Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
People have upbraided me for not doing an in-depth analysis of the paper “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications“, by James Hansen et al. (hereinafter H2011). In that paper they claim that the earth has a serious energy imbalance, based on the change in oceanic heat content (OHC). Here’s my quick analysis of the paper. A more probing discussion will follow.
Figure 1. What could happen if the ocean gets warm. Dangers include increased risk of lassitude, along with augmented consumption of intoxicants and possible loss of clothing, accompanied by mosquito bites in recondite locations.
Here’s how I proceeded for a quick look at the H2011 results. The paper says that during the period 2005 – 2010, the warming of the entire global ocean, from the surface down to the abyssal depths, is the equivalent of 0.54 W/m2 of energy.
When I read that, the first thing I did was make the conversion to degrees per year of oceanic warming. I wanted to see what they were saying, but measured in meaningful units. A half watt per square metre of energy going into the global ocean means nothing to me. I wanted to know how fast the ocean was warming from this rumored imbalance. The conversion from watts per square metre to degrees Celsius ocean warming per year goes as follows.
We want to convert from watts per square metre (a continuous flow of energy) to degrees of warming per year (the annual warming due to that flow of energy). Here’s the method of the calculations. No need to follow the numbers unless you want to, if you do they are given in the appendix. The general calculation goes like this:
An energy flow of one watt per square metre (W/m2) maintained for 1 year is one watt-year per square metre (W-yr/m2). That times seconds /year (secs/yr) gives us watt-seconds per square metre (W-secs/m2). But a watt-second is a joule, so the result is joules per square metre (J/m2).
To convert that to total joules for the globe, we have to multiply by square metres of planetary surface, which gives us total joules per year (J/yr). That is the total joules per year for the entire globe resulting from the energy flow in watts per square metre.
That completes the first part of the calculation. We know how many joules of energy per year are resulting from a given number of watts per square metre of incoming energy.
All that’s left is to divide the total joules of incoming energy per year (J/yr) that we just calculated, by the number of joules required per degree of ocean warming (J/°C), to give us a resultant ocean warming in degrees per year (°C/yr).
The result of doing that math for the 0.54 W/m2 of global oceanic forcing reported in H2011 is the current rate of oceanic warming, in degrees per year. So step up and place your bets, how great is the earth’s energy imbalance according to Hansen et al., how many degrees are the global oceans warming per year? … les jeux sont fait, my friends, drumroll please … may I have the envelope … oh, this is a surprise, there will be some losers in the betting …
The answer (if Hansen et al. are correct) is that if the ocean continues to warm at the 2005-2010 rate, by the year 2100 it will have warmed by a bit more than a tenth of a degree … and it will have warmed by one degree by the year 2641.
Now, I don’t think that the Hansen et al. analysis is correct, for two reasons. First, I don’t think their method for averaging the Argo data is as accurate as the proponents claim. They say we can currently determine the temperature of the top mile of depth of the ocean to a precision of ± eight thousandths of a degree C. I doubt that.
Second, they don’t use the right mathematical tools to do the analysis of the float data. But both of those are subjects for another post, which I’ve mostly written, and which involves the Argo floats.
In any case, whether or not H2011 is correct, if the ocean wants to change temperature by a tenth of a degree by the year 2100, I’m certainly not the man to try to stop it. I learned about that from King Canute.
w.
APPENDIX: Some conversion factors and numbers.
One joule is one watt applied for one second. One watt applied for one year = 1 watt-year * 365.25 days/year * 24 hrs/day * 60 minutes / hour * 60 seconds / minute = 31,557,946 watt – seconds = 31.56e+6 joules.
Mass of the ocean = 1.37e+18 tonnes
It requires 3.99 megajoules (3.99e+6 joules) to raise one tonne of sea water by 1°C
Joules to raise the entire ocean one degree Celsius = tonnes/ocean * joules per tonne per degree = 5.48e+24 joules per degree of oceanic warming
Surface area of the the planet = 5.11e14 square metres
1 W/m2 = 1.60e+22 joules annually
So the whole calculation runs like this:
.54 W/m2 *1.6e+22 joules/yr/(W/m2)
------------------------------------------------ = 0.0016 °C/yr
5.48e+24 Joules/°C
wow! 1400 years..
can we adapt in time !!
a very worrying scenario…
PANIC TIME !!!
And Peter, if the mods weren’t censoring all my comments, you’d be reading polite, factual explanations (the SBE 41/41CP CTD Module for Autonomous Profiling Floatswith links!) of why Dan-in-California’s pronouncements regarding sea-water thermodynamics and temperature-measurement both are wholly mistaken.
Perhaps that’s not the kind of knowledge that Anthony and the mods want WUWT readers to have?
Gee, that practice seems like no kind of rational skepticism, eh?
ps. ANYONE that takes short term data, fits a linear trend to it and then extrapolates out to 1300+ years, is more than a FOOL !!!
Kevin, you would already know the answers to your (very reasonable) questions … that is, if Anthony, Willis, and the WUWT mods wanted you to know those answers.
But Kevin, the regrettable fact is, they don’t want you to know the answers. Because WUWT’s peculiar brand of skepticism doesn’t just tolerate ignorance, it cultivates ignorance & restricts inquiry. By blocking plain factual answers to questions like yours.
One wonders, how do Anthony, Willis, the moderators, and even WUWT readers feel about a brand of skepticism that demands (in effect) loyalty to willful ignorance?
Does anyone care to comment on this? Or is this question too verboten here on WUWT?
From the Hansen paper,
Forcings through 2003 (vertical line) are the same as used by Hansen et al. (2007b), except the aerosol forcing after 1990 is approximated as -0.5 times the GHG forcing.
Hansen is using aerosols as a fudge factor to reduce his GHG forcing and bring it closer to reality.
His aerosol forcing has no basis in reality. Global aerosol levels have been declining for at least 2 decades and declining aerosol levels produce a net climate warming.
Analysis of the long-term Global Aerosol Climatology Project data set reveals a likely decrease of the global optical thickness of tropospheric aerosols by as much as 0.03 during the period from 1991 to 2005. This recent trend mirrors the concurrent global increase in solar radiation fluxes at Earth’s surface and may have contributed to recent changes in surface climate.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/315/5818/1543
This isn’t anywhere near as funny as the IPCC simplified formula for atmospheric forcing cased by CO2 – which delivers absurd results which were examined in depth on Junk Science.
Needless to say the atmospheric temperature didn’t increase by the amounts the radiative formula predicts when the result is converted to temperature forcing by well known physics.
The result is presently more than 1.77W/sqm forcing resulting in some 5 degrees per year ignoring ocean absorption. I think we might have noticed this.
As someone said Why would Hansen publish something like his paper – the same must apply to the IPCC with their simplified forcing calculation formulae – absurd results that I cannot believe pass any form of high school review let alone supposed distinguished PhD scientists.
Lets face it – High School Review is almost as entertaining.
Isonomia says: “It’s just a bit of fun. Hansen is an idiot…”
He’s not an idiot. Once someone gets a notion that he is the savior of the world, the idea can become so deeply embedded in the psyche that the unconscious blocks any information that might contradict the notion. One need not attribute all Warmist scientists’ actions to stupidity or malice.
Well done Willis!
The only way to deal with these clowns is to laugh at them
I still don’t understand why they have not bee charged with racketeering as i have been following the self-incriminating evidence of the climategate emails.
A physicist is an obsessive troll who thinks Anthony and the mods conspire against him.
He uses the Real Climate trick of posting a reference which has says supports some point or explains something. When the link does no such thing, as anyone who followed his link claiming to answer the question, how are the ARGO buoys capable of maintaining calibration?, will have found.
If WordPress had an ignore feature, he’d be first on my list.
A physicist said @ur momisugly December 31, 2011 at 2:49 pm
“Kevin, you would already know the answers to your (very reasonable) questions … that is, if Anthony, Willis, and the WUWT mods wanted you to know those answers.
But Kevin, the regrettable fact is, they don’t want you to know the answers. Because WUWT’s peculiar brand of skepticism doesn’t just tolerate ignorance, it cultivates ignorance & restricts inquiry. By blocking plain factual answers to questions like yours.
One wonders, how do Anthony, Willis, the moderators, and even WUWT readers feel about a brand of skepticism that demands (in effect) loyalty to willful ignorance?
Does anyone care to comment on this? Or is this question too verboten here on WUWT?”
Since you have not said which of your posts have gone missing, or what the content was, there’s not much to comment on. “Censorship” here has the commenter’s words snipped and replaced with an admonishment to abide by the blog rules. That does not appear to have been done in your case. If you want us to believe you have been censored, then you will need to provide some evidence.
Colour me sceptical…..
An excellent summary of the missing heat:
http://www.knmi.nl/publications/fulltexts/katsman_voldenborgh_grl_all.pdf
“Over the period 2003–2010, the upper ocean has not
gained any heat, despite the general expectation that the
ocean will absorb most of the Earth’s current radiative im-
balance”
Katsman and Oldenborgh.
ARGO can account for 35 % of the missing heat in water deeper than 700 meters but there is no mechanism proposed other than the overturning AMOC that can explain how the heat would transfer through the shallow non warming ocean less than 700 meters to the deeper ocean. The simple conclusion is that over the period studied there was no TOA radiative imbalance.
.
Except Willis’ calculation assumes that the heat from above immediately dissipates throughout the oceans’ volume, which, of course, it does not. The thermohaline circulation takes about 1,600 years to complete. There is stratification in the ocean, and currents, that have a significant impact on heat flow.
The total extra heating from this 0.54 W/m2 forcing is 0.20 petawatts (PW), while heat exported from the tropics is 3.2 PW [Gnanadesikan, A., R. D. Slater, P. S. Swathi, and G. K. Vallis (2005). “The energetics of ocean heat transport”. Journal of Climate 18 (14): 2604–16.
http://www.princeton.edu/~gkv/papers/Gnana_etal-oceenergy05.pdf%5D.
So we are indeed talking about a fair bit of energy here — 6% of the energy transported from the tropics.
I would like to see what a professional physical oceanographer has to say about these numbers…. The difference in radiative forcing between an ice age and an interglacial is only about 4 W/m2, so again a half W/m2 is no small amount.
richcar1225 says:
An excellent summary of the missing heat:
http://www.knmi.nl/publications/fulltexts/katsman_voldenborgh_grl_all.pdf
Note what Katsman and van Oldenborgh write in their abstract:
“The analysis reveals that an 8‐yr period without upper ocean warming is not exceptional. It is explained by increased radiation to space (45%), largely as a result of El Niño variability on decadal timescales, and by increased ocean warming at larger depths (35%), partly due to a decrease in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. Recently‐observed changes in these two large‐scale modes of climate variability point to an upcoming resumption of the upward trend in upper ocean heat content.”
Erinome:
“The thermohaline circulation takes about 1,600 years to complete. There is stratification in the ocean, and currents, that have a significant impact on heat flow.”
In other words the added deep ocean heat from the AMOC is the result of 1600 years of acculmulated heat. I wonder what that forcing would work out to be in w/m2 ? I would guess it would be negative since 1600 years ago the oceans have cooled as the new North Atlantic foram temperature reconstruction has revealed..
A physicist says:
“Kevin, you would already know the answers to your (very reasonable) questions … that is, if Anthony, Willis, and the WUWT mods wanted you to know those answers.”
What a disingenuous response. The units have a calibrated temperature accuracy of 0.002C. What about precision? How do you account for the continued calibration and what about equipment malfunction. An example are the “Druck Micro Leaks” where oil is leaking into the pressure sensors – the last I saw this problem might be affecting 12% of the newer sensors. I am more than a little cautious about hundredths of a degree C precision until all these buoys have gone through a few of being pulled and their reliability, functioning and calibration checked. Its been my experience those that sit in an office ( above a coffee shop or not) have little sense that the real world doesn’t care a wink about how the equipment is supposed to work on paper- the field guys know intuitively it never works as well as the designer’s claim.
The 3 really difficult questions your snarky reply avoided- how many sensors do we need, where do we need them and how do you know? (This is an exceedingly difficult topic made ever more so by our poor understanding of ocean circulation)
Richcar1225: Why are you applying the foram results — which were for the surface of the eastern tropical North Atlantic — to the oceans as a whole? Those results say nothing about global oceanic heat content.
Thank you for the information on the temperature sensors. It is very informative, although it doesn’t tell me everything I’d like to know, and those are quite some sensors aren’t they? It is quite difficult to measure temperature to 0.05C repeatably, and these do a great job to a 25th of that. I’d like to think about this information for a while, and perhaps post again in a few days, but by then everyone will have moved on from this thread. At present let me say that the ARGO sensors have repeatability (1 sigma) of about 0.001 to 0.0015C. This is the repeatability that one would expect from one sensor to another, stored under benign conditions, and reading the same bath. It is a minimum value of measurement uncertainty because these sensors have the usual geophysical problems–the sensors themselves have some uncertainty, they do not measure the same environment repeatably which adds more uncertainty, and they drift with time. The drift seems quite consistent–the sensors drift toward reading slightly cold by 0.001C plus or minus 0.001 in 5 years (1 sigma I’d call it again)–remarkable really.
I know you are intimating that Anthony, Willis, and the moderators are trying to keep information from me, and others, but I have never known A., W., and the Mods to be anything other than honest and pretty darned open people. There is some crazy stuff that gets presented and discussed here at WUWT, but it is wide open and I like it that way. Put the hay down in front of the cows and let them handle it themselves, as the ranchers around here might say, and that is how things ought to be–let people learn on their own and come to reasonable conclusions (or not)–don’t force feed them or force them down a particular path.
A physicist says:
December 31, 2011 at 10:38 am
David A asks: @ur momisugly Aphysicist [… rambling critique … and so] Hansen’s tale of CAGW is DOA. Do you accept that?
————————-
Rambling critiqe?? You took a five year trend, extended it to 1375 years, and declared Hansen correct. I called BS on that, and gave you a link to show you that during the recent past, the midevial warm period, the SST and probably the oceans were warmer.
I agree that the information on the site I was sent to is not the entire story on how reliably we can track ocean heat content, and I also saw the leakage problem discussed, and there are only six sensors that were pulled from their environment and recalibrated, the rest had been stored in benign conditions, but still those are pretty remarkable sensors. I like to know as much as I can about uncertainties when making claims about resolving very tiny differences. Unfortunately, and the media are partially responsible for this, the uncertainties are never quantified well, and you could even say not ever. Look at how people might still view the global temperature data sets if Anthony hadn’t been the curious character he is, wondered about the affect of coating on Stevenson screens, and started the surface stations project.
Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment and suppose that Hansen is correct in saying that there is an imbalance of 0.54 W/m^2, and that he is correct in saying this will be found in oceanic heat content if only the necessary measurements be done. It also seems that this imbalance is in LWIR downwelling from the atmosphere, for Hansen would not suggest that there is an increase in solar insolation, and so the ocean would have had to absorb this in a thin surface layer first, then somehow transport it to depth. And since there is no means to do this to any great depth except by the production of bottom water in the polar oceans, then the missing heat must be confined to the near surface, and should cause a large temperature trend. Considering how good the ARGO array is, shouldn’t this be as obvious as the nose on a man’s face? I mean, not withstanding what Katsman and van Oldenborgh write in their abstract:
“The analysis reveals that an 8‐yr period without upper ocean warming is not exceptional…
How can any recent 8-year period, with a serious ” energy imbalance” indicating anything but “not exceptional”, lack an obvious warming trend?
Something appears inconsistent here, but I really have to sleep on it. Good night, and a Happy New Year to you all.
A physicist says:
December 31, 2011 at 2:49 pm
Sure, Kevin. it’s all listed on the various Argo pages. Here’s one. The best data on maintaining calibration comes when they pull one in and check it. They seem to stay within their stated range (±0.005°C) quite well. Info on calibration is here.
They can’t measure the entire sea surface at one time, just the area directly under their footprint and a bit to each side. They do it with radar. They appear to be quite precise, although we don’t know about long-term drift. They certainly are sensitive enough to pick up subtle oceanic height variations, like eddies at the tips of the continents. Fascinating stuff.
Blocking plain factual answers? A physicist, tell the truth now, are you off your meds or something? We don’t block factual answers here at WUWT.
No one here can stop Kevin from finding out what ever he wants. And we don’t censor answers to questions like Kevin asked. They’re good questions. And “cultivate ignorance”? This site is wide open. We cultivate discussion.
I wouldn’t like such a skepticism, and I’m glad that neither I, nor my friends, nor Anthony, nor this site is involved with any such intolerance and censorship and willful ignorance as you describe.
Oh, please, stop the theatrics. There are no verboten scientific questions here, even your foolishness gets through. But you should give up on the dramatic claims, all of your hard breathing about this is starting to fog up the windows. You must have mistaken us for RealClimate. We don’t censor answers to Kevin’s questions, anyone can chime in on what Kevin or I said … and if you were truly concerned about Kevin’s questions, you’d have answered them yourself instead of just pissing and moaning about them, and pretending that you care about Kevin. You don’t care about him. If you did, you’d have answered his questions.
Thanks for bringing it up, though, I’d missed his questions when he posted them.
Kevin, “A physicist” is a purveyor of fantastic dreams, a wholesaler of chaotic scientific misunderstandings, a merchant of incomplete, unsupported, and un-cited claims, and (as you see from his post here) a veritable Santa Claus of wildly paranoid ramblings. Fortunately, he doesn’t represent WUWT. He’s like one of those remora fish that attach themselves to sharks, and when bathers scream, the remoras believe people are scared of them and not the shark. You can ignore his postings with no loss of scientific content …
w.
Thanks for your reply. The ARGO Buoys, which I new of, but knew little about, are pretty fascinating. I now know a bit more about them. Back in the days I was logging wells for heat flow or other information, I knew that getting temperatures reliably to repeat to 0.05C was difficult.
I realize that satellites can use interferometry to make very precise measurements of ocean height, but the question I asked about this being at a single time seems to me important because just having good instrumentation is only part of the battle in making repeatable measurements with high resolution. The instruments are uncertain, system being measured is uncertain (and in the case of temperature and ocean height changing in time), and the corrections and procedures needed to go from measurement to parameter value can add uncertainty. We are often told the parameter value, but rarely are told the uncertainties or how significant they are.
Happy New Year to you.
A physicist says:
December 31, 2011 at 2:49 pm
.
One wonders, how do Anthony, Willis, the moderators, and even WUWT readers feel about a brand of skepticism that demands (in effect) loyalty to willful ignorance?
Does anyone care to comment on this? Or is this question too verboten here on WUWT?
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
BUT…What you are stating – has been dis-proven by Un Dorctors
http://tinyurl.com/George-Bloment
Eniome said:
“Richcar1225: Why are you applying the foram results — which were for the surface of the eastern tropical North Atlantic — to the oceans as a whole? Those results say nothing about global oceanic heat content.’
I agree that sst alone does not give up OHC world wide as we do not have temp vs depth profile in temp reconstructions. However I believe sst is a good indicator of oHC less than 700 meters. If you really want to see where OHC is headed watch the decline in slr. This is really the demise of AGW.
Sea level Rise has declined rapidly the last ten years
.http://www.climate4you.com/
It is now a battle between the Hansen’s steric proponents vs the land ice melting proponents for diminishing real estate..
Accelerating slr over time is the must proxy for agw.
Maybe this is just a short term trend but I would guess that everybody in the climate science community is anxiously looking at the historic solar decline and the decline of the AMO.
Bob says
I’m an old chemical process guy. I got lost at “imbalance”. Mass and energy always balance.
————–
You are misunderstanding the usage of imbalance here. If you measure the heat going into a reaction vessel and the heat coming out of the reaction vessel and they are not equal, then you know there is an imbalance. Conservation of energy allows you to infer that the contents of the reaction vessel have retained the heat, possibly via an endothermic reaction or phase change.
That’s all imbalance means and it is not hard to figure out.