Fact check for Andrew Glikson – Ocean heat has paused too

Phobos says:
March 5, 2013 at 6:45 pm
“Some people still don’t understand…”
We understand perfectly. It is a massive flail. It is you who are running a deficit in understanding.
A word of advice: if you want to be taken seriously at this site, do not reference hacks like Foster and Rahmstorf. We’ve already seen you reach into this particular bag, and dismissed the results. Bob Tisdale thoroughly debunked this paper and it is just a meaningless exercise in curve fitting. For more, see previous comments up-thread. And, don’t bring it up again.
Phobos says:
March 5, 2013 at 6:49 pm
“You don’t even understand your own graph.”
No, you do not, as I explained at length. If all you can do is repeat previously discredited arguments, what is the point of hanging around?
Phobos says:
March 5, 2013 at 6:59 pm
“It’s the *world* that is stuck with this problem, including you and your children.”
“Melodrama’s so much fun,
Black and white for everyone to see,
Woe-oh-oh.”
– Billy Joel, Zanzibar
If you’re going to talk science, then talk science. If you are going to emote, there are other websites better suited for your maunderings.
Phobos says:
March 5, 2013 at 7:07 pm
“For the surface, the 10-year (120 month) moving average has been warmer than blah, blah, blah.”
Really, you do need to get new material. And, you’ll strain your arms with all this flailing.
Phobos says:
March 5, 2013 at 7:12 pm
“Here again is your lack of physics intuition: the acidity of the ocean is INCREASING, not decreasing. It contains MORE CO2, not less. It’s not giving off CO2, it’s gaining CO2.”
Non-sequitur. The oceans are not homogeneous. Upwelling waters can be richer in CO2 than downwelling waters, and the surplus would then accumulate both in the surface oceans and the atmosphere.
The excess CO2 is such a small fraction of overall flows, it can actually be coming from anywhere, or from multiple sources, or it can simply reflect a contraction of sinks, or all of the above. This is a continuous flow problem, and failing to take that into account is not unlike the mistake people who reject the greenhouse effect make when they maintain that a cooler object cannot heat a warmer one. There is a continuous input and output of heat, just as there is a continuous input and output of carbon. Anything which increases the flow in, or impedes the flow out, will cause a buildup of the transported item. And, the CO2 flows are so enormous that human inputs are insignificant.
All the sources and sinks for CO2 are temperature dependent, in that temperature modulates the rates at which it flows in, and flows out. And, this plot shows that, that dynamic is what is responsible for increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere in the last 55 years.
You really cannot get past it with word games. If dCO2/dt = k*(T – To), and the data says it does, then you are wrong about the source of the rise in CO2.
Phobos says:
March 5, 2013 at 7:28 pm
‘“The annual global ocean uptake [of anthropogenic CO2] is estimated at ∼1.4 to 2.5 Pg C/yr.”’
Keyword: estimated. And, if the estimates are based on faulty science, then you again have GIGO.

So, Anthony: any answer on what your evidence is for a pause?
You highlighted a region in the graph in which all the years on the left half are below your highlight line, and all the years on the right are above it. In other words, eyeballing suggests a positive trend. Other commentators (phobos on Feb 25, for instance) suggest the trend is indeed significantly above zero. That’s remarkable: in this data set, even if you pick the start date specifically to minimize the trend, you still can’t get it to include zero trend inside the error bars.

Joe says:
March 6, 2013 at 4:13 am
“…please explain why that statement you made is SCIENTIFICALLY wrong.”
I’ll help out. The oceans are getting less alkaline, not more acidic. But, it’s just a talking point. It does not compel the proffered conclusion, as I explained above.
This is a symptom of what passes for science among those with an agenda. Find something you want to be true, then assemble facts which are consistent with the hypothesis, and proclaim it to be scientifically indisputable. But, A) mere consistency is not proof and B) this methodology tends to confirmation bias, as valid data which do not conform to the hypothesis are dismissed out of hand.
Joe says:
March 6, 2013 at 8:34 am
He is late to the game. The argument is a quibble. Whether it is significantly above zero or not (and, it isn’t), the slope is so small that, were it to continue, it would be inconsequential.
But, it is very apparent that what we are dealing with is mostly the effect of a cyclical component with an approximately 60 year period. This is revealed in stark relief in this plot of the detrended temperatures. From the plot, it is apparent that the major components of the temperature series are a very slow trend, which could be a segment of a slower cycle, superimposed with a cyclical phenomenon with a period of approximately 60 years. It is, at last, now readily apparent that the downturn of the cycle occurred right on schedule at or around 2005. There is no evidence of any significant divergence of the pre-existing pattern, of trend + ~60 year cycle, due to markedly increasing levels of CO2.

The positive trend is statistically significant; that means you *cannot* fit a flat trend within the 95% error bars.
If you mean you can find a line that goes through all the error bars and is flat, you can’t (see 2009 versus 2005), but that isn’t actually relevant. The more data you have, the less uncertainty you have about the underlying trend — but also, the more likely it is that the trend line doesn’t actually go through all the 95% confidence intervals. In fact, with 20 data points you expect one of them to be significantly off trend; at just 10 points like here, it’s not particularly surprising.
I’m not sure where you see support for a sine wave. I’d be thrilled to see it; I like my cold snowy winters.

numerobis says:
March 6, 2013 at 10:16 am
I answered your questions in my comment to Joe’s comment to your comment above.

numerobis says:
March 6, 2013 at 11:16 am
“Similarly, the arctic is getting less cold, not more warm.”
But, “warm” and “cold” are relative terms. “Alkaline” and “acid” are not.

@DB Stealey: Of course CO2 is beneficial to life. No one is saying it isn’t, and this objection is a ridiculous canard.
But CO2 is also a strong greenhouse gas that warms the atmosphere and acidifies the ocean. Plants suffer heat stress when it gets too warm, and can suffer when precipitation patterns change. There is evidence that global crop yields have already reached the point where heat stress is undoing CO2’s fertilizer effect:
Global scale climate–crop yield relationships and the impacts of recent warming
David B Lobell and Christopher B Field
Environ. Res. Lett. 2 (2007) 014002
Abstract: “…For wheat, maize and barley, there is a clearly negative response of global yields to increased temperatures. Based on these sensitivities and observed climate trends, we estimate that warming since 1981 has resulted in annual combined losses of these three crops representing roughly 40 Mt or $5 billion per year, as of 2002….”

Bart says: “The excess CO2 is such a small fraction of overall flows,”
In fact it is not. You seem to think the appropriate scale of atmospheric CO2 is “exatonnes”; in fact, it is gigatonnes.
There was about 580 GtC in the atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution; today there is about 820 GtC, with an additional 125 GtC having gone into the oceans.
Carbon content is increasing both in the atmosphere and the total ocean. Of course it is, because we have been emitting CO2 for 150 years. That carbon has to go somewhere.
You can’t even be truthful on the signs of the changes, let alone their magnitudes.

Joe says; “Ignoring for a minute that a flat trend CAN be fitted within the error bars from 2003 to present (note that the yellow line is NOT an attempt to do this),”
Wrong — Tamino showed this very clearly: the best linear fit is not flat.
Maybe nonbest fits are, but why would anyone use a nonbest fit?

MiCro says: “Just because the instrumentation record is poor, does not mean there isn’t a lot of historical records discussing record heat and drought in the 30′s and again in the 50′s.”
In the US, not globally. There is no doubt that the globe is, on average, warmer than it was in the 1930s or 1950s. Not coincidentally, there is significantly less ice and a higher sea level, macroindicators that are unmistakable, just what you’d expect for a warming planet.

@Mark Bofill: I prefer to look at actual science, not just a Web page, especially ones that aren’t up on the latest research.
Trenberth and Fasullo (Science, Nov 2012) presented an observational test of the cloud feedback based on satellite measurements of relative humidity in cloud-free subtropical regions. This relativity humidity is strongly correlated with global cloud cover. They found that only models with relatively high climate sensitivities (~4°C for a doubling of CO2) replicate the observed seasonal changes in relative humidity, suggesting the overall cloud feedback is positive.
And as Jeff Tollefson wrote in Nature last year:
“Early results from the new models suggest that the addition of the more complex clouds and aerosols to simulations could help to provide an explanation. NCAR’s new atmospheric model produced more warming and sea-ice loss than the previous iteration, and the culprit seems to be clouds — a result that caught researchers by surprise.“ (Nature,News, May 2012)
It would be grossly irresponsible, in the face of expected greenhouse warming and recent work on clouds, to hope that maybe, just maybe, clouds will somehow reverse global warming. Uncertainty is not a reason for inaction.

@Bojan: Martin C is indeed off by a factor of 10. This is from the abstract to Levitus et al GRL 2012:
“The heat content of the World Ocean for the 0-2000 m layer increased by 24.0±1.9 x 10^22 J (±2S.E.) corresponding to a rate of 0.39 W m^-2 (per unit area of the World Ocean) and a volume mean warming of 0.09º C. This warming corresponds to a rate of 0.27 W m^-2 per unit area of earth’s surface.”