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:
On topic and off topic at the same time: Willis, you and others on this board do more personal work and analysis than Mann, Hanson, Gore, and the rest of the crowd. They draw huge paychecks while they tell their underlings to do the actual work. There is something terribly wrong with this picture.
Roger Sowell says on February 12, 2012 at 2:05 pm
Hey, Roger, I was only being flippant before.
I notice that the highest temperatures appear to be in the shallow areas next to land …
Willis,
Interesting post.
In Figure 6, the shape of the seasonal curves for the mid latitudes (with a sharp summer peak) has a lot to do (I think) with the influence of seasonal heating on the stability of thermal stratification. When the summer sun begins to warm the surface, that produces a rather steep temperature gradient (and so density gradient) which tends to suppress turbulent downmixing, and the greatest warming takes place in a relatively thin layer near the surface. When the solar flux begins falling, the cooling that takes place is at first rapid, because only that relatively thin surface layer, with relatively low heat capacity, cools by convection, but as the cooling continues, convective overturning must increase in depth, so that the heat capacity of the convective layer increases (and the cooling rate slows) the further away from the late summer peak surface temperature.
Mean sea temperature, Dubai, 32.8 degrees C for month of August, for the period 1987 – 2009. One can only wonder how hot the water is on non-windy days, 35 degrees C at least. If the Gulf of Mexico is 34 degrees C, then coastal Dubai should be at least 35 degrees C.
http://www.dia.ae/DubaiMet/Met/Climate.aspx
Roger Sowell says:
February 12, 2012 at 4:33 pm
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Roger if you haven’t seen my posts on the earlier thread by Willis: Jason and Argo Notes, you may be interested in having a look at them.
I started off this argument as to what is the theoretical cap on ocean temperatures. I noted that I had reviewed thousands of ship’s logs containing many hundreds of thousands of entires and I could confirm from this review that ocean temperature in many areas often exceed 30 degC and I had seen many examples of 34deg C such that the cap on ocean temperature (no matter how much solar) could not be as low as 30 degC.
You are quite right to refer to waters in Indonesia and off Durban. There are many warm areas such as in the Atlantic around Ghana/Ivory Coast, in the Indian ocean both off the East coast of Africa and the West coast of India, around the Mexican Gulf, Red Sea. North coast of Egypt around Alexandria and so on
The idea that there is a cap at 30degC beyond which no matter how much solar there may be is not born out by the data. Obviously the hydrological cycle together with a number of other processes (eg currents, ocean overturning, wind local environmental issues no doubt in some way connected to the local topography) all play a role to keep ocean temperatures down to whatever may balance the energy budget at the particular location under review. All of these factors (together with the local prevailing solar) add up to some unique pachage to create an energy budget for each area and hence the reason why ocean temperatures are different in different areas. . .
Good job Willis Eschenbach !
Ocean heat content tracking is revealing
Will be exciting, when the record is long enough to correlate with climate cycles
Roger Sowell says:
February 12, 2012 at 4:33 pm
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Roger
Wilis’s assertion has slightly ameiliorated from the more unequivocal statement he proffered a couple of days ago on the Jason and ARGO Notes thread. So too, the mechanism, that he asserts caps the temperature, has slightly widened.
James of the West says:
February 12, 2012 at 4:27 pm
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Agreed.
See my post of 06:38am, particularly the third point made in the second paragraph of that post.
tty says:
February 12, 2012 at 12:29 pm
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I don’t know what the ARGO buoys measure when they report on SST and I have asked Willis to clarify that very point. It is material.
I myself have a lot of experience with ship’s data. On the Jason and ARGO Notes thread I explained how they sample temperature. Broadly that is at a depth of 10 metres. So when I advise that I have seen numerous empirical data recording temperatures of up to 34 or 35degC this is ocean temperature at a depth of about 10 metres.
I am most certainly not trying to find a resting place for Trenbeth’s missing heat. I consider that there is no empirical evidence supporting his conjecture.
However, whilst I do accept that the hydrological cycle plays a role in keeping ocean surface temperature down, I do not accept that that process caps it at a temperature of 30 degC. If I am wrong on that, it does not act so as to cap the ocean temperatire to 30 degC at a depth of about 10 metres; this is a stark fact which can be seen from a review of ship’s logs. My view in this regard is based on the personal review of thousands of ships logs containing many hundreds of thousands of entries involving the major shipping routes through the major oceans.
I believe the stability of the earths climate system as noted by Willis, has everything to do with the physical properties of H2O, in particular the points at which a change of state occurs.
G. Karst says:
February 12, 2012 at 12:17 pm
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The example given by Roger is nor Spurious. See for enample one of my posts on the earlier threat in which I cite numerous examples:_.
richard verney says:
February 10, 2012 at 7:06 pm
@Philip Bradley says: February 10, 2012 at 2:40 pm
Fifth, you then at the end of your response set out a summary of the ARGO data reviewed by you. This summary suggests that nearly 10,000 points/sets of data show a temperature exceeding 30degC. That alone, would indicate that even based upon the data that you yourself have reviewed your assertion of a 30degC cap for surface sea temperature cannot be correct.
Those greater than 30C temperatures are clustered around 30 to 35 degrees north, which is where the Earth is mostly land and there are enclosed and semi-enclosed seas, the Med, Yellow Sea.
Without a geographic breakdown, I’ll suggest most of those +3OC temps are close to land.
30C does appear to be an upper limit for SSTs in the open ocean.
The cause is likely to be the hydrological cycle limiting the rise in air temps over the ocean.
And it doesn’t matter how hot your swimming pool gets, its not going to affect the hydrological cycle
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Philip
As you will have noted from my post. I have reviewed thousands of ship’s logs containing hundreds of thousands of entries and I can assure you that 30degC is not the upper limit for SSTs whether in enclosed, semi-enclosed or open oceans. Incidentally, the Med only reaches above 30 deg C close to Alexandria and very near to the Northern coast off Egypt.
Warms seas can be commonly encountered in and around Indonesia, Thailand, off the coast of China and Japan, in the Indian ocean both up the west side of India and the east side of Africa, in the approaches to and through the Red Sea (see my earlier post which referred to a wikipedia entry recording the survey done of Sudan revealling 32 degC temps) the Atlantic ocean around north east Africa, in and around the Gulf of Mexico.
Just to give you a slight flavour, see the following links:
Off the coast of UEA, this months water temp 32degc, long term max temp 35degC . See http://www.sea-temperature.com/country_water/united%20arab%20emirates/127
Off the coast of Ghana, this months maximum temp 34 degC, long term max temp 33 degC (the maximum cited is not the absolute maximum but more the average maximum there will always be examples when a higher figure is unusally observed) . See http://www.sea-temperature.com/country_water/ghana/77
Indian Ocean say off the coast of India, this month’s maximum 31 deg C, long term max temp 31 degC. See http://www.sea-temperature.com/country_water/india/110 In practice, this is far to general, warmer temperatures are not infrequently recorded off the west coast of India and say off the coast of Madagascar, see http://www.sea-temperature.com/country_water/madagascar/64 .
Off the coast of Thailand, this months max temp 32degC, long term max temp 32 degC. See http://www.sea-temperature.com/country_water/thailand/119
In an around Indonesia, eg this month’s max temp 31degC, max long tem temp 31 degC. See http://www.sea-temperature.com/country_water/indonesia/115 and East Timor this months max temp 29 degC, long term max 31degC. See http://www.sea-temperature.com/country_water/east%20timor/114
In and around Mexico, for example http://www.sea-temperature.com/water/tapachula/536 and Guatemala, see: http://www.sea-temperature.com/country_water/guatemala/49 noting max temps of 31 degC.
I make no comment upon the distribution of the ARGO buoys, My comments are based upon a review of thousands of logs compiled by ships plying trade through the shipping routes through the major oceans of the world. You will note from the above links (which is by no means an exhaustive list) that the distribution of temperatures above 30degC is not as narrow as you suggest nor is it limited to enclosed and semi-enclosed oceans.
If you read the third numbered paragraph of my post of 8:12 am you will note that I accept that the hydrological cycle has a role to play but it is not the only process at work.
The hydrological cycle does not cap SST in open ocean at 30 degC.
PS. I am not comparing my swimming pool to the open ocean. My observation was meant merely as an indicator upon which many people will have some experience so that they can get a grasp as to general merits of the assertion made by Willis that ‘no matter how much incoming solar there is the process of evaporation caps temperature at 30 degC’ (my paraphrasing). Obviously, not many people will have reviewed thousands of ships logs and will therefore have little feeling for what ships report as prevailing ocean temps
Wow, I am depressed by the nattering that goes on here. I do not believe Willis has stated a Law of Nature that sea surface temperatures are “limited to 30˚C”. He has merely shown a bazillion measurements that show that sea surface temperatures, for some reason(s), tend to maximize at 30˚C +/- a bit. A few of these bazillion measurements are indeed higher, maybe as much as 15% higher, but the tendency is 30˚C.
Now this paper sheds some real light on the issue in relation to the input of solar energy:
The Model Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect
Joseph E. Postma
http://www.tech-know.eu/uploads/The_Model_Atmosphere.pdf
“…We hold that the average solar radiative input heating is only over one hemisphere of the Earth, has a temperature equivalent value of +30˚C, with a zenith maximum of +87.5˚C, and that this is not in any physically justifiable manner equivalent to an instantaneous average global heating input of -18˚C…..”
That is, a chunk of the Earth’s surface, about the size of North America, centered on wherever the Sun is in its north-south seasonal migration, is receiving an instantaneous influx of energy that is the equivalent of 90˚C for part of the day. Much of this huge area necessarily is water – the world ocean. That water accepts this energy, and then all sorts of processes immediately start to remove and dissipate or limit the energy: evaporation, convection, condensation, cloud formation, rainfall, wind, typhoons, nightfall, etc. The summation of these processes tends to limit the water’s temperature to about 30˚C – as shown by a bazillion measurements.
Taking the latitude bands of 5 degrees either side of the Equator, if you gaze for long enough at the graphs, you might see that: 1. The SH band was hotter than the NH band in years 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, & 2006. 2. Then the NH is hotter for 2007, 2008 & 2010, with remaining years being about equal. (This is a visual observation, not a numerical one).
There is some evidence of feedback, detail not described here. In the NH, over all latitude bands, a hot summer is often followed by a colder winter, e.g the high red peak in mid-2005 is followed by a long blue tail descending in 2006. Ditto 2010-11.
Maybe it is noise or sampling, or simply by-products of currents, but there seems a hint of opposite symmetry either side of the Equator, additional to that in the first para. There is an equatorial downwards dip in the NH first half 2006, but a rise in the SH at the same time, being of similar shape but different sign.
This is a complex, multidimensional set of data. Who could possibly make a better conclusion than Willis, “Until we understand the reasons for the amazing planetary temperature stability, we have no hope of understanding the slight variations in that stability.”
Willis,
Another excellent thought provoking post. I’m continually astounded at how many otherwise intelligent people can’t read and comprehend your initial post – regardless of what post it is.
Here I seem to see people insisting that there are locations with SSTs over 31 C, you never said anything about all locations, just that most locations… Pointing out that there are places near Durban, or Brownsville, or anywhere else, with SSTs over 31C doesn’t exactly make a huge statement or discussion point. I’m sure I could find relatively deep water off the coast of Hawaii with temperatures well over 40C – they would just happen to be where lava is being extruded into the sea.
It is nice to see the majority of people are thinking about the data rather than trying to immediately “explain” everything there is to “see” in it. Your thoughtful purusal of data advances my understanding of the phenomena, not to mention being generally a delight to read.
To understand something, you first have to generally understand the majority of the data, then you can start refining the information by examining the exceptional data for hidden links to the general understanding.
Here is NOAA’s web page on ocean sea surface temperatures. Its just a further illustration of Willis’ data.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/clim/sst.shtml
Thank you to DB, RockyRoad, & tty for comments about the cold ocean deeps.
Here is my problem. The globe is exposed to hot sunshine from outside; and to a very warm interior, albiet one with a slow tranfer of energy outward. Yet, in between, we have the deep oceans at not much more than freezing point.
Given hot above and hot below, the oceans shold warm steadily unless or until there is an escape route like a phase change, or a radiative, convective or conductive loss to space. Such a loss to space has to ‘connect’ with the deep oceans. The obvious mechanism is oceanic circulation with a vertical component. The rate of loss, if the ocean heat content and solar input remain stable, can only really be controlled by the rate of circulation, with warming happening when the colder waters are bought more often to the sunshine.
So, Willis, a thought experiment. If ocean circulation was to cease overnight, would your tropical SSTs still be capped? Or, put another way, is the level of the cap dictated by the rate and disposition of ocean movement?
Just an observation
The 30 C line seems to be a sort of limit, with a few outliers
I wonder if someone thought about examining just that data above 30, and do some searching/analysis of that portion of the set.
Look for things like
1) depth of ocean measured (when above 30C) Was this in shallower water?
2) Proximity of storms (something that would remove heat), would require weather map correlation.
The overall data could also be correlated with depth, average ocean depth at each measurement.
Evan Thomas says:
February 12, 2012 at 5:21 pm
10*C
I compose in a text document. Then when pasted into the Word Press window I use these keystrokes to get a degree symbol
(ALT) 0 1 7 6 That is the Alt key and the digits 0176, no spaces.
So, putting the above between 10 and C gives: 10°C
R. Gates says:
February 12, 2012 at 11:27 am “…In this regard, you need to look at the complete ocean in all layers, and in doing so, of course you’ll find that the ocean heat content has been going up over the past 30+ years, and this is even more strongly indicated the deeper you take the metric….
Do you have a link to back up this statement. I would like to see it. According to the Ocean Page, under the Reference tab here on WUWT, indeed the heat content of the upper 700 meters of the sea has increased since about 1970, although the last decade seems to be a flat spot (little or no increase).
So what of it? We all agree that the Earth’s carapace – let’s call it the surface-atmosphere ensemble – has warmed by some fraction of a degree over the last 40 years. As a result, the Earth must be shining a little brighter to an observer in space – brighter in that its emission spectrum has shifted a bit to the short wave, and is somewhat more energetic. That’s as can be expected.
Whether or not there is equilibrium between incoming and outgoing energy I can’t say. The sea is a giant heat sink, filled with the most rapacious heat gatherer known in nature – water. That water can mix and spread the heat in three directional dimensions, and a couple of other physicochemical dimensions. There is a vast amount of heating required to destroy this planet.
I do not believe that Willis has shown that “…there is a cap on how rapidly the energy can flow from the ocean to the atmosphere…” I think that the processes that occasion this phenomenon – conduction, convection, evaporation, etc. etc. can scale up to match whatever heating input there is, at least within geologic reference. Witness what appears to be a cap on the Earth’s temperature over half a billion years; these processes get heat to the point where it can radiate to space in such a way as to maintain an upper boundary on surficial heating.
Willis Eschenbach says:
February 12, 2012 at 11:38 am
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Willis
I would respond to your response, if it actually made some sense.
I am able to respond to the IPCC point. No they do not have a physical hypothesis. They avoid putting forward this at all cost. For example, they do not explain how DWLWIR which by virtur of its long wavelength can penetrate the ocean by only about 10 microns (most of which is absorbed within 5 microns) can heat the oceans given that the first few microns of the ocean is no more than wind swept spray which in any event is being ‘boiled’ off as part of the process of evaporation. As such, it is difficult to envisage how it gets overturned thereby heating the ocean below.
Instead they look at some data covering temperatres. They see from this data that it appears to have gotton warmer these past 60 or so years and they are aware that man has been releasing a lot of CO2 and conclude from this that there is a process whereby CO2 drives global temperatures upwards. This is because they can’t think of anything else that may have caused temperatures to rise. They do not look at the data in any detail which detailed scrutiny may reveal inconsitencies with the data led hypothesis. So they do not see that there is in fact no correlation between CO2 levels and temperatures during the instrument periof (the only tome CO2 and temperatures run in tandem is during the late 7-s warming but the rate of warming is no greater than the 1920-40 warming). They do not see that in the geological past, there are periods when temperatures fall although CO2 is rising, there are periods when temperatures increase when CO2 is falling, there are temperaure plateaus when CO2 is either rising or falling and in any event to the extent that there are some broad similarities, CO2 lags temperature and therefore apprears a response not a driver. Inconvenient data is ignored.
In short, they are over-strecthing the data.
This, in my opinion, is essentially the approach that you have adopted. You collected the ARGO data, plotted it noted that it peaked at 30degC and immediately read too much into the data. You made a stark and unequivical claim to the effect that ‘no matter how much solar there is, the process of evaporation caps the ocean temperature at 30degC’ (my paraphrase).
A couple of days ago, I suggested that whilst I accepted that the hydrological procees does act to keep down ocean temperature it is (i) not the only process in play, and (2) the cap is not set at 30degC but rather higher. I recounted my extensive experience of ship log data that confirms that significantly higher temperatures are obtained in many different oceans and I pointed out that even the ARGO data that you collected contained nearly 10000 entries exceeding 30degC.
As you say at the top of this post, you have not identified any new process. Most people accept that the hydrological process plays a role in restricting ocean temperatures. But there are many other factors involved as well.
I pointed out that I only need show you one data set exceeding 30degC to establish the temperature cap you claim of 30degC is wrong. I cited nearly 10,000 ARGO temps logs showing this.
In my opinion, you are over reaching the data. Clearly there are processes involved which all taken together serve to restrict ocean temperature towards an upper level of around 30degC. These processes include the hydrological cycle but also prevailing currents, wind, ocean over turning, topography (and no doubt many others) but these processes do not cap it at 30degC and where local environmental conditions are different one can see ocean temperature rising to 35degC and even beyond. It is all a matter of the interplay of local prevailing environmental conditions. If you alter these, you alter the resultant tempoerature, If you increase solar, eg less clouds (or possibly a stroneger sun), there will be a resultant increase in ocean temperature which the hydrological process will act to some extent to to limit and the increased evaporation may lead to an increase in clouds which in turn may act to restrict temperature until a new equilibrium temperature is reached.
. ,
Richard Sharpe says:
February 12, 2012 at 12:05 pm
Roger Sowell says on February 12, 2012 at 12:00 pm
As others above also noted, the Argo data does not include shallow areas of the ocean. I suspect that those areas are also greater than 30 degrees C. If I recall correctly, the movie Endless Summer had the stars surfing off the coast of Ghana in water that was very hot, so hot the wax melted off the surfboards.
Roger, I advise you not to get your science from Hollywood.
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Richard, I advise you not to jump to fact free conclusions. The surf classic ‘The Endless Summer’ was made by independent film-maker Bruce Brown on a shoestring budget. It was rejected by all the Hollywood distributors he approached and opened in a tiny theatre in Witchita, Kansas. It then ran successfully in a New York independent theatre for a year before Hollywood would even touch it. It was a light hearted documentary which Hollywood thought would be of no interest to the public.
Snark without even a leavening of fact is just pure snark.
Does anyone know the melting point of board wax?
Geoff Sherrington says:
February 12, 2012 at 7:49 pm
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Not wishing to step on Willis’s toes (I think I have angered him enough already), it is almost certainly the case that they would go far higher as one can see in lagoons where temperatures of about 40degC can be seen. .
I marvel a little at the pedantic in here who have found individual buoys and areas which manage to exceed the (suddenly magical) 30C ‘limit’. Willis’ distribution plot in Fig 1 shows these are very is the exception, and I’d think easy enough to explain in shallower waters.
More important is probably the remarkable confluence of maximums, such that the range at a latitude of 5 degrees N is perhaps 1C, while at 20 degrees N it is more like 7C (eg). All capped out at (about!) 30C.
Of course, the converse argument may be very important: in that insolation varies increasingly with the seasonal changes in axial tilt of the earth at more extreme latitudes, whereas at the equator there is little variation at all.
30C is what you get there now, who is to say what it would be if insolation increased say 20%? A 20% variation at 20 degrees N does not answer the question because the maximum insolation in that case is still less than that at the equator.
I don’t comment much on Mr. Eschenbach’s postings. Also I have not read any of them for quite some time. This one, though, is a good example of the hockey-stick graph problem: Take a single set of data, no matter what other data exists to the contrary, then draw conclusions about the climate from it. Mann used some tree rings, Eschenbach uses Argo temperature data.
My version of science and valid conclusions doesn’t work that way. Each statement made in a post should be read with the question: is that a true statement? Math should also be carefully checked for accuracy, and more importantly, for validity. Is that particular bit of math appropriate at this point in the analysis? Graphs have the well-known problems of starting and ending points, choosing only the data to support one’s conclusions, and in particular drawing straight line trends through a portion of cyclical data. Is this data any good? Does the data reinforce or contradict previous data? Does this data support the conclusions? Those are just some of the thoughts I use when reading these posts. Others may use different means to question things, or “be skeptical.”
This post immediately rang the BS meter with the statement that ocean temperatures are limited to 30 degrees C maximum, more or less. I know for a fact there is data that disproves that. Perhaps it is because I grew up on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and have first-hand experience with warm water. I was quite surprised that so few (perhaps nobody?) challenged that point about a hard maximum ocean temperature. Richard Verney joined in later to confirm the bogus 30 degree C limit, from a different data set (ship logs). I am even more surprised that various people criticize my comments here today for pointing out that 30 degrees C (more or less) is not a hard limit on ocean surface temperatures. Is this now an echo chamber? Should we all just shout out “Yes that’s GREAT” on any serving of BS? Pretty graphs do not make good science.
So now, I expect to be more heavily criticized than before. I really don’t care at this point. The climate science is far too important for BS to be tolerated. My personal view is that we are completely out of time. The Sun has gone quiet and is expected to grow much quieter, the oceans have gone cold or into their cold phase, and all we can do is watch the coming cold-planet-catastrophe unfold. The Russians are on record that the thing of concern is not warming, but cold. I have seen the US West Coast temperatures and they are dropping dramatically. There is no great sunspot cycle this time, though, like there was in 1950 when this happened before. Instead we are facing a weak sunspot cycle. With all due respect to the Solar Scientists, Causation be damned. We know that world temperatures drop every single time the sunspots grow weak or disappear. Ancient men were smart enough to figure out that the Sun always rose in the east (correlation) but had no clue as to causation. Causation is not always necessary. The only good news is that today there is a wide array of scientific instruments in place to monitor and provide data as the cooling commences. We will not be able to stop it, but we will at least see it coming this time.
Guys
If one wanted to speculate on the main process at play which results in the tropical ocean generally having a temperature not exceeding 30 degC, my money would be on the ocean currents (which in turn drive air currents) that carry the heat away from the tropical ocean polewards, not the latent heat involved in the hydrological process..If it were solely down to the hydrological process it is difficult to envisage why there are great swathes of oceans covering 100s of miles where the ocean temperaure is frequently significantly above 30egC.
The tropical oceans are the heat pump of the planet. The currents eminating from them are constantly moving warm water generated in the tropics elsewhere. It is the distribution of this heat which is resulting in the relatively low maximum temperatures. If this conveyor belt were to stop, not withstanding the latent heat involved in the hydrological cylcle, the tropical oceans would be far warmer than 30degC .