Guest post by Alec Rawls
Dr. Isaac Held, who models fluid dynamics at NOAA, dismisses a solar explanation for late 20th century warming by invoking a 2-box model of ocean equilibration. In his model an upper upper ocean layer (100m or so deep) exhibits a rapid temperature response to any increase in radiative forcing (about 4 years), as has been observed for this part of the ocean. So far so good.
Below sits Held’s second box: the entire rest of the oceans, all modeled as having the same temperature. To see the effect of this highly unrealistic simplification, look at what would happen if an intermediate ocean layer were also modeled, say from 100 to 500 meters in depth. Following a step-up in forcing the rapid temperature response of the upper ocean layer would commence to warm the intermediate ocean layer on some intermediate time scale—from a few decades to a century perhaps—and the decreasing temperature differential between these two layers would decrease the rate of heat loss from the upper layer to the ocean below, causing the upper ocean layer to continue to warm on the decades-to-century time scale.
This is exactly what Held and others are saying will not happen. Their claim is that the 20th century’s persistent high levels of solar forcing could not have caused continued warming and hence cannot be responsible for late 20th century warming. But these claims always rest on unreliable and often unstated assumptions about ocean equilibration. Held’s assumptions are stated, making his example particularly revealing. His argument against solar warming hinges directly on what is unrealistic about his model.
Isaac Held on Raimund Muscheler
My email correspondence with Held began when I cc’d him on my critique of Raimund Muscheler, who had claimed that because the high levels of solar forcing from 1950 to 2000 were “relatively constant,” they were unlikely to cause continued warming:
Solar activity & cosmic rays were relatively constant (high solar activity, strong shielding and low cosmic rays) in the second part of the 20th century and, therefore, it is unlikely that solar activity (whatever process) was involved in causing the warming since 1970.
This statement by Muscheler was specifically in answer to the possibility of indirect solar forcings that might be much stronger than the slight variation in TSI (Total Solar Insolation). No matter the strength of the forcing Muscheler and others are saying, continued high forcing should not cause continued warming.
Do these people actually think that it is the rate of change in the level of a temperature forcing rather than the level of the forcing that does the forcing? Alternatively, they may be assuming some implausibly rapid ocean equilibration, so that by 1970 or 1980 equilibrium would have been reached, requiring continued forcing of the same magnitude just to maintain that equilibrium.
I thought Held might offer an antidote because at the same meeting that Muscheler had been quoted as dismissing the solar-warming theory, Held had noted that:
“… some 40-70 percent of the [temperature adjustment to a change in forcing] is achieved on a timescale on the order of 4 years, whereas equilibration takes centuries.”
If equilibration takes centuries then it would not have been attained by 1970. Thus continued high levels of forcing should cause continued warming, right?
No, says Held, not in the 2-box model that he was referring to, as he briefly explained to me in his reply:
Alec,
I believe that you have misunderstood my perspective on this. As I have tried to indicate in some of my blog posts, especially #3, 4 and 27, I think the forced temperature response should follow the forcing with only a small time lag (small enough that, in practice, it only affects the volcanic response), despite the existence of long oceanic time scales — the argument being that these deep reservoirs have not warmed enough to significantly affect the heat uptake.
Isaac
As Held puts it in his blog-post #4 (where he introduces his 2-box analysis) the heat capacity of the deeper ocean layer is effectively “infinite” in this model on intermediate time-scales. No matter how much heat gets pumped into the oceans, the deeper ocean layer does not warm significantly over mere decades and so there is no significant reduction in the rate of heat loss from the upper ocean layer. All of the heat that goes into the deeper ocean is regarded as simply disappearing, never to have any effect on upper ocean temperatures except on much longer time scales.
The result is a kind of psuedo-equilibrium where the only thing that will cause further change in the temperature of the upper ocean layer is further change in the level of forcing. Persistent high levels of even a strongly enhanced solar forcing would not cause continued warming of the upper ocean layer in this model. There would just be the rapid temperature response of the upper ocean layer then nothing measurable for generations.
Global Mean Atmospheric Surface Temperature (GMAST) is primarily determined by upper-ocean temperatures, thus according to Held’s 2-box model, where persistent forcing only causes brief warming, the late 20th century increase in GMAST could not have been caused by the high level of solar activity over this period. The highest levels of solar activity were reached in the 50s so the warming effect should have wound down by the 60s. But this 2-box argument turns on the known-to-be-wrong assumption that warming of the upper ocean layer does not warm the next few hundred meters of the ocean any more than it warms the abyss.
Simplified models are fine so long as the insights that are gleaned from them are not driven by the simplifications. For instance, it makes no difference that climate models do not include relativistic effects so long as they are not used to analyze relativistic phenomena, but Held takes this basic principle of science and turns it on its head. His argument that persistent enhanced solar forcing would not cause continued warming turns precisely on the unrealistic simplification that creates his 2-box model. Move just to the next simplest model, a 3-box model, and his argument evaporates. The next ocean layer will warm on intemediate time scales, decreasing the rate of heat loss from the upper layer to the deeper ocean, causing the upper layer to warm.
My second email exchange with Dr. Held
Isaac Held’s remarks to me were very brief and his blog posts are focused on a CO2 driver of late 20th century warming rather than the possibility of a solar driver. I wanted to nail down his position on the latter so I pulled together what his posts seem to imply about solar forcing and asked him to please let me know if I had his position right.
Isaac:
I got a chance to look at the blog posts of yours that you mentioned (3, 4, 6, and 27, and I read a few others too). All very interesting stuff.
On attribution for 20th century warming the focus of these posts is on WMGGs [Well Mixed Greenhouse Gases] and how, by adjusting the climate sensitivity estimate in the GCMs, variation in WMGG can be seen to account pretty well for 20th century temperature history. This doesn’t really get at my specific question, which is whether Raimund Muscheler’s statement can be supported. He was addressing the hypothesis that there might be some enhanced solar forcing effect, as by GCR or uv effects on cloud cover, and he claimed that even a persistent high level of such forcing could not cause warming [or continued warming].
You do make two comments that seem to imply a position here, but please let me know if I’ve got you right on this. First, you left a comment in your post #27 that specifically applies to the question of attribution for late 20th century warming:
“The assumption is not that the climate in 1980 is in equilibrium but that the heat uptake is proportional to the temperature anomaly from some (pre-industrial) equilibrium — ie. the system is in what I called the intermediate regime in post #3. (Actually post #4 — IH 5/17/12)”
As I understand your position, the heat capacity of the second ocean layer is effectively infinite in the intermediate regime and this regime easily persists for multiple decades and even centuries, even for quite substantial heat input into the deeper oceans. This is a direct implication of the 2-box model. Given the vast size of the second ocean layer it’s going to take a long time for this layer to warm enough to take a significant bite out of the rate of heat transfer from the upper ocean layer. As you put it to me in your email response:
“I think the forced temperature response should follow the forcing with only a small time lag (small enough that, in practice, it only affects the volcanic response), despite the existence of long oceanic time scales — the argument being that these deep reservoirs have not warmed enough to significantly affect the heat uptake.”
So with the temperature of the deep oceans essentially fixed over a broad intermediate time scale, the temperature of the upper ocean layer on this time scale is driven entirely (or virtually entirely), by forcings from above, which it responds to rapidly. Thus the only way to get continued warming of the upper ocean layer (necessary for continued warming of GMAST), is for temperature forcings to continue to rise.
CO2 forcing did continue to rise post 1970 while solar forcings were (to use Musheler’s phrase) “relatively constant.” Thus as analyzed by your 2-box model, CO2 is a viable explanation for late 20th century warming while solar-activity driven effects (no matter the mechanism) are not.
Am I understanding you correctly? Is this the argument you are making, or would make?
Sincerely,
Alec
In response, Held seemed to be satisfied with my account of his position:
It sounds like you understand
Isaac
I also understand how Held’s 2-box model fails catastrophically in this application
Add the least bit more realism—an intermediate ocean layer—and a persistent high solar forcing will cause continued warming on intermediate time scales. Isaac Held must understand this too. After all, he has a doctorate in this stuff and has spent his life studying it. Anything that is obvious at first glance to a non-scientist like myself cannot have eluded Dr. Held entirely, making it hard not to suspect that he might be treating this failing of his simplified model as feature rather than a bug. The “consensus” position that late 20th century warming was caused by CO2 depends on finding some way to dismiss the rival solar theory and Held’s hyper-symplified model provides one.
On the other hand, this application is not what Held has been using his 2-box model for. In his blog posts Isaac argues for the utility of the 2-box model entirely on the grounds that it does a remarkably good job of mimicking the behavior of the mainline GCMs, which are never used to examine what kind of behavior enhanced solar forcing might produce. These models are driven pretty much entirely by CO2. That is what Held is fixated on and I have no indication that he had ever used his 2-box model to dismiss a solar explanation for late 20th century warming until I urged him to weigh in on Raimund Muscheler’s typical/outlandish statement that a persistent high level of forcing should not cause continued warming.
All the consensus scientists are doing the same thing. The only models they look at are CO2 driven. The only hypothesis they actually try to work through, or even consider, is the CO2-warming hypothesis. When it comes to the possibility of late 20th century warming having been caused by the sun they content themselves with the most unscientific statements imaginable and simply refuse to look deeper.
I have compiled more than a dozen instances of leading IPCC scientists all making simple unconditional statements that because solar activity was not going up in the late 20th century it cannot have caused late 20th century warming. You’d think this was Newton’s Fourth Law: temperature is driven by the trend in the temperature forcing, not the level of the forcing. They all just pretend it is obvious that persistent high levels of forcing cannot cause continued warming.
Only when pressed do these scientists admit that they are making implicit assumptions about ocean equilibration, which they then try to justify with various half-considered rationales. Unfortunately, the only person who has been pressing these scientists on their unstated assumptions is me, so the unscientific statements continue to flow.
When the alternative is to hack-up an untenable excuse, avoidance is much preferred, and that’s where these guys all hang out, Held included. To make sure, I asked him about it: had the implications of his 2-box model for solar warming ever been pulled together and stated explicitly by anyone but me? Had it ever been published as a grounds for dismissing the solar-warming theory? Had it been discussed at meetings or passed around by email? Were people familiar with this argument?
Isaac just offered the modest answer that he found the 2-box model worthwhile because of how well it captures the response of the full-fledged GCMs to rising CO2. So that’s good. It means there has been no worked-out deception on Held’s part, and it means that Held’s excuse for dismissing a solar explanation for late 20th century warming is stillborn. In the first instance where Held has ventured to misapply his two-box model to the solar-warming hypothesis it now dies.
This makes FOUR off-the-cuff attempts to support the claim that persistent forcing can’t cause continued warming, all now dead and buried
1. Mike Lockwood cites Stephen Schwartz’ even more unrealistic one-box model of ocean equilibration.
2. Solanki and Schuessler argue that, since the solar-temperature correlations they have found are strongest with short time lags, rapid temperature responses are all they have evidence for and need to consider. Wrong. Rapid temperature responses of imply longer period responses (just as the solar warming of the day is evidence that the lengthening of the day will warm the season), especially in a system with large heat sinks.
3. Muscheler, Schmidt and others point to the pattern of warming. Since temperatures dipped between 1940 and 1970, the oceans must have equilibrated to the high level of solar forcing that began in the 1920s by at least 1940 they suggest, as if the mid-century wiggle in GMAST means there was a similar wiggle in ocean heat content, despite the apparent domination of GMAST by ocean oscillations.
It is perfectly possible that ocean heat content continued to rise when GMAST dipped and this is what the little heat-content data we have from the mid-20th-century suggests. There was no fall-off in the rate of sea level rise over this period and since surface temperatures were slightly down the melt-rate should not have increased, suggesting that thermal expansion remained steady.
4. Now add Isaac Held’s 2-box fail.
All four have been presented as reasons why a solar explanation for late 20th century warming can safely be dismissed as a significant possibility when in actuality not a one of these rationales stands up to the least bit of scrutiny. Besides internal variability, enhanced solar forcing is the alternative hypothesis to the CO2-warming theory, and the consensus has been falsely claiming to have ruled it out.
GCMs are multi-thousand box models
If going from 2 to 3 ocean layers changes model behavior so that persistent forcing does cause continued warming on intermediate time scales then a fortiori models with “as many as 30 [ocean] layers” will also exhibit this continued-warming behavior. In full-fledged GCMs convection, ocean currents and even ocean oscillations are all modeled. Heat that gets poured into the oceans for extended periods of time will come back out on similar time scales.
Have GCM tests with enhanced solar effects been run? There are some strong indications that they have not. In particular, if such tests had been run, and if they supported the claim that that continued strong solar forcing would not cause continued warming, then surely these tests would have been cited by the many scientists who make this claim, but no such citations are ever offered.
I’m trying to verify now whether these tests have been run and will do a full post on the subject in the future. In the meantime, if anyone has any information about whether GCM models with enhanced solar forcing have been tested and where any results might be found, please email me (alec-at-rawls-dot-org) or leave a note in the comments.
Conceptually there is no obstacle. Svensmark, for instance, hypothesizes that solar variance might be responsible for a 1% or 2% variation in low cloud cover. Adding this solar response to existing GCMs would be easy. To get the best fit for a given level of cloud effect climate sensitivity would have to be reduced an offsetting amount (which at the same time would reduce the warming effect of CO2). It’s just a matter of actually running the tests.
It the tests have been run, the lack of citations suggests that the results do not support the “consensus” position. There are three scandalous possibilities. 1) That contrary results were found and are being kept secret. 2) That contrary results were found and are available but are going un-cited because they contradict the statements that many scientists are making. 3) That despite over $100b in public funding for climate research the “consensus” never bothered to test the alternate hypothesis (in the “post-normal science” sense of seeing how well the hypothesis performs in model runs).
The only innocent possibility is that the IPCC has simply neglected to cite model-tests that support its otherwise unsupported claims that late 20th century warming cannot have been caused by the sun, but that really isn’t possible, not just because the “consensus” doesn’t behave this way, but because no legitimate GCM would behave this way. Persistent high levels of forcing must tend to create continued surface warming on intermediate time scales, and it must take quite some doing for a scientist to convince himself otherwise.
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In the first instance where Held has ventured to misapply his two-box model to the solar-warming hypothesis it now dies.
Where have you shown that?
All models deal poorly with cloud variations, primarily because equatorial ENSO teleconnected cloud variations cannot be predicted in the future, only hind casted or set up as dialed-in scenarios. A series of modeled La Nina events (strong and weak) reduce cloud cover. A series of modeled El Nino events (strong and weak) increase cloud cover. Further, correct model runs understand that these events do not cancel each other out and can drive a temperature trend in the ocean and over land for decades and more.
The AGW trouble with this is that the UN doesn’t know where mother nature lives in order to send her the tax bill related to increased use of energy to heat our homes or cool our homes in response to her fickle and unpredictable ways. Enter a convenient story to blame decadent fuel-drunk industrialized nations with deep pockets of cash just waiting to be redistributed under a new world-order scheme.
From vukcevic on November 16, 2012 at 1:21 am:
Relevance will only be possible when you state what is “Geophysics data”.
TSI has barely changed. The sunspot record cited as explaining 20th century global warming is the Group Sunspot Number, but the GSN is flawed and should not be used. The corrected International/Zurich number (ISN) does not show the Sun as the cause. So it’s not the Sun, according to TSI and the acceptable sunspot record.
Which starts with the premise:
Earth has a magnetic ‘ripple’ originating in the core and the sun has its cycles.
When two are in phase the oceans absorb more energy, when two are out of phase the oceans cool.
And where do we find evidence of this “ripple”?
Oh goody, another made-up Vuk index of unknown veracity made by unknown methods working on unknown data, which is why he will not directly link to the source(s).
Anybody here know a real measurement of Earth’s average magnetic field strength, suitable for comparison to solar data? All I keep finding are assorted indexes that are “space weather” oriented and already affected by solar influence.
Th reason for distinguishing the upper layer from the lower one is that the temperature profile of the upper layer (which Held correctly puts at about 100-m thick), cleverly called the “surface layer” is well mixed by wind and surface wave motion, whereas the lower layer has a strong temperature inversion, and is only weakly mixed, mostly by ocean currents. See this. This profile in the lower layer inhibits convection, so you end up with a much longer time constant for temperature exchange in the lower layer than the upper.
Because the time constant is much longer for the lower layer than the upper, you do get a thermal reservoir effect that depends on the mass of the deeper ocean. This is a well know result from the theory of heat diffusion, when convective motion is not possible.
You can calculate the response time of a 1-km thick layer of ocean by solving the heat equation and putting in the know profile for temperature, density and heat of conduction with depth of ocean water. Basically put in a step function in temperature, see how long it takes the ocean basin to response. From memory, the time constant for this is in the thousands of years. The real time constant is shorter because there are exchanges of water between the upper and lower layers due ocean current-driven mixing.
I’d invite Alec Rawls to come back once he’s made this calculation, after all you can do anything with physics when you aren’t constrained by what the mathematical relationships tell you must happen.
Dean:
Not really. They use a model that assumes a constant solar forcing over the entire Earth, which I think would be news for most of us if this were true—the well known phenomenon of “seasons” belying this assumption, instead of breaking temperature up into zonal bands to account for the zonal nature of the forcings, and then assume a single lag constant.
What F&R came up with is not even a physical plausible model. You need something a lot more in depth that what is frankly little more than a curve-fitting exercise run amok if you want to make any useful conclusions about solar equilibrium time scales.
The 2-box model fails completely when applied to the enhanced solar forcing theory. Switch two a 3-box model and the results reverse. Persistent forcing will cause continued warming. That’s simple logic.
I think you need to support those assertions with actual calculations. For calculations that fit the data best, the 2-box and 3-box model may be indistinguishable, or as we sometimes say, the 3-baox model may be non-identifiable or non-estimable. “Simple logic” is seldom adequate to these cases.
Greetings to Alec Rawls & David Hagen,
The informative ~1910-1940 mismatch in Stockwell’s Figure 2 ( http://vixra.org/pdf/1108.0032v1.pdf ) has been independently rediscovered countless times by countless investigators within seconds of their first look at sunspot numbers.
What do we know about meridional vs. zonal terrestrial flow regimes during that era (for example from the Russian literature)? Would you suggest we ignore it? Or can you see a learning opportunity here? (I hope so.)
I’m not looking for replies with written answers to these questions here & now. Rather, the questions are intended to suggest careful thinking about the role of equator-pole & continent-ocean gradients in terrestrial circulatory morphology.
It’s the integral of circulation (cumulative poleward heat & water pumping) that gives familiar multidecadal terrestrial waves.
Cross-ENSO terrestrial circulatory (gradient) anomaly from decadal gaussian climatology:
http://i49.tinypic.com/2jg5tvr.png
Rate of change of pitch of solar-terrestrial-climate helix (a very simple calculation):
http://i46.tinypic.com/303ipeo.png
http://i40.tinypic.com/16a368w.png
Synthesizing insights of Wyatt, Barkin, Sidorenkov, Courtillot, & Dickey, one might begin suspecting that vukcevic has plotted stimulating graphs quite successfully, but got the speculation exactly backwards:
http://i49.tinypic.com/wwdwy8.png
Like vukcevic, Courtillot might soberly consider the wisdom of accepting Sidorenkov’s superior counsel:
“Apart from all other reasons, the parameters of the geoid depend on the distribution of water over the planetary surface.” — Nikolay Sidorenkov
Sidorenkov’s Antarctic ice specific mass estimates are published in the following paper:
Sidorenkov, N.S.; Lutsenko, O.V.; Bryazgin, N.N.; Aleksandrov, E.I.; & Zakharov, V.G. (2005). Variation of the mass of the ice sheet of Antarctica and instability of the Earth’s rotation. Russian Meteorology and Hydrology 8, 1-8.
Regards.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
November 16, 2012 at 3:28 am
” Lean 2000 “11yrCYCLE” shows the 1961-2000 average to be only 0.25 W/m2 higher than the 1610-1960 average, 0.018%,”
You are stating the obvious. It is well known that changes to TSI on their own do not appear sufficient tp have a significant effect on the climate.
However, changes to TSI combined with other effects and feedbacks can combine to alter things significantly. We drift in and out of glacial cycles with minimal change to TSI.
Heck, during about the last billion years the Suns output has gone up 10%, a huge increase in TSI, yet the Earth’s temperature has FALLEN from 22c approx to about 14c today. All this time life has been well established on land as well as the oceans.
The Earth did it all by itself and CO2 was not a main player as CO2 has been much higher and lower than we see today with varying temperatures both higher and lower.
That’s the trouble with the alarmist scientists, they are locked into the scenario that nearly all the temperature change of the late 20th century was due to man and yet it is obvious that climate science is still in its infancy with huge unknowns not ‘settled’, as they like people to believe.
What is clear from the Holocene is that the Earth’s temperature is always on the move, up or down, in the medium term. It is never static for centuries on end. So, as well as the warm end of the PDO cycle, that kicked in in the late 20th century, we would have in addition the medium term climate signal. What was this? Well ,given the drop into the Little Ice Age and then the subsequent upturn it is likely that the medium term, underlying, natural climate signal was and is still up.
The alarmists however banked on nearly everything being due to man and reality is going to give them the biggest slap ever.
Alan
My question is: where does heat leave the ocean? The ocean is a layer of cold between a surface warmed by the sun and the earth’s inner heat.
On an additional topic, what is called the textbook number for the surface temperature of the earth is too high because temperatures of the ocean are not properly accounted for. The average surface temperature that is often used in zero dimensional climate models is usually stated as 15 degrees C. But this is not the surface temperature of the earth; it’s the combined global land and ocean surface temperature – with the deep ocean temperatures left out. This is a miscalculation that is commonly made in discussions about the magnitude of climate sensitivity.
This is all very interesting, but can we formulate a testable hypothesis?
Something like: if solar activity is the [dominate/significant] driver of global average temperature then the current reduction in solar activity should result in a [slower increase/leveling off/reduction] in global average temperature in X years.
In other words, when you turn down the heat, the pot of water will A) continue heating if there’s still more energy coming in than out, B) reach a steady state (relatively speaking) if there’s about the same amount of energy input as outflow, or C) cool if there’s less energy coming in than going out.
Would it coincide with Scafetta’s harmonics prediction?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/research-pages/scafettas-solar-lunar-cycle-forecast-vs-global-temperature/
Good work Alec, keep the pressure on.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
November 16, 2012 at 3:28 am
kadaka, despite all Leif’s efforts at reducing the scale of variability in TSI the general shape of the pattern of historical changes in TSI remains intact with lower levels of solar activity correlating well enough with climate changes.
Furthermore I have moved on since that article and made it very clear why raw TSI and/or sunspot numbers (and indeed cosmic rays) are merely convenient proxies for other aspects of solar output that vary more substantially such as the UV wavelengths and certain types of particles.
It appears to be those other wavelengths and particles which change the balance of ozone destruction and creation at different heights and thereby alter the vertical temperature profile of the atmosphere thus allowing a change in the gradient of tropopause height between equator and pole.
That allows the sliding latitudinally to and fro of the permanent climate zones and jetstreams beneath the tropopause so as to change the length of the lines of air mass mixing and especially the width of the subtropical high pressure cells where most solar energy enters the oceans.
The resulting cloudiness changes then allow more energy into the oceans when the sun is active and less when it is inactive.
My article was therefore somewhat prescient as have been a number of my subsequent articles developing the finer detail.
However the solar induced changes must be of the opposite sign to that proposed by standard climatology because the stratosphere must cool towards the poles relative to the equator when the sun is active and warm when the sun is active.
That is because incursions of polar air equatorward are usually associated with warming of the stratosphere at the poles and such incursions are more frequent when the sun is inactive.
Note that the stratosphere and mesosphere did cool with reducing ozone when the sun was more active and appear to have stopped cooling with recovering ozone with the less active sun.
Standard climatology proposes a warming of the entire atmospheric column when the sun is active and cooling of the entire column when the sun is less active.
That did not happen. In somewhat of a panic CFCs were blamed for the reducing ozone and CO2 was blamed for the warming and poleward migration of the climate zones.
Those assumptions are now in serious doubt.
From Alan Millar on November 16, 2012 at 7:01 am:
You are stating the obvious. It is well known that changes to TSI on their own do not appear sufficient tp have a significant effect on the climate.
Must not be too obvious nor too well known, with Stephen Wilde pointing to TSI for the support of his 2008 article titled “The Death Blow to Anthropogenic Global Warming”. Of course he didn’t know he was using bad info. Hopefully he does now.
Surely ARGOS is going to put paid to both sides of the controversy in relatively short order, so why all of the fuss? I agree that a two box model is almost certainly an oversimplification, and one that (by its selection of the two boxes) begs all questions because the vast bulk of the deepwater ocean is indeed a reservoir at a nearly constant temperature with effectively infinite heat capacity relative to the sun-warmed layer. It is doubly oversimplified, because at the thermocline the heat exchange mechanisms are very slow and involve things like turbulent turnover between moving layers at widely varying depths.
One key failure of the model described above (if I understand it correctly) from the beginning is that by its very nature completely eliminates thermohaline circulation. If correct, I’m frankly surprised that this isn’t pointed out in any and all critical analysis of the model and hence used to immediately dismiss it, as surely THC is a first order global heating/cooling effect, hardly something one can ignore, and a model that does not admit that it happens at all or have any mechanism for describing it (as it explicitly involves transporting heat into the deep ocean actively, as well as the uplifting of ancient stored heat actively, and the redistribution of oceanic heat from the equator to the poles actively, and is quite possibly responsible for the observed asymmetry between the two poles as far as mean temperature is concerned) cannot be sufficient.
Either way, though, replacing a smooth, empirically measured curve with a square well is just silly when the curve is readily available! For example here:
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Water/temp.html
This curve clearly indicates that in the middle latitudes (where solar heating is most important) the upper layer of warm water is only tens to a couple of hundred meters thick, followed by a long, smooth decrease to the deepwater average of 4K or less (nearly constant) starting around 1000 m across the thermocline. This curve is an “infinity box model” and is all you need to make all kinds of inferences about heat transport and probable equilibrium even as a static entity!
ARGOS will over time eliminate even that need — to make inferences about dynamics from static averages. Why build a two box model with crude dynamics when you can watch how the ocean actually responds all the way across the thermocline with ARGOS in real time?
I would be amazed if one cannot do this analysis rather precisely even now. Surely the buoys themselves or some other series of co-local surface observations provide a simultaneous running record of not mean insolation but actual, time dependent insolation over a buoy’s location that can be directly correlated with minimal averaging over the temperature profile as a function of depth at that location. If the buoys are free floating (I recall that they are) one does even better — one observes the heating of a given parcel of ocean as it moves around, eliminating the confounding effect of heat being absorbed here and then transported away by ocean currents that replace the warmed water with cooler water (or vice versa on the other end of the scale) at any give geographical location.
Of course, ARGOS drives me nuts because whenever I visit the ARGOS GCOS/WMO site (including the GCOS data page where one is “supposed” to be able to access the floating and fixed buoy data) all the links are dead or appear to be behind some sort of complex gatekeeping paywall. Who pays for all of this, and if it is me (as I suspect it is) via tax dollars why can’t I get at the data?
To conclude — a two box model is not only grotesquely oversimplified, it is completely unnecessary. Models themselves per se are unnecessary. We have at least a decade’s worth of high quality data, as well as a half century of lower quality (but still quite good) data before that. One should be able to watch the alteration of the upper ocean and the entire thermocline down to where the ocean does become moderately boring in actual time series, not model the entire upper and lower ends of this as well-mixed boxes.
rgb
kadaka, I said this in my 2008 article:
“The influence of the sun has been discounted in the climate models as a contributor to the warming observed between 1975 and 1998. Those who support the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), now known as anthropogenic climate change so that recent cooling can be included in their scenario, always deny that the sun has anything to do with recent global temperature movements.
The reason given is that Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) varied so little over that period that it cannot explain the warming that was observed. I don’t yet accept that TSI tells the whole story because it is ill defined and speculative as regards it’s representation of all the different ways the sun could affect the Earth via the entire available range of physical processes.
Despite the limitations of TSI as an indicator of solar influence I think there are conclusions we can draw from the records we do have”
Therefore, even back then, I duly acknowledged the limitations of TSI alone as a diagnostic indicator.
Your criticism is ill founded.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: November 16, 2012 at 6:54 am
……..
Oh goody, another made-up Vuk index of unknown veracity made by unknown methods working on unknown data, which is why he will not directly link to the source(s).
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/EarthNV.htm
Hi
Not made up, all in data by Andrew Jackson – ETH- Zurich) and Jeremy Bloxham – Dept Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University
Ripple in the field originates at the core, it is not smooth change, sometimes intensity goes down a bit, sometime goes up a bit, hence a ripple.
Whole lot (data, calculations and methods employed) emailed to Dr. Svalgaard, Dr. J.Curry, Dr. R.J.Brown and S. Mosher.
None objected to the data, calculations or method employed. No mechanism available!
Any one from NASA, NOAA or any well known university is welcome to contact me.
Anybody here know a real measurement of Earth’s average magnetic field strength, suitable for comparison to solar data?
Earth is not a bar magnet, there is dipole, but the Earth is most sensitive to the solar field at the poles, and two poles are behaving in totally different manner:
For Antarctic field::
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/TMC.htm
it is decadal change in the field that should be of interest
For Arctic field:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC1.htm
In reply to kadaka’s comment on the insignificance of solar forcing…
Taking 0.25W/m2 of forcing at face value, and a 100m water depth, that’s about 79,000 J/m^3 per year, which is 0.079 J/cm^3. Enough to heat the water by 0.019 Celcius.
So, the forcing is of sufficient magnitide to heat the ocean by 0.19 degrees per decade. Since the recent run-up in LT average temperature was from about -0.1 Degrees to +0.4 degrees in 30 years, i.e. 0.17 degrees per decade, I don’t think you can dismiss solar forcing so lightly.
It’s models all the way down….
Only a little OT – Nino 3.4 SST index is now down close to zero, has been for nearly a week, but the WUWT Nino dial is stuck at 0.5 – WUWT?
With the building east Pacific surface and subsurface cold, we could have a La Nina brewing.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/monitoring/nino3_4.png
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/sub_surf_mon.gif
From RERT on November 16, 2012 at 7:55 am:
But that is 0.25W/m2 Total Solar Irradiance. That’d be across the cross-sectional area of the Earth (a disk) of area pi*r^2. But it’s actually spread across the surface area of half of a sphere (half of the planet being illuminated, 2*pi*r^2) so divide it by half, for only half of a day so that value is divided by half again, so that amount of TSI gets divided by 4. Plus that value is TOA (Top of Atmosphere), and gets attenuated passing through the atmosphere. Roughly about 3/4 of that would actually make it to the ocean surface, if there are no clouds.
So that’s 0.25W/m2 * 1/4 * 3/4
= 0.05W/m2.
With Watt=Joule/sec,
365.25days/yr * 24hrs/day * 60min/hr * 60sec/min
= 31,557,600sec/yr,
that’s
0.05J/(s*m2) * 31557600sec
= 1.6MJ/m2 (megajoules per square meter)
So with a square meter of ocean surface receiving 1.6MJ over a year, if averaging that energy over a 100m depth, that’s only 16,000 J/m3.
How much of a temperature rise is that?
There is far too much attempt to dismiss solar variation as a potential climate driver. I really don’t understand the problem. As Stephen Wilde notes above, TSI is hardly a perfect metric – and it does vary slightly anyway. It really isn’t rocket science to work out that If you have a tiny variation in something like the suns massive radiative output or ‘power’ hitting the earth – it must have a corresponding effect of the climate. A small amount of a lot is still a lot. But that of course, isn’t the real problem with any solar variation. The real problem is that any relatively small change will take a long time to be noticed. The entire planet and its biosphere will take a finite time to adjust (either up or down) to increase in incoming radiation. Similarly, it will take a finite time to adjust and to effect a change in outgoing radiation. So straightaway, any observations you take are potentially being affected from some change from a good few months or years ago. The time lag on the cause and effect would perhaps be largely undetectable for small ‘input’ or ‘output’ changes – but if they occur over a significant period of time (half a sun cycle?) – the summary effect must be considered as potentially quite significant.
Add to this the very fact we have seasonal and of course diurnal variation, and the natural climate variation, all of which will obscure any direct measurement – how does anyone expect to measure small changes in solar effects?
And this does not warrant dismissal of solar variation as a primary climate driver. No way! We have Petawatts of energy smacking into the earth – a 0.1% variation in that incoming radiation (however it arises – from sun/albedo, Milankovitch, etc, etc) amounts to Terawatts of variation! This is not peanuts, especially if it is happening over a reasonably long timescale.
We know the various minimums of the recent past have occurred – and we deduce these are most likely related to ‘quiet’ sun periods – but the truth is, it doesn’t matter whether it was the suns variation, or a passing alien space shield/umbrella – it happened – and that caused a temperature change – Ergo, the incoming/outgoing energy budget was altered and the planetary temperature was changed. Period.
I am sick to the teeth of the attempts to dismiss solar variation – in an obvious attempt to prop up AGW.
It may be more accurate to not describe it as solar variation – but simply as ‘some mechanism’ of radiation budget alteration. There! Does that make the anti-solar folk happy? It makes not a jot of difference whether the radiation change is purely solar derived (i.e. a change in the actual output of the sun) – what matters is that the NET amount of solar net energy hitting earth is known to have altered and THAT caused the climate to vary. Where is the problem with that?
Of course, the problem is that if the alarmists ‘allow’ any extra terrestrial influence at all then they cannot just have an anthropogenic cause – it is all to easy for the skeptics to pass off any current observations as ‘solar or radiation’ derived – but the truth cannot be denied that such variation is highly likely, if not downright certain!
With the building east Pacific surface and subsurface cold, we could have a La Nina brewing.
Which would make it a triple Nina, right? Sounds like “Climate Change” to me…
It would also explain the midwestern drought, as Nina is correlated fairly strongly with drought conditions in the western US IIRC (as well as with global cooling).
This third Nina, coming so soon on the heels of the last one with only a few months in Nino conditions, might actually succeed in knocking down the UAH LTT to a moderately stable negative 30 year anomaly, actual thirty year cooling, where it is currently hovering around 0.1C/decade warming. If nothing else, it will prolong the current “no discernible global warming” stretch in the UAH record for another few years, well into the downside of the current solar cycle. And then we shall see.
rgb
Martin Lewitt says to look at the commitment studies. Great minds think alike Martin. I asked Lucia Liljegren last week if she knew of any GCM tests of the claim that persistent enhanced solar forcing would not cause continued warming. She suggested that the commitment tests that have been done with the CO2 driven models at least demonstrate the general principle that a prolonged step-up in forcing will cause continued warming.
The commitment tests are part of what I am going to discuss in the upcoming post I mentioned about the GCMs. Still looking for info there about what tests have and haven’t been run.
@Stephen Fisher Wilde (November 16, 2012 at 7:10 am)
From composite intuitive impression arising from countless exploratory analyses conducted to date, I suspect total ozone is just a loud symptom of something more fundamental. I suggest that in addition to and in concert with equator-pole gradients you carefully consider continent-ocean gradients. For example: (a) winter ocean-continent gradients from Far East Eurasia out into the Pacific Warm Pool and the North Pacific western boundary current (Kuroshio-Oyashio) and (b) parallel structures between Eastern North America and the Atlantic Warm Pool & Gulf Stream. These are the big meridional deflectors of winter midlatitude westerly flow. (For a summer equatorial easterly counterpart, consider Findlater Jet deflections.) The integral of meridional deflection (cumulative measure of sustained spatial field gradients & flows) is coherent with solar cycle deceleration, as I have advised countless times. The supporting evidence from LOD is well-constrained by conservation of angular momentum. Neutron count rates (commonly referred to as cosmic ray flux) have been widely misinterpreted and should be recognized as indicating changes in atmospheric circulatory morphology & mass distribution. Serious misunderstandings are likely to be ongoing since effectively we have a misnomer repeatedly triggering obfuscatory historical associations.
Hi Paul.
I agree that there is likely to be some ocean / continent variation in tropopause height gradients too but they are small and fixed except on geological time scales.
For climate zone shifting purposes solar or ocean induced changes in the equator / pole gradient are sufficient..
I am doubtful that cosmic ray counts have a significant effect because there are more than enough condensation nuclei anyway.
Changes in the length of the lines of air mass mixing are a far more likely cause of cloudiness changes.
Just look at the huge spiral of clouds generated by Hurricane Sandy as it dithered about whilst it was prevented from joining the usual zonal flow by the expanded polar air masses (which appear to expand when the sun is quiet).
rgbatduke says: November 16, 2012 at 9:33 am
…Which would make it a triple Nina, right? Sounds like “Climate Change” to me…
It would also explain the midwestern drought, as Nina is correlated fairly strongly with drought conditions in the western US IIRC (as well as with global cooling).
Kuroshio current is the major current of the North Pacific, it flows along the Japan archipelago, It takes about a year to reach Canada and few months more to the California cost.
There is likelihood that the last year tsunami has destroyed the thermocline (you talk of in your previous post) , sending volumes of cold water near or to the surface. This cold water would be flowing down the American west cost now, providing little evaporation and hence ‘drought conditions in the western US’
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.gif
shows that the first block of the colder water has moved away towards the mid Pacific, while second is on the way.