This comment seemed like a useful question to discuss, so I’m elevating it to post status
I see ocean heat content discussed here and elsewhere from time to time, but I have never seen a discussion of what causes it to increase. The clear implication is that it is increasing because of warmer atmospheric surface temperatures, but that makes no sense to me.
Surely the small increase in warming of the atmosphere to date could not transfer a significant amount of heat to the oceans. It seems obvious to me the only way that the oceans could accumulate much heat would be through direct heating from solar radiation. If that is occurring, wouldn’t that be direct evidence of a decrease in cloud cover, instead of evidence for AGW?
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The oceans actually have a low albedo, the average albedo of the earth’s surface is about 0.14. Sunlight penetrates 10s of meters into the ocean and there is some speculation that some gets deep enough that there could be kelp forests at 200 meters depth:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/25450094
Meanwhile, CO2 infrared wavelengths penetrate mere microns a surface or skin effect. Unfortunately most models couple CO2 to the whole mixing layer as if it were at short wave wavelengths. Perhaps this is why models under represent the precipitation and the negative feedback from speedup of the water cycle.
Sorry I didn’t mean the actual albedo of the ocean, itself does have a low value. It was suppose to mean El Nino’s and changing cloud albedo over the ocean. Thats why this text leads to global cloud levels.
Added to previous post.
The albedo of the planet is around 0.3 with global cloud cover about 65/66 percent.