Four out of five ARGO data studies now show Ocean Heat Content declining
Readers may recall that Dr. Kevin Trenberth said this in one of the Climategate emails:
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
Using the ARGO ocean buoy data from Josh Willis, Knox and Douglass still can’t find that missing heat in this paper published in the International Journal of Geosciences, currently in press here.
Recent energy balance of Earth
R. S. Knox and D. H. Douglass
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY
Abstract
A recently published estimate of Earth’s global warming trend is 0.63 ± 0.28 W/m2, as calculated from ocean heat content anomaly data spanning 1993–2008. This value is not representative of the recent (2003–2008) warming/cooling rate because of a “flattening” that occurred around 2001–2002. Using only 2003–2008 data from Argo floats, we find
by four different algorithms that the recent trend ranges from –0.010 to –0.160 W/m2 with a typical error bar of ±0.2 W/m2. These results fail to support the existence of a frequently-cited large positive computed radiative imbalance.
1. Introduction
Recently Lyman et al. [1] have estimated a robust global warming trend of 0.63 ± 0.28 W/m2 for Earth during 1993–2008, calculated from ocean heat content anomaly
(OHC) data. This value is not representative of the recent (2003–2008) warming/cooling rate because of a “flattening” that occurred around 2001–2002. Using only 2003-2008 data, we find cooling, not warming.
This result does not support the existence of a large frequently- cited positive computed radiative imbalance (see, for example, Trenberth and Fasullo [2]).
A sufficiently accurate data set available for the time period subsequent to 2001–2002 now exists. There are two different observational systems for determining OHC. The first and older is based upon expendable bathythermograph (XBT) probes that have been shown to have various biases and systematic errors (Wijffels et al. [3]). The second is the more accurate and complete global array of autonomous Argo floats [4], which were deployed as of the early 2000s. These floats are free from the biases and errors of the XBT probes although they have had other systematic errors [5]. We begin our analysis with the more accurate Argo OHC data. There are issues associated with a “short-time”
segment of data, which are addressed.
2. Data and Analysis
In what follows, we make reference to FOHC, defined as the rate of change of OHC divided by Earth’s area. It has units of energy flux and is therefore convenient when discussing heating of the whole climate system. In W/m2, FOHC is given by 0.62d(OHC)/dt when the rate of change of OHC is presented in units of 1022 J/yr.
Figure 1 shows OHC data from July 2003 through June 2008 (blue data points, left scale) as obtained from Willis [6]. These data appear to show a negative trend (slope) but there is an obvious annual variation that must be “removed.” We estimated the trend in four different ways, all of which reduce the annual effect. Method 1. The data were put through a 12-month symmetric box filter (Figure 1, red curve). Note that the length of the time segment is four years. The slope through these data, including standard error, is –0.260 ± 0.064 × 1022 J/yr, or FOHC = –0.161 ± 0.040 W/m2.
Method 2. The difference between the OHC value for July 2007 and July 2003 is divided by 4, giving one annual slope estimate. Next, the difference between
August 2007 and August 2003 is calculated. This is done ten more times, the last difference being June 2008 minus June 2004. The average slope of these twelve values, including standard deviation, is –0.0166 ± 0.4122 × 1022 J/year, or FOHC = –0.0103 ± 0.2445 W/m2. Method 2’s advantage is that the difference of four years is free
from short-term correlations.
Method 3. Slopes of all January values were computed and this was repeated for each of the other months. The average of the twelve estimates, including standard deviation, is –0.066 ± 0.320 × 1022 J/year, or FOHC = –0.041 ± 0.198 W/m2.
Method 4. The average of OHC for the 12 months from July 2003 to June 2004 was computed, similarly for July 2004 to June 2005, etc. For the five values the slope found, including standard error, is –0.0654 ± 0.240 × 1022 J/yr, or FOHC = –0.0405 ± 0.1488 W/m2.
These results are listed in Table 1.
There have been four other recent estimates of slopes from the Argo OHC data, by Pielke [7], Loehle [8], Douglass and Knox [9], and von Schuckmann et al. [10]. Each of these studies of Argo OHC data with the exception of von Schuckmann’s, which differs in the ocean depth covered (0–2000 m), show a negative trend with an uncertainty of several 0.1 W/m2. Why the von Schuckmann case is an “outlier” is worthy of further study.
…
3. Discussion and Summary
As many authors have noted, knowing FOHC is important because of its close relationship to FTOA, the net inward radiative flux at the top of the atmosphere. Wetherald et al. [13] and Hansen et al. [14] believe that this radiative imbalance in Earth’s climate system is positive, amounting recently [14] to approximately 0.9 W/m2. Pielke [15] has pointed out that at least 90% of the variable heat content of Earth resides in the upper ocean.
Thus, to a good approximation, FOHC may be employed to infer the magnitude of FTOA, and the positive radiation imbalance should be directly reflected in FOHC (when
adjusted for geothermal flux [9]; see Table 1 caption). The principal approximations involved in using this equality, which include the neglect of heat transfers to land masses and those associated with the melting and freezing of ice, estimated to be of the order of 0.04 W/m2 [14], have been discussed by the present authors [9].
In steady state, the state of radiative balance, both quantities FTOA and FOHC should be zero. If FTOA > FOHC, “missing energy” is being produced if no sink other than the ocean can be identified. We note that one recent deep-ocean analysis [16], based on a variety
of time periods generally in the 1990s and 2000s, suggests that the deeper ocean contributes on the order of 0.09 W/m2. This is not sufficient to explain the discrepancy.
Trenberth and Fasullo (TF) [2] believe that missing energy has been accumulating at a considerable rate since 2005. According to their rough graph, as of 2010 the missing energy production rate is about 1.0 W/m2, which represents the difference between FTOA ~ 1.4 and FOHC ~ 0.4 W/m2. It is clear that the TF missing-energy problem is made much more severe if FOHC is negative or even zero. In our opinion, the missing energy problem is probably caused by a serious overestimate by TF of FTOA, which, they state, is most accurately determined by modeling.
In summary, we find that estimates of the recent (2003–2008) OHC rates of change are preponderantly negative. This does not support the existence of either a large positive radiative imbalance or a “missing energy.”
===============================================================
Read the full paper available here at the authors University of Rcohester website:
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/KD_InPress_final.pdf
For those wondering how ARGO works unattended, this image shows how:
Simple Mission Operation: The float descends to cruising depth, drifts for several days, ascends while taking salinity and temperature profiles, and then transmits data to satellites. More here
h/t to Russ Steele
Yes but that was the wrong peer review process so we can disregard it. [sarc off]
Looks like good coverage to me. Interesting to note the concentration off Japan and Texas, though.
let’s see. no warming in oceans. no warming in satellite measures. no warming in raw/unadjusted land records for locations not subject to UHI.
warming in GISS “adjusted” numbers. warming in models.
am I missing something?
And, of course, the error range exceeds the measured change, as will all CAGW measurements, which only goes to support the argument that there is no significant trend.
Well my Pigeon friends, let me introduce you to Mr Cat. 😉
Well, this just means things are worse than we thought!
If the von Schuckmann paper is correct, I’m asking myself where this increase in heat below the cooling top 700m came from. Further down in the abyss is my current best guess, and that means long sequestered solar energy is starting to rise. A sure sign of cooling in my analysis. Heat is leaving the system faster than it is coming in.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/working-out-where-the-energy-goes-part-2-peter-berenyi/
Well this is obviously caused by global warming, just like it causes all the cold weather.
Nothing to see here . . . move along now
Naaah – that can’t be right! Has this been reviewed and adjusted by the ‘correct’ people?
Mark Wagner says:
January 6, 2011 at 3:29 pm
great post! No, you’re not missing anything at all – except those warmist blinkers! LOL
This paper and many other (e.g. Soares 2010) show that there is no correlation between CO2 increases and global heat content for at least the past decade. Meanwhile, ignoring that, California and the EPA trudge forward with their plans to tax carbon emissions. To quote the Eagles, “we stab it with our steely knives but we just can’t kill the beast.”
dT
Tallbloke,
The Purkey and Johnson paper may have the answer you are looking for.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JCLI3682.1
from an observer of the debate… your like has not been seen since the 300. Hero’s all.
we find by four different algorithms that the recent trend ranges from –0.010 to –0.160 W/m2 with a typical error bar of ±0.2 W/m2.
============================================================
Which means you found nothing.
Did anyone really think all that heat going to the poles was going be replaced forever.
If we extrapolate the trend for 1000 years, I get a loss by 3011 of 40 W/M2. So we will have the oceans frozen from top to bottom? Worse than we thought. Maybe in 2011 we have already reached the “tipping point”.
That is how a real climate scientist extrapolates, isn’t that so?
Sooner or later they are going to have to admit that it’s not missing, because it was never in existence to go ‘missing’. They simple got the numbers wrong because they did not understand the issue well enough, which is almost the definition of climate science as practiced.
Mark Wagner says:
January 6, 2011 at 3:29 pm
let’s see. no warming in oceans. no warming in satellite measures. no warming in raw/unadjusted land records for locations not subject to UHI.
warming in GISS “adjusted” numbers. warming in models.
am I missing something?
Quick, check for you wallet.
How did that get through.
JER0ME says:
January 6, 2011 at 3:27 pm
“Looks like good coverage to me. Interesting to note the concentration off Japan and Texas, though.”
They are free floating so they drift with the current. There’s a recirculation gyre in the Gulf Stream that evidently rounded them up into a herd like a circling *cattle dog.
http://kingfish.coastal.edu/gulfstream/path.jpg
*Since you mentioned Texas I had to mention cattle, natch.
Ummm… ignore the box in the picture that says “recirculation gyre”. That’s out in the Atlantic. There’s a smaller gyre to the left in the Gulf of Mexico. That’s the one I’m talking about that rounded up the Argo buoys. Yee ha.
http://kingfish.coastal.edu/gulfstream/path.jpg
Concerning Von Schuckmann et al.‘s finding, I find significant direct heat transfer to the deep ocean from the surface hard to believe. The most significant mechanism of sinking of water to abyssal depths is downwelling related to surface cooling at several locations such as the Norwegian Sea. By its very nature this mechanism only downwells cold and saline water due to its higher density (ice formation dumps salt into freezing water). You cant push down warm, low density water in to higher density water (not very far anyway). And you cant convectively heat water at 2000m depth somehow bypassing the upper 1000m.
However, of course climatic variations can and will vary the volume rate and spatial pattern of cold downwelling; this variation in supply of new cold water to the depths could indirectly impact deep ocean temperatures.
With so little known about the thermal dynamics of the ocean as a whole and the deep ocean in particular, that it cannot be excluded that cooling upper ocean and warming deeper water could reflect a natural mechanism of heat transfer from upper to lower water (somehow) associated with cooling of surface water and consequently of global climate.
The cold deep ocean bottom water is heated gradually from above over most of the earth surface and cooled by supply of downwelling freezing water. Gravity also plays a role limiting temperature variation – temperatures are kept close to the temperature of minimum seawater density (close to zero – not 4C as in fresh water) by huge gravitational pressure. Warming the deep ocean water would lift the whole water column, requiring huge additional energy.
Being a distant outlier, it is also possible that Von Schuckmann’s result is simply wrong.
The uncertainty value is apparently one standard deviation (standard error of mean?), so the 90% uncertainly limits are quite large compared to the best value.
It could turn bad quickly for AGW. This is more evidence that the insanity of extreme AGW is snapping back.
To be fair, Argo coverage ain’t that great. Argo buoys descend to a maximum of 2000 meters. Average depth of the global ocean is 4000 meters. Argo network completely misses half the ocean. They must assume that, like average albedo, average ocean temperature below 2000 meters never changes. Y’all know the old saying about what happens when we assume, right? Makes an ASS of U and ME.
It’s astounding that anyone thinks that <6yrs of autocorrelated data can indicate any secular global trend. But grasping at any scraps of evidence seems to be the nature of climate science. The idea that we don't really know is anathema.
Jason Joice M.D. says:
January 6, 2011 at 3:56 pm
Tallbloke,
The Purkey and Johnson paper may have the answer you are looking for.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JCLI3682.1
Further to my above comment: with so little known about deep ocean thermal dynamics, natural oscillations in temperature at any location cannot be excluded. Indeed, with the likelihood of oceanic dynamics featuring nonlinear oscillators, oscillation rather than stasis may be the more enlightened default assumption(the same is true for atmospheric climate, e.g. PDO, NAO, etc.). The underlying assumption of stasis being the norm in a dynamic system such as climate and ocean dynamics does not seem intelligent.
tallbloke says:
January 6, 2011 at 3:43 pm
“If the von Schuckmann paper is correct, I’m asking myself where this increase in heat below the cooling top 700m came from.”
I’m just spitballing here but has anyone considered these possibilities:
1. The Lost City of Atlantis
2. An alien spacecraft at the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle with anti-matter warp drives. The dilithium crystals are melting down.
3. Gaia has had enough of her polar nipples being frozen and turned on the heater.
I will of course need a hefty grant to study these possibilities further and would like to begin by studying cold nipples. Well actually that’s a continuing study as I’ve been looking closely at cold nipples whenever I spot a pair since about puberty.
Well, I was going to say, ‘The plot thickens’, but in the interest of providing a snarky comment:
The pipeline widens.
I do not understand why the authors publish the paper on such a questionable new journal. It’s no better than a blog.
http://www.scirp.org/journal/ijg/
Scientific Research Publishing : scam or not?
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=5196020
Dave Springer says:
“They must assume that, like average albedo, average ocean temperature below 2000 meters never changes.”
I don’t know their assumptions, but doesn’t it seem unlikely that the deep ocean below 2,000 meters would be, on average, warmer than the water above it?
>> Why the von Schuckmann case is an “outlier” is worthy of further study.
Perhaps because it went to 2000m and all the others only went t0 700m and below 700m the temps have risen for some reason?
Dave Springer says:
January 6, 2011 at 4:43 pm
To be fair, Argo coverage ain’t that great. Argo buoys descend to a maximum of 2000 meters. Average depth of the global ocean is 4000 meters. Argo network completely misses half the ocean. They must assume that, like average albedo, average ocean temperature below 2000 meters never changes. Y’all know the old saying about what happens when we assume, right? Makes an ASS of U and ME.
What does ARGO say about areas where it can sink to the sea floor?
Dave Springer says:
January 6, 2011 at 4:43 pm
They must assume that, like average albedo, average ocean temperature below 2000 meters never changes
It’s more like the changes at 2,000 meters become so small as to question as to how a significant change at 4,000 meters could occur.
I seem to remember an article about the ocean currents not making the paths that we normally see represented. Since the life-span of these buoys is 4-5 years, I was wondering if their paths be plotted to show the ocean currents or do they just send information signals only. The info page is not clear about that.
Dave Springer says:
January 6, 2011 at 4:43 pm
To be fair, Argo coverage ain’t that great. Argo buoys descend to a maximum of 2000 meters. Average depth of the global ocean is 4000 meters. Argo network completely misses half the ocean. They must assume that, like average albedo, average ocean temperature below 2000 meters never changes.
Could one of those things survive diving down to 4000m? What is the pressure of the water at that depth?
Whether at the poles or the equator, ocean temps below 1000 metres are remarkably uniform.
The above makes sense because the well mixed layer is only a few hundred metres and sunlight penetrates to only about 100 metres (3%)
Anyone looking for “lost” energy or climate signals in the depths is wasting their time.
http://www.john-daly.com/deepsea.htm
I was struck by this quote from the article: “In our opinion, the missing energy problem is probably caused by a serious overestimate by TF [Trenberth and Fasullo] of FTOA, which, they state, is most accurately determined by modeling.” [emphasis added]
Was that a put-down?
To be fair, Argo coverage ain’t that great. Argo buoys descend to a maximum of 2000 meters. Average depth of the global ocean is 4000 meters. Argo network completely misses half the ocean. They must assume that, like average albedo, average ocean temperature below 2000 meters never changes. Y’all know the old saying about what happens when we assume, right? Makes an ASS of U and ME.
Ah. So the “hidden” heat is hidden even further away than we thought? It’s a shell game isn’t it? No matter what you do, you will never get the pea!
My question is then: if the ARGO buoys had shown increasing heat would their coverage and depth have been sufficient? Is your scepticism of their results dependent more on whether they get the “right” answer?
(There are some other people posting above that they are sceptical of the results, but they are sceptical of any such analysis, hot or cold.)
Personally the “only 2000 feet and not complete coverage” argument is very thin. The bottom of the oceans don’t have much churn, and we all know that. Nor is coverage poor in spacial terms. The real weakness, as point out, is that 10 years’ data is not enough for decent predictions, not matter how accurate each individual reading is.
How did the 700-2000m depths warm without being detected in the upper 700m?
SST do not agree with the Von Schuckmann or Purkey and Johnson assessment. GRACE has been overestimating as was discussed here at WUWT. Sea level has slowed and also was overestimated according to Ablain et al http://tinyurl.com/2vf34tq.
The more accurate and spatially covered the data, the less evidence there is to support AGW tenets. To me the issue is the empirical data does not support the AGW meme, so instead of acknowledging the problem with the hypothesis, new “creative” means to attain the desired answer are formulated. This is just more of the same Mann/Steig/Santer pea-under-the- cup obfuscation game.
Now climate scientology is preparing the masses for global cooling by claiming it is caused by global warming. 20 years ago I may have fallen for it, but not these days.
Someone should collate all the failed predictions and back pedaling.
Smokey says:
January 6, 2011 at 5:03 pm
“I don’t know their assumptions, but doesn’t it seem unlikely that the deep ocean below 2,000 meters would be, on average, warmer than the water above it?”
Sure. The ocean is stratified since density increases all the way to freezing (please don’t make me link to the temperature/density graph for seawater yet again). Ain’t no way for inversion to be wide or last very long. That doesn’t mean the deep water doesn’t change temperature. It most certainly does. The only question is how long it takes to respond to forcings from above. Eventually even conduction will proceed through from top to bottom (like maybe in 120K years of a complete glacial cycle which explains why the ocean is 3C pretty much everywhere below 400 meters) but I expect convection works faster.
harrywr2 says:
January 6, 2011 at 5:13 pm
“It’s more like the changes at 2,000 meters become so small as to question as to how a significant change at 4,000 meters could occur.”
Easy. Colder water flowing in along the bottom from the poles. You’d miss it entirely because it won’t mix upwards but rather just hug the bottom and spread out sideways. Eventually temperature will equalize with water above through conduction and there’s a probably a math geek reading this who can figure out how long it might take.
Dave F says:
January 6, 2011 at 5:03 pm
“What does ARGO say about areas where it can sink to the sea floor?”
HELP! I’ve fallen to the floor and can’t get up!
OK for those warmists who still believe that the oceans don’t have that much to do with the climate or that there is heat trapped WAY down deep now what? As a side note I would tell you that as an outdoor cook I keep a small vessel of water in my barbecue for 2 reasons the least important is that it give some moisture to my cooking, the MOST important thing it does is maintains the level of the heat so spikes don’t happen in the cooking chamber it slows down any heat or cold spikes that happen. think on that before you discount anything the ocean does.
To me the greater the depht covered by the data, the better the coverage.
Von Shuckmann definitively is the best paper on the list, because the analysis go down to 2000 meters (this study go down to only 700 m). Their result is:
+0.77 ± 0.11 W/m^2
That implies a an F(TOA) of +0.68 ± 0.11 W/m^2
This paper only confirms that somehow the heat is transferred to the Deep Ocean by downwelling currents, like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC).
The more I look at this, the more absurd it is to think that 80% of the OHC that resides in the upper 750m can suddenly show up in the upper 2000m, again without showing up anywhere above.
I believe this is from Josh Willis. The Von Schuckmann account just doesn’t make sense.
http://www.mediafire.com/imageview.php?quickkey=sd29r8yr33g31wc
The ocean floor is closer to the molten core of the earth and has many fissures and volcanos sending out heat. Why wouldn’t it be able to be hot in many places and able to heat the lower regions of the ocean (which then would rise to the upper layers)? Everyone here so far seem to be thinking that all the ocean’s heat comes from the sun above. There are probably many places in the ocean at great depth that are far hotter than the surface ocean.
Gary Hladik says:
January 6, 2011 at 5:36 pm
I was struck by this quote from the article: “In our opinion, the missing energy problem is probably caused by a serious overestimate by TF [Trenberth and Fasullo] of FTOA, which, they state, is most accurately determined by modeling.” [emphasis added]
Was that a put-down?
I believe it is a statement of fact.
Perhaps the missing heat is in the computers producing the models?
Dunno.
Hey all, there is a new post at Real Climate. It’s a doosie, and timely, because they use the old ARGO data is broke meme to try and debunk a recent article in Forbes. Yet we here at the “Non Science” blog WUWT have the newest ARGO data, which supports the Forbes artcile and makes RC look like fools. I’m writing a blog post about it, but I won’t finish before 10 PM (have to go to band practice). I’ll let you know when I’m done.
Clearly the atmosphere is cooling the ocean, which is why it’s getting warmer 🙂
Seriously, when the error bars are so much greater than the value, then there is no trend any which way.
Well this certainly confirms, it is a travesty afterall. Sort of like the holy grail. Monty Python anyone ?
That was a smackdown.
ARGO buoys are an enemy to those who wish to find warming oceans.
How do the algorithms exclude local geothermal warming?
I guess Trenberth with have to theorize that the heat is in the bottom of the Mariana Trench now.
tallbloke says:
If the von Schuckmann paper is correct, I’m asking myself where this increase in heat below the cooling top 700m came from.
Maybe it’s not heat coming from below. What if the cold water sinking down just isn’t as cold as before? After all, the graph shows temperature anomalies. Just because the lower 1300m shows “warming” doesn’t mean those waters are no longer colder than the top 700m.
Dave Springer says:
January 6, 2011 at 5:44 pm
“harrywr2 says:
January 6, 2011 at 5:13 pm
“It’s more like the changes at 2,000 meters become so small as to question as to how a significant change at 4,000 meters could occur.”
Easy. Colder water flowing in along the bottom from the poles. You’d miss it entirely because it won’t mix upwards but rather just hug the bottom and spread out sideways. Eventually temperature will equalize with water above through conduction and there’s a probably a math geek reading this who can figure out how long it might take.”
The flow at the ocean’s bottom is generally poleward not away from the poles and introduces a not entirely insignificant amount of heat from geothermal sources, particularly into the AABW
http://www.ocean-sci.net/5/203/2009/os-5-203-2009.pdf
Could ocean heat content go down if day time cloud cover increased over a significant portion of the oceans for a considerable period of time? Does any organization track a metric for ocean cloud cover? Seems like an easy thing to do with satellite coverage. Just asking.
It looks as though E&E now has a serious competitor for skeptical authors. I hope that, like E&E, the publishers of the IJG are taking great care in ensuring they have a good peer review process.
re – tallbloke @3:43 p.m.,
Jason Joice M.D. @ 3:56,
phlogiston 2 4:41
Could be my thought here is “off the wall”, but seems to me a significant part, if not all, of that observed increase in deep oceanic heat could be “bottom up” geothermal origin as opposed to “top down” solar origin. Is it possible thermoclines could keep geothermal heat released into oceans at depth (submarine volcanic eruptions, thermal vents, seismicity, etc.) from rising until blended with thermohaline circulation currents?
A significant increase in incidence of major earthquakes (7.0 & over on Richter scale) over the past 30 years relative to the preceding 30 years might be interpreted as lending support to the “bottom up” heat hypothesis. Historical data files available on the USGS website indicate 89 major earth quakes (on land plus oceanic) were reported in 1951 through 1980 vice 412 (land + sea) recorded in 1981 through 2010.
FWIW
The Argo data is available up to September 2010 to anyone. Really simple to plot various things. The most interesting from my point of review is temperature anomalies by longitude and by latitude relative to the 6-year mean. But if you look at the temperature by long and lat on a YEARLY basis (anomaly from monthly mean) you’ll see a big variation year to year where the “hot” zones are. The variation is such that you might wonder what the deviation from the mult-year mean actually MEANS (signifies).
The variation from 6-year mean is within the measurement errors. The interest by us skeptics in that the resultant variation is “negative”, reflects on our desire for confirmation, not from the significance of the result. Essentially, the Argo data says that there is no change.
The temp by longitude: if the temp anomaly were adjusted for the actual temp and therefore gave the ocean heat content, I’m sure the resultant curve would show that the changes are not signifcant. But the year-to-year variation really has me wondering about the error bar of the multi-year trends. How can a huge year-to-year variation become a SIGNIFICANT multi-year value, regardless of trend?
The missing heat was never missing, it was only present in the models, put there by “mistake”.
A better question: what has happened in the data for the last 2 1/2 years?
The ocean heat content should be trending downward because the Earthshine project shows that cloudiness and albedo have been increasing for a few years now with less solar shortwave energy entering the oceans.
At the same time the jets became more meridional (and shifted more equatorward) with longer boundaries between air mass types and more mixing to form those extra clouds.
At the same time the AO has become more negative.
At the same time the sun has been becoming less active.
At the same time the stratosphere has stopped cooling.
At the same time ozone above 45km has increased (with warming up there despite the quieter sun) instead of decreased as expected.
Anyone (Leif?) who thinks it is all coincidence is suffering from coincimania (closely related to so called cyclomania).
Meanwhile less solar shortwave entering the oceans now is reducing the amount of energy going into the start points of the thermohaline circulation and will have its effect in about 1000 to 1500 years when it resurfaces again to modify whatever climate we may be blessed with at that time just as our current climate is likely being subtly modified by energy that entered that circulation around the time of the MWP (hence increasing CO2 in the air as that very slightly warmer THC water comes back to the surface thereby altering absorption rates).
That the “missing heat” is a CALCULATED MODELED amount instead of cold hard facts, is an interesting admission. That there is an all out effort to FIND that missing heat means that belief trumps data. Every time. Every day.
It will be a while before the climate warming community is convinced that the missing heat isn’t there (and yes, the familiar sound of that comment is not lost on me).
Two points to ponder:
1. When Willis originally noted this so called missing heat(go back in time), he turned turned heaven and earth to find any cold bias in the sensor,which he claimed he did. He actually apologized for not finding a larger bias. At this point I would say their is a significant probability that the temps are biased warm, with a zero percent chance of them being biased cold. More than likely we getting colder faster than noted.
2. Note how sensitive the system is to picking up the heating modulation caused by the earths distance to the sun with a yearly period.
I hope they’re not counting all this hardware as part of that twice the size of Texas raft of floating plastic.
Curious says:
January 6, 2011 at 5:03 pm
>> Why the von Schuckmann case is an “outlier” is worthy of further study.
Perhaps because it went to 2000m and all the others only went t0 700m and below 700m the temps have risen for some reason?
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Yep.
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From Peru says:
January 6, 2011 at 5:59 pm
To me the greater the depht covered by the data, the better the coverage
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Yep.
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Doug in Seattle says:
January 6, 2011 at 7:08 pm
It looks as though E&E now has a serious competitor for skeptical authors. I hope that, like E&E, the publishers of the IJG are taking great care in ensuring they have a good peer review process.
_____
Hope springs eternal. This is the 1st volume of this journal, and no mention is made of this being subjected to a quality peer review. This doesn’t mean that it wasn’t, but let’s see who it was. Here is an interesting link to a discussion about certain practices of this “Open Access” journal:
http://improbable.com/2009/12/22/strangest-academic-journals/
Now, I’m not saying anything is fishy here, as the researchers involved have at least some academic creditials, though they are hardly well known names in the field. I’ve been in personal communication with one of the very well known researchers mentioned in this paper, and I’ll supply his/her response when I receive it in full.
Maybe there is something to this…or maybe there isn’t. I’d recommend caution…
_____
It’s always Marcia, Marcia says:
January 6, 2011 at 6:41 pm
ARGO buoys are an enemy to those who wish to find warming oceans.
LOL!
Right. Watch for Greenpeace loading it’s new
torpedoplankton collection tubes on it’s ‘research’ ship. ☺If a million ocean volcanoes went off tomorrow and warmed the ocean a degree or two, I do not think it would mean anything to Trenberth if he could not tie it to anthropogenic CO2.
The source of the data used in this study is Willis:
“Figure 1 shows OHC data from July 2003 through June 2008 (blue data points, left scale) as obtained from Willis [6].”
The reference is:
“[6] J. Willis (Private Communication, 20 February 2009. The last 5 months are preliminary.)”
Well, Willis published a paper called:
“Assessing the Globally Averaged Sea Level Budget on Seasonal to Interannual Time Scales”
http://ecco.jpl.nasa.gov/~jwillis/willis_sl_budget_final.pdf
The paper showed a negative trend in thermo-steric SLR :
“The trends in the thermosteric and halosteric components were -0.9 mm/year
and 0.3 mm/year, respectively”
but Willis make clear that the datasets used were inconsistent between them:
“The observational estimates of each term in equation (1) are shown as black lines in
Figures 1 and 2. The gray lines show inferred estimates of each term, computed by
adding or subtracting the other two. Although there is reasonable agreement between the inferred estimates and the observational estimates in the first year of each time series, the inferred and observational estimates rapidly diverge after mid-2004. By the beginning of 2005, all three of the inferred estimates of MSL lie well outside the random error bars of the observational estimates.
(…)
The discrepancy between inferred and observational estimates is most readily visible in the trend. The trend in the sum of the components is 0.3 mm/yr, about 3.3 mm/yr smaller than that of the altimeter”
Another analysis of the same raw Argo data was performed by Leuliette 2009:
“Closing the sea level rise budget with altimetry, Argo, and GRACE”
ftp://ftp.ifm.uni-hamburg.de/outgoing/scharffe/BACKUP/paper/2009_GRL_Leuliette.pdf
Willis 2008 shows a cooling trend since 2004, while Leuliette shows a warming trend. The primary difference between the two is found early in the Argo record, when there were fewer Argo buoys deployed. Leuliette 2009 suggests the discrepancy between the two seems to be due to poor sampling and differences in how the data was handled.
This paper uses data from Willis, data that is flawed according to the Leuliette et al. paper.
An independent result can be found comparing the rate of sea level rise measured by satellites:
http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_last_15.html (SLR= 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/year)
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_ns_global.jpg (SLR= 3.0 ± 0.4 mm/year)
And substracting to it the rate of ocean mass SLR measured from GRACE:
“Sea level budget over 2003–2008: A reevaluation from GRACE space gravimetry,
satellite altimetry and Argo”
http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/home/files/Cazenave_et_al_GPC_2008.pdf
That found an ocean mass SLR of 1.9 ± 0.1 based on GRACE data.
The thermo-steric SLR is then:
3.2(3.0) – 1.9 = 1.3 (1.1) mm/yr
A result consistent with the von Shuckmann value of thermo-steric SLR of 1.01±0.13 mm/year
This is strong evidence that the “missing heat” is accumulating in the ocean below 700m, as was shown in the von Shuckmann paper.
Pamela Gray says:
January 6, 2011 at 7:52 pm
That the “missing heat” is a CALCULATED MODELED amount instead of cold hard facts, is an interesting admission. That there is an all out effort to FIND that missing heat means that belief trumps data. Every time. Every day.
===========================================================
Very much like the midlatitude troposphere hotspot.
It’s there, it has to be, we just haven’t found it yet (Santer & Sherwood notwithstanding).
From Peru says:
January 6, 2011 at 5:59 pm
“This paper only confirms that somehow the heat is transferred to the Deep Ocean by downwelling currents, like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC).”
I would think a small difficulty with that hypothesis is created by most descriptions of the operation of the MOC which require that the warm northward circulating surface waters lose their heat to a great enough degree to allow the densification that drives the global circulation. For the water mass to loop to the bottom it must necessarily have already dumped its heat, otherwise the circulation halts.
This is strong evidence that the “missing heat” is accumulating in the ocean below 700m, as was shown in the von Shuckmann paper.
And doing what? If a drop of water enters the ocean, how long does it take for this drop of water to see the bottom of the ocean, and then rise back to the top? Of course, I know we aren’t talking about drops of water here, I know we are talking about water transporting energy. But if it is simply accumulating, then you still have a problem in the models.
When is it going to come back? Is it going to be a giant wave of energy pouring out of the oceans into the skies, or trickle back slowly, accumulating all the while?
I think it unlikely because if the oceans were so adept at storing heat energy, Ice Ages would be a less frequent occurrence in Earth’s history. And, of course, you would have a problem with current models of imbalance because outgoing energy from the oceans becomes a point of contention. It is then impossible to say that the rise in OHC is due to CO2 if energy is stored that low because it is not clear which direction the energy would be coming from. This also has implications for the climate sensitivity figure if it is as you say.
Mark Wagner says:
January 6, 2011 at 3:29 pm
let’s see. no warming in oceans. no warming in satellite measures. no warming in raw/unadjusted land records for locations not subject to UHI.
warming in GISS “adjusted” numbers. warming in models.
am I missing something?
============
Don’t forget the ‘missing’ tropospheric hot spot, which was supposed to be global warming’s signature.
In answer to your question, no. 😉
JohnWho says:
January 6, 2011 at 6:18 pm
I do believe you may have stumbled onto the evidence for the “missing heat”. The growing number super computers dedicated to “proving” that CO2 is killing us must consume (in addition to billions of our tax dollars) many megawatts of electrical energy. After all, it must be going somewhere mustn’t it – but then again maybe it just goes to keeping the gravy train in motion.
But I guess we should just accept that these things are most accurately determined by modeling.
It’s always Marcia, Marcia says:
January 6, 2011 at 6:41 pm
“ARGO buoys are an enemy to those who wish to find warming oceans.”
And when research vessels goes looking for plastic and trash in that “plastic-gyre”, they find ……. argo buoys.
Mods:
In a number of places in the paper as posted the figure 1022J/yr appears. I don’t know if it is that way in the original or if it is the result of a formatting fault, but it should be 10 to the 22nd power Joules per year.
“Maybe it’s not heat coming from below. What if the cold water sinking down just isn’t as cold as before? After all, the graph shows temperature anomalies. Just because the lower 1300m shows “warming” doesn’t mean those waters are no longer colder than the top 700m.”
The deep ocean water does come from the surface, either in the north Atlantic (NADW) or the Southern Ocean (AABW). The water there sinks because it is denser (=colder and saltier) than any other water in the oceans. For warmer waters to be able to sink and dislpace colder waters means that the salinity must have increased significantly. This should be easy enough to verify.
The interesting thing is that there is a plausible mechanism for increased salinity in Antarctic Bottom Water. Salt is enriched in the AABW mostly by sea ice formation, so the increasing amount of sea-ice around Antarctica in the last few decades could cause higher abyssal temperatures in the Southern Ocean.
enough:
Two interesting points, especially number two. After looking at the graph did you also notice the somewhat anti-correlation of the blue line to arctic sea ice. The lowest OHC is exactly in sept 2007 when arctic ice hit it’s minimum. Why?? The years show a decrease in OHC as the sea ice decreased. Now that’s something to think on for a while.
enough:
Maybe we now know where all of the cold from the missing ice in the arctic went to. ☺
Katherine says:
January 6, 2011 at 7:01 pm (Edit)
tallbloke says:
If the von Schuckmann paper is correct, I’m asking myself where this increase in heat below the cooling top 700m came from.
Maybe it’s not heat coming from below. What if the cold water sinking down just isn’t as cold as before? After all, the graph shows temperature anomalies. Just because the lower 1300m shows “warming” doesn’t mean those waters are no longer colder than the top 700m.
If that was so, why wouldn’t the signal have showed up in the top 700m? The Argo network doesn’t extend all the way to the north pole, so here may be some room for speculation there.
One of my first experiences in school physics was to hold the bottom of 6″ test tube of water whilst the teacher boiled the water in the top of the test tube with a Bunsen burner to show water is a terrible conductor of heat. So how does hot ocean surface water get to the bottom?
It’s always Marcia, Marcia says:
January 6, 2011 at 6:41 pm
“ARGO buoys are an enemy to those who wish to find warming oceans.”
Sounds like the makings of a WWE wrestling match. The Argo Buoys versus Real Climate.
Adrian Kerton says:
January 7, 2011 at 12:45 am
There are loads of reasons, convection, ocean currents (gulf stream, etc), sea density variation, wind, waves, tidal movement, etc,etc. All will tend to mix up the upper zone of the ‘warmed’ water with the less warm lower zone but generally it would be a slow process I guess.
Has anybody established what percentage of incoming radiation is
a) reflected versus absorbed
b) used by latent heat of evaporation (i.e. lost to the atmosphere as water vapour)
c) actually retained by the sea water
d) used/absorbed by plant life (phytoplanckton)
and
e) the relative differences if the sea is rough or choppy with higher winds?
It just strikes me as strange that these temperature readings are potentially as variable as climate for a variety of other reasons – though of course the oceanic thermal ‘mass’ is much greater and the variation would be expected to be smaller in size.
It’s a travesty that we’re letting all that energy escape to space without putting it to use doing work first.
Tilo, Trenberth still hopes the missing heat is deep. He and Josh and Pielke Pere had a plaintive exchange last Spring in which Josh and Roger tried to convince him that the data was not there to show transport of heat to the depths.
Trenberth inadvertently spoke the truth in his famous NPR interview of almost three years ago when he speculated that possibly the missing heat had escaped to space.
Uh hunh. You got it right there, Travesty Trenberth.
=============
“Adrian Kerton says:
January 7, 2011 at 12:45 am ”
“So how does hot ocean surface water get to the bottom?”
There is a long slow circulation within the oceans which is driven by density differentials arising from salinity differences which are in turn driven primarily by the melt/ freeze process at the poles – The Thermohaline Circulation (THC). The time taken for a full circuit is 1000 to 1500 years.
Solar shortwave energy penetrates up to 200 metres into the oceans and is carried along into the THC. Neither convection or conduction is necessary and the flow of the THC effectively by passes the barriers created by water stratification within the oceans.
So if one has a century or so (more likely 500 years going by the length of time from LIA to date) of slowly increasing solar shortwave into the oceans there will also be a slow increase in temperature along the horizontal route of the THC. And an increase in ocean heat content.
That will produce a slow increase in oceanic heat energy released to the air when that warmer water exits at the end of it’s 1000 to 1500 year journey.
The opposite for a long period of reducing solar shortwave into the oceans.
So what causes a 500 year cycling of variable solar shortwave into the oceans ?
Look at cloudiness and albedo changes arising from variable jetstream zonality or meridionality. That seems to have varied on an approximate 1000 year cycle from MWP to LIA to date.
Coincidentally (or not) that fits with the variability in levels of solar activity over the past 1000 years (but with lots of shorter term failures of correlation – probably ocean induced).
Taking the next step, what causes the sun to have an effect on the behaviour of the jets ?
I have suggested that in some detail previously. A change in the mixture of photons and particles from the sun appears to affect ozone chemistry above 45km to change the vertical temperature profile of the atmosphere and shift the tropospheric air pressure distribution.
Dave says:
January 6, 2011 at 7:13 pm
re – tallbloke @3:43 p.m.,
Jason Joice M.D. @ 3:56,
phlogiston 2 4:41
There is a very simple interpretation – increased upwelling and downwelling.
However geothermal input cannot be excluded as a factor.
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
Does anyone know whether Dr. Trenbeth has ever explained why ‘finding a lack of warming’ should be considered a traversty? I would have thought that in the light of the catastrophy that is about to befall the earth through global warming, according to his and his colleagues endless prognostications, he would have been overjoyed with such findings. Can we invite Dr. Trenbeth to clarify the point he is making by making a statement on this site?
It seems that the exits are closing one by one. Just when the Warmists will admit defeat is anyone’s guess but our best friend is a cooling planet over time as AGW would find itself in a right pickle.
It always distresses me that Warmists never rejoice when snow returns, at the lack of global warming for over 10 years, heavy rains returning to Australia etc. All they do is deny the evidence and point you to a warm spot on the Earth or the Antarctic peninsula.
It’s called a green agenda. It’s called continued climate funding – follow the money.
Below is quite clear evidence that sea surface temperatures have dramatically cooled over most of the worlds ocean area in the past 6 months with the solar downturn!
1. Most of thr Arctic has cooled substantially
2. Hudson Bay and surrounding areas have cooled substantially
3. Greenland area has cooled
4. Norway-Britain-Spain and to Italy Ocean adjacent have cooled
5. North Atlantic has cooled
6. Gulf of mexico has substatially cooled.
7. North part of South Atlantic Ocean has cooled
8. Far South Atlantic Ocean has cooled
9. South of South Pacific Ocean has cooled substantially
10. El Nino-La Nina Pacific Ocean has cooled and broadened
11. Near New Zealand and South of Australia Southern Ocean
has cooled substantially
12. Eastern and far western North Pacific Ocean have cooled substantially
13. Indian Ocean and Indonesian area have cooled substantially
14. Almost all adjacent Antarctic area ocean has cooled substantially.
The only real warming evident is near equatorial Africa in the Atlantic, a slab of the South Atlantic Ocean, a slab of the Indian Ocean east of tip of South Africa, and a small area off NW WA.
Convincing irrefutable evidence that the surface of the world’s ocean are cooling quite quickly over the vast majority of ocean area due to the solar downturn. This would be expected to carry on with a cooling trend inn the decades ahead and cause land temps to follow suit further than they already have done already also in the decades ahead of forecast further low solar output.
http://i519.photobucket.com/albums/u359/ianholton/001-7.jpg
Jimbo says:
January 7, 2011 at 3:00 am
you are quite right!
Anybody visiting a ‘supposed’ terminally ill loved one in hospital and being told that the diagnosis might be wrong would normally be pleased and hopeful. S’funny that the warmists never seem to look for or quote any ‘good’ signs (of AGW weakness)? I mean when was the last time that a warmist blog put up a post saying ‘AGW may be wrong because of this evidence or that evidence’ or even a post saying ‘Great!: AGW may be much slower than thought’, etc…..
Several people have asked what Kevin Trenberth meant when he used the word “tavesty” in a ‘climategate’ email. Actually, the meaning is clear from the email which was as follows:
From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer
Hi all
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).
Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27,
doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001.
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People like CPC are tracking PDO on a monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO. Most of what they are seeing is the change in ENSO not real PDO. It surely isn’t decadal. The PDO is already reversing with the switch to El Nino. The PDO index became positive in September for first time since Sept 2007. see http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_ocean_monitoring_current.ppt
Kevin
So, the “travesty” was “that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment”, so he assumes and asserts that this is because “Our observing system is inadequate”. In other words, the “travesty” he asserts is that the data must be wrong (and, therefore, he deduces that “Our observing system is inadequate”).
However, the claim that “Our observing system is inadequate” because it disconfirms a theory is an assertion that the theory decrees what the data must show.
I disagree with Trenberth on this because – to me – it is a travesty when the scientific method is abandoned, and the scientific method says that the theory must rejected when it fails to explain the data unless and until the data is shown to be wrong.
Richard
Richard S Courtney says:
January 7, 2011 at 4:14 am
However, the claim that “Our observing system is inadequate” because it disconfirms a theory is an assertion that the theory decrees what the data must show.
I disagree with Trenberth on this because – to me – it is a travesty when the scientific method is abandoned, and the scientific method says that the theory must rejected when it fails to explain the data unless and until the data is shown to be wrong.
I agree, but in addition the fact of the situation is that we don’t know the radiative energy balance at the top of the atmosphere with sufficient precision to know what effect various variables are having. So as well as Trenberth not being able to prove the co2 enhanced greenhouse effect hypothesis, it isn’t falsified by TOA energy balance either. However, a reasoned analysis of ARGO data compared to TOA balance is currently making it look like more energy is leaving the system than entering. Therefore natural variation easily overcomes co2 forcing.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/working-out-where-the-energy-goes-part-2-peter-berenyi/
I seem to recall from my long ago grad school days that water is densest at about 4 degrees C. That applied to freshwater lakes–I don’t know if it applies to seawater. But if it does, deep water could be warmer than surface water. Just a thought to throw out.
Amsel says:
January 6, 2011 at 5:01 pm
I do not understand why the authors publish the paper on such a questionable new journal. It’s no better than a blog.
http://www.scirp.org/journal/ijg/
Scientific Research Publishing : scam or not?
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=5196020
Thanks, for pointing that out. While there may be merit to the paper I’m certainly left with some doubt as a result of seeing the discussion at forums.randi.org.
I also noticed that the Journal is offline currently.
Hmmm….
MikeEE
I do not believe even that ARGO data much. Remember?
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/
All “too cool buoy” data were removed by Willis, event the problem in Atlantic might be real. We need raw ARGO data and get it recalculated ASAP.
Remember, all SST data are available and updated in time, but ARGO data are being sat on by NASA JPL.
Thankfully, we have AQUA SST data and satellite-based Reynolds OI.v2 ain’t not that bad either.
R. Gates says:
January 6, 2011 at 9:06 pm
Curious says:
January 6, 2011 at 5:03 pm
>> Why the von Schuckmann case is an “outlier” is worthy of further study.
Perhaps because it went to 2000m and all the others only went t0 700m and below 700m the temps have risen for some reason?
_____
Yep.
===========
Now hold on. I can’t see how you want to bunch the 2000m layer with the upper layers and say, hey look, here’s the missing heat. But that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny If temperatures at 2000m are increasing while temperatures above are not then that begs the obvious question – how did the layer at 2000m gain heat that did not pass through the upper layers? Tallbloke opined that the heat may have come from even lower – the very deepest layer. That implies that the bottom layer is warmer than that at 2000m, also problematic.
As the authors say, ‘it warrants a further study.’
The ‘missing’ energy simply did not enter the oceans because around 2000 cloudiness and albedo began to increase just as the jets started to become more meridional/equatorward.
So less solar shortwave was entering the oceans but there was still plenty of residual earlier (from the late 20th century spell of active sun and poleward/zonal jets) oceanic warmth in the system hence the warm troposphere generally until 2010.
Now we have a developing La Nina along with a generally negative PDO and that is supposed to be a period of ‘recharge’ for ocean heat content.
However the more meridional jets and increased cloudiness and albedo will be frustrating the necessary recharge.
During the late 20th century we had both increased solar input to the oceans from more poleward jets plus increased energy release to the air so that overall the extra incoming exceeded the extra being released for a net gain in ocean heat content.
Now we have decreased solar input to the oceans and decreased energy released to the air.
We will get declining ocean heat content for as long as the decline in input exceeds the decline in release of energy to the air.
The change in solar activity levels has been large and sudden. I expect the reduction in input to the oceans to exceed the recharge capabilities of La Nina for some time.
The scary scenario would then be a substantial discharge from a strong El Nino whilst there is still reduced energy input from more equatorward jets. There might be a brief boost to tropospheric air temperatures whilst the energy passes from oceans to space but combined with a reduced input to the oceans the decline in ocean heat content would be large for a severe subsequent effect on tropospheric temperatures.
Some additional points to ponder related to this “research” paper:
1. Do the authors describe what data they use, exactly? Argo data have undergone
several major revisions.
2. Data varies in time in amount and coverage, and some floats were “bad” and some had calibration problems (the surface pressure was recorded as negative, indicating depth problems).
3. Why don’t the authors use Lyman et al results?
4. Looking at the figure in the paper also reveals a clear problem: The values at the end are higher than any others yet they have a downward trend. Clearly any “trend” they get depends critically on how they get it and it highly dependent on the time period. By taking a 12 month running mean they discount the last 6 months.
Once again . . . I’ve only scanned all the posts . . . .but, do ‘they’ do the same data collection around the vents of the “ring of fire”? If so, is that seperated out of the average? I would be interested in these graphs . . .
The missing heat cannot enter the ocean except by conduction. Most of that is lost immediately to evaporation for transport aloft.
Trenberth, and all moderate warmer’s, are tasked to a fool’s errand-trying to make a science of lunacy.
Before Argo, was there ANY longterm reliable widespread data down to 2000M?
There is a difference between explaining something and explaining away something. To say that there is no missing ocean heat found so far explains something. Claiming that the missing heat must therefore be someplace else is an attempt at explaining away an unwelcome observation. Attempting to dismiss a fact by contriving an ad hoc speculation or untested hypothesis is what one expects from those suffering from cognitive dissonance.
The recent epidemic of cognitive dissonance amongst warmists is wonderful to behold. They make themselves look both desperate and foolish as they flounder about in search of ways to explain away the current cooling trend. In so doing they will ultimately destroy what little is left of their credibility.
Measurements of ocean heat content (OHC) down to 700 m show cooling. But one measurement down to 2000 m (about half way down to the average ocean bottom depth of 4000m) shows warming (averaged over all depths 0-2000m).
When you think this through it makes good sense.
The upper ocean is clearly cooling [refs. 6, 7, 8, 9]. Where is the heat going? The amount of heat in the ocean is – as often repeated here on WUWT – many hundreds of times more than in the atmosphere.
It is impossible for all this heat to be removed just at the surface by interaction with atmosphere and ocean. The atmosphere has a tiny fraction of the ocean’s heat capacity. Even emission to space – at rates within the satellite-measured range by IR etc. – over a single decade cannot account for this flux of heat.
The only other option for this real “missing heat” is – as Trenberth correctly concludes – the deep ocean. But the missing heat is associated with cooling, not warming.
Deep ocean water is colder than surface water. The only mechanism by which the upper ocean (down to several hundred meters, not just SST) can be cooled is water convection by upwelling – the upward movement of substantial volumes of deep cold water, such as occurs at the East Pacific in the La Nina cycle and most of the time except during an el Nino.
If deep water moves up in one place, it must be replaced by upper water downwelling somewhere else. Thus upwelling must be balanced (somewhere) by downwelling.
Thus:
(1) cooling upper ocean means upwelling (nothing else can shift that amount of heat that quickly)
(2) upwelling means downwelling
(3) upwelling + downwelling means increased mixing of the whole water column, which has the inevitable result of
(4) warming of deep cold ocean water – probably mostly around the middle of the water column, i.e. about 2000m down.
Cooling of the upper ocean results in cooling climate. If climate cools it is because of cooling upper ocean.
The upper ocean (as distinct from just SST) can only by effectively cooled by upwelling and deep mixing.
Thus, in an analogous way to which AGWers posit a cooling stratosphere to accompany troposphere warming, climate cooling due to cooling of the upper ocean must result in an increase in ocean temperature at mid water column depths e.g. 2000m.
Thus in conclusion, Von Schuckmann’s finding of apparent warming at depths down to 2000m, in combination with multiple observations of cooling in the upper 700m, is important confirmation of upper ocean cooling and consequent climate cooling.
Heat is “missing” only in the minds of modellers. Now, what those minds and models are missing is the operative question.
Unless geothermal sources on the ocean bottom are much greater than is commonly known, the abyssal waters are kept near 3C primarily by very inefficient conduction from layers intermediate between the well-mixed near-surface layer. THC does not generally reach that deep. While upwelling on continental shelves may bring cold bottom-water to the surface, this never happens in the deep ocean. By comparison to the upper layers, the deeper layers that are assumed to be the heat sink are very poorly measured. There simply is no sound basis for saying whether they have cooled or warmed. In either event, their impact upon surface climate is negligible. And their temperature, which transitions gradually between that of seasonal thermoclines and the abyss is invariably much higher than in the upper troposphere, let alone space. Entropy tells us in which direction the “missing” heat escaped., if it was there at all.
There’s a lot of speculation going on on this thread, and much of it is not supported by OHC data. The Knox and Douglass paper ended its data in 2008, and since that time, OHC has risen globally. The rise isn’t significant but it is a rise, and all of those attempting to explain why OHC is dropping should refer to the most up-to-date OHC based on ARGO data:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/10/update-and-changes-to-nodc-ocean-heat.html
The OHC data since 1955 reveals that the dominant drivers of OHC are natural and they are ENSO, Sea Level Pressure in the form of the AO and NPI, and AMOC. This was discussed in three posts (and if memory serves me well, they were cross posted here at WUWT). Refer to:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/09/enso-dominates-nodc-ocean-heat-content.html
And:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/12/north-pacific-ocean-heat-content-shift.html
And:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/10/north-atlantic-ocean-heat-content-0-700.html
sky says:
January 7, 2011 at 12:46 pm
Bob Tisdale says:
January 7, 2011 at 2:44 pm
There’s a lot of speculation going on on this thread, and much of it is not supported by OHC data. The Knox and Douglass paper ended its data in 2008, and since that time, OHC has risen globally. The rise isn’t significant but it is a rise, and all of those attempting to explain why OHC is dropping should refer to the most up-to-date OHC based on ARGO data:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/10/update-and-changes-to-nodc-ocean-heat.html
The OHC data since 1955 reveals that the dominant drivers of OHC are natural and they are ENSO, Sea Level Pressure in the form of the AO and NPI, and AMOC…
Bob, the recent (post-2008) OHC rise is presumably linked to the latest el Nino, now being reversed by the current La Nina. Looking at all your OHC charts, this uptick is indeed of little significance, not really affecting an overall downward current trend globally.
The point I raised previously is admittedly not backed up by hard facts and figures, but based on the (IMO reasonable) premise that, such is the magnitude of the heat content of the ocean – we are talking about hundreds of meter layers, not the millimeter or two that account for SST – that significant changes of heat content in the upper thousand or so meters of ocean cannot be ascribed to a few weeks of sun or cloudiness or wind. The overall heat balance at the surface is approximately known and does not allow for the huge changes in flux that wound be needed to change the temperature of the upper thousand meters at the rates at which such changes are observed (or would they??).
Of course weather at the ocean surface matters, every photon absorbed and every evaporated water molecule change OHC. And SST can react practically in real time to weather (sun and no wind = instant high SST). Its just a question of scale and the amount of energy. I am suggesting vertical mixing and upwelling / downwelling as likely important players in OHC changes. (What controls or “drives” or “forces” up/downwelling changes or cycles is another question entirely). Possibly the dominant players. Unless my very empirical maths is entirely wrong.
The Argos data – from my limited look at some of it – seem to be revealing more thermal structure in the water column than would have been expected. This suggests more vertical mixing than previously assumed. “Sky” above reiterated the standard oceanography position that in the deep ocean the water column is very poorly mixed or even – at the bottom – completely unmixed and stratified. At Abyssal depths this is likely true. The mixing I was speculating about involved approximately the middle of the water column, not the very bottom.
The water column is, in general and as a whole, strongly stratified; vertical mixing modifies this stratification in only a minor way. However in view of the sharp drop in temperature with depth that characterises this stratification, any vertical mixing represents downward movement of heat, and consequent cooling of the surface layer. Thus vertical mixing – integrated over whole oceans or globally – can by itself be a major climate player.
The AGW people are looking to deep ocean heat as a possible refuge for beleagured global warming missing heat. But this is just one paradigm – an alternative one is that “deep heat” is a signature of vertical mixing, which is a signature of surface layer cooling – a fore-runner of climate cooling.
I’m sure you’ll shoot me down in flames – but what the heck!
From this data I would conclude there is either no trend in ocean heat content or a very small negative trend. The only thing definitely ruled out is a warming trend.
Of course, this is more significant than anything going on in the atmosphere. Water holds much more heat than air (which is why we use hot water bottles, not hot air bottles) to help keep us warm.
This simply confirms what I’ve been telling anyone who will listen (no one): the world is cooling.
phlogiston (January 7, 2011 at 4:18 pm): Eventually, someone will put together 3D animations based on the ARGO data.
“Jack Simmons says:
January 7, 2011 at 8:38 pm
Water holds much more heat than air (which is why we use hot water bottles, not hot air bottles) to help keep us warm.”
Indeed:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=1487&linkbox=true&position=4
“The Hot Water Bottle Effect.”
“This paper only confirms that somehow the heat is transferred to the Deep Ocean by downwelling currents, like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC).”
The heat? Would that be as modeled so accurately by Trenberth and Fasullo? We should go and check out Gigo Inc for the latest figures.
Feel the heat. Monbiot wrote a book about it. Unfortunately he didn’t have anything scientific to say on ‘somehow’. Something to do with redistribution of heat being linked to redistribution of wealth maybe.
If the “missing heat” can’t be found from the surface down to a depth of 700 meters, I find it very difficult ( in fact, almost impossible ) to believe that such a large quantity of heat could be hiding in deeper water.
Jimbo says:
January 7, 2011 at 2:51 am
It seems that the exits are closing one by one. Just when the Warmists will admit defeat is anyone’s guess but our best friend is a cooling planet over time as AGW would find itself in a right pickle
________
Let’s see Jimbo…2010 was in the top 1 or 2 warmest years on instrument record, and the Arctic has not seen a positive sea ice anomaly since 2004. 2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record, Antarctic and Greenland ice mass continues to decline, and the oceans continue to rise through both additional water from melting ice as well as thermal expansion. Why, exactly, would “warmists” want to “admit defeat?”.
It seems this period of a quiet sun has given the AGW skeptics a bit too much puffery…
John W. Garrett says:
January 8, 2011 at 9:55 am
If the “missing heat” can’t be found from the surface down to a depth of 700 meters, I find it very difficult ( in fact, almost impossible ) to believe that such a large quantity of heat could be hiding in deeper water.
____
Perhaps you ought to do a bit more research on the topic, beginning here:
http://news.discovery.com/earth/antarctica-melting-warming-penguins-101214.html
R. Gates says:
January 8, 2011 at 11:21 am
Perhaps you ought to do a bit more research…
______________
QUOTE:
Accounting for the known contributions to energy uptake still leaves a likely residual of 30–100× 10^20 J/yr, although total error bars overlap. Possibly this heat is being sequestered in the deep ocean below the 900 m depth used for the ARGO analyses where it would contribute about 0.4–0.5 mm/yr sea level rise, and then the land ice melt estimate would have to go down. Or the warming is not really present?
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final2.pdf
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/is-there-missing-heat-in-the-climate-system-my-comments-on-this-ncar-press-release/
QUOTE:
Trenberth replied… that von Schuckmann’s energy imbalance of 0.77 W/m2 was for the ocean only and when you average it out over the whole globe, it gives a net energy imbalance of 0.54 W/m2. This is still insufficient to meet up with the satellite data and there are unresolved issues …
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Tracking-the-energy-from-global-warming.html
“2010 was in the top 1 or 2 warmest years on instrument record, and the Arctic has not seen a positive sea ice anomaly since 2004. 2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record, Antarctic and Greenland ice mass continues to decline, and the oceans continue to rise through both additional water from melting ice as well as thermal expansion.”
Let’s see Gater: Norway and Finland are having exceptionally cold weather because the AO is retrograde and Greenland/Labrador ice is being flushed into Arctic by the ‘warm’ NA waters. Sea of Othotsk is receiving sea ice flushed from Arctic locking 10 freighters in ice.
Warm tropopause temps coincide with elevated cloudiness and H2O, a significant greenhouse gas, and a source of negative feedback responsible in large part for the ‘missing heat’ as the albedo began its rise at the end of the last millenium.
GISS interpolation of Arctic warming is entirely fraudulent. Finally, the record is corrupt, having been incrementally adjusted upward for a decade.
Back-radiation cannot heat the oceans because the emissivity of water and snow is 500 times the preponderant low-pressure green house gasses.
It is your pompous self that requires remediation.
phlogiston says:
January 7, 2011 at 11:43 am
Your notion of strong downward mixing in the intermediate levels (say,1000-3000m)of the deep ocean has precious little observational basis. It seems to rest on a mistaken sense of the rate at which the recently-much-ballyhood THC operates. Compared to wind-mixing, the breaking of internal waves near the seasonal thermocline, and the intrusion at depth by ever-shifting current regimes, that rate of heat transport is very minor. We should be aware of order of magnitude differences!
Looking at global OHC is fine idea in principle, but in practice we need the temporal difference in very huge numbers that are, at best, very crudely estimated spatially and temporally prior to the advent of ARGO. Even ARGO, which has nary a station in the Caribbean, does not provide a definitive picture.
There’s nothing shameful in saying “we don’t really know.” But that’s not the meme in climate science, where pet theories seem to flourish in a scientific desert.
‘Trenberth replied… that von Schuckmann’s energy imbalance of 0.77 W/m2 was for the ocean only and when you average it out over the whole globe, it gives a net energy imbalance of 0.54 W/m2. This is still insufficient to meet up with the satellite data and there are unresolved issues …
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Tracking-the-energy-from-global-warming.html‘
John Cook at ScepSci used the Harries paper and offshoots to show a change in IR emissions over the satellite era – the so called missing heat. I think the Harries paper is quite clever in demonstrating the obvious – a change in IR emissions as a result of a build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But Cook is typically ingenuous in ignoring the change in total radiative fluxes.
Someone mentioned that the satellite data was not precise enough to define absolute radiation and this is true enough – but it is the change we are interested in – which is considerably more precise and can be used to quantify change in energy storage in the atmosphere and oceans.
Consider the 1st order differential equation of global energy storage (GES).
EIN/S = EOUT/S + d(GES)/dt (1)
By the law of conservation of energy – the average energy in at the top of atmosphere (TOA) in a period is equal to the average energy out plus the rate of change in global energy storage. Energy in (in the visible and infrared spectrum) varies marginally in the 11 year Schwabe solar cycle, perhaps a little more over the longer term due to solar variation and, due to orbital changes, over an Ice Age. On a decadal timescale – energy in is more or less constant.
Most change in the global energy balance occurs in energy out resulting in an equal and opposite change to global energy storage – planetary heating and cooling. Energy out is measured by satellite in the short wave and infrared spectrums. Changing cloud cover influences the global energy balance by reflecting more or less visible light back into space – and thereby reducing or increasing the amount of energy coming into Earth’s climate system. As stated above, greenhouse gases change radiative flux in the infrared band. In both cases, the change in radiative flux is reflected in a change in energy stored in the Earth’s climate system – mostly as heat in the oceans. If the trend in energy out in a period is negative then the rate of change of global energy storage is positive and the planet warms and vice versa.
There is a discussion by Roy Spencer here –
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/09/the-2007-2008-global-cooling-event-evidence-for-clouds-as-the-cause/ – showing the CERES data.
The big changes are in the shortwave – decreasing reflectance over the period of record to 2008 along with fluctuation but no trend in IR. The shortwave changes (and most of the IR changes) are a result of cloud cover changes in the period.
There are many complexities involving ENSO and cloud feedback and other factors – but the bottom line is that the planet should have warmed in the period and this is why the von Schuckmann paper better reflects what should be the empirical reality. The planet has warmed over the past decade but, as always, this has most to do with ENSO variability.
To quote Roy: ‘I was especially interested to see if this was caused by a natural increase in low clouds reducing the amount of sunlight absorbed by the climate system. As readers of my blog know, I believe that most climate change – including “global warming” – in the last 100 years or more has been caused by natural changes in low cloud cover, which in turn have been caused by natural, chaotic fluctuations in global circulation patterns in the atmosphere-ocean system. The leading candidate for this, in my opinion, is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation…possibly augmented by more frequent El Nino activity in the last 30 years.’
‘Tropical and subtropical low-level marine clouds consist of optically thick stratocumulus clouds, which usually form over the regions associated with relatively cold sea surface temperatures (SST) and atmospheric subsidence, and optically thin shallow cumuli in the tradewind regime. These low-level clouds play a pivotal role in the global climate system not only by affecting radiative budgets but also by promoting heat and moisture exchange between the sea-surface, the boundary layer, and the overlying troposphere.’ (Zhu, P., Hack, J., Keilh, J and Zhu, P, Bretherton, C. 2007, Climate sensitivity of tropical and subtropical marine low cloud amount to ENSO and global warming due to doubled CO2 – JGR, VOL. 112, 2007)
The big changes in SST, and therefore clouds in the climatological critical tropical and sub-tropical regions is of course ENSO and ENSO is of course a complex and dynamic system (chaotic – have a look at the 2007 and 2009 papers from Tsonis and colleagues). The ‘oscillation’ (more correctly a chaotic bifurcation) is non-stationary and non-Gaussian – producing climate change over decades to millennia.
Cheers
Robert
You know, the more I think about it, the more the idea of ‘smoothing’ out those seasonal wanderings bothers me.
Here we have clear evidence that the ocean can gain, or dump, a pot load of heat (ocean mass x specific heat x 1 C range – from the looks of the graph) in VERY short order. Any “retained” heat would be dumped in a couple of months, per the slope of those seasonal rise / fall segments.
What this tells me is that the system is not acting as a slow charging battery, it’s acting like a very fast capacitor. It only gains temperature (and thus heat as mass and specific heat are nearly constant for the ocean) when the input is in excess, and promptly dumps it when the input is in deficit.
Those cycles tell you that the whole notion of ‘retained excess heat’ is broken. All you have is a fast read of input variation. And from the looks of it, that variation is closely tracking the sun. Both seasonally as it has more ‘sun on the ocean’ and over the years as the sun has cooled down from the 1998 or so peak.
Basically, I think there is a whole lot of ‘over averaging’ in this ocean retained heat business and it’s hiding the actual mechanism of rapid heat gain / loss in sync with input variation.
All you buoys are belong to us. 😉
{R. Gates says:
January 7, 2011 at 7:45 am
Some additional points to ponder related to this “research” paper:
1. Do the authors describe what data they use, exactly? Argo data have undergone
several major revisions.
2. Data varies in time in amount and coverage, and some floats were “bad” and some had calibration problems (the surface pressure was recorded as negative, indicating depth problems).
3. Why don’t the authors use Lyman et al results?
4. Looking at the figure in the paper also reveals a clear problem: The values at the end are higher than any others yet they have a downward trend. Clearly any “trend” they get depends critically on how they get it and it highly dependent on the time period. By taking a 12 month running mean they discount the last 6 months.}
Mr Gates, you describe these questions, over at Dr. Curry’s blog, as coming from Dr. Trenbeth, from an e-mail exchange with the good Dr.
If you check the latest posts on Climate Etc. You will see that Drs. Douglass and Knox have now replied to your/Dr. Tenbreth’s questions.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/01/07/wheres-the-missing-heat/
sky says:
January 8, 2011 at 2:23 pm
phlogiston says:
January 7, 2011 at 11:43 am
Your notion of strong downward mixing in the intermediate levels (say,1000-3000m)of the deep ocean has precious little observational basis. It seems to rest on a mistaken sense of the rate at which the recently-much-ballyhood THC operates. Compared to wind-mixing, the breaking of internal waves near the seasonal thermocline, and the intrusion at depth by ever-shifting current regimes, that rate of heat transport is very minor. We should be aware of order of magnitude differences!
Looking at global OHC is fine idea in principle, but in practice we need the temporal difference in very huge numbers that are, at best, very crudely estimated spatially and temporally prior to the advent of ARGO. Even ARGO, which has nary a station in the Caribbean, does not provide a definitive picture.
There’s nothing shameful in saying “we don’t really know.” But that’s not the meme in climate science, where pet theories seem to flourish in a scientific desert.
“Strong” downward mixing is putting it too … well … strongly. I’m not proposing any detailed mechanism of ocean circulation and dynamics – that’s been done already, starting with the Pacific, by Bob Tisdale, focusing on the ENSO system.
What I’m saying amounts to armchair oceanography, thinking aloud about the role of vertical mixing in the context of a generalised global ocean heat budget. The starting point is the set of Argos studies reported on this posting by Knox and Douglass – 4 showing cooling in the upper 700m, 1 (Von Schuckmann or “VS”) showing warming down to 2000m, over the last half-decade. You and others have pointed to the uncertainty in these findings – 3256 floats is still too few for the world’s oceans, and the density of measurement decreases with depth. At the deepest layers, the smallest number of measurements is multiplied by the largest heat capacity to give the greatest errors. So the only very general conclusion I would draw is that (1) the surface 700m seems to be cooling and (2) if you look deeper the temperature trend moves in a positive direction – warming or less cooling.
I considered the question of what happens to the very large amount of energy moved by a change in temperature of a significant slice of the ocean in half a decade – if the upper 700m has cooled, where has the energy gone? Its a nonsense to suggest the atmosphere (1/500 of the ocean heat capacity), and radiation of all this energy to space would surely give a substantial outgoing IR signal that would have been noticed. The only other possibility is vertical ocean mixing pulling the heat down. I reflected on the fact that in a strongly stratified ocean, with temperature falling sharply with depth, ANY vertical mixing results in downward movement of heat.
The ocean mixing processes that you mention are interesting – “wind-mixing, the breaking of internal waves near the seasonal thermocline, and the intrusion at depth by ever-shifting current regimes. You assert that this mixing is too small in magnitude to have the significance that I am arguing / suggesting. However (admittedly anecdotal) indications from Argos data are that pockets of warmer water appear quite deep down and vertical mixing may be more significant than previously thought – perhaps some of the mechanisms you refer to might be more powerful than presently understood, or other mechanisms may exist.
In the Pacific ocean ENSO system, what I am saying (that vertical mixing explains a lot of the heat movement) is orthodox, not controversial – La Nina cools the (eastern) Pacific surface by substantial deep upwelling, and this leads to an episode of climate cooling. Conversely, el Nino systems interrupt this upwelling, which combined with decreased trade winds results in a large warm pool of surface Pacific water, and and episode of climate warming. (Back me up here Bob if you’re still following this thread – although I’m probably just talking to myself here.) My argument is simply to extend this generic process to to the global ocean, and suggest that the main driver in OHC of the upper level ocean might be vertical mixing – this umbrella term could include many mechanisms, anything moving deep water up and surface water down.
I very much agree with your point that we know little about the working of climate as a whole – what causes the whole fractal range of climate oscillation from hot and cold years to PDO oscillations, MWP-LIA swings and switching between glacial and interglacial, is largely unknown, only fragmentary clues and speculations are explored. In the coming years the extent of our ignorance of climate will move more clearly into focus. Eventually some underlying and unifying explanatory theories / mechanisms might be found. If I’m lucky I might be alive to see it.
phlogiston:
Armchair oceanography is not a science, but a realm of speculation–one that runs into deep conflict with observations. I don’t wish to spend time on that, other than pointing out the most egregious lapses. The whole idea that there is heat “missing” is model-based conjecture. I never suggested that this conjectural heat is being actually STORED in atmosphere, only that entropy favors that escape route to space, rather than storage in the deeper levels of the oceans. Nor am I saying that the “interesting” mechanisms of downward transport of heat from the sun-warmed layer are too weak. Measurements indicate that they simply do not penetrate to the deep levels that you’re speculating about. Downwelling as a necessary adjunct to upwelling–which is confined to continental shelves and margins–is untenable when one considers the wind-stress induced dynamic topography. As for the “detailed mechanisms of ocean circulation and dynamics,” I’m unaware of any ground-breaking proposals by Bob Tisdale that are based on rigorous dynamical analysis. If you’re seriously interested in the science, let me recommend Piccard’s “Introduction to Dynamic Oceanography” for starters.
Dave Wendt says:
January 6, 2011 at 7:03 pm
“The flow at the ocean’s bottom is generally poleward not away from the poles and introduces a not entirely insignificant amount of heat from geothermal sources, particularly into the AABW”
Nonsense. The conveyor belt generally carries warm surface water from the tropics poleward where it cools, sinks, and returns along the bottom.
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/conveyor.html
I found the missing heat. It’s spread out in an expanding sphere with a radius of about 30 light years.
All that cool water extending virtually Indonesia is experiencing some cloud cover. EUV retarded at source and visible retarded near surface are integrating at reduced levels. Look for neutral conditions following La Nina, whenever it comes.
sky says:
January 9, 2011 at 11:23 pm
The CORRECT reference is George L. Pickard: “Introductory Dynamical Oceanography.”
I know where the missing heat is going,
It goes into James Hansen’s, GISS, estimations of temps up to a 1000 kilomtres from weather stations around the world.
Great post on New paper on ARGO data: Trenberth’s ocean heat still missing | Watts Up With That? – and great domain by the way!
Trenberth is looking for 0.85 W/m2. The recent change in insolation meaurement is 1.6 W/m2. What is the +/- of atmosphereic and land/water/ice heating over the year, and what is the +/- of same year-to-year? A 1.5% change in albedo (at 0.296) is 1.5 W/m2. Do we know that albedo changes over the year are consistent in time and location to average out to << 1.5 W/m2?
The +/- of insolation values is unlikely to be far off from Trenberth's "missing" heat. I know of no albedo variation data (or time-distribution information either) that bring us into a position of "knowing" such a small amount of heating is present or absent.
Those who know differently should get me to move on about this. I'm getting fixated by what appears to be model discussions disguised as fact discussions. Right at the top of the warmist food chain.