Astronomers tell us we only have a billion years left before a senescent sun burns us out of here. This is a haha at a facebook timescale, but in the big picture it means that life on earth is very late middle aged in human terms.
We feel a deep kinship with all the life that has passed before, from human ancestors to the first shrewlike mammals that inherited the earth from the dinosaurs, to the first fish to venture on to land, and all the way back to the first organic molecules that replicated. We use “we” in the big sense to include all life that has come before and what will follow.
We are curious. If cold, salty ocean water that was beginning it’s descent to the abyssal plain when the Vikings were sacking England is resurfacing today, with upwelling that alternates between the eastern and western pacific every thirty years in the PDO (Pacific Decadal Ocillation), and more frequently but less regularly in the ENSO (El Nino Southern Ocillation), what would have been going on for most of earth history when there was a panthalassic ocean and the continents were smaller and more clustered than they are today?
geosciencebigpicture 
First off, great post Joe, I must say I am a large fan and I do something smialir on a very smaller scale, namely predicting long term weather patterns over the midwest. Your pointers in videos and your explanations have probably motivated and helped me most of all of anyone in this endeavor. Its not that your predictions are always right, but more that they are explained with full and complete explanations for what drives our weather.As for another topic .I have been doing a lot of reserach on the Super el-nino and to explain it and why computer model output HAS to be interpreted:Its a computer glitch/artifact or whatever you want to call it. The way GCM’s run, they did not take into consideration that trends over 30-60 years would glitch in this method when you combine so many fudge factors. I will explain this further, but the thing here is that:Cold PDO means longer and more intense la ninas.Warm PDO means shorter and less intense la ninas.When you combine that in a model that looks at data starting from the COLD PDO, moves to a warm PDO, the model is going to extrapolate based on this in a very simple fashion. Its a computer, it does not analyze data and come to conclusions if its not given enough data.Therefore, the output is going to be very simple: The future will appear to be a super el nino since the data goes from la ninas being strong and frequent, to weaker and less frequent and finally the computer will determine that the next logical step is SUPER EL NINO!!Its so simple, and to rip off a commercial, its so simple a caveman can do it! And yet James Hansen who is supposedly this God-like intelligence can not even figure out that this simple artifact that a beginner in computer modeling could find, is telling the world that we will see super el nino conditions.Very scary that this artifact pops up in roughly half the GCM’s out there, while some of them escape it to some extent do to better fudge factors but when we are talking about GCM’s, we are not talking about physics or science or even trend analysis.We are talking about a model based on fudge factors and every GCM output can be seen for what it is with a simple trend analsysis Worthless. This is my homework for all you sceptics out there. Anaylize the trends. Find out how our climate changed starting from say 1900 to today and find the trends that predominate, and guess what? You will find artifacts that warmists claim as predicted by models. You don’t have to even understand computers, look at what the computers predict locally for individual areas. This is not public domain for a lot of GCM’s, but for those that are, its very telling to see trends that tended to start in the 1970 s and continue to today pop up like magic.The most telling recently is the Colorado River. Rainfall and snowfall in the entire basin was slated to decrease forever in just about every GCM out there, and lo and behold this year the Colorado river is not just running above average, but it appears to be filling up the Lake Powell and Lake Meade basins to a point not seen in 30 years. This is my case in point and what trends to find. This is how computer models operate if you use fudge factors too much and do not understand the modeling technique you are using. Have fun and enjoy.Remember, the only person who gets hurt when you show how wrong GCM’s are is the scientists who did not understand what they were doing and deserves to be fired for incompetence anyway.PAGING DR HANSEN ..