Related to this story: The Pacific Decadal Oscillation Time Series from the University of Washington, seen below. Emphasis points mine. h/t to WUWT reader Richard Heg. – Anthony
Monthly Values for the PDO Index, January 1900 to September 2008. Positive (red) index values indicate a warm phase PDO; negative (blue) index values indicate a cool phase PDO. While short-term flips in PDO phases do occur, evaluation of 20th century instrumental records has shown that PDO phases generally persist for 20-30 years, as indicated in this figure. To download the data, see Nate Mantua’s PDO page.
Changes in Net Flow of Ocean Heat Correlate with Past Climate Anomalies
Physicists at the University of Rochester have combed through data from satellites and ocean buoys and found evidence that in the last 50 years, the net flow of heat into and out of the oceans has changed direction three times.
These shifts in the balance of heat absorbed from the sun and radiated from the oceans correlate well with past anomalies that have been associated with abrupt shifts in the earth’s climate, say the researchers. These anomalies include changes in normal storm intensities, unusual land temperatures, and a large drop in salmon populations along the western United States.
The physicists also say these changes in ocean heat-flow direction should be taken into account when predicting global climate because the oceans represent 90 percent of the total heat in the earth’s climate system.
The study, which will appear in an upcoming issue of Physics Letters A, differs from most previous studies in two ways, the researchers say. First, the physicists look at the overall heat content of the Earth’s climate system, measuring the net balance of radiation from both the sun and Earth. And second, it analyzes more completely the data sets the researchers believe are of the highest quality, and not those that are less robust.
“These shifts happened relatively abruptly,” says David Douglass, professor of physics at the University of Rochester, and co-author of the paper. “One, for example, happened between 1976 and 1977, right when a number of other climate-related phenomenona were happening, such as significant changes in U. S. precipitation.”
Douglass says the last oceanic shift occurred about 10 years ago, and that the oceans are currently emitting slightly more radiation than they are receiving.
The members of the team, which includes Robert Knox, emeritus professor of physics at the University, believe these heat-flux shifts had previously gone unnoticed because no one had analyzed the data as thoroughly as the Rochester team has.
The team believes that the oceans may change how much they absorb and radiate depending on factors such as shifts in ocean currents that might change how the deep water and surface waters exchange heat. In addition to the correlation with strange global effects that some scientists suspect were caused by climate shifts, the team says their data shows the oceans are not continuously warming—a conclusion not consistent with the idea that the oceans may be harboring “warming in the pipeline.” Douglass further notes that the team found no correlation between the shifts and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.
“An interesting aspect of this research is that no reference to the surface temperature itself is needed,” says Knox. “The heat content data we used, gathered by oceanographers, was gleaned from temperature measurements at various ocean depths up to 750 meters.” The team also found that the radiative imbalance was sufficiently small that it was necessary to consider the effect of geothermal heating. Knox believes this is the first time this additional source of heat has been accounted for in such a model.
The team notes that it’s impossible to predict when another shift might occur, but they suspect future shifts might be similar to the three observed. Both Douglass and Knox are continuing to analyze various climate-related data to find any new information or correlations that may have so far gone unnoticed.
So looking at the sun climate ocean connection – if the sun continues in hibernation (almost 40 spotless days and counting, prolonged solar minimum, reduces intensity of sunspots) and the ocean is currently emitting heat rather than absorbing it – what is the climate likely to be in 20 years time? Here in Australia we fare well during colder periods (mini ice ages) but not so for Canada, Northern America and northern europe/Russia.
“The team also found that the radiative imbalance was sufficiently small that it was necessary to consider the effect of geothermal heating. Knox believes this is the first time this additional source of heat has been accounted for in such a model.”
Interesting. Geothermal is on the order of tens to hundreds of milliwatts per square meter. Compared to climate heat flows, it is usually too small to bother with.
Jim
We are being caught with our trousers down – negative/going to negative PDO&AMO and a bunch of weak solar cycles to follow.
I wonder how “robust” are the ocean depth temperature data prior to Argo system.
Really interesting article.
“These anomalies include changes in normal storm intensities, unusual land temperatures, and a large drop in salmon populations along the western United States.”
I posted a link to an SMH article relating to a significant reduction in salmon populations returning to spawn in N. America recently. I wonder what the correlations are? Cool = low numbers returning or warm = high/normal numbers returning.
Excellent, more proof that CO2 doesn’t have a major effect on GST and that ‘warming in the pipeline’ doesn’t exist. The AGW debate is far from over.
OT: Obama has ordered material from Bjorn Lomborgs “Copenhagen Consensus”.
It seems Obamas administration is in fact garthering information certainly not in line with IPCC. Sorry, in Danish, I can translate if asked:
http://jp.dk/indland/trafik/klima/article1784508.ece
Well slap me hard and call me Susan – the giant central heating system we’ve got on this planet (sun for a boiler, oceans for radiators) is the very beasty that’s been keeping us from freezing our cashews off all this time, not the minor outbursts of warm gas coming mainly from bovine backsides and Al Gore (choose your orifice).
Cheers
Mark
Hm, can’t wait for a copy to become available. This will take some digesting because it is looking at some new information not assessed very thoroughly yet.
I eagerly anticipate what discussion may come of this.
I bet the military guys giggling.
Just imagine what ocean temp. data the submarine fleet has! In 3D.
Now that would be classified me think…
NOT a random walk:
Sidorenkov, N.S. (2003). Changes in the Antarctic ice sheet mass and the instability of the Earth’s rotation over the last 110 years. International Association of Geodesy Symposia 127, 339-346.
“The purpose of this paper is to call attention to a close correlation of the decade variations in the Earth rotation with the mass changes in the Antarctic ice sheets.”
“The redistribution of water masses on the Earth entails changes in the components of the Earth’s inertia tensor and causes the motion of poles and changes of the Earth’s rotation speed.”
“Apart from all other reasons, the parameters of the geoid depend on the distribution of water over the planetary surface.”
Climate regime change-points evident in Sidorenkov’s Figure 1:
1902-1905; early 1930s; & early 1970s.
“Most considerable changes in the geoid parameters can result from the redistribution of water between the World Ocean and the polar ice sheets. In cold glacial epochs, when some portion of water was accumulated in the polar ice sheets, the geoid ellipticity was minimal. In warm interglacial epochs, when almost all the water went in the World Ocean, the geoid ellipticity was increased up to its maximal value.”
Great stuff. Of course there is no “correlation between the shifts and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration”. It is fairly intuitive that the temperature of the ocean can affect the temperature of the atmosphere to a vastly greater extent than the temperature of the atmosphere can affect the temperature of the ocean. So I can’t see how, even thought it may increase the temperature of the atmosphere a little, CO2 can affect climate – By which I mean the ups and downs in temperature that occur over hundreds and thousands of years.
Jim Masterson (23:44:43) :
Geothermal is on the order of tens to hundreds of milliwatts per square meter. Compared to climate heat flows, it is usually too small to bother with.
yes, but geothermal, vulcanic activities under the oceans may initiate little shifts in ocean drifts and may produce a regional heat exchange in deep water aereas.
Exactly as I have been promulgating in the public domain since April 2008.
The oceans vary independently of the air as regards the rate at which they release to the air energy originally derived fom solar input.
Everything else of a climate and weather nature follows from that in the sequences described by me at climaterealists.com in a series of articles.
The systems in the air that deal highly effectively with the changes in energy flow from the oceans deal equally effectively with any energy budget changes induced by the air alone or by any component of the air including water vapour and CO2.
As regards human CO2 the climate adjustment required to deal with it is miniscule and undetectable amongst the natural background variations created by the oceanic variability in the rate of energy release.
Why did the sea level rise also betweeen 1940 and 1970 if the net radiation was from the ocean? Can’t imagine it was due to melting ice.
their data shows the oceans are not continuously warming—a conclusion not consistent with the idea that the oceans may be harboring “warming in the pipeline.”
“The heat content data we used, gathered by oceanographers, was gleaned from temperature measurements at various ocean depths up to 750 meters.”
Umm, will be interesting to read the actual paper, the researchers do realise that the average oceanic depth is nearly 3,800m don’t they?
Is it just me or does that graph have a striking resemblance to this one?
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/reg/cli_chg/timeseries.cgi?variable=rranom®ion=eaus&season=0112
Three climate shifts in ~55 years… Has anyone run into a paper about OHC prior to 1948? That’s the earliest date I’ve seen. The recent Wijffels, Levitus et al, Domingues et al, and Ishii and Kimoto OHC reconstructions all start in 1955. What does the curve look like prior to then. Does the shape mimic global SST anomalies? Does it include the significant dip from the 1870s to 1910 and rebound from 1910 to 1940?
http://i33.tinypic.com/rixdzq.jpg
Another nifty piece of scientific study and yet another nail in the coffin of warmism.
Keep these shots of probity and common sense coming guys. It’s all good stuff – at least from a non-scientist’s angle.
This is particularly useful information given the spin being applied to the Pine Island Glacier this week, and its vulnerability to ocean heat.
O/T but fascinating, did anyone else read Vox Day’s interview today with Air Con author Ian Wishart?
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2009/08/interview-with-ian-wishart.html
This part caught my eye in terms of the geopolitics of this whole debate:
“The eventual target is fifty percent of the 1990 level by 2050, and the same government report suggests a forty percent target will cost $3,000 per person per year, or $15,000 for a family of five, on top of existing taxes and living costs. To achieve emissions cuts at that sort of level will require the equivalent of financially carpet-bombing the industrialized first world back to the Stone Age. And once the UN gets enough countries to agree that agriculture should be included in cap and trade, American farmers will be hit too, because the US administration will already have put the mechanisms in place to recognize the obligations of these international agreements.
“If you look at the economic prize at stake, consider this. We currently have gold markets, but you are not forced to buy and sell gold and only a tiny percentage of the community are active in the gold markets. The financial markets are larger, but even then most of us are not forced to buy and sell shares or trade forex, and only a minority of us actually do so. But if carbon trading becomes compulsory worldwide, effectively every single one of us will be forced to buy and sell through this scheme. No one will be able to go through their daily lives without being represented directly or indirectly in the carbon markets. Those who control the carbon markets will effectively control the world.
“If we are going to cede that kind of control, and money, for a claimed crisis of planetary proportions, shouldn’t we first be absolutely certain that the crisis is real?”
It’s what makes websites like this one so important in providing some scientific balance.
This just goes to prove that climate science should be taken away from “climate scientists” and left to physicists. The climate is driven by the laws of physics, not the laws of computer models or mathematics or statistics. However, just because I’m a physicist, it doesn’t mean I’m biased towards physics.
Since the authors only considered the upper 750 m of the ocean, one would assume that geothermal would only be a factor at all in shallower seas. Geothermal is just about always neglible in statified lakes, even if the stratification is permanent.
Wow. The rocks at the bottom of the oceans are pretty cold. The ocean is like a giant ice cube sitting on the sea floor. How does heat from the core pass through this cold layer of rocks without warming them up? I’m sure that a theoretical physicist will come up with a 0.? whatever number, but an engineer would come up with ‘nothing useful, statistically unimportant because of insulation’. I agree with Jim- it is too small to bother with. Entropy. If the core is getting colder, then the sea floor is getting colder.
Interesting that they think geothermal heating is a factor.
A relative (here in Ohio) uses geothermal heating to heat his entire house. The heat is gathered by a heat pump at a depth of a few feet in his back yard from a grid of underground pipes. I considered it myself (but have gone with a standard air heat pump/furnace combined system).
The fact that geothermal is practical for home heating at such shallow depths using only part of the area of a “back yard” has lead me to speculate geothermal is a factor in global temperature. Probably more so in the ocean where the crust is slightly thinner and, apparently, thousands of underwater magma vents exist. I wondered when a scientific study might ascertain that connection.
“Douglass says the last oceanic shift occurred about 10 years ago, and that the oceans are currently emitting slightly more radiation than they are receiving.” I remember saying, on this blog, that the earth was capable of receiving more radiation than it emits, and visa-versa. I got hounded for that.
Geothermal, while it may be an order of magnitude or two below solar levels, is still significant if it adds to or subtracts from solar levels destructively/constructively.
Given fortuitous circumstances, the Earth could plunge or rise from Ice Age.
And if geothermal is controlled by external forces acting upon the mass of the Earth, it argues for an external mechanism(s) to cause changes in both the Earth and the Sun.
Humans may be alone in the Solar System and nearby stellar neigborhoods, but the Solar System surely is not alone.
This stuff does not exist in a vacuum.
Scafetta in his recent work noted that the AMO & PDO work on a 60 year cycle that correlates with the 60 year cycles of the Sun’s orbit. What is also interesting is looking at the amplitude of the PDO….it also matches the amplitude of the Suns distance from the centre of the solar system.
http://www.landscheidt.info/images/scafetta.jpg
Looking at the PDO Index it is clear that there is no correlation with sun-spot activity either – as the 1950s and 1950s (cycles 18 and 19) saw high sunspot activity.
http://www.physics.unlv.edu/~jeffery/astro/sun/surface/sunspot_butterfly.gif
“lgl (01:10:34) :
Why did the sea level rise also betweeen 1940 and 1970 if the net radiation was from the ocean? Can’t imagine it was due to melting ice”
From 1940 to 1970 the net radiation was INTO the oceans.
The oceans reduced the release of energy to the air so the air cooled and energy in the oceans increased.
There are exceptions to the rule however because what matters is the balance between solar activity levels and the ocean phase state so one can get increasing energy in the oceans whilst the oceans are nevertheless releasing energy strongly which happened from 1975 to 2000.
At present the negative oceans are reducing energy flow to the air so the oceanic energy content should increase but in fact it is decreasing slightly because the weak sun is not supplying full replacement.
New paper: LNC drives PDO.
There has been general acknowledgement that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is now in its negative phase and that this means a colder climate for North America.
The following table shows how air temperatures, precipitation, and related effects in North America have been correlated with extreme PDO anomalies.
Climate Anomalies Warm Phase PDO Cool Phase PDO
Ocean surface temperatures in the northeastern and tropical Pacific Above average Below average
October-March northwestern North American air temperatures Above average Below average
October-March southeastern U.S. air temperatures Below average Above average
October-March southern U.S./northern Mexico precipitation Above average Below average
October-March northwestern North America and Great Lakes precipitation Below average Above average
Northwestern North America springtime snowpack Below average Above average
Winter and springtime flood risk in the Pacific Northwest Below average Above average
From: http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/645fall2003_web.dir/Jason_Amundson/trends.htm
During late April/early May this year there was a good paper, a fascinating and informative discussion and many relevant, authoritative links about the PDO on WUWT here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/28/misunderstandings-about-the-pacific-decadal-oscillation (aka http://tinyurl.com/mt5vwu ).
In a paper published in March this year, Dr. Ichiro Yasuda, Professor, Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo showed that the Luna Nodal Cycle drives the PDO.
The citation is: Yasuda, I. (2009), ‘The 18.6-year period moon-tidal cycle in Pacific Decadal Oscillation reconstructed from tree-rings in western North America’, Geophysical Research. Letters, 36, L05605, doi:10.1029/2008GL036880.
Here is the Abstract:
“Time-series of Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) reconstructed from tree-rings in Western North America is found to have a statistically significant periodicity of 18.6- year period lunar nodal tidal cycle; negative (positive) PDO tends to occur in the period of strong (weak) diurnal tide. In the 3rd and 5th (10th, 11th and 13rd) year after the maximum diurnal tide, mean-PDO takes significant negative (positive) value, suggesting that the Aleutian Low is weak (strong), western-central North Pacific in 30–50N is warm (cool) and equator-eastern rim of the Pacific is cool (warm). This contributes to climate predictability with a time-table from the astronomical tidal cycle.”
The last LNC maximum happened on September 16, 2006. According to Prof Yasuda’s finding the PDO should now be taking a significant negative value, as is being found. The climate consequences are therefore as expected.
There is substantial evidence that the LNC is a significant contributor to our planet’s climate dynamics. I include an illustrated explanation of the LNC and review a lot of the published literature about its contribution to climate dynamics in my paper “The Sun’s role in regulating the Earth’s climate dynamics” published in the Journal of Energy and Environment Vol 20 No 1 2009.
Amongst other things I wrote:
“The ocean currents generated by the northward movement of the tidal bulge, in conjunction with the rotation of the Earth through the bulges in the normal manner creating our experience of the tides, brings warmish equatorial water to the Arctic accelerating the warming that had being going on there because of other forms of solar activity as discussed below.
The LNC has maximum effect at higher latitudes, resulting in higher sea levels at these latitudes. It creates tidal currents resulting in diapycnal mixing, bringing the warmer equatorial waters into the Arctic. The LNC is therefore a major determinant of Arctic climate dynamics, influencing long term fluctuations in Arctic ice. As a result, it is a key driver of European climate.”
There is also a very good paper accompanied by useful discussion and web links about the LNC on WUWT here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/23/evidence-of-a-lunisolar-influence-on-decadal-and-bidecadal-oscillations-in-globally-averaged-temperature-trends/#more-7965
(aka http://tinyurl.com/mrjq9e )
The effect of the LNC is amplified by the distinct geography of the high latitude oceans, e.g. the North Pacific and the Bering and Okhotsk Seas.
Prof Yasuda and his colleagues have been researching the role of the LNC for several years. Their work is meticulous and rigorous. It builds on other published research in this field over the last forty years, which I’ve reviewed in my Journal of Energy and Environment paper.
The LNC is one of the better demonstrated ways in whch the Sun regulates our climate. The main thing to consider in this regard is the interaction effects between the different solar processes. For example, the LNC may sometimes amplify the effect of other solar processes documented by Willie Soon (see Soon, W. W.-H., 2005. Variable solar irradiance as a plausible agent for multidecadal variations in the Arctic-wide surface air temperature for the past 130 years, Geophysical Research Letters, 32, L16712, doi:10.1029/2005GL023429 ).
Considering the totality of the non-linear, sometimes but not always non-stationary processes (irradiance, plasma, electromagnet and gravitational fields) by means of which the Sun has an impact on climate dynamics, the role of the Sun is significant, but depends noticeably on latitude and longitude, where the Sun induces a non-linear, non-stationary response at any given location. As a result, in response to variable solar activity, the real change in global average temperatures has been smaller than the change in the regional temperatures. Significantly, regional temperatures that have had a greater influence human history since the end of the last ice-age.
“dennis ward (04:14:22) :
Looking at the PDO Index it is clear that there is no correlation with sun-spot activity either – as the 1950s and 1950s (cycles 18 and 19) saw high sunspot activity.
http://www.physics.unlv.edu/~jeffery/astro/sun/surface/sunspot_butterfly”
It’s a matter of balancing sun and oceans. Sunspots are merely an adequate proxy for overall solar activity.
During cycles 18 and 19 the sun was highly active, as you say, but the oceans were negative and suppressed the warming of the air.
Cycle 20 was a bit weaker and so the real warming of both air and oceans did not arise until strong cycles 21,22 and 23 coincided with a warming ocean phase after 1975.
Then it all hit a wall when cycle 23 fizzled out and the oceans went negative.
Now we have negative oceans cooling the air but still no energy build up in the oceans while the sun stays so weak.
“climate science should be taken away from “climate scientists” and left to physicists.” But surely the Climate Scientologists are physicists? It’s just that they’re fifth-rate physicists.
Phillip Bratby (02:27:14) :
“All science is either physics or stamp collecting. ”
As quoted in Rutherford at Manchester (1962) by J. B. Birks
Once the AGW scam is unwound, the People are going to distrust scientists for a generation or more.
Stephen Wilde (04:15:40) :
My rewriting: From 1940 to 1970 the PDO was negative, or rather there was stronger upwelling of cold water in general (globally?) perhaps, which overruled an active Sun in setting the surface temp. 1970 to 2000 there were both reduced upwelling and an active Sun and that boosted temps. The sea level rose quite steadily all the way from 1910 because of the active Sun most of the time. Think I can buy that. Are we roughly on the same track? (I would add some CO2 also but we can leave that in this thread)
Richard Mackey (04:17:56) :
How does the 18.6 yr ‘build’ the 55-60 yr? or doesn’t it?
Very good.
“Douglass says the last oceanic shift occurred about 10 years ago, and that the oceans are currently emitting slightly more radiation than they are receiving”.
If we answer the question why our oceans are currently emitting more radiation than they are receiving? Svensmark! and Nicola Scafetti do have a theory.
Have a look at the video here: http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/century-to-decade-climate-change-created-by-planetary-motion/
Nev, you write:
“No one will be able to go through their daily lives without being represented directly or indirectly in the carbon markets. Those who control the carbon markets will effectively control the world.”
Besides this: What a huuuuuge waste of time and energy for all people. That we have to sit and use our lives on this.
“lgl (01:10:34) :
Why did the sea level rise also betweeen 1940 and 1970 if the net radiation was from the ocean? Can’t imagine it was due to melting ice”
I could be wrong but if the ocean water is cooling, that will cause expansion. Water, unlike just about everything else, expands as it cools and contracts when heated.
http://www.physorg.com/news167040410.html
Note that each time the rate of energy release from the oceans changes then the average latitudinal position of all the air circulation systems then follows in order to change the speed of the hydrological cycle and move the entire system back towards energy equilibrium.
When oceans release more energy to the air then the air works to push it faster to space and thereby reduce the warming of the air.
When oceans release less energy to the air then the air works to pull more energy from the oceans and thereby reduce cooling of the air.
A positive oceanic phase with faster release of energy to the air combined with weak solar input to the oceans is the recipe for fastest cooling of the entire system but that cooling is masked by the short term warming of the air.
A negative oceanic phase with slower release of energy to the air combined with a weak solar input to the oceans is the recipe for slower cooling of the entire system but we get a bit of a fright from the cooling of the air.
The issue of sensitivity is critical in this context but not in the way it is normally meant.
The changes in the solar input to the oceans may appear small in terms of total solar energy available and in terms of total energy content in the oceans but we as a species are extraordinarily sensitive in terms of our day to day perceptions and in terms of the effectiveness of our measuring techniques.
The fact is that in objective terms from the point of view of the planet itself the smallness of the solar and oceanic variations renders them miniscule on time scales of less than millennia.
It is our observational and subjective sensitivity that really matters. An objectively insensitive and relatively unvarying system still feels like a roller coaster ride to us now that we have acquired the abilities to measure, record, compare and recall for generations back.
In that respect those alive today have acquired a new and frightening relationship with our environment unique in the history of life on Earth.
The case of the missing Salmon.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/millions-of-missing-fish-signal-crisis-onthefraserriver/article1249976/
Where did all them fishies go?
“There are a lot of variations in the ocean,” she said. “They’re all interconnected, so it’s impossible to point to one reason for this happening.”
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gYlWSgTmTbDbwNbzTcw1DHZSjpNw
Energy and heat
This post includes the term ‘heat flow’. The question is are the words energy and heat interchangeable?
Energy is only ever used as a noun, to describe the state of a system.
Heat is used as a verb and a noun and has an opposite, to cool. So language suggests there is a difference.
The unit of energy is the joule, J. What is the unit of heat? To heat is a process, to change the energy of something. That is heat is change of energy/ time, joules/sec.
Joules/sec is the unit of power. Therefore heat is a form of power.
The term ‘ocean heat content’ leads to confusion. The term ‘ocean energy content’ is clearer.
The term ‘heat energy’ is also confusing and can be replaced by ‘thermal energy’ or ‘kinetic energy’.
‘Heat flow’ is meaningless, there is no such thing. Heat is a flow if energy. It could be ‘energy flow’ or simply ‘heat’.
There is one thing for certain: climate is very complex with many variables that are not fully understood. I find it amazing that people think something as complex as climate can be simply explained away by “more greenhouse gases = higher temperature”. There is a difference between lab work and real world work. Just because something works in a controlled labatory environment does not mean it carries over into an uncontrolled environment. To believe the AGW mantra requires you to throw away basic science.
Here’s a recent article by Emile-Geay and Madec on the role of geothermal heating in the deep oceans. The authors find the mixing effect underestimated and of the same order of magnitude of mixing due to diapycnal (density) differences. They write, for example:
“Prescribing a realistic spatial distribution of the heat ?ux acts to enhance this temperature rise at mid-depth and reduce it at great depth, producing a more modest increase in overturning than in the uniform case. In all cases, however, poleward heat transport increases by ~10% in the Southern Ocean. The three approaches converge to the conclusion that geothermal heating is an important actor of abyssal dynamics, and should no longer be neglected in oceanographic studies.”
Geothermal heating, diapycnal mixing and the abyssal circulation
http://www.ocean-sci.net/5/203/2009/os-5-203-2009.pdf
Isn’t this the same Douglass and the same paper that was blogged about on ?WUWT last week?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/11/ocean-heat-content-and-earth’s-radiation-imbalance/#more-9865
The paper is now online if you have free access through a University or want to purchase a copy,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TVM-4WS2HSJ-2&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=342b9bd78b1f46189e8627759180620c
REPLY: Yes it is, but we did it with preliminary copy and never covered their press release. In the PR released Friday some points were made that I felt were worth covering. – Anthony
Can we infer from this that the atmospheric greenhouse gas system is indeed saturated, as some have postulated?
Allen63 (03:40:00) wrote:
Interesting that they think geothermal heating is a factor.
A relative (here in Ohio) uses geothermal heating to heat his entire house. The heat is gathered by a heat pump at a depth of a few feet in his back yard from a grid of underground pipes.
The fact that geothermal is practical for home heating at such shallow depths using only part of the area of a “back yard” has lead [led] me to speculate geothermal is a factor in global temperature. Probably more so in the ocean where the crust is slightly thinner and, apparently, thousands of underwater magma vents exist. I wondered when a scientific study might ascertain that connection.
I make no claim to being an expert in geothermal heating, but I have read and heard a lot about it. The following are jumbled thoughts on the subject. While there is a steady flow of heat from the interior, it is low, and the surface several feet of ground are cooled in winter and heated in summer to a larger extent by the air above the ground. A relatively constant temperature is reached a few feet below the surface which is a very good proxy for the annual average temperature. (Caves have a nearly constant temperature year-round.) Heat from the interior does not play a large role near the surface.
If the ground is wet, preferably with the water flowing through it, the source of energy for heating is the water. If the ground is dry, the rate of extracting heat depends on the thermal conductivity of the soil. Local conditions determine many details of a geothermal system.
I question whether the rate of heat flow from the interior is sufficient to have any measurable effect.
I suspect current ‘El Nino’ conditions are related to increased cloudiness but am prepared to entertain other causes.
Phillip Bratby (02:27:14) wrote that climate science should be taken away from “climate scientists” and left to physicists. Why should physicists have all the fun? I would like to claim a significant place in the debate for the geological profession (Disclosure: that’s my profession). Indeed, I would go so far as to say that you can’t really understand what drives climate without understanding at least a smidgin of earth history. Most climate scientists have no time perspective, hence they can’t see or don’t understand the real demonstrable changes that have occcurred over time without CO2 exerting a major influence.
On the discussion of geothermal, it is interesting to note that about 85% of all active volcanoes are located on the sea floor – eg on mid-oceanic ridges. No climate model I am aware of incorporates submarine volcanism, either as a source of heat or various gases. And to be honest, I’m not sure that we understand enough about them to be able to quantify their effects.
The idea of ‘heat in the pipeline’ is interesting because it suggests that the oceans actually ‘store’ heat (I prefer the term ‘energy’ and will use it instead) independently of the ever changing balance from time to time between solar input and release of energy from ocean to air.
I think it is important to say that the oceans will only gain energy for so long as the energy entering them is greater than the rate of energy release by them. They will only lose energy for so long as the release of energy is faster than the rate of energy recived from the sun. All trivially obvious really.
That does, however beg the question as to the existence or otherwise of such a thing as an ‘equilibrium’ temperature for the planet as a whole.
In response I would say that such an equilibrium temperature is just that temperature which the past history of the sun/ocean energy balance has led us to at the current moment. It has no real meaning other than that.
Now, given that the ocean surfaces control the surface air temperatures according to the rate of energy release from the ocean surfaces then it becomes clear that the air quite simply has no independent equilibrium temperature of it’s own.
Thus no change in the air alone can create an independent equilibrium temperature for the air and if there is no such thing then it cannot be influenced by, say, a change in the level or relative proportions of greenhouse gases.
The current temperature of the Earth is the consequence of the past history of the interaction between sun and sea alone.
The greenhouse effect thus appears to be a trivial irrelevance.
Tyndall et al ascribed the paramount role in setting the Earth’s temperature to the characteristics of the air alone. The role of the air is in fact miniscule and probably not even measurable in terms of the entire sun and ocean driven climate system
Taking into consideration, what they say: “These shifts happened relatively abruptly” and “rogue wave” :
http://wattsupwiththat.com/?s=rogue+wave
This phenomena requires much more study. Its relation to LOD, plate tectonics,etc.
As regards geothermal output being a couple of orders of magnitude different than solar input, it’s a much bigger difference:
Solar=1.365 X 10^3 W/m^2 Geothermal=8.2 X 10^-2 W/m^2
OT This report on bbc web page today… A few years ago a report like this would have troubled me…. Now I just don’t believe such findings anymore… yet they may be true! This is what happens when science is politicised!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8205864.stm
For those that don’t want to bother opening it… it is another finding along the lines of OMG its all Much worse than we expected and we thought it was bad before!! Methane escaping as ice melts near Spitzbergen. Yet arctic ice not that different to any time in last 30yrs….
Is there a free version of the paper online? The ScienceDirect site wants $31.50 — which seems a lot for a paper I likely won’t understand 😉
But I would like to at least try to read the whole thing.
Thanks,
tim
Allen63 (03:40:00) wrote:
“Interesting that they think geothermal heating is a factor.
A relative (here in Ohio) uses geothermal heating to heat his entire house. The heat is gathered by a heat pump at a depth of a few feet in his back yard from a grid of underground pipes. I considered it myself (but have gone with a standard air heat pump/furnace combined system).
The fact that geothermal is practical for home heating at such shallow depths using only part of the area of a “back yard” has lead me to speculate geothermal is a factor in global temperature. Probably more so in the ocean where the crust is slightly thinner and, apparently, thousands of underwater magma vents exist. I wondered when a scientific study might ascertain that connection.”
Strictly speaking, Allen’s relative isn’t using “geothermal” heating. Rather, he’s using a heat-pump system with the ground in his back yard as the outside heat sink. During the summer his system heats the ground in the back yard by pumping thermal energy out of the house and into the ground (that’s ‘air conditioning’ the house). During the winter, his system pumps thermal energy from the ground in the back yard into the house (thus cooling the ground and heating the house).
The reason such systems are so efficient is that pumping heat around is 3x-6x more efficient than direct heating or cooling (depending on the specific technologies used). When sized correctly, this is a GREAT approach for heating and cooling your house. The biggest drawbacks are installation cost and the need for backup heating and cooling for those days when extreme outside temperatures lead to a need for more heating (or cooling) capacity than the system can deliver.
What we normally call “geothermal” heating would be more like what they do in Iceland — drill down into a volcanically active area and pump water through it. This heats the water “for free” (and may even boil it, providing steam).
Xenophon
(A knowledgeable lay-person, but NOT a professional engineer)
lgl (01:10:34) “Why did the sea level rise also betweeen 1940 and 1970 if the net radiation was from the ocean? Can’t imagine it was due to melting ice.”
————————————————————
Probably more to do with bad siting of the measuring equipment…. The baseline for the East Coast of Australian is situated on a Jetty…. Not very accurate…. the jetty can sink… The land can subside…. etc.
I had a link to a picture and an article on it…. But I can’t find it now.
Wade (06:26:14) :
“There is one thing for certain: climate is very complex with many variables that are not fully understood.”
Spot on there. And anyone who tries to tell you that they can model it using a few grammes of silicon is shooting the bull big style.
Salmon go where the plankton blooms in extravagant numbers, which occurs on a multidecadal cycle. The extravagant bloom changes location from off the coast of Alaska to off the coast of California depending on the PDO phase. Fishing vessel records going back to the previous century documented this phenomenon along with ocean temperatures, which was the source of the discovery of the PDO. With cold oceans in the Northern Pacific Ocean, plankton blooms because of nutrient rich waters (upwelling of shallow waters as well as wind blown dust) there. Eventually warm waters return to this area and plankton is not as abundant. However, at the end of the cold PDO when California and the Dust Bowl blows nutrients into the coastal waters and shallow mixing brings up nutrients there, plankton blooms in abundance, leading to renewed salmon runs in that area. The population of salmon in oceans and rivers grows and shrinks in tune with these oceanic blooms. Overfishing occurs when catch is not restricted during the down cycle.
J.Hansford (08:16:10) :
lgl (01:10:34):
Measuring sea level rise is a bit like measuring a global temperature. (To paraphrase Swiss Tony from the excellent BBC TV series “The Fast Show” – Johnny Depp is a great fan.)
There are probably very few places on the earth’s surface that are not either subsiding or uplifting due to tectonic processes. Those that are stable at the moment probably won’t be for very long…
But it’s not our fault. Again.
Joe. Good points. IMHO, we don’t know enough about Geothermal to assign quantitative values to it. It is the great unknown. Why is it that atmosperic temps. are adjusted due to volcanic eruptions, but geothermal contributiuons are deemed to be so small as to be ignored? fm
As regards geothermal we seem not to need it to adequately account for all past climate changes but it may well have an influence on the timing of changes in ocean phases.
I know the oceans store a vast amount of energy, but it occured to me that they are a relatively trivial mass. Assuming an average depth of 3 miles X 70 % = 2.1 miles of earth’s surface. Earth’s radius of 4,000 miles gives ocean as 2.1/4000 = .000525 ISTM, if one could ” hold ” the earth it would merely feel damp. Given that the weight of fresh water is 62.4 lbs./ cubic foot, and rock/soil is approx. 110 lbs./ cubic foot, it seems to me that the energy stored in the earth is hugely greater than that stored in the oceans. I doubt that we know very much about the rate of release. fm
“I could be wrong but if the ocean water is cooling, that will cause expansion.”
Water only expands on cooling below 4 degrees C (39.2F); above that, it expands again. My understanding is that the molecules are organizing into a position where they can crystallize, and the distances in the crystal are greater than the distance in the cool liquid.
Water only expands on cooling below 4 degrees C (39.2F); above that, it expands again.
The relationship is not the same for sea water. The density monotonically decreases down to the freezing point for the oceans due to its salinity.
Mark
A little OT, but we’re talking about thermal energy storage in water after all 🙂
Allen63 (03:40:00) wrote:
“…A relative (here in Ohio) uses geothermal heating to heat his entire house. The heat is gathered by a heat pump at a depth of a few feet in his back yard from a grid of underground pipes. I considered it myself (but have gone with a standard air heat pump/furnace combined system).”
A friend of mine here in SoCal has a very effective variation on this theme. He build a heat exchanger for his AC/heat-pump to pump thermal energy into/out-of his swimming pool.
In the summer his AC system cools the house and heats the pool. If the pool gets too warm to swim in, he runs the pool water at night through pool heater panels on his roof, so the water gets radiatively cooled down.
In the winter the opposite happens, during the day the heater panels gather enough solar heat energy so the water does not get too cold (it’s too cold for swimming anyway).
The system is VERY effective, much more so than an air-source heat pump. And it’s also very cheap compared to ground sourcing.
Frank Mosher (09:07:32)
The mass of the oceans is trivial compared to the mass of the Earth but huge compared to the mass of the air.
However the Earth’s crust is not penetrated much by solar energy (much is covered by water anyway) so that energy is quickly lost to space again.
Air doesn’t retain solar energy either save to a trivial extent as per the findings of Tyndall et al (though they thought it was all important).
The largest solar energy retaining (and manipulating) medium by far is the oceans. That is where we must look for a coherent climate overview.
There is in fact more energy stored in the Earth than in the oceans but it is geothermal energy not solar energy and leaks out rather slowly or in intermittent bursts. The slow leakage sets the base temperature below which the temperature of the bottom of the oceans cannot drop.
The intermittent bursts may have an influence on the timing and/or intensity of oceanic phase changes as regards the rate of releases of energy to the air.
Just to remind folk that PDO data is also available at WFT, if you want to play with it yourselves:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo/mean:60
Stephen Wilde. Thanks for your observations. I always find them instructive. I am curious about the intermittent bursts, and their effect. It seems apparent the PDO signature is evident in climate. The Rim of Fire, circling the Pacific is well known, as is the thermally active Indonesian area. I have always found it interesting that the Pacific Warm Pool exists in a known geologically active area, and that to rule out posible geothermal contribution is reckless. fm
woodfortrees (Paul Clark) (10:17:48) : Thanks for the tip Paul. I wish you’d put up some more data sets and analysis techniques-you have the best graphing tool I have seen! Maybe you can add a way to put “custom” time series?
Yes, that’s correct. I was just attempting to explain the comment I responded to, upthread, that stated that water becomes less dense as it gets colder. Fresh water does that, between 4 degrees C and 0 degrees C, but above 4 degrees C it expands with temperature, which would make sea levels rise with temperature, not fall as you’d expect with a substance that has (reaching, here) a negative coefficient of thermal expansion.
Frank Mosher (10:39:03)
Thanks Frank.
As regards those intermittent bursts of geothermal energy I also think it relevant that those El Nino events occur in such an active region. I’ve also noted that in the same region we have the deepest ocean trenches where the crust is at it’s thinnest so the energy transfer from the interior must be at it’s fastest straight into the deepest parts of the Pacific.
However the problem then is that 30/60 year periodicity which is too regular for any known volcanic influence and it also gives problems for all those whose ideas rely on changes in the air as primary climate drivers
There are no 30/60 periodicities in the air either so I am forced to regard it as an internal oceanic variability which has not yet been adequately described.
My favourite idea so far is that whether the background solar trend is towards warming or towards cooling the steady solar change in input to the oceans gradually destabilises some internal oceanic feature which then flips periodically as the oceans adjust in steps to the solar changes.
Thus during a background solar warming spell the excess energy buids up slowly then gets released over the next positive oceanic phase and builds up again during the subsequent negative phase and so on thereby giving a ‘stepped’ progression of global warming.
During a background solar cooling a deficit builds up slowly then gets restored during the next negative oceanic phase with the deficit increasing again during the subsequent positive phase so one gets the same ‘stepped’ pattern on the way down as well.
That’s my best guess at the moment but I’m looking for other possibilities.
lgl (05:40:04)
We are probably on the same track as regards sun and ocean but probably diverge on the CO2 issue.
I’m a bit out on a limb there because the logic of my climate description forces me to the conclusion that the GHGs in the air have no measurable effect in the face of the natural solar and oceanic changes.
In particular the role of the hydrological cycle in changing the rate of energy transfer from surface to space is overwhelming so to deal with human CO2 we probably only need a latitudinal shift of a tiny amount in the air circulation systems to negate it (possibly in the order of less than one mile). In contrast those air circulation systems shift hundreds of miles poleward or equatorward in response to changes in the rate of energy emission from the oceans.
We shall see.
Stephen Wilde,
I know very little about this but it seems that there may literally be millions of underwater volcanoes on the ocean floors, emitting heat at various rates and times about which we know little.
Whilst such volcanoes may not actually be able to affect greatly the temperature of the oceans in bulk is it not possible that underwater volcanic activity could coincide with other factors to produce changes at the surface – a bit like tipping points?
Your comments would be welcome.
Re: Richard Mackey (04:17:56)
Thanks for the notes.
It’s not just LNC:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ClimateRegimeChangePoints.PNG
(This draft plot is before even including info about LNC.)
Depending on political dynamics, the mainstream might soon be piling on natural factors and claiming them as their discovery. It might be decades before the truth is made (fully) public about why this knowledge was obstructed from public view for decades. By now the authorities should be realizing they can’t block this knowledge from view for much longer. Statistical methods which have emerged over the past few decades make it too easy to discover the change-points independently. The only way around that: Manipulating the data released to the public… (e.g. see the recent argument to change ~1945 SSTs by a lot)…
Bob Tisdale (01:40:40) “[…] climate shifts […] Has anyone run into a paper about OHC prior to 1948?”
You may note that 1948 & 1950 are popular cut-off dates for a variety of studies & [public versions of] time series. The Chandler wobble frequency stabilized ~1940 and the precision of the polar motion record improved dramatically a few years later. It is easier for the authorities to introduce a convenient temporal-boundary than to overcome their poor understanding of phase relations during earlier times. Like you, I await focus on earlier dates. Priority 1 has to be explaining reversals in phase relations (e.g. SST / solar; PPT / solar). Otherwise people (including regulars here) are going to continue making the same (ongoing) mistake of thinking recent phase-relation patterns can be extrapolated backwards in time to pre-1940. We need to keep hammering this until the mainstream authorities have no choice but to deal with it. 1931 is the inconvenient point in the records that mainstream authorities canNOT evade. Serious, truthful, unreserved scientists who look at ~1931 carefully are going to start noticing things that many alarmists are categorically not going to like. It will be interesting to see if people start proposing radical “corrections” to 1915-1945 records that “can’t possibly be right”.
pinkisbrain (01:04:03) :
Jim Masterson (23:44:43) :
Geothermal is on the order of tens to hundreds of milliwatts per square meter. Compared to climate heat flows, it is usually too small to bother with.
yes, but geothermal, vulcanic activities under the oceans may initiate little shifts in ocean drifts and may produce a regional heat exchange in deep water aereas.
Within the mid-ocean rift zone and around submarive volcanoes the rate might be so large as watts or even tens of watts per squared meter. Take a look at a vent in the mid-ocean ridge–looks like a rocket engine on a test stand. Still, I am surprised that it makes much of a difference globally in normal circumstances.
Dave Andrews (12:30:56)
The timing and mechanics of any energy transfer from deep ocean volcanic activity to the surface is problematic.
The oceans are deep, dense and cold in the main.
I expect that whatever happens at the bottom becomes pretty diffuse before it can affect the surface and is much delayed.
For that reason I prefer the idea that undersea volcanic activity can only have a surface effect in two ways:
1) By setting a minimum temperature below which the water at the bottom of the oceans cannot descend it sets the starting point for the temperature gradient all the way to the surface.
2) Nothing in nature is invariable so over time any variations in energy emanating from the mantle are likely to reach the surface in irregular waves or pulses. I find it easy to accept that such irregularity would create or at least contribute to irregularities at the surface so it may be a contributing factor along with solar variability to the phase switching we see in oceanic energy release.
So far I have avoided too much involvement in trying to work out the mechanics of the oceanic phase changes but now that my observations concerning events in the air are slowly being validated by real world events and supported by papers such as the one that started this thread I do find myself concentrating more on that aspect.
Tallbloke made an interesting suggestion that the phase switch in the Pacific always comes at the solar minimum on every third cycle and I would support more investigation of that. I haven’t yet checked it out myself.
Geoff Sharp (04:12:09) “Scafetta in his recent work noted that the AMO & PDO work on a 60 year cycle that correlates with the 60 year cycles of the Sun’s orbit. What is also interesting is looking at the amplitude of the PDO….it also matches the amplitude of the Suns distance from the centre of the solar system.”
http://www.landscheidt.info/images/scafetta.jpg
–
Geoff, this is interesting, but can you clarify your comments or provide a link? The graph to which you linked shows nothing surprising, so I am guessing your comments are largely motivated by something else (maybe a different graph)? In particular, I am curious to know exactly how you are getting the notion that: “the amplitude of the PDO […] matches the amplitude of the Suns distance from the centre of the solar system”.
.Hansford (08:16:10) :
lgl (01:10:34) “Why did the sea level rise also betweeen 1940 and 1970 if the net radiation was from the ocean? Can’t imagine it was due to melting ice.”
————————————————————
Probably more to do with bad siting of the measuring equipment…. The baseline for the East Coast of Australian is situated on a Jetty…. Not very accurate…. the jetty can sink… The land can subside…. etc.
I had a link to a picture and an article on it…. But I can’t find it now.
In addition to thermal effects, the ocean height is partially dynamic–i.e. the result of currents and gyres. Case in point–the “island” of plastic trash in the Pacific is probably a dynamic feature. So loss or gain of heat, and mass, is only part of the story. There should be an “island” of trash in the Atlantic as well.
I’m glad to see geothermal flux mentioned. It has been written off, much like solar cycles, as significant components of global heating by physicists on both side of the debate. Check this out and see what you think – the anomalies are sure in the right places. Scroll down three or four clicks to see the global anomalies:
http://geophysics.ou.edu/geomechanics/notes/heatflow/global_heat_flow.htm
I am very glad that they are considering the thermal potential of the subsurface. Not having special expertise on it, or even done specific literature searches, its my speculation that while geothermal heat flow may typically be very small, it is quite possible, probable even, that there are substantial zones and lineaments where very high heat flows may be focussed at the ocean bed, such as along active volcanic spreading zones and transcurrent faults, and associated more extensive regions of thin newly formed basaltic oceanic basement with higher than average geothermal gradients and heat flow. In continental margin areas with thick sedimentary cover, there are likely local areas of biogenic and deeper migrating gas/oil seepage and expelled hot connate water. Sedimentary basins commonly exhibit pock-marks and/or seismically-recognised gas chimneys. Some of the above may be capable of generating significant oceanic convection. The geosphere can not be disregarded as an inactive substrate, it has its own processes and cyclicity some of which probably have significant influence on the oceanic thermal budget. As a young geologist, I was always interested in the findings of the numerous legs of the the DSDP (Deep Sea Drilling Project) oceanographic cruises by the Glomar Challenger, in the heyday of newly understood plate tectonics and continental drift. Many of the deep ocean core holes from the initial and follow up cruises were temperature logged, for example:
http://www-odp.tamu.edu/publications/149_IR/chap_04/c4_18.htm
Much of this huge oceanic research advance in the late C20th is in no small measure down to the pure, no strings, research efforts made possible by co-operating US institutions such as the Lamont-Docherty Observatory, founded, eco-activists please note, on philanthropic private funding from the Docherty family, Henry Docherty having made his fortune in oil with the ‘Indian Territories Illuminating Oil Co’, then ‘Cities Service’, which until takeover the 80’s maintained one of the most important geological research laboratories and library in Tulsa Oklahoma.
Good posts Gary and Britannic. fm
We know so little about the sea floor. Recently over 200,000 new undersea volcanoes were discovered.
[source] [better source]
Paul Vaughan (14:21:06) :
Geoff Sharp (04:12:09) “Scafetta in his recent work noted that the AMO & PDO work on a 60 year cycle that correlates with the 60 year cycles of the Sun’s orbit. What is also interesting is looking at the amplitude of the PDO….it also matches the amplitude of the Suns distance from the centre of the solar system.”
http://www.landscheidt.info/images/scafetta.jpg
—————–
Geoff, this is interesting, but can you clarify your comments or provide a link? The graph to which you linked shows nothing surprising, so I am guessing your comments are largely motivated by something else (maybe a different graph)? In particular, I am curious to know exactly how you are getting the notion that: “the amplitude of the PDO […] matches the amplitude of the Suns distance from the centre of the solar system”.
Hi Paul, its very interesting but not too many people have picked up on it. I was referring to the trend line in the first graph, see how the amplitude varies (if the graph was stretched higher it would be a lot more obvious). Scafetta shows this trend change but does not know or talk about the underlying cause. He talks about The PDO & AMO lining up with the 60 year cycles caused by the varying Sun/SSB distance at this EPA conference here:
http://yosemite.epa.gov/ee/epa/wkshp.nsf/vwpsw/84E74F1E59E2D3FE852574F100669688#video
But perhaps he missed the amplitude change which is caused by the Neptune/Uranus conjunction, but the PDO graph not only follows the 60 yr period of his first graph but also the amplitude follows the same trend. To summarize, weak Angular Momentum equals weak PDO effect.
The exciting part for me is that finally we have someone new saying that solar modulation is a product of planet position.
Mick (00:47:45) :
I bet the military guys giggling.
Just imagine what ocean temp. data the submarine fleet has! In 3D.
Now that would be classified me think…
Methinks the data would be somewhat less useful than you do. Remember, US only operates about 100 boats (more or less) and they go to hot spots in the world (fast attack) or patrol in a box in some undisclosed location (boomers). The fast attack data would be inconsistent as to location and depth and you don’t get to know where the missile boats operate, period.
In either case, all submarine operations are classified and the submariners generally won’t talk even if they could. Here’s why:
After a senator, congressman or some official was given a tour on one of the new improved ‘Fleet boats’. He made a comment about the new improvements to WWII subs. One was the new hull design that increased diving depth to > 400ft. Up to this point the Germans and Japanese had set their depth charges for no more than 300ft because they knew subs didn’t go any deeper. It’s true a reporter heard this and printed an article touting the safety of submarines because they went deeper than the enemy depth charges. Soon after this article was printed the US suffered considerable submarine losses. It was traced back to this article and after that point submariners refused to say anything about their ships. Even the hull numbers were blackened out so observers couldn’t ID which subs were coming or going from port. I believe further verification of this can be found in Jane’s fighting ships. This error in judgment is also what coined the war phrase “Loose lip sink ships”
It only took a week for the depth charges to be reset and we lost boats and crews because of it.
Andy
Pamela Gray (08:36:01) “Overfishing occurs when catch is not restricted during the down cycle.”
Well-said Pamela …and yet in my area people are freaking out in the comments-section of local online-news forums because the only cycles of which they are aware are the diurnal & annual cycles. Reading through the comments (in those forums) it is evident that MOST of the people commenting assume the ONLY thing that affects the fish other than the annual cycle is humans …& as you know, those discussions get very nasty. WUWT readers would have a good laugh reading the comments …but at least our BC government is not fooled by the nonsense about fish – I’ll give them credit for that even if they have the wool over the public’s eyes with the carbon tax …which is really a way to (1) calm traffic in Vancouver so rich people can get around our congested-streets better and (2) help keep the province out-of-deficit for the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Andy Beasley (18:34:06),
That incident was documented in a great book called Thunder Below! by Admiral Fluckey, who commanded the submarine Barb in WWII.
Adm. Fluckey [the most decorated living WWII veteran — including the CMH] mentioned the blabbermouth Congressman. His two word summary: “War crimes!”
Stephen Wilde (01:07:07) : “The systems in the air that deal highly effectively with the changes in energy flow from the oceans deal equally effectively with any energy budget changes induced by the air alone or by any component of the air including water vapour and CO2. As regards human CO2 the climate adjustment required to deal with it is miniscule and undetectable amongst the natural background variations created by the oceanic variability in the rate of energy release.”
SPOT ON. This guy is on to something.
Listening….
CHRIS
Norfolk, VA, USA
Smokey (18:59:29) :
Adm. Fluckey [the most decorated living WWII veteran — including the CMH] mentioned the blabbermouth Congressman. His two word summary: “War crimes!”
The sad thing is that it was probably an honest mistake. Most of the people serving in the government at that time still had some honor left. I think you would be hard pressed to find 10% with that quality in congress today. Look at the number of our representatives who voted for the recent _________ (fill in the blank) bill when there was no possible way that the bill could be read in its entirety given the time for review and the length of the bill. One of my Republican senators voted for the bill. I’m voting for the other guy next election.
Andy
Don’t think this question is too off topic… So you’ve got the two 800 pound gorilla’s in the room when it comes to Earth’s climate: the Sun and the Oceans.
One, takes up ~98% of the solar system’s mass. The other makes up 71% of the earth’s surface (and how much of the atmosphere as water vapor?).
How much heat can salt water hold? And why isn’t it considered part of the greenhouse? It’s a fluid as are the gases in the atmosphere, no? Is it true the models don’t consider the oceans?
Luke (21:20:55)
One of my early contentions was that for greenhouse purposes both oceans and air together should be treated as the atmosphere:
“I would argue that the oceans should be regarded as a form of atmosphere in much the same way as the air because both air and oceans have heat storing properties. In effect Earth’s ‘atmosphere’ is in two parts for heat storing purposes and water is the primary player in both components.”
From this article:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=1562
from July 2008
I would adjust some of the wording with hindsight, such as switching ‘energy’ for ‘heat’ and refining some of the phrases but the essence of it all remains sound I think.
savethesharks (20:19:02)
Thanks Chris,
Having spent the past 17 months accepting fire by blogosphere the climate description I have been creating has retained credibility, has continued to account for real world climate events even as they change, appears to have some predictive ability, complies with basic physics and is now in parts being replicated in the mainstream such as in the article at the head of this thread.
It is the only existing coherent climate overview following the processing of solar energy through from arrival to departure.
I’m sure there are flaws but they are not fatal.
There are remaining puzzles and I’m working on them but at least I’ve put forward a basic structure that can serve as a starting point for a more intelligent approach to climate science.
Everyone so far has been working bottom upwards from a confusing plethora of coflicting data.
I have adopted a top downwards approach and all the different bits turn out to fit nicely so far.
>> Luke (21:20:55) :
Is it true the models don’t consider the oceans? <<
GCMs (General Circulation Models) come in many flavors. AGCM are Atmospheric General Circulation Models. OGCM are Ocean General Circulation Models. AOGCM are Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models or just CGCM for Coupled GCMs.
The cell size for OGCMs are generally smaller than they are for AGCMs. This causes a mismatch at the surface boundary which usually requires a buffer layer. Many GCMs are of the coupled variety.
Jim
Finally a piece on the real creator of the earths atmosphere and weather / climate.
The sun may provide the energy but the vast dirty oceans makes this planet habitable.
The atmosphere is heated by the solar heated land and oceans, the ocean heat release is low and slow, the land release is high and quick. The atmosphere looses it’s heat contant very quickly, basicly over night. At sunup the air temperature is generally as low or lower then the local ground or water temperature.
Storms over the oceans act as a fume scrubber to wash (clean) the air of chemicals (CO2) etc. to be precipitated out by combination with contaminats (dirt).
The O2 N2 atmosphere is the creation of solar radiation caused disassociation of H2O and NH3, hydrogen is lost to space and gravity tends to trap the oxygen and nitrogen.
Stephen Wilde (23:00:11) :
This is a bizarre retooling of accepted terminology. We have an atmosphere and we have an ocean. Both are important. Why do we need to rename the oceans to be a part of the atmosphere?
From “Blackadder Goes Forth”
General Melchett: If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.
I’m thinking of getting some T-shirts printed up for Copenhagen later this year…
Cheers
Mark
oma (00:41:05)
Bizarre it may seem to some but it is nevertheless essential for the purpose of understanding why the temperature of the Earth is what it is.
Liquid water in the oceans and gaseous water vapour in the air both carry out the functions of transmitting solar energy through the Earth system and converting it to longwave from shortwave releasing heat energy in the process.
The effects of both media need to be seperated so that one can see how insignificant is the proportion of the job done by the air.
Sometimes retooling gives profoundly helpful results.
It is easy to view Ocean/Atmosphere as being separate at the energy levels we receive because there is a visible divide. But if the energy arriving here were a lot higher then that divide would disappear – ocean and atmosphere would become one.
As things stand we live just beyond the lower extreme where most water is ice and well away from all water being vapour. If the Sun were to increase it’s output tomorrow then the atmosphere would get more dense in proportion, that additional density being water vapour from the Ocean.
To put it another way, if you towed Venus away from the Sun, at some particular orbit you would get something we recognize as oceans and atmosphere. If you towed it even further you would get a solid with no atmosphere.
It is all just the same CO2 it has currently though.
Frightening only if you turn every “anomaly” into a planetary scare before you understand exactly what you are looking at. :~) My guess is that there will be many more scares over then coming decades for just the same reasons as the current one.
I’ve been intrigued by the discussions about the possible effects on climate of geothermal heat.
.
I have a simple working hypothesis: that CO2 has a negligible effect on climate, probably due to the effect of dominant negative feedbacks. Several times I’ve asked this question: is there any period in Earth’s history when it can be proven that the climate was driven by CO2? I never received an answer. Of course, the best evidence, the ice cores, appears to confirm my hypothesis. As we know, the CO2 followed the temperature and not the other way around.
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But could proof come from some special event, such as Snowball Earth (assuming it really happened?) It has been assumed that the long freeze came to an end due to vast volcanic eruptions that dumped huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. If this chain of events could be proven beyond any doubt, then it certainly would provide evidence that CO2 can drive the climate, even if only in a very special circumstance.
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But a thought did occur some time ago: if there were vast volcanic eruptions at the end of Snowball Earth, would there be sufficient additional geothermal energy to produce a warming? And if so, could Snowball Earth itself have been triggered by a significant fall in volcanic activity?
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Is it possible that long term changes in volcanism and an associated change in geothermal energy could explain some of the great climate changes in history?
Chris
Aug 17, 2009
The Great Modelling Fraud
By Norm Kalmanovitch
Enough data has already been released to unequivocally prove scientific fraud. All of the global temperature datasets that include the actual physical measurements of the global temperature clearly demonstrate that there was a rapid rise in global temperature from around 1910 to about 1942, followed by a slow drop in global temperature from 1942 to 1975, at which time the world reverted to warming which all global temperature datasets clearly show ended after 1998, with a cooling trend that is still continuing.
Global emissions increased by just half a billion tonnes of CO2 per year during the global warming of about half a degree C from 1910 to 1942. This equates to each gigatonne increase in CO2 emissions causing a one degree C rise in global temperature.
As a result of increased CO2 emissions from post-war industrialization, from 1942 to 1975 global emissions increase from under 4 billion tonnes of CO2 per year in 1942 to over 20 billion tonnes of CO2 by 1975.
During the cooling that occurred from 1942 to 1975 the global emissions increase by 16 billion tonnes of CO2 per year and based on the previous warming this should have caused 16C of global warming but instead there was nothing but cooling.
It was only 13 years after this global cooling with contemporaneous rapid increase in global CO2 emissions that the climate models incorporated a forcing parameter that related global warming to increases in CO2 concentration on the basis that this increase came from humans.
Since these are supposed climate specialists, these modelers would be fully aware that the globe cooled from 1942 to 1975 as the atmospheric CO2 concentration grew. The relationship of the forcing parameter of the climate models of 5.35ln(C/C0) in which C0 represents the reference level and C represents the new level of CO2 concentration, clearly shows that increases in CO2 concentration will produce an increase in temperature. This did not happen over the entire period from 1942 to 1975 and therefore this parameter is clearly not valid.
The modelers also related global warming directly to human sourced CO2 emissions, but these were increasing dramatically as the global temperature dropped over these 33 years, making this relationship completely contrary to physical observation.
Since physical data already existed that completely falsified the forcing parameter of the climate models long before the models were run using this forcing parameter, and this had to be known by the modelers, it is clearly an open and shut case of scientific fraud.
If the modelers were unaware that this physical data falsified their forcing parameter it is still fraud because the modelers misrepresented their credentials as climate specialists.
Either way it is still fraud, and as the atmospheric concentration of CO2 and global emissions of CO2 both continue to increase while global temperatures continue to drop the fraud becomes more and more obvious.
From icecap.us
I notice a lot of referneses to awesome episodes and excerpts of Blackadder and Monty Python. Choice!
Ron de Haan (05:49:34)
Have a look at the video here:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/century-to-decade-climate-change-created-by-planetary-motion/
Thank you. Previously I had looked at only the pdf, skipping the video. You’ve caused me to realize there is important info in the video (particularly near the end) that cannot be gleaned from the pdf.
Nicola Scafetta – Feb. 26, 2009 – Climate change and its causes: a discussion about some key issues.
http://yosemite.epa.gov/ee/epa/wkshp.nsf/vwpsw/84E74F1E59E2D3FE852574F100669688#video
http://yosemite.epa.gov/ee/epa/wkshp.nsf/vwpsw/84E74F1E59E2D3FE852574F100669688/$file/scafetta-epa-2009.pdf
– –
Geoff Sharp (18:23:13) “[…] perhaps he missed the amplitude change which is caused by the Neptune/Uranus conjunction, but […]”
He talks about it when asked. His response is sensible given the broader context of the presentation and the even broader [politically-charged] context. We may hear more from him on this sometime down the road. I suspect he is pacing the rate at which he introduces new ideas in order to retain audience receptivity. I commend him for his tact & patience in handling tangential interruptions, particularly considering that many of the questions from the audience were rooted in inattentiveness.
–
Geoff Sharp (18:23:13) “The exciting part for me is that finally we have someone new saying […]”
And note how thoroughly scientific he is: at Earth? – through the sun? – or both? He is not prejudging.
For balance, I will offer some criticism:
Note that Scafetta has (or at least appears to have) overlooked the highest-frequency component:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/M4PxPyf123.png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/(J,N)o2&Pr.png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/(J,N),r..png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/PhaseConcordancePxySI.png
The following is a progression of crystallizing insight (that is easy to overlook):
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/zF…18.png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/zF…32.png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/zm269..png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/zm269…png
The Chandler wobble phase reversal of ~1931, in conjunction with knowledge of north-south terrestrial asymmetry, is one key to unraveling the details of the 3 possibilities Scafetta outlines.
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriod.PNG
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/1931UniquePhaseHarmonics.png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/EstChandlerPeriodMorlet(2pi).PNG
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/f(Pr.,-2r..,-3LNC)LOD.png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/LODaa(yoy)diffsqHadSST.PNG
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/Phase(2r..-Pr)MorletPiLin(3.5,9.5)Chandler.PNG
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/Phase(2r..-Pr)MorletPiLin(3.5,9.5a)LNC.PNG
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/Phase(r..,LNC).png
If you have patience, try to make sense of this:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/Pr,JN4,r..,m4..png
Cross-wavelet harmonic analysis provides an objective means of assessing resonances.
Thanks Stephan and Jim.
The thought struck me last night, that the two should be considered in tandem.
If all bodies of water were considered part of the “atmosphere” what percentage would then be liquid?
Stephen Wilde
A question. I think it was you who said above that the greenhouse effect was unimportant, as distinct from the effect of CO2 compared to water vapour.
Roy Spencer says in his book Climate Confusion that if there was no transpost of heat in the atmosphere from the equator to the poles, the average surface temp would be some 60C as a result of the greenhouse effect. This effect is of course derived from a model as we can’t make the wind stop blowing.
Conversely, I thought that without the greenhouse effect the average surface temp would be below freezing.
Always willing to learn.
Regards
Paul
Paul Maynard (10:23:54)
I’m not sure that Roy is distinguishing between the greenhouse effect of the air and the similar effect of the oceans which I term The Hot Water Bottle Effect.
I have said that the greenhouse effect in the air is insignificant compared to the HWBE in the oceans and that the greenhouse effect of human CO2 is insignificant compared to the natural component.
If there were no greenhouse effect in the air you would notice no difference because of The Hot Water Bottle Effect save that no air would also result in no oceans because there would be no hydrological cycle and all the water would evaporate to space.
The average surface temperature in that situation would be like that of the moon i.e. very hot facing the sun and very cold facing away from the sun. Not sure how that would average out though.
Stephen Wilde (01:28:33) :
Be that as it may, there is already an entire field that studies the oceans (and it isn’t meterology). There is also substantial ongoing work in ocean-atmosphere coupling from both ends.
So, I ask again, why do we need to redefine the ocean to be part of the atmosphere?
Luke (09:31:30) :
Luckily, they are.
The water vapor content of the atmosphere represents much less than 1 m thickness of liquid water over the surface of the earth.
“So, I ask again, why do we need to redefine the ocean to be part of the atmosphere ?”
and I say again:
“The effects of both media need to be seperated so that one can see how insignificant is the proportion of the job done by the air.”
You dont need to view the oceans as part of the ‘atmosphere’ for any other purpose so what is your problem ?
My problem is that you keep trying to peddle old ideas under new names.
oms (11:45:22)
That’s news to me. Do elaborate.
I’d hate to think I’m wasting my life with stuff that others realised before the alarmist cult took over.
But then perhaps I am doing humanity a service by reinvigorating ideas unjustly ignored.
Stephen Wilde, I understand your point about regarding oceans & atmosphere collectively (for some purposes) and suggest that we:
a) be receptive to the message of N.S. Sidorenkov (for example, his valuable illustration of estimates being out by a factor of 30 under false assumptions about the distribution of water on Earth).
b) figure out why Earth’s Chandler wobble period stabilized as soon as it phase-aligned with Jupiter-Neptune (~1936). (If you understand what Sidorenkov is saying, this relates to the hydrologic cycle and Earth’s asymmetry.)
“Why did the sea level rise also betweeen 1940 and 1970 if the net radiation was from the ocean? Can’t imagine it was due to melting ice.”
Thermal expansion. Coastal erosion leads to declining coasts as well. Some ice still is melting despite false reports elsewhere.
Okay, where is the heat transfering the energy then? Where are temperarures changing? The atmosphere recieves some of this heat loss and a good % of it is held in, and the land temps change at varying rates depending upon the surface albedo; now, then heat (S) transfer converted to terms of q, in kilojoules, transfers and is absorbed depending upon the material chemical structure, color, shade, and physical composition.
The kinetic energy, the internal energy state of transfer due to temperature differences does not magically go to space; naturally of course GHG’s hold in energy, so, as GHG’s go up and rise from the mid and upper troposphere and into the stratosphere, more total thermal energy is brought back to the Earth’s surface; this will mean within the next 2 years, we will see a drastic resurgence in ocean holding onto thermal energy, as it shifts from both the atmosphere and the land surfaces. Water will not heat uniformly and it cannot warm in a linear fashion from year to year; this would violate simple physics, however, soon the heating will be concave up, and not just back in line with trend.
I wil digress for now with these links:
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761575286/Heat_(physics).html
http://hendrix.uoregon.edu/~dlivelyb/phys161/L14.html
http://hendrix.uoregon.edu/~dlivelyb/phys161/L15.html
http://hendrix.uoregon.edu/~dlivelyb/phys161/L16.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/cooling-oceans.htm