Freshwater is lighter than salt water and therefore floats above seawater, until it becomes saline through mixing and begins to sink cooling deeper waters.

For an analogy, see eg. how Mediterranean water behaves in the Atlantic.

Of course, I do not rely on government grants to prove incorrect theories just to allow the government to extort money from innocent people.

Sandy (13:43:05) “Water as solid/liquid/vapour is the only relevant temperature controller in the climate.
The middle of big deserts have little or no water in the atmosphere. Hug a warm rock as the sun goes down and in the morning we’ll discuss how warm these insignificant GHGs kept you.”

I was doing the calculation, but then found wikipedia gave me the answer,

geothermal ocean warming is about 1/10,000 of solar irradiation

Evidently no one has pointed out to you that Wikipedia may not be a source you want place a lot of confidence in, especially for anything related to climate. A little math,actually just arithmetic. The conventionally accepted figure for geothermal heating is 86.4mW/m2, times 10,000 gives 864,000mW/m2 or 864W/m2, not an estimate of TSI contribution that I’ve ever seen. And, as I pointed out previously, the 86.4mW/m2 figure is for generalized lithospheric cooling which makes no attempt to account for heat from volcanically active hot spots, largely, I would assume, because no one seems to have a clue what those contributions are. Additionally, since the geothermal heating seems to be expressed in spatially limited areas which represent only about 1/1000th of the area of the oceans, the effects are magnified.
I would never claim that geothermal heating is a first order forcing, but it appears to be another in a growing line of factors that the alarmist GCMs have gotten almost completely wrong and provides more evidence, as if more was really required, that their output is BS.

Let’s re-run the last 50 years of the Earth’s climate to prove the validity of this assumption.
Water as solid/liquid/vapour is the only relevant temperature controller in the climate.
The middle of big deserts have little or no water in the atmosphere. Hug a warm rock as the sun goes down and in the morning we’ll discuss how warm these insignificant GHGs kept you.

It didn’t hide anywhere. Without the GHGs the ocean would have cooled even more during periods of cooling and warmed less during warming periods.

Even the solid ground rises about 40cms with the tides. There are tidal waves down below the thermocline because gravity does not follow your assumptions. And those tidal currents, when they meet shallower ground or sea mountains will create turbulence as surely as god made little apples.

I stand corrected. There is deep ocean tidal turbulence.

However, does this turbulence produced significant deep ocean/thermocline mixing on the scale of the world’s oceans?

From what I can determine this turbulence would not significantly affect OHC above the thermocline, but I’m happy to be corrected.

Sorry, Philip, but I did understand what you were driving at. I included a link to my post on the El Nino-induced step changes in TLT anomalies at the end of this post above, so that should dampen part of that argument. Here it is again:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/06/rss-msu-tlt-time-latitude-plots.html

then why isn’t there 100% rel. humidity all the way to the tropopause?

to ignore half the physics is to get it wrong. moist air is lighter weight – lower average molecular weight and the parcel will be inclined to rise. In fact – think of it as a hot air balloon too since that moist air is chock full of ghg power absorbing h2o molecules – further decreasing the parcel density. As that parcel rises, it loses some energy that goes into gravitation potential energy but you’ve got a solar powered hot air balloon going on too. Ultimately it’s going to reach the altitude where it will try to form a cloud, increasing albedo and reducing downward SW – which include more near IR than visible light. Note too – it conveyed a lot of energy upward to where it can radiate away – that heat of evaporation is in excess of the heat required to raise h2o liquid from 0 to 100 C for a given amount of h2o.

Naw. I’m almost afraid to say it for fear of the idea being usurped and implemented. The new ‘forcing’ isn’t a forcing per se – it’s because of the increased awareness of the problem and the fact that all these lunatics ‘care’ about the ‘problem’ along with all that energy conservation being done by these loonies – nevermind the extra travel from one protest to the next.

GreenHouse Gases

I wasn’t saying that GHGs will cause a warmer and wetter atmosphere. I was saying, this is the mechanism by which the oceans would be warmed by GHGs, assuming GHGs cause sufficient atmospheric warming.

The important points are that Ocean Heat Content is not responding in the manner predicted by the theory and the climate models – and that GISS/the climate models treat the ocean cycles like noise in the system that can (almost) be ignored.

With almost no change in OHC in the last five years, that would indicate there is no lagged warming-in-the-pipeline to come and we are already at equilibrium. We’ve warmed 0.6C already, about the rate that would be expected if the temperature response was 1.0C to 1.5C per doubling.

By not taking the ocean cycles into account properly, the models have had to invent all kinds of other “external forcings” and “lags” in order to back-cast to the temperature record reasonably well.

What new “forcing” can they come up with to explain the last 5 to 10 years of no increase in temps or OHC. I’m sure that is being worked on as we speak. One could expect some exotic Ozone or new Aerosol explanation to fill the gap again but they could surprise us and actually build in an ENSO or AMOC module. [But that would require backing off the 3.0C per doubling proposition or using the ENSO, AMOC impacts in an illogical opposite to reality manner].