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
Anthony, thanks for the honorable mention in your update. Your reply above to BarryW, “My thought was that it was a dearth of cloud cover that may have triggered it,” prompted me to look at the ISCCP cloud amount data through the KNMI Climate Explorer website. Like SST data, cloud amount data over the equatorial Pacific is dominated by ENSO, with clouds and precipitation shifting back and forth from the PWP to the NINO regions, following the warmer water. So that data is very noisy. Instead of the equatorial Pacific, I decided to look at cloud amount data over the Northern and Southern equatorial currents (tropical Pacific), but leaving a 20 degree latitude gap (10S to 10N) in between, with the hope of minimizing the ENSO noise. Lo and behold, just as you surmised, there was a significant decrease in Total Cloud Amount over the two areas (10N-20N, 145E-90W & 20S-10S, 145E-90W) from the early 1990s to 1995-97.
http://s5.tinypic.com/1zb9q9v.jpg
(The change in the cloud amounts in these areas is significantly larger than the decrease in global cloud amount for the same period.)
It appears then that the decrease in cloud amount, led to significant increases in Downward Shortwave Radiation (Visible Light), which raised SST and OHC of the tropical Pacific. This warm water was carried by the equatorial currents to the Pacific Warm Pool, where it accumulated and provided fuel for the 1997/98 El Nino.
Too bad that dataset ends so early.
I’ve graphed the monthly cloud amount anomaly data as well. I’ll try to write the post tomorrow morning, for those who want to look at the monthly data too.
Allan M R MacRae: The SST anomaly (ERSST.v2) data source for that post was NOAA NOMADS, but it’s no longer available through NOMADS. ERSST.v2 data is, however, available through the KNMI Climate Explorer website.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectfield_obs.cgi?someone@somewhere
A more recent version of the NCDC SST data, the OI.v2 data, is still available though NOMADS, though.
http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh?lite
The KNMI website also has the HADSST data but it has an upward step change in 1997 due to the Hadley Centre’s change of data source.
Sorry about my description of the CO2 data, but I like to use the simplest description possible for the readers without technical backgrounds. It’s the CO2 value for Month N minus the CO2 value for Month N-1, also refered to as the first derivative.
Ric Werme (16:52:03) :
@Ric
re: ttp://wermenh.com/climate/climate2009.pdf
I read it, and did go conform with it.
OT here, but nevertheless, local climate here (Germany):
Feb was #59 warmest out of the last 109 years. (according to DWD)
Sun hours were about 38% lower than 1961-90 average.
Yep, felt that.
Usually, there is at least a day or two, around March 20th, where you
could go out at noon and don’t need more than a t-shirt.
I’m still needin’ the flat one this year. And that’s not related to sitting in an office
most of the day.
klausb: Was it a paper by Mehta? He did a lot of work on the PWP, though I don’t recall km^3.
Anthony,
REPLY: If you read the post you’ll see that I did in fact mention that the blue trend line was eyeballed.
“I’ve bracketed the area of interest below and added an eyeball trend line for the peaks:”
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
There are 3 factors that influence the rate of change of CO2 in the atmosphere.
1) Human related emissions
2) Natural emissions
3) Natural absorptions
These effects occur continuously. I don’t see the justification for focusing on the peaks. The tropical oceans are continuously emitting CO2 and the polar oceans are absorbing it. On the other hand the seasonal effects are said to be due to the growth and decay of vegetation in the northern hemisphere.
The emission from the oceans is not a seasonal effect and the main short term variation is from ENSO. The emission of CO2 is an ocean surface phenomenon, as is the absorption. One would expect a long lived ocean cooling phenomenon to pull the entire curve more negative, rather than lopping off a peak.
It is more instructive to look at the annual mean growth rate.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/index.html#mlo
The data from 2000 onward :
2000 1.74
2001 1.59
2002 2.56
2003 2.29
2004 1.55
2005 2.55
2006 1.69
2007 2.17
2008 1.66
This seems to be quite noisy. I don’t think there is a real trend there.
Leif,
With regard to the graph
Here is an up-to-date graph of detrended Mauna Loa CO2:
http://www.leif.org/research/Mauna%20Loa%20CO2%20detrended%202004-2009.png
would it be useful to look at the areas above and below zero to see if a trend emerges ?. It seems to me that it is both the peak, and time spent getting there and back that matters and would be reflected in above and below area analysis.
The significance of this is that, while there is no question that human emissions of CO2 are the major driver of atmospheric CO2 levels in the short term (say less than 10 years), Ocean temperatures drive CO2 levels in the medium term and longer (more than say 10 to 20 years).
What this means is that climate predictions for a 100 years in the future have no validity, except (possibly) to the extent they are predictions of human CO2 emissions a 100 years in the future.
It also means that CO2 cannot be the primary climate temperature driver in the shorter term (less than 10 years).
So CO2 can’t be either the primary long term or primary short term climate driver.
Which is not to say CO2 doesn’t have a secondary role in the climate.
I thought CO2 lagged temperature by 800 years!
Just another thought, why is the Mauna Loa trend line so linear?
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
is there anything else so linear in nature? especially as the dreaded CO2 is being generated (I imagine) exponentially?
Bob Tisdale (17:50:18) :
Bob, silly me,
usually I do at first store the description/explanation of the data.
I did go back through the CDs/DVDs of my backups back to 2004/12 now.
Didn’t find it.
At the moment, I have only one explanation. I was sloppy and didn’t do
what I should have done. I am sorry, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
I’ll try the TAO page tomorrow. Somewhere it should be.
Klaus
And a graph of the ‘rate of change’ :
Leif, maybe I’m missing something here, but detrended data (see your graph) by definition can’t have a rate of change.
Ak asks: “do you believe that your acceleration, rate of change of velocity, of your auto is highest when your velocity is at it’s [sic] highest?”
No. Why should it be? I believe my dv/dt in any gear is highest when my engine RPM’s correspond to peak torque. And seawater will evolve CO² fastest when it’s at peak temperature.
“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.”
Ocean heat content has trended downwards since ~2004. There is an apparent matching downward trend in peak C☺² evolution rate. This would, if true, be perfectly consistent with physical principles. It washes fine.
[trimmed stuff]“[IF] they had read the text, and had a good understanding of the math behind it, then yes, you are correct.”
Well, ak, we do get all kinds in here. Some people leap to conclusions, just as you say. I, too, have had to put an occasional pin in a sceptic’s balloon.
“…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.””
Ak, what was said regarding the hot spot was this: “…the SST maps show a warm anomaly in that region, and extending off to the east. Is that anomaly a result or coincidence?” That seems like a question regarding effect, not a supposition of cause.
“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.”
I’ll withdraw the san, since it seems to have caught you off-guard. Sorry you were offended.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_titles#San
Jorge
E.M.Smith wrote:
“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.”
Sure, but in the context of a century or millennium wouldn’t the sea levels tend to rise steadily, AOTBE (all other things being equal)?
Incidentally, what about cosmic dust falling on the earth? I’ve read that some huge number of tons of it falls to earth (and sea) daily. What effect would that have on sea levels?
Keith Minto (18:25:36)
That’s a pretty short time span your’re looking at. I would think an exponential increase (the more there is the faster it grows, the runaway scenario) would be the least likely . There is an interesting treatment of co2 increase during the 20th century (total co2 has increased by only 23.7%) in “Cold Facts on Global Warming” Look at the Global Carbon Dioxide Level graph which compares CO2 ppm levels throughout the 20th century but, unlike most graphs of this type, starts the CO2 scale at 0.
@Ron de Haan (15:38:32) :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….
…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…)…”
Gentlemen, please:
We have land after 4.5×10^9 years because what’s being generated by the process of subduction is rocks that are less dense than the material that forms the ocean floor (basalt mainly, plus even more mafic (dense) rocks of the peridotite family (rich in iron, magnesium, nickel and iron).
As the subducting slab begins to hydrate, heat and melt, the stuff that comes off is more enriched in sodium, potassium, aluminum and silica. This is “partial melting” and it is extracting a magma of material that has a lower melting point than the original material. This magma, compositionally less dense that what it derived from and hot so that it is less dense than what lies above it, rises and is ejected on the earth’s surface (as rhyolite, dacite, or andesite lavas and tuffs) or solidifies before then (as granodiorite or granite plugs/batholiths). This stuff floats like a cork on the mantle and overrides oceanic crust.
When this material is eroded and carried to the sea (often in even less dense form, as many volcanic/plutonic minerals alter in contact with atmosphere/ground water and take up water: feldspar (no H20) >> clay (feldspar + H20 +/-), the mass of the continent decreases. Thus it floats even higher. The new river deltas extend the continents’ breadth.
Oceanic volcanic islands, such as the Hawaiian Islands, are being formed where an upwelling mantle current (hot spot) occurs (or else some miles beyond a subduction trench where oceanic crust is sinking back into the mantle cuz’ it’s cool and dense whereupon the crustal material goes through the partial melting process described above, forming a volcanic island arc like Japan or an intra-continental volcanic chain like the Cascades/Andes).
In the first case, the hot spot creates a volcano that’s hot and less dense than the sea floor. In some cases, the volcano finally builds to protrude above the ocean’s surface (Mauna Loa is actually about 35,000 feet tall, measured from the sea bed). When the oceanic plate is moved beyond the hot spot, the volcanism ceases, the pile of basalt cools, and the whole massive shebang begins to sink back into the mantle. Witness Hawaii>Maui>Oahu>Kauai>whatever shoal. They’ll all disappear from sight eventually, and ultimately either be subducted or obducted (thrust up onto a continental margin).
There is a small amount of matter being added to the earth’s volume from spatial detritus (small meteorites and other debris that the earth’s gravity collects). Outside a MAJOR meteorite impact, what we have in terms of planetary mass is what we had since about 3.5BY- 4.0BY ago, when these massive collisions still did occur (the earthly vacuum cleaner has swept up its path pretty efficiently – but still, a blob the size of Monaco could ruin your whole day!).
So, take a cork, pin a fishing sinker to it, put it into water, mark the level of the water on the cork and the container. Now, remove the sinker, drop it into the water, and remeasure the water mark on the cork and the container. Do you see any change? 😉 There may be water yet in the mantle to be released to the surface that could increment the hydrosphere. Otherwise, there is likely little or no material change to sea levels as a result of any geologic process, except for the melting – or formation – of massive glaciers (I claim this for geology, of which climatology is a subset, and which really is just trading hands).
schnurrp,
Yes, the scary Mauna Loa CO2 graph, which shoots up at an alarming 45° angle, deliberately misrepresents the situation.
A graph that starts at zero is more honest: click
I wrote to NOAA about a year ago regarding the relationship between dC02/dt and global temperatures, which I could see in the record. I recieved a prompt and courteous reply from Pieter Tans, from which I quote:
“The relationship with temperature and El-Nino was noted first by Robert
Bacastow of the Scripps Inst of Oceanography, in 1976 in Nature, vol.
261, p. 116-118.”
So it has been known about for a goodly length of time and was spotted when there was not a long record of CO2 data available.
On the main point:
Loehle’s analysis, if correct, is truly astonishing. Given that the ocean surface warmed between 1970 and 2000 thereby moving the ocean temperature profile away from equilibrium. Heat uptake should have continued for many decades to come with a surface temperature that has been largely constant since 2000 or even with a moderately declining surface temperature.
To put it bluntly, if the heat content of the oceans is falling whilst the ocean surface temperature is roughly constant then the “pipe line” is at best empty, at worst backing up. By which I mean that the earth is, as a whole, cooling, which implies that the current surface temperatures can not be sustained by the current levels well mixed greenhouse gases. It would imply that something quite drastic has happened to the atmosphere-ocean system whereby the ocean is now heating the atmosphere and on to outer space.
We are living in very interesting times. It is one thing for the temperature trend to go flat but for the oceanic heat content to be dropping is much more difficult to explain, the “pipeline” should almost guarantee that this cannot happen.
Alex
Alex
crosspatch (14:05:50) : 21.03.09
Deep sea temperature measurement.
Some of you guys are too young. During the cold war days there was an enormous investment in military research, some involving submarine communication and signal detection. This can be better in some sea strata that have layered temperatures. As part of the research, many many sondes were sunk to ocean bottoms to record for a while, float to the surface, tansmit by a radio burst then sink again. There is wealth of information in the records. The trick is to access it. I don’t know how to, but I guess NASA do. Why not ask them?
Justin Sane (18:20:19) :
I thought CO2 lagged temperature by 800 years!
Yes, ~600 years +/- several hundred years, according to Vostok ice cores, if my faulty memory serves me.
Also ~ 9 months, according to my paper on icecap.us
Also possibly other delays, such as ~5 years on a cycle of ~60-90 years, if Ernst Beck is correct.
The point is that each delay time is a function of its cycle length.
The 9 month delay is probably a function of ENSO cycles, for example.
Beck’s ~5 year delay, if it exists, is likely based on a PDO or Gleissberg cycle.
The 600 year delay would be based on a longer cycle of perhaps ~1500 years.
These cycles are not mutually exclusive – they can all exist at the same time.
Regards, Allan
Smokey (19:27:04)
Here’s one that starts at zero CO2 ppm for the entire 20th century.
“BarryW (13:40:56) : 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?
REPLY: My thought was that it was a dearth of cloud cover that may have triggered it. – Anthony”
This would be due to activity on the sun and it’s effect on the earth, wouldn’t it?
Craig Loehle (11:39:04) :
What are your thought on Nir Shaviv’s work on energy from the sun and the possible amplifying of that energy in oceans?
ref :
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V12/N8/EDIT.php
I’ve gotta say it, being an ex trawlerman an’ all….. Ah, the sea is indeed a harsh mistress…. She has sunk the good ship AGW and all who sailed her are lost.
Weep tears of joy catastrophists…. The end has come and gone.
It was but merely the catastrophic collapse of a foolish hypothesis;-)
“REPLY: If you want to put the entire paper here (as a PDF) you are welcome to do so. It has been pointed out to me that with the traffic WUWT has, it likely reaches more people than many of the journals. And, a lot faster too!.”
I’m happy for you that you’ve reached this level Anthony Watts. Good on ya mate!
“nvw (14:05:45) : We are looking at the end game, a few moves and it is checkmate for AGW:”
Do you know how many times I’ve seen the words ‘endgame’ and ‘checkmate’ in the last two years? It was checkmate for AGW a long time ago. But there still is no end to AGW.
It seems to be like this : even though Einstein’s view of gravity is far better than Newton’s (Einstein’s view makes Newton’s look like something from the Geico cave man) Newton’s gravity is still taught in schools. Einstein’s is not.
The real science of climate may not get to the mainstream just like Einstein’s gravity has not made it to the mainstream.
But maybe I’ve become jaded.