmas (the reason for this seasonality is not yet fully understood ...)"
...
"However, the name ‘El Niño’, which originally has its origin from changes in the ocean, is linked to changes in the atmospheric circulation. The understanding of the atmospheric circulation changes, later to be discovered to be connected to the appearance of El Niño events, was originally motivated by reasons other than ocean currents. Sir Gilbert Walker (photo to the left) was motivated by the question why the South Asian Monsoon sometimes failed from one year to another. There was a catastrophic drought and a subsequent famine in 1877, and the question was why do such events take place? Walker discovered that the sea level pressure fluctuations over the Indian Ocean and tropical Pacific tend to vary with opposite phase. He named this dipole of opposite variations ‘the Southern Oscillation’. The atmospheric circulation associated with this dipole pattern is known as the Walker circulation. The Walker circulation refers to the mean (steady) circulation where air over the warm pool in the western part of the tropical Pacific rises, being fed by the easterly surface trade winds across the Pacific, and subsidence over eastern Pacific. The Southern Oscillation refers to the inter-annual variations in this circulation."
(El Niño and Global Warming, emphasis added). From Statistical Science:
"At that time, the approach most prevalent in the statistical analysis of weather variables was to search for deterministic cycles through reliance on harmonic analysis. Such cycles included those putatively associated with sunspots, the hope being to provide a method for long-range weather or climate forecasting. Walker was quite skeptical of these attempts, especially given the lack of statistical rigor in identifying any such periodicities. Eventually, he suggested the alternative model of quasiperiodic behavior (Walker, 1925). Meanwhile, the prominent British statistician George Udny Yule devised a second-order autoregressive [AR(2)] process to demonstrate that the sunspot time series was better modeled as a quasiperiodic phenomenon than by deterministic cycles (Yule, 1927). To determine whether the SO exhibits quasiperiodic behavior, Walker was compelled to extend Yule’s work to a general pth-order autoregressive [AR(p)] process (Walker, 1931).
...
In 1903 Walker left academia, taking charge of the Indian Meteorological Department the next year. This career change seems quite surprising given the fact that he was not a meteorologist, but a “typical Cambridge don and had never read a word of meteorology” (Simpson, 1959, page 67). In fact, it came about through the actions of the previous Director of the Indian Meteorological Department, John Eliot. His rationale for choosing Walker was that he saw the need for his successor to be someone with strong mathematical abilities (Normand, 1953)."
(Statistical Science 2002, Vol. 17, No. 1, 97–112 Sir Gilbert Walker and a Connection between El Niño and Statistics Richard W. Katz). The once-upon-a-time mixture of that not very well understood phenomenon was once associated with global warming induced climate change, however, the powers that be are removing that association:
"How did David square Exxon policy with the knowledge he exhibited in his Ewing speech? He became a climate change denier, bringing to mind Upton Sinclair’s famous dictum, 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.'"
(Exxon, Dr. James Hansen; emphasis added). That disassociation movement is supported by more money than you and I can muster:
"the Koch brothers ... billionaire US industrialists ... have also donated large sums to organisations lobbying against acceptance of man-made global warming"
(Global warming 'confirmed' by independent study). But don't be shocked to the max just by that, because in many scientific disciplines, what we thought was a known reality is also "up in the air":
"In the previous post of this series a couple of well-known physicists (Penrose, Hameroff) indicated that they hypothesize:
"... a theory of consciousness ... consistent with Eastern spiritual traditions ... Eastern philosophy and other spiritual traditions ... afterlife, reincarnation ... out-of-body experiences ... The quantum soul."
(Small Brains Considered - 6, emphasis added). This is completely in accord with some of the criticisms and observations made for years here on Dredd Blog."
(Small Brains Considered - 7). Just sayin' ... like some others are "just sayin'" (AMOC Or A Mock? - 4).
The previous post in this series is here.
