It's No Longer ENSO Vs. Climate Change

There are many natural causes deniers like to evoke either to blame the observed modern warming on, pretend that there is no warming and instead we are experiencing global cooling, claim the warming won't be that bad, etc. Yeah, I know, I can't figure these denier screwballs out either. One can only hope they make up their scrambled minds someday, and settle on just one way to be embarrassingly wrong. Nine buh-zillion wrongs don't make a right, I'm pretty sure. Anyway, high on their demented list is El Niño, or ENSO, a periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean.

A powerful ENSO year in 1997-8 (depicted in the NASA/JPL image above), and a distinct ignorance of statistics on the part of deniers are the main reasons why they mistakenly believe there has been a pause in surface temperature increases for the past 16 or so years, when there really hasn't been.

Deniers like to pit ENSO against climate change, like the two are diametrically opposed, competing forces, and if they can just prove it's all ENSO, then all the evidence for anthropogenic warming will magically evaporate.



Why, Bob Tisdale even wrote an entire book expounding upon his undying love for the Great El Niño Excuse-athon.

"In 2012, I published my e-book about the phenomena called El Niño and La Niña. It’s titled Who Turned on the Heat? with the subtitle The Unsuspected Global Warming Culprit, El Niño Southern Oscillation. It is intended for persons (with or without technical backgrounds) interested in learning about El Niño and La Niña processes and in understanding the natural causes of the warming of our global oceans for the past 30 years. It presents how the sea surface temperature data and ocean heat content data account for their warming—and there are no indications the warming was caused by manmade greenhouse gases. None at all."

None at all, eh? Oh, brother. I hate to break up such a precious love affair with the crushing news that one partner has been cheating on the other, but the truth seems to be that ENSO and climate change are the ones having the steamier relationship.

Studies have linked catastrophic floods, droughts, disease outbreaks, wildfires and even social unrest to the weather cycle, known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation.

Yet scientists have struggled to understand whether climate change is altering that cycle. Climate models have produced conflicting results, and reliable instrumental records of ENSO events begin in the early 20th century.

Now a new study, which builds on prior efforts to reconstruct El Niño's past behavior by examining coral growth, suggests that El Niño and La Niña events have become more variable and intense over the past several decades.

Yup, you got it. We may no longer be able to speak about ENSO like it is wholly natural and something separate from the changes we are inflicting on the climate. It may itself now be several decades deep into alterations and intensifications caused by our emissions.

Poor little deniers. Yet another tired canard slipping through their inept fingers, soon to be lost forever thanks to tireless climate research which always seems to prove them wrong.