Inspired by a WUWT comment from Bill Illis in the Maybe they’ve found Trenberth’s missing heat thread, I’ve elevated this to full post status and provided the relevant graphics from the links Bill provided. From a National Science Foundation article on April 15th, 2010:
“The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later,” says NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, the lead author. “The reprieve we’ve had from warming temperatures in the last few years will not continue. It is critical to track the build-up of energy in our climate system so we can understand what is happening and predict our future climate.”
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Bill Illis writes:
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).
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)
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It is unlikely that the ARGO measurements are wrong, and thus it can’t be found in the oceans, so where is it? Balancing budgets is never easy; there’s always a missing penny somewhere. Most often, that missing penny is due to human error. – Anthony
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Trenberth won a Nobel prize for the IPCC climate alarmism report, so there is no way he will be able to say the whole thing was wrong. It is a shame. I met him once. He is a very bright and decent guy.
What does the change in global sea level tell us?
That’s a different way to see if the accounts balance. One component from melted glaciers and icecaps, another component (steric) from the expansion of the ocean as it heats.
Perhaps someone knowledgeable could comment on sea level rise as a way to do a check on the ocean heat content estimates.
AGWObserver doubts ARGO, since it doesnt show warming:
http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/nodc-ocean-heat-content/
Never seen him doubt any other, highly suspicious data, like the thermometers. Now when ARGO doesnt fit his belief-system he starts to doubt it?
How pathetic is that?
People, people if the energy isn’t seen as a temperature change somewhere it could be because it’s gone to latent energy instead of sensible heat. Is there measurements of air moisture and other gaseous liquids in the atmosphere? Where have all meteorologists gone?
The deep oceans have been cold ever since some event (Maunder Minimum?) made them that way. Until that event or something similar happens again the deep oceans will continue to suck up heat and limit warming to about 0.4 C per century. Without the cold deep oceans, it would be much warmer today, perhaps as warm as it was in the Jurassic (25 C).
AJB says:
September 27, 2010 at 9:42 am
1 watt = 1 joule per second
Heat cannot go missing. It will go to the next coolest place until all the cool places are as equal as the “missing” heat can make them.
Heat missing. What will they think of next? Oh ya IR backradiation in w/m sqrd without caring about what the frequency of the of the IR is.
I am glad the Trenberth has finally engaged this issue publicly and taken up the Pielke’s challenge. After all, the use of OHC was advocated by Hansen and Schmidt in 2005 (Science, 3 Jun 2005, 1431-1435) but since there has been accumulated heat over last several years, they have been silent.
Even if the heat is “missing” in deep waters, how could it transit to lower depths without being detected near the surface by ARGO? After all there is no direct solar heating at those depths.
The fact is that we may never be able to account for slight fluctuations in the earth’s energy budget which means we have to allow large margins of error, esp. when measuring radiation gain and loss at the top of the atmosphere.
Most likely scenario is the NULL hypothesis: The Missing Energy was never stored or escaped.
Whether reflected into space before it got here or radiated away by a thinning upper atmosphere/2 strong El Nino’s, it hasn’t been found because it’s not on Earth.
It is worse than we thought!
Rich Americans have stolen the missing heat.
Get a new UN comittee to calculate how much we owe.
This is a great detective story. Mind if i drop a whoopsy. Missing heat reminds me of another missing enigma, missing mass.
Time to retreat.
One problem ( with the whole question of ‘global warming’, I mean climate change,
I mean climate disruption ) is the accuracy just doesn’t exist to make any statement
on what the energy balance is.
At its simplest, the question is does input = output?
That is,
(1-albedo) * S / 4 = sigma * T^4 ????
where albedo is earths reflectivity, S is Solar input, sigma is emissivity factor, and T is Temperature.
This is really:
(1-albedo) * S / 4 = (sigma * T^4) CO2 + (sigma * T^4) H20 + (sigma * T^4) clouds + (sigma * T^4) everything else
The theory is that the total right hand side will diminish because sigma (and T) for
CO2 will diminish, so
(1-albedo) * S / 4 = OLR
But when examines the total Outgoing Longwave Radiation
one actually finds a positive trend.
No doubt there is uncertainty with the measure, but the trend is positive.
Further, some measurements of albedo put it at 0.29.
I have texts which from scaling analysis put albedo at 0.30 and 0.31.
The GISS AOGCM uses albedo of 0.33.
Clearly, albedo is not known accurately, nor precisely enough to help with this
equation.
Further still, S, the Solar input could be:
1361 W/m^2,
1366 W/m^2, or
1367 W/m^2.
Or something else entirely.
So, we don’t know wither of the input variable terms (albedo or insolation),
much less how they may have varied in the past.
And the only measure of outgoing longwave radiation actually shows an increase!
How can we possibly discuss what the (im)balance might be?
“It is unlikely that the ARGO measurements are wrong, and thus it can’t be found in the oceans, so where is it?”
Ohh that is a very simple question to answer, it is far beyond Proxima Centauri allready, 4,2 lightyears away.
It was reflected away by earths increasing cloud cover after 2000 and is traveling away from earth at the speed of light.
If Trenberth hurry up he might catch up with some of the missing heat at Sirius A and we could go back to doing more usefull things on earth than hunting climate ghosts.
We are just setting the stage for the eruption of oceanic volcanoes, so the scientists can point to this as AGW’s revenge
If memory serves, Roger Pielkel Sr. had one or more posts on this very subject, several months ago. I think Trenberth and Pielkel exchanged email about it. I for one, hope, the heat is sequestered and reappears in time to moderate the next glacial. I hope to regain my youthful body too. Perhaps the heat is being stored, perhaps not. I strongly suspect Pielkel is correct and most has been sent back to space. That does not mean we should not look for it. It means we have two areas of empirical research that need much more attention. 1. accurate and reliable measurements to radiated energy. 2. way more quality and well distributed data about the oceans, heat included. If it isn’t there it can come back to us, if it is, perhaps, just perhaps, it will moderate future cooling.
netdr said: “If it is missing for 800 years we will have had alternative energy for 700 years and we might even need the heat to stave off an ice age.”
If it going to go missing for 800 years the ocean temps we are experiencing today are those from 800 years ago. Which would be about the end of the Medieval Warm Period. Which makes me wonder; Did the MWP end due to oceans sucking up more heat or did the MWP end for some other reason and oceans will now be releasing less heat?
Perhaps the missing heat has either gone to hell and it’s breaking loose, or not, and it’s freezing over. Doesn’t sound good for those poor souls either way!! I wonder if their computer warming models can account for it better than ours?
Hah, nice conclusion!
But you know, Anthony, those pennies, according to the NOAA study featured on the previous thread, are “statistically significant”.
I have a big bucket of pennies (that I am too lazy to roll so they just keep collecting at my house).
Using NOAA’s line of reasoning, though, I doubt if I would be successful convincing ANY bank in which I wanted to invest my bucket of pennies, in opening a new account, arguing to them that they were “statistically significant.”
They would laugh me out the front door.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
what I find amazing is the actual ‘net’ value, lets call it 0.8 w/m2.
Taking the ‘given’ value of average TSI of 1365 w/m2 – with an alleged maximum variation of 0.1% (giving a net actual variation of about 1.36 w/m2) and then of course the supposed net warming effect of CO2 of around a couple of w/m2 for a doubling of CO2.
what do all these figures have in common?
well, for a start they are something akin to about 0.05 to 0.1% of the TSI energy input value and
second, they are all within the same ‘order of magnitude’
….this would leave to me to surmise that the uncertainty in level of measurement/detection (especially when considered along with massive averaging for temperature data, etc!) is probably greater than the level of changes we are trying to ‘detect’.
On this basis, I find it quite hard to understand how anyone can ‘prove’ a theory (i.e AGW) to any reasonable level of confidence with the lack of accurate observations to back the theory up.
Obviously, the simple words to use here, are signal to noise ratios! but for those who find that too difficult – its something like balancing a current bank account but only being able to work with whole numbers (i.e. no decimal point on a calculator!) – in this case we have an input (salary) of 1365 (whole) dollars and all our direct debits are shown on our statement in whole dollars (but in the real world, they are in fact are taken in dollars and cents and are simply ’rounded up’ to the nearest dollar on our bank statement. Hence, we end up wondering why some months we are overdrawn or even in credit by a dollar or two from our monthly budget!
Until the climate accounting system is accurate to the level of ‘cents’ – trying to say someone has pinched (or creamed off) a few cents is really rather futile.!
probably a poor analogy, but it worked when explaining it to my teenage daughter!
Charklie A said;
“What does the change in global sea level tell us?”
It tells us nothing, other than sea levels constantly change, the means of measuring them are by no means accurate, and that sea levels go up and down and currently lie some 30cm or so below the levels in the MWP.
tonyb
” richard verney says:
September 27, 2010 at 9:38 am
The heat is certainly missing. Here in the UK, we have already experienced the first snows of winter, See the linked article from the Daily Mail.”
Sorry Richard, that’s not snow, that is Climate Disruption.
What, total solar irradiation (which is probably the most EASILY measured energy quantity, and the MOST ACCURATE… is up by almost 1 watt per m^2 (is that ONE SIDE or TWO? Average or only what comes in?) in the last 5 years?
And our “friend” the Hansen (demi-)GOD claims that since WWII the net “influx” change is 0.9 watts per square meter (that’s total, no 1/2 illumination problem there) and that HE and his people “found it” in the oceans.
File this ALL under, “Give me a BREAK!” Now if the Demi-GOD Hansen thinks 0.9 Watts is “catastrophic” and “significant”, wouldn’t the irradiation change be even MORE SO. Earth to Hansen, et. al. , suggest you get in your Ford ESCAPE and drive right over to your local Sol, and reset the control knob.
This sort of “logic”, burns me up.
Max
I am guessing that ultimately, human activities will lead to higher earth albedo, which may explain the missing energy. More humidity leads to more cloud formation, which leads to higher earth albedo. Does anyone have albedo measurements for 2007-2010?
Elvis has it.
It’s a travesty, a travesty, I say, that we can’t just reach up and pull all that missing heat back from space where it’s escaped.
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The Pielke Sr., Trenberth and Willis email exchanges:
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/further-feedback-from-kevin-trenberth-and-feedback-from-josh-willis-on-the-ucar-press-release/