Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
It has been known for some time that the “Pacific Warm Pool”, the area just northeast of Australia, has a maximum temperature. It never gets much warmer than around 30 – 31°C. This has been borne out by the Argo floats. I discussed this in passing in “Jason and the Argo Notes“, and “Argo Notes Part 2“. I’d like to expand on this a bit. Let me be clear that I am by no means the originator of the claim that there is a thermostat regulating the maximum ocean temperature. See among many others the Central Equatorial Pacific Experiment. I am merely looking at the Argo data with this thermostat in mind.
First, Figure 1 shows the distribution of all of the ~ 700,000 surface temperature measurements taken by Argo floats to date.
Figure 1. A “histogram” shows how many data points fall in each of the 1°C intervals shown along the bottom axis. The maximum is in the interval 28°-29°C.
The number of temperature records peaks around 29°C, and drops quickly for temperatures above 30°C. This clearly establishes the existence of the mechanism limiting the oceanic temperatures.
What else can the Argo data tell us about this phenomenon? Quite a bit, as it turns out.
First, a look at the year by year evolution of the limit, and how it affects the temperatures at different latitudes.
Figure 2. Annual temperature variations measured by all northern hemisphere argo floats that exceeded 30°C. Temperature observations are colored by latitude. Click on image for full-sized graphic.
A couple points of interest. First, the cap clearly affects only the warm parts of the year. Close to the equator, that is most of the year. The further from the equator, the less of the annual cycle is affected.
Second, the majority of the breakthroughs through the ~30° ceiling that do occur are from areas further from the equator, and are short-lived. By and large, nobody exceeds the speed limit, especially those along the equator.
Figure 3 is a closeup of the years since 2005. I chose this starting point because prior to that the numbers are still changing due to limited coverage. To show how the mechanism is cropping the tops of the warmer parts of the year, I have added a Gaussian average (129 point width) in dark gray for each two-degree latitudinal band from 0°-2°N up to 10°-12°N.
Figure 3. Annual temperature variations measured by all northern hemisphere argo floats that exceeded 30°C. Dark lines have been added to highlight the average annual swings of the data by latitude band. Click on image for full-sized graphic.
As you can see, the warm parts of the yearly cycle have their high points cropped off flat, with the amount cropped increasing with increasing average temperatures.
Finally, here is the corresponding plot for the southern hemisphere:
Figure 4. Annual temperature variations measured by all southern hemisphere argo floats that exceeded 30°C. Click on image for full-sized graphic.
Note that there is less of the southern ocean that reaches 30°C, and it is restricted to areas closer to the equator.
Next, where are these areas that are affected by the temperature cap? I had always thought from the descriptions I’d read that the limitation on ocean temperature was only visible in the “Pacific Warm Pool” to the northeast of Australia. Figure 5 shows the areas which have at some point been over 30°C.
Figure 5. Locations in the ocean which are recorded at some time as having reached or exceeded 30°C.
Figure 5a. A commenter requested a Pacific-centered view of the data. We are nothing if not a full-service website.
Clearly this mechanism operates in a wider variety of oceans and seas than I had realized, not just in the Pacific Warm Pool.
Finally, here is another way to consider the effect of the temperature maximum. Here are the average annual temperature changes by latitude band. I have chosen to look at the northern hemisphere area from 160 to 180 East and from the Equator to 45°N (upper right of Figure 5, outlined in cyan), as it has areas that do and do not reach the ~ 30° maximum.
Figure 6. Average annual temperature swings by latitude band. Two years (the average year , shown twice) are shown for clarity.
Note that at say 40°N, we see the kind of peaked summer high temperatures that we would expect from a T^4 radiation loss plus a T^2 or more evaporative loss. It’s hard to get something warm, and when the heat is turned down it cools off fast. This is why the summer high temperature comes to a point, while the winter low is rounded.
But as the temperature starts to rise towards the ocean maximum, you can see how that sharp peak visible at 40°N starts first to round over, then to flatten out at the top. Curiously, the effect is visible even when the temperatures are well below the maximum ocean temperature.
Speculations on the mechanism
I want to highlight something very important that is often overlooked in discussions of this thermostatic mechanism. It is regulated by temperature, and not by forcing. It is insensitive to excess incoming radiation, whether from CO2 or from the sun. During the part of the year when the incoming radiation would be enough to increase the temperature over ~ 30°, the temperature simply stops rising at 30°. It is no longer a function of the forcing.
This is very important because of the oft-repeated AGW claim that surface temperature is a linear function of forcing, and that when forcing increases (say from CO2) the temperature also has to increase. The ocean proves that this is not true. There is a hard limit on ocean temperature that just doesn’t get exceeded no matter how much the sun shines.
As to the mechanism, to me that is a simple question of the crossing lines. As temperature rises, clouds and thunderstorms increase. This cuts down the incoming energy, as well as cooling the surface in a variety of ways. Next, this same process moves an increasing amount of excess energy polewards. In addition, as temperature rises, parasitic losses (latent and sensible energy transfers from the surface to the atmosphere) also go up.
So … as the amount of total radiation (solar + greenhouse) that is warming any location rises, more and more of the incoming solar radiation is reflected, there are more and more parasitic losses, more cold water and air move from aloft to the surface as cold wind and rain, and a greater and greater percentage of the incoming energy is simply exported out of the area. At some point, those curves have to cross. At some point, losses have to match gains.
When they do cross, all extra incoming energy above that point is simply transferred to the upper atmosphere and thence to the poles. About 30°C is where the curves cross, it is as hot as this particular natural system can get, given the physics of wind, water, and wave.
I make no overarching claims for this mechanism. It is just one more part of the many interlocking threshold-based thermostatic mechanisms that operate at all temporal and spatial scales, from minutes to millennia and kilometres to planet-wide. The mechanisms include things like the decadal oscillations (PDO, AMO, etc), the several-year Nino/Nina swings, the seasonally opposing effects of clouds (warming the winters and cooling the summers), and the hourly changes in clouds and thunderstorms.
All of these work together to maintain the earth within a fairly narrow temperature band, with a temperature drift on the order of ± 0.2% per century. It is the stability of the earth’s climate system which is impressive, not the slight rise over the last century. Until we understand the reasons for the amazing planetary temperature stability, we have no hope of understanding the slight variations in that stability.
My regards to you all,
w.
UPDATE (by Anthony):
Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. has some praise for this essay here:
richard verney says:
” Putting things in context this is important since it may be that there is some cap of temperature placed on the very top of the ocean surface but the same cap is not necessarily imposed at say 10cm or 20cm or 50cm or 1m (or what have you) below the surface. ”
Since the density of salt water decreases monotonously with temperature this requires lower-density water to stay put below a thin layer of higher-density water. This is physically implausible to put things mildly.
The only way this can happen is if the surface layer has a much lower salinity than the deeper layer. This actually does happen in enclosed marginal seas if there is a very large input of fresh water from rivers but has never been observed in the deep ocean.
Willis, these observations are indeed important, and require urgent theoretical explanation and testing. I say urgent, because one can be certain, present climate modality does not have any mechanism or term to limit sea surface temps. Their extrapolations surely project temps above this apparent limit. This in itself would seem to falsify models.
Irregardless, the climate community must begin to address the argo data and begin the integration of these observations into the hypothesis. The fact that a blog must perform basic analysis is damning for this field and speaks volumes about you and WUWT.
I would tend to look at surface tension for mechanism simply because it is such a confounding state of water/matter. There are so many odd and difficult phenomenon present.
I wonder if there is a minimum depth involved in the apparent effect, as well as latitude restrictions. That would be indicative of the actual mechanism. It is all so interesting!
Thanks again for the cerebral candy. GK
tty says:
February 12, 2012 at 8:41 am
When you say “cold” we’re still talking ~275K, 20K above the 255K the GHE theory states the earth would be without atmosphere.
The hot periods in the oceans live, are they caused by large scale “opening up” of the earths crust?
Like eg in the period Pangea broke up and the separate continents formed?
Big D in TX says:
February 12, 2012 at 2:27 am
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Big D
Good to see you post. I wish I had seen your post before my post of 08:34 am. In that I mentioned that we need to see the historical data. I fully agree with you that we need more historical data before conclusions can safely be drawn.
I do not know how warm the ocean was during the Holocene Optimum, and the Minoan, Roman and Medieval warm periods but it would not surprise me if it was significantly warmer than it is today.
It may be that it could have been a couple or so degrees warmer, or that there were significantly greater areas of the ocean that were warmer than the ’30 deg C capped’ areas that Willis has charted. If so, then that will tell us quite a bit about the effective cap imposed by the hydrological process.
It is always very important to put things in context particularly historical context and the length of reliable data sets. If one looks only at a short snap shot of time, it is easy to draw the wrong conclusions.
Richard M says:
February 12, 2012 at 5:54 am
“It does appear that the limit only shows up in the open ocean. The coastal areas and seas have no problem going over 30°. It may be informative to look only at these areas and see if they have another limiting factor.”
And they do. Over the open ocean near the equator the wet adiabatic lapse rate governs. Over the adjacent desert zones the air is dry. The dry adiabatic lapse rate governs (which is higher) so surface temperatures can be higher. Also, inland seas in the desert regions can be warmer than 30C if the atmosphere above them is dry. Over most of the earth the effective lapse rate may be somewhere in between so the maximum temperature may not be so strikingly apparent as it is over the equatorial oceans.
richard verney: February 12, 2012 at 9:08 am
and
Big D in TX: February 12, 2012 at 2:27 am
say: ” ……I fully agree with you that we need more historical data before conclusions can safely be drawn……”
Historical Data. In notoriously short supply. Good luck with that. I see the models and proxy data sets (tree rings for ocean temperature, anyone?) being dragged out again.
I think this lack of data prompted the whole Argo project.
Mann has already plotted and published a modelled worldwide chart of temperatures for the MWP, and strangely enough, most areas were far cooler (according to him) than the (very few) proxy data sources which drove the models were. In fact, Mann’s MWP (or MCA, as he renamed it, “Medieval Climate Anomaly”) was markedly cooler than the present.
tty says:
February 12, 2012 at 8:57 am
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I think that the thrust of the point you make is mistaken.
The top micron layer of the ocean is cooler than the layer immediately below it. This is because evaporation (and convenction) takes place from the very top micron layer. It therefore is cooled by the latent heat involved.
There is no significant salinity profile that I am aware of in the first metre or so of the ocean. Are you aware of such a salinity prodike, if so please link it.
You may not have understood my point. It may be that due to the laent heat etc involved in evaporation that the top surface layer cannot heat to above 30degC. However since evaporation does not take place from the water which is at 5 cm or 10 or 20 cm below the surface, it may be that water at that specific and particular depths can be heated to above 30degC. The ocean is overturned which means that water which is say at 5 cm depth is churned in a circular manner influencing the temperature of the water at a depth of say 4.7cm and at 5.3 cm. This process is on going at various depths. The net effect of this is that if the ocean at say a 5 cm depth can be warmed above 30deg C since it is not directly cooled by the latent heat loss in evaporation taking place at the very top millimetres it can tend to warm the ocean both above and below it. Eventually more heat *energy is being captured.in the ocean and eventually that heat can be released (such as in an El Nino).
Huh? You state it isn’t a hard limit but then say that something in control has hit a maximum. – Make up your mind. If there some sort of ‘maximum heating’ then that is a limit and has to be explained by ~something~.
Keep turning up the heat under a pot of water and it will eventually start to boil. We all know that if you keep increasing the heat beyond that, the water temperature will stay at 212. If you were observing this per your suggestion above then you would be stating that ~something~ mysteriously begins to limit the heat when the water reaches 212 when in fact nothing is limiting the heat at all, it is evidenced simply by more steam.
To me it suggests maybe some sort of strong convective ‘tipping point’ going on that entrenched ‘climate scientists’ have been too blind to notice. In the tropics you can almost set your watch by the thunderstorms building up in the afternoon. The hotter it gets, the higher they go, the COLDER the rain falling back to earth. Sounds like a negative feedback…
Tim says:
February 12, 2012 at 2:35 am
This is part of a wider misunderstanding, which claims that for various reasons the ocean can’t be heated by infrared … I just ignore them, and advise others to do the same. For some reason, the idea that infrared (thermal) radiation can heat anything but water has taken hold with these folks, and there is nothing that will convince them otherwise.
Ignore them.
w.
[edited to add: See my post, “Radiating the Ocean“, where many examples of R.M.B.’s kind of foolishness are on display … w.]
Slight diversion.
Any comments on the 30-35C summer peaks at mid latitudes in Figure 2? Granted some of this is due to shallower waters but in eyeballing the charts there seems to be a dearth of red points in the summer. Is this due to the Argos being pushed out of the equatorial region by the upwelling and currents?
Or maybe an issue with which color is displayed with lots of overlapping data points?
Well, at the least the reds seem to be spread over the 25-30C range in the summer, whereas they are concentrated around 30C in the winter.
Maybe add some kind of graphical at the bottom of the chart showing the number of buoys for each of the latitude bands over time (weekly/monthly) to see the distribution of data reports?
All very interesting Wills, and certainly, as you point out, is an excellent example of the self-regulatory nature of Earth’s climate system, and in this regard is very similar to the ways in which your own body regulates itself to keep its temperature from going too high, or too cold. What your very specific and narrow SST analysis absolutely does not do is saying anything about of the impact of increasing amounts of CO2 to the ocean as a whole, when looking at all ocean layers, and extending even into the cryosphere and across all latitudes. When a similar analysis is done on this more comprehensive scale and scope, we see a much different story being told. We see a system that is undergoing rapid change. Now it well could be that (just as the human body does when it has a fever), that these changes to the system as a whole will prove the extreme self-regulatory ability of Earth’s climate under increasing external forcing, and that would not surprise me. We know of course that every system does have a point beyond which a sudden or extreme enough shock will forever alter that system– either sending into a whole new mode of operation, or of course, in the extreme case, destroying the system completely. Discovery of exactly how much of a shock (i.e. the sensitivity) to the system the relatively rapid buildup of CO2 and other greenhouse gases is likely to be is the prime focus of much of the ongoing climate research. knowing this is of course vital, as the cost of getting it wrong, and to continue down the same path of massive dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere could be extremely high. The point is, we don’t know for certain, but the answer is probably the most important one we could have.
Buck Smith says:
February 12, 2012 at 3:23 am
From memory, it’s about the same as the top ten feet of the ocean …
w.
I’m a bit less reserved, I’d say that if these numbers are right it DOES falsify their models and in a very big way. Hopefully big enough to cause many of them to fold up shop and run away with their tails between their legs.
Jimmy Haigh says:
February 12, 2012 at 4:56 am
True only for fresh water. Because of the pressure and salinity, at the ocean bottoms ocean water is densest at about freezing.
w.
Fascinating analysis, Willis. It is at least conceivable that this construction would still allow for ice ages and glacial epochs through low frequency changes in albedo. As for Stephen Wilde and the Pressure folks, I’d be curious how one achieves a glacial epoch, an ice age, and an interglacial from pressure changes. Similarly, if our current climate has a maximum as shown here, despite the fact that we are well below normal temperatures in terms of the earth’s largely ice-free history, that means atmospheric pressure was both higher and lower in the past?
Willis, this is interesting. You will see the areas that can get warmer than 30 C are shallow areas, which leads me to suspect that the deeper areas are controlled by the deeper ocean temperature that will only change slowly with climate. The IPCC AR4 projections have the oceans warming in all areas, implying that the 30 C limit will be raised in the future. This may be perhaps as the warming spreads to deeper layers over time. It just takes a long time to warm hundreds of meters depth of water.
John B says:
February 12, 2012 at 5:50 am
Even though every year during part of the year there is excess radiation hitting the area of the ocean that reaches 30°C, it doesn’t go over 30°C.
This is the evidence you are looking for, that the surface maximum is in fact a thermostat which is unaffected by the level of forcing. If it warmed as the year warmed, we would see it … and since it doesn’t happen during the warmest part of the year, why should it happen during the warmest part of the century?
w.
Do the Oceans not act as the Earth’s thermostat? The saturation vapour pressure of water follows the Claussius Claperyon equation which is approximately VP = Cexp(-DH/RT) (DH = Latent Enthalpy, R Gas constant, T=Temperature. The water holding capacity of the atmosphere increases by something like an extra 8% for a 1 degree rise in temperature. The ocean surface loses heat through evaporation increasing approximately exponentially with T. Rising moist air packets then condense into clouds at some height (Pressure) where latent heat is released to the atmosphere. This changes the dry adiabatic lapse rate to a moist adiabatic lapse rate. The lapse rate is fundamental to the greenhouse effect because it changes the temperature of the level where heat (via CO2 + H2O) can freely radiate into space. This can effectively short circuit AGW because increases in temperature of CO2 molecules at the critical height offset any increase in the height itself. In the tropics, increases in clouds and daily thunderstorms transport vast amounts of heat to higher altitudes. Looking at a Skew-T diagram, 30 degrees C at the surface is about where the moist adiabatic becomes vertical, and temperature stops decreasing with height making the atmosphere unstable.
richard verney says:
February 12, 2012 at 6:38 am
Nonsense. Yours is the trap that the AGW folks have fallen into, of hypothesizing in advance of the data. I’m putting the data out their. Whether or not I have a hypothesis that explains it is immaterial. I’m just looking to establish the extent and structure and nature of the phenomena involved, not provide some overarching theory of why it happens.
w.
David says:
February 12, 2012 at 4:36 am
Tim says:
February 12, 2012 at 2:35 am
R.M.B. says:
“You can not heat water from above because of surface tension”
I have seen this statement several times on these pages. Can someone explain to me why surface tension should totally inhibit heat transfer from gas to liquid?
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Hi Tim, just as Willis did not say “oceans cannot exceed 30 C”, likewise RMB should not say ““You can not heat water from above because of surface tension”. The message RMB is trying to convey is that almost 100% of the energy/heat from LWIR is abdsorbed in the top few microns of water, right at the evaporation level of the ocenas top surface, and therfore this energy is used almost exclusively to accelerate evaporation and increase convection and coud formation, further reducing surface insolation, wheras SWR is absorbed over a three D medium of ocean depth up to 900 meters in the clearest part of the oceans. Now the above is true, especialy in the tropics as we near 30C, it is just not quantified. In short, we do not know the relative ability of an equal amount of SWR to heat the oceans, vs an equal (W/M2) LWIR to heat the same ocean, it is just apparent that the SWR does a more effective job. There is much we have to learn.
Ridiculous. Tim don’t bother with such utter codswallop – the direct heat from the Sun warms the oceans. The direct heat from the Sun is thermal infrared, if this didn’t heat the oceans because it couldn’t penetrate more than a few microns there would be no such thing as swimming in really warm tropical waters – it would be cold water with a thin layer of heat on it! Utter nonsense.
“Ocean Regions
Heat from the sun warms the world’s oceans near the Equator. This heat is gradually circulated through the oceans by currents. Since these waters are always being warmed, they maintain high year round temperatures (21° – 30° C, 69.8° – 86° F) and are known as the Tropical Regions of the world’s oceans.” http://oceanofk.org/tag/Tagmigrate/ddisttemp.html
My bold.
The heat we feel direct from the Sun is thermal infrared, this is the same radiated heat energy used in countless applications to heat water, including us as in infrared saunas because we are so much water – It penetrates out skin and into the body by inches! And it can’t get past the surface tension of the ocean!?
Thermal infrared has the ability to move the molecules of water into vibrational resonance, this is kinetic energy, which is also heat. Water has a very high heat capacity, it takes in a lot of heat before it shows temperature changes and it takes longer to heat up than land and so takes longer to lose heat, from this we get the inshore and offshore breezes.
http://thermalenergy.org/heattransfer.php
Heat Transfer
“Thermal energy and heat are often confused. Rightly so because they are physically the same thing. Heat is always the thermal energy of some system. Using the word heat helps physicists to make a distinction relative to the system they are talking about.”
http://thermalenergy.org/
Thermal Energy Explained
“What is thermal energy ?
Thermal Energy: A specialized term that refers to the part of the internal energy of a system which is the total present kinetic energy resulting from the random movements of atoms and molecules.
The ultimate source of thermal energy available to mankind is the sun, the huge thermo-nuclear furnace that supplies the earth with the heat and light that are essential to life. The nuclear fusion in the sun increases the sun’s thermal energy. Once the thermal energy leaves the sun (in the form of radiation) it is called heat. Heat is thermal energy in transfer. Thermal energy is part of the overall internal energy of a system.
At a more basic level, thermal energy comes form the movement of atoms and molecules in matter. It is a form of kinetic energy produced from the random movements of those molecules. Thermal energy of a system can be increased or decreased.
When you put your hand over a hot stove you can feel the heat. You are feeling thermal energy in transfer.”
An ordinary incandescent lightbulb produces around 95% heat, and 5% light.
http://www.commonsensepress.com/GSA-sample_lesson/lesson_ocean.htm
The direct heat from the Sun, the direct thermal energy of the Sun in transfer, is what heats the oceans.
If you can’t stand the heat…
Nice work Willis,
You may recall my paper at http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2vsTMacRae.pdf
Figure 2 shows the relationship between the rate of change of detrended atmospheric CO2 and the change of detrended average global atmospheric temperature T.
This can be expressed in the modern data record as:
dCO2/dt = 4 * dT (CO2 in ppm and T in degrees C).
The data can be viewed in Excel at http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2vsTMacRaeFig5b.xls
The paper also shows that detrended CO2 lags temperature by ~9 months.
The reason I repeat this information is because there has been debate here about what heats what.
I haven’t had my coffee yet, but since dT leads dCO2, and the incremental CO2 is probably coming from ocean exsolution, is it not reasonable to suggest that the Sun heats both the atmosphere and the ocean surface, and as this heat penetrates into the thin ocean surface layer, it releases small amounts of CO2. I am not suggesting there is no heat flow between ocean and atmosphere – I suggest there is, in both directions, from warm to cold.
I further expect that the above equation is a function of the length of the typical time cycle of warming and cooling, in this case a ~4 year cycle, possibly related to major El Nino’s.
A much longer time cycle would impact deeper ocean layers and result in a larger multiple (than the 4 ppm/C above) and a longer time delay of CO2 after temperature. We know about the longer time delay (~800 years) in the ice core data, but I’m not convinced we can say much about its magnitude – I speculate that the ice core data is relatively accurate, but not absolutely accurate.
____________________________________
More on ice cores:
Note the alleged Siple data 83 year time shift – if this is true, the 83-year time shift could constitute remarkable self-delusion!
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/co2-carbon-dioxide-concentration-history-of-71.php
The well known graph for CO2 is based on Ice core data (”Siple”) and direct measurements from Hawaii (Mauna Loa). The Siple data ended with a CO2 concentration of 330 ppm in 1883. 330 ppm CO2 in 1883 is way too high, 330 ppm was first reached by Mauna Loa data around 1960-70. The two graphs (Siple and Mauna Loa) was then united by moving Siple data 83 years forward in time. The argument to do this was, that the atmospheric content of the ice was around 83 years older than the ice. So rather “fresh” atmospheric air should be able to travel down in the snow and ice corresponding to the 83 year old ice? This is perhaps 50 meters down or probably more. And then the fresh air is locked in the 83 year old ice. So a good ventilation down 83 year old ice, and then the ice closes. This hypothesis is still debated – but the classic Siple-Mauna Loa CO2 graph is used widely as solid fact.
Big D in TX says:
February 12, 2012 at 2:27 am
“. . . first time poster here, . .
. . . exist mechanisms that tend to kick in at the 30C mark that halt further warming? What is special at that particular temperature that happens?
As no one else seems inclined to respond (possibly no one knows the answers), I will say, first, thanks for no-longer-lurking.
Next, if governments and NGOs had not wasted so much money over the last 25 years more and better science could have been done. Instead we have smart folks (Willis, being just one) using their own money and time. It is amazing.
Last: An answer to your question (quote, above) might come from something as straightforward as the size and surface composition of Earth. For example, the Equatorial Zone is a certain size and Earth rotates under the direct rays of the Sun at a given speed. These things are what they are – constants, if you like that term. What would happen to this “ocean temperature cap” if any of these constants were to change? Say the circumference of Earth was somewhat longer and it rotated somewhat more slowly, and it had more land and less ocean in the Equatorial Zone. What then? My WAG: no change. What’s yours?
As to the mechanism, to me that is a simple question of the crossing lines. As temperature rises, clouds and thunderstorms increase. This cuts down the incoming energy, as well as cooling the surface in a variety of ways. Next, this same process moves an increasing amount of excess energy polewards. In addition, as temperature rises, parasitic losses (latent and sensible energy transfers from the surface to the atmosphere) also go up.
There is a way of testing this hypothesis Willis. Look at the cloud coverage as recorded by the Terra and Aqua satellites as well as others to see if the cloud feedback is at work here. You can also look at the water vapor channels on the birds.
Another possibility that caps the heat is that some of this energy is transferred to cooler deeper regions of the ocean, which at the end of the day results in a longer term form of regulation but I was slightly surprised that you did not mention it.
Stephen Wilde says:
February 12, 2012 at 7:38 am
Hang on, that sounds kinda familiar … oh, wait, I said it at the start of the head post, here it is:
Do you always repeat peoples’ ideas back to them? I’d advise giving that up, it’s boring. I said it already, makes you look like a ditto-head.
Stephen, if you want to argue for the Nikolov and Zeller nonsense, please do it over at Tallbloke’s Talkshop. There at least they’ll tell you how brilliant you are. Here, I’m just going to point out that you are a fool following the lead of greater fools, so you’ll find the atmosphere at Tallbloke’s much more congenial.
And no, the N&Z pressure theory isn’t true, it is pseudoscience at its worst and you are revealing your ignorance by backing it. We’re talking about real science here, so lead, follow, or go to tallbloke’s.
w.
Steve from Rockwood says:
February 12, 2012 at 8:11 am
Steve, every year the energy from the sun increases and decreases. Given the sun’s intensity, for part of the year there is plenty of energy from the sun to make many ocean areas reach over 30°C … but they are not getting that warm.
This is demonstrated by Figure 6, where during the summer the tops of the temperature swings are cut off flat.
w.