Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
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. Lately there’s been much furor about what the Levitus ocean data says about how much energy has gone into heating the ocean, from the surface down to 2000 metres depth. I discussed some of these issues in The Layers of Meaning in Levitus.
I find this furor somewhat curious, in that the trends and variations in the heat content of the global 0-2000 metre layer of the ocean are so small. The size is disguised by the use of units of 10^22 joules of energy … not an easy one to wrap my head around. So what I’ve done is I’ve looked at the annual change in heat content of the upper ocean (0-2000m). Then I’ve calculated the global forcing (in watts per square metre, written here as “W/m2”) that would be necessary to move that much heat into or out of the ocean. Figure 1 gives the results, where heat going into the ocean is shown as a positive forcing, and heat coming out as a negative forcing.
Figure 1. Annual heat into/out of the ocean, in units of watts per square metre.
I found several things to be interesting about the energy that’s gone into or come out of the ocean on an annual basis.
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. In a world where the 24/7 average downwelling energy is about half a kilowatt per square metre, that’s tiny, lost in the noise. Nor does it portend much heating “in the pipeline”, whatever that may mean.
The second is that neither the average forcing, nor the trend in that forcing, are significantly different from zero. It’s somewhat of a surprise.
The third is that in addition to the mean not being significantly different from zero, only a few of the individual years have a forcing that is distinguishable from zero.
Those were a surprise because with all of the hollering about Trenberth’s missing heat and the Levitus ocean data, I’d expected to find that we could tell something from the Levitus’s numbers.
But unfortunately, there’s still way too much uncertainty to even tell if either the mean or the trend of the energy going into the ocean are different from zero … kinda limits our options when it comes to drawing conclusions.
w.
DATA: Ocean temperature figures are from NOAA, my spreadsheet is here.
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The forcings look ENSO ish; when ENSO3.4 is less than -0.5, 12 out of 14 of the forcing are positive (two are zero and two are slightly negative).
The positive nino34’s explain nothing (the r2 for the overall forcing:nino is only 0.1) however the state of Nino the year before/ the violence of the change seems important.
eg The negative relationship between nino34 and forcing is reduced if both this years and last years nino are postive – r2 about 42%
One can do a bit better if the annual change in Nino34 is included.
If the annual change in ocean energy content/forcing is dependent on Nino34 then the ocean heat content itself should be an accumulation of the Nino3.4 effect ??
Bart:
Willis did not find a zero forcing.
He found, in effect, a die that rolls on average 3.7, with a standard deviation of 0.3.
Would you ever place a bet on such a die? Of course not.
And I notice you, like Willis, continue to ignore the case of OHC(Y)=kY, which demonstrates his methodology completely fails in just the simpliest case.
How much longer will you, he, and David Riser ignore this?
Ximinyr says:
June 22, 2013 at 5:05 pm
“He found, in effect, a die that rolls on average 3.7, with a standard deviation of 0.3.”
You can reasonably argue about that. Which is why it baffles me why you are instead arguing that he didn’t claim it at all, which is a complete non-starter.
“And I notice you, like Willis, continue to ignore the case of OHC(Y)=kY…”
The mean of dOHC/dt is k. If k is statistically indistinguishable from zero, then the slope of OHC is indistinguishable from zero. QED. Why are you arguing this?
Bart says:
The mean of dOHC/dt is k.
Yes!
That’s exactly what I’ve been saying all along — Willis has plotted the *derivative* of OHC(t), which he calls a “forcing.” He finds it has a near-zero trend — that is, that the 2nd derivative of OHC(t) has a near-zero trend..
Yet clearly this ocean is warming!
That indicates his methodology is completely false — his interpretation of “forcing” is just wrong.
He thinks a forcing trend of zero means the ocean is not warming.
Yet clearly it can be warming!
He thinks a forcing trend of 0 means the ocean is not warming.
But this example shows it clearly *can* be warming.
Perhaps you’re finally starting to get it??
lgl says, June 22, 2013 at 9:10 am:
“So it’s the S-B law you are rejecting?”
No. I am not rejecting the S-B law. Any other strawmen you’d like to throw in …?
Ximinyr: I don’t believe that Willis is claiming that a lack of trend in the changes of OHC means that the world is not warming. This thread is based directly on the Levitus paper which clearly shows an accumulation of heat over its period. Given that, it is still an interesting question whether or not the warming of the ocean is *accelerating*.
I think you have a point that the use of forcing by Willis is confusing – what he really is getting at is the warming of the ocean. His calculation is very simple – (he takes the total change in heat content per year as reported in Levitus and divides it by the surface area of the Earth and the number of seconds in a year) – not much to disagree with there.
It seems to me that the interesting point that should’ve been made is that there is no *observable* acceleration in the warming of the ocean even though there *should be* given that there has been an accelaration in the forcing the Earth (as per the GISS forcing numbers (see Sheet1 column F of Willis’ spreadsheet). IOW, our predictions didn’t match our observations – an accelaration in forcing was not matched (well) in a similar accelation in the change of OHC.
Cheers, 🙂
Bart says, June 22, 2013 at 10:38 am:
“No, we are interested in how much energy is stored on the Earth. The average temperature on the Earth is related to how much energy is stored.”
I agree. And yet, the GHErad proponents keep claiming they can estimate the surface temperature of the Earth by simply looking at the fluxes coming in and going out. That’s the origin of what seems to be a deliberate and concocted state of confusion. Remove the inferred 390 and 324 fluxes to replace them with the actual 66 flux going up, and the deception and circular reasoning behind this approach becomes clear as day at once. The 390 & 324 individually don’t do anything. Only the ‘net’. So they have no function, no place in that budget diagram. Except to muddy the waters. To distort people’s perception and understanding of what is actually, physically going on in the Earth system.
And it’s clearly worked. Because everyone is buying it.
How is the atmosphere helping the storage of energy on Earth to build if there is balance between incoming and outgoing energy fluxes at all times, Bart? I’m not talking about transient imbalances which will always be there in the short term (geologically), the Earth system is a highly dynamic one. I’m talking about the general picture. The mean (longterm) energy budget between incoming and outgoing. It is at balance.
So how is energy building in the Earth system by way of restricting the outgoing energy? That’s the claim of the radiative GHE hypothesis, Bart. The atmosphere apparently let’s ‘all’ energy in, but slows the release back … This is a bogus claim. You only need to look at the budget in terms of ‘heat’ fluxes to see this. And that’s my point. 235 IN, 235 OUT at the ToA. 168 IN, 168 OUT at the surface. Where is the ‘letting all in but slowing the release out’ in all this? Where do you see it? Flux-wise.
The outgoing simply follows the incoming, Bart. It’s its slave. Our atmosphere reduces the incoming flux from the Sun reaching the surface as compared to the Moon (without atmosphere) by 44 %! And the surface in turn releases back out the entire absorbed solar flux, at the same rate.
How is this ‘letting all in but slowing the release out’? In what universe? They’ve got it all turned completely on its head.
So, we need to look beyond the radiative properties of the atmosphere to explain the mean surface temperature of our planet. That’s been my point all along.
Ximinyr says:
June 22, 2013 at 7:04 pm
“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying all along…”
Good grief, Dude. Yeah, I know what you’re saying. I’ve known what you are saying. I’ve repeated it back to you several times now. It holds no water.
I have given you three instances where Willis clearly states that the mean or average, i.e., the “k” value, is indistinguishable from zero.
You keep saying “He finds it has a near-zero trend”, but that is not ALL he said. In fact, it was stated secondarily. He specifically said the mean is indistinguishable from zero, as well as the trend.
Why do you keep editing this out?
I should add to that last comment that I am talking about energy gained and lost through radiation. Not through conduction/convection and evaporation. These latter ones after all are the mechanisms holding the key.
Kristian says:
June 22, 2013 at 11:31 pm
“How is the atmosphere helping the storage of energy on Earth to build if there is balance between incoming and outgoing energy fluxes at all times, Bart?”
Who says there is a “balance between incoming and outgoing energy fluxes at all times”? On what basis do you claim a long term balance? In the past century, and in the long term trend, the global temperature average has been going up, which indicates an imbalance somewhere.
It hasn’t been going up as much as the AGW proponents expected lately, and the long term trend is not due to CO2 forcing, as it has been going on for longer than CO2 could have been a significant forcing even if they were right. But up nevertheless.
Kristian
Of course you are rejecting the S-B law when claiming the 288K earth is only emitting 66 W/m2. It does not say “in a vacuum at 0 K”.
And you are rejecting all the measured emission spectra, even to be found here at WUWT; http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/10/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-emission-spectra/
so I’m asking again: Do you think they are just made up?
Chas
“If the annual change in ocean energy content/forcing is dependent on Nino34 then the ocean heat content itself should be an accumulation of the Nino3.4 effect ??”
Exactly, http://virakkraft.com/Radiative-imbalance-ENSO.png
lgl says, June 23, 2013 at 2:40 am:
“Of course you are rejecting the S-B law when claiming the 288K earth is only emitting 66 W/m2.”
Sigh. I do not ‘claim’ that the 288K surface of the Earth on average emits 66 W/m^2 of radiative heat, lgl. That is what it is emitting. It’s called ‘reality’, lgl. As opposed to ‘theoretical concepts’.
The S-B law works perfectly well … in the situations where it’s supposed to work. The surface of the Earth is not such a situation. It simply doesn’t apply. The convective losses of the Earth’s surface are easily large enough to throw way off the estimation of radiative loss, and the S-B result will therefore always be in error.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/stefan.html
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/cootime.html
“And you are rejecting all the measured emission spectra (…)”
Again, no. I’m not ‘rejecting’ them at all. I’m just informing you: They are not measured. They are derived from applying radiative heat transfer equations based on assumptions on the concept of energy exchange. There is nothing inherently wrong in that. The concept works. But what’s actually measured is the ‘heat transfer’.
Kristian
So you think you can just decide the S-B law does not apply at the Earths surface. Fine, dream on and let others deal with science.
The emission spectra are indeed being measured, using FTIRs for instance, http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0442(1995)008%3C0286%3ASLEITT%3E2.0.CO%3B2
but again, dream on.
lgl says, June 23, 2013 at 5:30 am:
Yes, lgl, you’re pretty clear evidence of the truth in the adage: Mundus vult decipi. ‘Verden vil bedras.’ Ergo decipiatur. ‘Så la den bedras.’
Pointless continuing this discussion …
Kristian says:
June 22, 2013 at 11:39 pm
Bart says:
June 22, 2013 at 11:45 pm
//////////////////////////////////
It is often claimed that pre the industrial era, CO2 levels have not changed significantly during the Holocene.
If GHGs have the ‘heat trapping’ effect claimed, how has the Earth shed the ‘heat’ that was present during the Holocene Optimum, or for that matter during the Minoan, Roaman and Medieval Warm Periods?
I have never seen anyone explain, in the light of the claimed ‘heat trapping’ properties of GHGs, how the ‘heat’ was lost, or where it went.
richard – The best basic, simplest explanation is the atm./surface interface planet wide energy balance 1st law:
energy flux density in – energy flux density out = 0
2nd law would be enforced by the ~g/Cp gradient temperature mean decline with height.
If the first balance term gets larger, the surface temperature responds – rises to make the 2nd term larger until = 0 again, the g/Cp gradient has a new starting temperature at h=0. And vice versa. Ad infinitum.
Satellites measure Teq.=255K, and thermometers measure surface mean Teq. = 288K today: h=0 starting point for g/Cp. The 33K would remain ad infinitum until input or output changes. Go back in history, project back satellites & thermometers would measure some different surface T means as planet wide infrared active gas changes, surface emissivity changes, net solar changes so the difference would not be 33K however it would still be significantly nonzero since:
There has always been water vapor and CO2 in the atmosphere.
Here are two nice sources on how FTIR spectrometers work. No one is measuring (in the sense of detecting) ‘back radiation’ from a cool atmosphere impinging on a warm surface/instrument detector anywhere:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform_infrared_spectroscopy
http://www.daham.org/basil/leedswww/ftir/ftir_principle.htm
“The basic components of an FTIR are shown schematically in Figure 1. The infrared source emits a broad band of different wavelength of infrared radiation. The IR source used in the Temet GASMET FTIR CR-series is a SiC ceramic at a temperature of 1550 K. The IR radiation goes through an interferometer that modulates the infrared radiation. The interferometer performs an optical inverse Fourier transform on the entering IR radiation. The modulated IR beam passes through the gas sample where it is absorbed to various extents at different wavelengths by the various molecules present. Finally the intensity of the IR beam is detected by a detector, which is a liquid-nitrogen cooled MCT (Mercury-Cadmium-Telluride) detector in the case of the Temet GASMET FTIR CR-series. The detected signal is digitised and Fourier transformed by the computer to get the IR spectrum of the sample gas.”
In other words, a hot (near BB) beam passes through the sample gas (ambient air) and ends up after partial absorption at a deeply cooled detector, from where the signal is transformed and computed into an IR spectrum for the specific air sample. From hot to warm to cold. That’s the way heat travels.
Kristian
And your point? The modulation distorts the signal and it’s a pure coincidence the result showing radiation only (almost) in the GHG bands when pointing upwards from the surface, and much more radiation in the atmospheric window relative to the GHG bands when looking downward from TOA?
Like when the analog signal of a human voice is modulated on to a high frequency carrier and sent thousands of kilometers through the air it coincidentally still sounds like a human voice after demodulation because an analog signal just can’t travel thousands of kilometers through air, right?
lgl,
What’s your point? I have never claimed any emission/absorption spectra to be incorrect or made up or imaginary. So I seriously don’t understand what you’re trying to convey here. All I’m saying is that radiation from a cooler object to a warmer isn’t and cannot be measured directly. It will have to be inferred, calculated. Only the heat flux going from hot to cold is directly observable. That’s the real, physically detectable phenomenon. That goes for pyrgeometers, that goes for spectrometers, that goes for bolometers, that goes for … all things.
Either way, this line of discourse is quite irrelevant. All you need to comprehend is what ‘heat’ is and what it entails. Get that and you’ll see at once that the postulated 390 and 324 fluxes are doing nothing but fogging up the real picture: 168 IN, (-66-102=) -168 OUT. Balance. Heat balance. That’s all you need to know. Incoming reduced from a potential 298 W/m^2 (lunar mean solar surface flux), outgoing simply compelled to equal it, nothing more, nothing less.
Kristian
Not long ago you said “We cannot physically separate and detect individual opposing flows of energy in a radiative field between objects”
Then I pointed to spectra proving your claim wrong. The opposing flows are totally different, spectra almost the inverse of each other in fact, and they are both being measured, no matter what nonsense you are making up just because you do not understand the technology. The radiation from the surface is close to a black body spectrum, the downwelling spectrum is not a black body spectrum, containing radiation mostly in the GHG bands. Note those from the arctic, almost no radiation except from the GHGs. Not only can we measure the downwelling radiation, the spectra also looks totally different in the arctic compared to the tropics. How do you explain that? Your 66 W/m2 is going out so it must look like a black body spectrum.
Now you say “I have never claimed any emission/absorption spectra to be incorrect or made up or imaginary”. Ok, then you must have come to your senses and are now accepting there is radiation coming from the GHGs to the surface, good. Then all that’s missing is for you to realize this radiation is indeed being absorbed by the surface attributing to the high temperature of the surface, which the 168 IN/OUT cannot explain.
lgl,
You’re making a fool out of yourself. It helps reading what your opponents are actually writing before trying to tear it down. You’re just making up strawmen and keep fighting those instead of addressing what I’m teling you.
YOU ALWAYS MEASURE THE HEAT FLUX. YOU NEVER MEASURE THE INDIVIDUAL FLUXES IN AN INFERRED ENERGY EXCHANGE. YOU CALCULATE THEM. (Or how do you imagine we physically separate them from each other? Why do you think that pyrgeometers have to go the long way around first detecting the heat flux coming in to or going out from the thermopile and then taking into account the temperature of the apparatus and its state of calibration before applying different formulas with this as input to obtain the DLR flux from that? Why do you think that is, if the DLR is so easy to just measure directly? Same with bolometers. If you read how they actually function, you will see that the priciple is exactly the same.)
If you cool the detector to a temperature below that of the atmosphere, then of course you will register incident radiation from above. But it is still ‘the heat flux’ coming in, not the individual ‘back radiation’ flux from the atmosphere to the surface. It’s still ‘the net’.
Get a grip, man.
Kristian
Why didn’t you take a look at Fig. 8.2 from Petty here, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/10/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-emission-spectra/
Then you would have seen they are obviously measuring the individual fluxes and not the net.
richard verney says:
June 21, 2013 at 2:09 am
If something slows the rate of cooling, say it slows the rate of cooling. Say it would be even cooler but for X. Don’t say X warms, when X does not and merely slows the rate of cooling.
Sometimes it does both Richard, the rate of cooling at the ToA is slowed, therefore the surface warms!
Here’s an example, you have a surface which absorbs solar radiation at 240 W/m^2, it has an emissivity close to 1 in the IR so in equilibrium it is at a T of ~255 K and emits ~240 W/m^2.
Now place a dichroic mirror above the surface which passes 100% of solar but reflects 50% of IR. The immediate effect is to reduce the amount of cooling of the system to 120 W/m^2 and to increase the flux to the surface to 360 W/m^2. The surface will warm until 240 W/m^2 is emitted from the system and equilibrium is restored, that will be achieved when the surface is emitting 480 W/m^2 and its temperature has reached ~304 K.
Everything done in vacuum.