Even More about Trenberth’s Missing Heat – An Eye Opening Comment by Roger Pielke Sr.

Myrrh says: “A reasonable answer to rise in temperature below 700m is volcanic activity….”
Yes. There’s only one volcanic seep whose emissions have ever been fully captured: Lake Nyos. Using the emission rate for Lake Nyos, annual world-wide volcanic CO2 could be as high as 30 gigatons (as CO2). Compare that to Gerlach’s 0.145 to 0.255 gigatons.
RobertInAz says: “I don’t think this is true: ‘Even if climate sensitivity is somewhat less than the IPCC’s median value of about 3 degrees Celsius, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are increasing exponentially, so a smaller value merely buys an extra decade or two until the same amount of warming is reached.'”
You’re right; it’s wrong. The rise in CO2 has been clearly linear for the last 20 years. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2
The “missing” heat has somehow tiptoed downward into a place where we personally can neither check on it nor be affected by it. It’s…it’s…a trenbersty.

The premise of global warming/ climate change is that the CO2 causes the atmosphere to warm, which warms the surface. Accumulating deep ocean heat, without atmospheric warming, must be due to some other mechanism. Try underwater volcanoes, or something.

When I think of the world being covered with “oceans”, I don’t think of just liquid water. Nor do I think that the ocean depth starts at the liquid water surface and extend downward to a mere 700m or 2000m for that matter. No, the earths “ocean” starts at the top of the atmosphere and extends all the way down to where the water meets a physical barrier – rock! This “model” of the ocean has all 3 (or is it 4 if you consider liquid crystal water?) phases of that next (/sarc on)dangerous molecule to be outlawed by the EPA – H20, dihydrogen oxide. (/sarc off)
This amazing molecule REGULATES dangerous levels of radiation coming from that big ball of thermonuclear radiation – our sun – every second of every day from the top of the atmosphere down. It absorbs far more infrared energy than CO2 or any other GHG. It reflects more of the entire spectrum back to space in all three phases. It radiates far more of that absorbed energy back to space than any other GHG. And it does all of this dynamically, continuously varying the degree to which it absorbs, reflects or reradiates, based on whatever local energy imbalance is present. Spacial variation in any local energy balance is quickly rebalanced by not just energy flow, but also physical transfer (wind and currents) in both lateral and vertical directions.
In reimagining the “ocean”, I would recommend that serious climate scientists need to start rethinking the whole system. Energy – heat – can’t be “lost”. Therefore, whatever static model has been dominating the discussion must give way to a dynamic model that will satisfy the flows – energy and mass. If there is no significant temperature gradient measured in the liquid ocean to explain radiative, conductive or convective heat transfer from the gaseous phase downward, then there must be a dynamic process that satisfies the energy loss upwards. Water must be actively and dynamically transferring the heat back to the top of the atmosphere and reradiating back to space – and not at a constant static rate, but rather at a rate that maintains the net overall energy balance. I agree with Willis Eschenbach’s postulated theory that storms serve as the regulator for dynamically balancing energy imbalances in our larger “ocean”.
When I imagine this larger “ocean”, I can see that there are most likely four major “layers” to it – but also many “sub-layers” within these four major layers. You can see these “layers” every evening if you stand on the shore of a tropical island and you watch the beginnings of and then the eventual approach of a daily evening thunderstorm.
The lowest layer is all liquid water – the surface of the sea. That is easy to see. Most of the radiative transfer onto our planet (in the absence of clouds) happens on, or rather to, this layer.
The next layer is between the sea surface and the third layer. Most of us not living in mountainous regions live in this second layer. In this layer a LOT of convective transfer of energy occurs (warm moist air rises up through this layer, or hangs around and makes us sweat), a LOT of conductive transfer (we are cooled by physical contact to rain and snow) and some radiative transfer.
The next layer is also easy to see. It starts at say 1000 m above the oceans surface (this height varies on any given day and is based on the local RH, air pressure and temperature) and is clearly defined at the bottom of the clouds that are forming. Above this layer, any slight perterbation, ionized gas molecule or dust particle will begin to cause the excess energy stored in the gas phase of saturated water vapor to quickly condense. I imagine that this layer has a “fuzzy” boundary simply because in the absence of any perturbation, super saturation can occur. Billowing cloud formation above this layer is visual evidence to me of a runaway “crashing” of water liquid out of super saturated water vapor in air. As clouds are forming any one (not just the special scientists that call themselves “climate” scientists) can SEE energy transfer occuring. Water vapor turns from a clear gaseous state to a liquid state that scatters light. The now scattered sunlight is reflected back to space (the first part of the dynamic energy rebalancing act).
Most of these water droplets are initially too light to spontaneously fall back to the sea, and instead do two amazing things. First they self organize into “clouds” – which seems to defy thermodynamics! How they do this might have something to do with the second thing they do. Dr. Gerald Pollack in the video “Water, Energy, and Life: Fresh Views From the Water’s Edge” postulates that IR energy that is absorbed by these liquid water droplets drives a natural self-organizing capability of the water molecules to create a liquid crystaline “skin” completely surrounding the droplets and penetrating a surprising distance into each one and in so doing actively separate charge so that the droplets that have formed have a net surface charge. This high surface tension “skin” layer of water has been proposed as the “4th phase” of water. In any event, water droplets in clouds absorb solar radiative energy at a higher elevation, (preventing solar radiation from warming the liquid in the ocean below any further sunlight, and contributing yet another element of the dynamic energy rebalancing act) both charging and warming them and pushing them higher into the third layer of the larger “ocean”. I don’t know for sure but I would imagine that if your eyes could see in the infrared portion of the spectrum that corresponds to water’s IR spectrum, that you would SEE clouds giving off light as the condensation was occuring. Has anyone ever attempted to measure the net IR energy “pulse” coming off of a storm from outer space?
The fourth layer is much higher and occurs more infrequently – only when thermal imbalance and water vapor transport merits the need for rebalancing of a massive heat buildup. It is also evident however as a distinctive layer. It is characterized with a flat bottom and an “anvil” shape. At this elevation, the temperature and pressure have dropped so low that saturated water vapor that has been transported this high, as well as liquid droplets suspended in upwelling winds, experience a runaway “crashing” and instant freezing to form the cystalline water – snow flakes. Once again this phase change from liquid state to solid state involves HUGE amounts of energy transfer, is highly dynamic, and only occurs where local energy imbalance drives the process.
At all four layers of this larger “ocean” phase transitions occur from one phase of water to another. Whenever, a phase transition occurs a MUCH larger energy transfer occurs than just radiative, conductive or convective transfer – because changes in entropy are also occurring. I suspect that the reason one can “see” clouds when taking IR pictures from space at night of large tropical storms, is that HUGE amounts of radiative energy in the IR portion of the spectrum is being given off. I supect that during thunderstorms besides massive amounts of light being given off by lightning, that clouds also “glow” in the IR. And that the amount and intensity of this radiative energy exacly matches the amount of energy given up during condensation or crystalization at the two upper atmospheric levels of the larger “ocean”. And that this dynamic release of radiative energy is where all that “lost” energy from the atmosphere can be accounted for. In concurrence with Willis, I postulate that the radiative balance on our blue ball is not a static event but a dynamic process and that water serves as the magic energy balancing molecule.
The middle layers of our larger “ocean” of water (mixed with air) are the most interesting, most dynamic, and IMHO where all the unaccounted for energy movement is happening. They are also where all the “weather” happens. Characterizing only the “surface” temperature at one boundary of this “ocean” and saying that it’s average annual or decadal drift must be used to accurately predict scary long term future trends and therefore massive changes in economic policy, completely ignoring the highly dynamic nature of the whole water cycle, is laughable and IMHO a bit narcissistic on the part of us puny humans.
So what explains the very very small “average” changes in the surface temperature over any given year, decade, century. Naturally occuring long time scale oscillations like solar activity, ocean currents, . . . (/sarc on) and the 17 year cicada, yea that’s the ticket, cicada farts (/sarc off). Seriously, WHO CARES. If the water cycle can buffer a 100 degree swing in any given year, and has done so since man has been keeping records of such things, what is so scary about 1 or 2 degree fluctuations in average air temperature over a decade?

A) the thermohaline circulation takes a long, long time. Something like 800 years. The notion that latter 20th century heat is showing up below 700m now is difficult to credit.
B) Because of that long time lag, I would expect the heating below 700m could easily be from warm waters which downwelled ages ago coming back up again. An indication of that would be a temperature gradient which starts increasing at some depth as a function of depth.
C) If heat is being transferred to the depths from the surface, then there must be a gradient of decreasing temperature with depth somewhere where the heat is downwelling, and that gradient is not decreasing in time. Is there any patch of the oceans in the ARGO data which shows such a phenomenon?

mpainter says:
May 9, 2013 at 8:28 am
“It escapes me how a scientist with Trenberth’s background could attribute warmer SST to increased atm. CO2. But, then, this is the guy who is tucking the “global warming” into Davy Jones’ locker.”
Trenberth’s general idea, which he has been unable to develop at all, is that there is a great deal of vertical mixing that goes on in the oceans and this mixing takes warmth from the surface and transfers it to the deep oceans. So, all he has to do now is “discover” (model…cough…cough) how the mixing works. Then he will have his missing heat.
However, as Pielke Sr indicates, if Trenberth concedes that the deep oceans sequester heat from manmade CO2, among other things, then he must concede the principle that any physical process can sequester what Pielke Sr. calls “radiative effects.” In other words, he would have to concede that even the atmosphere can sequester radiative effects. But once you make that concession, the radiative theory must be totally re-evaluated. “Top of the Atmosphere radiation measurements” no longer mean what they once meant.
To cut to the chase, Trenberth’s latest “hypothesis” makes the processes of vertical mixing in the oceans more important than the manmade CO2 blanket that supposedly “feeds” them. (Actually, Trenberth has been forced to the right path but he is so averse to empirical investigation that he cannot see that empirical investigation of ocean mixing is what he is now promoting.)

I reckon Trenberth’s “missing heat” is a few light years past Alpha Centauri.
Stefan–Boltzmann rules:-)

When I search for information on the temperature of deep ocean water I get results like this one from Wikipedia – “Deep ocean water has a very low temperature, typically from 0 °C (32 °F) to 3 °C (37 °F), and a salinity of about 3.5% (35 psu).[”
Well no wonder all that heat can hide there.
What is a wonder is why this claim was never made during the period when atmospheric temperatures were rising ?
I remain convinced that “Quark Soup” is hallucinogenic !

This heat transfer would take a bit of time to reach any depth at all if due to ocean mixing. What goes down comes back up in Kelvin waves. More importantly that anthropogenic signal is not in the equatorial records. Period. So it must be riding on top in warm pools till it gets to the Arctic ocean where it may indeed sink. The problem with that is historically we don’t have Arctic temperature records of natural incoming and outgoing current temperature variation at depth and on the surface. It is entirely possible that the minuscule CO2 warming is within the bounds of oceaning natural variation.

Hello, stacase.

“The oceans are warming. Over the period 1961 to 2003, global ocean temperature has risen by 0.10°C from the surface to a depth of 700 m.”
Really? No error bars, no kidding? We are expected to believe that they can measure an annual change of 0.002°C?

That is the mean result from the executive summary. A few pages later:

“We assess the heat content change from both of the long time series (0 to 700 m layer and the 1961 to 2003 period) to be 8.11 ± 0.74 × 1022 J, corresponding to an average warming of 0.1°C or 0.14 ± 0.04 W m–2…”

I don’t know why they don’t give error bars for degrees C, but they are not claiming absolute precision for ocean heat content.

Pamela Gray says:
May 9, 2013 at 6:39 am
“Coulda woulda shoulda” is a liberal’s dream of a law’s unpinnings. There is only one way to get out of this folks. Change the political leanings of our lawmakers world wide.

When I was a child I thought the world’s problems could be solved by killing a few dictators: Stalin, Mao, Franco and others who I forget. What a waste of ammunition that would have been. If you think the world would be improved by getting rid of all the ‘liberals’ you are a very naive young whippersnapper.