The Sceptical Science kidz and Trenberth think that the deep ocean has absorbed all the heat that isn’t showing up in the atmosphere, and that’s [why] we have “the pause”. Well, that’s busted now according to ARGO data and JPL and it has NOT gone into the deep ocean.
NOTE: Graph by Bob Tisdale – not part of the NASA press release
From NASA Jet propulsion Laboratory:
The cold waters of Earth’s deep ocean have not warmed measurably since 2005, according to a new NASA study, leaving unsolved the mystery of why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years.
Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, analyzed satellite and direct ocean temperature data from 2005 to 2013 and found the ocean abyss below 1.24 miles (1,995 meters) has not warmed measurably. Study coauthor Josh Willis of JPL said these findings do not throw suspicion on climate change itself.
“The sea level is still rising,” Willis noted. “We’re just trying to understand the nitty-gritty details.”
In the 21st century, greenhouse gases have continued to accumulate in the atmosphere, just as they did in the 20th century, but global average surface air temperatures have stopped rising in tandem with the gases. The temperature of the top half of the world’s ocean — above the 1.24-mile mark — is still climbing, but not fast enough to account for the stalled air temperatures.
Many processes on land, air and sea have been invoked to explain what is happening to the “missing” heat. One of the most prominent ideas is that the bottom half of the ocean is taking up the slack, but supporting evidence is slim. This latest study is the first to test the idea using satellite observations, as well as direct temperature measurements of the upper ocean. Scientists have been taking the temperature of the top half of the ocean directly since 2005, using a network of 3,000 floating temperature probes called the Argo array.
“The deep parts of the ocean are harder to measure,” said JPL’s William Llovel, lead author of the study, published Sunday, Oct. 5 in the journal Nature Climate Change. “The combination of satellite and direct temperature data gives us a glimpse of how much sea level rise is due to deep warming. The answer is — not much.”
The study took advantage of the fact that water expands as it gets warmer. The sea level is rising because of this expansion and water added by glacier and ice sheet melt.
To arrive at their conclusion, the JPL scientists did a straightforward subtraction calculation, using data for 2005 to 2013 from the Argo buoys, NASA’s Jason-1 and Jason-2 satellites, and the agency’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. From the total amount of sea level rise, they subtracted the amount of rise from the expansion in the upper ocean, and the amount of rise that came from added meltwater. The remainder represented the amount of sea level rise caused by warming in the deep ocean.
The remainder was essentially zero. Deep ocean warming contributed virtually nothing to sea level rise during this period.
Coauthor Felix Landerer of JPL noted that during the same period, warming in the top half of the ocean continued unabated, an unequivocal sign that our planet is heating up. Some recent studies reporting deep-ocean warming were, in fact, referring to the warming in the upper half of the ocean but below the topmost layer, which ends about 0.4 mile (700 meters) down.
Landerer also is a coauthor of another paper in the same Nature Climate Change journal issue on ocean warming in the Southern Hemisphere from 1970 to 2005. Before Argo floats were deployed, temperature measurements in the Southern Ocean were spotty, at best. Using satellite measurements and climate simulations of sea level changes around the world, the new study found the global ocean absorbed far more heat in those 35 years than previously thought — a whopping 24 to 58 percent more than early estimates.
Both papers result from the work of the newly formed NASA Sea Level Change Team, an interdisciplinary group tasked with using NASA satellite data to improve the accuracy and scale of current and future estimates of sea level change. The Southern Hemisphere paper was led by three scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.
NASA monitors Earth’s vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth’s interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.
Source: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4321
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RFK, Jr.: “Do I think the scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely, that is a criminal offense and they ought to be serving time for it,”
I don’t know where the heat has been hidden now, but I can assure you that the evil Koch brothers are behind it. They did in fact have the heat hidden deep in the ocean, but the noble client scientists who are saving the planet caught on to them. So they moved it somewhere else and will keep hiding it, because they have to keep “the pause” going in order to discredit the settled science so that they can continue to produce their filthy fossil fuels that spew toxic CO2 into the atmosphere so that they can make more money to add to their fortune and to fund disinformation about climate science.
client scientists->climate scientists 🙁
You were right the first time.
Actually according to the latest BBC revelation the missing ocean heat has been on the surface all the time.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29474646
But my personal opinion is that all the heat has emigrated to Australia and has become the new dinki di, record breaking, homogenised heat:
http://www.bom.gov.au/tmp/cc/tmean.aus.0112.24987.png
In fact I think that the BOM are hopeful that if 2014 is anything like 2013, far from what once looked like a progressing sinusoidal curve, the heat will be off the map.
Ok, look, it get it. These guys are all worried that if the CAGW hypothesis fails, then they could all be out of a job and will have to go back to teaching Ecology 101 for $40K per year. Oh, and Jessica Alba — you can just forget about her.
But I think they guys are missing an opportunity. They should say that extraterrestrials kidnapped the excess heat. I mean its just as plausible as the deep ocean theory (the immaculate convection — I love it!), but its much less testable. So they could keep it going for decades. They could do a History Channel Series called “In Search of Aliens Who Stole our Heat”. Lewandowsky could write articles about how people who deny the Alien consensus are nothing but whack-job conspiracies ideationists. And if they could work Big Foot into it somehow, then they could get a cross-over audience — think night-time scenes with tree knocking while listening for a heat signature. This could be huge. Plus, the fact that they are all Nobel Prize winners would add a lot of credibility.
These guys just have to start thinking outside the box a little bit.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but there is something in the oceans called “Thermocline”. A distinct layer of water (usually @ur momisugly about 500-1,500 meters deep in open oceans) bellow which water doesn’t mix with surface layers any more, and the water temperature remains relatively constant all the way to the bottom. The reason behind that is that the heat transfer in surface layers is subject to radiation, convection and conduction, whereas bellow the thermocline, it is conduction only (far less efficient).
I’m sorry, … if they can’t find the “missing heat” above the thermocline, it is far less likely they will find it bellow.
Blast it all Dirk, you can’t go using logic in a debate with warmists about this matter. Logic and their computer games just do not mix well together.
How do we know the mean depth of the thermocline does not change each year?
It does change somewhat, depending on weather conditions (huge waves), and latitude, but as far as I know, 2,000 meters is well bellow it under any circumstance, at any latitude.
Thanks. It is just that it is very difficult to get the global average surface T. I question our capacity to measure the three dimensional depth of the oceans as well, even with Argo. I can see how Argo buoys must drift, possibly in a systemic way due to major ocean currents, which could well introduce a systemic bias in the readings as well.
The Amazon River alone supposedly dumps millions of tons of solid matter into the Atlantic yearly. Glaciers must carry a lot of solid material into the polar oceans. And I have lived long enough to see the cliffs on the California coast move inland from erosion, something they were doing long before AGW. Altogether there must be billions of tons of solid material entering the oceans every year.
By how much is continental erosion raising sea level?
The energy balance figure in the abstract is 0.64 +-0.44 w/m^2, which is roughly what Trenberth has estimated before. Any comments?
“Coauthor Felix Landerer of JPL noted that during the same period (2005-2013), warming in the top half of the ocean continued unabated, an unequivocal sign that our planet is heating up. ”
Yet Tisdale’s graph claims no continuing rise.
Is the coauthor Landerer outright lying or is Tisdale?
Sorry “Continuing rise” should read “continuing rate of rise”
and I would bet Landerer is ‘bending the truth’
“Study coauthor Josh Willis of JPL said these findings do not throw suspicion on climate change itself.”
““The sea level is still rising,” Willis noted. “We’re just trying to understand the nitty-gritty details.””
Now THAT sounds suspicious!
Like turtles, it’s heat all the way down.
Seriously, can someone explain how our atmosphere heats ocean water to depth.
Again I ask.
1. The heat capacity of the ocean is so large compared to the atmosphere that any temperature changes would be undetectable for centuries.
If there really is a detectable change, it cannot be due to AGW.
2. The atmosphere does not warm up the ocean, the reverse is true. If the ocean surface really was warming up so much, we would see atmospheric temps rising rapidly.
We are not.
Oceans are huge heat sinks indeed, but even if they warm up, they won’t start releasing the stored heat unless the atmosphere cools down. Laws of thermodynamics. Which is a positive thing in my mind, unless one wishes another ice age to come.
We are in an interglacial. Is it not the case that the deep oceans should be warming. Go into the shallow underground in Scotland and it gets colder, not warmer, since the land surface has not yet reached thermal equilibrium since the end of the last glacial, 10,000 years ago that placed where I sit now under 3 kms of ice.
Having told fibs from the outset, the warmists now have to find something they know full well wasn’t there from the start. Oh dear.
Oh My!
The HMD (Heat of Mass Destruction) has gone MIA! Or is that AWOL? Sarc》
The missing heat is about 10 light-years away by now.
Can you imagine how much they’ll tax us to get it back?
So does this mean – if we further account for the contribution of underground aquifer depletion… then MSL has actually decreased??! GK
2013
Groundwater abstraction is about “one fourth of the current rate of sea level rise of 3.3 mm per year.”
Here is the paper’s abstract
Update:
The abstract is from 2010. Certainly ground water abstraction adds to sea level rise.
Thanks for the reference. I was referring to the simplified math in the above premise:
“Abyssal expansion = sea level change – glacial melt – upper 2000 meter ocean expansion” which the conclusion could be:
3.3 mm = sea level change – glacial melt – upper 2000 meter ocean expansion.
If glacial melt and thermal expansion equals our present MSL rise then removing the groundwater abstraction would place us into negative MSL… ie: if oceans were not warming and ice was not melting, then the MSL would be flat. Therefore, if we stopped groundwater abstraction – sea level would fall. I suppose, I was just trying to point out (badly) that an important term was missing, from the study. Sorry if I have added to confusion. GK
Historic ocean temperature and heat absorption based on Sea Level rise (rather than extensive, accurate temperature measurements) ?
Sounds reasonable — water expands as it becomes warmer. But, is it an “empirically proven” connection in an ocean (to the degree used in the calculations)? Or, just another “hypothesis” that allows the “model” to arrive at the “desired” result?
I personally wonder, what factors other than heat absorption could be causing a significant fraction of the “apparent” Sea Level rise — thus, nullifying the model conclusions?
Tell me about this 97% consensus.
Anthony: Second sentence – way I think should be why.
and that’s way we have “the pause”
[Changed, thank you. .mod]
I think the “heat” went to their heads long before it went missing.
Some boffins at DOE (and NASA) now claim the missing heat has been found. It has been hiding in plain sight, not the in the deep oceans, but rather the _shallow_ ocean parts (apparently using observed sea-level rise as a proxy for heat):
http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2014/10/past-measurements-may-have-missed-massive-ocean-warming
Of course not…
At the near 0C temps of the deep ocean, the density vs temp curve is pretty flat. A change of 1C would cause little change in volume compared to the surface.
Hi Bob,
Regarding this statement:
“Coauthor Felix Landerer of JPL noted that during the same period, warming in the top half of the ocean continued unabated, an unequivocal sign that our planet is heating up.”
But your graph shows essentially zero warming from 2005. How can your graph and the above statement be reconciled?
I, also, was curious about that. It says: “NOTE: Graph by Bob Tisdale – not part of the NASA press release” but gives no other info. It seems different from the graphs NOAA is peddling, and I don’t know why, or how I can use it in debate when others cite NOAA.
Found this article from Bob’s site. It appears the discrepancy is between adjusted and unadjusted measurements.
Apparently, the “rise” is models all the way down.
Is it a coincidence that NASA can’t find the missing heat in the Oceans and then on roughly the same day in another paper Nature Climate Change we get the old “This underestimation is a result of poor sampling prior to the last decade and limitations of the analysis methods that conservatively estimated temperature changes in data-sparse regions,” said LLNL oceanographer Paul Durack, lead author of a paper appearing in the October 5 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change.”