March 24, 2005
Warming and La Niña

There's an interesting new paper in tomorrow's Science by Rickaby and Halloran that supports the idea that warm conditions during the Pliocene were linked to a cool equatorial Pacific - a La Niña-like state:


Our Pliocene paleothermometer supports the idea of a dynamic "ocean thermostat" in which heating of the tropical Pacific leads to a cooling of the east equatorial Pacific and a La Niña–like state, analogous to observations of a transient increasing east-west sea surface temperature gradient in the 20th-century tropical Pacific.

This is relevant because of the connection between La Niña drought in the southwestern U.S.

This is an idea I first ran across last year in a paper by Mike Mann and some other folks. It also fits quite nicely with a paper last year by Ed Cook and some other dendrochronologists linking warmer temperatures during the Medieval with widespread drought in what is now the western United States.

I don't know a lot about this, but apparently there have been folks who have argued in the past that a warming greenhouse climate could tilt toward El Niño-like conditions. This is the latest line of evidence to contradict that assertion.

Posted by John Fleck at March 24, 2005 09:39 PM
Comments
Comments
Comments