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
“But all that heat went into Hansen’s magical mystery “pipeline” tour, don’t ya know.”
I think they took all that heat, created financial derivatives, and had AIG peddle them around the world in exchange for mortgage default risk insurance. So when the heat of the oceans began to fall, they were forced to pony up more capital until it eventually the entire thing collapsed. It looked like a neat thing to do at the time because according to IPCC and the general scientific consensus, it was almost a riskless transaction and the values of ocean heat were expected to go nowhere but up forever.
Leif Svalgaard (16:26:10) :
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
I don’t know how he constructed his graph. I downloaded the data from the ftp-site quoted on the Figure and differentiated the data to get the rate of change. Detrending first does not make any difference because d(b+ax+c*sin(x))/dx = a + c*cos(x).
The point is not what this or that graph shows, but what the actual data treated correctly show. By ‘correctly’ I mean in a straightforward way that can be explained and reproduced.
Philip_B (18:30:21) :
Leif, maybe I’m missing something here, but detrended data (see your graph) by definition can’t have a rate of change.
See above or consider the function sin(x) which does not have any ‘long-term’ trend [always swings between -1 and 1 not matter how far out you go]. the rate of change of sin(x) is cos(x).
Jim F
An elegant and succinct description of the creation of continents!
I’ve often wondered why the ocean floor is so mafic. Is it not so much that the felsics are excluded, but rather that the mafics are, as you say, excluded from the continental crust?
But then, wouldn’t hydration at the ocean ridges create differentiated extrusions?
Also, is a significant amount of water going missing into the magma?
Craig Loehle: Thankyou so much for this important finding.
And thanks so much for you work with temperature proxies.
This strange farce of a science story,, “Global warming” – hysteria, is actually coming to an end soon. Many people out there dont know yet, but the world is in for a surprice, a story that will last for centuries. A story that will be told again and again. And some individuals might have some explaining to do.
So Craig, thank you so much for helping ending this sad epoke in science.
K.R. Frank
Just Want Truth: “Do you know how many times I’ve seen the words ‘endgame’ and ‘checkmate’ in the last two years?”
That’s not the half of it. Try these: “beginning of the end of the ‘global warming’ nonsense…more cracks in the AGW façade…IPCC’s house of cards is crumbling…AGW mantra will die soon…Game over man! Game over!…AGW bubble bursts for good…first trickle of the turning tide…will end the AGW parade…rats are beginning to jump ship…South-Seas-are-Bubbling bubble to burst…their house of cards will collapse…a sign of the beginning of the end…another twelve months before this mess falls to pieces…the AGW balloon is about to burst…the AGW theory is about to come crashing down…this may be the tipping point to a revival of reality…we are finally witnessing the last gasps of a dying theory…is dying as a viable bogey man before our very eyes…the extremely thin veneer of science is beginning to crack, revealing the crumbling edifice of AGW.”
Anthony,
Well spotted – is there any lag between the MLO data and Craig’s? Trends are trends, but if Tom Segalstad’s estimate that CO2 residence in the atmosphere is ~ 5 years, then MLO should be about 5 years behind Craig’s, everything else being equal.
If shorter, lag-wise, then CO2 vs SST coupling has to be tighter.
Just a muse as I haven’t been paying much attention to climate stuff lately.
Frank Lansner (22:33:17) :
“Craig Loehle: Thankyou so much for this important finding.
And thanks so much for you work with temperature proxies.
This strange farce of a science story,, “Global warming” – hysteria, is actually coming to an end soon. Many people out there dont know yet, but the world is in for a surprice, a story that will last for centuries. A story that will be told again and again. And some individuals might have some explaining to do.
So Craig, thank you so much for helping ending this sad epoke in science”.
K.R. Frank
Yes, and now we have redo the big media, politics, the UN, the IPCC, all the enviro’s,
and half of the brainwashed world population.
This will take approx. twenty years, so we’re still left with a “Blue Planet in Green Shackles”
http://www.klaus.cz/klaus2/asp/clanek.asp?id=4YaljNm0KrL2
Just Want Truth… (21:18:59) :
. . . 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.
General Relativistic gravity is only better than Newton’s take in the extremes. For anything man can survive, Newton works just fine. He got us to the moon, he gets our robots to the planets. Using GR equations for that would just get the same answers.
The schools don’t teach GR because
1. It’s useless
2. It’s incomprehensible
I think it was Einstein who said that only Arthur Eddington actually understood General Relativity. The only one of Einstein’s ten GR tensors that I understand is the metric tensor, and Pythagoras came up with that one 2500 years ago.
You’re dead on right about the facts getting to the mainstream. Most folks get their ‘facts’ from the perky Katie Couric, and if something goes against the template, well, it just doesn’t get reported. I’d bet the people per million who know that global warming topped out in the last century is lower that the CO2 ppm.
AGW is going to live as truth until the
stupidproposed government ‘cures’ start costing people their jobs.klausb: It occurred to me this morning that there’s another dataset available from the CPC that they call Ocean Heat Content of the equatorial Pacific.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/MJO/enso.shtml
Their link to the data is down toward the bottom of the page. Here’s the link, which clarifies that it’s actually the average subsurface temperature from 0 to 300 meters.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ocean/index/heat_content_index.txt
My posts on it are here:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2008/11/average-subsurface-temperature-of.html
and here:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2008/11/nino34-sst-warm-water-volume-subsurface.html
Jim F
I was thinking of things like the billion metric tons of dust that blows off of Africa every year 1.4 billion tons from the Yellow River, who knows how many tons of material dropped from bergs as the glaciers forming them scraped out valleys. Yeah, I know that on the scale of millions of years all that stuff gets recycled but I would also posit that as time goes by, that process is slowing. At some point I would expect the land to be below sea level if the oceans don’t outgas into space first (which is actually the more likely scenario).
I would expect that overall across the planet, the amount of land mass above the surface of the water to be shrinking (more land eroding than rising) but the Himalayas would probably be the dominant factor in that equation and places like the St. Elias Mountains in Canada are still growing rapidly.
Water lost from the oceans into the rocks being subducted is a factor, too. Example: “Subduction of serpentinized peridotites from ophiolite slabs is here considered the most effective mechanism of bringing water to great depth within the mantle.” But there is conflicting research. Some claim that more is being subducted than returned, others claim to be able to account for that deficit. Is it all locked up in hydrous aluminum silicates or does it work its way back out somehow?
There were a few recent “scare” stories that Earth was losing ocean to subduction at an “alarming rate” but looking closer at the press release it seemed to be more a plea for justification for funding someone’s research by scaring people into giving them the cash to “study” it than anything else. (which is why I am wary of any release in the press that mentions a scary scenario followed by mention that more money is needed to study it).
Overall it won’t matter. At some point all the water will be gone anyway either locked up in the rock or lost to space.
Just Want Truth… (20:52:03) :
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?
JWT: You should enjoy this – Shaviv slides from 2004 Florence conference
http://www.fi.infn.it/conferenze/ecrs2004/Pages/Presentazioni/04%20Shaviv.pdf
Thank you Bob for the data sources.
The above work on SST vs CO2 is fairly similar to my January 31, 2008 paper on icecap.us.
I used Hadcrut3 which includes air temperatures over land and HadSST2 sea surface temperatures.
I used UAH LT (Lower Troposphere temps) and both Global and later Mauna Loa CO2 concentrations.
Repeating from my previous WUWT post:
It is interesting to note that the detailed signals we derive from the data show that CO2 lags temperature at all time scales, from the 9 month delay for ~ENSO cycles to the ~600 year delay inferred in the ice core data for much longer cycles.
My paper on the 9-month delay was posted Jan.31/08 with a spreadsheet at http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/carbon_dioxide_in_not_the_primary_cause_of_global_warming_the_future_can_no/
In my Figure 1 and 2, global dCO2/dt closely coincides with global Lower Tropospheric Temperature LT and Surface Temperature ST. I believe that the temperature and CO2 datasets are collected completely independently, and yet there is this clear correlation.
After publishing this paper, I also demonstrated the same correlation with different datasets – using Mauna Loa CO2 and Hadcrut3 ST going back to 1958. More recently I examined the close correlation of LT measurements taken by satellite and those taken by radiosonde.
Further, there are papers by Kuo (1990) and Keeling (1995) that discussed the delay of CO2 after temperature, although neither appeared to notice the even closer correlation of dCO2/dt with temperature. This correlation is noted in my Figures 3 and 4.
This subject has generated discussion among serious scientists. Almost no one doubts the dCO2/dt versus LT (and ST) correlation. Some go so far as to say that humankind is not even the primary cause of the current increase in atmospheric CO2 – that it is natural. Others rely on a “material balance argument” to refute this claim – I think these would be in the majority. I am officially an agnostic on this question, to date.
The warmist side also has also noted this ~9 month delay, but try to explain it as a “feedback effect” – this argument seems more consistent with AGW religious dogma than with science (”ASSUMING AGW is true, then it MUST be feedback”). 🙂
It is interesting to note, however, that the natural seasonal variation in atmospheric CO2 ranges up to ~16ppm in the far North, whereas the annual increase in atmospheric CO2 is only ~2ppm. This reality tends to weaken the “material balance argument”. This seasonal ’sawtooth” of CO2 is primarily driven by the Northern Hemisphere landmass, which is much greater in area than that of the Southern Hemisphere. CO2 falls during the NH summer due primarily to land-based photosynthesis, and rises in the late fall, winter and early spring as biomass degrades.
There is also likely to be significant CO2 solution and exsolution from the oceans.
See the excellent animation at http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/carbonDioxideSequence2002_2008_at15fps.mp4
For more on this subject, see
Increasing Atmospheric CO2: Manmade…or Natural?
January 21st, 2009 by Roy W. Spencer
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/01/increasing-atmospheric-co2-manmade%e2%80%a6or-natural/
Also Veizer (2005) and the classic Veizer and Shaviv (2003), if you can find them online. Veizer used to be at http://www.gac.ca/publications/geoscience/TOC/GACgcV32No1Web.pdf
Many scientists who believe that the theory of catastrophic humanmade global warming is invalid still do believe that humankind is driving increased atmospheric CO2 through combustion of fossil fuels.
I used to be accept without question the role of fossil fuels in driving increased atmospheric CO2 – now I am leaning towards being an agnostic on this very interesting scientific question.
The really important question is whether the world is undergoing catastrophic global warming or NOT.
It is apparent to me that there has been no significant warming for many years, and sharp cooling since January 2007.
The shift in the PDO from warm to cool mode suggests we can expect, on average, 20-30 years of global cooling (with upward and downward natural variation).
In summary, I think the alleged catastrophic humanmade global warming crisis does not exist in reality.
Regards, Allan
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? Shouldn’t that put some ultimate upper bound on anthropogenic CO2 emissions?
Yes, it has been estimated. There ought to be about 5000 Gigatons of C in all the non-clathrate hydrocarbons. Clathrates are a bit less clear, but somewhere beween at most another 5000 Gt C and 500-2500 Gt C depending on who’s estimate and how old. See:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
In fairness, I do cite an older llnl.gov posting that estimated 10,000 Gt C in Clathrates, but I’m pretty sure it was over the mark so I’d cut it in half as an upper bound. BTW, at present we have no way to recover and use the Clathrates. They are at the bottom of very deep oceans.
One theory of how an ice age ends is that when enough water has been lifted from the ocean as land ice, it depressurizes the clathrates that then vaporize / out gas and a methane flood of the atmosphere causes a spike in temps with a melting of glaciers et. al.
Also, FWIW, since we don’t really have any idea how much methane from clathrates enters the oceans / atmosphere each year, any imputing that CO2 comes from people based on C12 : C13 ratios is broken. We don’t know what at least one major source is doing, so the error band goes too large to make a reasonable conclusion. See:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/the-trouble-with-c12-c13-ratios/
Finally, it’s constantly raining here. A large storm is hitting the Left Coast and just dumping on us. TWC was talking about feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada. The cold and wet is back after a brief respite.
Here is the unfiltered ocean heat content data – http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
Craig’s graph looks nothing like this data.
Why Antrophogenic CO2 does not cause warming: Shoot!
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_SimplifiedNutshell.htm
Roger Knights (19:00:18) : 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)?
What is the rate at which continental collisions are thrusting volumes of rock up into the air? Himalayas are still having some uplift. What is the rate at which subduction is dragging sediment down under the continent margin (to be melted and hydrated as described above)? What is the rate at which this process raises mountains? California coastal mountains still rise, sometimes very abruptly! What is the rate at which volcanoes reach for the sky? (Hawaii and Chaiten are still erupting along with some others). The thing you must remember is that even on a century long basis stuff is moving and you don’t know the quantities so you can’t know the net direction.
Heck, in a good jolt you can get several feet of lift over many miles all at once. The Indonesian Tsunami from a couple of years ago had a several hundred mile stretch of sea floor rise something like 9 feet in seconds to minutes! Parts of California are known to have moved up a couple of feet in seconds in a good quake.
To know the net effect you would need to “do the math” on all the numbers and you don’t have all the numbers. But we do know that the processes are still happening. (As described above with the “light rocks floating” description, the best we can do is look at the shoreline and notice if we’re floating any differently. Sometimes were are. See Scotland for example where the north edge is rising or Midway which is sinking oh so slowly). And as noted above about the Mediterranean being squashed and removed as a basin. But also notice that a rift is ripping Africa apart and some day the eastern edge will be a new Madagascar with a new sea between it and the main land.
You really must let go of the idea of using a static model to describe the land / ocean depths. It is dynamic and static analysis will fail.
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?
Essentially nothing. It’s trivial compared to everything else and it will just get subducted and melted along with everything else. (Since this has been happening for a long time, we ought to be near an equilibrium, where the stuff accumulated on the ocean floor and hitting the melting part of the cycle is about the same as the in fall. Basically the millions of years of in fall has all ready happened and now sea floor spreading is feeding the ooze to the subduction zone. New dust is just preventing this from making progress in cleaning up the net dust in the ooze. So we add comet dust to the continents and comet water to the oceans. What is the net? Unknown but certainly near nothing of importance.
I know it’s hard to put these two things in the same paragraph, but it is true that we can’t know what’s happening, yet we can know that the result is “not much” by inspection of the last few thousand years of shoreline. Some ports in Italy that are now higher than the sea. Some in Greece / Turkey that are now city, built over what was the port that silted up centuries ago and is now land well above sea level. Alexandria which sunk into the Mediterranean in an earthquake in recorded history (compensating for some of the Italian uplift!)
So we know land moves up and down and we know that most ports in most places are very close to the level they were at centuries ago.
So, to summarise:
“There are two resistors affecting the flow of solar energy through the Earth’s independently variable systems of ocean and air.
They each vary in the strength of their resistance to the solar energy flow over time.
In the case of the oceans, oceanic cycles cause the flow of energy to the air to speed up and slow down over periods of 30 years or so for each negative or positive phase.
In the case of the air it is the circulation of the air that
causes the energy flow to space to speed up or slow down but in that case it varies on a daily basis.
One resistor (the oceans) is massively greater than the other (the air) due to the huge density and volume of the oceans as compared to the air.
If the oceans are in a surface cooling (negative) mode they are net absorbers of solar energy and are releasing less energy to the air than is needed to replace the energy lost by the air to space. That is an
increase in the resistor effect of the oceans and the main body of the oceans is normally warming unless solar input is so weak that it offsets the warming effect of the negative mode. The air cools.
If the oceans are in a surface warming (positive) mode they are net emitters of solar energy and are releasing more energy to the air than is needed to replace the energy lost to space by the air. That is a decrease in the resistor effect of the oceans and the main body of the oceans is normally cooling unless solar input is strong enough to offset the cooling effect of the positive mode. That may have been the case from 1975 to 2000. The air warms.
Full article here:
http://climaterealists.com/attachments/database/Balancing%20the%20Earths%20Energy%20Budget__0__0__1233774754.pdf
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.
Actually our oceans are the planet’s largest Cold Sink. The average deep ocean temperature is about 3deg c. ARGO is starting to produce some usefull information but the ocean has limited ability to warm the planet but a much greater ability to cool it.
Craig Loehle (13:39:55) :
For those who keep asking, I published in E&E because it can take 2 years to publish elsewhere. I am perfectly capable of getting something published, with 115 pub papers so far I know the ropes. But timeliness seemed pretty important in this case.
My comment:
Makes sense to publish in E&E – McIntyre and McKitrick did so, as well as many others.
You’ll receive much tougher reviews online than the creampuff peer review process of alarmist climate papers in (Political) Science and Nature.
Craig – can you please provide your source for ARGO daa?
Thanks, Allan
I did find this – see slide 8
http://www.ioc-unesco.org/hab/components/com_oe/oe.php?task=download&id=6051&version=1.0&lang=1&format=6
E.M.Smith (14:25:36) :
“Ellie in Belfast (13:16:18) : This got me thinking, but as usual questions to which I do not have an answer: – is CO2 adsorption by oceans (roughly) linear with temperature?
I think there is another complicating factor. We have precipitation. I believe that it’s the colder rain and snow that acts as a counter current “stripper” taking CO2 from the air. Once that precipitation hits the ocean, then the question becomes does the CO2 stay or not. A colder ocean would imply:
1) It stays more than before.
2) The precipitation falling into it will be colder, so stripping more CO2.”
Good points – I would agree with both. pH of rainwater can be lower in urban areas even now that SO4 is largely controlled, which might argue for higher localised CO2 a la Beck. (sorry i missed your comment earlier)
DJ (03:12:54) :
said,
“Here is the unfiltered ocean heat content data – http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
Craig’s graph looks nothing like this data.”
Thanks for looking this up on the internet. You are exactly right.
This graph is based on a recent publication, which claims to correct errors in recent data.
ftp://ftp.nodc.noaa.gov/pub/data.nodc/woa/PUBLICATIONS/grlheat08.pdf
There are a number of different versions of this graph in the paper which compare the results for ocean heat content from 700M to the surface with previous workers.
The graph on page 32 shows a huge increase between2002 and 2005, from 4.5 to 12*10^22J which is missing from Craig’s graph, and a slower increase through 2008. There is no way one could get a decrease of 1*10^22 J from this graph, which is what Craig Loehle has gotten.
This whole learned discussion seems to be based on questionable data. The annual rate of increase of CO2 is actually quite noisy, and the ocean heat content did not actually decrease in recent years according to the latest corrected version of the data.
It seems not everyone at NOAA is convinced that CO2 will be the final destruction of all life on earth. I’m sure when management catch up with the prankster he will receive a severe rogering.
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/co2.jpg
Eric: You wrote, “This whole learned discussion seems to be based on questionable data.”
The data varies from month to month even from data source. Which of the datasets is most current? Also Craig Loehl noted how he detrended the data in the first comment on this thread, which may explain part of the difference.
I obtained the data from Josh Willis based on HIS corrections to the raw data, which I assumed to authoritative. It seems that the different methods do not lead to the same corrections, which is a problem, clearly.
The ocean heat content should decrease during a period of net positive global ocean cycles due to energy release to the air.
Accordingly it should increase during a period of net negative ocean cycles when energy is being denied to the air.
What really matters is the netted out effect of all the oceans simultaneously at any given moment.
However the level of solar input is also important.
At any given point during a period of positive or negative ocean cycles the rate of solar input to the oceans can be more or less than the energy passing to the air from the oceans.
From 1975 to 2000 it would appear that an active sun was adding more energy to the oceans than was being lost to the air by the positive ocean cycles so total ocean heat content was rising despite the positive cycles.
From 2000 to now it would appear that with the progressively more negative ocean cycles the reduction in loss of energy to the air is causing an increasing total ocean heat content despite the weakening solar input.
It might take some years, possibly a couple of decades, for a weaker sun to have enough of an effect on ocean heat content to offset the ocean warming effect of the negative ocean cycles fully (it may never do so) so while we still have negative ocean cycles the ocean heat content would normally continue to increase even while the climate cools.
That is a scenario that could explain a continuing rise in total heat content if that is what is actually happening.
Craig’s chart would suggest that the solar input is so weak that there is still a net reduction in ocean heat content despite the negative ocean cycles which would normally ADD to ocean heat content.
I would like to know which chart is correct but on the basis of my suggestion neither chart is inconsistent with entirely natural processes.
The fastest energy loss from the oceans would be during a positive set of ocean cycles and a weak sun even though the air would be warming. Despite warming of the climate under such a scenario we would be rushing towards a sudden temperature drop as soon as the ocean cycles went negative again.
The current negative ocean cycles may be helping to delay the full consequences of what might be an extended period of lower solar activity by helping to retain more energy in the system for the time being.
The ‘battery’ is still being charged, fortunately for us.
Even during a generally negative period of ocean cycles which can go on for 30 years or more there are still periods of positive oceanic balance. If the sun stays weak such positive spells just accelerate overall energy loss which might be masked climatically during the positive spell but which would result in a faster drop down in temperature to a lower level when the next net negative spell arrives.
Such a process applies both within a longer term warming spell AND a longer term cooling spell and gives rise to a ‘stepped’ pattern of air temperature rise or fall.
That ‘stepped’ upward rise is just what we observed during the 20th Century warming trend and as we might well now see with temperature going downward during any 21st Century cooling trend.
Everything we observe fits perfectly well with natural solar and oceanic changes and need not involve GHGs at all.