One of the great things about running this blog is that people send me things to look at. Sometimes I see connections between two things that were initially unrelated by the original messages. This is one of those cases.
Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. suggested back in 2003 in a peer reviewed BAMS paper, that “…it is the change in ocean heat content that provides the most effective diagnostic of global warming and cooling.” Recently at ICCC 2009, Dr. Craig Loehle did a presentation titled “1,500-Year Climate Cycles, Broken Hockey Sticks, and Ocean Cooling” (PowerPoint) which talked about the ocean heat content.
I was reminded of one of his graphs from that presentation by a recent post on Jennifer Marohasy’s blog. For your viewing pleasure, using graphic editing tools, I created a slightly larger and annotated version, shown below:
The next day, on an email list I subscribe to, Alan Siddons sent along this graph with this note:
“Thought you’d like to see the Mauna Loa rate of CO2 change up to now. Kind of odd these recent years.”
I didn’t think much of Siddons’ graph initially, but as luck would have it, I happened to have Loehle’s graph open in a desktop window from Jennifer’s blog. I noticed something interesting and unexpected looking at the two.
Here is Alan Siddons’ graph of recent MLO CO2 data that shows the changes in the rate of CO2 with their measurements. I added some annotation and a title to make it clearer as to what this graph is:
What interested me about Alan’s MLO CO2 rate of change graph was the period from 2004 to the present. There’s a noticeable downturn in the peaks. I’ve bracketed the area of interest below and added an eyeball trend line for the peaks:
When you take the bracketed period from Alan Siddon’s MLO CO2 rate of change graph, and compare it (again using graphical editing tools) to Loehle’s Ocean Heat content graph, there appears to be some correlation:
It makes sense, as the heat content of the oceans drops, CO2 solubility in seawater increases, and thus we see an absorption of CO2 and dampening of the annual peaks in the rate of change. Obviously this is just a simple visual analysis, and I don’t pretend to know everything there is to know about either of these subjects or datasets, but I thought the serendipity of these two pieces of initially independent and unrelated graphs of data was interesting and worth discussing.
Of course there will be those that argue that “the oceans have not cooled” and cite the work by Josh Willis on catching some errors in the ARGO floater data. I won’t dispute his work here since I’m not an expert on the ARGO project. I’ll leave that to Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., as he wrote in this post on his Climate Science blog:
Josh Willis is a well respected scientist and his view merit consideration. In this case, however, Climate Science concludes that he is misinterpreting the significance of his data analysis. He agrees that
“Indeed, Argo data show no warming in the upper ocean over the past four years”.
He dismisses this though by claiming that
“…but this does not contradict the climate models. In fact, many climate models simulate four to five year periods with no warming in the upper ocean from time to time. “
Where are these model results that show lack of upper ocean warming in recent years? There is an example of a model prediction of upper (3km) ocean heat content for decadal averages in Figure 1 of
Barnett, T.P., D.W. Pierce, and R. Schnur, 2001: Detection of anthropogenic climate change in the world’s oceans. Science, 292, 270-274,
but they did not present shorter time periods. Nonetheless, since Figure 1 is presumably a running 10 year average, the steady monotonic increase in the model prediction of upper ocean heat content (the grey shading) suggests that no several years (or even one year) of zero heating occurred in the model results. The layer they analyzed in the figure is also for the upper 3 km but in Figure 2 the Barnett et al study showed that most of this heating was in the uppermost levels.
Thus the lack of heating in the upper 700m over the last 4 years does conflict with at least the Barnett et al model results!
What the upper ocean data (and lack of warming) actually tells us is that if global warming occurred over the last 4 years, it was in the deeper ocean and is thus not available in the short term to the atmosphere.
Indeed, if it is in the deeper ocean, it likely more diffused and therefore could only enter the atmosphere slowly if at all. This heat could also have exited into space, although the continuation of global ocean sea level rise suggests that this is less likely unless this sea level rise can be otherwise explained.
The other heat stores in the climate system are too small (and the atmosphere has clearly not warmed over the last few years). Global sea ice cover is actually above average at present (the Antarctic sea ice is at a near record level). The continued sea level rise indicates that the heat is in the deeper ocean (which is not predicted by the models).
Finally, there is also no “unrealized” heat in the system. This is a fallacy of using temperature trends as the surrogate for heat trends as has been reported Climate Science (e.g. see, see and see).
Josh Willis too easily dismisses the significance of his research findings.
The interesting thing about what I’ve pointed out above is that we have two independently analyzed datasets (Oceanic heat content and MLO CO2 rate of change) that appear to demonstrate the same thing: the oceans appear to have cooled in the past 5 years. That is also partially consistent with a third dataset, the RSS global temperature anomaly (or fourth if you want to count UAH same data, different method) which shows there has been a flat trend in the past few years. The graph below is both for land and ocean data:
RSS Data Source is here
Even Josh Willis’ own graph of corrected -vs- uncorrected ARGO data illustrating sea level change due to thermal expansion shows a flat trend during this period:
Clearly something is happening to heat content within our oceans, whether it is a flat trend or yet unrecognized loss of heat, remains to be hashed out. The year 2008 was a cooler year globally, and there is quite a bit of measured as well as anecdotal (weather event) data to support that. Our oceans are in fact the planet’s largest heat sink, and it has been routinely demonstrated that changes in that heat sink status (AMO, PDO, El Nino and La Nina) do in fact affect our weather and climate.
So to paraphrase Josh Willis in his rebuttal of his own data: “Is it me, or did the oceans cool”?
UPDATE 4:45 PM 3/21: Allan Siddons has provided two additional graphs. The first being an overlay of MLO monthly data on MSU oceans data
The second is a 12 month average of MLO CO2 rate overlaid on my RSS MSU land and ocean graph posted originally. It seems clear that there is a CO2 rate of change response that mirrors global temperature.
Bob Tisdale has also provided some similar graphs via many links made in the comments. Be sure to have a look. – Anthony
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Bob Tisdale (14:44:07) :
Barry W: You wrote and asked, “One thing I haven’t seen explained is the 1998 “Super” El Nino. The temp shot up. Where did the heat come from and where did the heat go?”
Oops, Bob, didn’t see, that you already responded to:
BarryW (13:40:56) :
… and mentioned the pacifc warm water pool. Seems, again, I was too slow.
Klaus
Oh, and let’s not bad mouth Josh Willis here. He’s a righteous bloke and very well thought of by many skeptics. No ad hominem or guilt-by-association, either, please. Let’s leave that to others.
One thing I have always wondered about …
Has anyone estimated what portion of available fossil hydrocarbon resources have already been burned? Shouldn’t that put some ultimate upper bound on anthropogenic CO2 emissions? I mean, if we have already burned half the world’s coal, oil, gas, etc. then we can probably only emit about as much as we already have. The only thing that could vary is the rate at which we reach exhaustion of the available fossil fuel. But once exhausted we can not emit anymore.
And the moment we stop emitting the gas, the concentration will again begin to drop through natural processes such as erosion. But ultimately, there is an upper boundary to what we are even capable of emitting. As CO2 is always being removed from the atmosphere, there should be an absolute upper limit of how much CO2 we can possibly put in the atmosphere.
I am starting to get a bit frustrated. Cooling sea water is to be expected with the PDO shift. A synchronized shift with the AMO, NAO or some soon to be discovered oscillation will intensify cooling. That is climate. It is somewhat chaotic, but I see predictability for those with an open mind.
Not totally predictable, all models are wrong but some are useful to quote Tamino. But there are some interesting things happening in climate. Do a quick review of Tsonis and open your minds.
I did not fit the trend line to the peaks for the ARGOS data–I fit a seasonal model + linear trend and the figure Anthony shows is the linear trend. It is identical to “detrending” the seasonal data and then fitting a linear model to the residuals. It did it both ways to check.
is it just me, or is comparing two graphs, one showing the actual value being measured (heat content, J) against one showing the rate of change of an actual value ( concentration, ppm CO2) not correct?
first off, it creates the impression that CO2 is not increasing when it is (the actual increase is the cumulative area below the curve and the x-axis, which shows the continued increase in CO2)
secondly, 2008 hasn’t reached it’s peak (or we don’t know that it has) and as such is a poor point to use for a trend line. and when the trend line is limited to the last four peaks (really, three), it reeks of cherry-picking when 12 years of data are shown (and more is available).
thirdly, it’s fairly obvious that the blue trend line is simply eye-balled, not accurate, or based on any actual data (please provide which months were used to provide the peak, if i’m wrong).
but this has been the trend on this site over the past several posts, no?
REPLY: If you read the post you’ll see that I did in fact mention that the blue trend line was eyeballed.
There’s nothing wrong with doing that. The idea of this post is to show that the rate of CO2 increase has been slowing as ocean heat content dwindles. No claims whatsoever were made about the overall concentration of CO2 decreasing. There’s plenty of places where that information is available such as here. – Anthony
@Bob Tisdale
Bob, re: Pacific Warm Water Volome / Warm Water Pool
There seems to be a mechanism working,
between 2.6 and 2.7 ^14, there starts a distribution of heat energy ot atmosphere,
between 2.3 and lower starts a collection of heat energy.
Huhmm, wondering what is triggering it. Or is it starting at the average and we’re recognizing the hysteresis?
Klaus
E.M.Smith (14:54:24) :
“crosspatch (14:05:50) : As the continents erode and volcanoes erupt into the sea, sea levels will always be in a relentless rise, all other factors being equal.
I agree with all the temperature gathering ideas.
The continental erosion has a problem: All other factors are not equal.
That’s why we still have land after 4.5 Billion years of erosion. We have isostatic rebound, plate subduction / uplift, vulcanism moving land to above water, etc. all moving rocks “up” off the sea bottom. Oh, and with India whacking into Asia we got sea bed lifted into some of the highest mountains on earth… Something similar happened to create the lifted land that is now surrounding the Grand Canyon (that was sea bottom…)
What the “islands sinking” folks forget is that on a geologic time scale, the ocean floor is a bucking heaving bouncing thin film and the continental margins are getting reformed by “collision damage” and ocean plates sliding their feet under the continents and lifting mountain ranges…
You can make no prediction about which way “sea level” will go in that context. Each place on the planet will be having it’s own motion and all you can say with certainty is that the water will slop around and find it’s own level. Tide gauges are great in the short run for calling, well, tides, but they are useless for geologic / climate time scale changes since on that scale the land moves more than the water.
Basically, the shape and size of the ocean basin is not a constant in geological time scales, nor is the size and shape of continental land masses.”
E.M Smith,
You are correct.
Some more factors influencing sea levels:
1. Earth receives water from space! This was a WUWT posting some time ago.
2. As the African shelf collides with the European shelf, the Mediterranean is slowly getting narrower.
3. Since the last Ice Age land masses are still rising.
The area that includes the East Sea rises 1 cm per year.
4. You already have mentioned erosion.
It would be interesting to find out how many cubic meters of material ends up in the oceans:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/category.php?cat_id=7
Anyhow, there is more to study between heaven and earth than meets the eye.
Hmmm. This makes me think. I saw an IPCC member (Isaac Held) explain the yearly up and down of CO2 as the effect of annual plant growth and decay in the northern hemisphere. Perhaps it is more well explained by the effect of winter ocean cooling in the southern hemisphere? What is the winter/summer monthly detail of the sinusoid? I would expect growth/decay to be relatively immediate and ocean absorption/outgassing to show more of a lag, speaking as an admitted numbskull… What do smarter people think?
@ur momisugly crosspatch (15:19:35) :
One thing I have always wondered about …
Has anyone estimated what portion of available fossil hydrocarbon resources have already been burned?
Crosspatch, a good source for getting an answer on this, would be:
http://www.theoildrum.com/
okay, okay, there is from time to time, some AGW tendency, but not as much
as it couldn’t be easyly ignored. When it comes to critically look on available datas,
crunch ’em, question ’em, get the best out of it, they are nearly as good as people here or CA.
Klaus
klausb: You wrote, “There seems to be a mechanism working,
between 2.6 and 2.7 ^14, there starts a distribution of heat energy ot atmosphere, between 2.3 and lower starts a collection of heat energy.”
What are the units of measurement?
Bob Tisdale I’ve been swapping back and forth with your posts previously suggested.
Especially like Fig. 4 and accompanying text on this one:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/02/recharging-pacific-warm-pool-part-2.html
I now understand why there was a spike, dip, and then bouncing around in the temperature (1997-now). Shown in the previous thread here on WUWT — in the new first chart > (Akasofu thread).
You have done one heck of a lot of work pulling this together. Great information. Thanks.
ak (15:30:28) saith: “is it just me, or is comparing two graphs, one showing the actual value being measured (heat content, J) against one showing the rate of change of an actual value ( concentration, ppm CO2) not correct?”
‘Tis just thee, ak-san, because there is every reason to believe that the rate of concentration change should be highest when the temperature is highest.
“first off, it creates the impression that CO2 is not increasing when it is (the actual increase is the cumulative area below the curve and the x-axis, which shows the continued increase in CO2)”
Yes, that area is a measure of CO² increase, but no, it’s very unlikely that many here will get that impression if they actually read the text. It didn’t mislead you, did it? Right.
“secondly, 2008 hasn’t reached its peak…” etc.
Certainly, it’s not a conclusive finding. No trumpets were blown; there was no parade. It’s just something “interesting and unexpected,” as the post stated. I found it interesting. (I hope you did, too.) It’s also unexpected until after you look at it, at which point I said, “Of course!” Worth watching, in my opinion. You don’t have to watch. It’s optional. But stick around, anyway, ak-san.
Following the relation between the ocean temperature and atmosphere, if you compare their temperature trends, the ocean changes are hinting the atmospheric temperature changes by some 4-5 months ahead. It plays very well during the last 10 years, not so good before.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1999/plot/uah/from:1999
Based on this, one can predict that soon the global temperatures will start plunging down again, even probably not as deep as in early 2008.
@ur momisugly crosspatch (15:19:35) :
an example: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3720#more
… and there is another source, or better two:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/ipsr/supply.html
http://www.iea.org/Textbase/stats/index.asp
IMHO, we’re in at double peak, starting ’07, ending – probably – ’10.
From there on, there is less avalailable which could contribute to COO.
How about a world with decreasing temperatures and decreasing fossil fuels?
At least, we could give the proAGW guys a shovel. Somebody has to free
the entrances to our houses, in the coming winters. Personally, i’m tired already of this one.
Klaus
captdallas2 (15:22:55) wrote :
Not totally predictable, ‘all models are wrong but some are useful’ to quote Tamino.
That is probably the best know quote from George Box, a statistician. For a stastical book for beginners Box, Hunter and Hunter, “Statistics for Experimenters–An Introduction to Design, Data Analysis, and Model Building” published by Wiley & Sons in 1978 is very useful.
John F. Hultquist (14:59:27) :
The paper was just a quick survey and covers the 1997/98 El Nino. I was trying to see if Anthony’s conjecture showed up in any data.
Leif Svalgaard (14:29:25) :
“The Siddon graph as shown with the arrow is highly…” misleading REPLY: Leif you are correct, thanks for pointing it out.
I would even ‘lift’ your line up a bit because I see no reason that is should go below the third peak, especially since if you continued the plot with the most recent data http://www.leif.org/research/Mauna%20Loa%20CO2%20detrended%20-blue-%20and%20rate%20of%20change%20-red-%202004-2009.png the rate of change goes up again, i.e. the fifth peak just outside of the figure is higher that the low [and a bit strange] fourth peak and on par with the first peak…
REPLY: indeed that would be the case for your detrended data graph, but for the peaks on the Siddons graph I think this line is representative. – Anthony
Bob Tisdale (15:59:34) :
Bob,
kill me, but couldn’t find the original reference/data explanation.
I hate it, when these guys frequently change their content, and of course, their
URLs.
From rememberance, but that’s no good reference – hence, my next birthday ending
with a zero will have a nice six in front. (okay, just kiddin’), it means cubic kilometers
of water with a temperature above a threshold.
I started to collect data on that about 3 yrs ago. I do remeber, that the expanation of datas was somewhere around here:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/elnino/wwv/
‘Tis just thee, ak-san, because there is every reason to believe that the rate of concentration change should be highest when the temperature is highest.
do you believe that your acceleration, rate of change of velocity, of your auto is highest when your velocity is at it’s highest?
the connection, or correlation, casually being drawn here is that the linear decrease in one dPPM is directly connected the linear decrease of J. it doesn’t wash.
‘Yes, that area is a measure of CO² increase, but no, it’s very unlikely that many here will get that impression if they actually read the text. It didn’t mislead you, did it? Right.
if they had read the text, and had a good understanding of the math behind it, then yes, you are correct. as i alluded to earlier, there have been recent posts, here for instance, where the readership did not pick up on the obvious fact that tonga lay several hundreds of miles from, and in the opposite current direction, of the SST anamoly for which it was supposedly responsible. that i do consider “interesting” and is what keeps me sticking around these parts.
and, jorgekafkazar, what’s up with the -san thing? is this supposed to be patronizing and subtle ad-hominem? i thought that sort of thing was not tolerated here.
REPLY: “ak”, I think you are jumping to your own conclusions. The arrow pointed to a large anomaly as referenced in the text “SST maps show a warm anomaly in that region, and extending off to the east. Is that anomaly a result or coincidence?” The idea is to spur conversation by asking a question, and the question was could this anomaly be the result or is it merely coincidence. As for your claim of “it doesn’t wash” your saying so, doesn’t make it so. Its just an opinion. What will be really interesting will be if in fact the trend continues this year, and I believe it will. Then you can come back and say “it doesn’t wash” and be 100% correct. For now, your opinion is no more correct than mine. You also might want to think about a better handle than “ak” since it invites such puns as you’ve witnesses. Or better yet, come into the light and use your full name. – Anthony Watts
Craig Loehle (13:39:55) :
In http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=5416#comment-330321 you say:
Did they supply reasons for rejecting the paper? Ah well, you have some good company.
I may have embarked on writing an annual “State of the Climate” report, see http://wermenh.com/climate/climate2009.pdf . This would be a good thing to put in next year’s. I thought I saw something from you elsewhere earlier today offering to send copies of the paper to interested parties, but can’t find it now.
If you can send it out, please send a copy to “ric” at “wermenh.com”.
another refresh and i see the Siddons’ Mauna Lao dPPM chart that was present before, and which i referenced, has been changed. (and also that i forgot to properly close an i tag)
REPLY: Yes it was changed (to do a better job of the trendline) and referenced in comments. – Anthony
The oceans are said to hold 50 times as much CO2 as the atmoshere, one source says 70 times. I am suspicious of round numbers like that which suggests that not much care has gone into the calculation. The half life of CO2 in the atmosphere is 5 years, which means that there is rapid exchange with the oceans. By my calculations, the atmosphere is in equlibrium, on average, with the top 100 metres. Also by my calculations, a cooling of the world by 2 degrees over 20 years would result in a flat atmospheric CO2 trend, with the anthropogenic contribution offsetting the increased solubility. The CDIAC site has some interesting data: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/oceans/glodap/images/TOS_fig8.jpg
These are the people who resorted to poisioning their plant growth trials with ozone in order to get the right result.
crosspatch (15:19:35) :
“Has anyone estimated what portion of available fossil hydrocarbon resources have already been burned?”
It is defining ‘available’ that is the problem. Quote from BP oil reserves “Nobody knows or can know how much oil exists under the earth’s surface or how much it will be possible to produce in the future”
For oil alone (@2007):
– 985 billion barrels consumed worldwide since 1965.
– current reserves 1238 billion barrels (1390 including oil sands)
These are ‘Proved Reserves’, not all of which may be ultimately recoverable.
info here: http://www.bp.com/productlanding.do?categoryId=6929&contentId=7044622
info at bp.com – I should have said look in excel file under historical data