Guest post by David Middleton
This is a sort of sequel to my most recent guest post. Any and all sarcasm is purely intentional.
I ran across this really bizarre blog post from “The Energy Collective” on Real Clear Energy…
This bit is just “nutty”…
Five degrees:
The Atlantic ocean is five degrees warmer than is was when most of you were born. Let that sink in for a minute. The entire Atlantic ocean averages five degrees warmer.
What does that mean for hurricanes? Hurricanes get their power by feeding on the warm water under them. That means that a warmer Atlantic has a lot more fuel to contribute. How much more? Hard to say for sure but the the number is astronomical. Take the top inch of ocean surface below hurricane Katrina (125,000 sq. miles) then run out the math to heat that volume by five degrees. What you get is an amount of energy in that water eight times greater than was released in all the nuclear tests in the history of the world.
[…]
“The Atlantic ocean is five degrees warmer than is was when most of you were born.” Really?
I was born in 1958. I don’t have a handy temperature plot of the Atlantic Ocean, but the folks a the UK Hadley Center & Climategate CRU do have a plot of Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperatures. If the Atlantic has warmed by 5 degrees since 1958, it should show up on this plot, unless the North Pacific Ocean has been cooling…
I get a warming of 0.3-0.5°C since I was born… And only about 0.6°C of warming since the last time a Whig held the presidency…
The author noted that, “We’ve only been aware that the earth revolves around the sun for some 500 years.” This is true. It’s also true that New England was hit by at least four storms, rivaling Sandy, between 1300 and 1650 AD. But our temperature records only go back to about 1850.
Fortunately, there are little critters living in the oceans called “Foraminifera,” or Foram’s as we tend to call them in oil exploration. Foram’s have the capacity to act as geochemical thermometers. Globigerinoides ruber is a particularly good geochemical thermometer. Back in 1996, Lloyd Keigwin of WHOI published a really good paper in which he reconstructed a 3,000-yr record of the sea surface temperature of the Sargasso Sea.
Keigwin was able to calibrate his proxy temperature series to a 50-yr long instrumental record (Station S). Station S matches the HadSST NH quite well…
If we add in the Foram proxy record, we can see how warm the Atlantic Ocean was back when those pre-1650 monster storms hit New England…
The 1351 AD (±56-yr) storm occurred when the Atlantic was most likely a bit cooler as when I was born. The 1425 (±21-yr) storm occurred when the Atlantic was most likely a bit warmer than I was born. The 1635 and 1638 storms occurred when the Atlantic was a lot cooler than when I was born. And the 1815 storm occurred when the Atlantic was a bit cooler than when I was born.
It appears to me that the climatological state of the Atlantic Ocean hasn’t really been a controlling factor in the frequency of major storms hitting New England. If a climatologically warm Atlantic was the cause of these monster storms, the Medieval Warm Period must have been a veritable hurricane nightmare…
And the Minoan Warm Period must have been an absolute hurricane apocalypse, even though the Atlantic was only about 2°C warmer than when I was born.
Well, that’s enough on the “five degrees”… On to the really nutty bit…
Gazillions of joules!
A five degree rise for just the first inch of ocean, for a static area 900 miles in diameter (the size of hurricane Sandy) requires 95-million terajoules of energy. If we assume it gets used the most efficiently it can be, a ton of coal gets you about 35 gigajoules. That means we’d need a cube of coal .9 of a mile/side to generate the energy needed to heat just that first inch of water five degrees. All that energy is a fraction of the heat being trapped, just a fraction. We’re going to see a lot more storms get charged up this way.
The best way to alarm the scientifically illiterate is to convert 0.8°C into eleventy gazillion joules.
Ocean Heat Content for the upper 700 meters of the oceans increased by about 16 gazillion (10^22) Joules over the last 40 years or so! 16 gazillion is a huge number! Unfortunately for Warmists, 16 gazillion is a very tiny number relative to the volume of the top 700 meters of the oceans and the heat content that normally resides in the oceans…
16 gazillion Joules is enough heat to increase the average temperature of the upper 700 meters of ocean by a whopping 0.168 degrees Centigrade.
The average temperature of the upper 700 meters of ocean is somewhere in the ballpark of 10 degrees Centigrade…
How much heat content is required to raise the temperature of the upper 700 meters of ocean from 0 to 10 degrees Centigrade?
A bit less than 950 gazillion Joules.
16 gazillion is less than 2% of 950 gazillion.
More fun with gazillions of Joules
This is a graph from a Skeptical Science post…
Frightening, right?
In addition to lacking any context, the title of the graph is amazingly and ignorantly wrong. There’s a lot more to the Earth than water, ice and air… There’s that whole solid(ish) thing in the middle.
The heat flow at the surface (the coolest part of the solid Earth) of the Earth is ~47 Terawatts (TW). A Joule is 1 Watt*second of power. 47 TW is 47,000,000,000,000 joules per second (47*10^12 J/s). Over the 40-yr period (1969-2008) the Earth’s heat flow transferred 6 gazillion (10^12) Joules of heat from the interior to the surface. That 6 gazillion is a very tiny fraction of the total heat content of the Earth (~12,600,000,000 gazillion Joules). So the SkepSci graph doesn’t even come close to capturing the “change in the Earth’s total heat content.”
Here’s a little more context… Unsurprisingly, ocean heat content and sea surface temperature are highly correlated…
So, we can very easily estimate OHC from SST to see what the OHC was
doing before we started measuring it…
Wow!!! The OHC had to have increased by 13 gazillion Joules from 1910-1941. How did that happen? CO2 was mired in the “safe” range of 310-320 ppmv (assuming Antarctic ice cores are accurate sources of paleo-CO2 data).
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Remember when storms were gentle?
Me, neither.
Sane people with more than 2 brain cells to rub together, know this is complete and total bullshit. Unfortunately, there are millions of people who only have 1 brain cell and that one is totally occupied with breathing and other bodily functions. And even more unfortunately, they also vote.
can we please have a real unit of measurement, as opposed to this ‘gazillion’ nonsense? there is no quantifiable number to correlate to ‘gazillion’. for 10^12, use 1 billion (long scale) or 1 trillion (short scale), just define which scale you’re using!
The site is sponsored by Siemens, a multinational company with large interests in the renewable energy sector. There are “pro-science” blogs that claim that skeptics are just parroting the opinions of oil and coal interests. Here is direct evidence of the opposite.
http://www.siemens.com/sustainability/en/
Sadly, since the “Energy Collective” post was “published, it will now become a fact by the cause believers.
I love the way they think they can get away with making such outright BS claims such as the 5 degree temp rise. And of course all the usual suspects will mindlessly lap it up and repeat it as if it is true…
If the ocean is 5 degrees warmer than when I was born (1947) because of general warming, would not my local lakes and ponds exhibit the same increase? Stange that I notice no increase. And the ice goes out at about the same time every year give or take a week. Some years sooner, some years later.
Whenever that “Change in Earth’s Heat Content’ chart from Skeptical Science is shown (an increase of 230 X10^21 joules), I try to remind everyone that GHG increases should have produced 1730 X10^21 joules over the same period. Where did the 1500 10^21 joules go?
The chart is just a line going up (much less than it is supposed to – and I work in 10^22 which is what everyone is supposed to).
http://s18.postimage.org/xtfcr4n3t/OHC_GHG_and_Missing_Energy.png
Delightful or terrifying, winds on earth are convection, which results from differences in temperatures. Knowing about changes in environmental temperatures tells us nothing about storms unless we also know about changes in distributions of temperatures. The Energy Collective piece makes no effort to talk about distributions and is thus content free as to the likelihood of future storms.
Where did the convention that a gazillion is 10^22 come from?
Just a joke, or did someone start using it and it caught on?
Just a small quibble, Celsius is the proper word for measured temperatures using the centigrade units (Kelvin uses these units as well) and centigrade is used for differences / anomalies, though officially k is supposed to be used, but I won’t quibble about that.
Nice article David!
I really thought most averagely intelligent people would be rolling their eyes at the blatant attempts to link one storm to AGW, but, from the comments in newspapers there are still a stack of pre-programmed warmists out there, and they are embracing any mention of the storm with glee.
I like to quote Levitus etal: Where they show those marvelous ocean energy charts, then inform us the top two thousand meters of the entire world’s oceans have warmed 0.09 degrees C in the last 55 years. (With no indication of how they achieved that degree of accuracy in measurement then or now).
>>The author noted that, “We’ve only been aware
>>that the earth revolves around the sun for some
>>500 years.”
Not true.
The Greeks had long known that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and probably the Egyptians before them. Here is a quote from Nonnos of the 4th century about the design of the Cosmos.
Beside the socket of the axle were the poles of the two
heavenly wagons, never touched by water … Between the two
wagons he made the serpent, which is close by and joins the
two separated bodies. Dionysus, Nonnos XVII:135
The heavenly wagon wheels were the celestial and ecliptic poles, which rotate in the northern hemisphere but never dip below the horizon (into the sea). The snake that intertwined these cosmic wheels is the constellation of Draco(n) – the snake-dragon. If you know that the celestial and ecliptic poles rotate, which are quite complex elements of astronomy, then you likely to know that the Earth rotates.
This tradition was even continued in Arthurian legend, where the Great Bear was known as Arthur’s Wagon.
.
Well, a tiny part of the North Atlantic Ocean outside the US east coast, is actually 5 C warmer than “normal”: http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom_new.gif – but as you can see, a large part of the South Atlantic is quit a bit cooler than normal, and there are also large cooler than normal areas in the Pacific and Southern Oceans.
The most interesting thing about that SST anomaly map is that a colder than normal area has appeared in the wake of Sandy: From Cuba over the Bahamas and along the US east coast.
Where’s John Balusi when you need him (Animal House – Germans and Pearl Harbor, etc)
The facts aren’t important to these guys, it’s the message! Scare the hell out of the ignorant so they’ll buy your snake oil!
Bill
There is nothing like the miss positioning of a decimal point to raise the alarm.
All this joule talk is lost on me – can someone convert it to the Hiroshima Bomb standard unit, as used by JC.
I plotted global ocean temperatures (HADSST2) and land (HADCRUT3) for the first time after reading your post. The correlation is so high it leads me to believe the oceans are responsible for global warming. I have a feeling this has been discussed here before and I imagine I’m about to be lessoned by Roy Spencer. But I was surprised by how highly correlated they (land and sea temps) are.
Excellent post, David! I love to read an article like that, which totally skewers a warmist. I knew that after Sandy skeptics would have a field day debunking all the crapola coming from the CAGW alarmists. Good work!
Since Brian Reynolds runs a company that cashes in on taxpayer subsidies for uneconomic renewable energy generation, you would expect him to to indulge in scaremongering to keep his income stream alive. One could question whether he is merely ignorant of the facts or is deliberately being misleading?
Those kinds of alarmist claims are the sceptics’ best weapon because they’re so full of BS that one suspects the propagators of lying rather than of simply being ignorant. And that generates disgust. I really feel disgusted right now. And that’s no sarc.
If warm water was so good at powering anything, we would have warm water power station all over the ocean.
So some “scientist” walking along some Atlantic beach one day decided to stick his pocket thermometer into a seaside pool and noted how much warmer the water was?
I see….
I am embarrassed for Siemens that their name is at the top of that.
And another thing! Brian Reynolds said, “Rev your engine to 5000 RPM in “Park” and you’ll run out of gas as quickly as someone racing around a track with their tachometer in the same spot.” This is NOT true! It takes only a little throttle to maintain 5000 RPM on an engine pulling no load (in neutral), while it takes lots of throttle to maintain 5000 RPM on a loaded engine (racing around a track). It will burn gas much faster racing on the track. This is a testable claim.