McLean and Carter et al. ENSO paper officially debunked - is the ENSO global warming theory now dead?

Question

You may recall that last year there was some noise in the blogosphere about McLean et al. (one of the co-authors was Bob Carter, Australian marine geologist well-known for his global warming 'skepticism') study which concluded that the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) might be responsible for some of the recent global warming. The paper created a hubub because although they snuck this conclusion into the paper, it was not supported by their research. It was a conclusion which shouldn't have made it through the peer-review process. Nevertheless, at the time, various denier blogs trumpeted the study as 'proof' that the current global warming is natural.

After apparently sitting on the journal editor's desk for 6 months (first they do a shoddy peer-review process, then they take over 6 months to publish a correcting study - AGU needs to work on their standards for the GRL journal), a paper discussing and correcting McLean et al. has finally been published. Normally a reply from the original authors would be published, but apparently McLean et al. couldn't come up with a publishable response (their attempt at one was rejected).

The correcting paper pointed out the glaring errors in McLean et al. As one of the authors summarized,

"The primary error of McLean et al is that although they filter out all long term changes, they still claim that the resulting high correlation between SOI [Southern Oscillation Index] and global mean temperature (in the filtered series) has relevance for long term trends. As shown in the toy examples in the comment, this is simply not true - the correlations calculated by their analysis method are completely unrelated to any long-term trends in the underlying data. A secondary error is that they splice together two data sets which have different baselines, which artificially reduces the warming by about 0.2C. A third error is that they claim to identify two flat periods with a breakpoint in the middle (for both SOI and temperature), but their statistical analysis provides no support for this."
http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frsgc/research/d5/jdannan/comment_on_mclean.pdf

The good news is that other than Roy Spencer on occasion, deniers rarely attempt to attribute global warming to ENSO (unless you count the 'magical natural cycles' argument). So it seems as though McLean et al. never got a foothold in the denier movement consciousness anyway. Given the lack of popularity of the argument and this debunking paper, is the ENSO global warming theory now dead?

Facts Matter · Accepted Answer

Let me spell it out for "Lorna", and any other denialist acting dumb.

The paper attributed recent warming to ENSO. We have had denialists quoting it with approval, either explicitly or as part of the "natural cycles" handwaving.

The paper has now been shown to be crp. Will the denialists who quoted it admit they were wrong on this point? Or will they just carry right on quoting it, like other exploded arguments?

Eric c · Answer

Evans  findings have also been confirmed by Tsonis et al.

Quote
Tsonis et al. write “We find that in those cases where the synchronous state was followed by a steady increase in the coupling strength between the indices, the synchronous state was destroyed, after which a new climate state emerged. These shifts are associated with significant changes in global temperature trend and in ENSO variability. The latest such event is known as the great climate shift of the 1970s.” Two other times between 1900 and 2000 had the same alignment when synchronization was following by an increase in coupling strength. One occurred ~1912, and the Earth warmed steadily for the next 30 years, while the other occurred in ~1941, and the temperature of the Earth remained remarkably steady for a 30 year period. Furthermore, Tsonis et al. ran a global climate model over a 100 year period and found that each time synchronization was followed by an increase in coupling strength, the Earth’s climate seemed to move into a new state defined by warming or cooling.

? · Answer

So the question in simple terms leads lower back to why they use SST's and not STD's. For the latter, no single numerical value may be assigned to the intensity of experience(s). they at the instant are not even specific what mechanisms triggers those events. so which you have 2 very great unknowns which could no longer be represented. Hooray! lower back to sq. one.

Tomcat · Answer

Dead? What a ridiculous question the climate warms and cools in 30 year cycles, failure to acknowledge that is plain and simple denial at it's most basic form. Thirty years of cooling is ahead of us, one day you will be forced to accept that or nobody will take you serious, if anybody still does for that matter.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/14/dr-nicolas-scaffeta-summarizes-why-the-anthropogenic-theory-proposed-by-the-ipcc-should-be-questioned/

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McLean and Carter et al. ENSO paper officially debunked - is the ENSO global warming theory now dead?

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