Roy Spencer writes on his website:
NASA’s James Hansen is probably right about this point: the importance of ocean heat storage to a better understanding of how sensitive the climate system is to our greenhouse gas emissions. The more efficient the oceans are at storing excess heat during warming, the slower will be the surface temperature response of the climate system to an imposed energy imbalance.
Unfortunately, the uncertainties over the rate at which vertical mixing takes place in the ocean allows climate modelers to dismiss a lack of recent warming by simply asserting that the deep oceans must somehow be absorbing the extra heat. Think Trenberth’s “missing heat“. (For a discussion of the complex processes involved in ocean mixing see here.)
Well, maybe what is really missing is the IPCC’s willingness to admit the climate system is simply not as sensitive to our greenhouse gas emissions as they claim it is. Maybe the missing heat is missing because it does not really exist.
This is where we can learn from the 40+ year record of deep ocean temperature changes. Even the 2007 IPCC report admitted the oceans have warmed more slowly at depth than the climate models can explain.
Hat Tip to “Jeff Id ” for posting in Tips & Notes
“Roy Spenser writes on his website:”
That’s Roy Spencer
REPLY: Fixed, thx – JTF
you might want to have a peak at my pool table that I have updated just now. It is quite interesting the way that the balls have fallen into their respective positions….especially comparing NH and SH.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
Any time a theory has to introduce hidden variables, dark matter, parallel universes or epicycles, that should be an instant alarm bell. Clang! Clang! Clang! Time to discard the theory and start over!
In modern science the alarm bell is totally silent.
Another great article, and yet more fuel to the sceptical fire.
Somehow I doubt simple evidence like this will ever change the mind of the hardline eco-fascists like the BBC. What was it they reported a few minutes ago as “yet more proof that global warming is affecting …” NOTE, they have not once ever shown global warming to be a real phenomena, yet it is spoken as a fact … a fact that us stupid viewers should just accept without question because god’s spokeswomen at the BBC have it direct from Gaia.
So what is their conclusive proof? That a new bacteria is in the Atlantic … much like the bloom of Jelly fish (caused by lack of fish to eat them) was also “proof” of global warming affecting the ecosystem.
What’s the Global Warming equivalent of ‘dark matter’?
Regardless of mixing heat rises !
try a simple experiment a deep drum ( 44 gal) insulated at the side with a heatlamp above giving the same radient heat as the sun for 12 hours out of 24 & see what happens. Does the bottom heat up?
Typo just under the graph: Roy Spenser = Spencer.
Well, maybe what is really missing is the IPCC’s willingness to admit the climate system is simply not as sensitive to our greenhouse gas emissions as they claim it is. Maybe the missing heat is missing because it does not really exist.
And the sooner the warmists understand that the better.
“Maybe the missing heat is missing because it does not really exist.”
or
“Maybe the missing hotspot is missing because it does not really exist.”
Solution: Blame it on data errors. Yeah, that’s the ticket. ;O)
Q: What’s the Global Warming equivalent of ‘dark matter’?
A: Backradiation.
LOL
“Maybe the missing heat is missing because it does not really exist.” Indeed, nobody has ever seen and confirmed the existence of this ‘heat’ and then lost track of it so that it can be said to have gone missing. It is only missing if the models and all the data are assumed to be correct. and complete. What Trenberth is saying is that our picture of reality doesn’t seem to be conforming to the models, and he wants to reverse the burden of proof for CAGW. His starting point should be that the models don’t appear to conform to reality, and start asking what’s wrong with the models.
Models of combustion and heat have a long history of being wrong: we don’t go looking for phlogiston and caloric loss in materials today because they never had any physical basis in reality. In their day (to which we could add the luminiferous ether for electromagnetic propagation, the miasma theory of disease transmission and many others), these concepts were consensus ideas, tenaciously held by the most prominent and respectable scientists. A little knowledge of history and the philosophy of science would engender a bit of humility and realism in climate science today.
From the most recent peer-reviewed paper on the issue (Kouketsu et al. 2011):
“We calculated basin-scale and global ocean decadal temperature change rates from the 1990s to the 2000s for waters below 3000 m. Large temperature increases were detected around Antarctica, and a relatively large temperature increase was detected along the northward path of Circumpolar Deep Water in the Pacific. The global heat content (HC) change estimated from the temperature change rates below 3000 m was 0.8 × 1022 J decade−1; a value that cannot be neglected for precise estimation of the global heat balance. We reproduced the observed temperature changes in the deep ocean using a data assimilation system and examined virtual observations in the reproduced data field to evaluate the uncertainty of the HC changes estimated from the actual temporally and spatially sparse observations. From the analysis of the virtual observations, it is shown that the global HC increase below 3000 m during recent decades can be detected using the available observation system of periodic revisits to the same sampling sections, although the uncertainty is large.”
Brent Hargreaves says:
June 28, 2011 at 3:49 am
Dark heat (which is simply inferred to exist from model discrepancies yet apparently can’t be detected with thermometers or any other form of heat measurement). Obviously, even if it does exist, if it doesn’t manifest itself as a threat (or even an impact) to Earth’s climate, it is nothing more than a theoretical consideration that can be dismissed and ignored. We certainly shouldn’t give it any weight in policy making.
See also:
http://news.discovery.com/earth/antarctica-melting-warming-penguins-101214.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7296/abs/nature09043.html (admittedly, cocerning upper ocean) (Lyman et al, 2010)http://www.reportingclimatescience.com/news-stories/article/cancun-climate-change-conference-climate-science-facts-about-global-warming.html
Trenberth’s missing heat may simply not exist. I can’t get heat into a bucket of water wjth a heat gun. water seems not to accept physical heat from above. Surface tension. The ocean only accepts sun’s radiation. Neat eh!
I submit that ocean currents transfer energy vertically faster than diffusion. Look at your first graph. Freezing of sea ice at around 60S increase the salt concentration and density of the underlying water which sinks. That deep ocean current travels north and eventually upwells near the equator (off the coast of Peru). The surface water warms (evaporates)as it travels west and eventually returns to the south. Air currents carry much of that energy (in the form of water vapor and clouds back toward the poles.Much of that energy is lost to space via radiation as it rains and snows.
CO2 is just going along for the ride being carried by these ocean and air currents.It is a lagging indicator of temperature changes, not a forcing factor.
@buzz:
Yes. And it is exactly this kind of fudging, using ‘virtual’ observations in laughably desperate attempts to hand-wave away lack of deep ocean warming that Spencer lays waste to in the linked article, if you can bear to read it.
Is there any kind of info graphic that compares the volume of the oceans to that of the atmosphere? Additionally like the famous co2 experiment, has any anyone reproduced the ratio of air to ocean and shown how the atmosphere heats the ocean?
And of course, assuming that a real warming (as opposed to computer generated warming shoehorned into the observations, with deliberately blurred boundaries between the two) was observed, during a short period between the 90’s and 00’s (conveniently unspecified in the abstract from which you quote), where in any case, the ‘uncertainty is large’, in this short – one might claim ‘cherry picked’ – timescale, it could have nothing to do with ENSO / ocean currents, could it? Got to be back-radiation that can penetrate a few mm of sea water, then ‘teleconnect’ into the ocean depths. Hard to tell though as you don’t link to the paper you pulled from the AGW ready-cooked rebuttal archive, or include any data from it.
Roy Spencer includes the following note at the end of the post: “IMPORTANT NOTE: The above model simulation does not account for the possibility that some of recent warming could have been due to one or more natural processes, in which case the diagnosed climate sensitivity would be even lower.”
Much lower.
We have shown that much of the rise in Ocean Heat Content to depths of 700 meters can be explained by natural variables. Including ENSO:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/enso-dominates-nodc-ocean-heat-content-0-700-meters-data/
And shifts in Sea Level Pressure:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/north-pacific-ocean-heat-content-shift-in-the-late-1980s/
And AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation)/AMO in the North Atlantic:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2009/10/04/north-atlantic-ocean-heat-content-0-700-meters-is-governed-by-natural-variables/
Brent Hargreaves says:
June 28, 2011 at 3:49 am
What’s the Global Warming equivalent of ‘dark matter’?
Dark Greenhouse Gases which create energy by multiplication.
I would posit that you can not heat the bottom of the ocean on a decadal or even century time scale by warming the surface air above it by a degree or two. In fact, I would be willing to bet that the opening of a single new hydrothermal vent has more impact on the deep ocean than a decade’s worth of 1 degree surface air temperature change.
A degree or two change in air temperature might move the point at which warm salty water dives under the fresher cooler water a bit to the North of where it was, but it is still going to dive at roughly the same temperature it did before. It will just reach that temperature a little later and so have traveled a little farther on the surface before doing its dive.
Check this vent field out (over a mile deep): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRYgeOMBlmQ
The bubbles from that vent are pure liquid CO2. The extreme pressure keeps the CO2 as liquid. This vent would inject more CO2 directly into the ocean water (the bubbles are absorbed by the sea water before they make it to the surface) than it is going to absorb at the surface. In fact, I am not convinced that the ocean absorbs a lot of atmospheric CO2, the transfer probably goes the other way, the ocean likely transfers more CO2 to the atmosphere than it absorbs, in my opinion.
I vote for the missing heat to have escaped by convectional heat transfer which, if considered even at all, is horribly under-represented in the models. Heat going towards water vapor production is insensible heat—not registered as temperature. Thus, some of the heat hitting the surface is never available as re-emmitted radiation or as measurable heat (temperature change) in the atmosphere.
“What’s the Global Warming equivalent of ‘dark matter’?”
Trenberth’s “missing heat”. Can’t detect it, but we know it is there, because without it the theory would be wrong, and we know the theory is right, therefore it must exist. QED.
Any theory can be 100% correct, so long as you allow new variables to be added to the theory to explain new observations that don’t fit the theory. Such a theory is also 100% useless for any practical purpose, because you cannot rely on it. A new variable can be added at any time, invalidating all decisions made before the new variable was introduced.
It is like playing a game in which the rules are changed arbitrarily; it is impossible to plan a winning strategy that will perform better than chance. In such a game there is no value in using experts to plan anything. You cannot do better than simply tossing a coin to make each decision.
For example, if you were to build a billion dollar spacecraft to go to mars, and the laws of gravity were to unexpectedly change 1/2 way there. It would make no difference how many experts you used to plan the launch trajectory. Depending on the change in gravity, you might have been better off to head in a random direction when you left earth, than in the direction the experts said you should take. There is no way to know ahead of time, because the change in the laws of gravity is like “dark matter” or “missing heat”. It is an unexpected new variable.
PearlandAggie says:
June 28, 2011 at 4:39 am
Q: What’s the Global Warming equivalent of ‘dark matter’?
A: Backradiation.
LOL
The laugh is on you. That’s pretty apt. There is no question that dark matter exists. Its gravitational effects on visible matter is as unmistakable and well established as the moon’s gravity causing tides. But just like we don’t know what particles, if any, carry the force of gravity from the moon to the ocean we don’t know what particles make up dark matter.
Back radiation is better understood than dark matter of course. The standard model has all the requisite particles to explain back radiation in excrutiating detail.
How does melt water from melting glaciers affect ocean temps? In particular at the 150 meter notch.
[This is just a curiosity question. I suspect the answer might be “It’s negligible.”, but I would think it’s something to look into.]
ScientistForTruth says:
June 28, 2011 at 4:51 am
“Models of combustion and heat have a long history of being wrong: we don’t go looking for phlogiston and caloric loss in materials today because they never had any physical basis in reality. In their day (to which we could add the luminiferous ether for electromagnetic propagation, the miasma theory of disease transmission and many others), these concepts were consensus ideas, tenaciously held by the most prominent and respectable scientists. A little knowledge of history and the philosophy of science would engender a bit of humility and realism in climate science today.”
Sometimes these things are dismissed prematurely. Lamarckian evolution (the inheritance of acquired traits) was entirely discounted during most of the past century by the central dogma of molecular biology that states: DNA—>RNA—>Protein is a one way street. Turns out it ain’t and there’s a thriving field nowdays in study of what’s called epigenetics. Yo and most every other living thing can inherit traits yo momma acquired during her lifetime. These are inherited in a number of different ways from the mix of small interfering and micro RNA (siRNA and miRNA) molecule types and ratios floating around in the protoplasm to methyl groups that attach to the DNA molecule itself causing changes in transcription activity which are duplicated when the cell replicates.
Likewise, luminiferous ether is making a comeback which I wrote about here a month or so ago. In a surprising recent observation it has been found that gamma rays from very distant sources are spread out in their arrivial times by frequency. This suggests a medium of some sort through which they travel otherwise they should all arrive at the same time as the speed of light in a vacuum is constant regardless of the temperature of individual photons.
While we do control the amount of CO2 releaed from our fossil fuel burning, and the heat energy released by the combustion process, none of that controls the climate.
The CO2 is eaten by the biosphere as it consumes incoming solar energy, and the released heat of combustion escapes off the planet, in blackbody fashion, to replace the extra incoming that is processed by the biosphere.
Zero-sum game. The missing heat came from the Sun, and it was merely stopping by at our place on it’s merry way out of the Solar System. It left the building.
Energy: use it or lose it.
Ignore – following comments
Brent Hargreaves says:
June 28, 2011 at 3:49 am
What’s the Global Warming equivalent of ‘dark matter’?
Dark Forcing?
The figure is very interesting. However, it seems to imply that low temperature flow is blocked by the ridge at the equator. Can’t be. The slice of ocean we are looking at is shown at the bottom right (blue line). I think we can be sure the low temperature deep current makes a left turn away from the section. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I don’t believe mixing can be significant, or else energy would be removed from thermohaline current through turbulence. That would make the current slow or stop.
I suspect the depth of the deep current is too great for thermal conduction even with 1000-1600 years traveling from the North Atlantic to the Indian Ocean or Eastern Pacific. The higher density of colder salt water at the bottom of the deep zone would maintain separation from the overlying warmer water in the pycnocline. The bulk of the deep zone would serve as insulation.
Buzz Belleville says:
June 28, 2011 at 5:06 am
From the most recent peer-reviewed paper on the issue (Kouketsu et al. 2011):
“We calculated basin-scale and global ocean decadal temperature change rates from the 1990s to the 2000s for waters below 3000 m. Large temperature increases were detected around Antarctica, and a relatively large temperature increase was detected along the northward path of Circumpolar Deep Water in the Pacific. The global heat content (HC) change estimated from the temperature change rates below 3000 m was 0.8 × 10²² J/decade; a value that cannot be neglected for precise estimation of the global heat balance.”
Come on. That’s a 0.05 W/m² global average imbalance. A quantity of this magnitude is absolutely negligible compared to the alleged (and probably non-existent) 0.85 W/m² long term radiative imbalance at TOA (Top of Atmosphere). Therefore they effectively say no heat is sequestered below 3000 m. Even if they prefer to use a different wording.
BTW, the concept of “virtual observations” is simply hilarious.
@Dave Springer:
This suggests a medium of some sort through which they travel otherwise they should all arrive at the same time as the speed of light in a vacuum is constant regardless of the temperature of individual photons.
It could also suggest something as yet unknown about (a) the source of the gamma rays, or (b) the path taken between their source and here. To discount other possibilities simply because one likes one particular possibility more is not science.
@Hoser
I think they should have stayed on one side or the other of the mid-ocean ridge rather than crossing it.
TonyG says:
June 28, 2011 at 2:48 pm
To discount other possibilities simply because one likes one particular possibility more is not science.
Oh, yes it is! It’s a special kind of science called “Climate Science”.
The “Missing Heat” is hiding with the “Hot spot”.
to all sceptics in sydney australia at 12.oo mid day 1st july at martin place a rally will be held to stop labour bringing in a carbon tax
Dave Springer says:
June 28, 2011 at 10:22 am
“Likewise, luminiferous ether is making a comeback. . . ”
Aha! Aristotle is vindicated! At least for some things scientific.
A problem with the ether is that it must also be quanta, otherwise a wave couldn’t exist or propagate: what is the distinction between the ether at the crest and at the trough of a “wave”? It can’t be “continuous”.
So it’s just pushing the transmission issue back one step, not changing it.
As for dark matter, it was there all along, remember?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081020135219.htm
Dave Springer says:
June 28, 2011 at 10:22 am
“…speed of light in a vacuum is constant regardless of the temperature of individual photons…”
Yes. All evidence would appear to substantiate this fact. However, space is not a vacuum and every cubic centimetre is being transited by millions of assorted particles at any moment of time, with photon/neutrino ‘traffic’ predominant in numerical terms.
The ‘dynamic mass’ of this traffic could be both the mysterious ‘dark matter’ and the luminiferous aether which have yet to be found. How ironic it would be this conjecture turned out to be true – it would prove modern physics is still in the dark about how the universe works!
“The laugh is on you. That’s pretty apt. There is no question that dark matter exists. Its gravitational effects on visible matter is as unmistakable and well established as the moon’s gravity causing tides. But just like we don’t know what particles, if any, carry the force of gravity from the moon to the ocean we don’t know what particles make up dark matter.”
Fricking hilarious. I happen to loosely know the guy who came up with the whole dark matter/dark energy theory, and he completely disagrees with you. Dark matter has never been detected, only inferred by theory, and all the top physicists know this means it remain hypothetical, not actual. They know it takes real experiments and real data to confirm the theory, and they don’t have that yet. They built the LHC in large part to test this theory. This guy gets an automatic Nobel Prize if the tests turn out positively, but when asked what he would do if they smashed his theory, he said, “I would be much happier if the theory were disproved, because it would make the universe a much more interesting place”. You will never hear any of these climate wizards voice a similar sentiment. They aren’t real scientists, they are advocates for a hypothesis they have fallen in love with and can’t let go of. It’s becoming pathological, like a bunch of nerdy stalkers who can’t get the girl to pay attention anymore.
[snip. Please read the site Polcy regarding the use of “deniers” and its derivatives. ~dbs, mod.]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13796479
Suggest reading this summary and the final report for an alternative study on the Ocean.
The IPCC climate model is broken. If it cannot predict PDOs and AMOs it isn’t working and must be discarded.
Any electrical engineering system analyst will tell you that a ramp function input (CO2 increase) cannot cause an oscillation output (ocean temperatures).
Planetary beats and the Sun account for the oscillations by their very orbits and transfer of angular momentum, which is totally predictable. It’s celestial mechanics that drives the climate, not man.