Pielke Sr: No Climate Heating In “The Pipeline”

Will it be long before the Hockey Team works its statistical magic and discovers that the oceans are actually warming dramatically?

Crosspatch
Deep ocean temperature history,
Nobody seems to know, but below the thermocline the temperature is somewhere between 2 and 4 degrees even in the tropics, the deep ocean constitutes 90 % of the ocean”s water. Water has maximum density at 4 degrees so at the poles sinks, supposedly driving the ocean currents. The ocean is a cold sink not a heat sink. when the sun heats the surface water it stays on the surface till it cools down ?
How much energy would be needed to raise the deep ocean temperature even .1 of a degree .
70% of earth surface average depth 3,300 meters total volume 1.359 billion cubic meters a hell of a lot of energy, but how do you get to heat the deep ocean ?

Mary
That is the worst piece of deduction I’ve seen in a long time.
Influences on sea level (depending on how and where it is measured) include:
Land movement, atmospheric pressure, temperature (local and long term), sea bottom profile.
If I read you correctly, sorry if I didn’t, you are saying :
sea level rise = temp rise ergo global temp rise ergo heat in the pipeline !!

@Mary Hinge (02:07:31)
That graph can be *interpreted* as showing (virtually) no sea-level rise since 2005 or 2005. You need to ignore the straight black line that they misleadingly draw though the last few years.
Of course, there is so much noise in the data, that the sea rise could still be there, so we will only really know after waiting a few more years. But it does seem strange that this co-indices with flat air temperatures (for a decade), and flat sea temperatures (since 2003)…

A good proxy of sea water temperature is mean sea level, higher sea temperatures will result in thermal expansion.
If sea levels decline for 2 or 3 years, does that mean that the whole global warming scare has been falsified? Or will the alarmists come up with some reason why such a decline is “consistent with” their hypothesis?

It would be helpful to reclassify elements back to their historical names so that we can observe clearly what is happening and not create a situation that is similar to ‘leading the witness’. The term ‘global warming gas’ is not helpful as certain gases are picked out as having the ability to warm, even though all gases can be warmed. The term ‘global warming gas’ has the potential to block understanding of the world around us. In particular water vapour is classified as a ‘Global Warming Gas’ which is a loaded term, when it should just be called Water Vapour. Water vapour has certain properties, and those include the ability to cool as well as heat. If this is not the case then the nearly 800 million road vehicles that use water cooled engines must be doing something wrong.
My next gripe is albido. The oceans are considered dark and therefore heat absorbing. The oceans look dark but are not dark in the same way as black paint. They reflect a lot of light, perhaps most of it, because very little light gets very far. It does not take long to get to pitch black when descending in the ocean. Compare that to the atmosphere where light will make it through to the surface even with the thickest clouds. I can also attest to the reflective qualities of the Oceans having observed the calluses on two individual’s eyes who have spent several months each year sailing in the Bahamas over the last 30 years. Look at it another way. Imagine shining a light directly into a cave and it continued to look dark. Would that be odd?
I am not a sceptic of the fact we may be changing the environment. I am a sceptic of the single idea that CO2 is driving up temperatures and nothing else matters. As long as we deal with CO2 we can carry on clearing all the forests (given the same albido as towns), carry on overfishing, etc etc.
I overheard one sentence on the radio to do with eco friendly fridges “…CO2 is a natural refrigerant”
And ‘Swampy’ said; ”I don’t care about the numbers it’s the symbolism”.

There seems to be some confusion in the top article on this subject. Inspection of the Urban and Keller (U-K) paper indicates that the conclusions drawn in the top post are incorrect.
ONE: U-K are addressing something quite specific, namely the long tail at the eigh end in possible climate sensitivities when analyses are constrained by observational evidence. Thus while a whole load of analyses support a “short tem” (decades-centuries) climate sensitivity near 3 oC of warming per doubling of atmospheric CO2, it’s difficult categorically to rule out significant likelihoods of values that are quite high (e.g. greater than 5-6 oC) based on observational evidence, largely due to uncertainties in the aerosolic contributions and especially the timescale(s) of the ocean response.
What S-K indicate is that in the so-far notional situation that we ignore the aerosolic uncertainties and consider a “pure” system of Earth surface temperature and ocean heat content, reliably known, that a combination of the two analyses can reduce uncertainty in the tail at the high end of climate sensitivities.
S-K don’t address the climate sensitivity in terms of assessing likely values and in fact use the evidence-based data (likely climate sensitivity near 3 oC) to model their analysis.
TWO- Nothing in S-K (or Pielke’s) analysis indicates that there isn’t warming “in the pipeline”. That’s an essential fact of life in a world that is warming via a increase in external forcing (solar/greenhouse). The question is how much warming is “in the pipeline”. S-K indicate that this can be narrowed down according to their model. But they certainly don’t show, state, infer or imply that there isn’t warming “in the pipeline”.
THREE-It’s worth pointing out that “warming in the pipeline” isn’t a result of heat stored in the oceans per se, although the storage of heat in the ocean is an integral part of the inertia with respect to the Earth’s surface temperature change under enhanced forcing. The “warming in the pipeline” is more easily understood in relation to the ability of the oceans to cool the Earth’s surface (or to resist surface warming), until such a time that the oceans themselves come towards equilibrium with the enhanced forcing.
So Pielke’s notion of heat stored in the ocean and “subsequently released into the atmosphere” isn’t a very helpful one….The essential question is the rate at which the oceans come towards equilibrium with forcings. If it’s fast, the climate senstivity is low…if slow the climate sensitivity is high. That’s the question that U-K are addressing with their modeling…

anna v (03:43:52) It seems logical to me that there would be an effect from the earth’s internal heat. From the numbers in my CRC handbook, it only works out to .082 W/m2, not much compared to the sun.

anna v (03:43:52) :

In my simple physicist mind the heat source (magma) must be approximately spherically distributed, thus the rock at the bottom of the ocean should have the above temperature 45 to 50 Cm maybe even more. That is a lot of heat, much more than the atmosphere heating the water on top ( it is seldom 45C). And hot water rises.
Just curious if anybody knows.
Anna, read about Picard and his bathyscaph “Trieste” or google for them
or other deep see projects. It’s damn freaking cold down there, with the exception of a subsurface volcano here or there

Re: anna v (03:43:52) :
An average geothermal gradient for the Earths Crust is about 25 degrees C per Km of depth, however it varies strongly depending on the type of Crust.
For example, the crust under the Oceans is very different to that under the Continents. Typical Continental crust is about 200 km thick, relatively low in density and relatively low in thermal conductivity whereas Oceanic crust can be as thin as 100 km thick, much denser and higher in thermal conductivity. The total heat loss from the Mantle through the Earths crust is though to be about 42×10^12 W, of which 70% is through the deep oceanic crust (see http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1980/RG018i001p00269.shtml)
In the oceans, you then have the additional factor of hydrothermal vents which occur along the mid-ocean ridges. These are the locations where new oceanic crust is being formed – the crust is very thin here (on the order of a few Kms) and therefore the 600C+ Mantle is much closer to the ocean/crust boundary. Water temperatures around these hydrothermal vents has often been recorded in the 300 to 400C range. These mid-ocean ridges are a semi-permanent feature through geological time and probably account for about 90% of the heat loss through the Oceanic crust.
With all of this in mind – there is almost certainly a Mantle heat loss component in the temperature of the worlds oceans. How does that vary with time (e.g. tidal influences and chaotic dynamics within the Earths Mantle and Core)? We don’t know. That science is still in its infancy.