Forcing The Ocean To Confess

Guess this means I won’t be able to use the sea to boil eggs. Bummer.

O/T but this is REALLY IMPORTANT NEWS. see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2343966/Germany-threatens-hit-Mercedes-BMW-production-Britain-France-Italy-carbon-emission-row.html
It would appear that Germany (Europe’s most powerful player) has woken up and has now realised the adverse effect of carbon emission restrictions.
I have often commented that Germany will not let its manufacturing struggle as a consequence of such restrictions and/or high energy prices (which germany is begining to realise is disastrouse for its small industries which are the life blood of German manufacturing).
First, germany is moving away from renewables and is building 23 coal powered stations for cheap and reliable energy.
Second, Germany wants to rein back against too restrictive carbon emissions.
The combination of this new approach is a ground changer in European terms.

richard verney
What they really mean, in placing limits of CO2 emissions, is making cars more economical, doing more kM/ltr or mpg. That is the only real way they can reduce vehicle emissions!
Reminds me of the comment Jeremy Clarkeson made on Top Gear a few years back whilst interviewing former soldier turned pop-singer James Blunt, he commented that the EU are demanding military vehicles have reduced emissions of CO2 & other stuff, so that they can still fire depleted uranium out the sharp end, but at least they can claim they’re being more friendly to Gaia from the rear end!!!!
Perhaps this reality is going to be the catalyst to bring down the ghastly edifice of AGW in Europe? Who knows?

this easily (to most normal folk perhaps?) demonstrates to jai mitchell why the claim for bucket loads of heat stored in the ocean as per the other thread, is complute bunkum.

Just for perspective, how does this tiny ocean heat accumulation compare to what the science is based on – GHG forcing.
The SKs chart shown above, does not have the other side of the equation in it and, in fact, is only presenting a tiny part of the picture.
The GHG forcing is 2.86 W/m2 in 2012, while the accumulation in the ocean and land/atmosphere/ice-melt is only 0.52 W/m2 (I’ve got slightly different numbers than Willis).
http://s9.postimg.org/cwz2zl70v/OHC2000_M_GHG_Forcing_Q1_2013.png
Now, that is a completely different picture.
But it is not the whole picture. Over the time interval, there were volcanoes which reduced the net impact of the GHG forcing and there were aerosols reducing the net impact of the GHG forcing (and other changes like land-use etc.). The total forcing which supposed to be apparent in 2012 is 1.78 W/m2 (according to the numbers being used in the upcoming IPCC AR5 report).
http://s12.postimg.org/urxw7cq71/OHC_Accum_vs_Forcing_1955_2013_Q1.png
But again, that is not the whole picture either. As it gets warmer, more long-wave energy is supposed to escape to space, as it gets warmer, more feedbacks like water vapor and reduced cloud opacity are supposed to show up and ramp up the energy accumulation even further.
The total net forcing which is supposed to be showing up is 2.3 W/m2 including the feedbacks (feedbacks which are to occur at a 0.7C temperature increase). Increased long-wave emissions to space in the climate models are supposed to be in the 0.8 W/m2 range (according to Church and White 2011).
http://s10.postimg.org/vf4h3oizd/Net_Forcing_Feedbacks_Energy_Going.png
Putting everything into place, the net forcing which is supposed to be here is 2.3 W/m2, while the ocean heat accumulation, land/atmosphere/ice-melt warming and the increased LW emissions to space total up to just 1.3 W/m2. So, a full 1.0 W/m2 is completely missing from the climate system.
http://s12.postimg.org/6cycqfpcd/Net_Forcing_Heat_Accum_vs_Missing_Energy.png
Church and White 2011 provides some background to the above and the paper is where SKs got their idea from on “90% of the heat is going into the oceans” misdirection (I’m just updating and presenting the info in a different way than C&W11 – ignore the sea level parts of this paper).
http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/phys/2012-0229-200953/2011GL048794.pdf

Quote: According to the current climate paradigm, if the forcing (total downwelling energy) increases, a combination of two things happens. Some of the additional incoming energy (forcing) goes into heating the surface, and some goes into heating the ocean….
Of course if the surfaces heat the fraction of energy which “downwells” i.e. “back radiation” then decreases as more is radiated by the surfaces (upwelling) than downwells. This is due to the unfortunate fact that most downwelling energy comes from thermal energy in the atmosphere originating from the thermal mechanisms: conduction, convection and latent heat of evaporation. This non GHG back-radiation is equal to (and opposite in direction) the net removal of thermal energy from the surfaces which is radiated into space via these thermal mechanisms.
As a heater reaches higher temperature radiative loss begins to dominate over thermal loss (just like infra-red heaters radiate far more than they conduct/convect whereas convector heaters like the domestic “radiator” are lower temperature devices and convect much more heat than they radiate).
Lower surface(s) temperatures = more fractional back radiation (from all sources).

Note I exclude solar originating radiation from my definition of downwelling..

Water is the most energy consuming thing per degree C rise of anything, ie,. it needs more energy to raise its temperature by 1C than anything in the known universe. So to raise the temperature of the oceans by 1C needs lots of heat which comes from a, now, quiet star. Cooler oceans means cooler continents.

But the oceans had nothing to say …
Thanks Willis. Excellent article!
The “pipeline” is empty because it does not exist. Weather drives climate, ENSO reigns.

The size is disguised by the use of units of 10^22 joules of energy … not an easy one to wrap my head around.
I agree. So let’s wrap it up.
Convert all such figures in 10^22 Joules into ZetaJoules, 10^21 Joules.
(Note, these are the units of the SkS graph above… those exponents are fine print)
Now keep these earth constants in your back pocket:
Heat to raise upper 0-2000m Ocean 1 deg K = 2730 ZJ / deg K
Heat to raise 0-700m Ocean 1 deg K = 960 ZJ/K
So the SkS graph’s Y-Axis of 0 to 200 ZJ could be replaced with 0 to 0.07 deg K.
On top of that, the X-Axis runs from 1950 to 2003… stopping before the ARGO constellation. Today, with ARGO, it is debatable whether we have precision of 0.05 deg K. Before ARGO, it is fantasy to suppose we measured the average temperature of the 0-2000m ocean layer to even 0.25 deg K. So the entire SkS graph is well within reasonable error bars.
So, whenever you see x.x*10^22 Joules,
immediately convert it to temperature at the rate of 2730 ZJ per deg K

Anthony Watts says:
June 19, 2013 at 4:13 am
Hmmm, this rather puts the kibosh on this graph from the SkS zealots
…
Makes me wonder how Murphy finds such a large trend in OHC, but Levitus does not find any trend in forcing.
_______________________
If you draw a corresponding graph using data in Willis’ sheet (the Joules column) you get very similar, compatible result. That actually ensures me the Willis’ analysis is about right.
What’s missing are uncertainity intervals but I don’t think they would change much as individual errors cancel out. There is no dispute that there’s about 0.07 between -0.013+/-0.006 and 0.061+/-0.002, you can’t bring that down to zero by saying that the forcing is statistically indistinguishable from zero as demonstrated in this article. And that’s the answer to your question.
I like this article. It puts those huge OHC numbers nicely in context.

I find it hard to believe anyone can say, with any degree of certainty, just what the average temperature of the oceans on this planet is. The Pacific and Atlantic oceans alone are so vast, with currents constantly changing, and upwellings and downwellings occurring constantly somewhere at all times, there are not enough static temperature monitors at all the various depths to adequately measure and compile data.

The interesting (bizarre) part of their argument requires that the energy flux at the surface has to be orders of magnitude higher in the areas where there is downwelling.
Given that the “missing heat” is not stored in the upper layers of the oceans. Given that the “missing heat” is warming the deep oceans. Given that the “missing heat” travels to the deep ocean by downwelling. Given that the areas of the oceans where downwelling occurs is something like 1% of the entire area of the oceans. Given that the volume of the deep oceans is so vast that the “missing heat” raises its temperature by fractions of a degree.
This can only mean the “missing heat” is discretely added to the downwelling water just when it becomes too late to measure.its temperature.

Here’s a reality check. For ease of arithmetic, let’s suppose that a 1M x 1M x 200M water column is absorbing 1 Watt every hour of every day for a whole year. If we convert that to calories we get: 5363190 cal.
There are 100 x 100 x 200 x 100 grams of water in the column. Since one calorie causes one gram of water to warm by one degree centigrade, we divide the calories by the grams to get a net heating of 0.027 degrees centigrade per year.
So, if the ocean were a uniform 200 M deep and if it absorbed 1 watt per square meter (of surface) 24 hours a day for 100 years, it would warm up almost THREE whole degrees. That’s the worst case if you make a couple of unsupportable assumptions.
I have no idea how fast heat moves vertically in the ocean but its average depth is around 4000 meters. If the heat were uniformly distributed then the warming would be closer to 0.15 degrees C per century. If we choose a more sensible value for the watts per square meter, then the heating is even less.
As others have pointed out, the warming of the ocean is so tiny that we can’t even measure it from year to year. That’s why the alarmists give us values in gigajoules. It sounds way scarier.

I am on the hunt for some historical census of deep ocean temperature data: How much by time. I found this curious paragraph describing what appears to be the MiniMODE experimental system from the early 1970s :

Again, the floats could be recovered and 41 of 52 were retrieved. These floats were used at depths between 500 and 4000m and collected a total of 714 [instrument?] days of data over a 2 month period. This was approximately equal to the total number of ship-tracked float days accumulated during the previous 17 years! — Gould (2005?), “From Swallow floats to Argo – the development of neutrally buoyant floats pg.10.

These floats were short range so the data is clumpy and the recordings very primative.
Whatever you thought the error bars were on OHC prior to 1970…. double it.

Very nice, Willis.

Joseph Bastardi says:
June 19, 2013 at 4:54 am
Everyone knows my admiration for Bill Gray, so at the risk of bias, I live and die with his ideas. Let me share this with you:
http://typhoon.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Publications/gray2012.pdf
a great read

Indeed it is. The 0.3° doubling sensitivity matches my own long-time estimates, so it must be right! 🙂

Kristian says June 19, 2013 at 5:57 am “It’s important to note that ‘downwelling energy’ to Earth’s surface from above does and can not ‘heat’ the surface unless it comes down as … heat.”
Energy is the ability to do work, whether it is to move an object or to heat an object. Radiated energy becomes heat, electrical energy (solar cells) or chemical energy (photosynthesis) when it is absorbed.

science is settled

Nice post Willis. In a much earlier post on this site you made the assertion that the behavior of the ocean and atmosphere above it (what I now think of as the rest of the ocean of water on our blue ball) was the “governor” regulating the temperature on the planet. I agreed with that insightful thinking and now even postulated further on it. (For this response think of the “ocean” as encompassing ALL of the water on the planet, from the bottom of the liquid ocean to the top of the atmosphere where water has crystalized into ice particles.)
I would like to add to the theory in your earlier post, something that I observed later on in a different post here on WUWT. During the time that hurricane Sandy was making a big splash in the news, someone posted a picture of what the storm looked like in the infrared part of the spectrum from outer space – at night, no moon! Now unless the storm was actually giving off infrared light, that picture should have been all black. But what you could clearly see was that different layers of the storm were giving off different amounts of light. So I assert that what was missing from your original post is that at the three different layers in the ocean/atmosphere where phase change occurs – ie. where massive amounts of energy get dumped into the liquid ocean to create water vapor, then at the layer where that vapor condenses back out of the atmosphere, and then again at the top layer where the liquid crystalizes to form ice – you should see in infrared images (especially in the IR spectrum where water has a high extinction coefficient) where water appears to be “glowing”. That IR “picture” is a dynamic rebalancing of the radiative energy equation. Radiative energy being transmitted off of our blue ball is not a static “average” thing. It is as dynamic as solar storms are, and water is the primary molecule that absorbs then moves then condenses and transfers the energy off of the surface of the ocean back to the cold of outer space.
Combining radiative losses from the background IR glowing from storms with the HUGE radiative loss every time lightening occurs and you have the last piece of the dynamic energy balance that is happening every day at all locations on this planet. Any excess energy from the sun that warms up the ocean, causes water to evaporate, carrying that energy into the lower layer of the atmosphere. Now that layer continues to absorb light and along with continuing evaporation lifts the water vapor up vertically until the elevation where the temp/press matches dew point at which point condensation releases some of the energy radiatively back to space and also coincidentally creates a white billowy cloud that now scatters sunlight back to space preventing the ocean below from absorbing any more energy. If the condensed water vapor continues to absorb excess energy from the sun and is fed more water vapor from below the white billowy cloud climbs higher and higher until it reaches the height where the temp/press match the freezing point and a second phase change occurs. Both phase changes AND the active transport of energy off of the liquid oceans surface up to the highest level of the atmospheric ocean create a “self regulating” system that CAN NOT exceed the boundaries water’s natural temp/press/phase properties place on it.
This “model” is still too simplistic because in any storm, a massive amount of energy is consumed in the work of transporting huge volumes of water across vast expanses of ocean or land, and the energy expended in a storm can get extreme! No one can really predict the violence that results. Chaos!
In a self regulating system that at any point in time or space has temperature varying from a warm 80 degrees all the way up to 0 degrees where ice has formed, again what is the point of fixating on “average” temperature variation of 1 degree over a day, month or year? or trivial fluctuations in average energy content that is more than likely noise? Why is everyone paying so much attention to our self regulating system’s noise that is most likely error in measurement anyways?

Willis,
Really appreciate looking at this from average power density rather than total joules to gain proper perspective.
Performing a simple numerical integration using the “trapezoidal rule” on the data from your spreadsheet yields 0.21W/m^2 averaged over the 57 year period.
Doesn’t seem like much to be worried about relative to the earth’s average solar insolation and known negative feedback mechanisms i.e. thunderstorms.
Reducing this by a factor of 37.5, as indicated by Bob Tisdale’s update, yields an average 0.0057W/m^2 averaged over the 57 year period.
Not going to worry over this one bit

richard verney
The reason the oceans don’t freeze is because water that gets colder gets denser and sinks. Then warmer water takes its place. That is why the surface of a pond freezes but you can still ice fish 🙂

It is worth re reading Willis’ previous post on Levitus.
It is also worth noting the comment made by Manfred (see his post of May 10, 2013 at 7:46 pm). It is so important that I set it out again in full:
“Just to show how implausible the 1 E23 Joules increase during the approx. 2 years around 2003 is:
Global ocean surface is 361 E12 m2.
2 years have 63 E6 seconds.
That means average heat uptake of oceans must have been
1E23 Watt *s / (361 E12 m2 * 63 E6 s)
= 4.4 W /m2 in the 2 years around 2003.
Compare this with with the IPCC AR4 estimate of ocean heat uptake of 0.2 W/m2.
There is no way that oceans took up as much heat in 2 years around 2003 as in all other years between 1970-2010 combined (see figure 2).”

This is probably a dopey comment. But I’m far from convinced anyone really knows much about temperature or heat in the oceans. ARGO hasn’t been going long enough and there aren’t enough of them.
And the people beating the scare drums are proven incompetent liars.
But what about heat coming up from the core?
Doesn’t that matter? There was a paper earlier this year suggesting a core temperature of 6,000ºC. Instead of 5,000ºC aassumed previously by everyone except Al Gore. Doesn’t this make a difference? What about all those pesky vents?
Not sure about ocean temperatures 2,000 m deep (or much more). Don’t think it is all that hot.
1,000 m down a coal mine is bloody hot.
Just a thought.

2 conclusions
1. If there is more heat going into the deep ocean, the body of water to be heated is much larger than previously thought, requiring less surface warming and a lower sensitivity.
2. As temperature increases in deep ocean are only of the order of hundredths of a degree since 1750, that heat can never recombine to generate a warming of say additonal 1 degree on the surface once deep water upwells. Entropy cannot be reduced.
Therefore heat going into deep ocean is not much different from going back to space.

Great post and excellent observation, unexpected oddities are a fecund source of new discovery. So the thermal budget associated with measured ocean temperature changes is small and insignificant? Reflecting on this, the word that comes to me is thermocline. When I was studying oceanography at Uni back in the early 80’s, the thermocline was presented as a central feature and impassible obstacle in ocean heat dynamics. There is surface vertical mixing above it, and deep circulation below it, but not much exchange across this sharp thermal barrier.
but like so much historic established research this understanding of the thermocline has been brushed aside by “climate science”. Now we are told that large amounts of peccatogenic heat can fly down in practically real time from the atmosphere to 2000m ocean depths without any thought of obstruction by the thermocline.
However, Willis’ finding of only small heat changes measured in the oceans suggests that the thermocline might indeed be a real barrier, and that thermal budget above it and maybe below it also is something of a zero sum game. Are SSTs hot? This is from stratification meaning that deeper down it remains colder. Vice versa when above-thermocline mixing causes cooler SSTs. So Willis’ data may point to a damping and stabilising role of the thermocline.
This combined with the gigantic heat capacity of the oceans may mean one has to look to century and millenial timescales to notice the oceans’ thermal dynamics.

serious error in the trend calculation here. i find
0.23 plus-or-minus 0.02 W/m2 (2-sigma)
which is easily statistically significant.
REPLY: Stan, show your work. Just saying there is an error with out showing how/why is meaningless – Anthony

Kristian says:
June 19, 2013 at 12:42 pm
“I’m not the one not getting (or simply misrepresenting) what the basic thermodynamic concept of ‘heat’ is and means.”
Um, yes you are. I am the third or fourth person to call you out on it. I’m pretty sure we are all non-warmists. You are not helping us. You are making long posts which thereby become representative to onlookers, and paint us all in a bad light. Please stop.

Bob Tisdale says:
June 19, 2013 at 9:11 am
“http://i42.tinypic.com/347d1xl.jpg”
Good graph.
Info like that plot tends not to be posted in a location many readers would see but should be. That shows the claimed actual temperature variation in Kelvin, amounting to a few thousandths of a degree over the years and decades, not converted to another metric hiding how tiny it is. To place much stock in trusting such, one would have to believe that temperature over that volume of ocean is both measured with 0.001K level accuracy and so reliably reported, at the same time even something with far more potential independent verification, reported U.S. surface temperature history, has 0.3+K variation.*
*
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/fig1x.gif
…is very contradictory to
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.D.gif
…as the former shows the 5-year mean of U.S. surface temperature was 0.4 degrees Celsius colder during the local high in the 1980s than during the high in the 1930s, but the latter had those two times under 0.1 degrees Celsius apart in the same 5-year mean.
Contradiction is further illustrated about two-thirds of the way down in http://s9.postimg.org/3whiqcrov/climate.gif which enlarges on click, with lines drawn to be more blatant.

Bart says, June 19, 2013 at 2:13 pm:
“Um, yes you are. I am the third or fourth person to call you out on it.”
Calling me out on what, Bart? You’re calling but you’re not showing anything.
What is ‘heat’ to you, Bart? Does it fly around in every direction? Show me how my definition of ‘heat’ goes against the physical definition. Show me how the atmosphere is a source of heat for the surface, how it transfers heat downwards. Do that instead of submitting meaningsless, unsubstantiated “Um, yes you are” comments …

Thanks Willis,
Excellent post along with some good comments. Particularly like your energy explanation. Was working on one myself for the same reason but yours was way better.

w:
so you agree, ocean warming is highly statistically significant for the 0-700 m region.
and for the 0-2000 m region, there is warming but the data is insufficient to conclude that at the 95% confidence level.

and, your methodology is flawed.
you aren’t calculating the trend of OHC, you are calculating the trend of the derivative of OHC. that is a very different thing.
to find if a body of water is warming, i.e. if the amount of heat Q it contains is increasing, you would calculate dQ/dt. that’s the slope of OHC(t).
but you have first calculated (essentially) d(OHC)/dt for each year, then calculated the slope of *that*. That’s more like the 2nd derivative, which you have found to be positive (but at some CL lower than 95%) — i.e that the rate of increase is (most probably) increasing.
a proper calculation of the linear trend of OHC for the 0-2000 region gives 0.27 plusmn 0.01 (1-sigma, no autocorrelation, entire Earth area). autocorrelation will increase sigma by a factor of sqrt((n_eff-2)/(n-2)), where n_eff can be calculated by your Nychka method. that’s a factor of (i’m guessing; i haven’t calculated the lag-1 correlation coefficient) 3 or so, but it’s certainly far less than 27/2, which means the trend in OHC is easily statistically signficant at the 2-sigma level.
conclusion: the 0-2000 m region of the ocean is most definitely warming.

w: the question isn’t really about your statistics, it’s about your physics.
you are calculating the trend of d(OHC)/dt, not the trend of OHC.

i am using the pentadal 0-2000 m dataset:
http://data.nodc.noaa.gov/woa/DATA_ANALYSIS/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/DATA/basin/pentad/pent_h22-w0-2000m.dat
but the question isn’t about the data, but your interpretation of it (i.e. the physics), which you have badly muffed.

what’s more, it’s *obvious* that you’re wrong. anyone can look at the graph of pentadal 0-2000 m OHC and see that it is increasing in an obviously statistically significant manner.
it’s the graph #2 here:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/

I guess I’m pretty dumb as I had never though of it this way
Judith Curry – “Climate etc” in her very recent post; “The New Republic on the ‘pause’” has this to say in her own comments.
[quote]Global warming is pretty much defined in context of the mean surface temperature. People live on the surface, not in the ocean below 700 m. Yes, warming the ocean interior will cause some sea level rise associated with thermal expansion. But this line of argument that warming in the deep ocean will change the climate (presumably due to changes in the ocean circulation) really just supports the argument for ocean circulations being a primary driver for climate (the natural variability hypothesis promoted by many skeptics).[ end]
If Trenberth’s missing heat is going into the oceans then the oceans are the main controllers of the global climate as they absorb, smooth out and transfer heat around the planet.
And when that “dangerous” heat is again released as promised by Trenberth, Hansen and etc, it is the Oceans that will again be controlling the global temperatures and climate.
Where does CO2 fit into that except in a minor and / or subsidiary role?
1 / If the missing heat is going into the oceans it’s not CO2 but the oceans that are the main controlling factor of the global climate [ nothing much new there, ]
2 / Or Trenberth’s “missing heat” has just gone plain missing and nobody yet knows why.
Or far more likely, that “missing heat” was never there to actually go missing.
The solar guys are probably the closest to the answers to the “missing heat” question.
All just another blatantly biased example of climate model vapourware and climate warming scientists running around as all their previous theories fail, with yet another hypothesis looking for an excuse to exist..
.

w: here’s an explanation more in the language you’ve used.
you’ve shown there is a small trend in the annual forcing, that isn’t statistically significant at the 2-sigma level (but is at some lower level).
but even an unchanging forcing, i.e. a constant forcing, means the ocean is warming — some number of W/m2 is going into the ocean on a constant basis. more joules every second.
that *heats* the ocean, until the forcing=0.
a zero *forcing* keeps the ocean at a constant temperature (i.e. constant OHC), not a constant forcing.
you haven’t understood what you’re really calculating. this is a wrong post all around.

Well Ximinyr,
I am pretty sure that if the ocean heat content has an average effect of increasing the averaged temperature of the ocean by less than a .1 degree C over the course of 60+ years; for most of that time we were taking a very small number of measurements; and those measurements were taken had a greater uncertainty than .1 degree C than this is logically not significant.
If you have to take a measurement such as the oceans temperature and turn it into energy and then graph it so it looks huge and significant your not doing anyone any favors. Particularly if the data it is based on is not statistically significant.

The AGW paradigm of the ocean is ludicrously simplistic. It treats the oceans as a passive puddle. Only external “forcing” (what a deeply ignorant word) can change its temperature and heat content. However the oceans own internal dynamics with oscillations on century and millenial scales drive heat and temperature changes in the upper ocean, bearing in mind the overwhelming majority of climatic heat content being in the ocean. Measured temperature trends in the upper ocean allow very little if anything to be concluded about in-out heat budget.

Ximinyr says:
June 19, 2013 at 7:04 pm
you are calculating the trend of d(OHC)/dt, not the trend of OHC
—————————
Yes, because Willis was talking about d(OHC)/dt, What is your point ???
The trend in OHC is approx. equal to the mean, also given in figure 1. Its all there…

Why bother to entertain the change in subject? The climate scientists said temperature was going up and would continue to rise. Hockey stick anyone. They did not say heat content would rise like a hockey stick. Temperature and heat are two different things. If they want to discuss ocean heat then say fine first lets discuss land and atmosphere heat rise from 1900. Anthony’s graph show no rapid rise in land heat content.

Willis,
Another good post, and good responses to other commenters. Many thanks.

Willis Eschenbach says, June 19, 2013 at 10:08 pm:
Yes, always the same old bluster without substance when entering this subject: “You don’t know physics! Your ideas are deeply flawed! Go read a textbook and learn something! All physicists disagree with you!” And so on and so forth.
And that’s that.
Could you rather than rambling please address what I asked from Bart upthread?
“What is ‘heat’ to you? Does it fly around in every direction? Show me how my definition of ‘heat’ goes against the agreed upon physical definition. Show me how the atmosphere is a source of heat for the surface, how it transfers heat downwards.”
I have no problem admitting when I’m wrong, Willis. I am not wrong on this one.
I will however concede one point. I shouldn’t have quoted that whole paragraph of yours when claiming my argument didn’t oppose it. I was actually referring only to the last line: “Heat, on the other hand, is a NET energy flow.”
How does what I’ve written above go against this notion?
You mix up individual and opposing energy fluxes in an exchange between two systems and the ‘net’ flux between them, the heat transfer. Only heat transfer transfers … heat (increase in internal energy for the cool system, decrease in internal energy for the warm system).
There is nothing novel in my definition of heat, Willis. Heat is energy transferred from a hot to a cold system. This transfer (the ‘net’ flow of energy) only goes one way. Pertaining to the radiative interaction between Earth’s surface and Earth’s atmosphere, the transfer goes UP and only up.
You can look this up anywhere. This is not a warped idea om mine.
What happens when you introduce the upwelling and downwelling IR fluxes between surface and atmosphere in the energy budget diagrams, is that you confuse people’s perception of what is actually physically going on. You give the impression that the atmospheric flux is equivalent to the solar flux. It is not. The inferred 324 flux is not an independent, extra flux of energy coming down to the surface, like the solar flux. The 324 W/m^2 down could not increase the internal energy of the surface, and therefore could not heat it, because on average it would always be opposed by a larger flux going up (the equally inferred 390 W/m^2 flux). The 324 is the LESSER PART of an assumed continuous IR exchange between the two systems, the result of which is an upward radiative heat flux of 66 W/m^2. (Well, since you’re seemingly so against the term ‘heat flux’, then use the term ‘net energy flux’ instead.) You cannot include the one and exclude the other. They are two sides of the same coin (exchange process).
In what way is this wrong, Willis?

Willis Eschenbach says:
June 19, 2013 at 10:57 am
Eric H. says:
June 19, 2013 at 6:38 am
Thanks Willis,
Some of my own ponderings: 1) If it cannot be shown that CO2 is heating the ocean then CAGW is done as a theory. 2) LWIR is only capable of penetrating water at a depth of millimeters and the amount of heat transfer rate change from an increase in CO2s LWIR is dwarfed by the amount of LWIR from clouds. 3) SWR can penetrate the ocean to a depth of 30 meters (if my memory serves) and changes in cloudiness and/or solar activity would have a much greater impact to OHC than LWIR from all sources. Is this correct?
Not really, or at least that’s not all there is to it. Once it strikes the ocean, long-wave infra-red (LWIR) is converted from radiant energy to thermal energy, so it adds energy to the ocean. See my post Radiating The Ocean for a “full and frank” discussion of the issues.
w.
Thanks Willis and Ian for your responses but I am not trying to argue that LWIR cannot heat the ocean my question is one of effectiveness which I apologize if this was lost in my post. The point I was trying to make is that changes in solar output and/or cloudiness are better explanations for an increase in OHC than CO2 due to a greater ability of solar and clouds to raise ocean temperatures. If clouds and solar cannot be ruled out then CO2 cannot logically be the cause. If CO2 can’t be shown to be the cause of increased OHC then CO2 cannot be the driver of climate change…
What I appear to have wrong was my thought that SWR was a greater forcing than LWIR which I incorrectly thought was due to penetration:
“So if the DLR isn’t heating the ocean, with heat gains of only the solar 170 w/m2 and losses of 390 w/m2 … then why isn’t the ocean an ice-cube?”
Again, thanks for the info, Eric

Willis, you say:
“[Heat] is a concept, not a physical flow, so it can’t “fly around” anywhere. […] There is no such thing as a “radiative heat flux”. There are only radiative flows of energy, not of heat. The radiative energy flows in both directs between two objects like say the atmosphere and the surface. The NET of these two energy flows to and from a given body is called heat.”
Oh my. I see your confusion. Wow. Just wow. Listen, ‘heat’ is what we actually and physically measure, Willis. We cannot physically separate and detect individual opposing flows of energy in a radiative field between objects, only the spontaneous flow of heat that results from temperature gradient from hotter to colder. Those individual fluxes are only inferred, assumed.
‘Heat’ is the physical flow. The ‘radiative flows of energy’, the ‘exchange’, is the concept.
You’ve got it all turned on its head.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrgeometer#Measurement_of_long_wave_downward_radiation
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/pyrgeometers-untangled/

From Eric H. on June 20, 2013 at 2:19 am:

The point I was trying to make is that changes in solar output and/or cloudiness are better explanations for an increase in OHC than CO2 due to a greater ability of solar and clouds to raise ocean temperatures. If clouds and solar cannot be ruled out then CO2 cannot logically be the cause.

Never be a doctor, especially an ER doctor. If hepatitis and acetaminophen overdose cannot be ruled out then cirrhosis cannot logically be the cause of liver failure?
Of course in the real world it could be all three at once.

If CO2 can’t be shown to be the cause of increased OHC then CO2 cannot be the driver of climate change…

CO₂ could be the bad front end alignment. As in, it is not the driver, the driver determines where the car’s going. But it can be a force the driver has to counteract, and if the hands are off the steering wheel then instead of going straight the car will drift left.

Kristian says:
June 20, 2013 at 2:39 am
///////////////////
It is because people conflate slowing the heat loss with warming.
A warmer atmosphere may slow the heat loss from the surface, but it does not warm the surface. Save in rare cases of a very warm wind where the wind is warmer than the ground below, all warming (ignoring geothermal) comes from the sun (and, of course, the sun was the source of the warm wind),
Unfortunately, some people give an example of clouds forming at night warming the surface below, as if clouds were heaters (when they are not).
Warming, and slowing heat loss are different processes, and it is important not to conflate one with the other.

Willis Eschenbach says:
June 20, 2013 at 2:20 am
///////////////////////////////
Willis
Further to your explanation above.
Lets say that the facts are that YOU has no money at all and therefore has nothing from which to give ME anything, but there is an arrangement that at in the early morning ME gives to YOU his payment, and at the end of the day YOU gives to ME his payment. The arrangement can work because ME is effectively funding everything. IF YOU had to make the payment before ME handed over any money, the arrangement would fail instantaneously.
Now lets consider the position in relation to K&T energy budget where Surface absorbed solar is 168 Wper sqm .and where atmospheric back radiation is 324 Wper sqm. Lets say the atmosphere is YOU and the surface absorbed solar is ME.
On day 1, the very first day that Earth acquired an atmosphere, the atmoshere (YOU) has an empty bank. It has nothing to to give to the surface (ME). At the beginning of the day, ME gives to YOU 168 Wper sqm, being all the solar that it was able to absorb. At the end of the day, YOU is obliged to make his payment. He only has 168 Wper sqm being the payment made by the surfaced absorbed solar, so all he can pay to ME is 168 Wper sqm; he is unable to pay 324 Wper sqm because he does not start with anything in his kitty.
The example you gave works fine where ME is richer than YOU, or where YOU actually has something in his pocket with which to fund his payment independently of the payment made by ME. But is falls down IF those facts are not met.
The problem in the real world is that the only source of revenue is the sun,so how can the atmosphere pay more than it receives.
It is like government expenditure. Lets say a government cannot borrow. The only asset that the government has is tax revenues. How can it spend more than it receives in tax?
It is the problem we have in the UK. Some consider the public sector to be a wealth generator. They consider that the government should employ more people and this will help the government since the people it employs will pay tax. They consider it to be self financing.
In reality the only wealth generator is the private sector. It is the private sector that pay for everything. It is taxes taken from the private sector that enable the government to employ some people in the public sector. Of course the government does not have to pay the full gross wage of those it employs on the public sector, it only pays the net pay, ie., after the public sector workers have paid their tax. But none of the tax paid by the public sector workers enables the government to employ public sector workers. It is the tax paid by the private sector that enables this.
In short, you can’t spend what you do not have. It is difficult to see how the atmosphere can spend more than it receives from solar (surface absorbed solar which the surface radiates) when the only source of revenue into the system is from the sun.

willis wrote:
It is also why Mr. X is wrong when he claims that you can determine significance by looking at a graph.
i first gave the calculation, with uncertainty, then noted that eyeballing (intuition) clearly backs that up. Anyone can look at that graph of 58 points and see that it clearly has a positive slope.
But the more important point is that you have completely misunderstood what it is you’re calculation, which is not the trend in OHC but the trend in d(OHC)/dt.
Your entire post is badly wrong.

From Eric H. on June 20, 2013 at 3:08 am:

So the sun and clouds (drivers) are responding to CO2 (bad alignment)? How does that work exactly?

Is it that hard for you to figure out?
Out here in the real world, we’ve been doing something horrendously old-fashioned, the taking of actual measurements and making deductions based on empirical evidence. From this we find the transient climate sensitivity (aka climate response) to further atmospheric CO₂ concentration increases is basically negligible, with the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ha ha, like equilibrium will happen anytime this millennium) likewise negligible to easily manageable.
But that’s in a system filled with feedbacks, overwhelmingly negative, that work to maintain the temperature, as found in the many different temperature regions and local climates with certain processes that have global effects, etc.
What would happen without them? Without the feedbacks, including clouds which you’ve mislabeled as a driver though they form in response to other things, what’s the effect of CO₂?
We’re shooting for a constant global average temperature. Don’t higher concentrations of CO₂ tend to bring about higher temperatures, when feedbacks aren’t countering that force?
Let’s say without the feedbacks, the “ideal” concentration for the preferred global average temperature was 300 parts per million (volume). Wouldn’t 400ppmv cause a higher temperature?
So there’s the analogy. 300ppmv CO₂ would be good alignment, the climate would keep going straight without feedbacks. 400ppmv would be bad alignment, the climate would want to drift warmer. But with feedbacks, the climate could still be going straight at 400ppmv because the feedbacks would be counteracting the bad alignment.

If your car cranks and doesn’t start you check for fuel and spark first (primary drivers of combustion) you don’t start by changing the MAF sensor.

The Mass Air Flow sensor would be very low on the list of anything to check, as the worst that should happen if that goes bad is the computer will switch to the less-economical “static” setting where it computes with stored presets rather than dynamically with “live” measurements. These newfangled “modern” cars will also likely signal a problem, with a “check engine” light or similar, and plugging in the diagnostic scanner should quickly reveal that particular problem.

If fuel and spark cannot be ruled out then the MAF sensor cannot logically be determined to be the cause.

Hopefully you realize a diesel engine could be involved which doesn’t require spark.
With today’s vehicles, spark is rarely an issue, and good chance you’ll find individual ignition coils for each cylinder rather than a single central coil with a distributor, thus it is very likely you’ll have cylinders firing. If there are no cylinders firing then it’s possibly a loose connector, or a blown fuse, but also possibly a computer failure.
As long as there’s fuel in the tank showing on the fuel gauge, you likely have fuel. With in-tank electric pumps it’s easy to check for fuel at the relief valve on the fuel rail, but there’s normally a sensor checking that anyway. But even then, with injectors on every cylinder, for no cylinders to fire indicates a possible loose connector, or a blown fuse, but also possibly a computer failure.
Frankly, outside of the lawn tractor, the only vehicle I have that I have had a problem with starting for a long time, is an old Ford pickup with a V8 from the glory days of the early 1980’s when vacuum controls on carbureted engines reached their pinnacle of complexity before makers surrendered to practicality and went with fuel injection. Which has the brown grommet Ford solid-state ignition module, much less common than the blue grommet, which I replaced soon after getting the truck when the old module melted out. The mechanical fuel pump might die, but that’d more likely be at full-out highway speeds rather than slow starting.
If that truck doesn’t start, I just pump the pedal a lot more, and play with the gas pedal a lot more, trying to get it to start firing at least a little before the battery dies… Because it’s the computer that’s keeping it from starting, and I have to basically override the emission controls.
So to summarize, if a vehicle doesn’t start these days, fuel and spark are not the first things to check. Indeed, the most likely problem is electrical/electronic, plug in the diagnostic scanner, available at auto parts stores for about $90 and up depending on the frills. Which will report on many things, including the MAF sensor, at once. Thus the first thing to check, is what does the car think the problem is.

Or perhaps we should just avoid bad analogies?

Please do so, yours was terribly screwed up.

also willis, your graph is wrongly labeled. you’re not calculating the annual forcing that’s gone into/out of the ocean, but into/out of the top 2000 m of the ocean.
heat may well be going deeper into the ocean, below 2000 m. average ocean depth is about 4000 meters.

ferd berple says:
Call me when the oceans are jacuzzi warm.
silly. tell us, what do you think is the (approximate) difference in average ocean temperature between a glacial and an interglacial period?

richard verney says:
June 20, 2013 at 4:32 am
The problem in the real world is that the only source of revenue is the sun,so how can the atmosphere pay more than it receives.
=============
surface warming can only increase if the atmosphere is made cooler. otherwise, energy is being created out of nothing.
So, for example, GHG in the atmosphere can remove energy by conduction from the surrounding air, and radiate this to the surface and space. This will cool the atmosphere while warming the surface. Which is what we observe, the atmosphere is cooler than the surface, rather than isothermal as one would expect without GHG.
However, there is a problem with this. As the surface warms and the atmosphere cools, this sets up convection which works to return the atmosphere to the same temperature as the surface. The stronger the atmospheric cooling and surface warming effect of GHG, the stronger the vertical circulation to remove the effects of GHG.
This negative feedback is inherent in the climate system. The limiting factor is the force of gravity, which determines the maximum acceleration of the atmosphere downward, which limits the conversion of PE into KE, which determines the dry air lapse rate.

Willis,
I understand the laboratory accuracy of the ARGO floats. The issue as I see it is the previous generation of methods for measuring the ocean used sensors of similar accuracy. Yet the ocean apparently cooled once ARGO was fully deployed. So different instruments with calibrated sensors of relatively similar design showed different enough results to go from warming to cooling just based on the homogenous method of sampling the ARGO floats use.
I think this highlights your point that the forcing or for that matter OHC change is not statistically significant. The data record is particularly problematic due to small sample size and a wide range of methods, sensors and equipment to take those samples over the graphs some 60 years of data. Which makes the overall error of the entire record large, very large.
This is also a problem for ARGO because there isn’t a really good way to test their operational accuracy in the lab. If I had the roughly 20k it would cost to throw about I would take a ARGO float out and test it in the OCEAN versus a suspended TCD to see if the float itself creates error as it operates. This would be pretty hard to accomplish but given some time and experimentation I think you could get an idea of accuracy. If ARGO were to be confirmed to an accuracy of .005C through out its operational range through rigorous operational testing then the rest of the record is essentially junk. In that case we should deploy more of the little devils and kick back for about 20 years to get a good idea of what is going on. Particularly since there is a new model coming out that is capable of doing 6000M.

And the beat goes on–see this interview of Hans von Storch in
the online edition of Der Spiegel. (Don’t worry, it’s
been translated to English.)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-hans-von-storch-on-problems-with-climate-change-models-a-906721.html
Note the careful phrasing, but the rigid adherence to the defense of
AGW:
— Simulations show a “pause” in global warming lasting 15 years or
longer less than 2% of the time, BUT–“… in five years, at the latest, we
will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with
our climate models.” Move the goalposts again, why don’t you?
— “[Ocean] Temperatures at depths greater than 700 meters (2,300 feet)
appear to have increased more than ever before.”
— “The IPCC’s predictions have been conservative. And, considering the
uncertainties, I think this is correct.”
— Asked if there were findings related to global warming that worried him:
“The potential acidification of the oceans due to CO2 entering them
from the atmosphere. This is a phenomenon that seems sinister to me…”

Manfred is correct.
Manfred is incorrect.
Look, this isn’t difficult. You have calculated the annual change in OHC, and taken the trend of that.
That is not the trend of OHC.
The function f(x)=x has a trend of 1.
But you have plotted the point-by-point difference in f(x), which are the points {1,1,1,1,1,…}, and taken the trend OF THAT, which is obviously zero.
It’s obvious — your calculated trends in forcing are essentially the 2nd derivative of OHC, not the 1st derivative.

Willis wrote:
Manfred is correct. The graph is of the first derivative of OHC, in units of W/m2.
The points in the graph are the value of the first derivative of OHC(t).
Hence, its trend is the second derivative. Obviously.
My example with OHC(Y) just above makes this very clear.

Instead, the OHC represents the ongoing balance between two very large flows—the flow of sunlight and longwave radiation into the ocean, and the same sized flow of energy out of the ocean in the form of radiation, conduction to the atmosphere, and evaporation.
again, you are ignoring heat that travels out the bottom of the 0-2000 m layer.

Willis: you are getting lost in the statistics.
Again: you aren’t calculating the trend in OHC!
you are calculating the trend of its derivative.
these two things have very different statistical results, because the first is increasing strongly, but the second isn’t.
that’s hardly surprising — that the 2nd derivative fluctuates more than the 1st derivative. differences of differences often do.
the problem is with your understanding of the data, not the statistics. look at my example at 10:09 am above, for OHC(Y)=kY. This is a clean example where statistics can be ignored.
What does your methodology, as in your post, predict for the trend in forcing?

Willis Eschenbach says:
June 20, 2013 at 10:33 am
“So there are four examples of downward transport mechanisms, where you said there were none.”
OK, you’ve made your point. There are avenues for deep water mixing of upper heated levels. However, it still does not jibe with me.
I grasp what you are saying with the following analogy. You have a bucket of clear water. You take a pitcher and, from a height, start pouring blue tinted water in. By the force of gravity, it plunges down in a narrow channel, creating a localized gradient from deep blue at the surface to lighter blue with depth. But, that gradient doesn’t exist everywhere, so on average, as the plume spreads out below, you get bluer depths than in the upper layers.
Here’s where I see that scenario failing to match the real world. Even though there is mixing, there is nothing like a focused jet of tinted waters rocketing to the depths. Moreover, we are concerned specifically with heat generated by excess CO2, and that is not coming in at one particular focal point, but broadly distributed over the entire body of oceans.
So, it’s more like raining blue tinted water over the entire bucket, and then swirling a portion of the surface downward in a whirlpool eddy. Does this create a deeper blue at depth than in the upper layers? I have difficulty in imagining that.

Bart, I don’t immediately know the answer to your question, which is a good one as the random walk example makes clear.
Intuition often fails when dealing with autocorrelation, but I have an intuitive sense, for whatever that’s worth, that the slope of a set of nearly linear points can be statistically significant while the slope of the set of their differences may be statistically near zero.
I just have a very hard time believing that the NOAA plot of 0-2000 m OHC as a function of time does not have a statistically significant positive slope, even with autocorrelation. I could be convinced if (1) someone did a calculation of the slope using the OHC data directly, and not the slope of their differences, and (2) they used a better model for the autocorrelation than the Nychka equation.

Ximinyr says:
June 20, 2013 at 12:23 pm
“…I have an intuitive sense, for whatever that’s worth, that the slope of a set of nearly linear points can be statistically significant while the [mean] of the set of their differences may be statistically near zero.”
Take a closer look at the plot of samples of Brownian motion at the Wikipedia link I gave previously. Are there periods in which there appear to be a linear slopes? Are they real?

Willis’ top post: “..heat content of the global 0-2000 metre layer of the ocean…”, “” …change in heat content of the upper ocean..”, “..move that much heat into or out of the ocean…”,”..Figure 1 gives the results, where heat going into the ocean…”
1) Fig. 1 shows energy flux density vs. time not heat vs. time; the caloric theory had some usefulness in its time but like slide rules, we have moved on to energy flux densities as shown.
2) “..the energy that’s gone into or come out of the ocean on an annual basis” – that’s better, like calculators replacing slide rules.
Willis’ reply to Kristian 6/20 2:03am:
“Heat ….is a concept, not a physical..”
Think Willis will then agree that the term “energy” is the more appropriate physical term to use in the top post e.g. “…energy content of the global ocean”, “…change in energy content…”, “…move that much energy…” are more modern & correct than “heat content”. And better understood.
So agree, the difference in term causes much unneeded electron death. And much unneeded blog reader irritation.

Willis wrote:
I’ve shown that in excruciating mathematical detail above.
No, you’re applied some formulas, without understanding what they meant or their limitations.
In particular, the Nychka equation is inapplicable here. The document you referenced even says it doesn’t work when n_eff < 6.

Willis wrote:
What I said in the post and the comments is that the data are inadequate to determine a trend in either the OHC, or in the forcing responsible for the changes in the OHC.
Where did you calculate the statistics for the trend in OHC?
All I see is the trend in its annual change. Very different.

Willis wrote:
So my methodology doesn’t predict anything about the trend in forcing.
Does your own spreadsheet (cell P6) not say,
“”Mean: 0.2 ± 0.3 W/m2 (95%CI)
Trend: 0.1 ± 0.2 W/m2 per decade (95%CI)
Neither mean nor trend is statistically significant.””
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/96723180/Levitus%20Forcing.xlsx

Bart says;
,I.The first one is how small the average value of the forcing actually is. On average, little energy is going into the ocean, only two-tenths of a watt per square metre.
Willis isn’t calculating any “forcing.” For one thing he ignores heat moving into or out of the 2000 m layer of the ocean. In any case, heat transport is a “forcing” — it is just an exchange of heat. Forcings happen at the TOA.

Ximinyr says:
June 20, 2013 at 2:38 pm
You appear to somehow be editing out the part you don’t want to see. The average of what Willis calls “forcing” is indistinguishable from zero. Thus, the slope in OHC is indistinguishable from zero, too. What Willis is saying is that, as in the random walk example I provided earlier, there is no assurance that the slope in OHC is not a spurious, statistical artifact. At least, that is how I read it.
Willis then goes on to say that the trend is also statistically indistinguishable from zero. But, that is just icing on the cake.

Willis
I’ve just downloaded and had a very quick look at your spreadsheet. I’ll have a closer look later. But something caught my attention. Now It’s possible I’ve misunderstood exactly what each part of SS is calculating but I notice that Cell F3 contains the value 5.11E+14. Cell P3 contains the text “m2/surface” which I assume refers to the value in F3.
It’s just that the total surface area of the earth, I believe, is about 510 million sq km which looks pretty close to your F3 value. Is this what you intend – or do you really want to use the surface area of the ocean which is about 70% of this value.
sorry if I haven’t understood what’s going on. .

John Finn says:
It’s just that the total surface area of the earth, I believe, is about 510 million sq km which looks pretty close to your F3 value. Is this what you intend – or do you really want to use the surface area of the ocean which is about 70% of this value.
It’s somewhat a matter of taste. Over 90% of the Earth’s extra heat is going into the oceans, so dividing by the total area of the Earth would seem to make sense. On the other hand, it’s explicitedly going into the ocean, so why not use it’s area?
It’s easy to transition between the two, so it’s really a mote point.

ferd berple says:
June 20, 2013 at 6:37 am
Last time I dipped my toe in the ocean it was way too cold. Maybe if you live in the tropics the oceans are barely warm enough to go swimming. Everywhere else and you risk dying of exposure with anything more than a quick dip.
——————————————————-
Not quite true, Ferd. I have been in the ocean off Perth, Western Australia (31.9 degrees S) in summer, and the water was tepid. Summer currents bring this water a long way beyond the tropics.
It is certainly true that there is a lot of cold and dangerous ocean on the planet. But, given that the Pacific is the largest of them all, and most of it is in tropical or temperate zones, things are not quite as bad as you claim. The Indian Ocean – which Perth adjoins – is also substantial, and contains significant amounts of (to me) water which is like a bath you need to get out of.

From Eric H. on June 20, 2013 at 10:58 am:

Actually it is. Can you please provide a reference that shows the sun responding to CO2? I would love to read it.

Actually that comes from what you said just before, “So the sun and clouds (drivers) are responding to CO2 (bad alignment)? How does that work exactly?” You mangled my clear analogy and assigned “sun and clouds” as drivers. My apologies for fleshing out my analogy as I intended rather than address the mangling.
Frankly, after reading this stuff for this long, I doubt there’s any particular thing that can be called a “driver”. Sure, the Sun provides the energy, but there are many feedback mechanisms, with many interconnections, that regulate how much solar energy is absorbed, rejected, and re-emitted. There are compensation mechanisms, including biological, that adapt to variances in solar output over time and maintain temperatures.
The climate travels in a rut. Unless it drops into the deeper rut of glaciation, where it’ll travel much longer.
It’s feedbacks on feedbacks, feedbacks all the way down.

I read climate blogs because the debate and science interests me. I seldom post and when I do I do so respectfully and I am usually asking questions.

I look for the quirks, the snags, where what should be the smooth flow of logic gets hung up. I comment to show those glitches, make them apparent to those who don’t realize they’re there.

Unlike you, I don’t harass others and engage in petty fights in order to try and look smart, in short kadaka, I don’t wrestle with pigs and I don’t argue with idiots.
I am done with you,

Thus you imply I am both an idiot and a pig. But you have done so respectfully, as is your wont when posting. I appreciate your respectfulness.

PS I have over 30 years experience in auto mechanics… as a profession, business, and hobby…Don’t quit your day job.

Gee, I have about that long myself, but I do it for survival, couldn’t and can’t afford to run to the repair shop every time. I remember putting up a new power rack on my 1978 Ford Fairmont, in winter, with snow so deep outside I had to cut a path through the snow, it was up to the door handles, to get it to the front of the garage, where I worked underneath on a tarp on snow while wearing several layers. Fun times. It’s much better to break out the engine hoist and rebuild an engine in summer.
So you couldn’t point to anything specifically wrong with what I said? Oh well, thanks for the employment advice. You presented it quite respectfully.

Is Willis really going to ignore the OHC(Y)=kY example, that disproves his method?

David Riser wrote:
I think Willis has shown that the forcing that is “causing it” is actually indistinguishable from zero.
Wow — is there not a single person here who understands how to do basic functional algebra?
A “forcing” trend of 0 says nothing about the change in Ocean Heat Content.
The example OHC(Y)=kY shows this explicitedly.
Did anyone here study calculas, or at least algebra?

David Riser wrote:
Some ARGO’s were pulled out because they were too cool without doing anything other than tossing the cold readings other older instruments were adjusted cooler without any real onsite analysis.
Which buoys? Serial numbers? Where can I read a report on the particular buoys that were allegedly pulled?
Please let me know. Thanks.