Inspired by a WUWT comment from Bill Illis in the Maybe they’ve found Trenberth’s missing heat thread, I’ve elevated this to full post status and provided the relevant graphics from the links Bill provided. From a National Science Foundation article on April 15th, 2010:
“The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later,” says NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, the lead author. “The reprieve we’ve had from warming temperatures in the last few years will not continue. It is critical to track the build-up of energy in our climate system so we can understand what is happening and predict our future climate.”
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Bill Illis writes:
Trenberth is looking for about 0.8 watts/m2 of the projected increase in energy held in the Earth system that is not going into heating the surface.
Either this energy is not being held in the Earth system (and is just escaping to space and hence climate theory is not correct) or it is hiding and the most likely place for that would be the deep oceans (or continental ice sheets warming up and melting that we have not observed).
This paper measured/extrapolated the potential heat content going into the nearly the entire global ocean below 2000 metres [It doesn’t appear they measured the Arctic bottom water but the north Atlantic does not appear to have warmed so it is likely no extra heat is going into the Arctic bottom water].
So, Table 1 in the paper shows 0.068 watts/m2 is going into the oceans below 2000 metres. Far less than the 0.8 watts/m2 Trenberth is looking for.
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/gjohnson/Recent_AABW_Warming_v3.pdf
We also know there is no accumulation in the last 7 years in the 0-700 metre ocean – von Schuckmann 2009 found 0.77 Watts/m2 going into the 0-2000 metre ocean (although no one seems to believe these estimates since almost all of the warming they measured was in the 0-300 metre area which is contradicted by the Argo floats).
Trenberth Missing Heat – 0.8 Watts/m2
Going into 0-700 Metre ocean – 0.0 W/m2
Going into 0-2000 Metre ocean – ? (but could be as high as 0.77 W/m2 but this contradicts Argo)
Going into the 2000+ Metre Ocean – 0.068 W/m2
Going into the 2000+ Metre Ocean from the Arctic – ? (but looks to be very low)
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It is unlikely that the ARGO measurements are wrong, and thus it can’t be found in the oceans, so where is it? Balancing budgets is never easy; there’s always a missing penny somewhere. Most often, that missing penny is due to human error. – Anthony
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Nice conclusion.
Mailman
Such as dust particles being melted into ice, then being buried by snow? We don’t have enough instrumentation to detect a change from -60 to -59.9 deep in glaciated continents. More funding needed. I also need funding to investigate the amount of heat emitted by magic shows in Las Vegas.
Cynical data-miners are wont to say of their own toils through stacks and stacks of non-quality-controlled data: ‘if you find anything interesting, you must have made a mistake’.
What, I wonder, would be a phrase that might be used by a cynical climatologist. My best so far: ‘if the results are not alarming, try, try, and try again.’
I wish Trenberth would read this article and provide us with the answer. Probably he won’t as he is probably still looking for the missing heat.
The heat is certainly missing. Here in the UK, we have already experienced the first snows of winter, See the linked article from the Daily Mail.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1315636/First-snowmen-2010-spotted-shivering-Scotland.html
If we have another cold winter like last year (which seems increasingly likely), the public will become increasingly sceptical of the AGW scare and pronouncements of impending doom unless we stop emitting the deamon CO2.
In all seriousness, the warmers should be pushed to evidence where the missing heat is. This is something tangible and measureable and if the missing heat cannot be located, their theory would appear very shaky indeed.
It’s lurking in the deepest darkest depths of the AGW advocates’ collective soul. Either that or the heat faeries are at work. It has to be anything other than bias in the study for how can they AGW advocates be wrong, their own models show what is supposed to be happening. It’s not their fault if the climate isn’t cooperating.
Energy is measured in Joules. Can we please stop this nonsense accounting based on flux and temperature.
Like OJ, Trenberth will keep searching…
“Either this energy is not being held in the Earth system (and is just escaping to space and hence climate theory is not correct) or it is hiding and the most likely place for that would be the deep oceans (or continental ice sheets warming up and melting that we have not observed). ”
Or.
The extra heat just flat doesn’t exist. Which would indicate the models are (ta-da!) WRONG…
Heat doesn’t go missing. It’s just on the move and it should show up somewhere unless, of course, it was never there in the first place. It’s all down to accurate measurement and this is where climatology stumbles. Inaccurate data will not build secure theories. As a crumbly, I hope the missing heat pops up this winter. I can seriously do without that snow and ice.
(or continental ice sheets warming up and melting that we have not observed).
Or they are warming and not melting becasue have a long way to go before they get to zero/32 degrees.
Kinda like the Arctic ice melt when the temperature is -20, ice is diminishing and some people claim it is “warm air” causing the melt.
As I understand it, original AGW theory held that there should be a “pipeline” of heating/warming in the atmosphere above the tropics. This was discovered to not exist.
Would it be a fair assumption, then, to consider this exercise in studying the ocean depths as an attempt to find the heat pipeline not located in the tropical atmosphere?
If so, we have an AGW theory that is, at best, incomplete. At worst, as as been pointed out, flat out wrong.
It certainly can’t be human error when we have so many computer models to back us up. Can it?
MattN says:
September 27, 2010 at 9:47 am
Or.
The extra heat just flat doesn’t exist. Which would indicate the models are (ta-da!) WRONG…
Models can not be wrong in post-modern science. I don’t know what you are thinking, but anything that is contrary to what environmentalists think is good for the planet can not be true. My bet is the missing heat can be found in massage parlors frequented by Al Gore, but then again, just like the heat fairy, the heat could be anywhere.
Just watch the bad science erupt over this where paper after paper postulates where missing heat is coming from…and none of it will be possible to contradict or prove…just another relic from going from the scientific method to the post-modern scientific method.
And yes, the wheels of fortune are turning as the climate goes into its cold phase from whatever we want to guess that causes the 60 year cycle (solar, ocean, etc.) So GW will lose in the coming years…and the cause of this will once again go un-explored as all of these “scientists” start to jump on the global cooling bandwagon.
It’s not missing, it’s lurking!
I think Mann and Gore and Jones and Co. will find all of the missing heat and then some in the level of hell reserved for dirty rotten snake oil salesmen.
It must be the yet-to-be-described unknown form of radiation that is only absorbed at greater than 2000 m. Let’s call it “2-KM radiation” and start talking it up as a wonderful discovery. It explains everything including death and taxes.
Does Trenberth really think any (little) heat from that depth is going to surface all at once to harm us? Most of it will probably be down there for hundreds of years as it circulates and surface only at certain places (of upwelling).
For that mater, how does he know when or how this heat, at that depth, arrived there? He has no clue. There is a good chance that the heat he has detected has been there quite a while and has nothing to do with current history. His cause and effect is wanting.
This happens, if you calibrate your “state-of-art models” on temporary warming trend, part of a sin wave, and then it flips to other side.
Based on what measuring hardware is the claim about 0-2000 m OHC rise, if we have ARGO?
Does anyone know when a study will be published with Argo results of heat down to 2000 meters? Or 700-2000 meters?
Hopefully someone is saving the raw ARGO and ship data, just in case the dog eats it again!
Yet another fine article!
Looking at the White Witch- La Nina this am-I have a question.
Where does that cold water come from? in my layman’s thinking,
with just enough scientific training to be dangerous, you’d think that
Ninas would be warmer as well or at leas not as cold?…
The crucial question not answered is “When will the heat return to cause warming ?”
If it is missing for 800 years we will have had alternative energy for 700 years and we might even need the heat to stave off an ice age.
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So far the warming has been far below the 6 ° C rate the alarmists want to use for a doubling of CO2. Since we have had 1/3 of a doubling of CO2 we should have had more than 2 ° C warming we haven’t had this. [.7 ° C is the accepted value and less than ½ of that is from CO2 in the best case.]
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To get around this alarmists have speculated that the ”missing heat” is stored in the oceans ! The problem is that since 2005 both atmosphere and the ocean have been cooling.
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http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
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Some have SPECULATED that the missing heat may be in the deep parts of the ocean but since they haven’t measured to test this speculation they don’t know. This article claims to have found 20 % of it.
The most important and ignored part of the missing heat controversy is when the heat will return. ?
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Since we are only speculating where the heat has gone and have only speculation about how it got there how can we predict how long it will be until it returns ?
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Answer: We can’t ! We have a theory of CAGW which DEPENDS upon the “missing heat ” returning in the next 100 years and we don’t know where the heat is and don’t know if or when it will return. Since we cannot find it we cannot measure it so we don’t know much of it exists.
Despite all of this “the debate is over” and we should throw ten’s of trillions of dollars at the nearest politician to make it go away.
“Writing in 2005, Hansen, Willis, Schmidt et al. suggested that GISS model projections had been verified by a solid decade of increasing ocean heat (1993 to 2003). This was regarded as further confirmation the IPCC’s AGW hypothesis. Their expectation was that the earth’s climate system would continue accumulating heat more or less monotonically. Now that heat accumulation has stopped (and perhaps even reversed), the tables have turned. The same criteria used to support their hypothesis, is now being used to falsify it.
It is evident that the AGW hypothesis, as it now stands, is either false or fundamentally inadequate.”
Here;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/06/the-global-warming-hypothesis-and-ocean-heat/
You just gotta love it!!!! The heat is not hidden at all. Its in space!
Hope I did that html right.
Isn’t heat accumulation measurable in thermal expansion (e.g., global sea level)?
It looks like sea levels in the past few years have continued the same slow steady rise they’ve been doing for a decades, so I don’t quite get how the total net energy of the oceans has been declining. Or does the first graph just say that the rate of increase in total net energy of the oceans has been slowing recently?
US Thermometer readings show cooling since 1895, before adjustments.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/us-thermometer-readings-show-cooling-since-1895-before-adjustments/