There are now 2 UPDATES at the end of the post.
# # #
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
This post presents a very simple way to illustrate the tempering effect of the oceans on global warming. The idea for this simple presentation came from the response of the reality-impaired wing of the catastrophic human-induced climate change movement to the deep-ocean-warming portion of yesterday’s blog post On The Blog Post “Hiatuses in the rise of temperature” at ClimateLabBook. The cross post at WattsUpWithThat is here, and an archived edition of the response from Miriam O’Brien (a.k.a. Sou) at HotWhopper is here.
It is often said that more than 90% of the heat caused by manmade greenhouse gases is absorbed by the oceans. But as skeptics often note, the absorbed heat has little impact on the temperatures of the oceans to depth, and that’s because of the seemingly limitless capacity of the oceans to store heat.
INTRODUCTION
More than 3000 ARGO floats were distributed around the global oceans in the early 2000s to the measure temperature and salinity in all ocean basins for the depths of 0-2000 meters, about 1.25 miles…from the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica to the Arctic Ocean. From that ARGO-based data and other measurements, the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) now determines and provides data for the annual change in the heat stored by the oceans, starting in 2005. Ocean heat content data from the NODC for the depths of 0-2000 meters are presented in terms of Joules*10^22 (here), and the NODC provides the vertically average temperature anomaly data (here) from which the heat content is calculated (along with the salinity data). The temperature data are presented in terms many people are familiar with, degrees C.
The units used to present the ocean heat content (Joules times 10 to the 22nd power) look like an astronomically large number. Feel free to add 22 zeroes in your mind to the following graphs. And since few people have any idea what those units mean, we helpful people try to present them in more-familiar terms (deg C) as well.
The reality-impaired wing of the catastrophic human-induced climate change movement doesn’t like it when we present data in familiar terms. They claim silly things like we don’t want our readers to know data indicate the oceans are absorbing heat. Again, see the archived version of the post here. What’s really strange about that is, if you were to do a Google Image search of “NODC ocean heat content” the vast majority of the images presented by Google are those I prepared for my blog posts and the posts at WattsUpWithThat. In Figure 1, I’ve highlighted all of the illustrations I prepared or that were prepared by others and included in my posts that show up on a screen cap.
Figure 1
To me, it doesn’t look like I’m trying to hide the fact the oceans have absorbed heat. In fact, I’ve explained, using data, the naturally occurring processes that cause the oceans to warm at the surface and at depth. See the free illustrated essay “The Manmade Global Warming Challenge” (42MB).
THE SIMPLE PRESENTATIONS OF THE TEMPERING EFFECT OF THE OCEANS ON GLOBAL WARMING
Well, I came up with a very simple way to keep alarmists AND skeptics happy. I’ve presented the NODC ocean heat content data in terms of Joules*10^22 and the NODC vertically averaged temperature data in terms of deg C—ready for this?—on the same graph. See Figure 2. In it, the data have been zeroed at 2005.
Figure 2
The caption for it and Figure 3 reads, A hypothetical energy imbalance resulting from the emissions of manmade greenhouse gases has caused the oceans to absorb heat from 2005 to 2013 at a rate of about 8.6*10^22 Joules/decade, according to the NODC data for the depths of 0 to 2000 meters, but due to the heat capacity of the oceans, the oceans for those same depths have only warmed at a rate of about 0.03 deg C/decade, also according to NODC data.
For those who would prefer the NODC data to not be zeroed at 2005, see Figure 3.
Figure 3
Again, the warming rate illustrated in Figure 2 and 3 is only +0.03 deg C/decade. Let me repeat a portion of yesterday’s post:
That’s read 3 one-hundredths of a deg C per decade, which is a very tiny warming rate. It would be even tinier if we had data for the oceans from the surface to the ocean floor.
The oceans are deeper than the 2000 meters reached by the ARGO floats. So we have to look elsewhere to see if the deep oceans below 2000 meters have warmed. The title of Llovel et al. (2014) explains the findings of the paper Deep-ocean contribution to sea level and energy budget not detectable over the past decade. “Not detectable” says it all. Phrased differently, there has been no detectable warming of the deep ocean (below 2000 meters) from January 2005 to December 2013, the time period covered by Llovel et al. (2014), which happily coincides to the period we’re discussing.
From the NOAA OceanToday webpage Deep ARGO, we learn that the depths of 0-2000 meters include only about one-half of the volume of the global oceans.
Based on those findings, we can assume the trend in the temperature of the oceans, from surface to ocean floor, from 2005 to present, is one-half the +0.03 deg C/decade trend calculated for the depths of 0-2000 meters, or a warming rate of +0.015 deg C/decade. That’s read 15 one-thousandths of a deg C per decade.
That minuscule warming rate of the oceans serves only as the background for the surface warming. It can’t magically come back to haunt us.
CLOSING
I want thank Miriam O’Brien (Sou) from HotWhopper. Without her nonsensical response, I would not have come up with the idea for this post. Now, in the not-too-distant future, every time someone performs a Google Image search of “Tempering Effect of the Oceans on Global Warming”, or some derivative thereof, they’ll see Figures 2 and 3 from this post…and read the all-important caption.
(Sarc on.) I’d like to also thank the always-helpful William Connolley of Wikipedia fame and the blog Stoat for trying to post my full name and address on that thread at HotWhopper. A special thanks to Mariam O’Brian for leaving the U.S. Copyright Office website address for my book Who Turned on the Heat? (On sale for only U.S.$5.00.) Now global warming skeptics from all around the world can easily find my name, address, phone number and email address. When they’re in the neighborhood, they can take me out for a cup of coffee*. Or those who have always wanted to tip me for my work, but didn’t want to use PayPal, can now send me checks by mail. How convenient! (Sarc off.)
*PS: Please call first.
*PPS: Skeptics can also use my new-found home address to send me Christmas cards
# # #
UPDATE: The following is a screen cap of a Google Image search (from the morning of December 1, 2014, a day after this post was originally published): The Tempering Effect of the Oceans on Global Warming
That didn’t take long. Never does. As I wrote above… every time someone performs a Google Image search of “Tempering Effect of the Oceans on Global Warming”, or some derivative thereof, they’ll see Figures 2 and 3 from this post…and read the all-important caption.
Once again, thank you, Sou (Miriam O’Brien). Someday Miriam will figure out she’s helping skeptics, not hurting them. Will that stop her rants? I think not. It will simply make her madder.
UPDATE 2: Believe it or not, this is one of the posts that Sou (Miriam O’Brien) has chosen to comment on at HotWhopper. See my post Miriam O’Brien says: Warmer oceans matter. It includes an archived version of her painfully flawed rebuttal. Miriam has also given me another idea for a post on ocean warming.
Breaking News…
Spring, November temp records smashed.
AUSTRALIA has had its hottest spring and its hottest November on record.
BUREAU of Meteorology climate monitoring manager Karl Braganza says 2014 was the latest in a long line of hot springs in the past decade.
The previous record was set only last year, he said.
“Really, it was only 2010 that had a cool spring in the past 10 years or so. Nine out of the warmest springs on record have occurred since 2002,” Dr Braganza told AAP.
The average spring 2014 temperature of 24.17C exceeded the mean by 1.67C, Dr Braganza said.
“That departure, averaged over a whole three-month period, is actually really large. That means it was, on average, over 1.5C warmer, and that’s the largest seasonal departure that we’ve ever recorded,” he said.
The November 2014 average temperature was 27.27C, 1.87C above the mean of 25.4C.
A spike in maximum temperatures – up 2.19C on the mean maximum temperature for November – contributed to the record-breaking mark.
Heatwaves in NSW and Queensland were major factors in the November result, while seasonal warm conditions were recorded across both states and in areas of South Australia and Western Australia, Dr Braganza said.
“This is similar to what we’ve seen in the past couple of years, when these high summer temperatures started to get going late in spring or early in December, which is about a month earlier than typical,” Dr Braganza said.
http://www.news.com.au/national/breaking-news/australia-endures-hottest-spring-on-record/story-e6frfku9-1227140814512
BOLLOCKS!
My first question to the BoM would be…..what heatwaves? (unless they have redefined the term ‘heatwave’)
What heatwave bruceC asks?
This heatwave!
October temperature records fall as southern Queensland bakes through heat wave.
Southern Queensland has sweltered through some of the hottest weather ever recorded in October.
St George (42.6), Toowoomba (36.4 degrees), Oakey (39.1) and Applethorpe (34.7) today experienced their hottest October days on record.
The exceptionally warm weather also saw the record books re-written on Sunday in Cunnamulla, with a top of 42 degrees Celsius, and Goondiwindi, which hit 40.6.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-27/hot-south-qld/5844570
And how many days was this ‘heat-wave’ Martin? One day, two days…….a week?
Was it anywhere near Marble Bars 160 days over 35C (of which ~70% was over 40C) between October 1922 & April 1924?
Sorry that should be Oct, 1923.
Sorry, just noticed it was reported by the ABC………..so it must be true.
/sarc.
INLAND HEAT
BRISBANE, November 15, November 1937
Most parts of the State are still in the grip of the heat wave, many inland centres recording well over the century. At Winton to-day the temperature was 109 [42.8], Longreach 108 [42.2], Charleville 107 [41.7], and Cloncurry 105 [40.6].
If I were you Martin, I would suggest reading through the Australian newspaper archives before believing what todays ABC, HotFlopper and who-ever-else is feeding you tripe.
http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/result?q=october+heat
Tell me Martin, what caused this hot period of time in QLD during 1937 when CO2 was at a ‘safe’ level of <350ppm.
ABNORMAL HEAT
BRISBANE, SEPTEMBER 19. [1937]
This was the hottest day in Brisbane for nearly six months, the maximum temperature of 86.5deg. [30.3] was 1.1deg. lower than the average for January, and was 10.9deg. higher than the September normal.
Bob T…..hoping you can answer a query/question for me.
I have ARGO’s ‘Global Marine Atlas” installed on my computer, available here;
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/Marine_Atlas.html
One of the program’s options is ‘ARGO Warm Water Volume’ (found in ‘Derived Products’). What is this? Is it the same as OHC? (graph below from Jan 2004 – Sept 2014).
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh154/crocko05/ARGOWarmWaterVolumeSept2014_zps57394cb4.jpg
Thanks in advance.
BruceC, does ARGO provide the coordinates of the portion of the ocean for that specific dataset? My guess is that it’s ENSO related and represents the volume of warm water (possibly for a portion of the western tropical Pacific) above a specific absolute threshold.
The TAO project website has a product using the same Warm Water Volume name, which represents the volume of water along the equatorial Pacific above the 20 deg C isotherm. I use it in my 2014/15 El Nino updates. Example here:
https://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2014/11/11/the-201415-el-nino-november-update-the-little-el-nino-that-shoulda-woulda-coulda/
See the top graphs in Figures 5,6, and 7.
Sorry Bob, I cannot help you on that. When you select ‘Argo Warm Water Volume’ in the program, the only parameters that can be adjusted are the start and end dates (month/year). The ‘Help’ file is, ummm…..no help.
Some find travesty in missing heat and there’s likewise problems with Argo pressure sensor drifts
reminding us of ‘the ongoing need to detect and remove subtle and systematic errors in ocean observations ‘ But of course, if yr goal is to scare the pants off the prols then all you hafta’ do is
convert celsius measurements into SCARY joules.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2011JTECHO831.1
You mean like this;
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh154/crocko05/ArgoSept04-14_1900m_zps02210d5c.jpg
Oceanic oscillations involve multiples of the temperature variations that are indicated in this post, as can be seen in this Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillations (AMO) diagram (±0.3 K):
http://climate.mr-int.ch/images/graphs/amo.png
Source: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/timeseriesimeseries/AMO/
I don’t know how it is done to extract a trend of 0.003 K/a from such huge longer term variations; neither is it indicated what is the confidence interval of this trend (Argo floats measure temperatures with a precision of 0.01 K).
May be it’s just such a short time period under observation (here 2005 to 2013) that actually means nothing in regard with other changes (but yes with weather, which is not the same).
Michel, the AMO is a surface temperature phenomenon, while the trend of 0.003 K/a is a subsurface trend for the depths of 0-2000 meters.
Bob,
Of course it’s sea surface, measured at an uncertain depth (few mm down to few meters), representing a more or less well mixed layer, more or less in equilibrium with a more or less humid atmosphere.
But in any case, if a temperature change takes place in deeper zones the driver for any gradient is the surface temperature (neglecting geothermal fluxes). It’s just a kind of slow dilution into the ocean mass.
My point is that a 2005-2013 period is not revealing a global trend for e.g. climate change when multi-decadal variations are at work.
Bob’s points about the heat content of the oceans are very appropriate.
And also, I have yet to hear from Trenberth or any of the other warmists a satisfactory explanation of how the infrared radiation can be trapped by the CO2 in the atmosphere and miraculously get sucked into the oceans, without first warming the atmosphere.
James McCown,
Sunlight penetrates water to tens and hundreds of meters, IR on the order of millimeters — leaving evaporation as the main mechanism in which the oceans shed absorbed solar energy. Trenberth has — apparently vainly — attempted to explain that oceans will tend to accumulate more energy during ENSO, AMO, PDO (etc.) negative conditions since with more cool water at the surface less evaporation will tend to occur. And of course with cooler water at the surface, the atmosphere will respond accordingly since water has the far higher heat capacity.
Brandon,
For absorbency of water with respect to IR, it is measured as less than ten microns.
Brandon Gates
“Trenberth has — apparently vainly — attempted to explain that oceans will tend to accumulate more energy since with more cool water at the surface less evaporation will tend to occur.”
The good old “as it gets warmer in Antarctica we will have more sea ice argument”.
or
“As it gets warmer we can expect more cold weather”
Have not heard it in this form.
Please understand if the water on top is cooler there is thus already less energy in the ocean.
The fact that there is more evaporation when water is warmer is irrelevant . It is not a source of energy to heat up the ocean or increase ocean heat loss.
All cold water evaporates less than hot water precisely because the ocean heat content is always less in cold water.
angech,
I don’t recall ever hearing that as a prediction before it was observed. Since it’s such a mainstay of contrarian polemic, I doubt you have a literature cite, but hope springs eternal.
Oddly, I don’t see many people talking about stratospheric cooling — long a predicted effect of increased GHGs in the atmosphere — as a counterintuitive gotcha sort of non-argument.
That is something I recall hearing from consensus climatologists before it became a mantra on this and like-minded blogs. Though the statements were more nuanced, in the form of “some places will experience more extremes than others”, which extremes included both warm and cool. For the life of me, I don’t understand why that’s so hard to swallow. I guess because it’s not a very thinking sort of argument, and not thnking is a foreign concept to me.
Start with this: the main reason anything moves around on this rock to the extent it does is because of absorbed solar energy. Gravity, angular momentum and the like all play their part, but without solar input, 6 billion years on climate would be pretty static because everything would be static except the planet’s rotation on its own axis.
That doesn’t follow at all. First of all, for it to come up from the bottom required energy to put it there — it didn’t just lift itself out of the gravity well by magic. Secondly, what goes up must come down, so on balance if water is coming up from depth in one place, it’s got to be moving down elsewhere to replace it. Thirdly, water that has been at the surface for any appreciable length of time can’t not have picked up some energy from the sun, so water going under very likely — to the point of near certainty — has gained more energy than it had before it reached the surface. [1]
Now, if you were arguing that the upwelling water and downwelling water net out more or less exactly , well then you’d have a better argument. But you weren’t arguing that, at least not explicitly that I can tell.
The heck it’s irrelevant. Evaporation is the main way the oceans dissipate energy. What happens when convection carries that solar heated moist warm air to altitude is the next step of relevancy.
I think you mean that the oceans are not a source of energy. If so, I agree. The sun is the main source of energy.
Um, sure. In general, cooler water has a lower vapor pressure than warmer. I have no idea why you think I don’t understand that.
—————————————-
[1] An aside: Again, I’m speaking on balance here; nothing to do with weather and climate is ever isothermic at scale, hence never at equilibrium. Some people have made quite a cottage industry out of chasing anisotropies all over the map as if they’re somehow globally representative. But as both sides accuse the other of doing the same (and are often correct in the accusation), it’s kind of a zero-sum argument from my perspective. I did have fun writing it though.
What is the measurement error on the ocean temperature data?
Taking NOAA data the average heat accumulation of the 0-2000m layer has been 4.36 zettajoule per year over the past 50 years.
This heat will have been transferred over the ocean surface (362’000’000 km2).
Thus it corresponds to a mean heat flux of 0.016 W m-2
Reference values:
– Average solar input: 341.5 W m-2
– Primary radiative forcing due to all Greenhouse gases (CO2+Methane+N2O) since of begin industrial era: 2.59 W/m2, and for any doubling of CO2: 3.7 W m-2
– Human energy consumption in 2012. 0.033 W m-2
– Evaporation and condensation of all rainfalls: 88 W m-2
Ocean heat content and release may influence the weather (e.g. el niño events), but to be able to observe a steady and significant impact on climate we will need to wait for decades and centuries.
Michel, you are peddling crap. If you do not wish to do this, avoid all data concerning deep ocean heating. NOAA is not reliable for any such data.
@mpainter:
However, this is the same data that is used by Bob Tisdale in the figures of this post, but I took a longer time series.
To categorically call dung what NOAA and its researchers do, may need a little bit more explanations, or more careful evaluation.
Anyway, the heat accumulation in the oceans is probably not relevant to explain climatic variations. The NOAA data helps evaluating this.
Michel,
The GHE makes no contribution to SST or ocean heat. Any data that purports to show that it does is, just as I said: crap.
See the absorbency of water with respect to IR. Brandon Gates has put a link to such a chart below, at 12:12 pm.
You’re killing me, painter. Downwelling radiation from the sun is not the only mechanism for transferring energy into the oceans. Granted, direct IR doesn’t get it. I mean, there’s some effect of course but dude, consider the entire water cycle, not just the evaporative part.
Michel,
I’ve enjoyed reading your comments on this thread and mostly agree with them. I must balk at this one a bit. If you trust the >90% heat capacity of the system figure, wholly ignoring the oceans’ relevancy is not the best idea ever. I agree with Tisdale’s tempering effect concept because empirically that’s pretty much what they do over long periods of time. By long, I mean centuries and milennia. In the short term, by which I mean multiple decades down to a few years or so, they add variability.
On millennial time scales, their thermal inertia becomes quite evident. I think of them as dampers. I posted this link to data from Bintanja et al. (2008) elsewhere on this thread: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/paleocean/by_contributor/bintanja2008/ It’s pretty much my favorite data set for visualizing the long-term response of ocean temps to external forcings.
Over the course of a whole 100 Kyear glacial cycle where surface temps are ranging 12-18 °C, the deep ocean temperatures never move more than 3 °C. 3/18 = 6, so Bob’s 0.03 °C/decade roughly translates into 0.18 °C/decade at the surface. If that still sounds miniscule to anyone here, consider that since 1880, HADCRUT4 has changed 0.74 °C. Over 135 years that works out to a measly 0.055 °C/decade. Suddenly 0.18 °C/decade — being 3.25 times a larger number — doesn’t sound so piddly.
That is, if one thinks in terms of rates of change, percentage change and normal ranges for both those things. Not like Bob here who plays games with small numbers and thinks that arbitrarily scaling Joules to °C on the same axis then plotting a 0.03 °C/decade trend to produce one of his patented laser-leveled visually negligible trend lines has some sort of scientific meaning. Talk about reaching.
Even more bizarre given that 0.03 °C/decade is just over half the surface temperature trend since 1880 in a medium which has 4 times the heat capacity of air. [1] I don’t need to sell anyone on my x6 conversion factor from the previous paragraph to make this point stick: Bob has just unwittingly shot himself in the foot with his own math, showing all and sundry that the NODC OHC data have oceans presently gaining energy per unit mass at a rate which is twice that of the surface since the late 19th century. Factor in the net mass differential and, well there are gobs more energy going into the oceans … something which was not at all news well before this post was ever written. Like decades old news.
No warming since 1998 according to (pick a favored data set, usu. UAH)? Ok, what’s 0.03 °C/decade divided by alllllmost zero °C/decade? I couldn’t make this stuff up. I really couldn’t.
——————————-
[1] In fairness I should consider the heat capacity of land masses here, but I’m not feeling the need to be especially rigorous in the face of such lack of it.
Brandon, my points are :
– if exact, the 4.4 zettajoule per year (=0.39 W m-2, see correction below) are a very minor part of all the thermal exchange processes that are taking place.
– it’s all about net heat exchange between atmosphere and water with heat capacity and density differences: a layer of 3.4 meter of the oceans has the same heat capacity as the whole atmosphere.
– if the atmosphere warms up, it is logical that also the oceans will end up accumulating something, but something tiny. The one degree gained by the atmosphere since 150 years would have been capable to add 0.002 °C to a 2000 meter deep ocean layer (of course, it’s not the case, but I underline here the heat capacity equivalence). No Argo buoy can measure this in a 10 year time frame, and apparently they measure larger anomalies that remain to be explained. Fiddling around regression lines over 8 years or 50 years will not bring more useful insight on the on-going processes.
– multi-decadal oceanic oscillations are huge (see the AMO diagram that I posted). Underlying steady long term trends over centuries are and will stay unknown: we just lack the data and will be long dead when statistically relevant series will be available (this is one of the reasons why impatient people develop models). They can be used to explain weather patterns (multi- year, e.g. El Niño-La Niña, drought spells, etc.), but not climate change. They are perturbations within the system but not a cause by themselves.
In summary: yes the oceans can play a tempering role. But, taking into account the transfer rates, not a huge one. For example, water evaporation and cloudiness are orders of magnitude more important.
Michel,
I agree.
When one considers that the top 100 m of ocean are most closely tied with surface conditions, it becomes quite clear how oceans have a dominant role in determining short-term temperature fluctuations at the surface.
Indeed. I very often point out that ENSO has a significant, though not quite as dominant, effect over even shorter periods of time. One need not look at any particular index to just eyball a SAT timeseries and see +/- 0.25 °C/decade fluctuations all over the place.
Transfer rates NET. The two most dominant transfer rates are solar down and long wave out. Some of what goes on at TOA can be understood by chasing short-term SST fluctuations around the Pacific, but not everything.
Oceans can store energy for a time or absorb it for a time. About the longest they’ve had to do that over the past million years is 50,000 years at a stretch in either the up or down direction. My ballpark estimate is 6 degrees surface change to 1 degree ocean change, with peak to peak and trough to trough lags on the order of 10 thousand years. We hit the insolation peak vis a vis Milankovic ~10k years ago.
That should mean something to someone who has even the slightest grip on how heat transfer rates work, and who is also clamoring for long term perspective.
This doesn’t sound right. Are you sure you are not calculating the heat flux.trend.
Yep – I’ve checked I’m sure you’ve got it wrong. If the accumulation of energy is 4.4 x 10^21 Joules per year then the time value in the calculation is ONE year not fifty years. The mean flux over the 50 years is about 0.4 w/m2.
John: sorry I got it wrong by a factor 24.
The heat flux involve in the ocean heat accumulation is 4.36x10exp21/31557600 = 1.39 x10exp 14 W
Divided by 362’000’000’000’000 m2 makes a net heat flux of 0.385 W/m2.
Still a tiny component
and the mean Earth geothermal heat flow is 0.082 W m-2
ref: Pollack, Henry N., et.al., “Heat flow from the Earth’s interior: Analysis of the global data set”. Reviews of Geophysics, 31, 3, August 1993, p. 273 doi:10.1029/93RG01249)
No problem – easily done.
Not so sure about that. It looks as though the flux has increased to ~0.76 w/m2 over the recent ARGO-era period. If we get a shift to a warmer phase of ocean circulation, a lot of that energy is going to end up in the atmosphere and we’re likely to see some pretty rapid warming. As a “lukewarmer”, I’m slightly concerned by what the ARGO data is telling us.
IMO the apparent slight warming in ARGO data is largely due to the floats’ having changed position since being launched. Also, they appear to have concentrated disproportionately on the west side of the Pacific, where the warmer water goes during the “cool” phase of the PDO. This year however of course there was an unusual (for the cool phase) warm pool in the NE Pacific.
Warming is no cause for concern. Should the floats start showing global cooling, then we’ll have something to worry about.
Eugene WR Gallun,
No, that’s what you would be saying.
Mine too. The planet is never at equilibrium. I think of it in terms of relative stability, which — as far as we know — the Holocene has been more so than any similar length of time in the past million years, give or take.
No, thousands are good. Try 20 of them since the last glacial maximum.
That is indeed true.
Yah, that would be ideal. But since it’s rather difficult even today to get a tally on total energy content of the oceans, much less from paleo reconstructions, temperature and rate of change are used far more often. If you’re at all handy with Excel, pull the file down from this directory at NOAA’s ftp site and make some graphs: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/paleocean/by_contributor/bintanja2008/
Ocean temperature (and by extension, heat content) lag surface temperatures by several thousands of years.
The file I pointed to above shows that the deep oceans change about a tenth of what the surface does in a full glacial/interglacial cycle. Thing to keep in mind is that it takes great gobs more energy to change a cubic meter of water one degree C than it does a cubic meter of atmosphere.
Which is why I have a good chuckle when folk start talking about it’s undersea volcanoes whut dunnit.
No.
I’ve had more than a few run ins with the WT. I don’t envy you.
Bob, so disappointed in you! Cherry picking the data by leaving those other 8 charts out!
Atta boy, Bob. You’re a true climate warrior.
Wait a minute…. The oceans store heat? The oceans are much much colder than the average air surface temperature. There is a process that expels heat from oceans. It doesn’t get discussed much but from what I’ve read it happens when sea water at the Arctic becomes its densest at around 4 degrees C. I’ll grant that water in the ocean has the potential to store a tremendously greater amount of heat than the totality of the atmosphere (since the total atmosphere only weighs as much as 33 feet of water), but it just makes me think that all the strum and drang about air temperatures is pointless because there are no records for the majority of earth’s surface heat.
HankHenry,
They’re composed of matter, so yes.
Two things:
1) Whether you agree with it or not, the issue is that they’ve retained more energy than they’ve released, and thus slightly increased in temperature, relative to the past. Any mass above 0K has energy. Something at 0K can only warm up.
2) Given water’s far greater heat capacity than that of air, and observations that the oceans are quite a bit cooler on average than the surface atmosphere, one’s first instinct should be that the atmosphere is cooling because of colder water coming up from depth. And by the 2nd law of thermodynamics, that net energy is flowing from the hotter mass to the cooler mass.
There are many many other things to consider, however, so both points above don’t add up to a slam-dunk by any means. The vast majority of energy going into the oceans is due to direct solar heating — just like land masses. Speaking of, precipitation runoff from land masses is also significant, but I don’t have the percentage handy, or memorized. Not negligible by any means, and it is modeled with varying degrees of wrongess.
CO2’s main role in all of this is that it reduces the rate at which the oceans can shed heat … again just like landmasses. All is interconnected via fiendishly complex fluid flows and phase changes driven by energy exchanges, inertia, momentum and all the rest of Newton’s gifts to us. Bottom line: the only way for the planet to dissipate absorbed solar energy — short of mass loss — is back through the atmosphere via radiative processes. Period, full stop, end of story.
Ok you’re getting on the right track, but it’s somewhat at odds with your leading remarks. Note that it’s not just density (thence mass) which counts here, but heat capacity. There is a quite good writeup about it in this very forum from back in 2011: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/06/energy-content-the-heat-is-on-atmosphere-vs-ocean/
The relevant bit:
Heat capacity of ocean water: 3993 J/kg/K
Heat capacity of air: 1005 J/kg/K
This is the number of Joules (energy) to raise temperature 1 degree Kelvin which is the same as 1 degree Celcius. Energy cannot be created or destroyed to my knowledge so these are physically knowable values. Since they are in kilograms, we only need to look at kilograms atmosphere vs kilograms of ocean to make the following graphs.
I forgive Jeff for misspelling “Celsius” because I can’t get it correct 50% of the time either. Anywho, the takeaway is that ocean water (on average) has got 4 times greater heat capacity of air (on average, at the surface I’m assuming).
Not good instrumental data past a few centuries, no. But good, curious scientists generally don’t see challenging and potentially important research as pointless just because good data are nearly impossible to obtain. If they did, we might still be living in caves. Where hard data don’t exist, a thorough grounding in the relevant physics can offer a few pointers.
Of course, all the pristine perfectly accurate data in the world won’t do a bit of good if they’re not gathered and interpreted in the light of tried and tested theory.
Shouldn’t the mass of all the trees on earth be included in the mass of the atmosphere ?
You sure remind me of R. Gates that used to comment a few years ago on WUWT.
garymount,
I must say one of the things I like about this blog are the questions I’d never think of asking. Soo, vegetation of all sorts is considered but AFAIK more from the standpoint of surface albedo, carbon fixation, CO2 respiration, moisture transpiration, etc. Then there’s biomass decomposition which releases methane … a slew of soil biota factors to consider now that I think of it. If you’re interested in shaky modeling, I’d probably look to those sorts of biological processes third, well no, fourth, after ocean/atmosphere currents/coupling, ice sheets, clouds and aerosols. Oh, five — albedo. Albedo is such a WAG as I understand it that it’s one of the main parameters tweaked to balance TOA energy flux in the radiative models.
There is the surface itself to consider as well, as in bare dirt, rock and sand. I’m guessing mass doesn’t enter into it much since those things don’t move around much. Mostly what you’ve got to know is albedo, emissivity and heat conductivity. The latter is fairly well known since the borehole guys absolutely must know it. The first two, not so well characterized at present but I’m seeing a lot of recent papers on them.
I’m sure there are scores that I’ve missed (or flubbed) and that some climate modeler is reading this gritting his or her teeth at my ignorance.
I thought I saw him pop up within the last few months or so. I did always get a bit of a chuckle from his posts partially because he does share my old man’s first and last initials, but mostly because he is an entertaining writer. So thanks, I think.
1. Do the Argo floats drift? Has the average latitude of the Argo floats changed over the years?
2. Do the Argo floats tend to consolidate over time due to ocean currents, a major mover of energy in the oceans, and could this affect the T of the water anomaly they are measuring?
3. Is there published error bars for the Argo T estimates?
David A,
Yes to both.
They are by no means evenly distributed and appear to clump. A favorite spot looks to be between Japan and China: http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/statusbig.gif
But of course: http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/index1.html
Brandon, thank you for the answers!
I noticed the error bars have changed some, but not a great deal since 1960. If the floats are moving, and changing latitude, is there an adjustment made?
If the floats are concentrating more in certain locations, is there an adjustment made for that.?
For instance looking at 2014 locations it appears that that high latitudes in the SH are under represented.
Are all floats given the same area of coverage? Unlikely as the consolidated ones would likely overlap.
So, if the SH, which has cooled some relative to the rest of the oceans, at least at the surface, and with more sea ice there is likely more bottom water formation, and it is underrepresented by lack of Argo buoys, then they would need to overweight those buoys to include the entire area, all though by expanding the area covered the error bars would need to increase as well.
Any information appreciated.
The reason I mention the drifting of Argo floats is because the ocean surface currents tend to move from the equator, towards the polar regions, with much smaller areas of currents moving towards the equator.
This leads one to think that over time the Argo floats would migrate towards the polar regions, leading to cooler readings both at the surface, and at depth, thus requiring an adjustment, and likely larger error bars.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Ocean_currents_1943_%28borderless%293.png
Does this help at all David?
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh154/crocko05/ARGOstationdistributionSept2014_zps7cab54f8.jpg
This is a more current plot David, 1st Dec 2014…..3693 floats.
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh154/crocko05/ARGOstationdistributionDec012014_zps8891090b.jpg
David A,
Sure. Just eyeballing the ocean current map, the buoy distribution plot makes quite a bit of sense. Again, I’m not up on specifics but I do know at least two if not three tenders are at sea full time doing maintenance on the fleet, a large part of which I imagine is intentionally but semi-opportunistically repositioning them.
It actually sounds like a fun job. Part techno-geek, part seahand, part drunk on the beach in exotic ports of call making nice with the locals. I may have missed my calling.
Bruce, thank you for the two charts. There are some major differences in the float distribution over a relatively short period of time. IMHO, There is no way the tiny measured T change is meaningful with such changes in location and latitude.
Here is a link to the climate model fail articles at Bob Ts site…
https://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/category/climate-model-failings/
Regarding these remarks: “That minuscule warming rate of the oceans serves only as the background for the surface warming. It [the heat] can’t magically come back to haunt us.”
Much seems to depend on the rates of transfer of heat from the ocean’s surface into its depths and thence to the Earth’s crust, etc. The atmosphere’s mass is reportedly 5.2 • 10^18 kg. Based on its reported volume and some calculation, the ocean’s mass is about 1,300 • 10^18 kg, some 250 times the mass of the atmosphere. The Earth’s total mass is reportedly 6,000,000 • 10^18 kg. If the heat transfer rates from atmosphere to upper ocean, to ocean depths, and to oceanic crust are great enough, then it’s true that the heat can’t meaningfully come back to “haunt” us.
Overall, I’m amazed that anyone has tried to model the Earth’s climate without first learning these transfer rates with tolerable accuracy.
“If the heat transfer rates from atmosphere to upper ocean, to ocean depths, and to oceanic crust are great enough…”
=====================================================
The ocean crusts transfer heat to the ocean, not the other way around. The simple fact is ocean warming of .015 to .3 degrees over 1000 years cannot contribute more then that small T change to the atmosphere.
Around about 2035 or so we will have a considerably better idea of the true warming, or cooling rate of the earth’s ocean, land and atmospheric energy content.
The amount of energy the ocean is absorbing is… irrelevant is the wrong word, but without context its certainly irrelevant. Comparing it to what that would mean if the atmosphere is absorbing it is certainly irrelevant. You could argue if a frying pan absorbed that many joules of energy it would be a billion trillion degrees. So what? The question isnt what 2 x 1023 joules could do to the atmosphere, any more than what 2 x 1023 joules of energy could do to my water bed. The question is, what has it done to the ocean, which is much larger and a better heat sink than either the atmosphere or my waterbed.
Sou rightly points out how fortunate we are to have our oceans. Indeed. But we DO have our oceans. Im not sure what exactly a mental game of what would happen if we have didnt have oceans accomplishes, other than to paradoxically remind us that the oceans are vast and have a monstrous ability to soak up heat.
The atmosphere has a mass of 5 x 10^18 kg and heat capacity of 1000 J/kg/K.
The ocean has a mass of 1.4 x 10^21 KGs and a heat capacity of 4000 J/kg/K.
The ocean can absorb a tremendous amount more energy than the atmosphere, which means its temperature will rise only a fraction of what the air would (or does).
Other than scientific trivia, nobody cares about how much energy the ocean is absorbing. We care about what is happening to the temperature. Living creatures dont respond to the theoretical total energy absorption of the oceans- they respond to the temperature of their environments.
In the last 7 years we have ARGOS data the temperature needle has barely moved, despite huge increases in CO2.
Finally- lets set all that aside and just concentrate on the new argument that the atmosphere isnt warming as predicted, but the oceans are. Fine- but it takes MUCH more energy to warm the oceans than it does the atmosphere. Which mean that all the predictions of doom and gloom for climate change either need to be recalibrate to account for that (meaning we have far longer to mitigate), or somehow much more energy needs to be brought into the equation to screw up the earth. Its got to be one or the other.
In the last 7 years we have ARGOS data the temperature needle has barely moved, despite huge increases in CO2.
The temperature needle has barely moved for the past 10+ years.
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh154/crocko05/ARGO0-2000mtemp_Jan04-Sept2014_zps2d79b3e7.jpg
” the new argument that the atmosphere isnt warming as predicted, but the oceans are.”
=========================================================================
Yet even that is a major fail, as Bob t had a post demonstrating that the ocean warming is only 1/2 what was expected.
Also of course, over a hundred year period with major assumptions and no change, the oceans would contribute a .15 to .3 degree rise in atmospheric T. Nothing worth destroying the global economy over, and with a concurrent major increase in CO2, very likely net beneficial.
One of the major assumptions is the error bars in the Argo floats; discussed in the posts just above this. What adjustments are made to compensate for the changes in location? I notice that the SH polar ocean regions noticeably lack floats. Did they when they were first deployed, as the southern oceans have cooled?
My take-away on this is that it would be helpful to have a poll to see how many people care what Miriam thinks about anything, and an agreement with guest posters to not bring up the strongly partisan anti-skeptic nutter if the poll suggests nobody cares.
mpainter,
Thank you for the correction. Apparently I was remembering the so-called skin layer thickness. For those who are interested, there is a good summary of both concepts at this NASA webpage: http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/oceans/science-focus/modis/MODIS_and_AIRS_SST_comp.shtml
The largest interannual variations in Length of Day (LOD) were measured during January and February of 1983, when the atmosphere expanded in response to the warming from the El Nino:
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/oceanography-book/Images/elninoindex.gif
http://nathan.gfz-potsdam.de/research/plots/LOD_interannual_MGN_web.png
(Lower panel – the orange line is a simulation: ignore it)
You can’t have warm sea surfaces without an atmospheric response that will show up in LOD.
Could we not, therefore, use interannual variations in LOD to verify record temperature claims?
David A,
There would have to be. I’m not up on the ARGO program as much as I’d like, so I don’t have details. What I’ve read more about are calibration issues. I think they trashed something on the order of the first two or three years of data while they were working out bugs.
Again yes. And again I’m not savvy to the details, though I imagine it’s even more complicated than homogenizing surface station data because every time a float pops up to phone home, it’s position has changed relative to the last update.
There were dueling papers in Nature Climate Change last month (or was it October?) from JPL and LLNL respectively. One found SH warming underestimated do to sparse coverage, and the other one, using newer floats capable of going below 2,000 m which found that warming in below that mark had been overstated. Ah, it was October: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mystery-of-ocean-heat-deepens-as-climate-changes/
A fun bit was Trenberth getting po’d at Willis et al. from JPL for not finding his missing heat, followed by Josh giving Kevin the finger. In the best tradition of science, that.
No, and exactly.
All true except I have difficulty with your final reasoning about expanding error bars. Expanding relative to what? XBTs? Temperature samples from engine cooling water intakes? Buckets thrown overboard from ships? All in the pre-GPS era when celestial nav and dead-reckoning ruled the day? I’m research weary at the moment, but I’ll bet you a Benjamin that the error bars in those data are gobs bigger than what ARGO is producing.
John Finn ,
I wish I had seen your comment earlier because I was going about an energy imbalance calc from the standpoint of atmospheric surface temperatures (land + ocean) and wanted to know how well they stacked up against ΔOHC. So for 1880 to present, I get:
Net radiative forcing change: 1.74 W/m^2
Surface temp. change (HADCRUT4): 0.74 K * 1.25 W * m^-2 * K^-1 = 0.93 W/m^2
Net imbalance: 1.74 – 0.93 = 0.81W/m^2
Sooo, we disagree with each other by 0.05 W/m^2. The latest published figure I know of is 0.43 +/- 0.15. We’re both off by a factor of two, but, well look at that error margin. We did ok I think.
Absolutely priceless. Schmidt cops to an error and fixes it. Ages ago I might add. Tisdale bangs him for making the error, doesn’t answer your question. Probably because ….
…. Hansen must always be wrong at all costs, without fail. Especially when his numbers make sense from multiple angles.
The only bits I might disagree with are the Net Rad forcing and the temperature sensitivity. I think net radiative forcing is higher (more ghg and less aerosol) and temperature sensitivity is therefore lower but the main point still stands. From the data we have here, it looks as though a shift to a ‘warmer’ PDO phase will result in a pretty sharp warming trend.
The models will move further off. Watch the AMO…
David A,
Are we placing bets? Here’s my entry: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1C2T0pQeiaSOXFxZ0ZnczFjc2c
John,
The volcanic aerosol curve on the GISS forcing page way overdoes it IMO. But then I’m usually chunking that data into a simple linear regression model. The forcings on that page probably make more sense in a physics model than in my curve-fitting exercises.
Brandon – And here’s my entry: http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com