The New Pause lengthens again
WUWT 261 Comments
By VISCOUNT MONCKTON
The New Pause has lengthened by another two months...
In last month’s column, I showed Chris Schoeneveld’s graph of the succession of Pauses which, taken together, drove the global warming of the past century or so. By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The graph shows that each Pause commenced with a larger-than-usual el Niño Southern Oscillation. The y axis was incorrectly represented (which was my fault).
I hypothesized that there might be some causal connection between subsea volcanic activity in the tropical eastern Pacific (where three limbs of the mid-ocean tectonic divergence ridges meet and diverge at a rate an order of magnitude greater than anywhere else in the world) and the el Niño pattern...
Sure enough, Professor Viterito finds a correlation between seismic frequencies in areas of high geothermal flux and global mean surface temperatures:
It is above my pay-grade to determine the extent to which the correlation is causative. However, the sub-ocean seismicity that showed a pronounced increase from 1995 onward is now showing a decline again. If, therefore, the correlation is causative, it may contribute to less rapid warming in the coming decades.
What is more, the spikes in sub-ocean seismicity in 1996-7 and 2013-4 were both followed by unusually large el Niño events:
