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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What caused the massive rise from 1972 – 1973?
Probably lousy measurements and sample spread pre-Argo, I’d guess.
Everytime someone takes me down there in their underwater craft via TV it is cold down there several degrees above freezing and it is not 72 degees.
At the benthic depths, the temp is a constant 4 C. Add heat, and out of equilibrium, it warms and expands. Take away heat, it cools and expands. Entropy drives the system back to equilibrium via pressure, and the extra heat (when heated) flows upward above 2000m, no stays below 5000m. But it is not convection. The depth stays constant T, like a regulator after a perturbation and response. An emergent property coming from the uniques physics of water and the law of thermodynamics in the intense pressure of the deep ocean.
NASA along with every other government agency have been re directed from their mission such as valuable space exploration to an agenda to control everything in our life. The past numerous technical contributions of NASA to society have terminated
The does not sound like Jet Propulsion to me. No [wonder] we now depend on the Russians to get us to the Space Station. NASA’s mission has been corrupted. and we spend over $21 Billion annually on climate change which is a figment of someone’s imagination.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/orbiting-carbon-observatory-2-oco-2/
ABOUT THE MISSION
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2, or OCO-2, is an Earth satellite mission designed to study the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide globally and provide scientists with a better idea of how carbon is contributing to climate change. The mission launched July 2, 2014, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and is one of five NASA Earth science launches in 2014.
Starting about six weeks into its orbit, the satellite will begin gathering detailed global measurements — around 100,000 — of the Earth’s carbon every day, answering important questions about precisely where carbon is coming from and where it’s being stored. OCO-2 is a replacement for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, which was scheduled to launch in early 2009, but was unsuccessful due to a launch vehicle failure.”
“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. ”
The graph shows that the “top half of the ocean” (or at least top 700m, the top 20%) has not warmed at all since 2003.
I cannot say it better myself, so here is Motl’s take on ocean heat sequestering.
“While the evolution of the ocean-based temperatures could be less fluctuating than the surface temperatures, the particular extra arguments above in favor of the “ocean standards” are of course mostly silly. The ocean’s heat capacity is much larger than the heat capacity of the atmosphere, so if some heat makes it to the “bulk of the ocean”, it effectively gets hugely diluted. The second law of thermodynamics allows heat to get diluted, but it doesn’t allow the heat to spontaneously concentrate itself again!
What it means is that if the extra heat from a one-degree-like warming of the atmosphere makes it to the ocean, the bulk of the ocean gets warmer by something comparable to 0.01 °C, and the only thing that this warmer ocean may do to the atmosphere is to warm it (more precisely, to increase the expected equilibrium temperature) by the same 0.01 °C sometimes in the very far future, thousands of years from now. Physics just doesn’t allow the energy to be transformed from “diluted heat” to some more concentrated forms of energy.
Rahmstorf knows this piece of classical physics so he corrects them. There is no thermal threat waiting in the deep ocean.
But what he’s missing is that the writers in Nature talk about this non-existent threat because they’ve been misled by lots of intense propaganda about dangers related to the climate change. They were able to figure out that no noteworthy threat may be linked to the global mean surface temperature – the expertise of an astrophysicist and even the common sense of a political scientist are enough for that. However, the broader point that the writers were led to misunderstand is that there is no global climate threat at all, whether it is linked to the surface temperatures, ocean temperatures, or anything else.”
The universe seems to work on the principle of ‘dumping’ energy, not gathering it. Some people don’t understand the term ‘heat sink’. Its a sink and not one with a plug in the bottom. Its a sink because it flushes everything away.
AR5 TS.6 Key Uncertainties
This final section of the Technical Summary provides readers with a
short overview of key uncertainties in the understanding of the climate
system and the ability to project changes in response to anthropogenic
influences. The overview is not comprehensive and does not describe in
detail the basis for these findings.
OHC:
Different global estimates of sub-surface ocean temperatures have
variations at different times and for different periods, suggesting
that sub-decadal variability in the temperature and upper heat
content (0 to to 700 m) is still poorly characterized in the historical
record.
Below ocean depths of 700 m the sampling in space and time is
too sparse to produce annual global ocean temperature and heat
content estimates prior to 2005.
Let’s be serious. The only part of ocean heat that can possibly effect weather and climate is SST and a short distance below. The rest of the ocean is a vast thermodynamic sink that never gives up its heat, or its cold.
hswiseman, you are in error (unless you are being facetious). The abyssal waters are indeed brought to the surface and mixed in with surface temperatures. I wish these new young researchers knew what they were doing.
https://courses.seas.harvard.edu/climate/eli/Courses/EPS281r/Sources/Abyssal-circulation/Stommel-Arons-1960-I.pdf
You can bring up as much abyssal water as you want, the entropic process can never be undone.
There are many ocean currents, but pointing to a model as evidence is not very convincing. Especially when the authors themselves refer to the models as “simple”. Heck they even assume “covered with a layer of homogeneous water of depth h”. If you want to make a point, it seems that real data (which surely exists on the well-known “global conveyor belt” ) would be infinitely better than a model.
hswiseman, Pamela is of course right. Simplified description: Cold water sinks, warm water rises. Currents of water move toward the poles, cools, sinks, and proceeds along the bottom. Surface water at the equator is warmed enough to expand to be like 2 feet higher than cooler waters. Water flows down hill, away from the equator. Water rises from the deep to take it’s place.
Not only currents matter however. Your statement is the equivalent of saying that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is not true. Warmer water will definitely transfer energy to colder water. Water is a very good thermal conductor. However, since warmer water rises, it’s hidden by physical transport. In short, the situation is fluid.
The missing heat is longwave infrared, a fairly easy thing to spot. We could start a Christmas fund for Trenberth to get him one of these:
http://www.ircameras.com/cameras/long-wave-products/
Aye me laddies, cold it be in the deep, cold and bitter briny, like a Woman’s scorn. Or ye Moms recriminny, when ye leaves the sundering bowl lid aloft.
The heats a’missing a-right, things that should not want for motion, be animated in grimlike fashion, scurry about in the deep, like a pizza boy aturnin’ his batter.
Scutter they do, all the while collecting the heat in their slimy paws, all teeth, and dark hunger and mischief they clatter about.
“See you here…’ They’s a mutter,
“Heft I a bounty plenty, o’ the Suns foul oil, …its heats I stifle…”
And they saunter and gamble, betwixt the submarine reefs, bleaching the coral and drowning the Tuvaluan’s.
Frolics they do in delight, gleeful of deceiving the dismal Warm-apes, and their mad god who they mock, Model is his name, and he lives in EXCEL and divides by Zero.
Chirp and chitter, guffaw and mew and meep they do, as they hide the heat in the grimy deep.
Now that is eye candy. If ye young, run. If ye old, hold onto yer hat!
In my opinion the paper by Llovel et al is not being read correctly. Just look at what Llovel, Willis, Landererand and Fukumori wrote,
“Accounting for additional possible systematic uncertainties, the deep ocean (below 2,000 m) contributes … -0.08 +/- 0.43 W m-2 to Earth’s energy balance.”
Deep-ocean contribution to sea level and energy budget not detectable over the past decade, Nature Climate Change.
URL:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2387.html
The error bars are 5 times bigger than the observed contribution to warming. Meaning that we cannot measure what is happening in the deep ocean precisely enough to know if it is warming, cooling or constant.
Dr Roy Spencer’s diffusion model of the heat sequestered by the oceans explains this. The diffusion curve is negative exponential and therefore warming approaches zero with depth. By 2,000 meters (6,560 feet) the rate of cooling is less than the instrumental and other errors.
URL: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/06/
There are 3000 argo floats in the ocean. By comparison, there are thought to be 9000 blue wales in the ocean. That’s three times as many blue wales as there are argo floats.
There are so few of them that if argo floats were alive they would be a protected species.
If that’s what we have to rely on, then nobody knows anytime about ocean heat content.
It is very difficult to get just 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. Is anyone aware if this may exist as a factor?
So we should ask the whales if they’ve been feeling any warmer or colder recently.
Admitting the influence of the oceans is two-edged sword for alarmists. CAGW is not possible if we need to warm the oceans. It takes centuries to warm 1,35 10**9 km3 of water with 4 W/m2 forcing.
Think about a m2 on planet Earth: 6000 km of liquid iron, 4 km of water and 100 km of atmosphere. Warm it with a 4 W light bulb at 5 000 m.
Thank you global cooling! I’ve been making the argument that air/land/sea are components of one thermodynamic system for over 10 years. Almost no one on Climate Audit or other places appreciated the point. They accepted the premises of the AGW alarmists that atmosphere was the system, and was governed by rules that violated multiple laws of physics. Like Tom Vonk would say “it was a non-physical”. The “story” was more fiction than a description of reality. I used the analogy that even if C02 was acting like they described, it would be like trying to heat an Olympic swimming pool with a blow dryer. In short, AGW is impossible. Most commenters here are knee jerking reacting ridiculing the claim that oceans can store heat. They don’t seem to realize that they are admitting the truth, and that it doesn’t help the AGW cause, it’s a surrender, a slight turning away from being a science denier.
Once the heat goes below 700 m deep, it becomes irrelevant because the heat capacity of the ocean is 1,000 times greater than the atmosphere. Example, X megajoules warms the atmosphere by 1 C. X megajoules will warm the ocean by 0.001 C. The fishes will hardly notice it. Only top 200 m of ocean is significantly affected by temperature changes. Notice they always talk about changes in megajoules rather than in Celsius. Because temperature changes are negligible. Too small to be alarming.
Dr. Strangelove, you’re right that ocean energy is 1280x the energy of the atmosphere, and that 2c of atmospheric is equivalent to .000175 degrees C of ocean temperature increase.
However, this doesn’t make it irrelevant. We should have been focused on measuring ocean temperature all along, and ignored atmospheric temperatures. Measuring energy in Joules is the only scientifically responsible way to go. It’s representing energy as temperature that is very misleading. Measuring atmospheric temperature and making a claim about “global warming” is like taking my temperature and claiming that everyone on earth has a fever.
Also, you’re too focused on temperature. It only represents energy at a constant pressure. Gibbs law says that everything seeks the lowest state. In other words, excluding physical transport for a minute, the ocean internal energy is close to constant going all the way down. Temperatures near the surface are naturally higher since pressure is so low.
Water has this really weird property where it’s density changes right around freezing. It’s why the bottom of the ocean isn’t compressed into a solid (think about LP tanks, water doesn’t do that). If the deep water warms, rises. If it cools, it rises because it gets less dense as the angle of the hydrogen bonds expand. The really deep ocean is at a constant temperature that corresponds to maximum density and it’s a liquid.
Ocean is salt water, not fresh, & salt water’s density goes up as it cools to freezing (unlike fresh water). I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this common mistake.
There are two results to be discussed today – The Livermore ones and the JPL ones, covering much the same ground (water?) but presented in rather different ways. I’m not sure we can learn much either way from either of them. It’s rather odd that the object of both pieces of work seems to be to discover the missing heat that models say SHOULD be there, rather than the other way round, but that doesn’t invalidate the results.
I’m still really sceptical that, total ocean heat content being so vast, measuring directly a small trend over a short period of time is actually possible. 3600 Argos are a big step forward, but I still don’t think the measurements will be accurate enough for the purpose, and even if they are, we’ll need another 30 years to be confident.
Much less easily undermined are the altimetry results. If we can rely on them, they represent an excellent proxy for ocean volume, which will be related to both heat content and to volume changes due to precipitation and land ice mass changes. I would like to see much more detailed critiques of these measurements, but I would expect that, since the rate of sea level rise has remained so constant back to pre-industrial CO2, confirmation of ‘hidden’ heat is going to remain elusive.
Ergo, the climate scientists are incapable of working out the earth’s energy balance.
GO back to GO. Do NOT collect $200 billion in grants.
The very best thing about the deep ocen is that is vast so lots of things can be claimed to hide there , the next best thing is that its deep , so its very hard to find things there so its hard to prove your ‘its in the deep’ claims wrong .
Now normally in science this is a problem , because without proof you not got much and certainly not enough to justify the spending of trillions with massive changes to people’s live . But we are in the land of climate ‘science’ with its own special rules, and all that matters is you believe enough .
Any paper that includes the sentence “the estimates that we had up until now have been pretty systematically underestimating the likely changes,” is NOT scientific and can be safely ignored. Why do we keep paying for this level of scholarship? Some public sector scientists need to be fired for being useless and for not contributing any value to the society.
What the co2 driven global warming advocates don’t discuss is that if the ocean has started eating global warming since the trade winds changed during the negative phase of the ocean’s ~60 year multi-decadal cycles, they also emitted excess energy during their positive phase from 1975-2005. The implication is that the oceans are capable of storing energy on long timescales, and releasing it on long timescales too. And they store a lot of energy. The top two metres alone contain as much energy as the entire atmosphere above.
We know that the oceans keep the air temperature up over night as the release some of the energy the Sun poured into them during the day. We also know that there is a lag of a couple of months between the longest day of the year and the peak in surface air temperatures near coasts. This is thermal inertia and heat capacity at work. On longer timescales, we have recently confirmed that runs of El Nino events which release a lot of energy from the oceans are initiated on the falling side of the solar cycle, never on the upswing.
So we can go a stretch further and combine what we know. When solar activity falls, energy comes out of the ocean, not just over the period of the decline of a single 11 year solar cycle, but if the Sun stays low in activity terms, for many years. An integration of the sunspot number shows us that the ocean heat content rose all the way from 1934 to 2003. This is the real cause of ‘global warming’. A lot of excess energy is still retained in the upper ocean. We can expect the effect of a couple of low solar cycles to be softened by a proportion of that excess heat returning to space via the atmosphere warming it on the way.
In developing my understanding of the Earth’s systems, I developed a couple of very simple models to help me fathom the way the surface temperature stays fairly constant as the solar cycles wax and wane. Back in 2009, by analysing the data, I found that the global average sea surface temperature, the SST, stays fairly constant when the Sun is averaging around 40 sunspots per month. By calculating the running total departing from this figure in a simple integration I found that combined with the ~60 oceanic cycles (also solar influenced), I could reproduce the temperature history of the last 150 years quite accurately. By adding in a nominal forcing for co2 (or an allowance for the infamous ‘adjustments’ to the data), I was able to get a match to monthly data which has a Pearson R^2 value of 0.9.
The above is part of an article ROG TALKBLOKE wrote from his web-site talkblokes talkshop.
I think this article presents a strong case for solar/ocean connections.
But, the oceans still warmed – even during the “positive” phase. It may well have been the case, in the past, that the oceans would release heat to the atmosphere during the positive phase of the cycle and then store it during the negative phase but that’s not what is happening now. The oceans are warming throughout both phases of the cycle. Atmospheric warming has slowed and this may continue for a while but there is strong evidence that warming will resume at some point in the relatively near future.
Any day now brother, any day now.
What’s the strong evidence?
Missing ocean heat not found ? I know. This is the Koch brothers. They visited all Argo probes in their submarine and tampered with their measurements. (sarc. off).
A little poetry.
There once was a fellow named Trenberth
Who worried about global heat dearth
He searched oceans and lands
But there were no measurements
This unfortunate fellow named Trenberth
About warming they all have gone anal
But the warming itself has gone AWOL
They count rings in the trees
search the sky and the seas
But them megajoules simply aint there Y’all
Now waiting for those desperate, failed “scientists” to claim the missing heat was converted into “dark energy”, hiding in parallel universes, UFO’s, time slips, blaming it on contrails… Or the Koch bros secretly stole it to power their Capitalist industrial complex.
Comparison of the Ocean below 2,000 meters to the GLOBAL Land-Ocean Temperature Index from GISS.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/OA-Giss.gif
Only major divergence occurred around 2008
( surface water > evaporation > increase in salinity > rise in specific weight > sinks to depth below 2000 m )
Vukcevic, what is the “y” axis? It cannot be temperature.
There is something fishy about those Argo floats. In 2010 Trenberth and Fasullo reported that since 2004 ocean heat had been disappearing, and by 2008 their record showed that eighty percent of it was gone without a trace. But then we read in their text that “…Since 2004, ~3000 Argo floats have provided regular temperature soundings of the upper 2000 m of the ocean, giving new confidence in the ocean heat content assessment…” If I had been the reviewer of that paper I would have told them to forget that new confidence and sent them back to study those Argo floats until they find the secret place that the heat was disappearing into. But no, their buddies let that “disappearing heat” become another mystery of the deep sea, forever linked with Trenberth’s name. With everybody today concerned with yet another lost heat mystery connected with the hiatus, that lost heat of Trenberth now becomes a suspect when it really does not even exist. As to the hiatus, the heat is not lost, it was simply never picked up because according to MGT, addition of carbon dioxide to air leads to reduction of atmospheric water vapor, which in turn prevents any greenhouse warming from happening. This of course is the exact opposite role of what IPCC wants to assign to water vapor, namely that of multiplying the effect of the greenhouse warming caused by carbon dioxide. It is of course erroneous and is responsible for the many ridiculous climate predictions coming out of CMIP5 models.
Can you remind me what MGT is?
Talking about the oceans,
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom_new.gif
When was the north Atlantic last this cold?
The cold SSTs over the eastern continental seaboards suggest stalled NH poleward surface transport.
Not much sign of warmth around Antarctica either.
But who would be stupid enough to look for warming in Antarctica?