Why climate models and ocean observations diverge – “models are too sensitive to greenhouse gases”

Observational data challenges ‘official’ climate theory, which loses. Powerful natural factors have been overlooked. Better and/or updated climate models are recommended.
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Scientific models have predicted that climate change will drive oceans in the Northern Hemisphere to warm faster than oceans in the Southern Hemisphere, says Phys.org.

However, observational data over the last 70 years show the opposite—that Southern Hemisphere oceans are warming faster. New research from Northeastern University explains why.

“The climate models are too sensitive to greenhouse gases,” said Chengfei He, assistant professor of marine and environmental sciences at Northeastern.

As a result, He said, a crucial feedback loop involving wind speed, ocean water temperature and evaporation is overemphasized, having implications on tropical weather.

The findings were published in February in the journal Nature Communications.
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The role of trade winds feedback
So what caused this discrepancy?

He cited a “very complicated” positive feedback loop that relies on trade winds, which are winds in the tropics that move predominantly from the east and curve toward the equator.

Because of temperature differences between warming oceans and the air above the oceans, these winds become stronger, which then means more water vapor rising from the ocean to the atmosphere, he explained. This in turn cools the ocean’s surface, which then intensifies the surface wind speed and increases evaporation even more, keeping the loop going.

This is where He’s research diverges from conventional models.

How new findings shift forecasts
Because the Northern Hemisphere has more land than the Southern Hemisphere, and land warms more than water, conventional models predict that greenhouse gases will warm the Northern Hemisphere more than the Southern Hemisphere, He explained. That warmth, the models predict, will weaken the trade winds in the Northern Hemisphere, prompting less evaporation from its seas and warming sea surface temperatures.

With weakened trade winds predicted in the Northern Hemisphere, the winds in the Southern Hemisphere are predicted to correspondingly strengthen, resulting in comparable cooler ocean temperatures on the southern half of the globe.

But He’s research finds that the greenhouse gases aren’t strengthening the feedback loop as much as the models predicted.
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Implications for future climate modeling
“The tropical rain belt, hurricanes, drought, wildfires—they’re all related,” He said.

He hopes that future climate models, including ones that are scheduled to be released in the coming year, will incorporate his findings. “We have to fix that to better predict tropical climate,” He said.

Full article here.