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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Is Trenberth arrogant or naive?
For him to think we actually have the energy fluxes measured well enough to be able to say that there is 0.8 Watts/m2 missing is just laughable.
If “climate science” wants to attain any kind of stature at all they must begin by admitting just how ignorant they are about the climate system, rather than continuing the charade of knowing it all already.
Kev-in-UK says:
September 27, 2010 at 11:33 am
Groping in the dark, playing Hide and Seek?, Is it out there any order at all?, what is it that order, if any?
http://www.scribd.com/doc/38251461/Unified-Field
The average temperature of the global ocean is about 4C. I reckon’ that’s about what the global average temperature is for the past 100,000 years or so.
More proof of natural glacier retreat over the past 5000 years.
JUVFONNA, Norway, Sept 14 (Reuters) – Climate change is exposing reindeer hunting gear used by the Vikings’ ancestors faster than archaeologists can collect it from ice thawing in northern Europe’s highest mountains.
Freed from an ancient freeze, wood rots in a few years. And rarer feathers used on arrows, wool or leather crumble to dust in days unless taken to a laboratory and stored in a freezer.
“Over the past 150 years [i.e. started before industrialization with emergence from the Little Ice Age] we have had a worldwide trend of glacial retreat,” said Michael Zemp, director of the Swiss-based World Glacier Monitoring Service. While many factors were at play, he said “the main driver is global warming”. [and how do you know it is different this time vs. multiple other times thousands of years ago?]
In Norway, “some ice fields are at their minimum for at least 3,000 years,” said Rune Strand Oedegaard, a glacier and permafrost expert from Norway’s Gjoevik University College.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/09/more-proof-of-natural-glacier-retreat.html
Is there any hidden heat,
If the glaciers retreated to the same extent as today 3000 years ago what has happened to that hidden heat.
Just like the hotspot and now the missing heat. When you are in a hole stop digging.
http://www.c3headlines.com/predictionsforecasts/
I’m storing it in my garage for use later this winter.
Sorry, you can’t have any .. 🙁
The missing heat is hiding at the ocean bottom with the oil plume. When we least expect it they’ll rise and strike. Stay away from the ocean. It’s not just great whites down there.
What always seems to be missing from these discussions of “missing” heat is a recognition that the waters of the world’s oceans are in constant motion, not just at the surface, but at virtually every depth right down to the ocean floor. The observational data available to try to characterize that constant motion is, if anything, even more “abysmal” than the very weak data we have to characterize the oceans’ temperature, but what there is, suggests that those motions are quite variable. When solar insolation or any atmospheric inputs fall on the oceans they transfer potential energy in the form of heat, but the energy stored in the world’s oceans is far more than just that potential energy. There is also a vast quantity of kinetic energy involved in the constantly moving volumes of water. Some of that kinetic energy is supplied by the effects of planetary motion, gravitational tides, and other external forces, but a large and largely unknown contributor is the conversion of the potential energy of heat to the kinetic energy of movement. Many of the supposed heat fluxes actually involve the physical movement of vast masses of water. Changing the velocity or volume of the AABW or the MOC requires massive amounts of energy, but driving the highly variable flows of the multitude of all the other largely unquantified currents, gyres, and flows also consume energy, in amounts we really have no idea of.
At present we have a vague understanding of oceanic heat content and mostly ill-informed SWAGs about the kinetic energy content of the oceans. Until we have advanced our observational capabilities and data bases far beyond our present state and developed something like an understanding of the extent and interaction of these variables, talking about “missing” heat seems incredibly ignorant.
dear anthony ,
would it be asking too much , how this gentleman is arriving at the outcome of his calculations and which assumptions were used to determine the quantative effects of solar radiation , the influence of cloud formation , the amount of watervapor in the atmosphere and its condensation , the amount of ultraviolet radiation into and the amount of infrared radiation out of the atmosphere ? The amount of heat trapped into the oceans is looking to me like a total joke , because the warmest water temperatures are found at the surface , simple thermodynamics in fluids , and a cooler surface temperature will inevitably lead to cooler deep water temperatures or may be caused by it . Who knows ? But this is irrelevant , the surface will always reflect what is under it as long as the fluid is not replaced by a solid . So it is nice to make up 10-colored statistics but it all has nothing to do with a proper description of reality and it is serving only one purpose , to impress and to frighten the innocuous , scared co- citizens and to create the environment to push a draconian agenda . Or am i badly mistaken here ?
On total earth system energy.
The total earth system is never in actual energy equilibrium, although it is constantly trying to achieve it through all the various processes of insolation, irradiation, adsorption, re-irradiation, evaporation, latent heat, convection, conduction, sublimation, adiabatic lapse rate, oceanic, AMO, PDO, etc, etc.
So, at any given relatively small to medium time scales, the net energy into the total earth is almost always not equal to the next energy out of the total earth system. Oe very long timescales there is some increase in chance that Ein=Eout, but the duration of the Ein=Eout should be temporary and transitory.
So virtually all the time the total earth system energy is either increasing or decreasing. And the rate of change of the increase or decrease is also constantly varying.
It seems to me that the Ein is relatively easy to calculate compared to the Eout. This is because the Sun system accounts for virtually all of the Ein.
The Eout looks to be more of a problem for measuring in our energy accounting exercise. More data from current satellites and more satellites and different satellites should be in the mix for getting the Eout nailed down.
Next, the moving of energy (Eint) around within the total earth system is of much more highly complex nature than the flow of total earth system Ein and Eout.
Dropping the AGW bias in the approach to the behavior of Eint will help to give more balanced funding and thus input to more objective knowledge than the biased current knowledge.
John
Dennis Nikols writes:
“Perhaps the heat is being stored, perhaps not. I strongly suspect Pielkel is correct and most has been sent back to space.”
Isn’t this the obvious point to begin investigation? Roy Spencer’s book, The Global Warming Blunder, argues that the key to “forcings” is the behavior of clouds. There is no set of hypotheses which provide anything approaching a useful understanding of clouds, as Spencer explains. What is most likely is that the excess heat is being reflected by clouds. What is most needed at this time in climate science is a scientific understanding of the behavior of clouds.
I’m not sure how to phrase this question, not being a trained scientist, and I may have missed something in the posts which could explain it, but how much heat from the planet actually escapes into space? I always thought that if a body heated up, then it would radiate more heat, and where better to radiate it to than the cold of interplanetary space? I also realise that the atmosphere will keep a lot of the heat in, fortunately for all of us! I’m not being facetious, I’m just trying to advance my limited knowledge of this extremely complicated subject.
They’re going the wrong way about trying to find this missing heat. They keep using thermometers – that will never work. Trenberth needs to find a proxy.
When satellite measurments of tropospheric temperatures didn’t show any warming, they just used a proxy instead – wind shear, in that case. Maybe Trenberth can come up with drift sheer or something, that will prove the Argo nework is faulty, just like we’ve always known.
“I feel haunted already…. ”
“Do not.”
“Do too.”
“Do not!”
“Do too!”
“Not!!”
“TOO!!!!”
“STOP IT!, BOTH OF YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
(It’s hell, being all of me… };>)
“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.”
They don’t understand what is happening? They can’t predict our future climate? When did that happen?
Could this “lost” heating actually quantify changes in the average reflectivity of clouds?
Expert judgments about transient climate response to alternative future trajectories of radiative forcing
Five Reasons Why Water Vapor Feedback Might Not Be Positive Roy Spencer
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Somebody please clue me in on this.
How the devil do the AGW cultists explain the way in which this missing heat is supposed to have gotten pumped into the ocean depths without first heating the ocean waters within the first 700 meters of the surface?
Heat tends reliably to rise, right? So are there some kinds of enormous convection currents or something similar boring down through the topmost 700 meters of the oceans to carry that heat into the depths (from which is is magically not rising thereafter), “or are we just jerking off?”
(Hat tip to Mel Brooks and the other writers of the Blazing Saddles screenplay, 1974.)
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My hunch is that Trenberth will come back to haunt us sooner and certainly more frequently than the heat he cannot find.
That graph of the missing heat looks a lot like what’s been happening with GISTemp in comparison to the other temperature sets :
We know accurately how much radiation we get from the Sun. I wonder how accurate are our measurements of nighttime radiation from Earth to space. We may think we have that number, but a small excursion from a blackbody curve would explain this. When I look at photos of Earth from space, It’s obviously neither a black body nor uniform.
I’m quite confident that the missing heat is right there with the missing oil plumes from the gulf spill, if you find one you will most certainly find the other.
My guess is we should check out the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ for the missing two, but then again has anyone checked out the ‘Grassy Knoll’ lately?
I’m going to take a little bit of exception to calling Trenberth names or presuming what he does or doesn’t know. I believe that he’s been unfairly mischaracterized in the climategate statement “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
From what I’ve seen of what he’s written, he’s fairly open and clear. He even engaged with critics such as Pielke Sr. on his blog which led to a really interesting discussion (see Don B’s post above).
Here’s his original 2009 article: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final2.pdf
It’ll be interesting to see what he has to say about this paper.
This video makes an even clearer illustration that GISS may have found the missing heat:
So how do you know with 95% confidence that something is so; when you have this rather big missing chunk that you don’t know anything about.
That whopping missing energy since 2005 is much bigger than the base amount according to the graph taking the average (of the blue as 0.5 the missing energy circa 2010 is about 1.0 or twice the normal amount.
I would say they don’t know beans to 95% confidence levels. It ain’t missing; Mother Gaia knows where every last scintilla of that energy is; and she is quite happy with it where it is; if it is anywhaer at all.
But I will givew Dr Trenberth some credit for reducing the knowledge uncertain from a 3:1 standard Climatism fudge factor down to only a 2:1 range of ionexplicability. That’s a 50% +/- 50% improvement in precision of absence of knowledge.
If they don’t understand that LWIR emissions are quickly egested fromt he oceans as evaporation; then they will continue to look in vain in the deep oceans trying to find it.
Please don’t tell nobody: the heat must be hidden inside the Earth… It’s the only way to explain Al’s million of degrees!!!
🙂
Ecotretas