Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I previously discussed the question of error bars in oceanic heat content measurements in “Decimals of Precision“. There’s a new study of changes in oceanic heat content, by Levitus et al., called “World Ocean Heat Content And Thermosteric Sea Level Change (0-2000), 1955-2010” (paywalled here). [UPDATE: Available here, h/t Leif Svalgaard] It’s highlighted over at Roger Pielke Senior’s excellent blog , where he shows this graph of the results:
Figure 1. From Levitus 2012. Upper graphs show changes in ocean heat content, in units of 1022 joules. Lower graphs show data coverage.
Now, there’s some oddities in this graph. For one, the data starts at year 1957.5, presumably because each year’s value is actually a centered five-year average … which makes me nervous already, very nervous. Why not show the actual annual data? What are the averages hiding?
But what was of most interest to me are the error bars. To get the heat content figures, they are actually measuring the ocean temperature. Then they are converting that change in temperature into a change in heat content. So to understand the underlying measurements, I’ve converted the graph of the 0-2000 metre ocean heat content shown in Figure 1 back into units of temperature. Figure 2 shows that result.
Figure 2. Graph of ocean heat anomaly 0.-2000 metres from Figure 1, with the units converted to degrees Celsius. Note that the total change over the entire period is 0.09°C, which agrees with the total change reported in their paper.
Here’s the problem I have with this graph. It claims that we know the temperature of the top two kilometres (1.2 miles) of the ocean in 1955-60 with an error of plus or minus one and a half hundredths of a degree C …
It also claims that we currently know the temperature of the top 2 kilometers of the global ocean, which is some 673,423,330,000,000,000 tonnes (673 quadrillion tonnes) of water, with an error of plus or minus two thousandths of a degree C …
I’m sorry, but I’m not buying that. I don’t know how they are calculating their error bars, but that is just not possible. Ask any industrial process engineer. If you want to measure something as small as an Olympic-size swimming pool full of water to the nearest two thousandths of a degree C, you need a fistful of thermometers, one or two would be wildly inadequate for the job. And the top two kilometres of the global ocean is unimaginably huge, with as much volume as 260,700,000,000,000 Olympic-size swimming pools …
So I don’t know where they got their error numbers … but I’m going on record to say that they have greatly underestimated the errors in their calculations.
w.
PS—One final oddity. If the ocean heating is driven by increasing CO2 and increasing surface temperatures as the authors claim, why didn’t the oceans warm in the slightest from about 1978 to 1990, while CO2 was rising and the surface temperature was increasing?
PPS—Bonus question. Suppose we have an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and one perfectly accurate thermometer mounted in one location in the pool. Suppose we take one measurement per day. How long will we have to take daily measurements before we know the temperature of the entire pool full of water to the nearest two thousandths of a degree C?
Suppose we take one measurement per day. How long will we have to take daily measurements before we know the temperature of the entire pool full of water to the nearest two thousandths of a degree C?
Excellent question!
This is the same game as the precision and accuracy problem we all face when we try to treat a dynamic, heterogeneous, gross, and I mean Gross, amount, volume in this case, as if the work was being done in a laboratory. Nonsense is not a strong enough term. We can’t even achieve this in relatively static volumes such as large rock masses (hundreds of cubic meters not millions of cubic kilometers.) Who knows maybe they believe in the tooth fairy too. More seriously I have written a number of essays trying to address the precision/accuracy business from a practical and philosophical point of view. It is another one of those seemingly simple things that turns out to be highly complex.
“If the ocean heating is driven by increasing CO2 and increasing surface temperatures as the authors claim, why didn’t the oceans warm in the slightest from about 1978 to 1990, while CO2 was rising and the surface temperature was increasing?”
Maybe because CO2 has nothing to do with Ocean heating.
“The solar radiation penetrates the ocean to 100 metres at visible wavelengths but to much shallower depth as wavelength increases. Back radiation in the far infra-red from the Greenhouse Effect occurs at wavelengths centred around 10 micrometres and CANNOT penetrate the ocean beyond the surface ‘skin’.”
http://www.klimaatfraude.info/images/sverdrup.gif
It is good to see the paper. It is good to read the serious questions. Nothing surprises me more than all the ocean heat content claims. The oceans are not only huge, but have only an average temperature of about 4°C.
Willis:
In your critique, you overlook a fatal flaw in the argument of Levitus et al. This is that they.mislead their readers by implying that their data contain far more information than is present in them. They accomplish this feat by a method of presentation that dupes readers into vastly overcounting the empirical basis for their conclusions.
If you are correct, Levitus et al. average the data over 5 years. However, it is a 30 year averaging period that is canonical in climatology,. It follows from a 30 year averaging period that there are either 0 or 1 statistically independent values in the interval between 1957.5 and 2010; that’s far too few values for generalizations to be made about the cause of fluctuations in the heat content. Generalizations cannot be made but it seems to the statistically naive reader as though generalizations can be made.
Even the draft paper at NOAA states a similar order of magnitude in temperature … which is silly as it is impossible in practice to achieve measurements of such precision across multiple sets of instruments operating over long periods in uncontrolled environments.
Why don’t heated swimming pool owners pump carbon dioxide into their pools. They will need less heating then?
It is frequently possible to measure changes more accurately than absolute values.
Never believed that anyone can measure anything to any real sense to a thousanths of the degree C, rates of rise in temperature or actual rises in atmospheric or oceanic media. Phil Jones was always keen to show rates of atmopsheric warming to a thousanths of a degree which frankly strikes me as very unlikely to be achievable! I am alway open to persuasion!
Mark says:
And it’s a well-established fact that 76.38% of all statistics are made up on the spot
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That was the old studies, newer, more accurate, studies put it at 82.3459% +-0.002% 🙂
Eric Worrall says: April 23, 2012 at 7:37 am
“………And stop insulting the work of other scientists Willis – Climategate Email 4693.txt teaches us:-
Maybe it is an illusion or prejudice on my part, but somehow I am not convinced that the “truth” is always worth reaching if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships….”
********************
I beg to differ:
If the “lie” is part of a monumental hoax that will destroy the future of my children, then I believe coming to the “truth” IS worth a damaged personal relationship.
When perpetuating a “lie” causes the destruction of serious, honest, REAL scientists, then finding the “truth” IS worth a damaged personal relationship.
I believe that there is a different lesson in your quote: (Not necessarily in the context of this one report, but as part of the broader CAGW mime) When self-proclaimed “scientists” are destructively wrong using fraudulent data and McCarthy-ite tactics, then a failure to act is, at best, negligence, at worst, cowardice.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin.)
The way these guys make up statistics is chilling, and even more chilling is the way most gullible people believe them. Common sense contradicts many of the ‘statistics’ climate activists come up with. Help get the truth out by visiting ClimateTruthIreland.
mtobis (@mtobis) says:April 23, 2012 at 8:56 am
It is frequently possible to measure changes more accurately than absolute values.
…unless you are measuring those changes with 3000 diving, drifting robot buoys, in an environment which changes every minute, and every day, and cycles through 4 seasons every year, and each year on a day by day basis has never, ever been the same as any other year, and no consecutive sets of measurements are ever taken in exactly the same place or under the same conditions….
What you need to get increasing accuracy with repeated measures is, strangely enough, repeatable conditions.
“Never believed that anyone can measure anything to any real sense to a thousanths of the degree C, rates of rise in temperature or actual rises in atmospheric or oceanic media.”
Professor Spencer’s UAH measure satellite temperatures to the same accuracy.
@Rich Lambert
The reason why climate science will not agree to adhere to ISO standards (there are many different standards depending on the industry) is because that would involve a ground up systems audit of all the processes, measurements etc. thereby exposing their work to scrutiny outside their control. We mustn’t have that. My company gets audited 4x per year.
If there are any fellow Metrologists following, do you also split a gut laughing when seeing the claimed error bars for many of these so-called “studies”? In the real world, uncertainty must be accounted for empirically, not by playing statistics games.
I don’t think how to use significant figures is required learning to become an astrologist. Er, I mean climatologist.
“And the top two kilometres of the global ocean is unimaginably huge, with as much volume as 260,700,000,000,000 Olympic-size swimming pools …”
——–
how much is that in gallons?
Just wanted to beat Robbie and Monty
Mr. Willis Eschenbach needs to publish this. /sarc off 🙂
Well…lllll…you KNOW they are gonna say it.
Until we have a King and he answers that question.
Willis
I don’t know whats the matter with you. You’ll be claiming next that we don’t know the Global SST back to 1850 to fractions of a degree, or that tree rings can’t tell us about the global temperature a thousand years ago to fractions of a degree. 🙂
tonyb
Wow, amazing that I can keep my beer ice cold, despite all the CO2.
Its much easier to accurately measure volume than than temperature. Yet over the period considered by this study, estimates of ocean volume have been reduced by around 10 million cubic kilometres or 5 Gulfs of Mexico, or 1% of the total. Maybe the ‘missing heat’ was in that disappearing water? (http://www.tos.org/oceanography/archive/23-2_charette.pdf)
Tom Moriarty says:
April 23, 2012 at 7:59 am
Well done that man …
w.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 23, 2012 at 7:13 am
Many thanks, Leif. Do you (or anyone) have the Supplemental Online Information?
w.
I have never understood the point of plotting these graphs (Figure 1) with a Y axis expressed in heat content (even heat content anomaly). What does it mean to have a value of -4 or +8 x 10^22 J? Do they truly mean to imply that the heat content ranges 100 fold? (0.1 to 10 x 10^22 J)?
Willis, your temperature plot makes more sense to me. And it’s interesting to contemplate that a 100x change in heat content can result in an imperceptible change (0.01°C) in temperature, illustrating once more how inconceivably enormous the ocean heat sink really is.
Specious accuracy and woefully inadequate precision are endemic in this field.
Hard to see how this protocol results in an estimate that has any bearing on the real values:
“From every observed one-degree mean temperature value at every standard depth level we subtract off a climatological value. For this purpose we use the monthly climatological fields of temperature from Locarnini et a. [2010]. Then we composite all anomaly values in each one-degree square by five-year running compositing periods. Next the same objective analysis procedure used by Locarnini et al. [2010] is applied to these gridded, composited anomaly values and a global, gridded field with temperature anomaly values defined in every one-degree square is produced for each standard depth level. To compute heat content at each gridpoint the specific heat and density were computed using annual climatological values of temperature and salinity from Locarnini et al. [2010] and Antonov et al. [ 2010].” –Levitus et al. (2012)