![436189main_atlantic20100325a-full[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/436189main_atlantic20100325a-full1.jpg?quality=83)
The findings are the result of a new monitoring technique, developed by oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using measurements from ocean-observing satellites and profiling floats. The findings are reported in the March 25 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
The Atlantic overturning circulation is a system of currents, including the Gulf Stream, that bring warm surface waters from the tropics northward into the North Atlantic. There, in the seas surrounding Greenland, the water cools, sinks to great depths and changes direction. What was once warm surface water heading north turns into cold deep water going south. This overturning is one part of the vast conveyor belt of ocean currents that move heat around the globe.
Without the heat carried by this circulation system, the climate around the North Atlantic — in Europe, North America and North Africa — would likely be much colder. Scientists hypothesize that rapid cooling 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age was triggered when freshwater from melting glaciers altered the ocean’s salinity and slowed the overturning rate. That reduced the amount of heat carried northward as a result.
Until recently, the only direct measurements of the circulation’s strength have been from ship-based surveys and a set of moorings anchored to the ocean floor in the mid-latitudes. Willis’ new technique is based on data from NASA satellite altimeters, which measure changes in the height of the sea surface, as well as data from Argo profiling floats. The international Argo array, supported in part by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, includes approximately 3,000 robotic floats that measure temperature, salinity and velocity across the world’s ocean.
With this new technique, Willis was able to calculate changes in the northward-flowing part of the circulation at about 41 degrees latitude, roughly between New York and northern Portugal. Combining satellite and float measurements, he found no change in the strength of the circulation overturning from 2002 to 2009. Looking further back with satellite altimeter data alone before the float data were available, Willis found evidence that the circulation had sped up about 20 percent from 1993 to 2009. This is the longest direct record of variability in the Atlantic overturning to date and the only one at high latitudes.
The latest climate models predict the overturning circulation will slow down as greenhouse gases warm the planet and melting ice adds freshwater to the ocean. “Warm, freshwater is lighter and sinks less readily than cold, salty water,” Willis explained.
For now, however, there are no signs of a slowdown in the circulation. “The changes we’re seeing in overturning strength are probably part of a natural cycle,” said Willis. “The slight increase in overturning since 1993 coincides with a decades-long natural pattern of Atlantic heating and cooling.”
If or when the overturning circulation slows, the results are unlikely to be dramatic. “No one is predicting another ice age as a result of changes in the Atlantic overturning,” said Willis. “Even if the overturning was the Godzilla of climate 12,000 years ago, the climate was much colder then. Models of today’s warmer conditions suggest that a slowdown would have a much smaller impact now.
“But the Atlantic overturning circulation is still an important player in today’s climate,” Willis added. “Some have suggested cyclic changes in the overturning may be warming and cooling the whole North Atlantic over the course of several decades and affecting rainfall patterns across the United States and Africa, and even the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic.”
With their ability to observe the Atlantic overturning at high latitudes, Willis said, satellite altimeters and the Argo array are an important complement to the mooring and ship-based measurements currently being used to monitor the overturning at lower latitudes. “Nobody imagined that this large-scale circulation could be captured by these global observing systems,” said Willis. “Their amazing precision allows us to detect subtle changes in the ocean that could have big impacts on climate.”
Source: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/atlantic20100325.html
h/t to WUWT reader Scott Gates
UPDATE: This story sent to me today was dated 3/25 and I originally thought it was new today. It was coincidentally 3/25 of 2010, not 2015. The first paragraph of the story has been changed to reflect this within 5 minutes of posting. h/t to Andrew Freedman – Anthony
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“This was just released today.”
It looks like this was released 5 years ago today. Note “03.25.10” and the date in the URL http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/atlantic20100325.html
Yep, coincidence that it arrived in my inbox today dated 3/25. Fixed quickly after being point out on Twtter feed by Andrew Freedman
That does make you any less incorrect about the findings in the paper you “debunked”
Someone else
Huh?
@ur momisugly Chip Javert…that is the new Agenda 21 double speak. Soon many people will speak just like that all around the globe. This will be the modern version of the fall of the Tower of Babel.
Someone Else:
Less incorrect = More correct
Yes, no it does not.
Being 100% correct, or 0% incorrect, is the theoretical maximum and minimum limit of correctitude and incorrectitude, respectively.
Funny that the study you praise now is based on Argo measurements. They are pretty accurate aren’t they? The data from Argo is one of the fundamental sources in the study of climate change and effects of greenhouse gases on oceans; in many ways countering the agenda of this site.
Janne
No. Rather, numerous writers here have used the Argo buoy distributions and measurements from their almost-random population to show that the catastrophic clcimate change is falsified as theory. Rather, as theory, it is a perfect construct; but compared to the earth’s performance as time passes that “simulated theory” of CAGW fails.
Repeatedly.
Now it only takes Willis to learn the true story of climate – there is neither a climate threat nor a risk for Gulf Stream slowing down….
Btw – back in 980 AD to 1341/43 Greenland had warmer climate. Min 1 and a media of 3 degree Celsius more than today.
”Most of the Viking expansion took place during what scientist refer to as the dimatic optimum of the Medieval Warm Period dated ca, A.D. 800 to 1200 (Jones 1986: McGovern 1991); a general term for warm periods that reached chere optimum at different times across the North Atlantic (Groves and Switsur 1991). During this time the niean annual temperature for southem Greenland was 1 to 3°C higher than today.” Julie Megan Ross, Paleoethnobotanical Investigation of Garden Under Sandet, a Waterlogged Norse Farm Site. Western Settlement. Greenland (Kaiaallit Nunaata), University of Alberta, Department of Anthropology Edmonton. Alberta Fa11 1997, sid 40
My own comments in one of my blogg articles is:
One of the most common pollens found during the excavation of the Garden of Sandet was Cyperaceae, if you read Linnaeus, the virutal Flora on net, Cyperaceae isn’t supposed to have existed at all in such environment. But then neither Bilberry, Sapsella bursa pastorais nor crowberry should have been able to make it. Then birch and willow not mentioned…those trees were common in Greenland during the earliest settling years and also during the later. In between it was even warmer….
—- from Äntligen efter 671 år blir det, Norah4you 1 december 2012 At last After 671 years…….
“But then neither Bilberry, Sapsella bursa pastorais nor crowberry should have been able to make it. ”
That’s Capsella (shepherd’s purse)
should have is one thing. could have an other. and pollen found in datable layers and analyzed, is hard proof if any. More than a smoking gun … 🙂
btw. I haven’t told 1% of the now proven climate back up to 1431. Almost all to be found in still existing documents and/or books(!) written before 1450….. the oldest map(!) I know of (and have the exclusive right to use in my manuscript if I want to) goes back to a cartographer’s work in 1354-61….
I believe it is worth noting that the transit time for this global conveyor is on the order of many hundreds of years. Not something that I’d think would participate in rapid, catastrophic climate change.
Moreover, if true about the time of cycle, we will have a century or more’s warning, then.
“…many hundreds of years.” doesn’t pass the smell test. 1 km/hr travels 8760 km in only one year. That’s about the distance from the equator to the arctic.
Dan
You’ve made a very interesting observation; I hope some oceanographer-type explains what’s going on here. I’m total unqualified to express an opinion, but my presumption is surface currents move faster due to winds (or some such…).
Carl Wunsch says that the Atlantic Conveyer Belt is a fine cocktail party topic, but has little basis in observational reality.
You have something there. Just consider that it takes the heat in an El Niño only a few months to cross the Pacific. So the transit time of the global conveyor belt is more likely in years, maybe decades, than centuries.
So sorry that I did not provide a citation. I could have saved several of you from firing off commentary without taking any initiative to research:
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/currents/06conveyor2.html
In case others don’t want actually take the trouble to click on the link above:
“The conveyor belt moves at much slower speeds (a few centimeters per second) than wind-driven or tidal currents (tens to hundreds of centimeters per second). It is estimated that any given cubic meter of water takes about 1,000 years to complete the journey along the global conveyor belt.”
Note that there is no large scale surface current flowing across the equator from the southern Atlantic to the northern Atlantic, nor is there one straight up the center of either of these gyres.
Note too that the Gulf Stream does not end it’s northward journey by plunging into the abyss upon reaching the area south of Greenland.
One must presume, from these observations and Bernie’s comment below, that this is a very subtle effect, not a real current at all, as they are normally though of.
One wonders (at least this one does) how this circulation was discovered, how it is measured, and with what degree of certainty is anything “known” about it at all?
Two key items here.
The modelers/fraudsters ignore that the conveyor belt WILL SPEED UP WITH WARMING as the water becomes less viscous. That’s a no-brainer. And, being warmer, the warm water going north will evaporate more rapidly and become hyper-saline more rapidly, such that it is likely to sink before it encounters the fresh water from Greenland. They need to keep all the players in mind.
And, in reality, Greenland is gaining mass relatively rapidly, which has sped up some glaciers, but melting is not the problem. It’s too much ice that is pushing the glaciers.
How much warming, and how much viscosity ( and would it not be more convenient to use fluidity here, the reciprocal property)?
The missing energy from the pause is said to have been found hiding in the deep ocean *involuntary eyeroll*, and was reported in terms of watts, since the whole 15+ years of heating amount to one or two hundredths of a degree.
Since the difference in fluidity between water at 0 C and 100 C is about 1.5 cP, what is the practical effect of a change in temperature of a few one hundredths of a degree?
Seriously curious here, not being facetious.
“And, in reality, Greenland is gaining mass relatively rapidly, which has sped up some glaciers, but melting is not the problem. It’s too much ice that is pushing the glaciers.”
It looks like the ice mass is declining, what is your source that says it is growing:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/greenland_ice_sheet.html
Nice source. We are all prone to exaggerations. I love it when either side includes data or links to data (observations as well as reconstructions), so we can advance our collective knowledge as opposed to our biases.
Link shows Greenland ice sheet at the high end of gain.
If you believe calving doesn’t belong in the ice mass balance equation.
More up-to-date version:
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/yesterdays-big-lie/
Chris, Fig. 3.3 from your reference shows some pretty remarkable features. First, the dramatic melt seen in 2012-13 was uncharacteristic for the rest of the decade. The data shows annual decline up until 2013-14, which is also unprecedented. Is this a reversal? it will take years to know, but it is as remarkable as the loss in the year that was ballyhooed as “Greenland has Melted” in the internet story lines.
Chris, I so wanted ‘icouldnthelpit’ to make an appearance as your link would have killed his repeated posting that Greenland ice is falling catastrophically. But from your link, immediately below the chart that is ichi’s repetitive post is this gem (my bold):
I think the mods have “icouldnthelpit” in the penalty box for a short time-out.
@chris,
I remember reading that changes to GRACE in early 2012 allowed the large crater to be found in Antarctica.
That year seems to coincide with an obvious discontinuity in the death spiral trend for both the Arctic and Greenland.
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/images-essays/fig3.3-tedesco.jpg
I wouldn’t take a page titled ‘Report Card” seriously even if it came from NASA. Actually, these days, I would more likely dismiss the findings if it came from NASA.
Have a look at the Danish Meteorological Institute’s Current Surface Mass Budget of the Greenland Ice Sheet, at http://www.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget/
http://www.dmi.dk/uploads/tx_dmidatastore/webservice/b/m/s/y/a/todaysmb.png
Left: Map of the surface mass balance today (in mm water equivalent per day). Right: The average surface mass balance for today’s calendar date over the period 1990-2011.
[Thank you. Good find. .mod]
From linked site:
What bugs me is where is the Total Mass Balance on -200 Gt/year?
The old Tongan navigators had all of this ocean current information in very fine detail and used it along with detailed star sights to undertake epic voyages in their 30 m plus catamarans over 300 years ago.
All of this ‘ultra-modern” knowledge is a sad, limited and obscenely expensive re-run.
These brilliant old mariners would all be laughing at the palangi idiots right now
AGW THEORY -Yet another prediction turning out wrong the strength of the AMOC. This can be added to some of the bigger blunders I have listed below.
AGW SOME OF THE BIGGEST PAST BLUNDERS
1. more zonal atmospheric circulation
2. lower tropospheric hot spot
3. more el ninos
4. decrease in olr
5. Antarctic sea ice decrease
6. increase in global droughts
7. no pause in the global temp. rise
bit by bit we are building a convincing story to debunk the AGW myth. hopefully we can make it in time to prevent our current gov administration to provoke more damage than they already did.
Patrick
IMHO, government only want more taxes and control (i.e. power); they (it?) could care less about the scientific validity of so-called climate science used to justify their moves.
Example: in a few years when CAGW will be commonly understood to have been a silly academic fraud, don’t expect US DOT/EPA CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency) standards to be recinded.
Reblogged this on Norah4you's Weblog and commented:
Some information regarding Real Greenland “climate” in 1000-1250 AD.
Konungs skuggsjá (King’s Mirror) written around 1250 AD, translated into English by Laurence Marcellus 1917:
Chapter 18
….18 kapitlet som behandlar Grönlands produkter:
“Son. You stated earlier in your talk that no grain grows in that country; therefore I now want to ask you what the people who inhabit the land live on, how large the population is, what sort of food they have, and whether they have accepted Christianity.
Father. The people in that country are few, for only a small part is sufficiently free from ice to be habitable; but the people are all Christians and have churches and priests. If the land lay near to some other country it might be reckoned a third of a bishopric; but the Greenlanders now have their own bishop, as no other arrangement is possible on account of the great distance from other people. You ask what the inhabitants live on in that country since they sow no grain; but men can live on other food than bread. It is reported that the pasturage is good and that there are large and fine farms in Greenland. The farmers raise cattle and sheep in large numbers and make butter and cheese in great quantities. The people subsist chiefly on these foods and on beef; but they also eat the flesh of various kinds of game, such as reindeer, whales, seals, and bears. That is what men live on in that country.”
There are much more in prime sources (not Icelandic Annals) to be told about speed in the Gulf Stream back in older days than most knows…… but that’s an other story
“New NASA measurements of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, part of the global ocean conveyor belt that helps regulate climate around the North Atlantic, show no significant slowing over the past 15 years. The data suggest the circulation may have even sped up slightly in the recent past.”
NASA refutes Mann? So what did Mann et al say in their abstract?
“Here we present multiple lines of evidence suggesting that this cooling may be due to a reduction in the AMOC over the twentieth century and particularly after 1970. Since 1990 the AMOC seems to have partly recovered.”
Speaking of the “amazing precision” of the ARGO float array:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/heat_content2000mwerrpent.png
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/sl_therm2000mpentwerr.png
But such details are insignificant when the main concern is “proving” that MANN IS WRONG AGAIN.
Argo system has been operation for 15 years.
Not sure what your point is. ARGO was launched in 2000. Your graphs go back to 1967. What does that have to do with ARGO?
And how can a floating buoy (or a ship for that matter) create an historical temperature data record when it is not fixed in a location.
HUH? What does the GLOBAL HC say about the content of the RM 15 paper? About the new ( and not at all justified) Index for AMOC= SSTspg- Tnh? What deatils do you mean?
So, they’ve successfully measured a less than 35mm thermosteric change in sea level from a low in the 1960s to the current height? 35mm? Really?
BTW: Why, exactly do they use joules? Now, I live near Lake Michigan. It is by no means the largest Great Lake but it’s still fairly good sized at 4.5 quadrillion gallons of water. Heck, that’s a thousand times, give or take, the gargantuan trillion dollar size of the Federal budget; which itself is a thousand times a billion – which is no Pee Wee Herman sized number either. Now, last time I checked you could probably dump quite a few Lake Michigans into the North Atlantic. And still have room for quite a few more. Now, it would be nice to think that a joule was a thermal measurement necessary, not necessarily to raise the temperature of 4.5 quadrillion gallons of water, but, I dunno, maybe a trillion, or a billion, or a million, or maybe just a thousand gallons of water? Ok, how about just one single, solitary gallon of water? Or, maybe a measely quart? Or liter? Or pint? How about just a glass of water? Maybe a shot glass? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no. No, it’s the ability to raise the temperature of one freaking “gram” of water. Ah, but maybe a joule is the ability to raise that puny “gram” of water to the temperature of steam? No – think again. It doesn’t even denote the ability to raise that “gram” of water even one single solitary degree. A joule represents the thermal energy necessary to raise one “gram” (sorry about the repetitious scare quotes but fair is fair: the CAGW crowd uses scare tactics all the time) of water all of 0.24 degrees Celsius. No wonder these people (admittedly a fast and loose definition) use numbers with astronomical implications. The number of joules for this exercise probably exceeds the number of stars in the Universe. Heck, it probably exceeds the human ability to count. Maybe that’s the point?
shs28078,
Yup. Rahmstorf, et al. (2015) goes back to 1925:
Reg Nelson,
Roughly this portion of those estimates are based on ARGO data:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/heat_content2000mwerr.png
http://data.remss.com/msu/graphics/TLT/plots/RSS_TS_channel_TLT_Global_Land_And_Sea_v03_3.png
Frank,
Nothing.
On one hand we have Anthony writing: From the “we told you so yesterday” and the “settled science” department. This study was released in 2010, and they used actual measurements, rather than proxy data and reconstructions like Mann did. Gee, what a concept!
And citing a statement by Josh Willis about ARGO: “Nobody imagined that this large-scale circulation could be captured by these global observing systems,” said Willis. “Their amazing precision allows us to detect subtle changes in the ocean that could have big impacts on climate.”
On the other hand we have Reg Nelson questioning ARGO’s “amazing accuracy” on the basis that the floats are not stationary.
One is left wondering whether ARGO would “refute” Rahmstorf, et al. (2015) or not even if ARGO data provided coverage over the same interval. Which it doesn’t. Quite the conundrum, no?
How does ARGO determine sea level? They have GPS receivers for lat/long, I doubt they have one that has millimeter resolution, especially on a surface that moves with waves and tides.
You didn’t answer my question. How can a float that is measuring temperatures at different locations provide any meaningful scientific temperature data.
It’s like measuring the temperature in Santa Monica one day, and Las Vegas the next, and claiming that this is proof of warming. The information is meaningless because you are comparing apples to oranges. Posting a graph of something is not proof of anything if the underlying data is rubbish, which it is.
Tom J,
My understanding is that they’ve inferred a 3.5 cm change due to thermal expansion. So it’s an estimate based on indirect measurements.
It’s difficult to get to W/m^2 without them. But if you insist, here’s the 0-2000m pentadal mean temperature anomaly, with error bars:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/meantemp_2000mpentwerr.png
3-month, yearly and pentadal averages without error bars:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/meantemp_0-2000m.png
Anyway you slice it, that’s an awful lot of energy staying in the system. For “some” reason. Who cares. Less than a tenth of a degree. Everyone knows that using the smallest scalar values imaginable will fool the planet into conforming to our wishful thinking.
Maybe such speculations are how people who lack evidence to support their unsubstantiated beliefs clutch at straws in desperation.
Reg Nelson,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA-19
Perigee 850 kilometers (530 mi)Apogee 869 kilometers (540 mi)
Period 101.99 minutes
Let’s see, the circumference of the planet at the equator is 40,075 km, so that works out to a ground speed of 23,575 km/h. Definitely NOT stationary. And not even remotely close to being inside the lower troposphere.
Or no change:
True … many have argued that TLT != the surface. Including me. Recently.
FWIW, many RSS fans here would disagree. And according to our host, this quote by Josh Willis …
“Nobody imagined that this large-scale circulation could be captured by these global observing systems,” said Willis. “Their amazing precision allows us to detect subtle changes in the ocean that could have big impacts on climate.”
… is submitted as evidence supporting his bold proclamation that:
NASA refutes Mann and Rahmstorf – Finds Atlantic ‘Conveyor Belt’ Not Slowing
From the “we told you so yesterday” and the “settled science” department. This study was released in 2010, and they used actual measurements, rather than proxy data and reconstructions like Mann did. Gee, what a concept!
NASA Study Finds Atlantic ‘Conveyor Belt’ Not Slowing
03.25.10
Houston, we may have a problem.
Ric Werme,
The key word is “thermosteric”. Temperature profiles applied to known sea water expansion parameters and then integrated into estimates. With healthy amounts of uncertainty of course. The figures I posted reference Levitus et al. (2012), which describes the gory details: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1029/2012GL051106/
Brandon Gates
‘Tom J,
So, they’ve successfully measured a less than 35mm thermosteric change in sea level from a low in the 1960s to the current height? 35mm? Really?’
‘Brandon Gates
My understanding is that they’ve inferred a 3.5 cm change due to thermal expansion. So it’s an estimate based on indirect measurements.’
That’s exactly what I thought. It’s a number that, by its very nature, cannot possibly be verified by any form of existing measurement. The accuracy to do so simply doesn’t exist. So it’s stated as if it’s a fact despite the inability to disprove it.
‘Tom Judd
BTW: Why, exactly do they use joules?’
‘Brandon Gates
It’s difficult to get to W/m^2 without them. But if you insist, here’s the 0-2000m pentadal mean temperature anomaly, with error bars:’
So this graph shows us ocean water temperatures to 0.1 degree accuracy (with essentially no error bars in the current context) down to 2,000 meters. They can really measure that, eh? Is that perhaps the reason they really use joules. Moreover, as we know a joule doesn’t represent temperature but, instead, a unit of energy. With an ocean to atmosphere density differential of about 1,000:1 would those joules (used to represent a 0.1 degree temperature anomaly) then translate into a 100 degree atmospheric temperature increase if that ever so sneaky heat, hiding out in the ocean depths, managed to re-release itself to the atmosphere? Of course not. But it sure sounds like a lot of potential energy, doesn’t it? All from an unmeasurable tenth of a degree.
Funny how when ARGO was first beginning it was showing cooling and after that was “corrected” they now show warming. SHOCKER I tell ya. 3500+/- floats attempting to cover 129 MILLION sq miles of ocean and none the polar regions. Oh and they’re not tethered. Nice sciency project but it ain’t soup yet
Tom J,
Avagadro’s number: 6.02214129 x 10^23 (molecules/mole)
Please count out exactly 1 mole of C12 atoms and verify for me that the resulting pile masses exactly 12 grams.
You’re running the same, tired and boring script that people who have an ideological conflict with evolution or the Big Bang do when they “debate” the empirical evidence supporting each theory.
Now you’re back to speculating about something which you cannot “prove”. By your own stated standards you should not be doing this.
As you say, of course not. But a warmer heat sink has less cooling potential. The oceans are not isothermal by depth:
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/Glossary_Climate/images/ocean_temp_profile.gif
And not isothermal by latitude:
http://xtide.ldeo.columbia.edu/mpa/Clim-Wat/Climate/slides/surfacetemps.gif
On geologic time scales, the ratio of atmosphere to ocean temperature is more like 5:1, very close to the water/dry atmosphere (sea level) specific heat capacity ratio of 4:1. Surface temperatures would be far more seasonally volatile without their attenuating influence and zonally extreme without the transport of heat from the tropics to the poles. But they’re not unlimited reservoirs. One needs to do a lot more than toss out basic definitions of joules coupled with vague references to heat inertia to have a cogent argument here.
Having some supporting observations helps too, but … well … you’ve sort of nuked that option for yourself.
Brandon, it’s Avogadro’s number, not Avagadro’s number.
[What is the mass of 0.6023 x 10^24 avocadros? .mod]
And don’t accuse me of rejecting evolution or the Big Bang theory.
Or of believing the moon landings were actually staged in a film studio.
Tom J,
Thank you, I never could spell it correctly … memorizing the number to 6 decimal places overflowed the buffers I guess.
Touchy touchy. “Maybe” you should lay of statements like …
No wonder these people (admittedly a fast and loose definition) use numbers with astronomical implications.
… because it’s just the sort of thing people who go around asking “If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” also say. By the way, how’s the mass estimate on that 1 mole of carbon-12 going? Finish that one, and you can do Millikan’s oil drop experiment for us. After that, what … ooh, how about a classic two-slit experiment? Particles which are really waves interfering with themselves? Nonsense!
For the final exam, a theme paper: How to Find the Higgs’ Boson in Your Spare Time from the Comfort of Your Own Garage.
Its the Avogadro constant that relates the amount of a substance (units mole) to the number of molecules (or atoms). It has units of per mole and was named after rather than suggest by Avogadro. I’m not nit picking, Brandon, but the reason that you remembered only to the 6th decimal place instead of 8 is because it is being more accurately measured (until they decide to define it as 6.022e23). There has been a huge improvement of the years, not to mention that the original Faraday constant was cocked up and corrected because nobody listens to what The Science says.
While you can’t pick out a mole of C12, there are many different experiments that have confirmed the value to fewer decimal places.
Robert B,
No, go ahead and nit-pick … I’m definitely not on my best behavior today. Truthfully, I actually can’t even remember to how many decimal places I knew it … that was 1987-1992 give or take a few years.
That’s more or less the light I’m attempting to share with Tom J. I brought up Millikan for a similar reason … well here, I’ll let Feynmann tell the story:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn’t they discover the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that…
There’s no way such things are NOT happening in ANY non-trivial bleeding-edge research right now, and that very much includes any and everything to do with climate. My point is that it’s a crappy, lazy method of attacking a scientific finding much less sweepingly condemning an entire field … and I’m of the opinion that those who engage in it frequently are saying far more about their own confirmation biases than those of the people whose research they dispute.
Brandon, you put up a plot of the heat content back until 1960 despite Argo only being deployed (fully) since 2007. The Argo data was corrected from showing an even smaller trend than 1/10th of a degree per decade for a decade. Your plot of heat content going back to 1960 hides how big a call it is to claim that the oceans are warming. If sea -level rise is then calculated from this, it is far from settled.
Now compare that to the much more obvious data such as current movements. If that were based on the Argo floats popping up only metres from their position on previous dives, you would describe any claims about the shifting of the Gulf Stream as bollocks.
Its childish to go on about how come it works for one thing and not the other.
Robert B,
The salient point about ARGO is: why is Anthony touting it as actual measurements (his emphasis) if the data are bogus? Here’s the quote in full context, again:
From the “we told you so yesterday” and the “settled science” department. This study was released in 2010, and they used actual measurements, rather than proxy data and reconstructions like Mann did. Gee, what a concept!
Did he or anyone actually bother to go read Willis (2010)?
[22] Based on coupled climate model runs, Knight et al. [2005] suggested a connection between surface temperature of the North Atlantic and AMOC strength. Despite uncertainty in the early part of the 16-year record, the increase in AMOC strength during the 1990s is consistent with decadal warming in the North Atlantic relative to the South Atlantic during the 1980s and 1990s. The decadal variations in AMOC strength may also be consistent with decadal changes in the temperature and salinity of the subpolar gyre [Sarafanov et al. 2008; Boyer et al., 2007; Curry and Mauritzen, 2005] but further work is needed to determine the dynamical link between these property changes and their relation to changes in the AMOC [Biastoch et al., 2008].
I’m thinking … probably not.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/03/whats-going-on-in-the-north-atlantic/?wpmp_tp=1#sthash.h9pYiyL8.dpuf
[Response: We are talking about the AMOC here, not the western boundary current which indeed is largely wind-driven, and more specifically about the thermohaline driven part of the AMOC. Its variations are controlled by density changes in high latitudes and not from the tropics. In paleoclimate, I would say it is well established by now that things like the Younger Dryas event or the climatic response to Heinrich events are driven by high-latitude buoyancy (mainly freshwater) forcing. Fans of the tropics as climate driver have tried but in my view failed to come up with alternative explanations for these events. -stefan]
One thing I learned how to do as a child is to read: “Here we present multiple lines of evidence suggesting that this cooling may be due to a reduction in the AMOC over the twentieth century and particularly after 1970. Since 1990 the AMOC seems to have partly recovered.”
Here’s a pretty picture from Rahmstorf et al. (2015) for the reading-impaired adults in the room:
On the off chance reading skills suddenly improve: Since 1990 the AMOC seems to have partly recovered.”
Brandon Gates.
Argo position and drift is very different and very simple to ascertain compared to measuring the mass of the ocean to a T change. Argo is relatively few measurements verses the vast size of the oceans. You are aware that even without considering the error bars in the Argo measurements, the small warming is, like the atmosphere, considerably less then the climate models predicted.
Also, I would be curious if you know, but is their an adjustment made to the Argo measurements due to their shifting geographical location? Should there be?
That reminds me, did Mann when estimating past warmth from tree rings, account for the reduced CO2 during that time frame?
Brandon, did you have a bad day? No need to shout.
David A,
That’s not immediately obvious. ARGO floats spend most of their time hibernating at 1,000 m … well here, they have a pretty picture of the full cycle with all the particulars:
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/operation_park_profile.jpg
So basically they’re at 1,000 m 90% of the time. Not the best place to be getting a read on surface currents, which is what you guys thing the “falsification” is all about. It’s a moot point, becuase just above your post I requoted the falsification of the “falsification”: “Here we present multiple lines of evidence suggesting that this cooling may be due to a reduction in the AMOC over the twentieth century and particularly after 1970. Since 1990 the AMOC seems to have partly recovered.”
http://www.quickmeme.com/img/df/df9514222dd43aa54f08b37483f214921d2722d3362b3ca5be2075c726d12018.jpg
Say “what” again. Sheesh. Mention “model” or “Mann” on this blog and the collective IQ drops to the negatives, something I really would not have thought possibe.
How many floats does it take, David? Do we need to replace the entire ocean with thermometers? How much are you willing to spend to do this according to your standards?
Make up your mind already. Do you trust the data or not? How do you know that the models are wrong if there are no good data to check them? How much did they blow it by?
If it’s all fake, why don’t the models agree with the “observations”?
Oh look, a squirrel! That reminds me, did Willie “The Sun is Big” Soon choose the most up to date TSI reconstruction in his 2005 paper?
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005GL023429/full
Or did he simply pick the one which gave him the best fit to the (obviously falsified, or is it? Will you guys EVER decide?) surface temperature record?
By the way, the lead author on the paper in question — you know, the one which talks about the AMOC from 2015, not NH temperature reconstructions 1998 — is Stefan Rahmstorf, not Michael E. Mann. Your obsessions obvoiusly wreak havoc with your literacy skills.
Well I had quite a lovely day, thank-you. How was yours?
Well Brandon, your post to me is full of straw man, attributing to me a multitude of assumptions that someone somewhere on a WUWT post said.
Did Mann use the Argo floats for his assertions? A simple question.
Did he use proxies? Another simple question.
Are Mann methods more accurate then the disparate direct methods in previous studies?
What proxies does Mann use?
Is the modeled mean of the IPCC atmospheric projections, more accurate then the observations?
When the Argo floats surface, which they do regularly, do we know their geographic location accurately. (Well yes we do)
Does this give us a fairly accurate idea of where they were between surfacing? (Why yes it does.)
Did I ever say we know exactly where the floats are all the time? (As I did not your winded assertions were not relevant. Did I assert that we know their location more accurately and with greater precision then we know the entire oceans GAT. Why yes I did, and you have provided zero evidence that this is not logically true, and so your worded response and graphics explain the obvious, is irrelevant.
Does Argo measure some areas of the ocean more accurately then others? (Why yes they do)
How are disparate geographic locations of all Argo floats considered each time, when estimating the thermostatic rise? (This is a very complicated thing to do BTW)
You ask, How do we know how close the OH model estimates are, if our observations are not accurate. (We don’t and climate skeptics have repeatedly said this, but even assuming they are, they still fall well below what the models predicted.
You ask, How do we know the models are not correct, if the observations are so poor. ( We don[t, and I never said we did. Skeptics just assert that the science does not support the CAGW concerns.)
You see Brandon, you are all mixed up. CAGW is a post normal science You have admitted to not studying the political aspect of CAGW. You have indicated you have not read “Blue Planet in Green Shackles”. or studied the political motivations of the United Nation member promoting IPCC summaries, which misrepresent what the IPCC actually says. You have admitted not studying the IPCC use of non peer reviewed literature. You admitted to me you have not read the NIPCC reports in any detail, and are not aware of much that they include, which the IPCC does not.
So Brandon, why do I think you are mixed up. Because instead of saying, “hey guys, I am a bit frustrated with all the instant criticism by many posters of some paper, before those poster have read the paper at all, what up with that?”. (BTW this frustrates me as well) you instead mock and berate the entire blog, and then you ignore the cogent points, or argue against them with broad and not relevant generalities, often missing entirely the message they were conveying.
I understand them, although I wish the comments were often separated from political to science, but hey
the CAGW crowd is what corrupted the science into the post normal mess it is today. Many of these folk have studied all the many legitimate and easily verifiable “Gates” which have plagued the CAGW post normal movement, and so such responses are often simple protests, using a disrespect that is WELL earned by the post normal science of CAGW. As such the have an understandable distrust of those who deserve to be distrusted. And once again they are correct. This paper has been legitimately criticized by many scientists for very good reasons. Mann well deserves the ridicule he receives. (No, I will not get into the hundreds f pages of legitimate criticism of his “science”) If you read them and studied them as an honest broker, you would not laments so much the ready ridicule of some posters.
You are mixed up by falling to address the many valid points made, or by addressing them in broad general terms For instance, when I criticized how the IPCC uses their modeled mean GAT forecasts as the basis for discussing future CAGW harms, instead of the VERY few models closest to the observations, you several times failed to address that, and instead went into multiple paragraph links describing how all models are wrong, something I never disputed and not at all relevant to my point.
So Brandon you misconstrue what other are saying, why they are saying it, and rarely if ever address the valid criticisms except to make non relevant generalities, and you quote sections out of context to what was written that interprets those statements. When you do give relevant and effective counterpoints, it is almost always to a point most educated skeptics would agree with, and not relevant to the valid criticisms.
BTW Brandon the RAPID study is seafloor to surface tethered buoys measuring T, salinity, and current velocity, not related to Argo, and being tethered, much better then the floating Argo “floats”.
.
You’re correct, Brandon, that I haven’t spent much time reading this but it was enough to read the heading to the paper – Exceptional twentieth century slowdown…..
Previous work, using measurements from a probe towed behind a boat, showed that the changes reported were far from exceptional. So if actual measurements show much larger changes, then the plot above from guesses based on guesses is probably wishful thinking.
Interesting. Almost objected. Well, if you define IQ as normally distributed with average 100 SD 15, you need a 7-sigma stupid to reach -5, right? And there would not be anyone in the world that stupid? I just can’t do the maths now, sorry.
It’s just that the whole test scheme (and thus definition of IQ) fails long before. There is at least one person in 1000 who is completely unable to take part in an IQ test in a meaningful way.
Mann likely needed to use proxy data for the entire length of his data set because the proxy data didn’t match the current observations and he darn’t not splice it together. Were I a fly on the wall, I bet I would have learned that he tried it that way first, the rest of the team discovered his use of “Mike’s trick”, and vetoed it.
Just sayin.
NASA can likely expect a lawsuit from Mann any day now.
Sorry Anthony – I saw it pop up in a feed today from GWPF and never thought to check the date either … SG
Chris – the evidence accumation is growing is in this chart from the orig Mann & Rahmstorf post:
?w=720&h=470
A. Scott, as AW showed yesterday, Mann/Ramstorf figure 6 is tantamount to academic misconduct. First, it blatently misrepresented what the referenced underlying source paper concluded. Second, the underlying paper was proxy based, not observation. There is no ice mass obaervation prior to 1958. Third, fairly detailed observational evidence (four different methods) suggests Greenland lost almost no ice mass in the 1990’s, then about 170-200gt/year in the first decade of this century. See Zwally, J. Glaciology 57: 88-102 (2011). It has been accumulating again for the past 3 years at a rate now exceeding 200gt/yr per http://www.dmi.dk/en/groenland/ .
NASA defamed Mann by publishing a rebuttal 5 years before his.
LOL!
Maybe he’ll sue Hansen? That’d be fun to watch.
I’m curious as to how ‘melting glacial water is warm’. Compared to the Gulf Stream it hardly is and the Gulf Stream continues a round trip to Europe and back. The Labrador countercurrent the last I heard was not part of the Gulf Stream Circulation. Diving in the Islands of Vanuatu, we often came across ‘blurry’ water, which of course was fresh water coming out from springs. This water was not warm.
It isn’t warm. The issue is that it is fresh. Part of what drives AMOC around Greenland is sea ice formation, which exudes salt, causing very cold surface water to become briny, so denser, so sinking, thus helping draw warm tropical water north ( as in the Gulf Stream). That part is called the thermohaline circulation.
For the record – I accept responsibility for sending Anthony this dated article, although it is still relevant to the Mann et al discussion.
It was posted by the GWPF on Facebook today – and the link leads to this story on their site. It does state in the embedded text it was a 2010 article but the GWPF article date was 3/23/15. Again, however, the ultimate responsibility is mine.
http://www.thegwpf.com/reminder-nasa-study-finds-atlantic-conveyor-belt-not-slowing-2010/
Well done both you and Anthony for spotting it and posting it.
Many moons ago, when I first became aware that there was disagreement about Global warming as it was called back then, the alternative to man’s emissions as the likely cause was changes to ocean currents. It seems that after all that time effort and expense, little has changed.
Someone should do their homework. The increase in the AMOC after 1993 is specifically discussed in the Rahmstorf, Box et. al. 2015 paper and the Josh Willis 2010 paper is specifically cited as the source.
It’s been a long time since I read the book “perfect storm”, but I seem to recall that one trick a fishing boat captain could use to escape heavy seas, was to exit the warm waters of the Gulf Stream and head into the cooler and denser waters nearby, which cut down considerably on wave heights.
I think the water temperature is immaterial. One needs to escape a region in which the wind is blowing against the current, which is what leads to large waves. A nor’easter blowing into the Gulf Stream is what one avoids.
This was in the North Atlantic, off the Grand Banks.
Not that I presume to know what that means.
Although I found this on Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Banks_of_Newfoundland
Nice depiction of the currents at that location though.
UK, I have sailed that area. In any intense storm, waves get very high (I encountered 15 feet just crossing Lake Michigan once in a 36 foot sailboat). Now that is not so much a problem if the crest/trough spacing is large. The Michigan bathtub effect makes the spacing small due to shore reflections. We were taking 3 feet of bluewater over the bow in that Michigan crossing for over 8 hours. Since the 36 foot boat was navigating basically directly across them on about a 30 foot spacing. Will always bury the bow.
In the perfect storm, what got them was two things. First, the fishing boat had been modified and was topheavy (liable to capsize). Never a good idea; sailboats have heavy keels yet can still be rolled 360 in the wrong conditions. Second, they were doing okay until back over the Grand Banks trying to get to land to save the iced catch. The GB shoals both increase the wave height, and shorten the wave pitch. Both are just simple physics of energy conservation, but very fatal. They might have survived had they tried to head east instead of west and forget saving the iced catch. (Remember, their ice machine had broken down also, and they had taken on fuel and ice from a less foolhardy skipper heading to port on the storm’s advance warning. Darwin awards.)
I think I’ll go with generations of seafarers, but that’s just me.
I’ve got no dog in the fight.
The Argo floats are measuring oceanic parameters down to a depth of 2,000m (Wikipedia). However, the average depth of oceans is around 5,000m with the greatest depths being of the order of 11,000m. There also seems to be a lack of Argo floats in the Arctic ocean which also abuts Greenland. Are these profound gaps in our knowledge being mannhandled and papered over?.
With respect to AMOC, the RAPID program strung a series of tethered buoys across the entire Atlantic at 26N (roughly mid Florida). These sample water temp, salinity, and current flow from the ocean floor to the surface, measuring both warm surface northerly flow and the cold deep southerly flow. They show the seasonal acceleration driven by sea ice formation. They also show no net slowing over the past decade despite measurable Greenland ice mass loss from roughly 2000 to 2012′ with a reversal to accumulation since.
AMO anyone?
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/facts-about-the-amo/
Please correct me if I am wrong but wouldn’t Mann, if was actually doing proper research, have to reference relevant papers, and in particular this one since it is bang on subject. Back in the day, I was required to read a lot and do a good job looking into claims that refute my work. I sure there is dicression about the references at time but…this is kind of shocking.
I went to M Mann’s facebook page and his links to try and get his paper to see if he referenced the NASA work. The links are disappeared. Anyone know?
discretion… sorry
the new paper actually does specifically cite the 2010 Josh Willis paper and discuss the AMOC increase since 1993
As much as I find it creditable that Mann’s paper has been
rubbishedrefuted by so many worthies, I shall only be really happy when stories such as this in the UK’s Daily Mail are countered in equal measure by these scholarly refutations (notwithstanding what ‘ichi’ and ATTP – if he ever posts here – have to say about it).Oops, “slowing down” was wrong, so that boat doesn’t float. Its time for the alternative:
According to NASA it may even be speeding up [slightly]. OH NO! THE GULF STREAM IS SPEEDING UP, ALL DUE TO HUMAN ACTIVITY EMISSIONS OF CO2. WE MUST STOP CO2 EMISSIONS IMMEDIATELY OR IT WILL ACCELERATE EVEN FURTHER AND LIFE ON THIS PLANET AS WE KNOW IT WILL END!
I am awaiting the call for action from Holdren due to this additional calamity resulting from fossil fuels, with such alarm being supported by “97%” of climate scientists who agree with anything Holdren says [according to Holdren].