Maybe they've found Trenberth's missing heat

I would feel a little more comfortable with the trend numbers if there were +/- values associated with them to show the accuracy of the original readings. +0.03K +/- 1.0? +/- 0.1? +/- 0.000001? I suspect the second case is likely the closest to the “truth”. I also doubt that there are sufficient stations for a good representation, but at least this is a step up because it doesn’t state “we modelled the deep-oceanic temperatures and our models gave us the following data…”
Baby steps, Baby steps.

CAGW Alert: The Western world is boiling all of the plankton in the hydrosphere!

So this study started in 1990s and has been running for less than 20 years? We all agree the 1980 -2000 was a warmer period than say the 1950 – 60s, does anyone know if the water was cooling or warming during these cooler decades?
The sea levels are going up by 1.2mm per year, that is 30 cms per century, hardly liklely to flood London or even the Tuvalu Islands in the liftimes of our grandchildren’s grandchildren, or am I missing something? It certainly leaves us time to imporve our sea walls whilst more studies check the science is correct and validate the causes.

Thank you Mr. Watts. It is kind of interesting.
3rd warming period of the inter-glacial period we are.
Not much concern here at the beach at the moment. I see their point though. I found in the past I have to move the beer cooler from time to time as the sea levels come up.
Thanks for the warning. It could have been a close one.

So far the warming has been far below the 6 ° C rate the alarmists want to use for a doubling of CO2. Since we have had 1/3 of a doubling of CO2 we should have had more than 2 ° C warming we haven’t had this. [.7 ° C is the accepted value and less than ½ of that is from CO2 in the best case.]
To get around this alarmists have speculated that the ”missing heat” is stored in the oceans ! The problem is that since 2005 both atmosphere and the ocean have been cooling.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
Some have SPECULATED that the missing heat may be in the deep parts of the ocean but since they haven’t measured to test this speculation they don’t know. This article claims to have found 20 % of it.
The most important and ignored part of the missing heat controversy is when the heat will return. ?
Since we are only speculating where the heat has gone and have only speculation about how it got there how can we predict how long it will be until it returns ?
Answer: We can’t ! We have a theory of CAGW which DEPENDS upon the “missing heat ” returning in the next 100 years and we don’t know where the heat is and don’t know if or when it will return. Since we cannot find it we cannot measure it so we don’t know much of it exists.
Despite all of this “the debate is over” and we should throw ten’s of trillions of dollars at the nearest politician to make it go away.

Hmmm. “Estimate temperature trends”. Why not “report” temperatures over 20 years or so?
I surely would not find it surprising that some areas within the oceans are heating a bit even as the ocean as a whole undergoes a cooling trend. But I am surprised it is a narrow zone below 4,000 meters near a continental pole that has been cooling slightly for the last 50 years.
On the other hand the absolute insignificance of this estimation is demonstrated by the fact that sea levels during the study period were abnormally stable world wide.

Is it surprising that the abyssal temperatures are not constant?
If a temperature is rising, extrapolate it out 100 years. Nice and scary.
If it is falling then the warming is just taking a hiatus. Don’t worry, it’ll start warming soon.

Save money, defund NOAA, EPA, and The Dep of Energy. Lets put men on Mars.

The post reads, “Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, cause heating of the Earth. Over the past few decades, at least 80 percent of this heat energy has gone into the ocean, warming it in the process.”
It should read: Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, should cause heating of the Earth. Over the past few decades, at least 80 percent of this heat energy should have gone into the ocean, warming it in the process. Unfortunately, we can’t find it.
Until now, apparantly. My first reaction was: how did they measure the temperature below the floor of the Argo system. Then I spotted that the used a ship – not a fleet of ships, just a ship – and took the temperature by – measuring differences in salinity.
Is it me, or does this remind anyone of Parkers’ (I think) attempt to show that tropospheric temperatures agreed with surface trends by measuring – wind shear?

“The scientists found the strongest deep warming around Antarctica, weakening with distance from its source as it spreads around the globe. “
Can someone explain in words of one syllable how Antarctica can be “the source” of deep ocean warming? The only sources of heat in that area are some volcanic activity… “Highly sensitive temperature probes moving continuously across the bottom of the volcano revealed signs of geothermal heating of seawater.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/05/040527235943.htm

Considering that sea level rise practically stopped in the last years, I announce the whole article as misleading, based on non-actual data and unfounded speculations.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/l3a.png
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/l2a.png
Dismissed!

It will be fascinating to read about their proposed mechanism for how the deep water got warmer — when the sun’s radiation hits only the top-most layer. Perhaps they will say that the Gulf Stream is warmer now, and as it reaches its sinking point near the Arctic that heat eventually reaches the ocean floor.
However, as I recall, that flow rate is rather slow, and the timing is not at all consistent with the “man-made global warming” of the past 35 years. If the deeps are warming now, the cause was likely from hundreds of years ago.
How about it, NOAA? Any mechanism to tell us about?

evanmjones said at 9:23 am: “Could the increase in underwater volcanic activity around Antarctica have any measurable effect?”
That’s exactly what crossed my mind as I read this article. Always assuming that there really has been a temperature rise in the deep oceans, then surely a lot more likely cause could be an increase in ocean floor volcanic venting, which could then also lead to the oceans losing some of their CO2 into the atmosphere.
Surely that is a lot more credible than some rather tortured hypothesis based around CO2 indirectly causing the oceans to warm, particularly if this is occuring in the deep oceans rather than as a surface effect – why would atmospheric warming cause the deep oceans to warm before first raising the surface temperature?

“”Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, cause heating of the Earth. Over the past few decades, at least 80 percent of this heat energy has gone into the ocean, warming it in the process””
I am beginning to wonder if NOAA release these papers to windup WUWT!
I was under the impression downwelling infrared radiation from CO2, from the
atmosphere no less, is completely absorbed by the first millimeter of the sea
surface thereby increasing surface evaporation which cools the sea surface.
But now the infrared radiation penetrates deeper into the oceans than sunlight.
You learn something new every day since CAGW became fashionable.

Richard111 beat me to it.
If the measurements (so long since I could use that word insted of “models” so have to give them marks for that at least) show that deep water has warmed slightly then that is information of value. But attributing it to CO2? Nonsense. As Richard111 pointed out, CO2 radiates in the infrared spectrum which penetrates water to a paper thing depth. Being concentrated in such a thin layer, any energy absorbed by that paper thin layer results in a large temperature increase which in turn results pretty much instant evaporation. Not to mention that even if it didn’t, the average SST of the ocean being about 15 C, it is in a temperature range where warmer water would tend to rise, not sink. With no physical mechanism to move the heat content from CO2 to the depths of the oceans, all they have reported is some interesting data that has no more to do with warming from GHG than it does with the sinking of the Titanic.

HelmutU says:
September 26, 2010 at 9:24 am
“One or two years ago the Alfred Wegener Institut in Bremen Germany published their temperature-measurements in the deep waters around the Antarctic und found a cooling of the deep waters. Somebody must be wrong.”
Reported here:
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080430/full/453015c.html

Recent decadal warming and freshening of Antarctic-derived abyssal waters
Gregory Johnson
NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle, WA, USA
IOP Conf. Series: Earth and Environmental Science 6 (2009)
source: http://iopp.fileburst.com/ees/ees9_6_032006.pdf
excerpts:
“The large distances between hydrographic sections, and the fact that they are reoccupied only from decade to decade makes quantification of the contribution of the observed recent abyssal warming to the global heat budget difficult. Quantification of the contribution of the warming and freshening observed to the global sea level rise budget is difficult for the same reasons.”
“Nevertheless, this qualitative analysis suggests that abyssal changes may play some role in global heat and sea level rise budgets.”
[like the image used related to the NOAA story — emphasis added for effect]
========
Note: if the “quantification of contribution” was difficult a year ago, what just changed?

The active sun of the late 20th century allowed the jetstreams and associated clouds to move poleward.
That allowed more solar shortwave into the oceans. That process has now ceased but some of the injected energy is still there.
I have proposed before that during a period of high solar input to the oceans some of that energy remains in the oceans and enters the thermohaline circulation to resurface some 1000 years later hence the climate cycling from MWP to LIA to date.
This paper would appear to support that proposition although a number of contributors tried to tell me trhat the downward mixing of that high solar input was minimal.
It is then somewhat of a lottery as to whether the energy coming out at the other end of that 1000 year oceanic cycling coincides with a period of high or low solar activity with the climate consequences varying accordingly.
Anyway, that extra energy in the oceans is from that higher solar shortwave input and nothing to do with CO2 because CO2 only produces more downward infra red which is immediately negated by faster evaporation.

Several others have already commented about deep ocean volcanoes. If there actually is any measurable change in heat content 1,000 meters below the surface a more likely (and obvious) explanation would be underwater volcanism. I instinctively roll my eyes whenever I hear claims of “hidden heat” or (my favorite) “planetary thermal inertia”.
I also have an inherent distrust of a thermometer deployed from a boat that can accurately determine temperature to 0.03 deg C of resolution and that they have 2 decades of such data. The implication is that they measured temperature (from salinity?) just as accurately 20 years ago as they do today.
Color me skeptical. The authors’ conclusions have that distinct odor of desperation about them.

I thought maybe they had already accounted for the missing heat. Section 5.5.3 Chapter 5 of the 4th IPCC report estimates the component of sea level rise due to thermal expansion as 1.6 mm/year (+ or – 0.5 mm) for the decade 1993 to 2003. For the period 1961 thru 2003 the estimate was 0.42 mm/ year (+ or – 0.12 mm). Aside from a mysterious change in the estimate of thermal expansion by a factor of 4 and the dismissal of other possible major contributors to sea level change, such as groundwater mining the analysts are closing the gap between estimates and observed. “Measure it with a micrometer, mark it with a grease pencil and cut it with an axe.” seems to apply.
Reference: Bindoff, N.L., J. Willebrand, V. Artale, A, Cazenave, J. Gregory, S. Gulev, K. Hanawa, C. Le Quéré, S. Levitus, Y. Nojiri, C.K. Shum, L.D.Talley and A. Unnikrishnan, 2007: Observations: Oceanic Climate Change and Sea Level. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

Am I reading this correctly?
“Scientists analyzing measurements taken in the deep ocean around the globe over the past two decades find a warming trend that contributes to sea level rise, especially around Antarctica.”
&
“Purkey and Johnson note that deep warming of the Southern Ocean accounts for about 1.2 mm (about 1/20th of an inch) per year of the sea level rise around Antarctica in the past few decades.”
Sea-level is a local phenomena?

I still have difficulty with the panic about rising sea levels. If you live by the sea, you know the defenses are at least 5m above the average sea level. That is what is needed to avoid getting flooded every time there is a bit of a storm surge at spring tides, and a few big waves. So 3mm a year means adding a brick every decade or so to the existing defenses. Does that constitute a crisis? Or is it really all in Al Gore’s imagination?

I can comment on the statistics
0.027 (±0.009) W m−2 applied over the entire surface of the Earth.
This is according to them a 3 sigma effect. Possibly interesting, but could disappear as noise
Deep (1000–4000 m) warming south of the Sub-Antarctic Front of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current adds 0.068 (±0.062) W m−2.
This is barely 1 sigma, definitely noise.
The abyssal warming produces a 0.053 (±0.017) mm yr−1 increase in global average sea level and the deep warming south of the Sub-Antarctic Front adds another 0.093 (±0.081)
Adding noise to a weak 3 sigma putative signal , to more than double it, is not only a scientific misstep, it also betrays the authors as working on an agenda.
What sort of peer reviews are these that do not catch so elementary scientific errors ?

richard111 and davidmhoffer, re sunlight penetrating only the top few mm of water.
The solar ponds show that is not the case. see e.g.
http://www.osti.gov/bridge/purl.cover.jsp;jsessionid=DD3754904F37D9B7EE92E4C803BB06FF?purl=/756432-k7Q3X9/webviewable/
and click on the pdf shown there.

Yeah, and think what will happen when the ice comes back … It’s not a one way street.

Roger Sowell says:
richard111 and davidmhoffer, re sunlight penetrating only the top few mm of water.
The solar ponds show that is not the case.
They are talking about the long wave infrared emitted from greenhouse gases, which indeed can only penetrate a few microns past the surface, all energy used up in the phase change of evaporation, with nothing left over to heat the deeper layers.
This chart shows depth of penetration v. wavelength:
http://omlc.ogi.edu/spectra/water/gif/hale73.gif
as the chart shows, solar UV and visible radiation can penetrate to much greater depths and heat the oceans.

R T Barker said:
“Measure it with a micrometer, mark it with a grease pencil and cut it with an axe.”
There speaks a true engineer.
BTW I seem to remember from back in the mists of time that below the deep sound channel (1000-2000m?) the thermal structure of the ocean is essentially isothermal at +4 deg with salinity being the cause of any variations. So why are minuscule temperature variations being ascribed to CO2?

I thought it was already reasonably well established, or at least generally accepted, that global ocean average level is going up 2-3mm per year in last few decades and it was going up 1-2mm per year for the last few centuries or so with decreased confidence since tide gauges weren’t designed for that kind of resolution and the land itself where the tide gauge is anchored might have been subsiding or rising in the past with no real way to measure it. I also thought it was generally accepted that the rise is more or less an even split between thermal expansion and glacier melt.
It doesn’t seem like there’s any significant new information in the report.

“The authors note that there are several possible causes for this deep warming: a shift in Southern Ocean winds, a change in the density of what is called Antarctic Bottom Water, or how quickly that bottom water is formed near the Antarctic, where it sinks to fill the deepest, coldest portions of the ocean around much of the globe.”
Lets take a stab at figuring out why the water may be warming from this statement. I would guess that the earths crust and mantel over time would warm the ocean water from the bottom up. What keeps the deep waters cold is that the cold water at the surface continually sinking to replace the slightly warmed water with fresh cooler water. I would imagine that melting ice would cool the surface water faster, and a decrease in melting would slow the feeding of colder water into the deep ocean, thus allowing the thermal transfer of heat from the Earths crust to the bottom water, thus warming it.

simpleseekeraftertruth says:
September 26, 2010 at 11:16 am

Sea-level is a local phenomena?

I would start by doing some searches for variations in earth’s measured gravity, irregularities in the shape of the planet, and variations in the composition (and now temperature) of seawater. I wouldn’t expect huge differences in sea levels, but I would expect some.

and they are having meetings and panel discussions and committees on how to make their “message” more believable……………

My read on sea level rise is it appears to be flattening over the past decade. An eye-ball measurement from the sea level curve suggests that over the past 5 or 6 yrs its rise has slowed to 2mm/yr. It is ridiculous to use only a linear fit as this carries your 3mm rate forward for a few decades. When the growth is zero over a few years, the linear trend over 30 years would still read some 2.8mm/yr.

There are a couple of scientists that might disagree.
If any reader thinks they would be offended by hypothermia-induced Tourettes, they should forego this video, whose disclaimer appears below.
“The following video contains language of a sort that is entirely unbecoming of any self-respecting ichthyologist, or, for that matter, any self-respecting scientist of any field or discipline. Nevertheless, in the interest of presenting an accurate portrayal of the indignities that must often be endured by scientists while in pursuit of their never-ending quest for discovery and exploration, the dialog contained in this video has not been edited in any way from its original (albeit vulgar) content.”

Gordon Ford asked: “Also how many cubic kilometers of sediment are washed into the oceans each year?”
20 billion tons at 120 #/ft3. If my decimal places are correct, that amounts to 0.03mm average depth.

Trenberth’s missing heat is very likely just a miscalibration of the 3000 Argo floats that came online exactly when he noticed that his heat was disappearing. I don’t know where these authors are going with their Southern Ocean temperatures. If you have to look at the ocean bottom to find global warming you are in bad shape. But evidently the idea brought grant money so here we are with another paper that goes nowhere. Expect more of the same with seven billion dollars to spend on climate research and propaganda.

Stephen Wilde wrote: The article said: “The scientists found the strongest deep warming around Antarctica, weakening with distance from its source as it spreads around the globe.”

So there clearly was southern hemisphere warming generally but it became concentrated around Antarctica which is consistent with the thermohaline transporting it there, carrying it around Antarctica and then distributing it northward.

So you are saying that warming surface water over the southern hemisphere causes it to expand and flow south where it is cooled and drops to great depth where it is still warmer than the water it displaces?
Which of these currents accomplishes that?
http://www.geology.iastate.edu/gccourse/ocean/images/image2.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/265d4t6

EFS_Junior says:
September 26, 2010 at 11:57 am
Well the article is behind a pay wall.
‘But wait, Underdog to the rescue, the author’s copy can be found here;
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/gjohnson/Recent_AABW_Warming_v3.pdf‘
Thank you for the link. Much appreciated.
Dominic

simpleseekeraftertruth says: at 11:16 am & W^L+ @ 12:10
“Sea-level is a local phenomena?”
See the second paragraph under “Description”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoid

DCC,
Some helpful material from vuk there.
And even from your link the warm current from the Pacific circles Antarctica before heading north so one would expect an accumulation of energy around Antarctica.

Verity Jones says:
September 26, 2010 at 10:41 am
John said at 10:07 am
evanmjones said at 9:23 am
I have done several ‘back of envelope’ calculations on volcanic heating of water (a while back) and come up with quite small numbers which may actually be worth revisiting in the light of this.
I’ve always considered the role of volcanoes not to be significant in the amount of heat they generate, but rather in the fact they set up convection columns which distribute the heat much more effectively than normal.
It’s a bit like the heat from the fan in a fan-assisted oven doesn’t really help the cooking times – but the cooking times improve out of all proportion anyway.

“The highly accurate deep-ocean temperature observations used in this study come from ship-based instruments that measure conductivity through salinity, temperature and depth” results in “about 0.03°C per decade in the deep Southern Ocean, less elsewhere”.
1.Ship-based instruments: How accurate were these instruments?
2. What was the margin of error? The report does not specify this.
3.How can one write “about 0.03C”?
4.How can one continue with: “less elswhere”, how much less is “less” and how big is “elswhere”?
I always suspected that someday someone would ‘discover’ Trenberth’s elusive temperature rise. Now comes a magician and finds 0.03C per decade, that is 0.003C per year but not everywhere, but somewhere, with less elswhere. LOL.
Its worse than I thought.

I’ve referenced this paper in comments here a number of times, but it has been a while
http://www.ocean-sci.net/5/203/2009/os-5-203-2009.pdf
Geothermal heating, diapycnal mixing and the abyssal circulation
J. Emile-Geay1 and G. Madec2,*
The essential finding of this work is that geothermal heating at abyssal depths has been seriously underestimated and it likely is most influential at high latitudes in the North Pacific and most pertinent to this paper in the AABW circulation.
“– In that sense, it is directly analogous to diapycnal mixing, both qualitatively and quantitatively. It has a similar effect on bottom water, eroding extrema of the global T- S diagram and depositing a comparable amount of heat in the abyss. On a global scale, it is in fact equivalent toa diapycnal mixing coefficient of ∼1.2×10−4 m2 s−1 at
3500 m, i.e. the canonical value of (Munk, 1966).”
“– A remarkable finding is that the increase in ocean heat transport was nearly constant across experiments, despite the broad range of thermal and circulation changes they encompass. The presence of a geothermal heatflow, whether spatially variable or not, means that the ocean must evacuate an additional 0.03 PW, which it does in all cases by enhancing poleward heat transport in the Southern Hemisphere, by about 10% near 50◦ S.”
“The case is hereby made that geothermal heating is an important actor of abyssal dynamics. We recommend its inclusion in every model dealing with the long-term ocean circulation, for it substantially alters bottom water mass characteristics and generates a non-negligible circulation in the present-day climate.”
I haven’t had time to peruse all of the paper referenced in this post, but given the relatively infinitesimal variations of ocean heat they seem to be citing, if they haven’t dealt with the geothermal component in the light of Emile-Geay and Madec’s work, they are probably overstating even the small changes they are suggesting.

@ Richard111 : September 26, 2010 at 10:13 am
Good catch Richard. What it does tend to indicate is that there was a decadal upward SW irradiance trend over this same long period and you seem right, it is the SW that has buried this deep. You also seem right that they cannot dance with the logic that this was surface LW from the top 1 mm or the air temperature, everyone in their dance would be steping all over the others!

These guys have a fixation with sea levels….guess they need some “water boarding” 🙂

Seeing as we now have some credible science that proves that CO2 is warming the oceans, I believe it’s time for me to roll-out my new Carbon Capture and Storage business. CO2 spa and pool heaters! Not only can you charge companies for the storage of their nasty CO2 but you can also sell your own Carbon Credits that you’ll earn from shutting-off your electric or gas pool heaters! This is a no-brainer. Mabel… get David Suzuki on the line!

I. “Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, cause heating of the Earth. Over the past few decades, at least 80 percent of this heat energy has gone into the ocean, warming it in the process.”
II. “NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources. ”
===============================
Hey NOAA, If your mission is to freaking “understand” it, then how can you be so stupid to betray that mission by allowing such utter nonsense in paragraph I above to be published??
Taxpayer-funded hubris!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

Cassandra King says:
September 26, 2010 at 12:31 pm
…
Are the oceans warming at all depths equally? I wonder if the authors actually realise the oceans are in fact cooling not warming.

Just look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thermocline.jpg . Ask yourself, what would happen to this curve if more energy was added to the top 100 m of the oceans (warming ocean). I think you will answer that yourself. What if you remove energy from the top 1 meter of this curve (cooling ocean).
Now look how NOAA conveniently leaves out the lower layers of the graph with its nearly vertical temperature profile. Doing that you can paint some very misleading views.
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/yos/resource/JetStream/ocean/layers_ocean.htm
Now, apply that knowledge to this article.

We quantify abyssal global and deep Southern Ocean temperature trends between the 1990s and 2000s to assess the role of recent warming of these regions in global heat and sea level budgets. We compute warming rates with uncertainties along 28 full-depth, high-quality, hydrographic sections that have been occupied two or more times between 1980 and 2010 .
Datasets allowing for measurements made as infrequent as two or more times during a thirty year period would be considered inadequate elsewhere but in “Climate Science” it is all too common for this to be termed “ROBUST” . The sad state of affairs in “Climate Science” forces me to wonder among other things whether or not all datasets with two or more measurements over the thirty year period were even included and what other criteria was considered to qualify the data.

Jeff L says:
September 26, 2010 at 8:30 pm
Dave Wendt says:
September 26, 2010 at 3:50 pm
http://www.ocean-sci.net/5/203/2009/os-5-203-2009.pdf
Are you sure the link given is live?
I went to it & found nothing.
I checked it and it works for me, not sure what the problem is.

This is a classic case of the Alarmists like the NOAA desperately trying to find an excuse for their failed hypothesis.
THE ATMOSPHERE CANNOT WARM THE OCEANS..PERIOD.
if it could, then since it’s been over 10,000 years since the height of the last ice age, the oceans should have warmed to the same temp. as the atmosphere by now. It hasn’t.
Those who want the truth about this subject can do themselves a favour and read THIS from the late great John L Daly. It’ll take 3 minutes.
I’m so tempted to call the wags at the NOAA liars and frauds, but I’ll hold fire for a while yet.

ooops there is my comment now. Seems I was a bit rash.
My apollogies to the mods. Sorry

I see this article is from the Journal of Climate.
So I presume that it is PEER reviewed.
Remind me, someone please,
What do the PEERS do when they do PEER review?
Check the spellllling perhaps or wot?
(Obviously this is not a peered reviewed blog).

There is surely no mystery as to how surface heat is getting to the lower layers. Heat will flow from warm to cool and ocean currents, the ‘conveyor’ system, will cause mixing over time. the rest of the surface heat will radiate away when atmospheric temperatures have fallen below that of the sea’s surface, ie. at night.
Anyway Trenberth’s heat is the heat in the mid troposphere from the GHG’s. This heat is not there because the theory of GHG’s is wrong.

Chris H says:
September 26, 2010 at 8:53 am
Have they put the cart before the horse? They attribute the deep ocean warming to rising atmospheric CO2. Is it not just as likely that something else caused the deep ocean warming and the CO2 rise simply represents the deep ocean de-gassing?
——————
On the balance of evidence it’s not equally likely. Conceptually, whether the oceans are absorbing or releasing net CO2 depends on the partition coefficient for CO2 between air and sea water (which is temperature dependant) and the actual concentrations of CO2 in both air and sea water.
I am going to make a wild guess and suggest that all of these quantities have been measured as well as related parameters such as sea water pH trends..

“Must be a really unknown method of heat transportation, as it by passed the argo measured dea depths, and then reappeared in the deeper ocean.”
Clearly, but if they say it’s there then either we ignore them or start looking into it.
I’m not sure that relying on the rather limited Argo results in order to announce that energy transfer into deep waters is impossible constitutes open minded science.
Anyway conduction, upward and downward convection and horizontal drift all conspire to shift energy around. We may be talking large amounts from the point of view of air but it’s miniscule stuff in terms of oceanic heat carrying capability.

Trenberth is looking for about 0.8 watts/m2 of the projected increase in energy held in the Earth system that is not going into heating the surface.
Either this energy is not being held in the Earth system (and is just escaping to space and hence climate theory is not correct) or it is hiding and the most likely place for that would be the deep oceans (or continental ice sheets warming up and melting that we have not observed).
http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/7316/trenberthmissingheat.png
This paper measured/extrapolated the potential heat content going into the nearly the entire global ocean below 2000 metres [It doesn’t appear they measured the Arctic bottom water but the north Atlantic does not appear to have warmed so it is likely no extra heat is going into the Arctic bottom water].
So, Table 1 in the paper shows 0.068 watts/m2 is going into the oceans below 2000 metres. Far less than the 0.8 watts/m2 Trenberth is looking for.
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/gjohnson/Recent_AABW_Warming_v3.pdf
We also know there is no accumulation in the last 7 years in the 0-700 metre ocean – von Schuckmann 2009 found 0.77 Watts/m2 going into the 0-2000 metre ocean (although no one seems to believe these estimates since almost all of the warming they measured was in the 0-300 metre area which is contradicted by the Argo floats).
Trenberth Missing Heat – 0.8 Watts/m2
Going into 0-700 Metre ocean – 0.0 W/m2
Going into 0-2000 Metre ocean – ? (but could be as high as 0.77 W/m2 but this contradicts Argo)
Going into the 2000+ Metre Ocean – 0.068 W/m2
Going into the 2000+ Metre Ocean from the Arctic – ? (but looks to be very low)

Just so we have some point of sanity checking of all of this; my Thermal Physics Text Book carries a Table detailing the “International Practical Temperature Scale of 1968. ”
That table lists the values of the various Standard and Primary fixed point Temperatures for thermometry standardization.
The only listed Standard temperature is the Triple point of H2O; which it states specifically should have the isotopic composition of ocean water and that Temperature is given as 273.16K or 0.01 deg C and it is exact by definition.
Of the Primary fixed Points the most precisely known one is the boiling point of H2O which is 373.15 Kelvins wiht an uncertainty of 0.005 K.
No other primary reference point is less uncertain than 0.01 Kelvins.
So unless there is a newer restatement of those standards; along with a rectification of any historical difficulties if definitions have changed; I would tend to take these very low Temperature uncertainties wiht a grain of salt; that being of course a grain of salt that is typical of ocean water.
But I have a basic distrust of the statements being made about these results. I should state, that I’m willing to accept that these researchers have done their homework and that they actually have measured what they say they have measured. Subject to peer reviews and replication of this work; I’m prepared to accept their data with that Temperature uncertainty qualification.
But they have their work cut out for them trying to convince me that they know the cause.
Incoming solar energy in a spectrum where 98% of the total energy lies between 250 nm and 4.0 microns wavelength, falls on the oceans and much of it penetrates deeply into the ocean to the sort of depths they are talking about well at least out to the 700-800 nm range does; but longer wavelengths are increasingly absorbed in shallower layers.
So this is energy that is depoosited down where these researchers say they have found the warming.
LWIR thermal emission from the atmosphere; on the other hand have a spectrum where about 98% of the energy lies between 5.0 microns and 80 .0 microns, and virtually all of that radiation is completely absorbed in the top 50 microns of the ocean surface water (down to 99% absorption or 5 times the exponential decay length.)
That energy deposited in such a thin surface layer must of necessity be a primary source of the energy needed to cause prompt evaporation of water from the surface; which also results in removal of vast amounts of latent heat of evaporation from the ocean surface.
So you have some conduction of surface heat down towards the deeper cooler layers; but then all that solar energy that is deposited in the deeper layers; must warm those layers, which then become bouyant compared to their immediate surroundings; so there is a natural convective transport of solar heated waters from the depth towards the surface.
My bet says that convection always trumps conduction; so I consider it far more plausible that solar energy depostied deeper, is convecting towards the surface; rather than a much smaller LWIR return radiation from the atmosphere iws driving energy to deeper water.
Note that the solar spectrum energy arrives nice and shiny new pristine ordered energy; is deposited deeply in the oceans; and apart from what might be absorbed in biological processes, is essentially 100% converted into low class dirty disordered heat; so it is a very efficient conversion to heat.
On the other hand; LWIR emission from the atmosphere is at least second generation energy; either starting out as incoming solar spectrum energy that was captured and thermalized by the atmospheric gases such as O2, O3, and H2O along with third generation LWIR energy that was captured by green house gases sucha s H2O, CO2, O3 and other trace (CH4) GHGs.
Those conversion processes come with an energy division. Solar absorbed by the atmospehre becomes LWIR after thermalization, and half of it escapes to space, and only half of it strikes the surface (ocen mostly). The earth surface; ocean and land is emitting second generation radiant energy by thermal emission from the surface; and it to after capture and thermalization by the GHG/atmosphere also results in a 50/50 split; with half escaping, and half returning to the surface.
And thena s I pointed out a good fraction of that LWIR gets siphoned back off as latent heat.
So I don’t buy for a minute that this deep (3,300 feet) heating is attributable to LWIR emissions from the atmosphere.
It might be present; that is NOT my issue; but proving that it is from greeh house gas heating is s pretty tall order. Once heat is present in the oceans; it doesn’t have any isotpoic signature that identifies its origin.

Gary Mount says:
September 27, 2010 at 12:26 am
Ray says: September 26, 2010 at 8:46 am
Since when warm water is denser than cold water?
I’m afraid its true, I just looked it up. Water that is between the temperature of 3.98 °C and 0 °C exhibits this behaviour of becoming denser as it warms up. (Note that the opposite is true for temperatures outside of this range.)
Pure H2O, not sea water. It’s a side effect of the geometry of the H2O molecule caused by it’s having charged local “poles”. The H2O molecules shift their inter-molecular orientation as molecular energy changes due to their peculiar geometry . Sea water has dissolved ions which give it a rather normal temperature-density curve without the hump that pure H2O does, the ions get between the H2O molecules which minimizes the need for the H2O molecules to assume special orientations to accommodate each other.
In sea water the mechanism of variable density would be salinity changes associated with freezing. When sea water freezes it loses most of it’s salt into the surrounding water, which becomes more saline and thus denser. This is the near freezing water (at maybe -2C, dissolving salt in your water in addition to changing the temperature-density curve also changes the freezing point) which is denser than surrounding water because of the increased local salinity.
What does this mean in terms of warm water sinking to the bathos due to global warming? Beats me, that’s oceanic convection currents, I only do the chemistry and associated physics. I note that water can remain liquid at much lower temperatures at higher pressure (the deeper under the ocean one goes) and freezing can be written off as a consideration below the surface. The difference in density would be mostly caused by salinity differences not temperature although salinity would be associated with temperature.

“”” max says:
September 27, 2010 at 11:40 am
Gary Mount says:
September 27, 2010 at 12:26 am
Ray says: September 26, 2010 at 8:46 am
Since when warm water is denser than cold water?
I’m afraid its true, I just looked it up. Water that is between the temperature of 3.98 °C and 0 °C exhibits this behaviour of becoming denser as it warms up. (Note that the opposite is true for temperatures outside of this range.)
Pure H2O, not sea water. It’s a side effect of the geometry of the H2O molecule caused by it’s having charged local “poles”. The H2O molecules shift their inter-molecular orientation as molecular energy changes due to their peculiar geometry . Sea water has dissolved ions which give it a rather normal temperature-density curve without the hump that pure H2O does, the ions get between the H2O molecules which minimizes the need for the H2O molecules to assume special orientations to accommodate each other. “””
Both of you guys have been asleep at the switch. It is very well known that the phenomenon oaf a maximum water density at 3.98 Deg C applies only to pure fresh water; it is also equally well known that ocean water with a salinity of more than 2.47% has NO maximum density before it freezes; and normal sea water is about 3.5% salinity so it always sinks when it gets colder.
So the Temperature turnover of fresh water lakes is a lake phenomenon only; and does not occur in the oceans.

“”” David L. Hagen says:
September 27, 2010 at 3:04 pm
George E. Smith
Triple points of water and gallium have ITS90 temperature uncertainties of 0.1 mK and 0.25 mK. “””
Well I cited what is listed as the International practical Temperature Scale of 1968; which does not even list the triple point of Gallium. It goes from Triple point of Hydrogen at 13.81 Kelvin to melting point of Gold at 1337.58 Kelvins. It gives an uncertainty of 10mK for Hydrogen and 200 mK for Gold with eight other things in between.
It also states that Triple point of water is 273.16 K exactly by definition; so I don’t know how exact can be uncertain by 0.1 mK.
I can believe we might not be able to measure it to better than 0.1 mK; but sicne 1968 unless recently changed it has been exact; as is the value of c and a couple of other Physical constant that taken together yield c.
But yes I’m not surprised to see that measurment technology has improved.
As I recall, in 1968 the value given for TSI due to Thekaikara et al was 1353 W/m^2; which is the value I grew up with.
Now I am quite prepared to accept those kinds of numbers (0.1mK) as laboratory capabilities; but I’d be very surprised that you can stick any thermometer down 1300 feet in the ocean and measure the Temeprature of anything down there to 0.1 mK.
But if YOU know that is possible or standard practice or whatever, I’d be really interested to learn that.

This has probably been previously noted above, but the conclusion for the sub Antarctic has this confidence level, 0.093 (±0.081). Gives me a lot of confidence..not.

Well according to a certain law of thermodynamics, some work has to be done…but then entropy, entropy, entropy you can’t just hide that heat away until some warmist needs to discover it…

“Sea level has been rising at around 3 mm (1/8 of a inch) per year on average since 1993, ”
Just been looking at sea level rise around NZ.
Bell 2000 – 1.3 mm per year
Hannah 2004 – 1.6 mm per year
IPCC AR4 Regional – 1.7 mm per year
Looks like there’s a surge coming.

Is Trenberth predisposed to conclusions that require missing data?
http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/LandseaResignationLetterFromIPCC.htm