…then why do the vertical mean temperature anomalies (NODC 0-2000 meter data) of the Pacific Ocean as a whole and of the North Atlantic fail to show any warming over the past decade, a period when ARGO floats have measured subsurface temperatures, providing reasonably complete coverage of the global oceans? See Figure 1. Or, in other words, why is the warming of the global oceans (0-2000 meters) over the past 10 years limited to the Indian and South Atlantic Oceans, when carbon dioxide is said to be a well-mixed greenhouse gas, meaning all ocean basins should be warming?
Figure 1
Or, to look at it in yet another way, we’re being told that, while surface temperatures are no longer warming, the oceans to depth continue to warm…yet the warming is not occurring in the largest ocean basin, the Pacific, and the North Atlantic is showing evidence of cooling.
Additionally, Kevin Trenberth and associates say the recent series of La Niña events are causing the Pacific Ocean to warm at depths below 700 meters, and as a result, global warming continues. See:
Why then has the annual vertical mean temperatures of the Pacific Ocean (0-2000 meters) failed to show any warming over the past decade? The data for the Pacific Ocean (0-700 meters, 0-2000 meters and 700-2000 meters) in Figure 2 reveals something different than portrayed by Trenberth and associates.
Figure 2
The data for the Pacific indicates that any warming at 700-2000 meters has simply opposed the cooling taking place in the top 700 meters. (Note: The basis for the temperature anomalies at the depths of 700-2000 meters is discussed in the post here.)
No wonder Trenberth had to use a reanalysis (instead of data) for his recent batch of “hey, I kinda-sorta found the missing heat” papers.
When the data doesn’t meet the climate model-based expectations of the climate science community, the climate science community adjusts the data. Then, when the adjusted data doesn’t meet the climate model-based expectations of the climate science community, the climate science community discards the data and uses the output of another computer model called a reanalysis. Bottom line: instead of admitting the hypothesis of human-induced global warming is fatally flawed, they perpetuate a myth.
A QUICK NOTE ABOUT THE VERTICAL MEAN TEMPERATURE DATA
The NODC’s vertical mean temperature data are the temperature component of their ocean heat content data. The other portion is salinity.
ADDITIONAL READING
Ocean heat content data, and the components that are part of it, are questionable at best, contrived at worst. For further information see:
- Is Ocean Heat Content Data All It’s Stacked Up to Be? (The WattsUpWithThat cross post is here.)
- NODC’s Pentadal Ocean Heat Content (0 to 2000m) Creates Warming That Doesn’t Exist in the Annual Data – A Lot of Warming (The WattsUpWithThat cross post is here.)
- A Different Perspective on Trenberth’s Missing Heat: The Warming of the Global Oceans (0 to 2000 Meters) in Deg C (The WattsUpWithThat cross post is here.)
- Rough Estimate of the Annual Changes in Ocean Temperatures from 700 to 2000 Meters Based on NODC Data (The WattsUpWithThat cross post is here.)
- AMAZING: The IPCC May Have Provided Realistic Presentations of Ocean Heat Content Source Data (The WattsUpWithThat cross post is here.)
- Comments on Stefan Rahmstorf’s Post at RealClimate “What ocean heating reveals about global warming” (The WattsUpWithThat cross post is here.)
- Trenberth and Fasullo Try to Keep the Fantasy Alive (The WattsUpWithThat cross post is here.)
- More on Trenberth and Fasullo (2013) “An Apparent Hiatus in Global Warming?” (The WattsUpWithThat cross post is here.)
BioBob, you’ve put your finger right on the incompetent neglect that plagues the entire field of surface temperature studies, including BEST.
Their work shows that they implicitly assume that the Central Limit Theorem applies to the systematic measurement error inherent in the data. It doesn’t. The few field calibration experiments of land surface temperature sensors show an average systematic error of about (+/-)0.5 C, that doesn’t average away.
There have been *no* field calibration experiments of ARGO sensors. But the variation between sensors that should be producing the same water temperatures is about (+/-)0.15 C. That’s got to be a lower limit of systematic error. It’s typically ignored when uncertainties are estimated.
The entire field of climate temperature studies lives on neglected systematic error. If the surface and sea temperature gonzos paid attention to detail, the way of people who actually do science, they’d have nothing to say.
BioBob says:
December 19, 2013 at 4:24 am
Sorry, Bob T……
1) normal distribution of observations – FAIL N = 1
2) The data must be sampled randomly – FAIL
3) The sample values must be independent of each other …..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Same goes for the land temperature measurements. For 3) The sample values must be independent of each other …..
we know it is EPIC FAIL since neighboring stations are used to “Adjust” rural stations up to match adjacent urban/airport stations for example. (This is the reason my closest weather station is always adjusted up about 1C the next day.)
There are those in the warmist camp who anticpate that another strong El Nino like 1997/1998 is just around the corner and global temperature will continue to rise in an unprecedented way like 1980 -2000. In my opinion this is not going to happen anytime soon . Matter of fact , I dont see another strong ELNino for many years possibly as late as 2018/2019. The past record of strong El NINO’s during cooling ocean phases is sketchy and the various reports that exist do not all agree what consitutes strong and which ones were actually strong ,but gaps of 10 years or more between some of the strong ones seems to have happened at least 3- 4 times since 1870 . This is another reason why global temperatures are not going to rise as predicted by the flawed IPCC science in my opinion.
The most remote places are the climateers’ favorite, where they can invent any temperature history and trendlines that they like. In the ocean, the deepest places. On land, the Antarctic. On the Antarctic, the Eastern half of the Antarctic peninsula where no manned base exists because it is too cold — so they publish papers that it is rapidly warming there, but still there is no manned base — still too cold. How long can this children’s scam continue to suck the public teat?
Ronald, you’re thinking in absolute temperatures, but I’ve presented anomalies.
Could you present the absolute temperatures?
I don’t find any of the analyses very compelling, yours or those you cite. Because of the ocean and wind currents, there is no reason why a “well-mixed” atmosphere need produce uniform ocean warming. Granted, Trenberth and Fasullo’s hypothesis is ad hoc, and seems positively desperate; I think a full characterization of where, and at what depths, the ocean is warming, cooling, and hardly changing at all will take a while.
Thank you for this post. And for your other ongoing efforts.
cap says:
December 19, 2013 at 5:04 am
It cannot be repeated often enough:
Climate change is difficult to observe on short timescales – and a decade is still a short time in this sense. The natural variations are just too big. But over longer timescales the climate is still very much within a warming trend….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
If you are going to pull that particular rabbit out of the hat then get your facts straight. Long term we are in a COOLING trend.
SEE GRAPH: http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg or read these peer-reviewed papers:
A more recent paper looking at glaciers in Norway.
The authors of BOTH papers simply state that most glaciers likely didn’t exist 6,000 years ago, but the highest period of the glacial activity has been in the past 600 years. This is hardly surprising with ~9% less solar energy.
MORE:
You can move a lot of energy into and out of the oceans without changing the average temperature much. Temperature is a terrible way to measure the energy balance of the earth/sun system.
“why is the warming of the global oceans (0-2000 meters) over the past 10 years limited to the Indian and South Atlantic Oceans, when carbon dioxide is said to be a well-mixed greenhouse gas, meaning all ocean basins should be warming?”
Those “hyper-active” molecules that vibrate too much aren’t liked by the other, cooler molecules. So the cool molecules have found a way to essentially exile the hyperactive ones.
Not only does this phenomenon explain the nonhomogenous warming of oceans, it also shows why these warmer molecules are forced to hang out in places where they are less likely to be observed, thus accounting for 50% of the warming since 1997: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/11/global-warming-since-1997-underestimated-by-half/
I intend to document this alienation / dislocation of these molecules as “Sociological Transitioning Realized: Anthropomorphic Warming Sanctions” aka “STRAWS”
The alienation of these molecules not only demonstrates that warming continues (just in ways that less sensitive observers failed to detect), it also demonstrates a gross injustice to these molecules who vibrate excessively through no fault of their own! These molecules get exiled to remote regions of the world (as the data clearly shows – or omits, which is an even greater injustice!) and then get blamed for things like ocean acidification.
To confront both the social and physical aspects of this I am considering writing a paper: “Grasping at STRAWS: why exiling warm molecules makes for a bad Acid trip.”
SOT but on Inside Science at 4:30pm the question was asked if global warming is continuing and oceans warming how come antarctic ice is increasing.
Basically the answer seems to be that if ice is retreating it’s due to man-made climate change, however if ice is increasing it is due to man-made climate change.
vukcevic says:
December 19, 2013 at 5:01 am
Ronald says:
So how could warm water sink under cold water?
Sea surface is warmed by sun, evaporation makes it salty and as such warm water becomes heavier than less saline cold water. In vicinity of Iceland these warm waters sink to a depth of 2000m or more. In the Arctic Ocean all warm water currents circulate below cold fresh water currents
vukcevic i think (its me personel) you must do your homework. 2 thinks could be happening.
1 your believing a agw story or.
2 your looking at the conveyor belt where cold water sinks to the bottom of the ocean. That happens around the pole, fresh cold water sinks under the warm water what starts the great conveyor of water around the world.
Bob you show just what I mean. The surface is 15 degrees and on say 700m dept its 5 degrees. There is no more to it. Every thing else is making it difficult. Yes for agwers its nice but ye the anomaly goes up so there is the missing heat. But they don’t tell way the anomaly goes up.
Is the surface warming up or is the deeper ocean warming up. And the other way around the same. Is the surface cooling or is it cooling at 700m, Or both.
Reblogged this on Power To The People and commented:
Another case where when reality disagrees with the Climate Change Alarmists reality is not what’s false.
@ur momisugly Bob Tisdale …..
Bob, I’m a bit confused, and it may be because of too much beer last night, but, your graph seems off to me. Following the link you posted, and going with the yearly data, I get a cooling for 0-2000 meters from 2003.5, globally. at -0.0026 annually.
Ronald’s question:
One example of warm water flowing under the Ocean surface can be found in the Mediterranean Sea outflow. I think I’ve got this right: When there is a lack of precipitation in its catchment area there is negative evaporation balance from the surface. Convection/gravity takes the warm saline water down and it outflows under the ocean water coming in through the Strait of Gibraltar. With greater amounts of precipitation in the catchment area of the M. Sea, the ocean inflow is under the warmer outflow.
Just another example of the dynamic oceans. Not at all like a small still pond in a field.
Has a published scientist taken a look at Bob’s ideas and reviewed them? I am curious to know what another expert thinks of them. He is clearly the resident expert on ocean temperatures around here, but his ideas need to be validated by others at least as knowledgeable on the subject as he is.
Specifically, I observe some of the same holes in logic as others have posted above:
Because of the ocean and wind currents, there is no reason why a “well-mixed” atmosphere need produce uniform ocean warming.
Individual ocean bodies have differently arranged water streams, different supply of (ant-)arctic cold water, different supply of sun radiation, different volume, different mixing with other oceans. All these and many more factors affect how they warm up or cool down. We can always say that if CO2 wasn’t here, Pacific and North Atlantic would be cooling much more. Not that I think that statement is true, but these graphs don’t disprove it.
Re your observation that Indian Ocean (IO) heat content rises during El Nino but doesn’t cool proportionately during La Nina: clearly the IO must have some mechanism for releasing heat accrued during El Nino conditions; otherwise nothing would prevent it from continuously building up heat. When do you think can we might expect to see this heat released?
And please spare me the line about how Bob just presents data, not hypotheses. These statements are certainly more than just presenting data:
“Bottom line: instead of admitting the hypothesis of human-induced global warming is fatally flawed, they perpetuate a myth.”
“Those hundredths and thousandths of a deg C aren’t coming back to haunt anyone at any time.”
Heh, @ur momisugly Bob, disregard….. copied wrong data.
Bob- I read most of your posts on El Nino/La Nina. It seemed that virtually all ocean warming comes from direct sunlight on the ocean surface, which absorbs and redistributes it. Some must also come from back radiation of IR from the atmosphere, but that is only a relatively small fraction. Then winds and ocean currents redistribute the heat.
That mechanism doesn’t explain why the ocean’s don’t show similar amounts of temperature(heat) change though. But nobody thinks the oceans are well-mixed either. I suspect the Argo data is just another example of poorly we understand the climate system.
Perhaps this means all the ocean heat went into those two oceans. Just because CO2 is well mixed, doesn’t mean ocean heat has to be. What does Trenberth&co missing heat papers say?
How are the Argos distributed between the two oceans?
“Willis also had ocean-based data sets, including temperature profiles from the Argo robot fleet as well as from expendable bathythermographs, called “XBTs” for short. XBTs are the equivalent of a disposable razor. A temperature sensor is spooled out behind a ship by thin copper wire. It sinks, making measurements at increasing depths, transmitting them back to the ship via the wire until the line snaps and the sensor sinks to the bottom of the ocean, discarded.
Artist’s impression of an XBT.
An XBT may look like a rocket, but it’s more like a fishing weight: a heavy zinc nose houses a thermistor (to measure temperature) attached to a spool of copper wire. The XBT is launched from a ship, then falls through the water at a constant rate. Temperature measurements are sent back to the ship through the wire until the entire length of wire is unspooled (up to 1,500 meters), at which point the connection breaks and the XBT falls to the ocean floor. (Render by Robert Simmon, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.)
The devices are manufactured to free-fall through the water at a known rate; scientists infer the depth of the temperature measurements by the time lapsed after the sensor hits the water. They have been used by the U.S. Navy and oceanographers since the 1960s.
“Basically, I used the sea level data as a bridge to the in situ [ocean-based] data,” explains Willis, comparing them to one another figuring out where they didn’t agree. “First, I identified some new Argo floats that were giving bad data; they were too cool compared to other sources of data during the time period. It wasn’t a large number of floats, but the data were bad enough, so that when I tossed them, most of the cooling went away. But there was still a little bit, so I kept digging and digging.”
The digging led him to the data from the expendable temperature sensors, the XBTs. A month before, Willis had seen a paper by Viktor Gouretski and Peter Koltermann that showed a comparison of XBT data collected over the past few decades to temperatures obtained in the same ocean areas by more accurate techniques, such as bottled water samples collected during research cruises. Compared to more accurate observations, the XBTs were too warm. The problem was more pronounced at some points in time than others.
The Gouretski paper hadn’t rung any alarm bells right away, explains Willis, “because I knew from the earlier analysis that there was a big cooling signal in Argo all by itself. It was there even if I didn’t use the XBT data. That’s part of the reason that we thought it was real in the first place,” explains Willis.
But when he factored the too-warm XBT measurements into his ocean warming time series, the last of the ocean cooling went away. Later, Willis teamed up with Susan Wijffels of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organization (CSIRO) and other ocean scientists to diagnose the XBT problems in detail and come up with a way to correct them.”
So where in all this can we find actual technical explanation for the diverse forms of data censoring? Nowhere! All we get is trust-us type statements like:
“…it wasn’t a large number of floats, but the data were bad enough, so that when I tossed (sic!) them, most of the cooling went away.” and
“…diagnose the XBT problems in detail and come up with a way to correct them.”
And that my friends is post-modernist science from a ‘published scientist’ for you! Toss that, and find a way include this, and generally screw around with the (various sources of) data arbitrarily until, basically, ….you get the very result you want.
This is just like the ‘problems’ with atmospheric radiosondes and the missing tropical hot spot all over again.
Sigh!
Thanks Bob!
Stephen Richards says:
December 19, 2013 at 7:39 am
Jon says:
December 19, 2013 at 3:54 am
What’s the last thing that goes trough a insects brain when it hits the windshield of a car?
“If it’s head on it’s his a$$”
HahaHa…beer spewed appropriately over screen.
Ronald says:
December 19, 2013 at 11:55 am
your looking at the conveyor belt …… fresh cold water sinks under the warm water what starts the great conveyor of water around the world.
Belief is a matter of faith, science is a matter of fact, and facts are different to what you sugested
http://science1.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2004/03/01/05mar_arctic_resources/currents1.jpg
MikeN says: “How are the Argos distributed between the two oceans?”
See the ARGO webpage:
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/
logicalchemist says: “I suspect the Argo data is just another example of poorly we understand the climate system.”
Bingo. And the data indicates we’re being misled by the climate science community.
Regards
Brian says: “Has a published scientist taken a look at Bob’s ideas and reviewed them? I am curious to know what another expert thinks of them. He is clearly the resident expert on ocean temperatures around here, but his ideas need to be validated by others at least as knowledgeable on the subject as he is.”
Data are data, Brian. I simply present in relatively easy-to-understand ways what the climate science community refuses to present.
Enjoy your holidays.