" If this El Nino is followed by a strong La Nina, then the pause will be back. This time though it will have a strong El Nino at the supposedly warming end as well as 97/98."
Posted by Siliggy, Tuesday, 22 March 2016 1:42 am

I'm not sure what you're trying to say there Siliggy, but do you realise the El Nino / La Nina phenomena are trans-Pacific ones and only drive changes in weather patterns either side of the Pacific? - ie. Australia, western Oceania & S/E Asia in the west and the western Americas in the east?

Do you realise that global warming only makes El Nino and La Nina slightly more extreme? and they do not drive global warming?

"If you would like to read more about the historical temperature records for Darwin"

Jennifer, sorry I am not that interested in reading about historical weather in Darwin. Mostly because it is not relevant to a discussion of global temperature changes and is being used to muddy the waters.

"There is more than one green-house gas: water vapour is a significant green-house gas, but is not as uniformly dispersed as CO2 (so harder to measure as a measure of greenhouse gases in toto) - we can see that by it's visual representations ie. clouds."

McReal, water vapour is indeed a greenhouse gas, but unlike carbon dioxide its residence time in the atmosphere is short (due to a phenomenon known as rain). Its concentration has risen little, meaning its effect on increasing temperature is very small. Unlike carbon dioxide.

http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-spm-2.html

"Time will pass. If this El Nino is followed by a strong La Nina, then the pause will be back. This time though it will have a strong El Nino at the supposedly warming end as well as 97/98. How many of the nasty abusive commenters here will be looking up Jennifer to appologise for the parranoid conspiracy theories and insults?"

Siliggy, you do realise that El Nino and La Nina are transient phenomenon driven by changes in the trade winds over the Pacific Ocean? El Nino years are always warmer than the surrounding years and La Nina years are always cooler. So yes the next La Nina will be cooler than 2015/6. But that doesn't mean global warming will have paused and global cooling begun. What is happening is that El Nino years are getting hotter and La Nina years are getting less cool due to the underlying warming trend.

http://blogs.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/files/2013/03/201213-noaa.png

Ant. The Carbon dioxide global warming end of the world myth is one of the oldest hoax jokes ever played on humankind.
Here long before the 1896 world wide heatwave gave the evil Swedish eugenicist, Svante Arrhenius his chance.
Here are echos of the predictions that no living thing would be left alive by the year 1900 from an 1883 newspaper that also mentions many other greenhouse gases.
http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/124795324

McReal
Global is only so big. Your "changes in weather patterns either side of the Pacific" is a very very large area of it.
As for CO2 back radiation making weather more extreme that is just not logical. Vertical radiation from CO2 can only go two ways (mainly up due to the atmosphere being a sphere). Horizontal radiation from CO2 can go in all four compass directions thus bypassing convection and reducing extreme weather.

Agronomist
El Nino and La Nina are driven like the tides not driven by winds. The wind is too feeble to drive that much water. Do the math or try to blow the water out of your bath tub. Just like the tides they are cyclic and driven by the motions of the moon, planets and the sun.
A quick fact check shows your claim that "that El Nino years are getting hotter and La Nina years are getting less cool due to the underlying warming trend." is just not true. Why don't you people check these things before regurgitating them?
Here is a link to a chart showing them since 1950. It is easy to see the cyclic nature of it all as the 70s and 80s have more extremes than recent and also more than the 50s and 60s.
http://ggweather.com/enso/oni.htm
From this old newspaper back when our meteorological records were better kept is a good take on the timings of these influences.
http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/141717877

"El Nino and La Nina are driven like the tides not driven by winds. The wind is too feeble to drive that much water. Do the math or try to blow the water out of your bath tub."

That is not how it works. This is:

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/about/australian-climate-influences.shtml?bookmark=enso

"A quick fact check shows your claim that "that El Nino years are getting hotter and La Nina years are getting less cool due to the underlying warming trend." is just not true. Why don't you people check these things before regurgitating them?
Here is a link to a chart showing them since 1950. It is easy to see the cyclic nature of it all as the 70s and 80s have more extremes than recent and also more than the 50s and 60s.
http://ggweather.com/enso/oni.htm"

That page has no global temperature data on it at all (for noting, I linked to a plot of global temperature data in relation to El Nino and La Nina years in my previous post). It is a comparison of Oceanic Nino Index. In any case, it does show sea surface temperatures in the Pacific increasingly departing from the mean in strong El Nino years over the period. And indeed sea surface temperatures in the Pacific getting closer to the mean in strong La Nina years.

I prefer to rely on climate experts rather than bank managers for my understanding of how the climate operates. YMMV.