Irene takes a bite out of ocean heat

Dale says:
August 29, 2011 at 3:41 pm
R. Gates:
Since you summed up ENSO so nicely (La Nina sucks heat from air to sea, El Nino pushes heat from sea to air) maybe you can answer me a question.
Warmist philosophy states that between 1975 and 2000, human CO2 caused most (if not all) the global warming. Okay. So by that statement, we warm the air a lot faster than nature (Sun) warms the oceans. That’s cool. So between 1975 and 2000, since the air over the Pacific was a lot hotter than the waters, we should see in the records a lot of La Ninas to “balance the heat” as you say.
Hmmm…… I think you have a problem there, let’s look at observations.
During 1975 and 2000 there were 14 El Nino years, 6 La Nina years, and 5 neutral years. So for 60% of that 25 year period, heat was being pushed out of the Pacific into the air and only 20% where heat was being pulled into the Pacific. So unless you somehow found a way to avoid thermodynamics, doesn’t that show that natural warming (Sun heating the ocean) outweighs human warming (CO2 warming the air)? Because if “humans did it” that would mean there should’ve been more La Nina years to El Nino years since the air would be hotter than the sea.
____
A few problems with your analysis of La Nina and El Nino. First, during La Nina years, the oceans are not “sucking heat from air to sea”, but rather the NET of heat entering the ocean, from both DLW (downwelling long wave), plus direct solar insolation or shortwave, is toward the oceans gaining heat during a La Nina year when compared to an El Nino year. Your reference to the time period in question is an interesting one, as the total ocean heat content did indeed go up during that period, so one must not assume that during this period that El Nino’s and La Nina’s completely balanced out, but rather, the cycle of ENSO has shown a step-wise increase over this period. Absent any AGW, we should see a step-wise decrease over the following few decades. Failure to do so will of course be further confirmation of AGW. The bottom line: despite the numbers of El Nino’s compare to La Nina’s…they still are not enough to dissipate ocean heat content over this period, meaning that oceans are gaining more heat during La Nina’s then they can dissipate during El Nino’s– at least for the period in question.

Bill Illis says:
August 29, 2011 at 10:02 am
During a La Nina, out-going longwave radiation in the equatorial Pacific can be 50 watts/m2 higher than normal due to the lack of cloud-cover. Additional energy is being released to space during a La Nina, that is why there is cooling. (R. Gates is trying to argue the opposite but he is not right as usual).
______
Bill, again, you have your basic physics confused, and it even goes against common sense. If the ocean didn’t build up heat during a La Nina, where would that heat come from that is then released during an El Nino? During a La Nina, the Pacific equatorial surface waters are cooler than normal (i.e. they are releasing less heat). If you can’t understand this basic principle, perhaps there’s no point in conversing.

R. Gates says:
August 29, 2011 at 8:54 pm
Failure to do so will of course be further confirmation of AGW
Why bicker over a few straws when you have a truck loaded with bales?
You still do not have confirmation of wholesale warming in significant excess of natural patterns, despite having an army of straw arguments.
Nothing further on account of their is no missing heat to account for.
Which is why this thread is about the heat pump that just hit the Atlantic.

Smokey says:
August 29, 2011 at 9:30 pm
He might get it if there were colored dye in the oceans detailing where the heat is going, and what it’s doing when it gets there.

LazyTeenager says:
August 29, 2011 at 3:58 pm
Radiation becomes the bottleneck at the nominal boundary between the atmosphere and space. That’s why radiation is important and why CO2 is important.

Exactly how much CO2 is there at the nominal boundary between the atmosphere and space?

Keith says:
August 30, 2011 at 4:51 am
Oh, and all the peole saying that El Nino means that the oceans are releasing heat to the atmosphere and La Nina means they are absorbing more heat, must’ve missed the numerous posts by Bob Tisdale among others about the nature of ENSO. It’s nowhere near as simplistic as El Nino = warming air and cooling water, La Nina = cooling air and warming water.
=======================================
Always one to go for the electrical analogy, here’s my mental model for ENSO. It’s like a crude oscillator circuit. The capacitor is the warm pool over by Indonesia. El Nino is the discharge cycle, La Nina is the charging cycle. Just because that circuit element may be charging or discharging, the oceans are not globally doing so in lock step.

“According to the NCEP re-analysis OLR increased by 6W/m^2 from 1948 to 2003.”
Quite right Rog. I should have said:
“AND the exit of that energy to space from that particular source was slowed down because the hurricane tracks remained within the tropics.”
Meanwhile other sources had a larger positive impact on OLR namely warmer ocean surfaces generally.

http://pafc.arh.noaa.gov/ice.php?img=fullice
There is also some interesting commentary from this office which speaks “volumes” about how “ice tectonics” can form new “cratons” just like what happens with continental crust. In this case, there is a lot of new thin ice at the edge. Over the next few days a wind event is prog’ed to result in compressive stress and subsequent “obduction” of thin ice into thicker ice. Yes the edge will temporarily “retreat” but thicker more resilient ice will emerge from the event. Fascinating stuff.

R. Gates says:
August 29, 2011 at 9:57 am

Higher night time temperatures are one of the things that AGW models have predicted, but course skeptics love to ignore.

Actually skeptics love to refute this claim.
From http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/Climate_Change_Science.html#Models_fail

Computer models predict warming at the north and south poles to be symmetrical, but there is a warming trend at the North Pole but not at the South Pole. They also predict that the polar surface regions will warm more than the surface at the tropics. Winter temperatures will warm more than summer temperatures; night-time temperatures will warm more than day-time temperatures. Therefore, according to the CO2 warming theory, winter nights in the arctic will warm, but there will be little summer day time warming in the tropics.
A team of four researchers from three American universities led by David Douglass compared the troposphere temperature trends in the tropics predicted from climate models to actual satellite and radiosonde observations. In a paper published in December 2007 by the Royal Meteorological Society, Douglass et al analysed the simulation results from 22 climate models at the surface and at 12 different altitudes. The simulation results were compared to the temperature trends determined from two analysis of satellite data and four radiosonde datasets for the period January 1979 through December 2004.

After the graph, this article continues:

The above diagram shows the comparison of temperature trends from 1979 through 2004 of climate models and actual satellite and radiosonde observations, expressed as degrees Celsius per decade versus altitude and atmospheric pressure. The left panel shows four radiosonde results as IGRA, RATPAC, HadAT2 and RAOBCORE. The thick red line shows the mean of the 22 computer model results, and the models’ 2 times standard error of the mean are shown as the two thin red lines. Temperature trends from three surface measurement datasets are identified in the legend by Sfc and are plotted on the left axis. The RSS and UAH analysis of satellite data are plotted on the right panel at two effective layers: T2lt represents the lower troposphere with a weighted mean at 2.5 km, T2 represents the mid troposphere with a weighted mean at 6.1 km altitude. A trend is the slope of the line that has been least-squared fit to the data. Synthetic model values corresponding to the effective layers of the satellite data are shown in the right panel as open red circles.
An essential place to compare observations with greenhouse computer models is the layer between 450 hPa and 750 hPa atmospheric pressure where the presence of water vapour is most important, and is called the “characteristic emission layer”. In this layer, the observations are all outside the 2 times standard error test. The radiosonde and satellite trends are inconsistent with the model trends at all altitudes above the surface. Douglass et al. conclude that “Model results and observed temperature trends are in disagreement in most of the tropical troposphere, being separated by more than twice the uncertainty of the model mean. In layers near 5 km, the modelled trend is 100 to 300% higher than observed, and, above 8 km, modelled and observed trends have opposite signs.” Therefore any projections of future climate from the models are very likely too high, and these projections should not be used to form public policy. See the paper “A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions” here.