This is the first I've heard of this "IPO" or "PDO" but it appears to be an interesting piece of the puzzle. As best as I can simply understand it, there seems to be a long term cycle between increased absorption of energy by the oceans, followed by increased absorption of energy by the atmosphere.
- The growing body of research helps explain why ocean temperatures have been rising faster than anticipated, and, perhaps more compellingly, why land temperatures rose less than models had projected after the turn of the century — a mystery, sometimes dubbed the warming “hiatus,” “pause” or “faux pause,” that confounded science until just the last couple of years.
“The hiatus is associated with the negative PDO phase — with strong subtropical trade winds that pile the warm water up in the tropical western Pacific, and bury some warm water in the subtropics,” Trenberth said. “If you turn that off, then the waters warm more generally and over a shallower layer, with consequences for the atmosphere above.”
The take away appears to be that scientists are predicting increased atmospheric warming, along with the author's optimistic prediction that it will take the wind out of global warming deniers' arguments, and that the public and policy makers will start taking this new reality more seriously. The optimism is nice, but I can't deny how determined some people are to keep their heads buried in the sand.
It's not the first I've heard of it; I'm pretty sure the cyclical oscillation of ocean temperatures even makes it into An Inconvenient Truth but it isn't really focused on as more than another factor that hides global temperature increases. So from a "climate skeptic" standpoint it becomes just another "excuse" as to why this winter is extra-snowy or whatever because unfortunately, climate models are difficult to adequately explain in the 11 seconds CBS This Morning is willing to give over to background science prior to making two talking heads fight. I think it's fair to say that most climate "skeptics" are older. They probably remember how the narrative in the late '70s/early '80s was that we needed to prepare for the coming ice age and that we'd all die in a hail of acid rain. The first time I heard about "the Greenhouse Effect" it was Weekly Reader letting me know how I'd die when all the CFCs caused a runaway albedo crisis and turned Earth into Venus in my lifetime. All this, of course, was probably to temper the fact that Reagan was busy calling the Soviets "the evil empire" and talking about putting death rays in space so really, death of any sort of natural causes was preferable. I guess this is my cynic's way of saying "those people that need to be convinced? They need something that can be understood and unequivocally demonstrated in ten seconds or less or they'll just growl like old people."
Well, I have to be honest, I don't think I've ever seen An Inconvenient Truth. I always just assumed the gist was "global warming is a thing, 'mmkay" and recently I thought it must be too dated to even bother watching, but I guess not. To me, I see several issues; on one hand, we're burning fossilized plant and animal matter at rate and scale which is having a measurable impact on the composition of the atmosphere, on the other hand, the climate is such a complex system if we wait until every minutia of weather is universally agreed upon, explained, and understood by every scientist, not to mention every John, Joe and Sally, as a species, we sill sit here and watch the ecosystem we depend on collapse around us. Combine that with the "sky is falling!" crowd which sees a doomsday around every corner (and they deserve to be tempered with reasonable skepticism) but I think we should be mindful that eventually, given enough time, the sky really will fall. Business as usual works great if you've been riding the gravy train for a long time and you're going to be checking out soon, but if policy makers are too busy shoveling coal into that gravy train to look up and realize we need to switch tracks, our future (or maybe just my future, considering you're a little older than me) is going to suck a little (or a lot) harder than it needs to. I suppose maybe they don't need to be convinced, they just need to be pushed off the train. The thing is, being convinced of something is different than really understanding something. I'm convinced gravity is a thing, despite the fact that I may not understand why gravity is a thing. I think the author hints at that a little: It sounds like we just need better propaganda, not in the sense that the masses become educated, but so that the masses become convinced. Of course, I'm not really clear on the correlation between who's in control of mass media propaganda, what public opinion is, and what the actions of policy makers are. “There have been a number of studies that have shown that some people will change their views of climate change based on extreme weather,” Leiserowitz said. “It’s not enough to simply experience a heat wave — it then needs to be contextualized. It needs to be interpreted by thought leaders and trusted people in a community and by the media and scientists saying, ‘This is an indication of global warming.’”