10/29/022

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Sincerely,
Paul

An extremely important peer reviewed scientific paper came out a few months showing how Arctic Sea Ice Loss is projected to lead to more frequent strong El Niño events.

We are presently experience the ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) state of La Niña, for the third year in a row (very unusual), and even with this cooler variability state, we are seeing a world of grief (massive floods, massive droughts, heat waves, massive hurricanes, etc. etc.).

When we next have a powerful El Niño in a few short years then global average temperatures will be sure to skyrocket to unheard off record levels.

Thus, this paper is extremely important. As we move to a seasonally ice free state in the Arctic (I came up with the phrase “Blue Ocean Event” many years ago to describe the first year where there is no sea ice left in the Arctic by the end of the summer) we can expect an increase in the intensity of El Niño’s, and they will occur more often (with higher frequency), and the corresponding La Niña cooling periods will be less intense and happen less often.

I show graphs of global temperature rise overlayed with various ENSO indices, and clearly strong El Niño’s happening more often will be highly destructive to human societies and cause great risk to our global food supplies.

Bottom Line: Elevator Points:

1) Present Arctic Sea Ice Loss has not yet significantly changed the occurrence of strong El Niño’s

2) As Arctic Sea Ice Loss Continues and the Arctic becomes seasonally free (most peer reviewed papers say by 2040) the frequency of strong El Niño events increases by between about 1/3 and 1/2 (actually by between 37% and 48% according to two different climate models (CCSM4 Community Climate System Model version 4; and CESM1.2: Climate Earth System Model version 1.2)

Basically, buckle your seatbelts.

Abrupt Climate System Change is worsening quickly, and the worsening will continue to accelerate and take mighty highly-nonlinear exponential leaps in severity, frequency, and consequences to us humans, let alone to all of Earth’s Flora and Fauna.

Please donate to http://PaulBeckwith.net to support my research and videos on the cutting edge science of abrupt climate system change.

If you prefer to directly support my press conference presentations and travel to the global COP27 climate conference in early November then please consider donating to my GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-paul-…

Alternately, you can set up a monthly donation on my Patreon site: https://www.patreon.com/paulbeckwith

Sincerely,
Paul

Ref: Arctic sea-ice loss is projected to lead to more frequent strong El Niño events
Jiping Liu, Mirong Song, Zhu Zhu, Radley M. Horton, Yongyun Hu & Shang-Ping Xie
Nature Communications volume 13, Article number: 4952 (2022) Cite this article. Published: 23 August 2022

Abstract
Arctic sea ice has decreased substantially and is projected to reach a seasonally ice-free state in the coming decades. Little is known about whether dwindling Arctic sea ice is capable of influencing the occurrence of strong El Niño, a prominent mode of climate variability with global impacts. Based on time slice coupled model experiments, here we show that no significant change in the occurrence of strong El Niño is found in response to moderate Arctic sea-ice loss that is consistent with satellite observations to date. However, as the ice loss continues and the Arctic becomes seasonally ice-free, the frequency of strong El Niño events increases by more than one third, as defined by gradient-based indices that remove mean tropical Pacific warming induced by the seasonally ice-free Arctic. By comparing our time slice experiments with greenhouse warming experiments, we conclude that at least 37–48% of the increase of strong El Niño near the end of the 21st century is associated specifically with Arctic sea-ice loss. Further separation of Arctic sea-ice loss and greenhouse gas forcing only experiments implies that the seasonally ice-free Arctic might play a key role in driving significantly more frequent strong El Niño events.

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