Pielke Sr: No Climate Heating In “The Pipeline”

Does anyone have data on seawater temperature on the ocean floor? That would, I think give the best overall indication of general climate change over time and there are no Urban Heat Island or poor siting issues involved. An array of temperature sensors that measure the temperature of the ocean at 2 miles and deeper depth would, I think, provide better data. It would be quite stable over time and trends should pop right out of the data.

Anybody knows what just happened to CA? Down again in the middle of a very interesting debate…

crosspatch (00:08:43) :
A good proxy of sea water temperature is mean sea level, higher sea temperatures will result in thermal expansion. Of course there are other factors especially melting glaciers and land ice sheets. These are also of course indicators of increasing temperatures. Check out the updated sea level graphs below
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
I have used the home page link so you can play with the adjustments your self, but whichever way you play it the sea level is rising, therefore sea temperatures are rising and/or glaciers and land ice sheets are melting.

Mary Hinge and Crosspatch
A plot of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (a well documented internal mode of variability in the Atlantic Ocean, thought to be related to changes in the Thermohaline circulation and strongly correlated to such things as Hurricane Activity in the Atlantic Basin) since the late 1800’s (ocean surface temperatures recorded by ships, bouys and more recently Satellite) shown here…
http://digitaldiatribes.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/amoraw200811.jpg
…shows that the Satellite recorded rise in sea-level (and ocean surface temperature) since 1994 is entirelly consistent with this natural mode of climate variability
For background on the AMO – the paper by Enfield is a good summary http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/docs/enfield/enfield_etal2001.pdf

I meant to say “since 2005 or 2006”.

I have a question on ocean temperature.
I know that on the land the deeper one digs the higher the temperature ( magma effect)
http://www.bullion.org.za/Education/Gold.htm
(to chilled water used to cool down air in the mine’s depths where rock temperatures can be as high as 45’C);
…..
Virgin rock temperatures higher than 52°C have been recorded in South African gold mines
…..
On average, gold in South African mines, is found in only 5.1 parts per million from rock extracted at depths of up to 3.5 kilometres below surface
Now the ocean bottoms are about 4 km down from the surface, so , my question is:
is all that heat taken into account when modeling/calculating oceans?
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.

@Mary Hinge
You write: “A good proxy of sea water temperature is mean sea level, higher sea temperatures will result in thermal expansion”
The best measurement for ocean temperature is… ocean temperature, just as referred to in the article.
Im not saying that sea levels are 100% useless in this context, but its a bit more complex:
1) As you say there are meltings of ice.
2) Measurement precision and measurement methods and adjustings.
3) The fact – as Lindsay indicates above that water has highes density at 4 degrees C. This last fact is much more important than one might think because a HUGE fraction of the oceans water has temperatures below 4 degrees:
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/sage/oceanography/lesson4/images/sm_temperature_depth.jpg
For this volumen, any heating will have the opposite effect: A shrinking volume.
And the volume of ocean water around 4 degrees will hardly be affected by a little heat change.
Therefore the sea-level proxy is way too complex for temperature use.
But yes, if we there was no ocean temperature measurements, one might use it somehow.
@all…
Another thing: Why do we still not have 100% free access to the ARGO data???
Is there a very good explanation howcome we after 6 years still are not allowed to see these data?? Should not this be changed?

And another thing. I don’t understand how we would be a lot colder without CO2. The min/max temp records are -50/+50. Meanwhile up on the ISS they have to deal with -150/+120. We obviously live on a fantastic air conditioned planet.

Mary Hinge (02:07:31) :
crosspatch (00:08:43) :
A good proxy of sea water temperature is mean sea level, higher sea temperatures will result in thermal expansion. Of course there are other factors especially melting glaciers and land ice sheets. These are also of course indicators of increasing temperatures. Check out the updated sea level graphs below
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
I have used the home page link so you can play with the adjustments your self, but whichever way you play it the sea level is rising, therefore sea temperatures are rising and/or glaciers and land ice sheets are melting.
Mary Hinge,
New posting, same conclusions.
Melting glaciers, melting and land ice sheets, rising temperatures!
Have a look at this Dutch Study which presents “real historic data” and know that since 2005 until today no accelerated rise in sea level has occurred.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=61
This is the stuff which is put under the carpet because it’s to “inconvenient” for certain religious agenda’s.

Sea level in Denmark
http://www.dmi.dk/dmi/ebovandstand1.gif

anna v (03:43:52)
I was able to visit Vaal Reefs many years ago and experienced that heat.
I think it is the rock density of the land being much less than the basalt under the sea that prevents the seas heating from the bottom up. I think there is more deep water heating from the mid-ocean ridges. Question is, how much?
Please add my question to anna’s.

Steve Keohane (05:03:20) :
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.
I am sorry, I am not familiar with a CRC handbook. Could you be a bit more clear? Is that for the ocean bottom at 50C? sounds too small to me. I would spend more watts to bring my kitchen hot plate to such a temperature. Maybe I should experiment with the microwave.

Anna,
The basalt at the bottom of the Ocean is denser than the continental crust. I am not sure (have not checked, but should be easy to do) what is the thermal conductivity for it, but considering that it conducts heat from Earth’s mantle to the bottom of the Ocean (which, I assume, removes it quickly) a gradient of temperature should appear on it so that the closer to the Ocean (going up from Earth’s mantle) the lower the temperature of the rock.
IOW, If the thermal conductivity is low enough, heath will be removed from the bottom of the Ocean and the temperature at the bottom will the same as the Ocean’s bottom, i.e., 2-4 C and not 55 C.

Another convenient lie exposed.
Lemme guess the reaction: “We’ve never said there was heat still in the pipeline…”

I’ve looked at a lot of station data on “Sea Levels Online” (NOAA Tides and Currents). Almost all data show a linear trend with no apparent expansion effect from “stored heat”. If anything, a majority of stations show no appreciable (relative) sea level rise in the last 30 years.

Atolls provide good evidence of either a substantially rising sea or a sinking mountain. One of the argument for AGW is that islands are being inundated with a rising sea. Let’s look at the evidence. Certain kinds of corals only grow if sunlight can reach them. Remains of this same kind of coral will occur if it becomes too deep and sunlight no longer graces it’s branches. Drill into any atoll and you find 100’s and 1000’s of feet of coral fossil. Since sea level rise or fall can be easily determined by many pieces of evidence, the prevailing theory of atoll formation is that land sinks, regardless of what the sea level does. This then becomes a very good “tree ring” proxy of both sea level rise and fall and plate tectonics. The overwhelming evidence is that even taking into consideration ice ages, islands sink on their own, paying no attention what soever to sea level. I just thought I would mention this in case we get a post that says that volcanic islands are being devastated by rising sea levels. It was Darwin who first posited this theory. He wasn’t deemed correct until the 1950’s. The consensus was the other way around, that coral reefs and atolls formed around stable underwater mountain tops and that sea level changes caused coral to die or build. Good theory till the shear amount of the depth of coral fossil was discovered with drill cores.

Why are “rising” sea levels proof of “rising” temperatures? All that is proof of is that current temperatures are warm enough to melt glaciers. They don’t have to be warmer, and if they were would that affect the rate of melting considering the diminishing amount of glacial ice?

Mary, the rise is sea level (after adjustment for changes in the land) has two component, an increase in volume from melting glaciers and an increase in volume from heat expansion. Since the Argo system has been deployed to measure the top 3000 meters of ocean, there has been no heat expansion (the steric component).
The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88520025
Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.
This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.
In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans. “There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant,” Willis says.

“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 V
“I think there is more deep water heating from the mid-ocean ridges. Question is, how much?”- Richard111
NOAA UNDERSTANDS and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the DEPTHS OF THE OCEAN to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.
Just ask NOAA. Didn’t you know the science is settled?

OT, but there are a couple of tiny spotlets on the sun, slightly left of, and above dead center. Cycle 23 spots?
REPLY: At that latitude, cycle 23 for sure. – Anthony

NPR seems worried Americans might balk at the idea of directing economic stimulus money to NASA and NOAA; explains why it is so very important:
Aging Satellites Threaten Climate Research Future
The U.S. satellites that monitor climate change are aging, and replacements are years away, thanks to more than a decade of budget cuts and squabbling about which federal agency should run the climate satellite program.
Scientists say this means the United States will probably have to get along without some critical eyes in the sky at precisely the time it’s making multibillion-dollar decisions about how to respond to climate change
…
“So you end up with two agencies, who are the primary climate agencies, having climate as the third priority,” Wielicki says. “So how are you going to get climate done? And the answer is, you’re not.”
To address the organizational problem, Jane Lubchenco — President Obama’s pick to run NOAA — plans to create a National Climate Service.
And to help with the money problem, the president’s stimulus package includes hundreds of millions of dollars for climate research, including new satellites.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101336630
Isn’t it amazing that they have been able to accurately model the future climate of the world without all the necessary tools?

DB2 (06:45:55) :

foinavon wrote: Nothing in S-K (or Pielke’s) analysis indicates that there isn’t warming “in the pipeline”.
As I read it, Pielke’s point is that there is no ‘pipeline’ to store the heat. The joules are either in the earth’s system or they’re not.
The main place for the heat to be is, of course, the ocean. Since the ocean’s heat content hasn’t changed over the last 5-6 years neither has the earth’s temperature.

I don’t disagree with you DB2. It’s the age-old problem of addressing an analogy too literally, and then getting mired in non-arguments over semantics! The warming “in the pipeline” that results from a response to an external forcing (solar/greenhouse) is not a consequence of heat stored in a “pipeline”, since as you say, there isn’t really a “pipeline” at all.
The warming “in the pipeline” relates to the fact that an enhanced forcing produces a response that takes some time to achieve equilibrium. In this case the slow equilibration time relates to the massive ocean sink, and the fact that the full response of an enhanced forcing will only be realized once the oceans themselves come towards equilibrium with the forcing. It would be more precise to replace “in the pipeline” with “still to come due to the slow equilibration times of various elements of the climate system”.
That issue is what the Urban-Keller modeling paper addresses.
The fact/observation that the ocean heat content hasn’t changed over the last 5-6 years is a different issue altogether, and somewhat of a red-herring in consideration of the transient/equilibrium responses to enhanced forcing.

On a much less technical note RE: oceans …
For every person on earth there are 230,000,000 tonnes of ocean water. A family of four “owns” almost one billion tonnes of ocean water. No matter how much humans are accused of affecting climate, I simply cannot accept that a family with two cars, a bungalow (etc etc) can have any affect whatsoever on “their allotment” of ocean water compared to the sun. That’s a lot of water.
It is arrogant of us (the warmers) to think we are more influential than the sun and the masses of oceans. Utter nonsense.
(One day I am going to write an essay about a hypothetical family on an island in a salt lake that measures 10 km by 10 km by 10 m deep … one day. ☺)
Clive
From the frozen Great Plains of Canada
(Where is will be 10C° colder than average for the next few days…bah )

It’s more the heat capacity (amount of heat per mass that the solid rock can “hold” compared to same mass of water)
+
the heat transfer ability (of a large mass of “solid” rock firmly fixed above the molten magma below the continental crust vs ocean floor). Include in this factor relative thicknesses of ocean floor vs continental masses. Rock compared this way acts more like an insulator than a conductor, so the internal temperature below a column of rock will be hotter than below an equal column of water. (Go an equal depth below the water-rock interface, and temperatures start rising again.)
+
the heat transfer motion of continental rock (fixed mass vs mobile water) once heated. This seems like the above, but consider that as soon as any mass of water is heated, it moves away from the heat source by convection and current floor. The heated mass is replaced immediately by cold water. Therefore (even very close tot he ocean floor rifts, ocean water temperatures are very low. Continental rock, on the other hand, if heated, stays on top of the lower magma for millions of years – moving away only by continental drift. So, the continental rock will be hotter.
-> this creates a virtual “insulation layer” above the magma under continents – which is where we place deep mines, which is where we notice and measure the hotter temperatures.
—
Earth’s core is being heated (continuously, but at ever decreasing rates) by radioactive decay and by the initial compression of the original plasma clouds that formed the planets.
There is much questioning about why Jupiter is “hotter” than it is supposed to be by these same “radiative balance” calculations – which are the same (coincidently also wrong?) IR balance calculations that begin the AGW greenhouse programs that Hansen is using. Some think Jupiter is “trying” to create a fusion reactor at its core from compressing H2 together – but it doesn’t seem to be big enough to do that either. If Jupiter were larger? Yes, fusion becomes possible – even probable.

Considering what Earth is made of; Molten ‘mantle’ and core covered with a relatively thin ‘crust’, I’m often surprised it isn’t a lot warmer in the deep oceans. Never mind all the talk of atmospheric ‘warming’.
http://chianti.geol.ucl.ac.uk/~dario/resint.htm

The benthic ocean is the world’s great climate flywheel. Changes in salinity caused by ice melt in the GIUK can affect North Atlantic Deep Water, which sinks and flows south along the bottom towards the equator. Eventually it emerges at the surface as coastal upwellings in various places. But this water circulation cycle operates in terms of centuries, not years or decades. It is a very LONG thermal pipeline.
See
http://radiocarbon.ldeo.columbia.edu/research/deepwater.htm

The key statement within the “key statement” of Urban and Keller’s paper is, I think, this: “Ocean heat observations are compatible with high sensitivities if there is substantial surface warming which is penetrating poorly into the oceans”. This implies that if the oceans happen to be mixing a bit better at the moment then we should expect a buffering of atmospheric temperature increases. Any thoughts on this?

“The warming “in the pipeline” relates to the fact that an enhanced forcing produces a response that takes some time to achieve equilibrium. In this case the slow equilibration time relates to the massive ocean sink, and the fact that the full response of an enhanced forcing will only be realized once the oceans themselves come towards equilibrium with the forcing.”
Hmmm… I thought “in the pipeline” referred to the hidden heat. Maybe all that extra heat dropped through the bottom of the ocean and into earth’s core.
It sounds like our Canadian friends would like to find some of it about now.

Could undersea volcanic activity account for previous ice ages due to heating of the oceans, releasing greenhouse gases etc?

Am i the only one expecting some sort of “adjustment”, to the arctic ice data seen here? http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic

Do they teach classes in school these days on how to write the kind of gobbledegook that passes for the abstract of this paper.
The authors should enter this one for the Bulwer-Lytton Prize for garbage writing.
But back to the science. It seems to be a pillar of modern climatology that the oceans are a giant heat sink that continuously soaks up energy and stores it somewhere. And so far, ocean diving buoy studies can’t seem to find any of this stored energy. Would that we could access some of it and make use of it in industry.
Last time I checked, the earth’s core temperature was reputed to be something in the range of maybe 10,000 K; they don’t really know for sure.
So I’ll peg it at 5775-17,320K using the obligatory 3:1 climate fudge factor.
In any case it is much hotter than any place in the oceans. Hence over climate timescales, one can surmise that the net flow of energy must be outwards towards space.
Apparently the ocean depths, remote from volcanism sit at around +3 deg C, and that has nothing much to do with the roughly 4 deg C temperature of maximum density of fresh water at standard pressure; since salt water of normal ocean salinity has no maximum density before it freezes.
So most of the ocean water is at around 3C and just the surface layers that are warmed by the sun, get warmer than that.
The solar energy that is incident and almost totally absorbed in the deep oceans (about 97%) propagates deepest at the highest irradiance wavelenghts of the solar spectrum, and goes less deep for shorter and longer wavelengths; in fact the ocean absorption curve looks just like the solar spectrum turned upside down.
Once those photons are absorbed in the ocean including some being taken up by ocean plants; seaweed and plankton for example, the rest heats up the local water, which therefore expands, since as I said above sea water has no temperature of maximum density, and it has a positive coefficient of expansion, so that sets up an upwards convectional flow, that tends to return those warmed waters back to the surface, while at the same time conducting energy in every direction, including down and up, and sideways.
It is not a particularly fast process, but neither is stalagmite formation in dripping limestone caves.
Infra-red radiation returned from the atmosphere, on the other hand, is absorbed in the top ten microns or so of the ocean surface and promotes quite prompt evaporation from the surface, which cools that surface layer, allowing the slowly rising convective layers to move in and displace the surface waters.
Now I don’t have any idea what rates these various flows have, but I don’t see any simple thermal mechanism for pumping thermal energy from the surface into the deep to store it up “in the pipeline”. I see exactly the opposite; a thermal barrier to heating processes propagating downward.
And evidently these newer buoy studies seem to confirm such a notion.
Now this isn’t rocket science; it’s pretty much plain common sense; which unfortunately doesn’t seem to be as common as it used to be.
So forget about this mythical ocean energy storage pipeline; it hasn’t proved its very existence as far as I can see.
Remember the latent heat of evaporation of water at say +15 deg C (global mean) is around 590 cal per gm; ok it’s 587.6; and ranges from 595.4 at 0 deg C up to 538.7 at 100 deg C.
I’ll leave it to the reader to convert that into SI units, or climatology units like “forcings”, “anomalies”, or “sensitivities”; your choice.
The oceans are disgorging astronomical amounts of energy into the atmosphere in the form of latent heat of evaporation, plus the combined effects of water and atmospheric convection and conduction. Did I say that convection always trumps conduction in heat transfer (check your car’s water system) Ok so its a power assisted convection.
Hurricanes and cyclones, and typhoons whatever they call them are some of nature’s finest refrigerators, cooling the oceans and transporting energy back out towards space.
If there is a pieline, it is flowing outward; to balance the radiative input from the sun; which it is well known doesn’t have any effect on earth’s climate at all.
George

{PS these temperature trends are from:
Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) Description of MSU and AMSU Data Products

Frank Lansner (03:58:09) :
“Why do we still not have 100% free access to the ARGO data??? Is there a very good explanation howcome we after 6 years still are not allowed to see these data?? Should not this be changed?”
From the ARGO website:
“A real time data delivery and quality control system has been established that delivers 90% of profiles to users via two global data centers within 24 hours. A delayed mode quality control system (DMQC) has been established and 50% of all eligible profiles have had DMQC applied.
Argo has developed a large user community in universities, government labs and meteorological/climate analysis/forecasting centers. ”
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/
Agreed. Minimally the real time data, like other publicly funded data, should be available to… the public. Is there no university publishing this?

“Could undersea volcanic activity account for previous ice ages due to heating of the oceans, releasing greenhouse gases etc?”
Well considering what people say the environmental result was of such events as the Deccan Traps and the Siberian Traps and Columbia River flood basalt, and considering that 70% of Earth’s surface is under sea level, it would seem reasonable that similar flood basalt events may have happened under the ocean surface.

(off topic, but we have proof of global cooling and heating just miles apart< you dont have to publish this. just thought it was fun for you.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1159929/BBC-weatherman-warns-people-Kent-prepare-temperatures-99C.html
The BBC gaffe came weeks after viewers in the London area saw predictions of an extreme heatwave 232C (450F) in Windsor.
Forecaster Kirsty McCabe said there would be a ‘few brighter spells’ as the map showed the the inaccurate temperatures. )

Tim Clark (09:59:46) :

foinavon (07:38:03) : The fact/observation that the ocean heat content hasn’t changed over the last 5-6 years is a different issue altogether, and somewhat of a red-herring in consideration of the transient/equilibrium responses to enhanced forcing.
So, help me on this. Approximately, by your own admission, in the last 5-6 years the oceans are not heating, nor are they rising. Gisstemps have plateaued (albiet at an elevated level), arctic and indeed global sea ice extent has increased in that time arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg but atsmospheric CO2 has increased in agreement with trend. In terms of “still to come due to the slow equilibration times of various elements of the climate system”. where is the heat to come from, or, where has the heat gone?

5 or 6 years is a very short time and it’s not clear if the oceans have heated or not during this period. The reported cooling from 2003 was shown recently to be an artifact from problems with some of the Argo temperature monitors [***].
In any case, we don’t expect a monotonous warming in response to enhanced forcing as the earth tends towards a new equilibrium temperature. For example, the current plateau in warming is quite similar to what was observed in the early 1980’s, the mid 1990’s and so on (see Figure 5 in the blog thread just below:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/05/ipcc-20th-century-simulations-get-a-boost-from-outdated-solar-forcings/#more-6046
Part of the reduction in warming is due to the fact that we’ve been descending to the bottom of the solar cycle during the last 4-5 years. So the enhanced greenhouse forcing has been reducing somewhat for a bit [during the next 5-6 years the increasing solar irradiance will be supplementing (rather than opposing) enhanced greenhouse forcing].
And whenever we have a strongish La Nina (a couple in the last several years), there is enhanced upwelling of cold waters which results in colder than average surface waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific, and the gobally-averaged surface temperature (or temperature anomaly) is decreased for a while. Presumably this is associated with enhanced mixing of warmth into the oceans.
An analogy might be turning up the thermostat in your kitchen so that the temperature rises slowly. If someone opens the fridge and blows a fan into it for a while, the measured warming in the room will be suppressed for a time. This isn’t a perfect analogy, and it’s a better one if the fridge is turned off just before starting the “experiment”. In this case some of the warming will have “gone into ” the fridge, raising its temperature. If the fridge is left on during the “experiment” then the heat is pumped into wherever the heat exchanger of your fridge dumps excess heat, which is very likely to be the kitchen!
[***]J.K. Willis et al (2007) Correction to “Recent cooling of the upper ocean” Geophys. Res. Lett. 34, L16601
[1] Two systematic biases have been discovered in the ocean temperature data used in “Recent cooling of the upper ocean” by John M. Lyman, Josh K. Willis, and Gregory C. Johnson (Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L18604, doi:10.1029/2006GL027033). These biases are both substantially larger than sampling errors estimated by Lyman et al. [2006], and appear to be the cause of the rapid cooling reported in that work.
[2] Most of the rapid decrease in globally integrated upper (0–750 m) ocean heat content anomalies (OHCA) between 2003 and 2005 reported by Lyman et al. [2006] appears to be an artifact resulting from the combination of two different instrument biases recently discovered in the in situ profile data. Although Lyman et al. [2006] carefully estimated sampling errors, they did not investigate potential biases among different instrument types. One such bias has been identified in a subset of Argo float profiles. This error will ultimately be corrected. However, until corrections have been made these data can be easily excluded from OHCA estimates (see http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/ for more details). Another bias was caused by eXpendable BathyThermograph (XBT) data that are systematically warm compared to other instruments [Gouretski and Koltermann, 2007]. Both biases appear to have contributed equally to the spurious cooling.

“Mary Hinge (06:34:49) :
Ron de Haan (04:59:48) :
Have a look at this Dutch Study which presents “real historic data” and know that since 2005 until today no accelerated rise in sea level has occurred.
Why pick 2005? Why pick one data set? I will repeat one of the comments, it seems very appropriate: “I’ll just add the comment that I find it strange how contrarians readily accept a plot such as the one shown here with hardly any details of the original reference, the actual data points, the analysis technique or the estimated uncertainty, while at the same time putting the “hockeystick” of Mann et al. under such heavy scrutiny!”
Also don’t forget on a local level there will always be fluctuations in sea level due to wind, currents etc and land based measurements measure their relative heights, not much good if land is rising (for example Scotland) or falling (for example southern England).
This is the stuff which is put under the carpet because it’s to “inconvenient” for certain religious agenda’s.
I’d be careful about the religious connection if I were you, the sceptic community, whether on this subject or evolution or even as was the case not that long ago, plate tectonics, are firmly wedded to the religious right. The belief being that God created man to basically do what he wanted to the Earth and only God can change the Earth etc. It would be more accurate to describe the contrarians of AGW, using your particular context as a cult, that is of being very much in the minority and oblivious to accepted scientific thinking”.
Mary Hinge,
1. The historical data sets used for the referred publication are the most reliable data sets available on earth.
2. Why pick 2005? Because the report was published in 2005
3. I’ve looked at the report, where the data comes from, it’s conclusions (and in this case my personal observations over a period of 40 years) and I think it’s very accurate.
4. The hockey stick of Mann is a proven fraud.
5. I agree with your remarks in regard of the use of religion.
Thanks to Religion the Age of Industrialization would have started 400 years earlier.
I used this remark to characterize an attitude often found in religions to defend a point of view by constantly repeating a certain statement over and over again without listening to the any of the arguments outside the church.
As you have made the same arguments in earlier postings and even provided the same answers in response to critiques I can only say that in this case it fits you
like a glove.

Frank Lansner (03:58:09) :
3) The fact – as Lindsay indicates above that water has highes density at 4 degrees C. This last fact is much more important than one might think because a HUGE fraction of the oceans water has temperatures below 4 degrees:

Sorry Frank, you’ve got it wrong (again). I think you are forgetting that the oceans are made up of salt water.

DB2 (06:52:18) :
Mary, the rise is sea level (after adjustment for changes in the land) has two component, an increase in volume from melting glaciers and an increase in volume from heat expansion. Since the Argo system has been deployed to measure the top 3000 meters of ocean, there has been no heat expansion (the steric component).

Why don’t sceptics ever check their facts? The bouys actually measure to a depth of 2,000m, average ocean depth is around 3.8km. Here is the link to the home page so you can read up about the project. http://www.argo.net/
Kinda leaves a lot of the oceans temperature unmeasured doesn’t it?

Bruce (07:03:48) :
Mary [snip],
The Colorado graph shows the 60 day smoothing sea level peaked in 2006

….and prior to that? You skeptics love the cherrypickin’ don’t ya! The La Nina in 2007 and 2008 caused the cooling you see on the graph (increased wind+increased evaporation etc etc.) Do you notice how the levels are now increasing again?

Ron de Haan quotes Mary Hinge, who says:

I’d be careful about the religious connection if I were you, the sceptic community, whether on this subject or evolution or even as was the case not that long ago, plate tectonics, are firmly wedded to the religious right.

It is one of the supreme ironies of the modern world that those of us who would have formerly been labelled as unbelieveing heathens are now regarded as members of the religious right by those with the current religious fervers.

foinavon (11:28:57) :
Please stop patronizing us. Are you an academic or just an academic wannabe? It doesn’t seem you have actually done any work in the field or data gathering yourself, am I correct on that? Your arguments can be addressed on their own either way, I’m just curious is all.
“The reported cooling from 2003 was shown recently to be an artifact from problems with some of the Argo temperature monitors..”
We actually know all about this, so don’t try to imply that we may be using false information when we state that there has been no warming and perhaps even a slight cooling over the past few years. That’s the conclusion Josh Willis himself came to AFTER he found the errors and made the adjustments. In fact he is quoted farther up in the thread saying exactly that.
“In any case, we don’t expect a monotonous warming in response to enhanced forcing as the earth tends towards a new equilibrium temperature.”
Tell that to the IPCC then. Their projections actually did show monotonous warming. See Lucia. And you know that, so why are you attempting to state otherwise?
“Part of the reduction in warming is due to the fact that we’ve been descending to the bottom of the solar cycle during the last 4-5 years.”
Oh please. It’s too late in the game for you to invoke the sun NOW. The same with La Nina. You would have to rethink your analysis of the temp trends for the entire 20th century first before you can claim any credibility with attribution NOW.
We’ll wait.

foinavon (11:28:57) :
So, help me on this. Approximately, by your own admission, in the last 5-6 years the oceans are not heating, nor are they rising. Gisstemps have plateaued (albiet at an elevated level), arctic and indeed global sea ice extent has increased in that time arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg but atsmospheric CO2 has increased in agreement with trend. In terms of “still to come due to the slow equilibration times of various elements of the climate system”. where is the heat to come from, or, where has the heat gone?
5 or 6 years is a very short time and it’s not clear if the oceans have heated or not during this period.
Your argument, as I understood it, is CO2 causes heating-heating goes into sink(ocean), but when temps aren’t rising in sync with CO2, (which they aren’t)-heat stored in sink causes sea level rise (which they haven’t since late 2006). My (and apparently Pielke’s) contention is: based on your climate construction, if sea level is static (link above), and sea ice is greater now than two years ago and CO2 is rising, then the ocean must be warmer, or CO2 doesn’t cause warming. So you argument against Pielke boils down to your belief that the ocean temp data is suspect. That makes you a denier in a similar fashion to my disbelief of GassTemp. And about the suns influence, better hope Leif isn’t reading :~).

foinavon (11:28:57) :
“In any case, we don’t expect a monotonous warming in response to enhanced forcing as the earth tends towards a new equilibrium temperature. For example, the current plateau in warming is quite similar to what was observed in the early 1980’s, the mid 1990’s and so on”
If the net forcing increases monotonously I think “we” expect energy to be accumulated more or less monotonously – if not in the atmosphere then in the oceans. What is interesting here is that unlike the plateaus in the 80’s and 90’s the current plateau cannot be attributed to stratospheric vulcanos. See these data from GISS – dramatic dips in net forcing occur at those times:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/
The current plateau happens in a period without stratospheric volcanos…
I would like to add another small observation of some relevance here. In a blogpost in October of last year Tamino takes account of the current understanding of TSI as almost invariant by attributing the warming in the first half of the 20’th century to a volcanic lull in the mid-century.
But where is the warming of the present volcanic lull, then? Taminos data do not extend beyond 2003 but the continued lull since 2003 should have a large effect on temperatures according to Tamino: http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/volcanic-lull/
No??

Henry Phipps (12:19:48) :
“Thanks to my Grampa, and thanks to my grandson.”
Loved it. Thank you.

Let me see if I have this right now.
Something disturbs the energy balance, and throws the system out of whack (well it’s never in a state of equilibrium anyway), so the surface and atmosphere start to warm, and the warmign surface evaporates more water, and the warming water outgases more CO2, so the atmsopheric water and CO2 start changing, and meanwhile the temperature is still moving from where it was to some new value, and while that is going on the oceans keep outgassing more CO2 and the water keeps evaporating; and so on, and so forth until finally the temperatures get to where they were going,a nd the extra evaporation gets to where it was going, asnd the ougassed CO2 gets to where it was going; so finally you have a new temperature, and a new atmospheric water content, and a new atmospheric CO2 content; so you can write all these numbers down in a table, and when the temperature decides to change again, all those things will again readjust to some nbew values, which you can add to the tables. In this way you can build up a table of water temperatures, and atmospheric temperatures, and relative humidities and water vapor content, and CO2 content; all of which oyu can find in things like “Steam Tables” in the handbook of Chemistry and Physics (CRC Press).
But nowhere in those books of tables do they describe any of this as “FEEDBACK” (sorry about the caps foinavon). They are simply tables of values of related variables in physical systemns; and they don’t have anything to do with any amplification process followed by feedback of some calibrated portion of the amplified output back into the signal input port of this system; and most of all they don’t take into account the fact that all amplifying systems involve time delay which translates to phase shifts in the frequency domain, and can result in oscillation behavior in any physical system that actually has real feedback.
Well you can read all about feedback in “Vaccuum Tube Amplifiers.” by Valley and Wallman, volume 18 of the Radiation Laboratory MIT series of textbooks (Cambridge Mass) 1940-1945. Anything you want to know about feedback is in there; and what climate “scientists are calling “Feedback” simply is not feedback at all; it is merely the time changing values of some related system variables re-adjusting to new values as a result of some system change. With the often very large delays in earth system responses to changes in temperature and such; if there was any significant “Feedback” going on; they would be oscillating their fool heads off.
Lenz’s Law, Le Chatelier’s Principle, photodiode self absorption in LEDs, etc are all examples of physical systems which readjust themselves to try and oppose any external change applied to the system. In electric motors, the rotating armature acts as a generator to produce a “back EMF” which opposes most of the applied terminal Voltage, and thereby reduces the current flowing which limits the speed the motor can get up to.
High efficiency LEDs always act as photodiodes as well, to internally re-absorb the photons generated by the current flowing, therby generating a counter current which stops the applied Voltage from generating any more photons, thus limiting the light ouput. More efficient optical extraction of the generated photons, leads to a lowering of the photodiode generated reverse current,a nd so allows for more light generation.
It is a general principle that physical systems react in such a way as to oppose the effect of external applied perturbations, and try to stop those changes from happening.
The earth’s ocean/atmosphere/cloud sytem is no different, and it simply reacts to any external disturbance, whether solar, or GHG, or volcanic activity, to simply alter the balance of water vapor, versus water clouds in the system to keep the temperature within a limited range. It isd larhgely unaffected by any human intervention.
George

Raven (13:12:30) :

foinavon,
Pielke has actually calculated the number of joules that would have to be accumulating in the ocean in order to be consistent with the IPCC claims of CO2 sensitivity. The difference between the expected and actual accumulation is so large that it casts signicant doubts on the IPCC claims.

Much of the uncertainty here relates to the extremely short time period under analysis. An analysis of a parameter for a period of 4 years is simply insufficient to establish what’s happening as a long term trend. The acumulation of heat into the oceans in the long term has been in reasonable agreement with expectations from models of the ocean’s response to enhanced greenhouse forcing. But it certainly seems the case that there hasn’t been much additional warming of the oceans (at least the top 700 metres) or the Earth’s surface or troposphere for the last few years.
But the temperature record of the past 30-odd years shows several periods of a few years when warming “stopped” or “reversed” (e.g. see Figure 5 of the blog thread linked just below). we don’t throw out everything we know about radiative physics, the greenhouse effect and energy “budgets”, on the basis of a few years worth of data, especially when we understand some of the contributors to the reduced warming during this period quite well.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/05/ipcc-20th-century-simulations-get-a-boost-from-outdated-solar-forcings/#more-6046
And Josh Willis whose data Pielke used for his analysis of ocean heat accumulation during the past four years highlights that exact point:
“Although the historical record suggests that multiyear periods of little warming (or even cooling) are not unusual, the present analysis confirms this result with unprecedented accuracy.”
Willis JK et al. (2008) Assessing the globally averaged sea level budget on seasonal to interannual timescales. J. Geophys. Res. Oceans 113, C06015

As for your papers on moistening: it is clear that the humidity datasets available are so bad that it is possible to make any number of claims that appear to be compelling if one ignores the data that does not fit one’s conclusions. That is critique applies to skeptics who claim that water vapour feedback is negative. IOW – they don’t really provide much supporting evidence for the models.

Really? The published data shows pretty uniformly that satellite measures of tropospheric water vapour content are largely consistent with models. I would have thought that does provide supporting evidence for the models…..

Well well. Heat “in the pipeline” and radiative imbalance. Published in the prestigious high impact journal Science no less 🙂
Per Hansen et al 2005:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2005/2005_Hansen_etal_1.pdf

“Our climate model, driven mainly by increasing human-made greenhouse gases and aerosols, among other forcings, calculates that Earth is now absorbing 0.85 +/- 0.15 watts per square meter more energy from the Sun than it is emitting to space. This imbalance is confirmed by precise measurements of increasing ocean heat content over the past 10 years. Implications include (i) the expectation of additional global warming of about 0.6-C without further change of atmospheric composition; (ii) the confirmation of the climate system’s lag in responding to forcings, implying the need for anticipatory actions to avoid any specified level of climate change; and (iii) the likelihood of acceleration of ice sheet disintegration and sea level rise.”
“The observed 1880 to 2003 global warming is 0.6- to 0.7-C (11, 22), which is the full response to nearly 1 W/m2 of forcing. Of the 1.8 W/m2
forcing, 0.85 W/m2 remains, i.e., additional global warming of 0.85  0.67 È 0.6-C is ‘‘in the pipeline’’ and will occur in the future even if atmospheric composition and other climate forcings remain fixed at today’s values(3, 4, 23)

A new sunspot is on the sun right now but it would seem that it’s a SC23 spot!!! Is that confirmed?
REPLY: Due to low latitude, yes. -Anthony

Well stated George, have you got the energy diagram for the process of sea water freezing? The freezing/salting effect has always struck me as very complex, there is a lot of energy removed from the system to go to a highly complex, ordered hydrogen bonded solid ice structured, from a disordered, ironically fractured liquid. The ‘heat’ required for this transition must be huge.

George E smith: thanks for good info as allways.
Mary hinge,
You write: “Sorry Frank, you’ve got it wrong (again).”
You don’t give me an idea what this “Again” is all about, if you wish to mention something that actually relevant speak out openly what it is you are talking about, that would be the least you could do.
Only the loosing side of a debate is tempted to try personal attacks rather than stick to sober science.
Most debators in simple blog entries will make an error now an then, whats your point?? You make errors too (!!) and so what??

Slightly off topic but did anybody else notice the Ap dropped to 1?

Tim Clark (13:39:46) :

Your argument, as I understood it, is CO2 causes heating-heating goes into sink(ocean), but when temps aren’t rising in sync with CO2, (which they aren’t)-heat stored in sink causes sea level rise (which they haven’t since late 2006). My (and apparently Pielke’s) contention is: based on your climate construction, if sea level is static (link above), and sea ice is greater now than two years ago and CO2 is rising, then the ocean must be warmer, or CO2 doesn’t cause warming. So you argument against Pielke boils down to your belief that the ocean temp data is suspect. That makes you a denier in a similar fashion to my disbelief of GassTemp. And about the suns influence, better hope Leif isn’t reading :~).

I don’t think that’s quite right. The most recent published analyses indicate that sea levels are still rising. However it seems that there is an increasing mass component to sea level rise (i.e. from land ice melt) and a diminished steric component (ocean expansion due to warming). One possible explanation is that in recent years a significant part of the absorption of “heat” has gone into melting ice, so that increased ocean mass is not accompanied by increased ocean warmth (see papers just below [***]). However we are talking about a very short period of time! It really isn’t worth overinterpreting a few years worth of observations.
Re the sun: I addressed this in my comment to Syl just above. Since everyone here is addressing phenomena occurring over a very short time period (4 years), we have to consider those elements of the climate system (internal and external) that are averaged out to essentially zero in the long term trend. So whereas we don’t consider the solar cycle in relation to the long term trend in the temperature anomaly, we should consider it if we’re interested in what’s happening over a period of a few years. For the last 4 years the solar cycle has been opposing the enhanced greenhouse forcing from raised greenhouse gas levels.
[***]
Cazenave A et al. (2009) Sea level budget over 2003-2008: A reevaluation from GRACE space gravimetry, satellite altimetry and Argo Global Planetary Change 65, 83-88
Willis JK et al. (2008) Assessing the globally averaged sea level budget on seasonal to interannual timescales. J. Geophys. Res. Oceans 113, C06015
http://www.agu.org/journals/jc/jc0806/2007JC004517/

“How dare you paint an opposing scientific view with a religious brush like that! ”
I think maybe people are thinking of the word “religion” here in two different ways. It isn’t meant as any disrespect for religious beliefs, in the way the word “religion” got connected with the “warmers”. What it means is that in religion, certain things are (as they should be) taken for truth as a matter of faith. One does not go around “testing” or “experimenting” with religious beliefs. They are simply taken as a matter of faith.
Now science is a different story. The conclusions MUST be testable and you must be able to reproduce experimental results and the conclusions one comes to with regard to data and the methods used for the analysis of data must also be documented and reproducible.
What we see happening is people taking “warming” as a matter of faith and refuse to accept the data from observation that is counter to their belief. In other words, many people’s conclusions are not based on any observational reality, but in faith that the models are correct. Now believing something to be true without any physical evidence is what has been called “religion”. It isn’t meant to mean that religious people are bad or that religious people “believe in” global warming. It is meant to say that the “belief in” global warming is its own religion. As there is no evidence that the outcome predicted by the models is actually happening, any “belief” that they are correct is simply a matter of faith.
Global warming isn’t something that one should or should no “believe in”. It is something that should or should not be able to be documented and shown to be empirically true or not true.
So far the temperatures are not rising as the models predict. There is no warming of the oceans. There is no great melt of the icecaps. There is no warming higher up in the troposphere. There is no increase in the rate of sea level rise. So what they are talking about is the religion of “global warming” being a belief not based on science but on “faith”. Now one’s religious faith, whatever it is, should be strong and unwavering and not require physical proof. A scientific conclusion that is going to cost us all billions and possibly trillions globally *had better* be provable.
That we are still even debating it is proof that the models are wrong because if they were correct, the changes would have been irrefutable by now rather than unobservable.
And once someone has a belief based on faith rather than physical observation, not argument of logic can dissuade them because they have blinded themselves by simply “believing” no matter what you tell them. In fact, rather than argue the facts, they will tend to attack the deliverer of the message, suppress the message, delete comments, etc. This is because they experience an attack on their “belief” to be an attack on themselves and so they respond by “attacking” back rather than engaging in a logical argument based on fact.
I don’t “believe” or “disbelieve” but I will say that so far I have seen no evidence that convinces me that the models so far accurately predict what is happening in our climate with regard to CO2 and so it is therefore foolish to waste money on mitigation of something that might be of no consequence or might even turn out to be beneficial in the long run.

George E. Smith, Mary Hinge and Frank.
I think the whole discussion is still a bit off on issue of salinity and temperature and density of the ocean. Frank is wrong about 4 deg C. However, there is no deep ocean thermal expansion either.
perhaps this web site would help:
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/Water/deep_ocean.html&edu=high
Warm ocean water stays on top, cold ocean water on the bottom. The bulk of the cold water is salty water that sinks in the arctic region. It goes down to the bottom of the ocean where it is as cold as 0 deg C or 32 deg F.
There is only mixing in the top 100-400 meters. So, If there is going to be any thermal expansion it happens here. If there is going to be any hidden heat stored in the ocean, it will be here too. So, the Argos measurements going down to 2000 meters is probably sufficient. Everything below that is in layers according to temperature or salinity. Warmer waters will not penetrate down there, only cold saltier water will. Hence there is little or no hidden heat in the pipeline. Argos is measuring a no heat increase in the top part of the layer, it means there is none worth talking about below.
FInally the only water that does pennetrate this layer comes from the Arctic. So George, we get very cold (28 deg F perhaps?) and salty water sinking down. It goes to the bottom and back fills the whole ocean. There is no hidden heat down there. It simply will not sink.
P.S. Mary, keep the God comments out of this. I have no religion, not even atheist. I was born and raised to choose my own beliefs, and I have chosen none. I do take offense to your comment about religion and skeptics, and it reflects negatively on your arguments. In addition I find most religious people being very concerned with the environment. They are the ones that do irritating things like invite me to a park to pick up garbage…

My experience with ocean tehrmodynamics is limited to the deep shelf, down to about 8000 feet, where my company’s drilling rigs operate. But FWIW:
Water temps at the depths where we operate (about 300 to 6500 feet usually) is consistently just below 0 degrees C (about 31 deg F) worldwide, and I mean worldwide (North Sea, GOM, Brazil, West Africa, Australia, etc.)
Remember that the hydrostatic pressure is around 0.4 pounds for every FOOT of water depth, so pressures are pretty high.
There ARE currents (sometimes several knots) at depth, but apparently very little vertical mixing, at least on the shelf where we operate.
My (limited) understanding is that the thermal statification below a couple hundred feet water depth is very severe, so that it takes a VERY long time for significant heat exchange to take place from surface to depths. That, coupled with the large thermal mass of seawater (btu/deg/lb, or if you like kcal/deg/kg) is what MAKES the deep ocean a highly effective “sink”
FWIW.

And the fact that automated weather stations in Antarctica must be raised a tower section every few years should give evidence that the snow pack there is accumulating significantly.

David L. Hagen (10:17:59) :

Decadal Temperature Trends
“Globally averaged trends computed over latitudes from 82.5S to 82.5N (70S to 82.5N for channel TLT) are shown in the table below, and include data through January, 2009:”

Lower Troposphere TLT 1979 to 2009-01 0.157 K/decade

http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/RSS-MSU-TMT.jpg

Middle Troposphere TMT 1979 to 2009-01 0.091 K/decade

http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/RSS-MSU-TMT-1.jpg
Lower Stratosphere TLS 1979 to 2009-01 -0.335 K/decade
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/RSS-MSU-TLS.jpg

All I can say with relation to the original story is, oh well. I was rather hoping that the cold snap was over and warming would again commence as promised. My primroses had the nerve to poke their heads out over the past 2 weeks, even with the consistent sub zero overnight temps. (We have had exactly 3 over night lows in positive territory since November. Tough plants) Now it appears that in my neck of the woods, we are about to have a March Blizzard! Haven’t had one of those since I left Thunder Bay in ’69. Next time I write from here I should be under a foot of warming! I was a bit worried that I had missed the optimum pruning window for the fruit trees. Silver lining?

Mike Ryan:
I just wonder why, in blogs to do with science, some people feel the need to refer to religion so much. Ladies and gentleman: please keep to the science!
I know what you mean, Mike, but it wasn’t me who brought up this whole line of argument, back when the AGW apostles apparently thought it was cute to call me a “denier”. It really did seem pretty stupid on their part and not “keeping to the science”, which in a way actually tells you what is being done in “Climate Science”.
And then the AGW’s kept right on doing it, so I just decided to ask, well, what is the opposite of a “denier”, and, yes, it can turn out to be a “believer”. I didn’t think they’d like that at all, but they started it and were making a lot of propagandistic hay by this “denier” name calling, again which I think tells everyone a lot about them.
Mike, if you start to look at the ipcc’s Climate Science as more of a massive propaganda operation, things will start to make a whole lot more sense. For example, what kind of scientist studying atmospheric temperatures never checks their thermometers?
As to Mary H. trying to tie me and everyone who does not toe her line to the “religious right”, I’m also pretty sick of being called a “theocon” and a “racist”. I say that people who use these kind of name-calling terms and tactics simply because of a disagreement are projecting, just as the “believers” were doing in calling me a “denier”. It’s funny how that works.

My understanding of why we even have weather is that the atmosphere is the mechanism to transport heat from the tropics to the poles. When you have a solar minimum then you get changes to this mechanism which opens up holes in the thermal blanket at the poles and reflects via low-lying clouds to reject more incoming. The upper atmosphere shrinks, and we just found that out. The sun’s TSI does not have to change, just the lack of solar wind to keep out the cosmic rays seems enough to get the job done: release stored heat & reject a portion of the incoming heat.
So, the Earth cools.
What’s the big deal?
Does it really matter right now how it’s doing it, just as long as we understand what it doing (a la cooling)???

100% bologna

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/03/06/nasa.fund.indictment/index.html
WASHINGTON (CNN) — A former high-ranking NASA official was indicted Friday for allegedly guiding more than $9.6 million in agency funds to one of his consulting clients.
According to the indictment, in 2005, Stadd helped steer NASA funds from an earth science appropriation to his client.
If convicted on all charges, Stadd faces up to 15 years in prison.
I’m quite sure that we’ll be hearing more about this, because where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

foinavan, did I read you right? You seem to suggest that weather variation in the short term could be related to the Sun’s effects. Or that we could consider some sort of Sun connection. Could you expand on your thinking? How big do you think it might be?

foinavon (15:52:27) :
You cannot dismiss the current flat/down trend by merely passing it off as la nina noise plus a dash of solar then walk away as if that means nothing to the overall sensitivity of the climate to CO2. Attributions matter.
How much of the 20th century rise in temps is attributable to ENSO events and the ocean oscillations?
What? they cancel out? Nope, no they did not. There were two warm PDO’s (more and stronger el nino’s, weaker la nina’s) and one cool one (stronger la nina’s, weaker el nino’s) last century. That does not equal zero.
And here we are in the next century without a volcano affecting the stratosphere and no major change in magic aerosols. Just a flipped PDO to the cool side giving us a nice la nina. Add in a pinch of solar. And we’ve overcome the heating of the still rising CO2 in the atmosphere!
The models have to rethink their attributions for the 20th century if a PDO flip and a la nina can have such a strong effect. How much any given model credited aerosols for cooling mid-century directly affected the climate sensitivity they calculated but since ENSO effects were merely considered noise they were missed. The ocean oscillations weren’t ignored because they were considered noise, they were ignored because they occur on a sub-century timescale. Actually they were ignored because we didn’t really know much of anything about them.
What I’m saying is that the amount of temp rise attributed to CO2 is a bigger share of the pie than deserved. What do you think the adjustment should be?
Or do you think you can dance around the issue for another twenty years?
As for the IPPC projections which effectively started in 2001, they sure looked monotonous to their intended audience. Were they merely propaganda? Are you saying the IPPC deals in strawmen? Lucia ( http://rankexploits.com/musings/ ) has demonstrated that so far our planet is falsifying these IPPC projections.

kevin (19:42:24) :
100% bologna
How do comments like this make it through moderation? Is he commenting on on a previous comment, the post, WUWT, or his last meal?

AKD (22:04:06) :
kevin (19:42:24) :
100% bologna
“How do comments like this make it through moderation? Is he commenting on on a previous comment, the post, WUWT, or his last meal?”
They make it through because Anthony is counting on people like you who creatively ask if it was his last meal. Spit my ice cold Coors light on my puter screen. So not only have I got me kickers in a twist from an earlier outburst of mine, I now stand accused of alcohol abuse.

Brendan H (22:17:51) :
So if you were to be consistent and stop reading people who paint an opposing scientific view with a religious brush, you could end up with a rather thin reading list.
Since the readership of this blog is so high, a poll would be interesting on the type of skeptic frequenting this site . For example I consider myself center to left and have left religion behind these last fifty years.

Pamela Gray (21:30:25) :

foinavan, did I read you right? You seem to suggest that weather variation in the short term could be related to the Sun’s effects. Or that we could consider some sort of Sun connection. Could you expand on your thinking? How big do you think it might be?

Pamela, I am addressing what this thread seems to be (partly) about, namely a very short period where there hasn’t been a rise in the surface/tropospheric temperature of the Earth. If we’re addressing very short periods then we obviously need to consider some of the contributions to temperature changes that occur on very short periods, but are generally averaged out to near zero on the timescales of long term trends in response to enhanced forcings.
So while any effects of the solar cycle on surface temperature average to zero (unless there is a persistent change in the solar output outwith the solar cycle), the small changes in solar irradiance during the solar cycle must contribute to “noise” on short timescales. The estimates of the peak to trough influence of the solar cycle on surface temperature is difficult to assess (since it’s small!) but it’s considered to be around 0.1 oC (a recent paper by Tung and Camp suggests that it could be as high as 0.18 oC, but this is likely to be on the large side [ Surface warming by the solar cycle as revealed by the composite mean difference projection Geophysical Research Letters, 34, L14703, (2007)].
If the long term warming trend under enhanced greenhouse forcing is (say) 0.2 oC per decade, to give an “ideal” annual warming of 0.02 oC per year, the effect of enhanced greenhouse forcing would be pretty much canceled during the waning 5-ish period of the solar cycle and doubled during the 5-ish year waxing period. The nett effect of the solar cycle is zero, but measured over very short time periods we expect on average the earth’s temperature to be a tad reduced near the minimum of the solar cycle and a tad enhanced near the maximum.
This doesn’t particularly stand out in the record because other contributions to “noise” (volcanic eruptions, El Nino’s/La Nina’s and so on) often make stronger contributions on short time scales.
However a period with significant La Nina’s, negative PDO indices that coincides with the solar minimum is likely to give us about as cool as we get under given conditions. That’s why 2008 gave us quite a significant down turn in the surface temperature record. Still, even with the coincidence of a number of “cooling” contributions, 2008 was still up there in the top 10 warm years….

Bill Illis (16:41:46) :

foinavon,
So there is no reliable water vapour data.
The only data we do have shows that specific humidity is more-or-less constant and it is relative humidity that is falling at all levels of the troposphere (the models assume increasing specific humidity and constant relative humidity (+/- 1.0% at different levels)).
But we can’t use this data.

I’m not sure what data you’re talking about Bill! I listed some of the large published data set from satellite measurements that seem to be pretty reliable since their interpretations are robust across a number of different studies [ see foinavon (12:07:48)].
I’m not sure what data you are referring to. The published data that bears specifically on the question of the water vapour response to changes in temperature seem to indicate that the water vapour concentration in the troposphere does tend to maintain constant relative humidity on average, and within the range of temperature variation of the period 2003-2005:
Dessler, A. E., Z. Zhang, and P. Yang (2008), Water-vapor climate feedback inferred from climate fluctuations, 2003–2008, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L20704
Otherwise the a couple of people on this thread have referred to a recent paper that addresses tropospheric water vapour from radiosondes, the authors of which explicitly point out repeatedly throughout the paper that the radiosonde data is not necessarily reliably [see foinavon (16:16:45)]
So you need to be specific about what data you are referring to.
…and notice btw that the models do not assume constant realtive humidity.

Is there anything in the models we can question?

Question everything Bill. Everyone questions models since that’s the only way of determining whether our understanding of the modeled phenomena are reliably parameterized. Models are continually assessed in relation to real world analyses, and if it becomes clear that parameterizations should be altered in light of new knowledge, then this is obviously done. However there’s no point assessing models against real world measurements that the authors themselves describe as quite likely to be unreliable…

If you need more information on global oceanic oscillations, this pdf article is a great way to start. Any poster and blogger here should be, in my opinion, encouraged to download this article as a requirement for being given the privilege of adding their 2 cents worth to this most excellent blog.
http://earth.unh.edu/esci765-865/Rahmstorf%202002.pdf

Pamela Gray (07:34:53) :

foinavon, I think you are unclear on the effects of solar output on recent temperature data (I think it has had no effect). “Tad” is not a statistic and you are unclear on the number you actually use. I believe that number is likely based on a now rejected measure of solar output.

There’s no question that the solar cycle itself must produce a (somewhat lagged) response in the Earth’s surface temperature. I’ve used a value near 0.1 oC of temperature response at the surface from the solar max to solar min. That’s the number that has been determined by a number of analyses [***]. It’s quite small (that’s why I used the term “a tad”!), but it will obviously oppose greenhouse forcing -induced warming as the solar cycle goes from max to min over around 5 years, and will supplement greenhouse forcing as the solar cycle goes from min to max on the “upswing”.
See for example:
J. L. Lean & D. H. Rind (2008) How natural and anthropogenic influences alter global and regional surface temperatures: 1889 to 2006 Geophys. Res. Lett.35, L18701
“The 13-month running mean solar cycle change is 0.11 K at one month lag, consistent with the solar cycle signal found in lower troposphere satellite data since 1979 [Douglass and Clader, 2002].”
[***] see also (which all indicate that the earth’s surface response to the solar cycle is around 0.1 oC from max to min):
Douglass, D. H., and B. D. Clader (2002), Climate sensitivity of the Earth to solar irradiance, Geophys. Res. Lett., 29(16), 1786, doi:10.1029/2002GL015345
Lean, J. (2005), Living with a variable Sun, Phys. Today, 58, 32–38.
Scafetta, N., and B. J. West (2005), Estimated solar contribution to the global surface warming using the ACRIM TSI satellite composite, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L18713, doi:10.1029/2005GL023849.
You describe ocean oscillation cycles:

Then consider how these trends can coincide to produce marked upswings and downturns in temperatures over long stretches of time (IE 30 or more years).

Is there any evidence that these longish term oscillations can result in significant global-scale temperature changes by “getting into synch” in the manner you describe? Most of the ocean current oscillations seem to be in anti-phase I think. Otherwise one has to postulate what seem like some decidedly anti-entropic phenomena…

Pamela Gray (12:33:34) :

foinavon, you reveal a common misunderstanding that one ocean oscillation feeds the other, thus they can never be in sync. My suggestion is that you improve your understanding of what causes these oscillations in each area. Our oceans are not as intricately linked as you think, given the break up and spread of land masses. Did you read the article I referred to above?

Yes, I know Rahmstorf’s Nature review quite well.
If you read Rahmstorf, you’ll find that he is largely describing the quite good evidence for anti-phase oscillations that are largely the result of changes in the strengths of ocean currents that carry heat from the equator to the high Northern latitudes. These alterations in the merodinal overturning circulation seem to underlie the D/O, Heinrich, and Younger Dryas events that Rahmstorf describes. There is also evidence that changes in heat transport to the high Northern latitudes played a role in the so-called “Little Ice Age”, which was also largely prevelant in the high Northern latitudes.
I really don’t think there is significant evidence that supports ideas of concerted “synchronization” of ocean currents to the extent that massive and concerted heat can “aggregate” and give significant longish term surface warmth (or cooling). I’m curious to see the evidence.

Mike Bryant (08:11:05) :
Concise, memorable, and hilarious. Thanks.
Henry.

I have a challenge for you. Gather information on all the oceanic oscillations that have been discovered so far. They each have names. There are at least two in the Atlantic. The Arctic Oscillation is not the same thing as the Atlantic Oscillation. Does the Indian Ocean have one? Which one circles the globe?

foinavon (12:57:25) :
“f you read Rahmstorf, you’ll find that he is largely describing the quite good evidence for anti-phase oscillations that are largely the result of changes in the strengths of ocean currents that carry heat from the equator to the high Northern latitudes. These alterations in the merodinal overturning circulation seem to underlie the D/O, Heinrich, and Younger Dryas events that Rahmstorf describes.”
There is also substantial isotope evidence,that in the plaeclimatic past ocean warming occurred sometimes 2-10k “prior” to increased GHG.
There are also other incidences of NH warming in instances of low ghg.An the interhemispheris assymetry (which is netter described as chirality) it has no mirror image.
eg Z. T. Guo et al.: Correlation of China loess and Antarctica ice records
MIS-13 is therefore a real case of a substantial northern hemispheric warming under relatively low concentrations of greenhouse gases. Smaller northern ice-sheets would have also occurred during MIS-11 and MIS-5e, with apparently
a lesser hemispheric asymmetry than for MIS-13. These also suggest that the coupling of hemispheric climates at the glacial-interglacial scales was significantly unstable in the Mid-Pleistocene and that marine 18O records may not
be always reliable indicators of northern ice-volume. These findings may also have implications for the evolution of the climate system during other periods of the Quaternary.
Once again paradox is the rule not the exception hence there is no standard model for understanding the “past”

So foinavon, found out anything yet about the possibility that various oceanic oscillations can land in bed together? Turns out it is more than just a possibility. Given the variations and noise apparent in all of them with patterns running from a few years to decades and with no correlations between oceanic oscillations strongly apparent so far, it appears mathematically plausible that these oscillations will coincide in cold or warm phases, causing various extreme trends over longish periods of time that some might mistakenly believe are related to solar affects, pollution, or the fact that someone forgot to leave a sacrifice at the goddess’ cave.

By the way, foinavon. What caused the warming of the first half of the 20’th century?
TSI didn’t vary enough (IPCC still uses outdated figures to do the trick). GHG levels too low. According to you, not enough evidence to attribute it to oceanic or atmospheric oscillations including albedo changes. Taminos vulcanic lull suggestion just makes the current flat temperatures even more inexplicable.
Well?

foinavon (04:50:50) :
“If we’re addressing very short periods then we obviously need to consider some of the contributions to temperature changes that occur on very short periods, but are generally averaged out to near zero on the timescales of long term trends in response to enhanced forcings.”
First: “enhanced forcings” has not been proven.
Second: The ‘zeroing’ only applies to forward projections and these factors cannot be ignored in determining attributions and climate sensitivity from the past century’s trend because in the past century the oscillations DID NOT ZERO OUT.
Third: the factors assumed to be responsible for the cooling in the middle of the last century have NOT been present during the current decade of net cooling temperatures in which no warming has occurred since 1998. This puts into question the amount of temperature rise during the last century that can be attributed to CO2 since the opposite warming to the current cooling was not factored in.
It will take two more decades or so to possibly accomplish a zeroing (if we’re speaking only of the PDO) in which time if current trends hold, the net long term trend which even now shows less warming from CO2 than expected from the climate sensitivity determined by the models will demonstrate even less.
The climate models have calculated a climate sensitivity too high and the attribution of factors contributing to warming/cooling is in error. The IPPC has little confidence in their knowledge of aerosol forcing as well they should. The IPPC has also admitted its understanding of low cloud cover is so poor that even the sign of the feedback is in doubt (yest a positive feedback is assumed). Its understanding of the oceans is even less.
Take it from there rather than repeating everything you think you’ve learned that is actually irrelevant to this issue. Studies based on the same assumptions as used in the climate models will by definition have the same errors.

Both the PDO and AMO have sub-oscillations in different parts of these large bodies of water that may need to be considered separately in order to determine if these sub oscillations oscillate together or not, with the big one. If they oscillate together, the larger measure can be used as a proxy in models. If they don’t oscillate together but cycle in and out of phase, they each need to be treated separately in model development. That is true of the Antarctic oscillation with its embedded 2-cycle warm/cool waves. However, it seems reasonable, and has been reported in the literature to be the prevailing case, that the two big oscillations, the PDO and AMO, are not intricately linked in that one directly causes the other with some predictable lag time. There seems very little such direct evidence. But that they do, and have, coincided and correlate with temperature trends, is not disputed.

Smokey: “But a poll of the rank-and-file dues paying membership of a professional organization like, for example, the American Meteorological Society, would certainly have plenty to do with science related to the climate and the weather.”
A poll of scientists on scientific issues would have greater force than a poll of the general public, but since science is not done by surveys such a poll would still not have the force of actual scientific work.

Niels A Nielsen (01:54:40) :

By the way, foinavon. What caused the warming of the first half of the 20′th century?
TSI didn’t vary enough (IPCC still uses outdated figures to do the trick). GHG levels too low. According to you, not enough evidence to attribute it to oceanic or atmospheric oscillations including albedo changes. Taminos vulcanic lull suggestion just makes the current flat temperatures even more inexplicable.

GHG levels weren’t really too low I think. If one inspects, say, the Hadcrut temperature record:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/
The temperature anomaly was around -0.3 in the mid-19th century up towards the end of the 19th century when there was quite a flurry of significant volcanic eruptions that temporarily drove the anomaly towards -0.5 oC. The anomaly reached zero in that odd bump around 1940, and settled around -0.1
It’s pretty likely that there was a bit of recovery from the temperature reduction from the volcanic activity at the end of the 19th century. The CO2 levels were 286 ppm in the mid 19th century and reached around 309 ppm by 1940. Within the mid-value of climate sensitivity (3 oC of warming per doubling of CO2), we expect around 0.35 oC of warming at equilibrium from that rise in CO2.
So we had around 0.3 oC of warming in the early 20th century, nearly all of which could be accounted for by the raised CO2 levels. Of course things aren’t so simple and a full analysis can only be achieved by modeling with the best estimates of the parameterizations and known amplitudes of the various contributions.
This has already been done of course. But if we wanted to make “back of the envelope” estimates we could get the 0.3 oC of early-mid 20th century warming from 0.3 oC of greenhouse forcing (somewhat delayed by the effects of volcanic activity), 0.05 oC of solar warming, and -0.1 oC of aerosolic “cooling” and 0.05 oC of ocean oscillations, if we were determined to include a bit of the latter..something like that seems in accordance with what we know.
The point is that GHG levels weren’t really too low…

foinavon (14:21:24)
The Spatiotemporal Structure of Twentieth-Century Climate Variations in Observations and Reanalyses. Part II: Pacific Pan-Decadal Variability
Chen et al
The spatiotemporal structure of Pacific pan-decadal variability (PDV) is isolated in global long-term surface temperature (ST) datasets and reanalysis atmospheric parameter fields from which El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) effects have been removed. Empirical orthogonal function (EOF) and combined EOF analysis of the resulting time series identify PDV as one of two primary modes of long-term variability, the other being a global warming (GW) trend, which is addressed in a companion paper (Part I).In this study, it is shown that one of several PDV interdecadal regime shifts occurred during the 1990s.
This significant change in the Pacific basin is comparable but antiphase to the well-known 1976 climate regime shift and is consistent with the observed changes in biosystems and ocean circulation. A comprehensive picture of PDV as manifested in the troposphere and at the surface is described. In general, the PDV spatial patterns in different parameter fields share some similarities with the patterns associated with ENSO, but important differences exist. First, the PDV circulation pattern is shifted westward by about 20° and is less zonally extended than that for ENSO. The westward shift of the PDV wave train produces a different North American teleconnection pattern that is more west–east oriented. The lack of a strong PDV surface temperature (ST) signal in the west equatorial Pacific and the relatively strong ST signal in the subtropical regions are consistent with an atmospheric overturning circulation response that differs from the one associated with ENSO. The analysis also suggests that PDV is a combination of decadal and/or interdecadal oscillations interacting through teleconnections.
Bottom line
“Our results therefore appear to be consistent with the conclusion of Chen et al.
(2002) that the observed top-of-atmosphere tropical radiative flux trend over this time is probably due to natural variability rather than external forcing”
egt Pontryagin and Andronov 1937
“Poincare bifurcation theory was elaborated by the Russian mathematicians Pontryagin and Andronov already in the 20’s and in the 30’s (due to the need to apply these bifurcations to radiophysics). Andronov published (with all the proofs) the theory of the birth of a periodic motion of a dynamical system under the generic loss of stability of an equilibrium position, in the case when two eigenvalues of the linearised system cross the imaginary axis, moving from the stable to the unstable complex half-plane.
Andronov’s theorem claims that (depending on the sign of some higher term of the Taylor series) exactly two generic cases may occur: Either the stability of the equilibrium position is inherited by the new-born limit cycle (whose radius grows like the square root of the difference between the new value of the parameter and the value at the stability loss), or else the radius of the attraction domain, diminishing like the square root of the difference between the growing parameter value and the future value, at which the stability will be destroyed, disappears at the stability loss moment.
The first case is called the mild stability loss, the new-born periodic motion-attractor describes a small oscillation near the old stationary regime. The second case is called the hard stability loss, the behaviour of the system after this stability loss being very far from the equilibrium, loosing its stability. The proofs of these results of Andronov on the phase portraits bifurcations were based on the Pontryagin’s extension of Poincare’s results in the holomorphic case to that of the smooth systems of differential equations.”
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Structural_stability

Syl (05:35:33) :

First: “enhanced forcings” has not been proven.

Perhaps…..if we’re taking a philosophical line, where in reality nothing is ever “proven”. But we know that raised greenhouse gas levels constitute an enhanced forcing, and the evidence supports a significant enhanced forcing near 3 oC ish at equilibrium for a doubling of atmospheric CO2.

…..because in the past century the oscillations DID NOT ZERO OUT.

I don’t think the evidence supports that interpretation (not even with capital letters!). That’s not only something that “hasn’t been proven”, but also something for which the evidence indicates specifically is unlikely to be the case (see papers/abstracts in [foinavon (14:21:24)]).
Of course I might be wrong. However a skeptic would like to see some evidence for that assertion (i.e. that ocean currents don’t average out to near zero in their effects on measured surface temperature). And not just a picture of some individual ocean oscillation record, but an analysis that considers the nett effect of ocean oscillations en masse. In my understanding, where this is done, there isn’t very much of a nett ocean current contribution to medium term surface temperature variations (e.g. see abstracts in [foinavon (14:21:24)]).

Third: the factors assumed to be responsible for the cooling in the middle of the last century have NOT been present during the current decade of net cooling temperatures in which no warming has occurred since 1998.

I think you’re confusing the issue by selecting a highly anomalous start year Syl! 1998 was lifted around 0.2 oC above the long term trend by the strongest El Nino of the 20th century. Since global warming is not occurring right now at a rate greater than 0.2 oC per decade, the fact that recent years (2005,2007) were close to 1998 without the benefit of a strong El Nino, indicates that we have warmed quite a bit comparing the decade 2000-now, with 1990-1999. The fact that we haven’t warmed in the past few years is nothing particulalry remarkable. 2008 had a coincidence of “cooling” contributions (La Nina, negative PDO indices, sun right at the bottom of the solar cycle). There will always be periods of temperature statis/cooling on a rising temperature trend where natural variations that can easily combine to give a temporary interannual rise drop of 0.1-0.2 oC provide noise on a temperature trend that may be rising by no more than 0.02 oC per year. We only have to look at the historical record to realize that..

It will take two more decades or so to possibly accomplish a zeroing (if we’re speaking only of the PDO)….

That’s the problem Syl. The PDO is only one ocean current. One can’t base the entire ocean contribution to short/medium term surface temperature by selecting a single ocean oscillation.

The climate models have calculated a climate sensitivity too high and the attribution of factors contributing to warming/cooling is in error.

I don’t think that’s an interpretation that is supported by the evidence. One certainly can’t base such an interpretation on a few years of surface temperature measurements.

Pamela Gray (15:42:34) :

foinavon: I believe the current consensus among researchers in the AGW camp is that the PDO, and by your extention, the AMO, WILL overcome AGW, in the short term (meaning potentially as much as 60 years or more based on your references), possibly reducing us to pre-AGW levels.

Not really Pamela. Have a read of the paper that maksimovich brought to our attention just above, for example. The analyses of ocean currents seems to indicate that the nett effects on global temperature are small. So in the short term we might have a few years where greenhouse-induced warming is countered by some ocean oscillations, and when combined with the sun at its solar minimum, there’s no reason to be surprised at a few years where the temperatures don’t change much or even fall a tad. However, we should be careful not to let these lull us into thinking that global warming might not be as the science indicates. Because remember that those smallish effects that temporarily oppose the warming trend will in a few years likely be supplementing it.

foinavon (16:22:44) :
Indeed it does,hence zonal climatology eg Cess 1976 . Monin 1984 Raspopov 2008
Thus we can state with some certainty(highly likely) that the datasets eg GISS and hadcru are inhomogeneous ie they are not representative ensembles in the ‘Gibbs’ sense of a global representation historically (before the satellite error) or enhanced observation (as present ) with regard to SST.
This was especially the case in ICOADS Worley et al 2005 when compared to high-quality meteorological data collected in the Northwest Atlantic during the period 1980–92 (russian demilitarized datasets) ie substantive samplig error.

Roger Knights (20:36:04) :

foinavon wrote: “………”

No foinavon didn’t write…!
Someone else must have written that Roger…not me!