The Sceptical Science kidz and Trenberth think that the deep ocean has absorbed all the heat that isn’t showing up in the atmosphere, and that’s [why] we have “the pause”. Well, that’s busted now according to ARGO data and JPL and it has NOT gone into the deep ocean.
NOTE: Graph by Bob Tisdale – not part of the NASA press release
From NASA Jet propulsion Laboratory:
The cold waters of Earth’s deep ocean have not warmed measurably since 2005, according to a new NASA study, leaving unsolved the mystery of why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years.
Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, analyzed satellite and direct ocean temperature data from 2005 to 2013 and found the ocean abyss below 1.24 miles (1,995 meters) has not warmed measurably. Study coauthor Josh Willis of JPL said these findings do not throw suspicion on climate change itself.
“The sea level is still rising,” Willis noted. “We’re just trying to understand the nitty-gritty details.”
In the 21st century, greenhouse gases have continued to accumulate in the atmosphere, just as they did in the 20th century, but global average surface air temperatures have stopped rising in tandem with the gases. The temperature of the top half of the world’s ocean — above the 1.24-mile mark — is still climbing, but not fast enough to account for the stalled air temperatures.
Many processes on land, air and sea have been invoked to explain what is happening to the “missing” heat. One of the most prominent ideas is that the bottom half of the ocean is taking up the slack, but supporting evidence is slim. This latest study is the first to test the idea using satellite observations, as well as direct temperature measurements of the upper ocean. Scientists have been taking the temperature of the top half of the ocean directly since 2005, using a network of 3,000 floating temperature probes called the Argo array.
“The deep parts of the ocean are harder to measure,” said JPL’s William Llovel, lead author of the study, published Sunday, Oct. 5 in the journal Nature Climate Change. “The combination of satellite and direct temperature data gives us a glimpse of how much sea level rise is due to deep warming. The answer is — not much.”
The study took advantage of the fact that water expands as it gets warmer. The sea level is rising because of this expansion and water added by glacier and ice sheet melt.
To arrive at their conclusion, the JPL scientists did a straightforward subtraction calculation, using data for 2005 to 2013 from the Argo buoys, NASA’s Jason-1 and Jason-2 satellites, and the agency’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. From the total amount of sea level rise, they subtracted the amount of rise from the expansion in the upper ocean, and the amount of rise that came from added meltwater. The remainder represented the amount of sea level rise caused by warming in the deep ocean.
The remainder was essentially zero. Deep ocean warming contributed virtually nothing to sea level rise during this period.
Coauthor Felix Landerer of JPL noted that during the same period, warming in the top half of the ocean continued unabated, an unequivocal sign that our planet is heating up. Some recent studies reporting deep-ocean warming were, in fact, referring to the warming in the upper half of the ocean but below the topmost layer, which ends about 0.4 mile (700 meters) down.
Landerer also is a coauthor of another paper in the same Nature Climate Change journal issue on ocean warming in the Southern Hemisphere from 1970 to 2005. Before Argo floats were deployed, temperature measurements in the Southern Ocean were spotty, at best. Using satellite measurements and climate simulations of sea level changes around the world, the new study found the global ocean absorbed far more heat in those 35 years than previously thought — a whopping 24 to 58 percent more than early estimates.
Both papers result from the work of the newly formed NASA Sea Level Change Team, an interdisciplinary group tasked with using NASA satellite data to improve the accuracy and scale of current and future estimates of sea level change. The Southern Hemisphere paper was led by three scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.
NASA monitors Earth’s vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth’s interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.
Source: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4321
Okay.
It’s not in the atmosphere.
It’s not in the deep oceans.
what does that leave?
Cowtan and Way find some at the poles. All? Not by a long shot.
….
Can we go home now?
Unless by all we mean 1.2C per century, I think, in which case we can all go home now, right?!?
The missing heat never entered the system?
:>
Here is Judith Curry and Willis Eschenbach on the missing heat. It never went missing!!!
The trivial effect of four rather than three CO2 molecules per 10,000 dry air molecules is swamped out by negative feedbacks.
David A October 6, 2014 at 9:39 pm: “[Durack]…“The estimates that we had up until now have been pretty systematically underestimating the likely changes.”
=================================
…estimates underestimating likely changes… How far has science fallen? A more accurate quote would have been …”The observations we had up till now have been well under the models predictions.””
When your reality is cartoons, you can have Wile E. Coyote spin his legs over the abyss for several seconds – more if you want… and have anvils fall on his head and not kill him. “Whatever you want, we can do it, Mr Warner! – er, Mr Gore! You want missing heat adjusted? NO PROBLEM!”
Space?
It is even worse than we think: We’re heating Mars with the reflected sunlight from Earth.
Save Mars!! (Mars average surface temp: −55 °C.) Our irresponsible increase of Earth albedo could threaten Mars with +0.01 °C over the next millennia. Deposition of solid CO2 from the air at the poles may cease, dry ice on Mars could become a thing of the past in 10 million years.
@sturgishooper October 6, 2014 at 12:46 pm
The trivial effect of four rather than three CO2 molecules per 10,000 dry air molecules is swamped out by negative feedbacks.
++++++++++
First I am of the opinion that the CO2 is fairly saturated as to what it can do if CO2 acted as it does in the lab. That is, the logarithmic effect. However the 1 part in 10,000 dry air molecules is not trivial in the sense of the first 1 or 2 parts per 10,000. They have a significant effect according to most skeptics. That’s where it had the largest effect (according to lab results). In our atmosphere, all bets are off as to the effect of 3 to 4 parts per 10,000. That’s my take. Am I missing something?
Its hiding in the earths crust
Bob Boder — I’ve often wondered about your point. Does the science concerned with measuring global warming have the means to accurately estimate the heat transfer between Earth’s crust and the atmosphere and the ocean? Does science have the means to estimate the heat transfer between the mantle and the crust? I’m not a scientist, but it seems to me that these would have to be major factors in estimating global warming.
…except that there’s a positive heat flow from the solid earth outward. I was going to facetiously suggest that the missing heat went deeper than the deep ocean and is sitting in the oceanic crust, but only because you beat me to it have I even mentioned it.
>> have the means to accurately estimate
Gerald, absolutely not.
>> it seems to me that these would have to be major factors in estimating global warming
Absolutely, they are major factors in modelling the system, apparently missing from typical AGW oriented models.
>> …except that there’s a positive heat flow from the solid earth outward.
RockyRoad, there is a small, but steady heat transfer between land and the atmosphere, because on average, the land is slightly warmer than the air.
However, the sun is much warmer than the land, so it does transfer a large amount of energy to the land. Land thermal conductivity is good, but water is better, which leads to onshore and offshore breezes as the sun rises and sets.
Bottom line: no energy is “hiding” anywhere. If for some reason, the atmosphere was heated, energy would be transferred to the land/sea. If more energy was coming from the sun, the vast majority of it would be in the land/sea. What you seem to imply as extremely unlikely is in fact, the way thermodynamics works.
They need to re-calculate!!! By using the Jason data, the sea-level rise is exaggerated by a factor of at least 2. So there is actually less expansion, and the heat retention remainder is incorrect!!!
Major fail!!!
To be honest, Cowtan and Way didn’t “find” heat. The did a re-analysis of satellite data using a Kreiging model to assume the Arctic had more heat content than we could measure.
There never was any missing heat. Trenberth’s energy budget is simply wrong. Fantasy physics.
Deep space is warming.
Yes! It’s not in the atmosphere, nor in the deep oceans… it’s hiding in DEEP SPACE. And it will come back to get us once we’ve saturated all of deep space with our heat pollution.
We need a new organisation. IPSCC Intergovernmental Panel for Space Climate Change. After all man kind is destroying space for our children! They won’t know what cold space is like! Oh the humanity!
It’s obvious. It’s in between the sofa cushions.
RoHa, you’re a genius. I had my doubts about your theory but I checked between the sofa cushions and there it was. I also found two quarters, a broken pencil, a small pocket comb with three broken teeth and some lint. It is unknown at this time if the comb, which was branded “Sunbeam” contributed to the heat retention.
It would be nice if Cowtan and Way took a look at Africa. However, if they applied similar techniques there, they might lose some.
I can hear Trenberth now: “It’s a travesty! Travesty, I tells yer!”
“Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in-for-me!” (Kenneth Williams in “Carry on Cleo”)
This on top of the August, 2014 study by Carl Wunsch and Patrick Heimbach that found the deepest part of ocean was likely cooling.
http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/papersonline/wunsch&heimbach_jpo2014_bidecadalheat.pdf
These two are the only studies which took a comprehensive look at the deep ocean heat content/temperature change below 2000 metres.
Figure 20 (top) of this paper is particularly striking.
“One of the most prominent ideas is that the bottom half of the ocean is taking up the slack, but supporting evidence is slim. ”
Translation:
“We have absolutely no real world data that supports our claims, but we are fighting tooth and nail to keep our jobs and salvage our reputations in face of the unfair and dirty tricks that Mother Nature has stooped to in refusing to co-operate with our computer models. We stand by our computer output and our lawyers are seeking to serve cease and desist orders on Ms. Nature as soon as her residence has been located “.
Better translation: We don’t know. Maybe we can’t know. But the precautionary principle compels us to destroy civilization as quickly as possible before something bad happens to all of humanity.
Khomeini times ayatollah? All the unicorns took it to the bottom of the ocean to save us. Hello … do you see any unicorns around?
Nah,
Unies can’t breathe under water…twas the mermaids wot done it
Of course not. They’re all at the bottom of the abyss, storing excess heat.
RSS August 1998 vs RSS August 2014. Hum, it looks MUCH cooler over the oceans now compared to 1998.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/us-government-agencies-just-cant-stop-lying/
BTW, look at the center of Africa in the 2014 RSS image. Yet GISS shows no data for the entire region, and then later in-fills the area in red.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/us-government-agencies-just-cant-stop-lying/
David, obviously the missing heat must be somewhere so if there’s a region we’re not monitoring then that must be where the heat is. It’s the only logical explanation. The models are skillful, the science is settled, the world is dangerously overheating, it’s our fault, and the only way to stop it is to ditch democracy and hand over all sovereignty to the UN.
(For those that need it: /sarc)
There is one parameter we might have forgot : The Ice on the Poles now are warmer than before. Ie the Global Warming is hiding in the ice
Naaah. It deep penetrated the crust and is now hiding in the Earth’s core at millions of degrees C (as per Al Gore).
I’ve always thought the missing heat might have gone into dark matter.
Would that make AlGore a hot head?
Which is missing as well.
Perhaps they ran off togather?
Well, we have “dark matter” and “dark energy”. Why not “dark heat”?
LOL. Must remember that one. Will use it to my letters to the various editors of MSM.
What sea level rise? See NOAA mean sea level data for the west coast and the Gulf coast.
Show zero trend.
The trend isn’t zero, bout close to it. San Francisco has the longest tide gauge record in the Western Hemisphere. In 158 years sea level at San Francisco rose only 107 millimeters (4.2 inches) or 2.7 inches per century, a tiny rate of increase. At that rate it takes over 22 centuries, not 86 years, to reach “expert” predictions of an increase of 5 feet by 2100. Only 129 years ago, the 1884 San Francisco sea level was only 1.8” lower than 2013.
Sea level fell since 1997 in San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Seattle, plus Victoria and Vancouver in Canada, when all the “experts” agree it must rise at an accelerating rate to increase 5 feet by 2100.
All six cities had higher sea levels in both 1983 and 1997 than in 2013.
The last 15-20 years show zero trend for all west coast gauges and Gulf coast gauges except for one or two that record local uplift or subsidence.
Sea level has been rising at about the same rate since the depths of the Little Ice Age, c. 1700, with minor fluctuations. Nothing to see here.
Speaking of sea level changes, I wish that alarmists in Oz would decide whether human global activities cause drought or floods there:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/23/australian-floods-global-sea-level
The article blames the slow down in sea level rise on the rains on Antipodean plains.
I keep hearing from people that sea levels are rising. I say the sun comes up every morning. Sea level has been rising since the last de-glaciation. I have evidence showing DEceleration in recent years. Why they keep bringing up this red herring?
Oh dear. That’s awkward.
There must be a vast conspiracy of denialists holding the heat hostage in their secret bunkers.
I guess a good question is did they use the Tide Gauge sea level data (of about 1.6 mm/year) or the adjusted satellite sea level rise (of about double at 3.2 mm/year) to estimate the thermostatic sea level rise.
The trick is to plot satellite data on an inclined base. For the rate of incline they selected some tidal gauges from locales undergoing subsidence and thus they can claim an observational basis for their fabrication. This trick was devised I believe by the U of Colorado and is copied now by NOAA among others. There is in fact no rise in sea level, in a general sense, worldwide.
Why do I remember Gilligan moving the the professor’s sea level stake in order to trap ? Lobsters. And the professor thinking the island was sinking…
trap “bigger” lobsters. I always thought they were cold water creatures (well at least not tropical).
Bill Illis,
After watching this short Video I have come to the conclusion that measuring Global sea level to the Millimetre is impossible.Even at the end they say to the nearest Metre.
Just because the oceans seem to be behaving as if there is no Secret Heat Layer doesn’t mean it’s not there. Maybe it moves. Maybe there are really really deep heat pockets. So there. #science
Besides as we officially dump the 2 deg C target for max AGW as part of the new trend toward a concept of Climate Change unconstrained by silly metrics like temperature, the notion of an undetectable secret heat stash will fit nicely in the new broader contextual view. Heck, there is already a growing consensus that the Secret Heat Layer not only exists but it is even more dangerous than the intense rapid warming already believed to be happening up here on the surface.
We seek it here, we seek it there, we seek that warming ANYWHERE.
It’s trapped in the models.
The way things are going, children just won’t know what heat is.
It’s hiding in their porridge
You missed the rest Trenberth I am I am ;>)
“Is it at the ples, or in the deepest sea, that damned elusive, OHC.”
Ack1 “Is it at the poles,…”
I havn’t done the calcs myself but isn’t the heat capacity of the oceans so massive that even if extra greenhouse heat was somehow being absorbed by the oceans, wouldn’t it be so small as to be unmeasurable anyway?
Anyone have any references for this calculation?
Climate4you calculates it in J/m2, that makes it easier to find out how many W/m2 it is over some time.
Dave in Canmore, very good scientific understanding.
Ocean T = ( 1.6×10^27 (Energy-ocean@273) + 1.03×10^22(Energy-atmos@2c ) / 1.4×10 ^21 kg / 4185 (Cp) = 273.000175
In words: If for some reason, the atmosphere was heated so that it was 2 degC hotter than normal, this energy would transfer to the land & sea. If for some reason, it was only absorbed by the ocean, it would show up as a steady state increase of .000175 degC.
Then how can working scientists calmly announce that ocean heat content data explains or could explain missing heat? I can hardly believe that such basic and non-controversial science literacy is missing in scientists and media.
1) it’s been shown that all of the so called “science” behind agw has been created by a very small group of people.
2) Almost all intellectually honest scientists work in other fields, so they don’t feel qualified to but in.
3) Others are being psychologically manipulated.
4) massive amounts of government money began pouring into US universities in the 70s. Bribery and extortion work pretty well. This is why many skeptics are foreign.
BTW, concerning the RSS images. In general they do geographically match fairly well with the surface GISS readings, so a major difference in the center of Africa, where RSS shows cool, and GISS in-fills warm from surrounding warm regions, is likely part of the record divergence between GISS and RSS. I question he infilling process.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/out-of-africa/
Abyssal expansion = sea level change – glacial melt – upper 2000 meter ocean expansion.
The error bars in almost every one of these measurements is large especially in the glacial melt measurement. I don’t having much confidence in this measurement.
I was thinking the same thing, AFAIK that glacial melt figure is model based isn’t it?
All of the measurements involved require ‘model’ like adjustments. Sea level, even when measured with tidal gauges, is based on a geo model of gravity, a model of land movements up and down and requires filtering for tides. The satellite based methods require many more ‘models’.
The upper 2000 meter expansion is based on the well known expansion factor for water based on the temperature of that water. But the data requires in-fillling for areas that lack ARGO data (under ice, shallow seas), also a ‘model’ for sensor ‘issues’ on the floats themselves.
But the glacial melt has the most model based error bars. We can easily measure the sea and land extent of glaciers from satellite but the thickness is much more difficult. The Antarctic glaciers for example are ~2km thick and we are talking about a change of a few mm per year. The measurements are highly ‘model’ based even when based on gravimetric satellites, but much more so when based on glacier movement.
My fear here is all of the data is so politicized that little truth can be found. If all the components of this calculation have been adjusted to tell a necessary ‘truth’ then we really can’t say what’s happening in the abyssal deep.
So Dana is busted.
This too is interesting.
”mystery of why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years”
It’s no mystery. The TCR to 2XCO2 is probably around 1°C and the ECS is most likely between -1 and 1 °C (+/-). That’s the significance of the pause, even if you buy into the “forcing” model of thought the climate is not warming @ 0.3 °C per decade but more like 0.3 °C per 3 decades.
The mystery is how long will it take before they admit they overestimated the anthropogenic component of global warming?
…they’ll find the missing heat first.
“The mystery is how long will it take before they admit they overestimated the anthropogenic component of global warming?”
That would depend on when governments stop funding ‘Global Climate Warming Change’ studies with our taxes. Though they’ll never admit they were wrong, they’ll just fade away, until a century from now people are asking ‘whatever happened to Global Climate Warming Change, anyway?’
Oh my, how I love watching the ‘Ocean ate the Heat’ excuse go down in flames.
Wouldn’t that heat the ocean and thus save the day for AGW?
I see a hockey stick in popcorn prices.
Mods: minor typo in sub-heading: …and that’s way we have “the pause” ……
…..and that’s why we have “the pause” …..
So, where is the direct human-induced forcing of +2.3 W/m2/year in 2013 showing up.
And where are the feedbacks (water vapour, less cloud) of another +1.8 W/m2/year showing up.
All we can find is 0.535 W/m2/year, in total.
“All we can find is 0.535 W/m2/year, in total.”
As a watt is defined in terms of joules per second, your unit of measurement does not exist.
1.16 * 10^22 joules of energy absorption across the whole ocean surface over 1.0 full year = 1.0 W/m2 of energy absorption continuously over one year = 0.004C/year of increase temperature in the full 0-2000 metres of ocean.
This is why this finding of no ocean warming below 2000 metres is important. There is really no other place that the missing energy can be found and the theories estimates are just way way off.
In the case of this chart, “Missing and/or Increased Emissions to Space” might also include incorrect theories about how strong the human-induced forcings are or incorrect assumptions about how strong the feedbacks are. For those interested in how much the increased emissions to space might be – Church and White 2011 stated that increased OLR should be about 0.8 W/m2, Trenberth’s CCM3 had it at about 1.4 W/m2 and CERES has it at 0.85 W/m2. That does not close the “Missing Energy” budget by very much.
http://s13.postimg.org/turztazs7/Missing_Energy_Increase_OLR.png
Someone explain to me why now? Did the heat suddenly decide to stop warming the atmosphere and seek refuge in the briny deep?
Why is there so much discussion about what should be plain facts?
And by the way, an unanswered question via Dr. Bill Cosby: Why Is There Air?
Somehow the ocean started soaking up heat, and this happened around 2005. I have filed for a joint grant from NOAA, CSIRO and the Grantham Institute to investigate this phenomenon using my climate simulation calculator. As soon as I get the grant I’ll notify my best research assistant and we will depart to investigate ocean pH and sea currents in the Bahamas.
What does she look like?
Greg, with a grant like that, I’m sure an appropriate female applicant can be found.
Why Is There Air? So watermelons can tax what you breath.
Where oh where is the “missing” heat?
it’s not in the ocean …
it’s not in the air …
the heat’s got to be hiding somewhere …
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_IM9Blz0yVvc/TGX9rIefuwI/AAAAAAAAAsM/yXHECiWxjyY/s1600/Hide+and+Seek.jpg
Its on its way to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and beyond, after having been reflected off the Earth at wavelengths that CO2 cannot intercept. Didn’t care to stick around here to the AGW crowd’s detriment!!!
Check out cloud coverage over the equatorial Pacific from our extended La Nina!!! And how about the record 20 million sq/km 70% reflecting floating ice around Antarctica replacing 80% absorbing ocean.
Check Sam I am.
Here is a reaction from a member of the public on the missing heat.
http://maxcdn.fooyoh.com/files/attach/images/3004/141/953/004/Monkey_facepalm.jpg
If the deep ocean is cooling then the heat has to go somewhere. It certainly didn’t go into the ground so it has to go up. I doubt if the other study showing the upper layer has warmed accounts for that “little” issue.
It was converted to living biomass – or a hypothesis that won’t die. Or just maybe it was wasted by propelling global warming lies around the world.
…maybe ocean acidification is an endothermic reaction.
I believe his claim was that heat went to ‘the DEEP ocean (2000 m +), not that heat ‘went to the oceans’. Even so, he appears to be wrong either way.
Was it detected on the way down?
Nope.
Maybe they’ve discovered “stealth heat”. Of course, considering the characteristics, it might be just as easy to not discover it.
“leaving unsolved the mystery of why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years.”
Here’s a crazy thought: We were WRONG about how strong a GHG CO2 actually is and there simply is no extra heat?
It is truly amazing…the last sentence of the article, with the notion they share all of this information worldwide so we can “protect” mother earth. What is truly amazing is the hubris of our species to believe we can control or protect natural phenomena.
“[…] What is truly amazing is the hubris of our species to believe we can control or protect natural phenomena.”
Not only that, but our Overlord Wannabees have these Amazing 7 Simple Tricks to Control The Earth’s Climate.
1. Raise taxes
2. Raise taxes
3. Prohibit everyone else from driving
4. Raise taxes
5. Raise taxes
6. Prohibit everyone else from flying
7. Raise taxes
The Immaculate Convection always was a monumentally transparent flail. These folks are guided by faith – faith that extra CO2 in the atmosphere MUST be causing more heat to be trapped. Therefore, any reason you can come up with to explain why Nature seems not to be cooperating, no matter how far out, is immediately considered plausible.
After all, once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. And, since it is impossible that extra CO2 cannot be causing extra heat retention, whatever remains must be the truth. Or, so they believe, to the point of religious fanaticism.
“The Immaculate Convection” – OK. You win.. I fell out of my chair laughing!
That was awesome!
Actually Immaculate Convection occurs during photosynthesis (an unknown scientific fact). All the missing heat is absorbed during this process and that is why the biosphere is greening. If you calculate how much the world has greened and then convert it to a heat value, you will see that it will equal exactly all the missing heat.
Bart,
Brilliant!
“Immaculate Convection” both funny and true. It is one of the primary games used to model radiative gases causing near surface warming.
Radiative gases absorb energy at low altitude, decreasing the time to air mass “breakaway” (Raleigh number exceeded) from the surface boundary layer after dawn. (Willis would call this emergent phenomena.)
Radiative gases emit energy to space at higher altitude, allowing radiative subsidence of air masses. As radiative gases are the only effective energy loss mechanism at altitude, they play a critical role in the speed to tropospheric convective circulation.
What did the climastrologists do? The modelled the speed of vertical circulation as constant for increasing radiative gas concentration. Immaculate convection!
Worse some even tried to model the speed of vertical circulation slowing for increased near surface warming after dawn and increased cooling at altitude. Raleigh and Bernard would be “rolling” in their graves…
Well, I was thinking more of the process by which heat got to the lower oceans without, er, ah, penetrating the upper layers first. But, if it can be applied elsewhere, be my guest.
Ah, that would be the other “immaculate convection”, the one that defies the laws of thermodynamics and whisks “missing heat” undetected past thousands of ARGO buoys and off into the dark and mysterious Trenberthian abyss…
The missing heat is in the mind of the (policy activist) beholder.
Isn’t the ‘missing heat’ perhaps Nature’s way of giving a hint that there may be something wrong with the assumptions underlying the ‘radiative forcing’ calculations which lead to the belief that there is missing heat to be accounted for?
Good thing the planet doesn’t have a molten core 1800°F ±300°F where fractions of a degree F could be totally obliterated in the temperature measurement record and error bar. I’d be more willing to give research money to any investigator who admits “I have, we have, no clue. We need to look at everything with no preconceptions.” as opposed to the current phlogiston peddlers.
Phlogiston was a very viable theory. It correctly postulated changes in chemical reactions, the only problem was that “phlogiston” was “negative energy”. Rather sad, because a great scientist missed out on being the discoverer of “energy”.
Time to revisit the “Small Comet” theory as a contributor (minor or major) for ocean sea-level rise? Perhaps there is even a solar component to the “Small Comet” flux? http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/preslectures/frank99/
Quote;Jimbo October 6, 2014 at 12:12 pm
Here is Judith Curry and Willis Eschenbach on the missing heat. It never went missing!!!
Changing cloud cover would explain much.
Several years ago, elsewhere, I discussed that from the early 1980’s, through the 1990’s, that I thought that mid-level clouds, – in particular, alto-stratus and alto-cumulus, were much less common than earlier.
This was of course, subjective, because my observations were local and not made routinely. But, these clouds have now become common again – imo.
And fog too.
Comments anyone?
There’s a funny thing about water. It shrinks, like most other materials, until it reaches 39F or thereabouts. Then something strange happens. Water begins to expand as it gets colder than 39F. It’s one big reason why ice floats, and why this planet isn’t a giant ice cube with only a few inches of liquid at the surface.
Soo– given this, I’m not sure just how much you can take the expansion of water as proof that it’s getting warmer, when the fact is that water near freezing expands as well. Hmmmm… might have to re-think that one.
Funny thing about SALT Water as in the oceans. It continues to shrink until it freezes out the salt then pops to the surface to form nice crystals of largely salt-free water. It is almost linear all the way down to the salinity based freezing point.
Fresh water behaves as you have described.
There is a very good chart of this density/temperature relationship at http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/seaice/index.html
mjmsprt40
This is a good point and if you are right, they should give you a Nobel Prize. Well, some have mentioned it before but you can still get it on account of being noticed.
If the 4 degree water cooled to 3.9 it would indeed do exactly the same thing as 4 degree water rising to 4.1 which is to expand. In the haste to assume the deep ocean is warming, this point may have been overlooked. Colder is also bigger if it was 4 degrees C to start with (which a lot of it is).
The chart in the head post takes on a much different complexion if it has an overlay of the methods of recording the temperature converted to heat.
1990 to 2003 was the ALACE program which averaged less than 500 depth ranging floats to 1000 m.
then the data switches to ARGO, 0-1500 floats 2003-2005, 1500-3000 floats 2005-2007, and 3000-4000 floats from 2007 on. See a sample overlay chart here.
Where is the change in slope on the head chart? 2003. Right at the change in instrumentation from ALACE to ARGO! Under the circumstances, the ALACE temperature record must be looked at with a good deal of skepticism.
Virtually any chart that records ocean heat content prior 1990 for 0-1000 meters or 2003 for depths 1000-2000 meters should be looked at askance. The data is poorly sampled spatially, biased to submarine patrol areas in the North Atlantic and North Pacific. (Who do you think paid the bills?). See these charts of sample coverage in a Mar 25, 2011 post by Bob Tisdale.
There is unbelievable accuracy claims in pre 1970 data. It takes about 10 ZJ to move the 0-700 m column 0.01 deg C. 27.5 ZJ to move the 0-2000 m column 0.01 deg C. (1 ZJ=10^21 J) Who can believe, with so much ocean unsampled in 1970, we know the temperature to 0.10 deg C much less 0.05 deg C?
Stephen, I’m with you on skepticism. However, to play devil’s advocate, why is temperature measurement accuracy so unbelievable? Man has been measuring temperature since the 1700s. It’s not something that one would expect to have improved much since 1970. In this case, accuracy is helped by knowing that the subject matter has a very small range.
We can do it electronically now. In the past it was thermometers using liquids in a precise tube. We know the thermodynamic expansion of the liquid – and so the measurements remain stable for a long long time. Electronic sensors degrade and require constant recalibration. The best we have today are platinum resistance temperature sensors called platinum RTDs (Resistive Temperature Detectors). The precision is what gets you repeat ability. Calibration gets you accuracy. The lack of quality of the station sites reduces the quality of what you are actually reading.
Mario,
I think you mean “electrically” and not “electronically”. The principle of RTDs was discovered in 1871, and they were being constructed by 1900. As an EE starting from the early 1980s, I learned about RTDs not as something new, but as something long since known. What’s new since 1970 is the transistor and the integrated circuit, neither of which help us –measure– temperature, but they are useful for helping us report and analyze data. Computers are also useful for doing calculations from IR measurements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_temperature_and_pressure_measurement_technology
VikingExplorer October 13, 2014 at 7:03 am
+++++++
Hi VikingExplorer: I actually meant electronically. Yes you are quite correct – the use of platinum is not new in temperature measurement. However it was rarely used because it was dearly expensive until relatively recent days. RTDs are made with the semiconductor deposition process now. Think silicon wafers that make 100’s of them on a disk which then get diced up and connected to terminals, 2, 3 and 4 wires. The 3 and 4 wire types use electronics to measure the resistance of the lead wires to remove their resistance measurement from the measurement of the detector. The original sensros used to require a long coil that was wound around form and were fairly large compared to RTD sensors today –which are considerably smaller than a match tip. The “electronics” that measure them need calibration factors, which are also done with a controller electronically to read the analog signals (tiny current and voltage readings to calculate the resistance that correlates to temperature). Todat’s RTDs are cheap and beginning to be ubiquitours where precise temperatures are required. They still need calibration and re calibration.
Asking where the missing heat went is like asking where the boogeyman is hiding.
Citing the recent warm decade as evidence of continued warming is like saying a drawing of a boogeyman is proof it is real.
Believing that waging a war against CO2 emissions can alter the climate is like believing your blanket can save you from the boogeyman.
AGW= the ultimate IQ test.
That made me laugh. My cat (Charlie), whenever a stranger walks into the house, runs to the bedroom and climbs up into the bed, between the blanket and bedspread. So my cat DOES believe the bedspread will save him from the bogeyman!
IQ test, indeed. It’s the one I use before voting for any politician. If a politician ‘believes’ in AGW, he is either too stupid to be in government, or too corrupt.
Anything that absorbs, will do it consistently…..the oceans did not suddenly decide to absorb another degree of “heat”…
..otherwise it would have been doing it all along….and we would be freezing our rears off
Tanks, A. Good news!
This is also at http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/06oct_abyss/ wich is more popular.
Another three years of data is available. Bob needs to include that in his graph!
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
I don’t bother with OHC data anymore. I’ve been presenting depth-averaged temperature data at different depths recently. OHC data are presented in terms of Joules*10^22 and that makes the warming look astronomical. Presenting it in deg C puts it into terms people understand and also shows how small (miniscule) the actual change in temperature has been.
Cheers.
Bob, I don’t believe in AGW. I seriously doubt that the graph represents all the oceans. It’s just one slice of the picture. However, showing this data in Joules is the only responsible way. A 2 C increase in atmospheric temperature is equivalent to .000175 deg C rise in ocean temperatures. If they said the oceans were up .000175, you would say it’s miniscule, when it’s not. The earth receives 1.5 x 10^22 J each day. So, the graph of Joules is a lot more meaningful. If it’s up 15 x10^22 J, that tells me it’s up the equivalent of 10 solar days worth of energy. Compared to the energy in the ocean, it’s an increase of .0094 %.
Viking, the only responsible way is to show both the Joules and the Temperature.
The temperature is important because you cannot estimate heat without measure temperature and the size of the temperature change is so small as to question its accuracy and validity, which I do.
Stephen, You’re right that energy data is based on temperature readings. I agree with you that temperature is important. However, my point is that from a global climate point of view, it’s total energy in the system that is most important. The global temperature profile is like a giant balloon, you push in one place, and balloons out somewhere else. It’s always shifting in 4 dimensions across 3 main components.
Saying that global warming is happening because one small area of the atmosphere got hot one summer is really saying nothing at all. I was very frustrated when all the focus was on atmospheric surface temperatures measured in cities. It’s much more productive to focus on ocean energy levels in Joules.
How accurate is the Argo data? “The temperatures in the Argo profiles are accurate to ± 0.002°C”
Like you, I’m skeptical of everything, but that accuracy seems pretty good to me.
Surely the inclusion of the graph at the top was mistake. (The only other choice seems to be intention misdirection.)
1) The headline is about “deep oceans” but the graph is for the top 700 m. Thus it has nothing to do with the body of the post.
2) The headline claims no warming since 2005, but the graph is artificially terminated 3 years ago to seemingly support this conclusion. If the last three years are included, then it is clear the data has been rising fairly steadily the whole time. http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/heat_content55-07.png (And again, this is for the top 700 m, not the deep oceans).
I see what you mean, but I find it difficult to perceive that the ‘missing heat’ has gone into the sea. The overall trend seems to be (and I haven’t checked this) a fairly straight line so there is no indication of the rise one might expect if this is where the missing heat from the last 18 years is supposed to have gone, when the previous 18 years to the ‘pause’ when the temperature was rising the sea level trend looks the same.
Looking at chart 7 on your link emphasizes that there is nothing much going on here.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/halosteric_700m.png
I think this chart is probably more appropriate as you can see the trend clearly.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/heat_content55-07.png
Yes, with poor error bars, and still less then 1/2 of what the alarmist predicted.
“Halosteric” means related to changes in salinity. All this graph shows is that changes in salinity are not the cause of sea level changes.
Tim,
Look at the trend in the second chart I posted from before the pause, does it look steeper than from between, say mid 80’s to early 00’s than it does from early 00’s to the end ?
If the heat was hiding in the ocean, it is really hiding very well, isn’t it ?
If the data are smoothed over a 5 year period, you really can’t get any closer than 2.5 years ago. In the chart from ManBearpig, the pentadal average also cuts off, but also appears to be downsampled, so that the apparent upswing could be an aliasing chimera. Perhaps Bob’s chart is simply a continuous smoothing over 5 years, which shows what is happening for overlapping intervals.
If true, the NOAA chart is deceptive.
Found this article from Bob’s site. It appears the discrepancy is between adjusted and unadjusted measurements.
Apparently, the “rise” is models all the way down.
It’s hard for them to accept the obvious… this is the way the earth works. Nothing unusual at all.
The planet is heating up? You mean like, including the molten core? Sounds scary!
“Landerer also is a coauthor of another paper … on ocean warming in the Southern Hemisphere from 1970 to 2005… Using satellite measurements and climate simulations of sea level changes around the world, the new study found the global ocean absorbed far more heat in those 35 years than previously thought — a whopping 24 to 58 percent more than early estimates.”
24 to 58 percent hey! This is why I love (TM) climate ‘science’, it’s just so EXACTLY. I mean,
who wants a number when you can have a whole range.
Yup folks, they got a team on it, changing the sea level, maybe next year they will have one
for the oceans too!
Well, it’s only right, the Stock and Bond markets have the Plunge protection teams at
the various central bankia, so why not a Hiatus protection team for ‘Climate’ “Science” (TM)
Think Progress(TM) has an article on Landerer’s paper on ocean warming in the Southern Hemisphere. The money quote (to me anyway): “If estimations for temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere are readjusted to fit better with climate models, they increase, the scientists found.” They found the “missing heat” by adjusting old guesses to fit with the new and improved guesses they get from models.
Oops, forgot the link:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/10/06/3576234/ocean-surface-warming-faster/
Looks like you have only down to 700m. But ARGO goes down to 2000m. What does that data look like these days?
@ Tim Folkerts & evanmjones
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Sea-Level.gif
Ocean heat content change above 2,000m depth. Curves show estimates based on data products from Scripps (blue), IPRC (red), JAMSTEC (black) and NOAA (green). The thick black curve depicts the mean among these estimates. The grey envelope denotes one standard error around this mean. Courtesy: authors and Nature Climate Change.
Back in July Jim Steele tried to track down the missing heat.
And so on. It’s still missing in action. Maybe we should look into the solar system.
Could it be that the data are systematically biased as the Argo buoys get attracted by currents running from cold to warm places, and drift into warmer waters over time? In terms of temperature, the change is really very slight.
Sorry
Wrong caption for the graph above, it should be:
0–2,000 m (red), 0–700 m (green), 700–2,000 m (blue). The dashed black curve shows an estimate for the remainder of the ocean below 2,000 m computed by removing the 0–2,000 m estimate from the GRACE-corrected observed mean sea-level
If possible please replace.
Thanks
Anyone have an idea of the average rate of movement for ARGO Buoys?
If it’s 5 mph, they’d be able to cover ~25% of the oceans volume. But that wasn’t stopping to deliver a data upload, nor drifting around in circles because that’s the way the water is moving. I looked for a bit then stopped looking.
Should be careful about this.
Isaac Held once put forth that since water is semi-compressible, it’s possible to get adiabatic warming/cooling from compression. Subsidence inversions are pretty easy to spot in the atmosphere, but for these small variances, probably pretty difficult to distinguish between irreversible heat changes from forcing and reversible changes from compression/decompression of ocean water.
Of course we have dealt with missing things before:
Has Josh Willis finally got tired of working towards the global warming ‘conclusion,’ and decided enough was enough. Regardless much thanks to him for having the courage to rock the boat. His equivocation is understandable considering the constant pressure that has been applied from ambient warming fanatics. From February, 2007 — in his own words. Scientific method being applied? You be the judge.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/
RFK, Jr.: “Do I think the scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely, that is a criminal offense and they ought to be serving time for it,”
I don’t know where the heat has been hidden now, but I can assure you that the evil Koch brothers are behind it. They did in fact have the heat hidden deep in the ocean, but the noble client scientists who are saving the planet caught on to them. So they moved it somewhere else and will keep hiding it, because they have to keep “the pause” going in order to discredit the settled science so that they can continue to produce their filthy fossil fuels that spew toxic CO2 into the atmosphere so that they can make more money to add to their fortune and to fund disinformation about climate science.
client scientists->climate scientists 🙁
You were right the first time.
Actually according to the latest BBC revelation the missing ocean heat has been on the surface all the time.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29474646
But my personal opinion is that all the heat has emigrated to Australia and has become the new dinki di, record breaking, homogenised heat:
http://www.bom.gov.au/tmp/cc/tmean.aus.0112.24987.png
In fact I think that the BOM are hopeful that if 2014 is anything like 2013, far from what once looked like a progressing sinusoidal curve, the heat will be off the map.
Ok, look, it get it. These guys are all worried that if the CAGW hypothesis fails, then they could all be out of a job and will have to go back to teaching Ecology 101 for $40K per year. Oh, and Jessica Alba — you can just forget about her.
But I think they guys are missing an opportunity. They should say that extraterrestrials kidnapped the excess heat. I mean its just as plausible as the deep ocean theory (the immaculate convection — I love it!), but its much less testable. So they could keep it going for decades. They could do a History Channel Series called “In Search of Aliens Who Stole our Heat”. Lewandowsky could write articles about how people who deny the Alien consensus are nothing but whack-job conspiracies ideationists. And if they could work Big Foot into it somehow, then they could get a cross-over audience — think night-time scenes with tree knocking while listening for a heat signature. This could be huge. Plus, the fact that they are all Nobel Prize winners would add a lot of credibility.
These guys just have to start thinking outside the box a little bit.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but there is something in the oceans called “Thermocline”. A distinct layer of water (usually @ about 500-1,500 meters deep in open oceans) bellow which water doesn’t mix with surface layers any more, and the water temperature remains relatively constant all the way to the bottom. The reason behind that is that the heat transfer in surface layers is subject to radiation, convection and conduction, whereas bellow the thermocline, it is conduction only (far less efficient).
I’m sorry, … if they can’t find the “missing heat” above the thermocline, it is far less likely they will find it bellow.
Blast it all Dirk, you can’t go using logic in a debate with warmists about this matter. Logic and their computer games just do not mix well together.
How do we know the mean depth of the thermocline does not change each year?
It does change somewhat, depending on weather conditions (huge waves), and latitude, but as far as I know, 2,000 meters is well bellow it under any circumstance, at any latitude.
Thanks. It is just that it is very difficult to get the global average surface T. I question our capacity to measure the three dimensional depth of the oceans as well, even with Argo. I can see how Argo buoys must drift, possibly in a systemic way due to major ocean currents, which could well introduce a systemic bias in the readings as well.
The Amazon River alone supposedly dumps millions of tons of solid matter into the Atlantic yearly. Glaciers must carry a lot of solid material into the polar oceans. And I have lived long enough to see the cliffs on the California coast move inland from erosion, something they were doing long before AGW. Altogether there must be billions of tons of solid material entering the oceans every year.
By how much is continental erosion raising sea level?
The energy balance figure in the abstract is 0.64 +-0.44 w/m^2, which is roughly what Trenberth has estimated before. Any comments?
“Coauthor Felix Landerer of JPL noted that during the same period (2005-2013), warming in the top half of the ocean continued unabated, an unequivocal sign that our planet is heating up. ”
Yet Tisdale’s graph claims no continuing rise.
Is the coauthor Landerer outright lying or is Tisdale?
Sorry “Continuing rise” should read “continuing rate of rise”
and I would bet Landerer is ‘bending the truth’
“Study coauthor Josh Willis of JPL said these findings do not throw suspicion on climate change itself.”
““The sea level is still rising,” Willis noted. “We’re just trying to understand the nitty-gritty details.””
Now THAT sounds suspicious!
Like turtles, it’s heat all the way down.
Seriously, can someone explain how our atmosphere heats ocean water to depth.
Again I ask.
1. The heat capacity of the ocean is so large compared to the atmosphere that any temperature changes would be undetectable for centuries.
If there really is a detectable change, it cannot be due to AGW.
2. The atmosphere does not warm up the ocean, the reverse is true. If the ocean surface really was warming up so much, we would see atmospheric temps rising rapidly.
We are not.
Oceans are huge heat sinks indeed, but even if they warm up, they won’t start releasing the stored heat unless the atmosphere cools down. Laws of thermodynamics. Which is a positive thing in my mind, unless one wishes another ice age to come.
We are in an interglacial. Is it not the case that the deep oceans should be warming. Go into the shallow underground in Scotland and it gets colder, not warmer, since the land surface has not yet reached thermal equilibrium since the end of the last glacial, 10,000 years ago that placed where I sit now under 3 kms of ice.
Having told fibs from the outset, the warmists now have to find something they know full well wasn’t there from the start. Oh dear.
Oh My!
The HMD (Heat of Mass Destruction) has gone MIA! Or is that AWOL? Sarc》
The missing heat is about 10 light-years away by now.
Can you imagine how much they’ll tax us to get it back?
So does this mean – if we further account for the contribution of underground aquifer depletion… then MSL has actually decreased??! GK
2013
Groundwater abstraction is about “one fourth of the current rate of sea level rise of 3.3 mm per year.”
Here is the paper’s abstract
Update:
The abstract is from 2010. Certainly ground water abstraction adds to sea level rise.
Thanks for the reference. I was referring to the simplified math in the above premise:
“Abyssal expansion = sea level change – glacial melt – upper 2000 meter ocean expansion” which the conclusion could be:
3.3 mm = sea level change – glacial melt – upper 2000 meter ocean expansion.
If glacial melt and thermal expansion equals our present MSL rise then removing the groundwater abstraction would place us into negative MSL… ie: if oceans were not warming and ice was not melting, then the MSL would be flat. Therefore, if we stopped groundwater abstraction – sea level would fall. I suppose, I was just trying to point out (badly) that an important term was missing, from the study. Sorry if I have added to confusion. GK
Historic ocean temperature and heat absorption based on Sea Level rise (rather than extensive, accurate temperature measurements) ?
Sounds reasonable — water expands as it becomes warmer. But, is it an “empirically proven” connection in an ocean (to the degree used in the calculations)? Or, just another “hypothesis” that allows the “model” to arrive at the “desired” result?
I personally wonder, what factors other than heat absorption could be causing a significant fraction of the “apparent” Sea Level rise — thus, nullifying the model conclusions?
Tell me about this 97% consensus.
Anthony: Second sentence – way I think should be why.
and that’s way we have “the pause”
[Changed, thank you. .mod]
I think the “heat” went to their heads long before it went missing.
Some boffins at DOE (and NASA) now claim the missing heat has been found. It has been hiding in plain sight, not the in the deep oceans, but rather the _shallow_ ocean parts (apparently using observed sea-level rise as a proxy for heat):
http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2014/10/past-measurements-may-have-missed-massive-ocean-warming
Of course not…
At the near 0C temps of the deep ocean, the density vs temp curve is pretty flat. A change of 1C would cause little change in volume compared to the surface.
Hi Bob,
Regarding this statement:
“Coauthor Felix Landerer of JPL noted that during the same period, warming in the top half of the ocean continued unabated, an unequivocal sign that our planet is heating up.”
But your graph shows essentially zero warming from 2005. How can your graph and the above statement be reconciled?
I, also, was curious about that. It says: “NOTE: Graph by Bob Tisdale – not part of the NASA press release” but gives no other info. It seems different from the graphs NOAA is peddling, and I don’t know why, or how I can use it in debate when others cite NOAA.
Found this article from Bob’s site. It appears the discrepancy is between adjusted and unadjusted measurements.
Apparently, the “rise” is models all the way down.
Is it a coincidence that NASA can’t find the missing heat in the Oceans and then on roughly the same day in another paper Nature Climate Change we get the old “This underestimation is a result of poor sampling prior to the last decade and limitations of the analysis methods that conservatively estimated temperature changes in data-sparse regions,” said LLNL oceanographer Paul Durack, lead author of a paper appearing in the October 5 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change.”
What caused the massive rise from 1972 – 1973?
Probably lousy measurements and sample spread pre-Argo, I’d guess.
Everytime someone takes me down there in their underwater craft via TV it is cold down there several degrees above freezing and it is not 72 degees.
At the benthic depths, the temp is a constant 4 C. Add heat, and out of equilibrium, it warms and expands. Take away heat, it cools and expands. Entropy drives the system back to equilibrium via pressure, and the extra heat (when heated) flows upward above 2000m, no stays below 5000m. But it is not convection. The depth stays constant T, like a regulator after a perturbation and response. An emergent property coming from the uniques physics of water and the law of thermodynamics in the intense pressure of the deep ocean.
NASA along with every other government agency have been re directed from their mission such as valuable space exploration to an agenda to control everything in our life. The past numerous technical contributions of NASA to society have terminated
The does not sound like Jet Propulsion to me. No [wonder] we now depend on the Russians to get us to the Space Station. NASA’s mission has been corrupted. and we spend over $21 Billion annually on climate change which is a figment of someone’s imagination.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/orbiting-carbon-observatory-2-oco-2/
ABOUT THE MISSION
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2, or OCO-2, is an Earth satellite mission designed to study the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide globally and provide scientists with a better idea of how carbon is contributing to climate change. The mission launched July 2, 2014, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and is one of five NASA Earth science launches in 2014.
Starting about six weeks into its orbit, the satellite will begin gathering detailed global measurements — around 100,000 — of the Earth’s carbon every day, answering important questions about precisely where carbon is coming from and where it’s being stored. OCO-2 is a replacement for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, which was scheduled to launch in early 2009, but was unsuccessful due to a launch vehicle failure.”
“Coauthor Felix Landerer of JPL noted that during the same period, warming in the top half of the ocean continued unabated, an unequivocal sign that our planet is heating up. ”
The graph shows that the “top half of the ocean” (or at least top 700m, the top 20%) has not warmed at all since 2003.
I cannot say it better myself, so here is Motl’s take on ocean heat sequestering.
“While the evolution of the ocean-based temperatures could be less fluctuating than the surface temperatures, the particular extra arguments above in favor of the “ocean standards” are of course mostly silly. The ocean’s heat capacity is much larger than the heat capacity of the atmosphere, so if some heat makes it to the “bulk of the ocean”, it effectively gets hugely diluted. The second law of thermodynamics allows heat to get diluted, but it doesn’t allow the heat to spontaneously concentrate itself again!
What it means is that if the extra heat from a one-degree-like warming of the atmosphere makes it to the ocean, the bulk of the ocean gets warmer by something comparable to 0.01 °C, and the only thing that this warmer ocean may do to the atmosphere is to warm it (more precisely, to increase the expected equilibrium temperature) by the same 0.01 °C sometimes in the very far future, thousands of years from now. Physics just doesn’t allow the energy to be transformed from “diluted heat” to some more concentrated forms of energy.
Rahmstorf knows this piece of classical physics so he corrects them. There is no thermal threat waiting in the deep ocean.
But what he’s missing is that the writers in Nature talk about this non-existent threat because they’ve been misled by lots of intense propaganda about dangers related to the climate change. They were able to figure out that no noteworthy threat may be linked to the global mean surface temperature – the expertise of an astrophysicist and even the common sense of a political scientist are enough for that. However, the broader point that the writers were led to misunderstand is that there is no global climate threat at all, whether it is linked to the surface temperatures, ocean temperatures, or anything else.”
The universe seems to work on the principle of ‘dumping’ energy, not gathering it. Some people don’t understand the term ‘heat sink’. Its a sink and not one with a plug in the bottom. Its a sink because it flushes everything away.
AR5 TS.6 Key Uncertainties
This final section of the Technical Summary provides readers with a
short overview of key uncertainties in the understanding of the climate
system and the ability to project changes in response to anthropogenic
influences. The overview is not comprehensive and does not describe in
detail the basis for these findings.
OHC:
Different global estimates of sub-surface ocean temperatures have
variations at different times and for different periods, suggesting
that sub-decadal variability in the temperature and upper heat
content (0 to to 700 m) is still poorly characterized in the historical
record.
Below ocean depths of 700 m the sampling in space and time is
too sparse to produce annual global ocean temperature and heat
content estimates prior to 2005.
Let’s be serious. The only part of ocean heat that can possibly effect weather and climate is SST and a short distance below. The rest of the ocean is a vast thermodynamic sink that never gives up its heat, or its cold.
hswiseman, you are in error (unless you are being facetious). The abyssal waters are indeed brought to the surface and mixed in with surface temperatures. I wish these new young researchers knew what they were doing.
https://courses.seas.harvard.edu/climate/eli/Courses/EPS281r/Sources/Abyssal-circulation/Stommel-Arons-1960-I.pdf
You can bring up as much abyssal water as you want, the entropic process can never be undone.
There are many ocean currents, but pointing to a model as evidence is not very convincing. Especially when the authors themselves refer to the models as “simple”. Heck they even assume “covered with a layer of homogeneous water of depth h”. If you want to make a point, it seems that real data (which surely exists on the well-known “global conveyor belt” ) would be infinitely better than a model.
hswiseman, Pamela is of course right. Simplified description: Cold water sinks, warm water rises. Currents of water move toward the poles, cools, sinks, and proceeds along the bottom. Surface water at the equator is warmed enough to expand to be like 2 feet higher than cooler waters. Water flows down hill, away from the equator. Water rises from the deep to take it’s place.
Not only currents matter however. Your statement is the equivalent of saying that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is not true. Warmer water will definitely transfer energy to colder water. Water is a very good thermal conductor. However, since warmer water rises, it’s hidden by physical transport. In short, the situation is fluid.
The missing heat is longwave infrared, a fairly easy thing to spot. We could start a Christmas fund for Trenberth to get him one of these:
http://www.ircameras.com/cameras/long-wave-products/
Aye me laddies, cold it be in the deep, cold and bitter briny, like a Woman’s scorn. Or ye Moms recriminny, when ye leaves the sundering bowl lid aloft.
The heats a’missing a-right, things that should not want for motion, be animated in grimlike fashion, scurry about in the deep, like a pizza boy aturnin’ his batter.
Scutter they do, all the while collecting the heat in their slimy paws, all teeth, and dark hunger and mischief they clatter about.
“See you here…’ They’s a mutter,
“Heft I a bounty plenty, o’ the Suns foul oil, …its heats I stifle…”
And they saunter and gamble, betwixt the submarine reefs, bleaching the coral and drowning the Tuvaluan’s.
Frolics they do in delight, gleeful of deceiving the dismal Warm-apes, and their mad god who they mock, Model is his name, and he lives in EXCEL and divides by Zero.
Chirp and chitter, guffaw and mew and meep they do, as they hide the heat in the grimy deep.
Now that is eye candy. If ye young, run. If ye old, hold onto yer hat!
In my opinion the paper by Llovel et al is not being read correctly. Just look at what Llovel, Willis, Landererand and Fukumori wrote,
“Accounting for additional possible systematic uncertainties, the deep ocean (below 2,000 m) contributes … -0.08 +/- 0.43 W m-2 to Earth’s energy balance.”
Deep-ocean contribution to sea level and energy budget not detectable over the past decade, Nature Climate Change.
URL:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2387.html
The error bars are 5 times bigger than the observed contribution to warming. Meaning that we cannot measure what is happening in the deep ocean precisely enough to know if it is warming, cooling or constant.
Dr Roy Spencer’s diffusion model of the heat sequestered by the oceans explains this. The diffusion curve is negative exponential and therefore warming approaches zero with depth. By 2,000 meters (6,560 feet) the rate of cooling is less than the instrumental and other errors.
URL: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/06/
There are 3000 argo floats in the ocean. By comparison, there are thought to be 9000 blue wales in the ocean. That’s three times as many blue wales as there are argo floats.
There are so few of them that if argo floats were alive they would be a protected species.
If that’s what we have to rely on, then nobody knows anytime about ocean heat content.
It is very difficult to get just the global average surface T. I question our capacity to measure the three dimensional depth of the oceans as well, even with Argo. I can see how Argo buoys must drift, possibly in a systemic way due to major ocean currents, which could well introduce a systemic bias in the readings as well. Is anyone aware if this may exist as a factor?
So we should ask the whales if they’ve been feeling any warmer or colder recently.
Admitting the influence of the oceans is two-edged sword for alarmists. CAGW is not possible if we need to warm the oceans. It takes centuries to warm 1,35 10**9 km3 of water with 4 W/m2 forcing.
Think about a m2 on planet Earth: 6000 km of liquid iron, 4 km of water and 100 km of atmosphere. Warm it with a 4 W light bulb at 5 000 m.
Thank you global cooling! I’ve been making the argument that air/land/sea are components of one thermodynamic system for over 10 years. Almost no one on Climate Audit or other places appreciated the point. They accepted the premises of the AGW alarmists that atmosphere was the system, and was governed by rules that violated multiple laws of physics. Like Tom Vonk would say “it was a non-physical”. The “story” was more fiction than a description of reality. I used the analogy that even if C02 was acting like they described, it would be like trying to heat an Olympic swimming pool with a blow dryer. In short, AGW is impossible. Most commenters here are knee jerking reacting ridiculing the claim that oceans can store heat. They don’t seem to realize that they are admitting the truth, and that it doesn’t help the AGW cause, it’s a surrender, a slight turning away from being a science denier.
Once the heat goes below 700 m deep, it becomes irrelevant because the heat capacity of the ocean is 1,000 times greater than the atmosphere. Example, X megajoules warms the atmosphere by 1 C. X megajoules will warm the ocean by 0.001 C. The fishes will hardly notice it. Only top 200 m of ocean is significantly affected by temperature changes. Notice they always talk about changes in megajoules rather than in Celsius. Because temperature changes are negligible. Too small to be alarming.
Dr. Strangelove, you’re right that ocean energy is 1280x the energy of the atmosphere, and that 2c of atmospheric is equivalent to .000175 degrees C of ocean temperature increase.
However, this doesn’t make it irrelevant. We should have been focused on measuring ocean temperature all along, and ignored atmospheric temperatures. Measuring energy in Joules is the only scientifically responsible way to go. It’s representing energy as temperature that is very misleading. Measuring atmospheric temperature and making a claim about “global warming” is like taking my temperature and claiming that everyone on earth has a fever.
Also, you’re too focused on temperature. It only represents energy at a constant pressure. Gibbs law says that everything seeks the lowest state. In other words, excluding physical transport for a minute, the ocean internal energy is close to constant going all the way down. Temperatures near the surface are naturally higher since pressure is so low.
Water has this really weird property where it’s density changes right around freezing. It’s why the bottom of the ocean isn’t compressed into a solid (think about LP tanks, water doesn’t do that). If the deep water warms, rises. If it cools, it rises because it gets less dense as the angle of the hydrogen bonds expand. The really deep ocean is at a constant temperature that corresponds to maximum density and it’s a liquid.
Ocean is salt water, not fresh, & salt water’s density goes up as it cools to freezing (unlike fresh water). I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this common mistake.
There are two results to be discussed today – The Livermore ones and the JPL ones, covering much the same ground (water?) but presented in rather different ways. I’m not sure we can learn much either way from either of them. It’s rather odd that the object of both pieces of work seems to be to discover the missing heat that models say SHOULD be there, rather than the other way round, but that doesn’t invalidate the results.
I’m still really sceptical that, total ocean heat content being so vast, measuring directly a small trend over a short period of time is actually possible. 3600 Argos are a big step forward, but I still don’t think the measurements will be accurate enough for the purpose, and even if they are, we’ll need another 30 years to be confident.
Much less easily undermined are the altimetry results. If we can rely on them, they represent an excellent proxy for ocean volume, which will be related to both heat content and to volume changes due to precipitation and land ice mass changes. I would like to see much more detailed critiques of these measurements, but I would expect that, since the rate of sea level rise has remained so constant back to pre-industrial CO2, confirmation of ‘hidden’ heat is going to remain elusive.
Ergo, the climate scientists are incapable of working out the earth’s energy balance.
GO back to GO. Do NOT collect $200 billion in grants.
The very best thing about the deep ocen is that is vast so lots of things can be claimed to hide there , the next best thing is that its deep , so its very hard to find things there so its hard to prove your ‘its in the deep’ claims wrong .
Now normally in science this is a problem , because without proof you not got much and certainly not enough to justify the spending of trillions with massive changes to people’s live . But we are in the land of climate ‘science’ with its own special rules, and all that matters is you believe enough .
Any paper that includes the sentence “the estimates that we had up until now have been pretty systematically underestimating the likely changes,” is NOT scientific and can be safely ignored. Why do we keep paying for this level of scholarship? Some public sector scientists need to be fired for being useless and for not contributing any value to the society.
What the co2 driven global warming advocates don’t discuss is that if the ocean has started eating global warming since the trade winds changed during the negative phase of the ocean’s ~60 year multi-decadal cycles, they also emitted excess energy during their positive phase from 1975-2005. The implication is that the oceans are capable of storing energy on long timescales, and releasing it on long timescales too. And they store a lot of energy. The top two metres alone contain as much energy as the entire atmosphere above.
We know that the oceans keep the air temperature up over night as the release some of the energy the Sun poured into them during the day. We also know that there is a lag of a couple of months between the longest day of the year and the peak in surface air temperatures near coasts. This is thermal inertia and heat capacity at work. On longer timescales, we have recently confirmed that runs of El Nino events which release a lot of energy from the oceans are initiated on the falling side of the solar cycle, never on the upswing.
So we can go a stretch further and combine what we know. When solar activity falls, energy comes out of the ocean, not just over the period of the decline of a single 11 year solar cycle, but if the Sun stays low in activity terms, for many years. An integration of the sunspot number shows us that the ocean heat content rose all the way from 1934 to 2003. This is the real cause of ‘global warming’. A lot of excess energy is still retained in the upper ocean. We can expect the effect of a couple of low solar cycles to be softened by a proportion of that excess heat returning to space via the atmosphere warming it on the way.
In developing my understanding of the Earth’s systems, I developed a couple of very simple models to help me fathom the way the surface temperature stays fairly constant as the solar cycles wax and wane. Back in 2009, by analysing the data, I found that the global average sea surface temperature, the SST, stays fairly constant when the Sun is averaging around 40 sunspots per month. By calculating the running total departing from this figure in a simple integration I found that combined with the ~60 oceanic cycles (also solar influenced), I could reproduce the temperature history of the last 150 years quite accurately. By adding in a nominal forcing for co2 (or an allowance for the infamous ‘adjustments’ to the data), I was able to get a match to monthly data which has a Pearson R^2 value of 0.9.
The above is part of an article ROG TALKBLOKE wrote from his web-site talkblokes talkshop.
I think this article presents a strong case for solar/ocean connections.
But, the oceans still warmed – even during the “positive” phase. It may well have been the case, in the past, that the oceans would release heat to the atmosphere during the positive phase of the cycle and then store it during the negative phase but that’s not what is happening now. The oceans are warming throughout both phases of the cycle. Atmospheric warming has slowed and this may continue for a while but there is strong evidence that warming will resume at some point in the relatively near future.
Any day now brother, any day now.
What’s the strong evidence?
Missing ocean heat not found ? I know. This is the Koch brothers. They visited all Argo probes in their submarine and tampered with their measurements. (sarc. off).
A little poetry.
There once was a fellow named Trenberth
Who worried about global heat dearth
He searched oceans and lands
But there were no measurements
This unfortunate fellow named Trenberth
About warming they all have gone anal
But the warming itself has gone AWOL
They count rings in the trees
search the sky and the seas
But them megajoules simply aint there Y’all
Now waiting for those desperate, failed “scientists” to claim the missing heat was converted into “dark energy”, hiding in parallel universes, UFO’s, time slips, blaming it on contrails… Or the Koch bros secretly stole it to power their Capitalist industrial complex.
Comparison of the Ocean below 2,000 meters to the GLOBAL Land-Ocean Temperature Index from GISS.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/OA-Giss.gif
Only major divergence occurred around 2008
( surface water > evaporation > increase in salinity > rise in specific weight > sinks to depth below 2000 m )
Vukcevic, what is the “y” axis? It cannot be temperature.
There is something fishy about those Argo floats. In 2010 Trenberth and Fasullo reported that since 2004 ocean heat had been disappearing, and by 2008 their record showed that eighty percent of it was gone without a trace. But then we read in their text that “…Since 2004, ~3000 Argo floats have provided regular temperature soundings of the upper 2000 m of the ocean, giving new confidence in the ocean heat content assessment…” If I had been the reviewer of that paper I would have told them to forget that new confidence and sent them back to study those Argo floats until they find the secret place that the heat was disappearing into. But no, their buddies let that “disappearing heat” become another mystery of the deep sea, forever linked with Trenberth’s name. With everybody today concerned with yet another lost heat mystery connected with the hiatus, that lost heat of Trenberth now becomes a suspect when it really does not even exist. As to the hiatus, the heat is not lost, it was simply never picked up because according to MGT, addition of carbon dioxide to air leads to reduction of atmospheric water vapor, which in turn prevents any greenhouse warming from happening. This of course is the exact opposite role of what IPCC wants to assign to water vapor, namely that of multiplying the effect of the greenhouse warming caused by carbon dioxide. It is of course erroneous and is responsible for the many ridiculous climate predictions coming out of CMIP5 models.
Can you remind me what MGT is?
Talking about the oceans,
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom_new.gif
When was the north Atlantic last this cold?
The cold SSTs over the eastern continental seaboards suggest stalled NH poleward surface transport.
Not much sign of warmth around Antarctica either.
But who would be stupid enough to look for warming in Antarctica?
I’d be happy if there were truly deep sensors.
Argo is great but not enough.
Of course there are the basics showing that alarmist theories FAIL:
– a physical limit to the effect CO2 can have on climate temperature
– several things that their theories fail to predict. (Even Trenberth’s deep ocean theory is inherently an admission that he and ilk don’t have a clue about the amount of understanding needed to predict climate.)
Alright, there is the missing ”warm air”.
Now can you tell where’s the cold air (era) you’ve all predicted ? I don’t see any cold era in the figures you are showing. Should we go over all of what you posted for the past 10 years of the cold era – and found it’s not there ?