Dr. Curry Warms the Southern Ocean

Hey Dr.Curry, WE NEED THAT WARMTH OF YOURS DOWN HERE, PLEASE, IF YOU FIND IT, SEND IT RIGHT AWAY!

The study was published.
I don’t see any comment that Willis was sent a pre-publication copy for approval, and I doubt that his opinion mattered to them. He does not have a union card. That might change — but I doubt it.
I don’t see how it can be rude to comment publicly on a public (published) document.
Perhaps the issue is that he has now gained some prominence in “auditing” the validity of the numerical and logical analysis. When people become concerned about what he might have to say then they will send him courtesy copies in advance of publication and solicit his comments. To do so, however, would recognize his membership in the club or on “The Team” as it were.
Think about it. 🙂

I like the phrase argument from incredulity, because that’s my first reaction to almost everything that the alarmist climatologists claim to have measured. How can anyone believe that what alarmists claim to be true can be estimated accurately with scattered local measurements at a few convenient spots? The most believable number they have is probably the amount of CO2 produced by fossil fuels, and that only because it comes from economic statistics. But even there, just because something’s been successfully sold doesn’t mean it’s been successfully burned — a very poorly known fraction of the stuff is spilled or allowed to evaporate, and what person or organization is likes to confess to being sloppy and wasteful? Everything else is randomly (in the sense that we cannot mathematically predict where it must be) and fractally distributed over the earth’s surface. Take, as just one example, the estimates of how much CO2 enters and leaves the earth’s atmosphere over the course of a year. Start with CO2 absorption by living organisms. You have smallish areas where relatively large amounts of absorption per acre occurs (e.g. jungles) and very large areas where relatively little absorption per acre occurs (e.g. blue-water sea surface). Can you, for that latter type of surface, multiply that very large area in acres by the small and inaccurately known average absorption per acre and get any sort of trustworthy estimate of the total CO2 absorption? Remember, that small and hard to measure average CO2 absorption per acre has to be well known for a very large area before the small and large numbers can be multiplied together to get an answer worth taking seriously. And of course the CO2 metabolism of living organisms changes with the weather, among many other things, so the fractal distribution is changing fractally with time — and that source of uncertainty exists everywhere living organisms grow. The amount of CO2 absorbed or released by the earth’s oceans through gas exchange is supposed to be known because we know the composition of sea water and the relevant temperatures. Really? Can calm beakers of sea water in a scientist’s laboratory, held at a steady temperature, be used to predict the gas-exchange behavior of the earth’s oceans — oceans that heat up non-uniformly during the day and cool non-uniformly during the night, oceans that are criss-crossed by everlasting wind and waves and at irregular intervals are whipped to a froth by passing storms? Rain falls from clouds, picking up CO2 on the way down and depositing it, dissolved, into the ocean. Can you imagine trying to estimate accurately the amount of rain falling into the earth’s oceans? Please don’t make me laugh! The amount of CO2 produced by natural sources (e.g. volcanos above and below the sea) is also randomly and fractally distributed in a way that changes randomly and fractally with time. It’s a good thing we have such accurate knowledge about all the sources of vulcanism under the earth’s oceans. Oh, you don’t thing so? Neither do I. It is no accident that Steve McIntyre led the charge against bogus climate science. With his background in mining he knows from case study after case study how difficult it is to determine the true distribution of an economically valuable mineral before actually constructing the mine. Mining companies routinely drill hundreds of small, narrow, relatively cheap boreholes in the land they intend to mine, then look at the concentrations of the mineral of interest inside the boreholes, and from that try to decide whether the proposed mine makes economic sense. This is over areas of only a few hundred to a few thousand acres as opposed to the entire surface of the earth. The borehole sampling would be analogous to surface measurements of CO2 absorption or temperature by little local gas-meters or thermometers — if the CO2 absorption or the temperature, like the minerals under the ground, were not changing with time. And yet these mining companies, with all the economic incentive they have to get the answer right, time and again are surprised when they go ahead and build the mine, finding much more or much less than expected. The random, fractal nature of the mineral distribution defeats their best efforts to discover through little, local measurements the true amount of the mineral present under those few hundred or few thousand acres. Climatologists never do the equivalent of constructing a mine to check out their estimates and, as mentioned, what they try to estimate often changes randomly, rapidly, and fractally with time. Yes, I am incredulous that alarmist climatologists know with any significant accuracy what they claim to have estimated.

Southern Ocean Warming Issue
In this study, we only examined the dominant SST variability in the Southern Ocean using the Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis. We performed the EOF analysis on the area-weighted annual-mean observed SST south of 40 °S for 1950–1999. The leading EOF modes of HadISST and ERSST show positive values extending from middle to high latitudes of the Southern Ocean, and negative values in the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic zones. The corresponding principle components (time series) show a substantial upward trend (statistically significant at the 99% confidence level). Thus, the observed SST pattern in the Southern Ocean during the second half of the 20th century is dominated by a broad-scale warming that accounts for one third of the total variance (28% for HadISST and 29% for ERSST).

The leading SST EOF modes show that the strongest warming is in the middle latitudes of the Southern Ocean, and the warming is reduced poleward.

We confine the analysis to the period 1950–1999 due to large uncertainty associated with sparse in situ SST samplings in the Southern Hemisphere for the first half of the 20th century (Smith TM, Reynolds RW, 2003). Also, in this study, we identify the dominant coupled pattern between the ERA40’s precipitation minus evaporation(which starts from 1950s) and HadISST SST south of 40 °S.

Yes, I also noted the rather unusual colour sequence in the orthogonal whats-it plots.
The pink of light red would not nomally be between blue and yellow. This inversion has the effect of making the contour closest to zero (0-0.1) look “slightly hot” and lots of pink in southern ocean in plots A and esp B .
Since the tones do not look very continuous even on the legend strip , they won’t give a correct visual on the plots.
Odd choice. But since nearly all latt. bands seem to be cooling anyway this seems like a stack of smoke and mirrors to arrive at accelerated warming.

Bill Tuttle says:
August 18, 2010 at 4:45 am
So tell us, richard,
1 how can one *reasonably* claim to get a ± 0.06°C accuracy from an instrument (a water-temperature gauge in a ship’s boiler intake line) that can only be read to the nearest .5°C and may have an instrument error of another whole degree C, and
2. how can one *reasonably* claim to have measured the decadal temperature change in a standard 5° x 5° grid *at all* without ever having taken one single measurement in it?
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Since no demonstration I make against the creed would ever be accepted by the true believers here, I instead offer a simple way that Eschenbach could try to falsify the claims made in the paper instead of relying on incredulity. He appears to prefer his incredulity, perhaps his readers do to, than risk finding out that his test of reasonableness is little more useful that extispicy. The other reason for not attempting the analysis myself is that Eschenbach finds so many thinks incredulous that there is not time in the day to test them all.
I will however point out that the average of several measurements is much more precise that that of the original measurements.

HOCKEY STICK ALERT
Jiping Liu, “The corresponding principle components (time series) show a substantial upward trend”
“We have got you covered …………… move away from the methodology, slowly, with your hands up “