…that some of the warming nearer to the surface came from the deep ocean.
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
The paper is Liang et al. (2015) Vertical Redistribution of Oceanic Heat Content. The abstract reads (my boldface):
Estimated values of recent oceanic heat uptake are of order of a few tenths of a W/m2, and are a very small residual of air-sea exchanges with annual average regional magnitudes of hundreds of W/m2. Using a dynamically consistent state estimate, the redistribution of heat within the ocean is calculated over a 20-year period. The 20-year mean vertical heat flux shows strong variations in both the lateral and vertical directions, consistent with the ocean being a dynamically active and spatially complex heat exchanger. Between mixing and advection, the two processes determining the vertical heat transport in the deep ocean, advection plays a more important role in setting the spatial patterns of vertical heat exchange and its temporal variations. The global integral of vertical heat flux shows an upward heat transport in the deep ocean, suggesting a cooling trend in the deep ocean. These results support an inference that the near-surface thermal properties of the ocean are a consequence, at least in part, of internal redistributions of heat, some of which must reflect water that has undergone long trajectories since last exposure to the atmosphere. The small residual heat exchange with the atmosphere today is unlikely to represent the interaction with an ocean that was in thermal equilibrium at the start of global warming. An analogy is drawn with carbon-14 “reservoir ages” which range over hundreds to a thousand years.
A preprint edition of the paper is here. The paper is full of memorable quotes, including (my boldface):
An upward heat transport in the deep ocean may appear to be in conflict with the widespread idea that a large portion of the extra heat added to the Earth system in the past decades should be transported into the deep ocean (e.g. Fig. 1 in Stocker et al. 2013). That inference is based on the assumption that the ocean was in equilibrium with the atmosphere before any extra heat entered. When interpreting measurements of the ocean heat content, it is often assumed that the disturbances arise only from the recent past. However, as emphasized by Wunsch and Heimbach (2014) and the present analysis, the long integration times in the ocean circulation imply an observed response involving the time history of the circulation over hundreds of years, at least.
And contrary to climate models:
Furthermore the ocean, far from being a passive reservoir filled and emptied by the atmosphere, is a dynamically active, turbulent element of a coupled system.
And keeping in mind that Balmaseda et al. (2013) was one of the papers that claimed to have found part, but not all, of Trenberth’s “missing heat”:
Global average cooling in the deep ocean conflicts with some previous ocean heat content estimates (e.g. Balmaseda et al. 2013), but is consistent with the long thermal memory of the ocean, and with other recent studies (e.g. Durack et al. 2014; Llovel et al. 2014).
For more on Balmaseda et al. (2013) and Trenberth’s “missing heat”, see:
- Trenberth Still Searching for Missing Heat
- More On Trenberth’s Missing Heat
- Even More About Trenberth’s Missing Heat – An Eye Opening Comment by Roger Pielke Sr.
[My thanks to Judith Curry, who included a link to Liang et al. (2015) in her recent Week In Review dated March 13, 2015.]
Any more arm-waving and he’s going to achieve lift-off.
No wonder the price of drones has plummeted.
That would be a travesty!
A gorenithopter?
A hellacrapter?
From 1996 to March 12, 2015:
Thanks Bob Weber, that is really good. I like the animations to see the real ocean dynamics at work.
But a little blip in the animation caught my eye. One can actually spot the DAY, the oceans warmed up (or some type of new adjustment was obviously implemented).
February 20, 2001.
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2001/anomnight.2.20.2001.gif
February 23, 2001, just three days later.
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2001/anomnight.2.23.2001.gif
February 27, 2001, seven days later and the ocean SST has warmed by nearly 1.0C
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2001/anomnight.2.27.2001.gif
Fishy.
Wasn’t it in Feb 2001 that Hansen began applying adjustments to GISS data? That was the year 1934 cooled by 0.1°C and 1998 heated by 0.2°C in the 1999 USA dataset.
Thank you Bill. Fascinating how the SSTs change so quickly at times. I am reminded by this graphic that the ocean receives solar energy to deeper depths than the surface, and it obviously takes time for the heat from solar warmed depths to “upwell” to the surface. making the SST at any time and place a function of current solar flux and cloud cover, and upwelling ocean heat from previous solar warming at depths below the surface.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/ocean-penetration-by-solar-spectrum1.png
According to the latest media hype anthropogenic CO2 emissions have stalled in 2014. In this unexpected turn of events, there is no need to seek for the missing heat. To reverse global warming, change, disruption or whatever, we only need to ensure the oil prices fall low enough.
This link http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ advises me that
“Recent Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO2
February 2015: 400.26 ppm
February 2014: 397.91 ppm”
hardly a sign that CO2 emissions have stalled from 2014.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo_anngr.png
That is not what Jaakko Kateenkorva said. Jaakko said “CO2 emissions have stalled in 2014.” And he is correct as it was widely reported just yesterday.
Thanks Jimbo. The news about CO2 emission reduction in 2014 is intriguing when compared to crude oil price development the same year. AGW crowd is sawing the branch they are sitting on faster than anyone else can:
http://static3.uk.businessinsider.com/image/548b6b91dd0895ac148b45c1-960/wti1yr.png
Think about it.
Emission stalled.
Concentration increased.
If emissions are stalled what caused the increase? Natural causes? The thermometer isn’t responding correctly either… its not going up… /sarc
that was in thermal equilibrium at the start of global warming….
But that is the entire premise of global warming…
….the world was prefectly balanced before….and the LIA ended in 1850
Whilst Im happy to see anything that counters CAGW propaganda, can’t say I trust the conclusions of this anymore than “the ocean ate my warming” papers. After all humanity’s ability to record samples of temperature of our vast oceans is still limited to a tiny tiny fraction of them.
http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys/smiley-shocked016.gif
TRENBERTH LOSES HIS STRAWBERRIES
(see the courtroom scene from the movie “The Caine Mutiny”)
As greenhouse gases still accrete
This captain of the climate wars
Is searching for the missing heat
That he believes the ocean stores
He’ll prove to all humanity
That danger in the deep resides
The Kraken that he knows to be
That Davy Jones’s Locker hides
The soul’s more heavy than we think
A truth that everyone must face
And to what depths a soul may sink
Oh! To what dark and dismal place!
Does Captain Trenberth understand
That data offers no appeal?
He tumbles in his restless hand
Three clacking balls of stainless steel
MY GEOMETRIC LOGIC PROVES
HEAT TELEPORTS FROM PLACE TO PLACE
FROM SKIES INTO THE DEPTHS IT MOVES
AND IN BETWEEN IT LEAVES NO TRACE!
When silent faces stare at you
It’s always best to shut your jaw
But Trenberth is without a clue
As he believes they stare in awe
Eugene WR Gallun
That’s very good!
In other words …
http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys/smiley-toilet05.gif
Nice teleconnection there, Mr. Gallun. Thank you, sir!
“That inference is based on the assumption that the ocean was in equilibrium with the atmosphere before any extra heat entered.”
Folks, this is why they had to get rid of the medieval warm period. This is why Michael Mann’s hockey stick, with its long straight SHAFT, was so important. No medieval warm period, long straight shaft on the hockey stick for a period of 800 to a thousand years, means thermal equilibrium between the atmosphere and the ocean by the time the period of anthropogenic atmospheric CO2 increase begins.
As far as I know, we have no way of measuring, globally, the temperature of the oceans below the surface. Satellite data, the only truly global data, only measures surface temperature.
We only have 3000 odd ARGO Buoys and even less deep ocean measurements. We can extrapolate and interpolate, but in the end there is no substitute for actual data.
We assumed that a single CO2 measurement at the Keck Observatory was enough, since CO2 is “well mixed”. However, when we got the actual global CO2 data from the new satellite, this assumption was totally wrong.
Look again at the actual global CO2 data from the new satellite.
Tell us the minimum to maximum registered. Please, don’t nitpick little circumscribed areas.
And these were just the preliminary data.
It will be quite interesting to see the very circumscribed area of higher CO2 and investigate their origins.
Can’t wait for the new measurements to come out.
There is a lot of water to measure with cold currents going one way and warm the other and both up and down, the up including to the stratosphere and the down including rain and snow. Imagine trying to figure where to start when you are looking at fractions of a watt/m^ 2. The only way to do this, and it has large uncertainties, too, that might change the sign of your result, is to measure sea level all over the place. I think the result is really just a complex way of saying that the ocean is an enormous heat sink/reservoir that just doesn’t change much.
Yes! the analogy of the iron marble and shotput touching and the associated physics;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/06/it-would-not-matter-if-trenberth-was-correct-now-includes-january-data/
Different depths of the oceans respond over different time frames. This paper deals with the “deep” oceans which respond over time frames of hundreds of years — therefore this is irrelevant to recent decadal trends nearer the surface (in the “not so deep” oceans) and in the atmosphere.
Ah Barry… so trollish . The whole point of this post was to show that Trenberth was wrong when he claimed all of the heat that should be causing the temp to rise in the past 18 years was hiding in the deep ocean. But you want to discard that to claim that only the near surface matters…
Your back must get tired from moving those goal posts around.
That’s funny.
Perhaps, Barry, but the prognostication by Trenberth was that the deep oceans were hiding the missing heat.
Here’s an option–maybe Trenberth should look deeper, as in the oceanic crust. Maybe the missing heat is hiding there!
You guys offer excuse after excuse, but fail to see the elephant in the room, which is that CAGW is an over-hyped meme.
By way of definition, a “meme” is “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture”. There’s very little scientific substance to a meme.
So the more accurate acronym should be CAGWM, with “M” representing “Meme”.
Barry, that’s right, but the ‘missing heat’ is supposed to be ‘hiding’ in the deep oceans.
I do not believe that sea surface temperatures have shown any temperature rise in the last 18 years, thus confirming “The Pause”
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/05/Global_Sea_Surface_Temperature.jpg
Hence the pause.
But, but, but….
…. we were told that all that nasty man-made heat had gone to hide in the DEEP oceans.
Nice try Barry.
Rats.
Mike, Rocky, and Eric all beat me to it.
Consider your @rse well and truly spanked Barry. Now, get back to moving those goalposts.
Barry
“Responding” to what? What if recent climate change at the surface was nothing more than vertical redistribution of ocean heat? Or all climate change? It’s hard to really comprehend how much heat energy lies in the ocean. On short to medium time scales the earth’s heat budget is close to a zero sum game. The bottom mile or two of ocean is close to freezing even at the tropics. Take a tenth of a degree from this water and the surface warms spectacularly. Add a tenth and the surface goes into an ice age.
Phlogiston on March 14,
2015 at 1:49 pm
What if recent climate
change at the surface was
nothing more than vertical
redistribution of ocean
heat? Or all climate change?
It’s hard to really
comprehend how much
heat energy lies in the
ocean.
_______
gives:
_______
in 10.000 interglacial years large amounts of heat / energy displaced from surface, stored in the depths of the oceans.
during 100.000 years of glaciation stored energy works back / forth into next interglacial.
Regards – Hans
Trenberth floated a hypothesis. There was no basis for the hypothesis, so maybe it was more like speculation in order to explain the pause or cliff or start of next cooling trend or whatever you want to call it.
But because of that speculation science did start to look at how heat was behaving in the ocean. That’s not bad news for science, it is good news that the science is being forwarded. (It still baffles me how climate science did not significantly consider ocean influence on climate in the first place.) The bad news is for ideologues and zealots who used Trenberths speculation as fact.
Actually it’s the purposeful confusion between speculation and fact that has been bad news all around.
Lordy !
Lord Ke[l]vin Tren[d]be[a]rth get a PI in the I on PI day.
Ja ja
This can explain all the rise in co2 the last hundred years. Heat traveling up to surface in oceans will have to release a lot of co2. Surface pressure are lower, temperature higher so trapped co2 will escape to the atmosphere along with the heat.
So in theory the planet could have been cooling slowly for a long time from the bottom of the ocean, releasing latent heat and co2.
Just small reduction in heat content in the ocean can explain the whole 100 ppm increase in co2 !
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_growth
Every year the co2 level increase with 1,5 ppm exept the warm years in 2014, 2010, 1998, 1977/78 when the increase was more than 2 ppm.
2014 show and increase of 3 ppm!
I may be spastic when it comes to search engines, as I can’t locate the two papers, but I don’t believe I’m hallucinating about the topic. Early last summer (2014), or thereabouts, there was a multi-author paper, blog reported and commented on (here, I think) that claimed to be the most comprehensive compilation of ocean heat/temperature ever done, utilizing every available database. It concluded, among other details, that the deep oceans had been, and were, cooling for some significant period, possibly corresponding to the same length of time reported in this current paper.
A couple of months later there was a paper from NASA that said the same thing and more. This paper also talked about heating of upper ocean depths in some ocean basins over the same period, but said that the energy gain at these depths was far short of the “missing energy” that would be required (based on AGW theory) to explain the lack of atmospheric heating.
Do either of these descriptions tickle anyone’s memory? Does someone know what the actual papers are, or the blog reports thereon?
This is a link to the NASA work you mention. I don’t have a link for the other one handy. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/06oct_abyss/
Thank you for the link.
Given some of the comments above , may I throw in the following wild card , from an alert of a recent Science article :
Glacial cycles drive variations in the production of oceanic crust
John W. Crowley1,2,*,
Richard F. Katz1,†,
Peter Huybers2,
Charles H. Langmuir2,
Sung-Hyun Park3,†
+ Author Affiliations
1Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
2Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA.
3Division of Polar Earth-System Sciences, Korea Polar Research Institute, Incheon, Korea.
+ Author Notes
↵* Present address: Engineering Seismology Group Canada, Kingston, Canada.
↵†Corresponding author. E-mail: richard.katz@earth.ox.ac.uk (R.F.K.); shpark314@kopri.re.kr (S.-H. P.)
Abstract
Editor’s Summary
Glacial cycles redistribute water between oceans and continents, causing pressure changes in the upper mantle, with consequences for the melting of Earth’s interior. Using Plio-Pleistocene sea-level variations as a forcing function, theoretical models of mid-ocean ridge dynamics that include melt transport predict temporal variations in crustal thickness of hundreds of meters. New bathymetry from the Australian-Antarctic ridge shows statistically significant spectral energy near the Milankovitch periods of 23, 41, and 100 thousand years, which is consistent with model predictions. These results suggest that abyssal hills, one of the most common bathymetric features on Earth, record the magmatic response to changes in sea level. The models and data support a link between glacial cycles at the surface and mantle melting at depth, recorded in the bathymetric fabric of the sea floor.
I cannot access the full article , for those who can :
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6227/1237?utm_src=email
That is sooo off topic, mikewaite… and very interesting. Sounds like Gaia loosens her whalebone corset around the middle while elsewhere getting a sharp, icy poke in the ribs. (Nope. I can’t access it either, but maybe it will show up in a bit as a post)
Try this:
http://tinyurl.com/mkjnose
If you were referring to the login requirement, I can’t help you with that.
@Michael Wassil – Yup. Can’t log in for the complete text, so I’m crossing my fingers that it shows up as a post so it can get some discussion.
Uh oh…
Bob,
Just where do the climate models “say” such an evidently silly thing?
Keeping in mind that Trenberth is an et al. in Balmaseda (2013), let’s finish Liang’s thought here, shall we?
All existing estimates of the deep ocean states, including this present one, are based on very limited in situ observations in the deep ocean, and the uncertainties are large. Furthermore, upper ocean warming may have been generally underestimated: Any bias errors in the initializing state rendering the upper ocean warmer than is correct would produce such an underestimate. Note the historical emphasis on measurements of the relatively warm North Atlantic Ocean and the tendency for shipborne observations to focus on lower latitudes generally, particularly in winter (See e.g., Fig. 2 of Atkinson et al. (2014).
From Durack et al. (2014):
It appears that both CMIP3 and CMIP5 have NOT found the missing heat either.
I’ll end with another memorable quote:
Results here are derived from an ECCO (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean) state estimate, labelled version 4, release 1, and which can be understood as the result of the least-squares fit of the MITgcm (Adcroft et al. 2004), with sea ice and mixed-layer submodels to about O(10^9) observational points (see Wunsch and Heimbach (2013) for a review). Lagrange multipliers are used (Wunsch and Heimbach 2007) to enforce the model equations in such a way that basic conservation rules (heat, freshwater, momentum, energy, etc.) are satisfied globally and locally in the interval 1992-2011. The estimate is based upon the model in a configuration with 50 layers and a spatial resolution of 0.25°-1°in latitude and 1° in longitude.
Apparently all models are contrary, except when they aren’t. Good to know.
Bad News for Trenberth’s
Missing Heat – New Study Finds
the Deep Oceans Cooled from
1992 to 2011 and…
Posted by Bob Tisdale
Thanks, Bob Tisdale –
enlightening, same as You ever were.
Regards – Hans
Reblogged this on Public Secrets and commented:
Ooops. That the world hasn’t wrmed since the mid 90s has bedeviled acolytes of the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming. The models predicted it, but where was the heat?? Some speculated (and took refuge in) that the heat was stored in the deep ocean, I suppose where it would build and build until the heat could be stored no more and… then we’d be sorry.
Time for a new theory, I think.
From the paper of Wunsch et al.
“the upward diffusive heat flux mainly occurs in the high latitude North Atlantic as well as the Southern Ocean, and is due to the vertical projection of isopycnal diffusion.”
This could potentially explain the melting of sea ice since 1992. North Atlantic is just beside Arctic ocean. Surely heat transfer is occurring between the two. The Arctic is cooler than North Atlantic. 2nd law of thermodynamics – heat will move to cooler region.
“the radiocarbon “age” of mid-latitude surface water is about 400 years, exceeding 1000 years at high southern latitudes and high northern Pacific ones”
The upwelling warm water is transporting heat from the Medieval Warm Period, not from our CO2 emissions since 1950.
For anyone else who had to look up ‘isopycnal diffusion’ other than myself, here is a paper, titled Isopycnal Mixing In Ocean Circulation Models: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/gent/gm1.pdf to
Forget isopycnal. Forget carbon dioxide. Forget the greenhouse. The ice has been melting since `1970, not 1992. Tou don’t know this because these Arctic explorers all start their warming curves in 1980, a convenient time when satellite observations begin. The warming actually started in 1900 but was interrupted in mid-century by a thirty year cool spell. There was nothing before it in the Arctic except for two thousand years of slow, linear cooling. What started the warming at that point was a rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system that began to carry warm Gulf Stream water into the Arctic Ocean. You obviously don’t know this and neither do these Arctic explorers because you are too lazy to do your homework. To catch up, read my paper in E&E 22(8):1069-1083(2011).
In their original paper reporting that missing heat, Trenberth & Fasullo state:
“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 I would have sent the paper back and have them learn more about those new-dangled Argo floats instead of publishing that nonsense. Considering their buddy-review system this is probably too much to ask from a big shots connected with the IPCC but this is what you get when peer review does not work.
That was a tactical error by Trenberth. He should have just labeled it Dark Heat at the time and made no mention of where it was since by definition it cannot be found.
I hope this puts an end to silly notions of heat “upwelling” in tropical oceans.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_RXGJAF_XL5dG55MTN5Sm1HNlk/view?usp=sharing