Guest essay by David Archibald
President Obama didn’t start the war on coal. That war had its origins back in the 1970s. The nuclear industry joined the fray in 1982 with the establishment of the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) at Oak Ridge, part of the U.S. Department of Energy. The CDIAC collects data on carbon dioxide concentrations around the planet and conducts experiments with pre-ordained outcomes. By that I mean growing plants in elevated carbon dioxide concentrations to study the effects of that on growth rates but at the same time adding ozone so that the growth would be stunted. Not everything the CDIAC is completely useless though.
The pause in global temperature rise might cause a loss of faith in the global warming faithfully so the priests of the movement are required to provide an explanation. The explanation they have come up with is that the missing heat is hiding in the depth of the Altantic Ocean and will one day leap out at us when we are least expecting it. This is an illustration of the heat gone AWOL:
The illustration shows heat plunging into the depths as far as 1,500 metres. The oceans don’t work like that. Most of the heat energy of sunlight is absorbed in the first few centimetres of the ocean’s surface. Waves mix the water near the surface layer such that the temperature may be relatively uniform in the top 100 metres. Below that there is almost no mixing and no vertical movement of water.
This is where the CDIAC comes in handy. Following is a map of CDIAC voyages in the Atlantic Ocean:
And this is the temperature profile of A16 from almost 60°S to near Iceland, a distance of over 13,000 km.:
It shows how the Antarctic is a giant refrigerator for the planet. The dark blue in the bottom left is cold water below 1°C plunges near Antarctica and ponds in the deep ocean right up to the equator. The CDIAC voyages also record carbon dioxide data of course. This is the carbon dioxide and total alkalinity profile for A20, to the west of the A16 voyage:
Once again, most variation is near surface while the bulk of the ocean is effectively homogenous.
We didn’t need the CDIAC data to debunk claims of missing heat in the ocean depths but it is good to have empirical data. The CDIAC is well past its use-by date though. Apart from the unnecessary cost, it was conceived for a dark purpose under President Carter. The United States will need all the energy it can get soon enough.
David Archibald, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short (Regnery, 2014).
Reference:
Is Atlantic holding Earth’s missing heat?
Eli Kintisch
Armchair detectives might call it the case of Earth’s missing heat: Why have average global surface air temperatures remained essentially steady since 2000, even as greenhouse gases have continued to accumulate in the atmosphere? The suspects include changes in atmospheric water vapor, a strong greenhouse gas, or the noxious sunshade of haze emanating from factories. Others believe the culprit is the mighty Pacific Ocean, which has been sending vast slugs of cold bottom water to the surface. But two fresh investigations finger a new suspect: the Atlantic Ocean. One study, in this issue of Science, presents sea temperature data implying that most of the missing heat has been stored deep in the Atlantic. The other, published online in Nature Climate Change, suggests a warming Atlantic is abetting the Pacific by driving wind patterns that help that ocean cool the atmosphere. But some climate specialists remain skeptical. In a third recent paper, also published online in Nature Climate Change, other researchers argue that the Pacific remains the kingpin. One reason some scientists remain convinced the Pacific is behind the hiatus is a measured speedup in trade winds that drive a massive upwelling of cold water in the eastern Pacific. But there, too, the Atlantic may be responsible, modeling experiments suggest. A consensus about what has put global warming on pause may be years away, but one scientist says the recent papers confirm that Earth’s warming has continued during the hiatus, at least in the ocean depths, if not in the air.
richardscourtney says:
August 24, 2014 at 12:36 pm
Firstly, people keep disputing that global warming has stopped and that needs to be corrected.
Global warming of the lower troposphere and the top of the ocean, which are the only parts of the planet whose temperatures matter to us and the only ones that the IPCC have been mentioning all along, and the ones that IPCC predicted that would rise faster and faster every year, have indeed stopped, and this needs no correction at all.
Well its been colder here all summer AND there’s been a bunch of extra high tides. I think they are on to something. However maybe one of you experts here can take the submerged heat theory and use it to explain how it could instead be a trigger for the next ice age?
richardscourtney says:
“Secondly, global warming is an increase to global average surface temperature anomaly (GASTA). Global warming has stopped and global temperature is in a plateau: the ‘missing heat’ and heat going into the oceans are not relevant to that.”
No, “global warming” is warming globally. What goes into warming the surface air is variable, but since almost all the extra trapped heat goes into the ocean, ocean warming is a strong sign the planet still has an energy imbalance — more coming in than leaving.
Matt G says:
“The data down to 2000 m is not reliable at all before Argos so I don’t trust it.”
What are the data’s uncertainties?
Magma, thats where the heat is hiding, all those cracks in the earth, the heat is going down there, the centre of the earth is heating up you wait a paper will come out soon
Daniel G. If you paused a video and didn’t watch it, then you stopped watching it! It didn’t continue, so it is stopped. The English language is flexible to some extent, but not that much. To ‘pause’ indicates a known future event. What you’re doing is to confuse the buttons on a video machine with the definition of the word in the English language. Stop it!
Daniel G.:
Your post at August 24, 2014 at 4:23 pm says in total
Unfortunately you did not read the reply to you which I took the trouble to provide at August 24, 2014 at 6:35 am. It is here.
My answer quotes the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) which refutes your assertion because “pause” is a TEMPORARY stop, and it specifically says your video illustration is wrong because – as I also quoted – it says
I consider the OED to be a more definitive indicator of the meaning of a word than you.
It is untrue propaganda to use the word ‘pause’ for global warming has ‘stopped’ or global temperature is at a ‘plateau’. And your false claim that I failed to read what you wrote is also untrue propaganda: I refuted what you wrote with quotation from the OED.
As I said in my first post which is at August 24, 2014 at 12:55 am and induced your propaganda crusade
Richard
Nylo:
I cannot reply to your post addressed to me at August 24, 2014 at 6:47 pm because I don’t understand what it says. Please clarify.
Richard
SonicsGuy:
Your post at August 24, 2014 at 7:13 pm is balderdash!
It says in total
No! Warming is an increase in temperature.
Global warming is an increase in GASTA.
Global warming is NOT a change to heat balance, to energy or to anything except GASTA.
That is why Hadley, NASA GISS, and et al. have expended – and are expending – so much time, money and effort in generating time series of GASTA. It is also why GCMs generate surface temperature emulations. And it is why etc.
But global warming stopped some 17 years ago so warmunists are now trying to pretend global warming is something other than an increase to global average surface temperature anomaly (GASTA).
And putative “ocean warming” is not relevant to global warming.
The entire change to GASTA since the industrial revolution could result from a redistribution of surface temperatures caused e.g. by variation to ocean currents. Thus, ALL the global warming since the industrial revolution may have happened without any change to radiative forcing and – in that case – any energy imbalance would have been a RESULT – n.b. not a cause – of global warming.
Richard
Hmm, I look forward to the day when that missing heat in the Atlantic stops me from freezing to death in a few hrs if i fell in.
I have a feeling you would need a thermal heat pump to extract any so called heat that would make any major difference to our atmosphere.
Mods:
I am sure you are very busy getting familiar with the new system.
I write to inform that my post at August 25, 2014 at 2:22 am in reply to SonicsGuy is still in moderation.
I hope this information is helpful when you get around to checking the ‘bin’.
Richard
richardscourtney: August 24, 2014 at 12:36 pm
“Thirdly, my first post in this thread stated the three known possible reasons why the ‘missing heat’ may not exist.
Thanks for the reply, Richard. Using Occam, I still feel that the simplest explanation for the ‘missing heat’ is that climate scientists don’t know how to calculate the energy balance of the Earth with sufficient accuracy to know whether the heat is missing or not. Too many assumptions made in their useless models and too few measuring points around the globe to even know what is going on at any delta(t), let alone on the scale of centuries.
Tenuc:
Thankyou for your reply to me at August 25, 2014 at 3:45 am which includes
I agree. Indeed, the methods used to determine energy balance are based on temperature estimates that are meaningless: if you have not seen it then I suggest you may want to read this, especially its Appendix B.
However, my point was that there may be no ‘missing heat’ because the hypothesis which suggests the existence of such ‘missing heat’ may be the wrong hypothesis. And this is directly pertinent to my post still in moderation which is at August 25, 2014 at 2:22 am and is in reply to SonicsGuy .
Richard
Local thermometer. The sea level reflects the expansion only in the local profile, plus or minus a hair for moving water. The warmer water floats on top of the cooler water underneath, forming a local hump that can easily be isostatic with cooler water elsewhere that is unchanged.
In coastal regions, local warming can produce a localized SLR increase. Or, in mid-ocean surface warming can cause SLR there only without affecting coastal SLR at all (as long as coastal temperatures do not vary).
The problem then is that coastal records have literally nothing to do with what is going on in or over the deep ocean. Our records over 150 years are nearly pointless except that they demonstrate that very little SLR is taking place along the coasts where people actually measure it, especially when subsidence is taken into account, because in fact there has been very little change in mean SST along the coasts. Only the very recent ARGO/Satellite era has a prayer of measuring global SLR at all accurately, and even there one needs to correct for geostasis using e.g. GRACE data and the many, complex measurements of the shape of the Earth and influence of the continental land masses.
In a few decades we MIGHT have enough, good enough, data to make halfway decent statements about SLR. At the moment, all we can really say is that the observed SLR rate is utterly ignorable, basically unchanged and tiny over the last 150 years.
rgbatduke
August 25, 2014 at 7:31 am
“Only the very recent ARGO/Satellite era has a prayer of measuring global SLR at all accurately”
Correct.
They have measured 50 mm of SLR in the 17 years of “no warming”
That’s two inches.
Half of that is attributed to the thermal expansion of the water in the oceans.
NikFromNYC:
Your post at August 24, 2014 at 12:16 am concluded saying
I write to help you following the response to your post that rgbatduke has provided at August 25, 2014 at 7:31 am.
I can commend the dental practice I use at Carnon Downs near Trurob for provision of your needed dentures.
Richard
Alan Davidson: August 24, 2014 at 12:21 pm
“Now that it has become impossible to explain the halt in warming from climate models, or increasing C02 theories, or unfathomable deep ocean heat burying theoriesetc, perhaps the most obvious explanation is that the “warming” and “heat” actulaly never existed and was completely manufactured from temperature record manipulation.”
————————-
Great minds think alike, to wit:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/24/missing-heat-in-the-atlantic-it-doesnt-work-like-that/#comment-1716274
===================
To better understand the physical movement of the Thermohaline Circulation, to wit:
http://essayweb.net/geology/quicknotes/images/thermohaline_circ.png
One needs to better understand the physical forces that are associated with the functioning of “fluid logics” or “fluidics”, to wit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidics
And “Yes”, that is a Wikipedia reference, …. and a pretty good one for the subject in question.
===============
And for those persons interested in knowing, the much argued phrase ….. “pause in global warming” ….. has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the status of the earth’s climate, but in actuality is a “descriptor phase” that defines the status of ……. the mathematically calculated “average increase in/of atmospheric temperatures”, ….. which are abstract numbers and therefore have no physical quantities or attributes associated with them.
Thus said, the literal translation of the aforementioned phrase of “pause in global warming” is in reference to the “pausing” of the mathematically calculated “average temperature increase”.
richardscourtney says”
“No! Warming is an increase in temperature.”
Warming is the transfer of heat.
“Global warming is an increase in GASTA.”
If it were, it’d be called “surface warming” or something like “global surface warming.” But it isn’t.
“That is why Hadley, NASA GISS, and et al. have expended – and are expending – so much time, money and effort in generating time series of GASTA. It is also why GCMs generate surface temperature emulations.”
No, that’s done because it easiest to do, because thermometers have been around for a long time but ocean soundings were scarce.
“But global warming stopped some 17 years ago so warmunists are now trying to pretend global warming is something other than an increase to global average surface temperature anomaly (GASTA).”
It has only “stopped in one of seven datasets (RSS LT), which differs significantly from UAH LT. That means the data are suspect. Meanwhile, the dataset that uses the most information for validation (Cowtan & Way) shows 0.16 C of warming in 17.0 years.
“And putative “ocean warming” is not relevant to global warming.”
Hardly. There is no guarantee that ocean heat will stay there — some of it could well come out in an El Nino or when the IPO or AMO shifts. That’s why scientists talk about “committed warming.”
Always fun to hear a rant from Mr. Archibald. He says “We didn’t need the CDIAC data to debunk claims of missing heat in the ocean depths” which is good, because it’s not debunked. He’s so intent on hating climate science that he contradicts himself repeatedly in this “essay”.
He says this about the illustration from the article he picks on:
“The illustration shows heat plunging into the depths as far as 1,500 metres. The oceans don’t work like that.”
But then he says this about the deep cold water in the Antarctic: “The dark blue in the bottom left is cold water below 1°C plunges near Antarctica and ponds in the deep ocean right up to the equator. ”
So he says that the oceans DO work like that.
And the temperature profile chart he includes from voyage A16 that shows heat mixing down to ~1500 meters from the equator northwards.
So, what’s been proved? Not that the oceans don’t mix, since Mr. Archibald himself shows us deep water mixing twice.
I must ammend my comment; the front page is not as nice but the inside is terrific for reading, I must say.
Thanks.
Richard Courtney has neatly put it in a nutshell.
SonicsGuy:
I am replying to your post at August 25, 2014 at 9:29 am. It begins
Oh dear. WARMING IS AN INCREASE IN TEMPERATURE.
A transfer of heat can occur without warming by providing a change of state; e.g. from solid to liquid.
After that ‘schoolboy howler’ your post goes downhill.
It next says
That is plain silly! If global warming is not an increase to the Earth’s average surface temperature then global warming can only be an increase to the average temperature of the Earth’s volume.
The volumetric temperature average would be dominated by the temperatures of the magma.
GLOBAL WARMING IS AN INCREASE TO GLOBAL AVERAGE SURFACE TEMPERATURE ANOMALY (GASTA).
I see. According to you all those organisations spent $billions doing pointless things because the pointless things were easy to do and they could not do what you claim is the right thing do. And, according to you, all the IPCC Reports are wrong because they assessed global warming in terms of GASTA. Are you really stupid enough to think anybody will accept those risible assertions or are you merely trying to look stupid?
Rubbish! GLOBAL WARMING HAS STOPPED. Read the liknked article by Werner Brozek which assesses all data sets.
Clearly, you don’t understand “committed warming.” And climastrologists talk about it.
“Committed warming” is global warming so is estimated as increase to GASTA because global warming is increase to GASTA. And it has vanished.
The explanation for this is in IPCC AR4 (2007) Chapter 10.7 which can be read at
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-7.html
It says there
In other words, it was expected that global temperature would rise at an average rate of “0.2°C per decade” over the first two decades of this century with half of this rise being due to atmospheric GHG emissions which were already in the system.
This assertion of “committed warming” should have had large uncertainty because the Report was published in 2007 and there was then no indication of any global temperature rise over the previous 7 years. There has still not been any rise and we are now way past the half-way mark of the “first two decades of the 21st century”.
So, if this “committed warming” is to occur such as to provide a rise of 0.2°C per decade by 2020 then GASTA would need to rise over the next 7 years by about 0.4°C. And this assumes the “average” rise over the two decades is the difference between the temperatures at 2000 and 2020. If the average rise of each of the two decades is assumed to be the “average” (i.e. linear trend) over those two decades then global temperature now needs to rise before 2020 by more than it rose over the entire twentieth century. It only rose ~0.8°C over the entire twentieth century.
Simply, the “committed warming” has disappeared (perhaps it has eloped with Trenberth’s ‘missing heat’?).
This disappearance of the “committed warming” is – of itself – sufficient to falsify the AGW hypothesis as emulated by climate models. If we reach 2020 without any detection of the “committed warming” then it will be 100% certain that all the IPCC projections of global warming are complete bunkum.
Richard
richardscourtney
August 25, 2014 at 12:41 pm
..
“This disappearance of the “committed warming” is – of itself – sufficient to falsify the AGW hypothesis as emulated by climate models”
The AGW hypothesis does not depend on models.
Svante Arrhenius did not have computer models when he first formulated the AGW hypothesis.
Edward Richardson:
Your post at August 25, 2014 at 1:26 pm demonstrates your difficulties with reading comprehension. It says in total
The AGW hypothesis as emulated by climate models does depend on the models which emulate it.
Svante Arrhenius did not formulate the AGW hypothesis and it would not be relevant if he had because there were no climate models in his time.
The climate models emulating the AGW hypothesis predicted (n.b. predicted and NOT projected) the “committed warming” which has not happened. And, as I said, this disappearance of the “committed warming” is – of itself – sufficient to falsify the AGW hypothesis as emulated by climate models.
I would be interested in a dispute of what I wrote. If you can dispute it then please do.
Richard
Edward Richardson says:
“Svante Arrhenius did not have computer models when he first formulated the AGW hypothesis.”
But he did have a model. He just did all the calculations by hand.