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).
But 5⁰c sounds so much more impressive than 0.5
Good time to review stuff like this:
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/evaporation-water-surface-d_690.html
That link maybe for “pool persons”,but,it probably has some relevance to the topic.
Thanks for the interesting articles and comments
Unsurprisingly, ocean heat content and sea surface temperature are highly correlated.
In that case, there seems to be nothing to worry about!
With the sea surface anomaly for September at 0.453, the average for the first nine months of the year is (0.203 + 0.230 + 0.241 + 0.292 + 0.339 + 0.352 + 0.385 + 0.440 + 0.453)/9 = 0.326. This would rank 10th if it stayed this way. 1998 was the warmest at 0.451. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in August of 1998 when it reached 0.555.
As well, the slope for sea surface temperatures is flat since February 1997 or 15 years, 8 months (goes to September). See
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997.08/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997.08/trend
This is off topic but for a good reason:
Friday Funny – global warming home experiment kit
Has evidence of Malware in it and should be checked for it as my computer Malware detection software detected it in all three ways of entering the blog post.
I did not continue to enter as I believe it is an infection that is sitting there ready to exploit and spread.
I am not kidding at all!
I know this is a repeat post but posted here as well to make sure a moderator got this warning.
You said it all with “the scientifically illiterate”. To these folks emotion is what’s important. If you can convert the issue into “eleventy gazillion million billion” and tie it to their children’s future, you’ve not only “set the hook” but you landed them and they are flopping helplessly on the deck waiting for the final blow from the legislative club.
Aside and with regard to the expression “Frankenstorm”:
Surely that term should better be reserved for the sort of confusion and upheaval resulting from a contested election, as in the case of weeks-long litigation promoted by a TV comedian named Franken?
Yes the average American is one braincell short of a synapse and that one is hypoxic. I have always wondered how you heat an ocean with air. Even if the evil CO2 heated the air the oceans would not warm enough to matter for a 100000 years. I always tell these people its like heating an Olympic sized swimming pool with a blow dryer.
I love the paragraph below the heading ‘Just the Facts’, which contains a lot of emotional rhetoric, but no facts!
I also not that Brian has chosen to work in a business that is 100% dependent on catastrophic global warming. If we apply the same judgement to Brian as warmists do to those who disagree with them, we can simply dismiss everything Brian says as a product of his pure, overwhelming greed!
On the other hand, his writing is so outrageously inaccurate that we do not need to resort to personal attacks. I guess they need to play the ‘greed’ card because they cannot argue with our facts.
I am confused by the term “gazillion”. It is my understanding that it is a purely fictional name used to signify a very large number. Have I spent a life time as an engineer living under an illusion. I’ll suspend my disbelief however and grant Mr Middleton the right to define that term as he chooses. He should at least be consistent in its use. Is a gazillion 10 to the 12th power or is it 10 to the 22nd power? Is this a typo or am I being dull in not seeing his intended meaning here.
“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!”
Then, just a few paragraphs later:
“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.
This is a huge difference! On order of “kagillion” if I am not mistaken. Wink, Wink.
This is a blog for science minded folks. Educated people DO read these posts in detail looking critically at what authors say. Let’s keep our orders of magnitude straight.
Out: Treemometers. New hotness: Foramometers!
To prove he is a math and science ignorant D-bag… as a car guy, and one who actually worked hard to understand the laws of thermodynamics, I offer this:
“The process is analogous to the gears in a car. 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. ”
I haven’t bothered reading the comments on his article but I cannot believe he wont be humiliated into dumping it down the memory hole. I took screen-caps of course. I’m sure LOTS of folks have.
Nice writeup; I like the “gazillion”. But it’s unnecessary – 10^21 is 1 sextillion in American parlance, so it would be better to talk about tens of sextillions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers
Excellent analysis of the uncertainty in heat content. I’ve been through a number of hurricanes. The first I remember was Hazel in 1954. I event went through a few in New Orleans. None big. The only thing remarkable about this one was location and damage caused by high density population and lack of preparation.
“The author noted that, “We’ve only been aware that the earth revolves around the sun for some 500 years.” This is true.”
+++++++
The heck it is. The Aztecs, the Mayans, the Druids, the Egyptian and even the Greeks knew the Earth went round the sun. It was Aristotle who put the Earth in the middle and that was taught until it became the consensus. The Catholic Church, having been hoodwinked into endorsing the consensus, set about persecuting heretics, of course. Denialists, you could call them.
Today, we have hoodwinked chatechistic newspapers playing the role of inquisitor. Friday’s English language paper in Phnom Penh reprinted an outrageous article from the New York Times yammering on about Sandy and global warming blah-blah-blah and how Eskimos don’t have a word for ‘robin’ and other BS-button tripe. The author was so ignorant it was actually shocking. I kept a copy to show my grandchildren the level of stupidity to which a major newspaper can sink when they stop bothering to independently investigate the truth.
FWIW, the first figure at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/10/tisdales-august-2012-sea-surface-temperature-sst-anomaly-update/ indicates above-normal temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean from eastern North America through to Iceland.
IanM
Curiousgeorge, me thinks you should be careful with the color you paint others with. Often, you end up with more paint on you than the people you think you are painting.
As a teacher, I can attest to the nearly universal habit of painting parents as being less than adequate for the job. I used to think that way too till I noticed I was getting an awful lot of that paint on me.
Actually it is apparent that at least some Greek mathematicians were aware that the Earth revolved around the sun.
garymount says:
November 3, 2012 at 6:12 am
>>
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.
>>
centigrade is old fashioned name for degree celcius, it is not used for anything in S.I. system .
The units are “degree celcius” or “kelvin” (NOT capitalised) abbreviated to deg. C and K (capitals). The units of temperature differences or anomalies are exactly the same as whatever you preferred to measure the original temperatures.
So you were just about wrong as you possibly could be in all you said. Well done.
Just a small quibble.
Crispin in Singapore says: The heck it is. The Aztecs, the Mayans, the Druids, the Egyptian and even the Greeks knew the Earth went round the sun. It was Aristotle who put the Earth in the middle and that was taught until it became the consensus… etc good stuff etc.
There was a fascinating article in Physics Today a few years back titled “The Copernican myths”:
http://physicstoday.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_60/iss_12/48_1.shtml?bypassSSO=1
“The real story of how the scientific and religious establishments greeted the Copernican revolution is quite different from the folklore. And it’s a lot more interesting.”
The article examines the popular notion of the extreme reaction of religious authorities to the idea of a non-earth centric universe, and presents the actual history that is rather more complicated. A very interesting read for anyone curious about the history of scientific advancement.
So all that lovely warmth has been sucked out of the gulf stream ocean current ,- it is supposed to to be keeping us warm over winter on this side of the pond , We want it put back please , warming holds no fear for us folk , we need as much as we can get !!
Marc77 says:
November 3, 2012 at 6:43 am
If warm water was so good at powering anything, we would have warm water power station all over the ocean.
======================================================
Warm ocean water can. (kind of)
If you lower the atmospheric pressure of warm water, it will boil.
But like other forms of non conventional energy, it takes too much energy to make energy.
The French came up with a plan for this in the 1920’s
Sadly, most humans have no idea how to compute the Enthalpy (not heat!) content of anything. In fact, most humans don’t know what either Enthalpy or heat are in the first place. Most humans are probably a bit sketchy on just what a Joule is. Most humans aren’t aware that almost all of the ocean is at 4 C (or slightly below that) and almost completely isolated and insulated from warming and cooling at the surface (although the figure above does a lovely job of illustrating that).
There is, of course, a substantial amount of “heat” (really Enthalpy) in the surface layer of the ocean, and it does, in fact, drive hurricanes and other tropical storms as heat engines. However, those storms cool the ocean, by lifting its heat up to where it can radiate away to space. They are part of the negative feedback cycle that responds to warming by increasing the efficiency of cooling.
In the end, argue all you like: there is no empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that tropical storms in the North Atlantic are either more frequent or more violent now than they were twenty, fifty, a hundred, or more years ago. To the extent that we have data, they appear to be more or less the same — a Poissonian distribution per year, with a probability that is weakly modulated by ENSO.
rgb
I don’t care if it rains or freezes
‘long as i got my plastic Jesus
standing on the dashboard of my car
Terr’ble rain and wind and thunder
causes some to steal and plunder
neighbors swamped by big waves from afar
They’ll try to tax me for my share
’cause wind messed up the mayor’s hair
Global Warming needs my last dinar
My plastic Jesus’ head unscrews
he’s hollow inside and filled with booze
for the road, NYC I bid you au revoir
Interesting observation in the link above by PaulH @November 3, 2012 at 8:55 am
It could be applied to the global warming theory and it’s adherents. The concept was attractive for various reasons, both logical and sociological/physiological and many people followed the fad and began working in that model. At first they thought they were producing useful results and ground out papers and studies and made predictions that at first blush appeared to be on reasonably solid ground.
Over time however their results have remained stagnant and unremarkable, giving no better results than the long standing assumption of natural variability. Over time one point after another has been found to be superficial and not based on sound research, and like other theories is slowing being discarded as the public at large (first due to practical considerations) detects that it provides no useful information and produces lots of collateral damage to both the economy and governmental action in private affairs.
Like numerous other failed theories like the Miasma theory of disease, and Phlogiston theory it may have been useful from a practical view but over time found to be better explained by other mechanisms. The Miasma theory of disease for example moved us away from the idea of diseases being some sort of divine curse to a cause based approach that eventually led to our discovery of (some) of the real causes of disease (ie bacteria, viruses, toxin etc.)
Likewise I think CAGW will be foot noted in history books as a useful step with lots of undesirable consequences, that eventually forced intense sound research to be conducted.
Like alchemy, and attempts at making gold from lead eventually led to modern chemistry. It will also be seen like alchemy as a fools errand that, eventually led to positive results (some time in our distant future) when we remove the religious zeal and propaganda and start to examine the experiments we should have been doing 20-30 years ago when all this nonsense started to take hold.
Larry
PaulH says:
November 3, 2012 at 8:55 am
I would suggest to simplify “Physics Today a few years back” to “Physics a few years back” as the “today” adds no information. Just kidding.
What I really wanted to say, thanks for the link, I was just about to ask for one after Crispin’s comment.