Argo, Temperature, and OHC

So…the thermal capacity of the oceans is 1000 times that of the atmosphere. The upper 2.5m layer of ocean has the same heat capacity as the entire atmosphere above.
48% of the oceans volume is found in the top 2000m
Yet, warming the top 2000m at a rate of 0.02°C per decade is described as “trivially small”?
I think the amount of heat stored could be described as “quite a lot”, especially as we’re being lead to believe that the Earth is undergoing a statistically significant and rapid cooling.

Thanks Willis, I really like that first graphic. It looks like the Arctic is a dumping ground and escape valve for heat. Like others, it ran a little fast at .1 second per frame, I slowed it to .5 seconds a frame here:
http://oi57.tinypic.com/12519p1.jpg

Temps based on settled science are going up by 5c which allows an ‘environmental economist’ to publish these findings
“rising temperatures in the United States will lead to an additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 cases of rape, and 1.3 million burglaries, among other crimes.
These numbers may sound dramatic, but they’re based on existing crime data and broadly accepted projections for temperature change. Ranson also projects future costs, and estimates that a 5-degree rise in global temperatures over the next century—a middle-of-the-road climate change scenario from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC—will end up costing society $38 billion to $115 billion across the country”
for another paper events like Ukraine would be expected with global warming?
“Hsiang and colleagues analyzed studies of modern and historical data from around the world, and found a surprisingly universal relationship between rising temperatures and increasing conflicts or social unrest.”
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/03/02/climate-change-may-mean-more-crime/dZCKg5nx7mUcj513lwAEyO/story.html
so crime, murder, social unrest never mind being fried with heat should keep those addicted to living in a Munch Scream plenty to ‘worry about’?
Cynics might say add the term global warming to any pet hobby [e.g chess and global warming, Hairdressing and climate change, circle of fifths and climate change] and u will get published in the media ?

The only comments I have to make are these:
a) 4000 buoys for 70% of the Earth’s surface is an absurdly sparse grid. The ocean covers roughly 400,000,000 square kilometers. 4000 buoys means that each buoy represents on average 100,000 kilometers. That is a square 300 km — around 200 miles — per side. If the distribution of buoys were either random (Monte Carlo selected fixed locations) or regular, this might be adequate to get a decent estimate. However, they are not — many of the buoys are free-floating and follow the currents. But are the currents themselves random samples of oceanic temperatures, or are they likely to be systematically biased? What is the scale of “features” of oceanic temperature (sea surface or otherwise). Would the state of North Carolina (in comparison) be well-represented in the land surface record by no more than three thermometers?
b) Twelve years is an absurdly short interval in climate science. Here we know some of the time constants. Thermohaline circulation — which surely is a major if not dominant factor in the time variation — has a cycle time on the order of 1000 years. That means that a significant fraction of any observed variation has nothing to do with what is going on now — the mid-ocean heat at depth visible in the Atlantic, for example, has to be decades to centuries old, for example. We know that there is no reasonable physical mechanism for transporting heat from the surface straight down to 2000 meters in a decade, or even two or three decades. The ocean is thermally stratified and (past a few tens of meters from the top) effectively opaque to solar energy, and the salinity variation that causes thermohaline turnover and mixing due to surface winds does not generally cause deep mixing, although there are specific sites where the thermohaline circulations turns over and warm surface currents descend into the depths for return. The movies above are indeed nifty, but they are like looking at gust of wind on a windy day and trying to conclude that the wind is rising as a climate feature. Are we looking at noise? Signal? Detrending on a decade’s worth of data doesn’t even catch one of the decadal oscillations that surely have a “trend” of their own.
c) As always in climate science, no error bars. Everything is smoothed. We cannot see which parts of the globe are oversampled (because ocean currents create an eddy that collects more than its share of buoys) and undersampled (because prevailing currents push buoys away, or because currents are depleted by buoys trapped in eddies). We do not get any feel for the granularity of the actual measurements. It might be more interesting to recreate the same map with each buoy’s results represented by a small patch of pixels along its actual trajectory in color — that, I suspect, would eliminate the smooth contours and impression of homogeneity produced by the maps above, and would give the viewer a much better idea of the probable error in the contours.
The point being, 0.02C/decade — is that C/decade, or is it C/decade or is it C/decade?
The answer to that one is simple. HADCRUT4 represents what, tens of thousands of reporting stations, including all of ARGO to represent the sea surface, and claims (probably egregiously, given the lack of UHI correction) 0.15C accuracy.
That’s the fundamental problem. I rather suspect that the reported warming is C/decade, which is a number that ought to be reported as “0” no matter how many “joules” one wishes to discover in the deep ocean. Or at the very least, it should be reported with an error bar, and some empirical and statistical justification for the error bar should be provided.
rgb

From what I remember reading, argo floats have a resolution of 0.005C, which is by far the most accurate system for ocean temp measurement ever. There’s a Wiki page here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_%28oceanography%29
and the argo project home page here:
http://www.argo.net/
Well worth spending some time at and a very ambitious project…

Is it possible rgbatduke has a point about the relevant ocean layer being very near the surface? Not sure at what depth increments Argo measures, but could the joules/decade calculation be made from say, 0 to 50 meters?
Also, is it possible to make a reasonable estimate of how many joules/decade would represent a 0.2, 0.4, and 0.6 C/decade surface warming. Would then comparing those numbers provide an indication of the validity of the theory that significant surface warming would be occurring, but for being masked by oceanic heat absorption?

One important thing is not to confuse resolution(0.005 c) with accuracy or uncertainty.
I do not believe that the changes measured are more than the uncertainty.