Date: January 31, 2014
Subject: Your Blog Post at SkepticalScience and an Invitation from WattsUpWithThat
From: Bob Tisdale
To: Kevin Trenberth – NCAR
Dear Kevin:
I note that you were co-author of the SkepticalScience blog post Warming oceans consistent with rising sea level & global energy imbalance along with Dana Nuccitelli and Rob Painting. The obvious intent of your post was to convince the SkepticalScience readers that, while the global surface warming (outside of the Arctic) has slowed or stopped since the late 1990s, human-induced global warming continues in the deep oceans. There have been numerous blog posts at SkepticalScience over the past few years that have basically stated the same thing, so, from the sidelines, it appears you’re preaching to the choir.
One would think your time would be better spent trying to convince actual global warming skeptics why we should be concerned about global warming …especially when we consider that in your recent papers you’re acknowledging that natural variability plays a major role in the warming of the surface of the planet. With that in mind, this is an open invitation for you to author a blog post or series of them for WattsUpWithThat (or co-author them with skeptics…like me, for example). There are a number of points you may wish to address and they are discussed in the bulk of this post.
WattsUpWithThat has a much larger internet audience than SkepticalScience. Refer to the recent Alexa statistics here. If you’re not familiar with the Alexa rankings, the lower rankings are better. Point of reference: Google ranks first. Also note the bounce rates and the time visitors spend on both websites. Many more people visit WattsUpWithThat than SkepticalScience and they stay longer at WattsUpWithThat once they’re there. That suggests, of course, if you were to write a post for WattsUpWithThat, more people are likely to read it.
INITIAL COMMENT ON YOUR SKEPTICALSCIENCE POST
Assuming you’re correct and the deep oceans are warming instead of the surface, then your post at SkepticalScience likely appears to many readers to be nothing more than redirection—because it refocuses attention from the problems that climate models are having simulating global surface temperatures. The previous generation (CMIP3) and current generation (CMIP5) climate models cannot explain the current pause in global warming (that’s occurring outside of the Arctic), thus your recent flurry of papers on this topic. Also assuming you’re right, due to the heat capacity of the oceans, the claimed increase in subsurface temperatures of the global oceans (while the halt is taking place at the surface) is so tiny…so minute…so miniscule…that the additional warming of the oceans is not coming back to haunt anyone at any time.
While the topics of ocean heat and energy imbalance have a place in technical discussions, they are of no importance to people and policymakers who want to know how high global surface temperatures might rise in the future and why climate models did not forecast the cessation of global surface warming.
PAST COMMENTS
At WattsUpWithThat, we’ve already discussed many of the arguments you’ve presented…discussed them numerous times. See the posts from my blog (and the cross posts at WUWT in parentheses):
- Trenberth Still Searching for Missing Heat (WUWT cross post here)
- More on Trenberth’s Missing Heat (WUWT cross post here)
- A Different Perspective on Trenberth’s Missing Heat: The Warming of the Global Oceans (0 to 2000 Meters) in Deg C (WUWT cross post here)
- Even More about Trenberth’s Missing Heat – An Eye Opening Comment by Roger Pielke Sr. (WUWT cross post here)
- Open Letter to the Royal Meteorological Society Regarding Dr. Trenberth’s Article “Has Global Warming Stalled?” (WUWT cross post here)
- A Couple of Comments about the Oppenheimer and Trenberth Op-Ed in the Washington Post (WUWT cross post here)
- Meehl et al (2013) Are Also Looking for Trenberth’s Missing Heat (WUWT cross post here)
- Trenberth and Fasullo Try to Keep the Fantasy Alive (WUWT cross post here)
- More on Trenberth and Fasullo (2013) “An Apparent Hiatus in Global Warming?” (WUWT cross post here)
- Comments on the Nature Article “Climate Change: The Case of the Missing Heat” (WUWT cross post here.)
You may want to review those posts, because those are arguments you will face if you choose to author a post for WattsUpWithThat.
POINTS MISSING FROM YOUR ARGUMENT
The core of your recent argument is that there was a turn-of-the-century switch of ENSO mode from a period of El Niño domination to a period when La Niñas dominate. Further to your argument, this change in mode around 1999 has caused the tropical Pacific to release less heat than normal to the atmosphere and to redistribute less warm water from the tropical Pacific to adjoining portions of the oceans. You’ve also argued that the stronger trade winds associated with La Niñas are forcing more warm water to be stored in the western tropical Pacific. As a result, according to your argument, there has been a substantial decline in the warming rate of global surfaces (outside of the Arctic).
This strongly suggests that ENSO was also responsible for an extensive portion of the warming that took place while El Niño events dominated from the mid-1970s to the late-1990s. I don’t recall you ever stating that in so many words in any of the recent papers you’ve written on this topic, and I don’t believe, in light of your new understandings, that you’ve recently attempted to quantify the contribution of ENSO during that late 20th Century warming period.
Based on my research, ENSO—acting as a chaotic, naturally occurring, sunlight-fueled, recharge-discharge oscillator—was in fact responsible for the vast majority of the warming of global sea surface temperatures outside of the North Atlantic during the past 32 years (the satellite era)…and ENSO was also responsible for the vast majority of the warming of the tropical Pacific to depth…and ENSO, along with a shift in sea level pressure (and interdependent wind patterns) of the extratropical North Pacific (as captured by the North Pacific Index that you, Kevin, developed for such purposes) were responsible for most of the long-term warming of the extratropical North Pacific ocean to depths of 700 meters. Add to that the findings of Lozier et al. (2008) The Spatial Pattern and Mechanisms of Heat-Content Change in the North Atlantic. They found that all the warming of the North Atlantic to depth could be explained by natural factors. See the January 2008 article in ScienceDaily titled North Atlantic Warming Tied to Natural Variability about Lozier et al. (2008). The ScienceDaily article includes:
“We suggest that the large-scale, decadal changes…associated with the NAO [North Atlantic Oscillation] are primarily responsible for the ocean heat content changes in the North Atlantic over the past 50 years,” the authors concluded.
Those points were discussed in the posts linked earlier. They should be addressed by you if you elect to prepare a post for WattsUpWithThat.
DATA THAT CONFIRM AND CONTRADICT YOUR ARGUMENT
Based on your argument, the ocean heat content of the western tropical Pacific should be increasing during the hiatus period. In one of your recent papers you argued that the hiatus period started in 1999, with the switch from a positive to a negative Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which you’re using a proxy for ENSO modes. Figure 1 presents the NODC ocean heat content for the western tropical Pacific (24S-24N, 120E-180), for the depths of 0-700 meters, for the period of January 1999 to December 2013. We can see that the western tropical Pacific to depths of 700 meters has, in fact, warmed.
Figure 1
As you’re well aware, the TAO project buoys have sampled subsurface temperatures, etc., in the tropical Pacific since the early 1990s, so the NODC data should be a reasonably reliable there. Over the past decade, ARGO floats have supplemented the TAO buoys. And the source Ocean Heat Content data in the tropical Pacific for 0-700 meters and 0-2000 meters (represented by the unadjusted UKMO EN3 data) during the TAO project and ARGO eras are exactly the same, see Figure 2, and that suggests that all of the variability in the tropical Pacific ocean heat content is taking place in the top 700 meters.
Figure 2
The NODC ocean heat content data also show the ocean heat content (0-700m) of the eastern tropical Pacific, a much larger region, has been cooling from 1999 to 2013. See Figure 3.
Figure 3
As a result, there has been an overall decrease in the ocean heat content of the tropical Pacific since 1999, Figure 4, and a substantial decrease in the ocean heat content of the tropical Pacific as a whole since the peak around 2004.
Figure 4
Therefore, based on data, there appears to have been a rearrangement of heat within the tropical Pacific and not an addition of new heat as your studies suggest.
Also, in the recent post If Manmade Greenhouse Gases Are Responsible for the Warming of the Global Oceans… I presented the NODC’s vertical mean temperature anomaly data for the Indian, Pacific, North Atlantic and South Atlantic Oceans, for the depths of 0-2000 meters, during the ARGO era (starting in 2003). Figure 5 is an update of that illustration, including the recently released 2013 data. The flatness of the Pacific trend indicates there has not been a substantial increase in the subsurface temperatures of the Pacific Ocean as a whole to depths of 2000 meters over the past 11 years…same with the North Atlantic. Manmade greenhouse gases cannot explain the warming in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, when they obviously have had no impact on the warming of the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to 2000 meters over the past 11 years.
Figure 5
You might argue that the recent warming in the Indian Ocean is a response to ENSO. I would agree. I discussed a number of topics in the post Is Ocean Heat Content All It’s Stacked Up to Be? One of them was the influence of ENSO on the warming of the Indian Ocean to depths of 700 meters. The following is that discussion. Note that I’ve linked the animations and revised the Figure number for this post.
[Start of a portion of “Is Ocean Heat Content All It’s Stacked Up to Be?”]
Why is the Indian Ocean warming during the ARGO era? Figure 6 compares ocean heat content data for the Indian Ocean (90S-90N, 20E-120E) to scaled sea surface temperature anomalies for the NINO3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific. Both datasets have been smoothed with 12-month running average filters. The NINO3.4 data is a commonly used index for the timing, strength and duration of El Niño and La Niña events. The ocean heat content for the Indian Ocean warms in response to El Niño events, but it obviously does not cool proportionally during strong La Niñas.
Why?
It’s simply yet another example of what I’ve been noting for a number of years: La Niñas are not the opposite of El Niños.
Figure 6
In the following animations, you can watch warm water that’s left over from the El Niños being passed from the tropical Pacific into the Indian Ocean during the trailing La Niñas by the current called the Indonesian Throughflow. That leftover warm water counteracts any cooling that would result during the trailing La Niñas due to changes in atmospheric circulation.
ANIMATION 1 presents maps of the NODC ocean heat content data for the ARGO-era, using 12-month averages. The first cells are the average ocean heat content from January to December 2003. These are followed by cells that show the period of February 2003 to January 2004, then March 2003 to February 2004 and so on, until the final cell that captures the average ocean heat content from January to December 2012. The 12-month averages reduce the visual noise and any seasonal component in the data. It’s like smoothing data with a 12-month filter in a time-series graph.
Due to the resolution of the ocean heat content data, you might be having trouble catching the processes that cause the leftover warm water from 2006/07 and 2009/10 El Niños to be carried into the Indian Ocean. ANIMATION 2 is a gif animation of sea level maps for the tropical Pacific from the AVISO altimetry website. The maps also capture the easternmost portion of the tropical Indian Ocean. I’ve started the animation in January 2003 to agree with the discussion of ARGO-era ocean heat content data. So there are a couple of minor El Niños before the 2006/07 El Niño. At the end of the 2006/07 El Niño, a (cool) downwelling Kelvin wave splits the elevated (warm) sea level anomalies along the equator. The residual warm waters are carried west by Rossby waves to Indonesia, and the stronger-than-normal trade winds in the Pacific during the trailing La Niña help to force the residual warm water past Indonesia into the eastern Indian Ocean. In addition to the Indonesian Throughflow, warm water from the southern tropical Pacific also migrates west into the eastern Indian Ocean through the Torres Strait, between Australia and New Guinea. The same thing happens after the 2009/10 El Niño. (My apologies for the shift in the animation in 2011. Aviso changed the format of the maps.)
[End of the portion of “Is Ocean Heat Content All It’s Stacked Up to Be?”]
A COUPLE OF QUICK COMMENTS ON TRENBERTH ET AL. (2014)
Thank you for linking a preprint copy of Trenberth et al. (2014) “Earth’s Energy Imbalance” to your SkepticalScience post. Sorry to say, I haven’t had the opportunity to study it in any detail. But I did take a quick glance. Thank you for including a number of ocean heat content datasets, in addition to the ECMWF ORA-S4. We’ve discussed the problems with that reanalysis in many of the posts listed at the beginning of this one, so I’m not going to dwell on it here…though I note you’re continuing to try to justify using the ORA-S4 reanalysis by showing that it responds to volcanic aerosols where other datasets do not. (Not surprising since the ORA-S4 reanalysis is the output of a computer model that’s forced to cool by volcanic aerosols.)
Also note your Figure 11, which I’ve included as my Figure 7, is missing a La Niña event.
Figure 7
According to the paper you used the old version of the ONI index (base years 1971-2000) as your reference for official El Niño and La Niña events. Clearly, you overlooked the strong 2010/11 La Niña that followed the 2009/10 El Niño. Also, moderate strength La Niña conditions existed during the 2008/09 ENSO season, but they didn’t last long enough to be considered an “official” La Niña based on the old ONI climatology. I’m not sure that helps you for 2008/09 or in 2010/11.
Again, I haven’t had the chance to examine your new paper in much detail. Sorry.
ENSO IS FUELED BY SUNLIGHT, ACCORDING TO YOU, KEVIN
In your much-cited Trenberth et al. (2002) The evolution of ENSO and global atmospheric surface temperatures, you stated:
The negative feedback between SST and surface fluxes can be interpreted as showing the importance of the discharge of heat during El Niño events and of the recharge of heat during La Niña events. Relatively clear skies in the central and eastern tropical Pacific allow solar radiation to enter the ocean, apparently offsetting the below normal SSTs, but the heat is carried away by Ekman drift, ocean currents, and adjustments through ocean Rossby and Kelvin waves, and the heat is stored in the western Pacific tropics. This is not simply a rearrangement of the ocean heat, but also a restoration of heat in the ocean. Similarly, during El Niño the loss of heat into the atmosphere, especially through evaporation, is a discharge of the heat content, and both contribute to the life cycle of ENSO.
Thus my earlier description of ENSO as a chaotic, naturally occurring, sunlight-fueled, recharge-discharge oscillator…with El Niños acting as the discharge phase and La Niñas acting as the recharge phase. But La Niñas also help to redistribute the leftover warm waters from the El Niños—something that was very obvious in the animations linked above.
That quote from 2002 leads to a very basic question: how can you now suggest that the dominance of La Niña events in recent years has caused more greenhouse gas warming of the Pacific to depth, when La Niña events are fueled by sunlight?
To that end, if you should elect to prepare a blog post for us here at WattsUpWithThat, please document the downward shortwave radiation and the downwelling longwave radiation, both at the surface of the tropical Pacific, from the ECMFW ORA-S4 reanalysis, which you rely on so much for your recent papers.
BIG JUMPS
You occasionally describe “big jumps” in global surface temperatures. Your big jumps were discussed in my Open Letter to the Royal Meteorological Society Regarding Dr. Trenberth’s Article “Has Global Warming Stalled?” You have more recently added to those discussions of big jumps. For example, you also referred to the big jumps in your August 2013 interview on NPR (my boldface):
The oceans can at times soak up a lot of heat. Some goes into the deep oceans where it can stay for centuries. But heat absorbed closer to the surface can easily flow back into the air. That happened in 1998, which made it one of the hottest years on record.
Trenberth says since then, the ocean has mostly been back in one of its soaking-up modes.
“They probably can’t go on much for much longer than maybe 20 years, and what happens at the end of these hiatus periods, is suddenly there’s a big jump [in temperature] up to a whole new level and you never go back to that previous level again,” he says.
You can think of it like a staircase. Temperature is flat when a natural cool spell cancels out the gradual temperature increase caused by human activity. But when there’s a natural warm spell on top of the long-term warming trend, the story is dramatically different.
“When the natural variability or when the weather is going in the same direction as global warming, suddenly we’re breaking records, we’re going outside of the bounds of previous experience, and that is when the real damage occurs,” Trenberth says.
First, once again, you’re suggesting that El Niño events caused a portion of the surface warming during the late 20th Century. It had to have been a major portion if a switch to La Niña domination could stop the surface warming. Why not simply come out and state it? Is it because people will then realize that by recognizing that a series of strong El Niños contributed to the warming from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s that you are also recognizing the models have overestimated the future warming? We already understand that…well, most of us do. And people also realize that you also haven’t included the influence of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, which also contributed to the warming during the late 20th Century. Why not simply state that the models predictions are too high and that they’re probably too high by at least a factor of two?
In the portion of your NPR interview I highlighted above, you suggest that a strong El Niño event can cause a big jump in surface temperatures. We understand that. I first presented those “big jumps” in sea surface temperature more than 5 years ago. And we also agree with you that El Niños are fueled by sunlight…which is part of the “life cycle of ENSO”, as you stated more than a decade ago. But I am very curious about why you seem concerned that “you never go back to that previous level again” after a big jump caused by a strong El Niño. That is precisely what we would expect to happen in a world where natural processes are causing the vast majority of the warming…a world in which the oceans show little influence from the effects of the increased emissions of manmade greenhouse gases.
The 1995/96 La Niña created the warm water for the 1997/98 El Niño via a reduction in cloud cover and an increase in sunlight over the tropical Pacific. The 1997/98 El Niño released that warm water from beneath the surface of the western tropical Pacific…and, in turn, it released a substantial amount of heat into the atmosphere…and an unfathomable volume of warm water was then redistributed around the global oceans in the wake of the 1997/98 El Niño. That leftover warm water prevented global surface temperatures from cooling proportionally during the trailing 1998-01 La Niña. The 1998-01 La Niña also served to replace the warm water in the tropical Pacific that was released and redistributed by the 1997/98 El Niño. Everything fits for a naturally warming world…a world that is not as sensitive to manmade greenhouse gases as simulated by climate models (climate models which still cannot simulate basic ENSO processes).
“THE PAUSE IS FICTIONAL; OCEAN WARMING IS FACTUAL”???
I suspect your co-authors Dana Nuccitelli and Rob Painting wrote that heading for the closing of the SkepticalScience post, Kevin. It’s comical and misleading. Data indicate the oceans are warming to depth, but the warming is not occurring in all ocean basins. Additionally, you, Kevin, wouldn’t have been spending so much of your time over the past few years trying to explain the cessation of global warming outside of the Arctic if the “pause was fictional”.
At the rate the global oceans have warmed to 2000 meters during the ARGO era, Figure 8, no one should really be too concerned about the warming of those oceans, especially when the data suggests it warmed via natural processes.
Figure 8
And no one should be concerned about the observed warming of the oceans to depth when we consider that the warming of the global oceans can cease for almost a decade, according to ORA-S4 reanalysis you continue to present. See my Figure 9, which is an annotated version of the first graph you presented in your blog post.
Figure 9
The following exchange is from the NPR interview linked above:
So will the oceans come to our rescue?
“That’s a good question, and the answer is maybe partly yes, but maybe partly no,” he says.
The oceans can at times soak up a lot of heat. Some goes into the deep oceans where it can stay for centuries. But heat absorbed closer to the surface can easily flow back into the air. That happened in 1998, which made it one of the hottest years on record.
But, again, the warm water for the 1997/98 El Niño was created via a temporary increase in sunlight beating down on the tropical Pacific as part of “the life cycle of ENSO”.
CLOSING
Thank you for considering the possibility of preparing a blog post or series of them for us here at WattsUpWithThat. Many of us applaud you in your efforts to explain the slowdown and cessation of surface warming, but there are many points that need clarification.
Additionally, we really appreciate it when authors of blog posts answer questions posed to them on the thread, so you should expect further exchanges.
Last, if this invitation interests you, please feel free to leave a comment at WattsUpWithThat. If you’d like the initial discussions to be off the record, please leave a comment at my blog Climate Observations where I still moderate comments. We can then discuss the matter further via email.
Sincerely,
Bob Tisdale
Anthony,
Some comparative UK mobile site access numbers for you (Dec 2012 – Dec 2013)…
WATTSUPWITHTHAT.COM SKEPTICALSCIENCE.COM
Avg Monthly Unique Visitors 905 382
Total Minutes 18347 8319
Total Page Views 112509 1356
Total Visits 42365 6268
(from a bona fida source, which shall remain anonymous)
REPLY: Thanks, the ratios are similar with other metrics I’ve seen – Anthony
@ferdberple at 6:55 am
doesn’t the conduction of heat in water move at the speed of sound? about 4 times faster than in air.
Have you ever filled a warm bathtub. Then turned on the hot. Don’t you slosh the water around to spread it?
How about turning on the hot water tap? Do you get immediate hot water or does it warm up slowly as heater water displaces water in the pipes?
Thermal conductivity of water: about 0.6 W / (m-K) at 300 deg K. 0.65 at 360 deg K.
Think of W/(m-K) and a heat flux in W/m^2 in a 1 deg K/m temperature gradient.
Water thermal conductivity is relatively high for a liquid (Oil is 0.15-0.20)
But puny to Pyrex Glass (1), Rock (2 to 7), Mercury (8), Steel (10 to 60), Iron (80), Aluminum (205), Silver (425), Diamond (1000 – Wow!)
@bobl at 4:02 am
water is NOT an insulator, any warming in the deep ocean will get dissipated
Water is not an insulator. But it’s thermal conductivity is almost an order of magnitude lower than rock. So if you are going to move heat around in the deep ocean, then the ocean bottom becomes a non-negligible element in the model.
Indeed, heat flow from the ocean bottom into the ocean is a poorly sampled, and highly diverse flux field. http://www.und.edu/org/ihfc/marine.jpg
You sure cannot treat the ocean bottom as a thermal insulator.
Message to Kevin Trenberth…
I strongly suggest you accept Bob Tisdale’s offer to engage in debate.
My survey says that you have a 97% chance of not looking like a complete tool.
🙂
Greg Goodman on January 31, 2014 at 9:50 am
A lamentable paper by Peter Stauning who , in case it was not evident from the rest of the paper, proves he has no idea about climate science by writing:
“But secondly, there must be a fair global coverage such that localized climate variations like the North-Atlantic Oscillation (NfAO), or the El Ninjo/La Ninja in the Pacific would not affect the result too much.”
The pal review must have pretty much a rubber stamp for no one to have seen that glaring error.
It is a troubling pattern along with the apparent decay of the TAO ENSO buoys and the tendency to write off ENSO as white noise.
There seems to be a contempt for ENSO reflecting active denial of inconvenient data. Bob correctly identifies ENSO as a nonlinear oscillator of the recharge-discharge type. ENSO rubs peoples’ noses in the inescapable fact that, at least one major natural system oscillates by its own internal dynamic, not requiring any external forcing. This blasphemes the myth that every climate change however small must be of human origin. It also undermines the absurd notion of cimate stasis being either desirable or possible.
However there is a rich literature on the nonlinear dynamics of ENSO but like Bob’s research it is being ignored by an elite who dislike its obvious message.
I can’t understand the fuss about Trenberth. He proved to me in a series of email correspondence that he’s a blatant liar. Ignore him.
@ferdberple at 6:55 am
“doesn’t the conduction of heat in water move at the speed of sound? about 4 times faster than in air. ”
Yes, last time I was on holiday in Greece I say local people fishing. They throw a bucket of hot water into the sea. The sonic shock wave concusses the fish and they float to the surface. The locals just have to go out is a rowing boat and scoop them up!
Totally illegal of course and not very environmentally friendly. 😉
Not a chance. Play your own game, never punch down. If you want Trenberth to talk to you, you’re going to have to get into his arena and fight to publish in the peer-reviewed literature. Heinlein: “Of course the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you–if you don’t play, you can’t win.”
All you’re really doing, is helping Trenberth identify the weaknesses in his research. He will publish again, and his research will be the better for it, but your contribution will never, ever, be attributed.
Thank you, once again, Mr. Tisdale for your wonderful work. This invitation to Trenberth does a great job of bringing everyone up to speed and helping us focus on the main issues.
Greg Goodman says: “Bob, I’m all for the recharge oscillator idea but please get yourself a decent filter from somewhere. Those pointy bits should not be there after a 12 mo filter so they are spurious artefacts. How can you or anyone else draw any info from a distortion of the data?…”
For Figure 6 in the post above, I used a 12-month running mean filter, centered on the 6th month. I redid the graph with updated data below, starting again in 2003 to represent the ARGO era.
Now, using a low pass, 12-month 1st order LOESS filter (available as an option through the KNMI Climate Explorer), I basically get the same results.
I’ll stick with the running mean, because most people can understand it and replicate it.
I do not understand why Trenbarth would want to be associated or involved with Skeptical Science in any way, shape or form.
Anyone interested in this potential (but, alas, never-to-be debate) should find the email debate between Spencer and Dessler from a few years back to be interesting:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/12/dessler-and-spencer-debate-cloud-feedback/
The Trenberth article states ”
There’s also the issue of sea level rise, whose main contributors are melting glaciers and ice sheets, and thermal expansion (water expanding as it warms). Climate scientists have been able to close the sea level ‘budget’ by accounting for the various factors that are causing average global sea levels to rise at the measured rate of about 3.2 millimeters per year since 1992 (when altimeters were launched into space to truly measure global sea level). The warming oceans account for about 35–40% of that rate of sea level rise over the past two decades, according to the IPCC AR5. If the oceans weren’t continuing to accumulate heat, sea levels would not be rising nearly as fast.”
This is a bunch oh hooey! Warming below 700 meters causes almost no thermal expansion. The thermal coefficient of expansion for sea water is almost zero at the 3 to 4 degrees celsius temperature associated with water below 700 meters.
Sorry Trenberth, your hypothesis is a complete failure.
It”s not necessary to get Trenberth to agree to a debate. The Dutch government’s Climate Dialog website could simply announce that they have scheduled a discussion of the Trenberth and Tisdale papers–or, better, of the whole oceans-ate-my-warming thesis–in two month’s (say) time, and say that they will start registering credible participants for their top-level discussion. Trenberth wouldn’t have to participate if he didn’t want to.
Is Anthony Watts and WUWT still the names that should not be spoken?
ROFLMAO
With 95% confidence, I state KT will not answer. He might ask the question, “Who’s paying me?”, but I would expect that will be his only reply.
Bob, I’m on your side here, but we should understand this post is just an opportunity to state your views and know you will never get a response. Nevertheless, we appreciate your hard work.
I enjoy the related information in the comments. PLEASE, everyone, check what you wrote before hitting the “Post Comment” button. Some errors are so egregious, it makes me embarrassed to be on the same side of an argument. At least this post doesn’t muddy the idea, as many others do. “IF Kevin was to actually respond to Bob it would be an admission that the ***septics*** are right and requires Kevin to eat crow.” A followup post correcting an error is useless, as the damage has been done. We look like dum-aces. A little more care, please. Thanks 🙂
Laurie,
I think you’ll find that it is ‘dumb-asses’… 🙂
This would be a great opportunity for Dr Trenberth.
doesn’t the conduction of heat in water move at the speed of sound? about 4 times faster than in air. somewhere around 3000 miles per hour. this would suggest that water will quickly try and equalize any heat imbalance, as it would travel around the world in 8 hours.
I have no idea what, precisely, you are referring to here, but no, no, a thousand times no. Maybe a billion times no. A whole lot of no. It’s always good to look things up. How fast waves propagate isn’t completely irrelevant to conductivity, but heat conduction isn’t a wave phenomenon; it is more akin to diffusion. The measure is called the conductivity. Here is a table:
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_429.html
Air is a terrible conductor of heat, but is pretty good at carrying heat by convection and is moderately transparent to thermal radiation for medium scale distances (less than maybe ten meters) in non-GHG-blocked bands. Water is a better conductor of heat, again excellent at transporting heat via convection, adds in the possibility of carrying heat by adding latent heat of evaporation/fusion to convecting air, but STILL sucks as a conductor at around 20x the conductivity of air. Copper — now copper is a good conductor. Diamond is a SUPER conductor (but not a superconductor, sorry). Copper is around 800x better than water. Diamond is around 1800 times better than water. It would be difficult to maintain a temperature difference across a moderately sized chunk of diamond. It’s easy to maintain a significant temperature gradient in water.
That’s really the thing, you see. If water were a GREAT conductor, it would be at a very uniform temperature. It’s not. It’s highly stratified, and the ~4K temperature of over 90% of the oceanic water doesn’t conduct the surface heat down much at all! Which is a very good thing — if it did, the Earth would be an iceball. Instead, most of the ocean is within a few degrees of freezing, regardless of latitude or time of year. If you swim in the warm surf in the tropics, you are enjoying the fact that water is a pretty poor conductor of heat. Go down a few meters and it is cooler. Go down 100 meters and it is cold. Go down 200 meters and it is colder. Go down 1000 meters and it is 4K or colder, pretty much all over the world, from there to the bottom:
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Water/temp.html
Note well that this curve is for highly temperate surface water in the tropics and lower latitudes — lots of ocean surface starts at much lower temperatures and then descends faster.
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What is Trenberth still doing around? Didn’t the president say that climate science was finished?
The upper hierarchy of climate scientists should head off for retirement in a climate of their choice, like the Bahamas. Lower rungs for jobs in the service industry.
With the $10 million/day which are going into climate science moved to actual science – the one not finished.
Foxgoose has it exactly right!
“Now the hard core original “hockey team” are happily endorsing the amateur musings of completely unqualified activists.
Trenberth puts his name to a paper with Nuccitelli.
Numerous serious climate scientists happily requote the Cook et al “97%” rubbish, in the full knowledge that it only represents the opinions of anonymous bunch of activists.
Why have the climate hardcore crowd suddenly abandoned the “peer reviewed science” faith in favour of joining up with any self-promoting activist who shouts loud enough?
Could it be that they’ve circled the wagons for their last stand – only to find they don’t have enough proper scientists left to man the guns?”
They are hoping to somehow get through this global warming “pause” before everything falls apart completely, in hopes that the warming will soon resume. Then, they can go back to the way it was before, with global temperatures rising and their theories and models just needing some slight adjustments but still very much intact.
As somebody that trades commodities for a living, I can tell you exactly what it’s like to “get married to a position” After analyzing fundamentals and doing painstaking work to predict where the price of a commodity is going, you put on a large position and risk a tremendous amount of money based on confidence that you are right. If it initially goes in your direction, you may add to that position as your confidence increases.
But then, something unexpected happens and the price starts moving the other way. Humans tend to be biased(with big egos) and look at new data/information in a way that confirms what we think we know instead of like scientists(or professional traders) that look for why we might be wrong. We look for reasons to justify previous actions and to reinforce ourselves/ego’s that we are really right and are actually smarter than the market (of in this case, other scientists).
At this point, for a trader a critical decision has to be made if the position, now quite large is going against them. Am I really, really so smart that I know things all these other traders don’t that make up the market or have I miscalculated and possibly overlooked something.
There actually are some really, really smart traders that at that point, decide to stay through a painful drawdown, still confident that they are right…………and the price/market turns around resulting in them making a really, really lot of money.
However, even the smartest traders are wrong sometimes. The difference between somebody that is smarter than the market most of the time and makes a living off of it and somebody that is smarter than the market most of the time and goes broke is that one of them trades based on admitting they are wrong sometimes and takes immediate actions to cut their losses before their account blows out.
What I see right now with the current climate science/global warming crowd on one side, is a bunch of people that don’t know when to cut their losses. They refuse to adjust the position(s) accordingly to account for the last decades worth of empirical data that is going much differently than what their initial position was based on.
Instead, they are justifying why they are still right by finding reasons DIFFERENT than what they gave or knew about 15 years ago for why things are temporarily producing a drawdown for them but fully anticipate it to go back in their favor.
Trenberth is not worried about convincing skeptics at all. He needs to keep the other side from losing faith during this temporary pause. When the warming resumes, he needs them to still be there with him and THEN he can focus on proving to the skeptics that he was right all along.
Ten years ago, it was easy for him to crush the few skeptics around since our planet had just had 2 decades of warming.
Bob is a gift to us here and is an unmatched authority in his field. His credibility has been growing, thanks to what our planet has been doing. Trenberth’s has been dropping. He is no match for Tisdale and certainly not on Tisdale’s home turf or terms. Not here, not right now.
I’m thinking Bob is well aware of this too.
This would be like today’s heavy weight boxing champion of the world challenging Mike Tyson to a match. At one time, everybody knew he was the best but he’s way past his prime.
Tyson will probably never try to make a come back but you never know.
Trenberth has never retired and is just waiting for the warming to resume so he can make his big comeback. Then you can have your match Bob Tisdale.
If warming does accelerate, then we should all make the correct adjustments in how we view the world………….except those that have never lost the FAITH.
There is a fundamental problem with Kevin’s hope to find his missing heat “injected” deep into the tropical western Pacific by the trade winds in the course of ENSO cycles. The deep ocean over there is 1000 years old.
There are several fundamental problems with Kevin’s notion that GHG’s are warming the oceans so the heat can be injected. The first is that in order for GHG’s to warm the oceans, they must also warm the atmosphere, and it is very clear that is not happening. The second is that Carbon dioxide is evenly distributed, and the patterns of ocean warming and cooling are not.
Vince Causey Jan 31 6:02
So if I understand you correctly — Trenberth’s basic premise is that heat goes into the ocean depths and raises the water temperature there by a tiny faction to something like 4 degrees centigrade. Trenberth then contends that this slightly warmer water will eventually rise to the surface and heat the atmosphere which is already say (I really don’t know) 40 degrees centigrade. This means (by Trenberth logic) if you put a bowl of water into a freezer it would eventually boil.
Eugene WR Gallun
Good letter, Bob, but I don’t think anybody in their right mind would ever reply to an “open letter”, whether a scientist, politician, or tradesman. There is no upside for them to do so, and if I were Trenberth’s advisor, I would tell him to ignore the letter.
Remember, Bob, you are preaching the choir, and Trenberth will gain nothing in debating you, no matter how smart and credible you are.
There is lots of good material in what you write, and I thank you for that and your effort to keep our eyes on the real issues.
Mighty gentlemanly offer you make to Trenberth there Bob.
He will not respond, that would be “old science” not “Travesty science”.
The irony will show up in a couple of years.
By then Team climatologists will be desperate to engage, to be seen to be participating in actual science and public debate.
By then the worm will have firmly turned, these kind of fads collapse very fast.
So while K Trenberth could engage now, return to the practise of science and argue his theory, he will not.
When it is too little too late, he will be aggressively seeking attention.
As layoffs loom, funding vanishes and politicians rant about seeking financial redress from those “who so badly mislead the public”.
For as most of us know and government scientists will learn, politicians are never responsible.