Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
According to the current climate paradigm, if the forcing (total downwelling energy) increases, a combination of two things happens. Some of the additional incoming energy (forcing) goes into heating the surface, and some goes into heating the ocean. Lately there’s been much furor about what the Levitus ocean data says about how much energy has gone into heating the ocean, from the surface down to 2000 metres depth. I discussed some of these issues in The Layers of Meaning in Levitus.
I find this furor somewhat curious, in that the trends and variations in the heat content of the global 0-2000 metre layer of the ocean are so small. The size is disguised by the use of units of 10^22 joules of energy … not an easy one to wrap my head around. So what I’ve done is I’ve looked at the annual change in heat content of the upper ocean (0-2000m). Then I’ve calculated the global forcing (in watts per square metre, written here as “W/m2”) that would be necessary to move that much heat into or out of the ocean. Figure 1 gives the results, where heat going into the ocean is shown as a positive forcing, and heat coming out as a negative forcing.
Figure 1. Annual heat into/out of the ocean, in units of watts per square metre.
I found several things to be interesting about the energy that’s gone into or come out of the ocean on an annual basis.
The first one is how small the average value of the forcing actually is. On average, little energy is going into the ocean, only two-tenths of a watt per square metre. In a world where the 24/7 average downwelling energy is about half a kilowatt per square metre, that’s tiny, lost in the noise. Nor does it portend much heating “in the pipeline”, whatever that may mean.
The second is that neither the average forcing, nor the trend in that forcing, are significantly different from zero. It’s somewhat of a surprise.
The third is that in addition to the mean not being significantly different from zero, only a few of the individual years have a forcing that is distinguishable from zero.
Those were a surprise because with all of the hollering about Trenberth’s missing heat and the Levitus ocean data, I’d expected to find that we could tell something from the Levitus’s numbers.
But unfortunately, there’s still way too much uncertainty to even tell if either the mean or the trend of the energy going into the ocean are different from zero … kinda limits our options when it comes to drawing conclusions.
w.
DATA: Ocean temperature figures are from NOAA, my spreadsheet is here.
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Guess this means I won’t be able to use the sea to boil eggs. Bummer.
Ol’ Twitchy Jim must have upped his twitching by a tenth of a watt per eyelid, +/- 0.1….
Gawd, and I was hoping for a free natural sauna. Guess I’ll hafta wait until Earth reaches Venus’ orbit, or until the sun goes nova.
O/T but this is REALLY IMPORTANT NEWS. see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2343966/Germany-threatens-hit-Mercedes-BMW-production-Britain-France-Italy-carbon-emission-row.html
It would appear that Germany (Europe’s most powerful player) has woken up and has now realised the adverse effect of carbon emission restrictions.
I have often commented that Germany will not let its manufacturing struggle as a consequence of such restrictions and/or high energy prices (which germany is begining to realise is disastrouse for its small industries which are the life blood of German manufacturing).
First, germany is moving away from renewables and is building 23 coal powered stations for cheap and reliable energy.
Second, Germany wants to rein back against too restrictive carbon emissions.
The combination of this new approach is a ground changer in European terms.
In the recent Salby lecture posted in this blog he said at one point “if the energy budget is wrong then all bets are off”. Over at Talkshop there is a post that points out that TSI measurements by radiometers disagree by about 5 watts/m2 (and they don’t know why!!).
Yet so many people pretend that they can calculate the temperature of the seas in thousandths.
Then they pretend they knew what the temperature of the sea was 50, 100, 200 years ago.
This is all claptrap.
Willis concludes, “But unfortunately, there’s still way too much uncertainty to even tell if either the mean or the trend of the energy going into the ocean are different from zero … kinda limits our options when it comes to drawing conclusions.”
I hate when that happens.
Thanks for the post. I enjoyed it.
Regards
Hmmm, this rather puts the kibosh on this graph from the SkS zealots:
Cook writes: Build-up in total Earth Heat Content since 1950. The data comes from Figure 6b in Murphy 2009. The data was kindly emailed to me from Dan Murphy and I plotted just the Ocean/Land + Atmosphere components of the graph in order to show the heat building up in the climate system. The ocean data was taken from Domingues et al. 2008.
Excel Spreadsheet XLS: http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Total_Heat_Content.xls
Makes me wonder how Murphy finds such a large trend in OHC, but Levitus does not find any trend in forcing.
[REPLY: Thanks, Anthony. There is a large trend in OHC, as you show in your graph, but it is not statistically significant. This is because of the high autocorrelation of the data (lag-1 autocorrelation of 0.92). As usual, SkS forgot to mention that … w.]
If Joe Public realised just how little the scientists actually know about what’s happening to the world, they might start to wonder how come they’re so certain about what’s in store for us later.
Yes, this makes an important point, which is that the actual measurements which go into the calculation of the rising OHC have huge error bars, which are not reflected in the graph Anthony has plotted above meant for public consumption and hand-wringing. Bob Tisdale has, I believe, come to a similar conclusion.
richard verney
What they really mean, in placing limits of CO2 emissions, is making cars more economical, doing more kM/ltr or mpg. That is the only real way they can reduce vehicle emissions!
Reminds me of the comment Jeremy Clarkeson made on Top Gear a few years back whilst interviewing former soldier turned pop-singer James Blunt, he commented that the EU are demanding military vehicles have reduced emissions of CO2 & other stuff, so that they can still fire depleted uranium out the sharp end, but at least they can claim they’re being more friendly to Gaia from the rear end!!!!
Perhaps this reality is going to be the catalyst to bring down the ghastly edifice of AGW in Europe? Who knows?
Everyone knows my admiration for Bill Gray, so at the risk of bias, I live and die with his ideas. Let me share this with you:
http://typhoon.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Publications/gray2012.pdf
a great read
this easily (to most normal folk perhaps?) demonstrates to jai mitchell why the claim for bucket loads of heat stored in the ocean as per the other thread, is complute bunkum.
Thanks Willis. Using comprehensible units like watts instead of gazillions of mega-joules makes it obvious.
Joseph Bastardi says:June 19, 2013 at 4:54 am
Thanks Joe, interesting paper.
Just for perspective, how does this tiny ocean heat accumulation compare to what the science is based on – GHG forcing.
The SKs chart shown above, does not have the other side of the equation in it and, in fact, is only presenting a tiny part of the picture.
The GHG forcing is 2.86 W/m2 in 2012, while the accumulation in the ocean and land/atmosphere/ice-melt is only 0.52 W/m2 (I’ve got slightly different numbers than Willis).
http://s9.postimg.org/cwz2zl70v/OHC2000_M_GHG_Forcing_Q1_2013.png
Now, that is a completely different picture.
But it is not the whole picture. Over the time interval, there were volcanoes which reduced the net impact of the GHG forcing and there were aerosols reducing the net impact of the GHG forcing (and other changes like land-use etc.). The total forcing which supposed to be apparent in 2012 is 1.78 W/m2 (according to the numbers being used in the upcoming IPCC AR5 report).
http://s12.postimg.org/urxw7cq71/OHC_Accum_vs_Forcing_1955_2013_Q1.png
But again, that is not the whole picture either. As it gets warmer, more long-wave energy is supposed to escape to space, as it gets warmer, more feedbacks like water vapor and reduced cloud opacity are supposed to show up and ramp up the energy accumulation even further.
The total net forcing which is supposed to be showing up is 2.3 W/m2 including the feedbacks (feedbacks which are to occur at a 0.7C temperature increase). Increased long-wave emissions to space in the climate models are supposed to be in the 0.8 W/m2 range (according to Church and White 2011).
http://s10.postimg.org/vf4h3oizd/Net_Forcing_Feedbacks_Energy_Going.png
Putting everything into place, the net forcing which is supposed to be here is 2.3 W/m2, while the ocean heat accumulation, land/atmosphere/ice-melt warming and the increased LW emissions to space total up to just 1.3 W/m2. So, a full 1.0 W/m2 is completely missing from the climate system.
http://s12.postimg.org/6cycqfpcd/Net_Forcing_Heat_Accum_vs_Missing_Energy.png
Church and White 2011 provides some background to the above and the paper is where SKs got their idea from on “90% of the heat is going into the oceans” misdirection (I’m just updating and presenting the info in a different way than C&W11 – ignore the sea level parts of this paper).
http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/phys/2012-0229-200953/2011GL048794.pdf
Darn, I put the wrong chart in on the total missing energy (it’s hard to keep your head straight on this).
The total forcing “including feedbacks” is supposed to be 4.0 W/m2 and the energy accounted for in ocean heat, land/atmosphere/ice-melt and increased LW to space is only 1.3 W/m2 and thus the total missing energy is 2.7 W/m2.
http://s10.postimg.org/w4uagx7jt/Total_Forcings_Energy_Accounted_for.png
Quote: According to the current climate paradigm, if the forcing (total downwelling energy) increases, a combination of two things happens. Some of the additional incoming energy (forcing) goes into heating the surface, and some goes into heating the ocean….
Of course if the surfaces heat the fraction of energy which “downwells” i.e. “back radiation” then decreases as more is radiated by the surfaces (upwelling) than downwells. This is due to the unfortunate fact that most downwelling energy comes from thermal energy in the atmosphere originating from the thermal mechanisms: conduction, convection and latent heat of evaporation. This non GHG back-radiation is equal to (and opposite in direction) the net removal of thermal energy from the surfaces which is radiated into space via these thermal mechanisms.
As a heater reaches higher temperature radiative loss begins to dominate over thermal loss (just like infra-red heaters radiate far more than they conduct/convect whereas convector heaters like the domestic “radiator” are lower temperature devices and convect much more heat than they radiate).
Lower surface(s) temperatures = more fractional back radiation (from all sources).
It’s important to note that ‘downwelling energy’ to Earth’s surface from above does and can not ‘heat’ the surface unless it comes down as … heat. So, what radiative flux comes down to the surface from above as heat? The solar flux. What about the alleged atmospheric radiative flux? It is not a heat flux. If it even exists, it is THE LESSER PART of an exchange, the assumed IR exchange between surface and atmosphere, and the spontaneous ‘net’ energy flow that would come out as a result of this posited exchange is a radiative heat flux going UP. There is NO radiative heat coming down from the atmosphere to the surface of the Earth. The atmosphere is not a separate source of heat for its own heat source, the surface. The surface acts like a heat source to the atmosphere, not the other way around. Because the surface is warmer than the atmosphere. And that’s that.
People need to understand and remember these most elementary thermodynamic concepts …
Heat is energy in transit from a hot to a cold system. Energy is not in itself heat.
Note I exclude solar originating radiation from my definition of downwelling..
Speaking of oceans, I was recently having a cordial debate with a co-worker regarding an earlier discussion of Mayor Bloomberg’s plans for dealing with “rising sea levels”. I used the NOAA trend tool to highlight the 1’/century rise and he said I supported Bloombergs assertions. Well, that got me to looking around and I noticed the trend for Guam found here: http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=1630000
Someone please help me understand the 2.77’/century from this trend. Obviously, I’m not as smart as a government employee.
I also take note that the higher trends seem to be found on sedimentary soil/substrates bays, inlets, and coastlines while in rocky bays and coastlines the trend is generally no more or less than +/- 0.5 feet/century.
I doubt that most visitors to Anthony’s site would believe that the models are even close to the truth on what is actually driving Global temperature and its trends (if any).
This just goes to confirm that opinion.
Thanks Willis,
Some of my own ponderings: 1) If it cannot be shown that CO2 is heating the ocean then CAGW is done as a theory. 2) LWIR is only capable of penetrating water at a depth of millimeters and the amount of heat transfer rate change from an increase in CO2s LWIR is dwarfed by the amount of LWIR from clouds. 3) SWR can penetrate the ocean to a depth of 30 meters (if my memory serves) and changes in cloudiness and/or solar activity would have a much greater impact to OHC than LWIR from all sources. Is this correct?
Water is the most energy consuming thing per degree C rise of anything, ie,. it needs more energy to raise its temperature by 1C than anything in the known universe. So to raise the temperature of the oceans by 1C needs lots of heat which comes from a, now, quiet star. Cooler oceans means cooler continents.
There is no ‘back radiation’. If there was you’d be able to feel it on the back of your hand.
As for the ocean heat transport, it’s the difference between absorbed SW and that lost by evaporation plus direct radiation.
Anthony Watts: Thanks for the link to the SkepticalScience spreadsheet. I’m sure it’ll come in handy one of these days.
Regards
Perhaps that’s why Trenberth says the heat is in the deep ocean below 2000m. Nobody can look down there.
0.2W/m2 is indeed trivial. How then , can they point at this as if it is material to anything?
But the oceans had nothing to say …
Thanks Willis. Excellent article!
The “pipeline” is empty because it does not exist. Weather drives climate, ENSO reigns.