Tracking El Niño: Summertime Update

For one thing, the media is prone to exaggeration and hype in order to get more attention.

And as a comment I saw elsewhere pointed out, the climate change deniers could have encouraged such exaggeration in the media, which they influence, so that they can later turn around and use that to influence people to ignore actual problems. This would be consistent with their other actions.

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/RickyRood/comment.html?entrynum=305

By: Dr. Ricky Rood , 10:49 PM GMT on August 01, 2014

Back in May 2014, I wrote a couple of blogs about El Niño predictions for this year (Tracking El Niño and Underlying Models). For those who need it, there are links to basic information such as definitions of terms in those blogs. This entry is an update.

One quote I want to bring forward from the May 20, 2014 entry, “Note, none of these centers are predicting, yet, strong, super or monster. I’m not as smart as those others [predicting the super and the monster], so right now I am steering away from “monster,” and looking forward to what we learn about prediction, the climate as a whole and, of course, how we communicate our science.”

I had three reasons to avoid going along with the “super” and the “monster.” First, reading the dispassionate words of several forecast centers, there was little suggestion of an extraordinarily strong event. Second, it’s usually not wise to predict extraordinary extremes without a lot of evidence, because extremes are rare. Finally, as was the case in my cranky response to the return of the polar vortex, the increasing exaggeration and personification of weather events and their implications for climate change are distinctly negative contributions.

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I used the Search Tools in Google and looked at the last three months.

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What’s the three month arc there? From super and monster to yet another false alarm and bust. What was the evidentiary information for super and monster as adjectives back in May? How did super and monster enter into and flash to the top of headlines? Worth studying and thinking about.

In my entry from May 29, 2014 I wrote, “even a moderate El Niño this year is likely to lead to the hottest year on record.” My rationale for this statement is that we are living in the hottest decade since we have had easily defended direct temperature measurements. We have remained warm, globally, despite relatively cool temperatures in the eastern Pacific. Given the importance of the eastern Pacific to the global picture, even a small break in the cool pattern is likely to lead to globally historic highs. Though too early to declare 2014 as warmest, as summarized in Jeff Master’s July 24, 2014 entry, June 2014 was the warmest June since modern temperature records began in 1880, May 2014 the warmest May, April 2014 the warmest April.

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The forecast summaries from these four centers are consistent in the sense that none of them are calling for a strong El Niño, much less a super or monster El Niño. It is also true, that the forecast centers summaries NEVER called for a strong El Niño in their public releases of information.

All of the centers are maintaining that it is more likely than not that the criteria for an El Niño will be met. The onset, originally predicted for the middle of northern hemisphere summer, keeps moving into the future. The strength of predicted El Niño is projected to be from weak to moderate.

Looking at the press and blogs reports, I would be interested to see in the blog comments how people think “super” and “monster” entered into the discussion. There is a burst of the adjectives in the press and blogs in May, followed quite quickly in June by people distancing themselves from the extreme description. Accompanying this distancing is the growth of commentary in the press and blogs about exaggerated claims and failed models. I point out explicitly, there is no language of exaggeration in the summaries from the prediction centers, which should be viewed as the basic knowledge-based information. Therefore, there is no foundation to say these models have failed in any fundamental sense.

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