Guest post by David Middleton
WASHINGTON (AP) — The amount of man-made heat energy absorbed by the seas has doubled since 1997, a study released Monday showed.
Scientists have long known that more than 90 percent of the heat energy from man-made global warming goes into the world’s oceans instead of the ground. And they’ve seen ocean heat content rise in recent years. But the new study, using ocean-observing data that goes back to the British research ship Challenger in the 1870s and including high-tech modern underwater monitors and computer models, tracked how much man-made heat has been buried in the oceans in the past 150 years.
The world’s oceans absorbed approximately 150 zettajoules of energy from 1865 to 1997, and then absorbed about another 150 in the next 18 years, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
To put that in perspective, if you exploded one atomic bomb the size of the one that dropped on Hiroshima every second for a year, the total energy released would be 2 zettajoules. So since 1997, Earth’s oceans have absorbed man-made heat energy equivalent to a Hiroshima-style bomb being exploded every second for 75 straight years.
“The changes we’re talking about, they are really, really big numbers,” said study co-author Paul Durack, an oceanographer at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California. “They are nonhuman numbers.”
Because there are decades when good data wasn’t available and computer simulations are involved, the overall figures are rough but still are reliable, the study’s authors said. Most of the added heat has been trapped in the upper 2,300 feet, but with every year the deeper oceans also are absorbing more energy, they said.
[…]
WTF is “man-made heat”???
The source of Mr. Borenstein’s latest exercise in scientific illiteracy is this paper…
On what planet is “ocean heat content” synonymous with “man-made heat”?
Even if, the rise in ocean heat content was entirely due to the rise in atmospheric CO2, the “heat” wouldn’t be “man-made.”
Ocean heat content is measured in joules, usually expressed as gazillions of joules (J). It takes 4.186 J to raise the temperature of 1 g of water 1 °C. Since the oceans are composed of a rather large volume of water, it takes a lot of joules to warm it just a little bit. Without a rather large heat content, the oceans would be frozen solid.
Addendum: Gazillions of Joules Under the Sea
Gazillions of joules!
A five degree rise for just the first inch of ocean, for a static area 900 miles in diameter (the size of hurricane Sandy) requires 95-million terajoules of energy. If we assume it gets used the most efficiently it can be, a ton of coal gets you about 35 gigajoules. That means we’d need a cube of coal .9 of a mile/side to generate the energy needed to heat just that first inch of water five degrees. All that energy is a fraction of the heat being trapped, just a fraction. We’re going to see a lot more storms get charged up this way.
The best way to alarm the scientifically illiterate is to convert 0.8°C into eleventy gazillion joules.
Ocean Heat Content for the upper 700 meters of the oceans increased by about 16 gazillion (10^22) Joules over the last 40 years or so! 16 gazillion is a huge number! Unfortunately for Warmists, 16 gazillion is a very tiny number relative to the volume of the top 700 meters of the oceans and the heat content that normally resides in the oceans…
Figure 6. Change in Ocean Heat Content from Levitus et al., 2009 via Bob Tisdale – Climate Observations (http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/the-warming-of-the-world-oceans-0-700-meters-in-degrees-c/)
16 gazillion Joules is enough heat to increase the average temperature of the upper 700 meters of ocean by a whopping 0.168 degrees Centigrade.
The average temperature of the upper 700 meters of ocean is somewhere in the ballpark of 10 degrees Centigrade…
Figure 7. Approximate average oceanic thermocline (Windows to the Universe).
How much heat content is required to raise the temperature of the upper 700 meters of ocean from 0 to 10 degrees Centigrade?
A bit less than 950 gazillion Joules.
16 gazillion is less than 2% of 950 gazillion.
More fun with gazillions of Joules
This is a graph from a Skeptical Science post…
Figure 8. An unreliable representation of recent changes in Earth’s total heat content (Skeptical Science).
Frightening, right?
In addition to lacking any context, the title of the graph is amazingly and ignorantly wrong. There’s a lot more to the Earth than water, ice and air… There’s that whole solid(ish) thing in the middle.
The heat flow at the surface (the coolest part of the solid Earth) of the Earth is ~47 Terawatts (TW). A Joule is 1 Watt*second of power. 47 TW is 47,000,000,000,000 joules per second (47*10^12 J/s). Over the 40-yr period (1969-2008) the Earth’s heat flow transferred 6 gazillion (10^12) Joules of heat from the interior to the surface. That 6 gazillion is a very tiny fraction of the total heat content of the Earth (~12,600,000,000 gazillion Joules). So the SkepSci graph doesn’t even come close to capturing the “change in the Earth’s total heat content.”
Here’s a little more context… Unsurprisingly, ocean heat content and sea surface temperature are highly correlated…
Figure 9. Cross-plot of ocean heat content (Levitus, 2009) and sea surface temperature (Hadley/CRU via Wood for Trees).
So, we can very easily estimate OHC from SST to see what the OHC was
doing before we started measuring it…
Figure 10. Historical ocean heat content calculated from HadSST and OHC (Levitus, 2009).
Wow!!! The OHC had to have increased by 13 gazillion Joules from 1910-1941. How did that happen? CO2 was mired in the “safe” range of 310-320 ppmv (assuming Antarctic ice cores are accurate sources of paleo-CO2 data).
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Poor heat. First it gets “trapped” in the atmosphere by man’s evil CO2. With nowhere else to go, it decides to hide in the oceans. But even then it can be “found”, so in desperation it decides to hide in the deep oceans, where it can’t be found. Peace at last, but can it escape from the Models?
Can’t we give the heat a break?
I’ve been hoping the cold will break. Brrrrrr.
WTF is a zeta Joule?
ToA……..…5.101E+08…..km^2
Surface…….5.125.E+08….km^2
In meters…5.125E+14…m^2
W/m^2 power flux…..2.0 1750 to 2011
W/day…….1.025E+15
W/y………..3.741E+17
Btu/y………1.276E+18
Btu/ 132 y….….1.685E+20
150zJ………….1.42173E+20 Btu
IPCC AR5 attributes 2 W/m^2 of unbalancing RF due to the increased CO2 concentration between 1750 and 2011 (Fig TS.7, SPM Fig 5.). In the overall global heat balance 2 W (watt is power, not energy) is lost in the magnitudes and uncertainties (Graphic Trenberth et. al. 2011) of: ToA, 340 +/- 10, fluctuating albedos of clouds, snow and ice, reflection, absorption and release of heat from evaporation and condensation of the ocean and water vapor cycle. (IPCC AR5 Ch 8, FAQ 8.1)
A local “Medeorawlajust” was spouting this stuff as a closer to last night’s “weather show” There’s yer Global Warming, folks!
A local “Medeorawlajust”
Around here it sounds like they’re saying meat-eating-urologist and cheap-meat-eating-urologist.
probably just my old ears.
Maybe they’re saying ‘Mediaologists’… or ‘Media-all-adjusts’?
Dawg, that was my thought too…”Media…I’ll adjust” Or “Meet T, your all adjust”
These asinine claims of great heat retention and dangerous climate change will not stop until the graphing scales “proving” it are expanded to an actual real world temperature range.
Hi Anthony
This is what I tweeted on the paper
Roger A. Pielke Sr @RogerAPielkeSr 49m49 minutes ago
If >1/3 heating below 700m, this below thermoclime, and thus is a negative feedback in terms of affecting SSTs and atmospheric heating.
Roger A. Pielke Sr @RogerAPielkeSr 50m50 minutes ago
“~1/2 increases ..OHC occurred in recent decades; >1/3 of accumulated heat occurring below 700 m..steadily rising” http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2915.html …
Authors missed this consequence if their analyses are correct.
See also my weblog post on this subject
https://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/torpedoing-of-the-use-of-the-global-average-surface-temperature-trend-as-the-diagnostic-for-global-warming/
Roger Sr.
Hi Dr. Pielke,
Thanks for the link to your blogpost. I have a couple of questions if you have the time:
1. You make the point that the Argo floats have yet to detect the movement of heat from the upper ocean to the deep ocean. I assume you mean from the 0-700 m range to the >2000 m range. Looking at the graph that everyone is talking about – % Change OHC versus year, I judge the deep ocean OHC to have changed by about 15% since around 1947. To me, this seems a very slow process. Are the Argo floats really capable of detecting this rate of heat transfer? (Admittedly I haven’t tried performing my own calculation of the order of magnitude of heat transfer we are talking about, but I would probably foul it up anyway.)
2. You state that if heat is really deposited in the deep oceans, it will likely not be released on short time periods. But, again referring to the graph, this might be true for only a small fraction of the heat, right?
I appreciate any information.
cgs,
Since you asked for more information, here are some ARGO charts.
0 – 1900+ meters depth. Oceans cooling:
http://tumetuestumefaisdubien1.sweb.cz/NH-0-65N-v-50-65N-0-2000dBar-2004-2013max.png
Ocean heat content, declining:
http://s27.postimg.org/idj4ait4z/Deep_OHC.png
The models were wrong …again:
http://www.climate-skeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ocean-heat.gif
OHC has been steadily declining for a long time:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/temperature/100Myr.jpg
“The changes we’re talking about, they are really, really big numbers,” said study co-author Paul Durack, an oceanographer at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California. “They are nonhuman numbers.”
Oh my god, he’s right about that. They’re nonhuman numbers. And, not just nonhuman, but…I can barely type it…really big nonhuman numbers. And, and, not just really big, but…whew…really, really big nonhuman numbers. I mean they are supercalifragilisticexpialidocious numbers that are really quite atrocious. Ferocious.
Or, maybe they’re a symptom of alarmism that’s a serious psychosis.
Actually, using terms like these will defeat their purpose. The folks will tune out quickly. Numbers like these are “non-human”. They should reduce these to 1 it’sworsethanwethoughtillion.
Tom Judd. + 1 and Mary Popping musta really stuck with you. Also, thanks…It’ll take days for me to stop it going round and round repeatedly in my mind. I’ll be whistling it in line at the market and such.
“When good data wasn’t available and computer simulations are involved, the overall figures are rough but still are reliable,” said no scientist, ever.
That is + a shed load, James.
Auto
Can we get a serious article about this?
If the heat is indeed going in the ocean, then at 2W/m^2 of net extra flux over the earth it will take 800 years to heat up the ocean 1degC, according to my calculations. If evenly distributed. Based on the heat capacity of a cubic meter of salt water and a rough calculation of the volume of the oceans.
That’s fodder for a serious article, and the above one completely misses this in all its sarcastic glory.
I’d write it but my knowledge of thermocline is near zero. I don’t know why it exists, what its heat flow characteristics are, or any of that. So an expert would need to write it. I would love to read it, as I’d learn something.
Peter
The thermocline exists because the source of bottom water everywhere on the planet is the surface of the polar oceans where the water is “global warming challenged”. Oh, there are sources of intermediate water in places, but the source of bottom water is the big effect. Note that the thermocline in places actually disappears during some seasons.
so what’s the global average turnover rate and how did they measure it?
Peter Sable, As I indicated in a posting below, the turnover has a time scale of thousands of years. The bottom waters sink in the polar oceans, and eventually rise to the surface in many places, subtropics and tropics for a variety of reasons. “1sky1”, below speaks of the absorption of solar heating in the first few tens of meters at the surface, and that eddy diffusion pushes warm surface water to a few hundreds of meters, which is all so, but there is no thermocline without a source of cold bottom water.
Sorry, Peter, I forgot to tell you how they go about measuring it. It is done on the basis of mass balance calculations using what is known of surface and subsurface flows. There is a good book by Henry Stommel entitled “A view of the sea” that will tell you about the early and long-term efforts to quantify the ventilation of the oceans in their overturning. The book is at least 30 years old at this point, so you can find it on alibris or amazon for next to nothing i’ll bet.
It is done on the basis of mass balance calculations using what is known of surface and subsurface flows.
“what is known” about the Ocean, given the density of measurement instruments, appears to be extremely small…
We get upwelling events on the entire US northwest coast that can drop the water by 4-5degC for weeks at a time during the summer. That warm water went somewhere, and the cold water after a couple of weeks is definitely getting warmer in the long summer days.
So again, how do they measure it? Not model it, but measure?
I’m going to guess that the error bars on ocean heat flow estimates are rather large…
Kevin Kilty:
FYI, thermoclines develop in lakes and ponds–where there is no “source of cold bottom water”– through the well-understood mechanisms that I mention. Don’t let the peddlers of the oceanic “conveyor belt” fiction of climate science mislead you.
Peter Sable:
Despite the development of tri-orthogonal flow meters, both mechanical and electromagnetic, direct scientific measurements of THC are virtually nonexistent. Aside from the orbital velocities of various waves, the vertical component of flow in the oceans is extremely weak and subject to practical difficulties of sensing, You are correct in surmising that what we know of vertical flow rates is largely the product of theory and computer modeling.
1sky1 – The source of cold bottom water in lakes are surface waters cooled during the cold season. The bottom water is produced in place in this instance. In the oceans the bottom water is produced in polar regions where it sinks and extends throughout the ocean basins. Bottom water throughout the world’s oceans is near or slightly below zero centigrade. This is no reasonable local means to produce such cold water in most places. Instead it sinks at near zero in the polar oceans and maintains this temperature until even thousands of years later as it rises in the subtropics and tropics.
Peter Sable- undoubtedly there was a very large uncertainty in knowledge of ocean circulation at the time that oceanographers like Sverdrup and Stommel were measuring what they could from surface ships and buoys, and then inferring the rest from mass balance.
Sorry guys, I can’t let this go as it stands.
1sky1 – i don’t know what you mean by the fiction of the conveyor belt. What is known of three-D flows in the ocean grew over a very long period of observation (starting perhaps with Ben Franklin when he was Postmaster General) coupled with mass balance calculations and assuming that temperature and salinity of water are “conserved” quantities. It is not infected with climate science’s political needs.
Peter Sable-when there is an upwelling of cold water near shore it usually results from a strong wind running parallel to shore (northwest to southeast). The resulting Ekman flow (coriolis acceleration) draws warm surface water to the west, away from the shore, and cold water from the thermocline, or below it, takes its place at the surface. The warm water doesn’t just disappear, it moves west.
Kevin Kilty
The formation of oceanic bottom waters is well-known to oceanographers. It is also quite irrelevant to the various boundary-layer processes that produce the thermocline. Unlike oceans, whose bottom waters remain virtually unchanged in the course of a year, ponds and lakes typically experience wholesale overturning during the seasonal cycle as a result of those processes.
Climate science has taken the concept of thermohaline circulation, which is extremely weak and regionally localized, and misconstrued it along the lines of limnological behavior. Thus it portrays coherent currents, such as the Gulf Stream, sinking in the polar sears, with the resulting bottom water unaccountably rising to the surface eventually, usually in the Indian Ocean. This, of course, is dynamical nonsense, easily recognized as such by oceanographers. In fact, Carl Wunsch calls the whole concept of the great conveyor belt “a fairy tale for adults.” You can google his phrase to familiarize yourself with the issue.
Peter:
Very briefly, the thermocline comes into existence as a result of insolation being virtually totally absorbed within tens of meters of the surface and turbulent mixing (eddy diffusion) by variable winds seldom extending more than a few hundred meters. Buoyancy forces alone segregate the water column into characteristic temperature strata (salinity being the far-less-variable determinant of density in the open ocean), with a sharp gradient where the effect of the aforementioned factors practically terminates.
It’s incredible that this paper ever got published. It took me five minutes to to find the facts to refute the foundation of this paper, that the ocean heat content is so much higher now than in 1997. The facts say otherwise, from
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ocean/index/heat_content_index.txt
Here’s a comparison of 1997 to recent OHC figures, where it’s plainly evident that OHC for December of 2015 are similar to December of 1997, and January of 1997 is close to the same as in December 2014. Commas added in case the table doesn’t format:
1996, 12, .08, -.17, -.30
1997, 1, .54, .49, .56
1997, 2, .84, .85, 1.00
1997, 3, 1.09, 1.26, 1.17
1997, 4, 1.49, 1.87, 2.17
1997, 5, 1.38, 1.82, 2.01
1997, 6, 1.55, 2.01, 2.25
1997, 7, 1.34, 1.77, 1.83
1997, 8, 1.07, 1.50, 1.79
1997, 9, 1.25, 1.85, 2.38
1997, 10, 1.35, 2.05, 2.56
1997, 11, 1.19, 1.94, 2.30
1997, 12, .56, 1.15, 1.02
1998, 1, -.24, .16, .00
2014, 12, 0.50, 0.48, 0.54
2015, 1, 0.28, 0.22, 0.15
2015, 2, 0.54, 0.65, 0.83
2015, 3, 0.85, 1.17, 1.52
2015, 4, 1.05, 1.42, 1.74
2015, 5, 1.03, 1.42, 1.53
2015, 6, 0.87, 1.27, 1.51
2015, 7, 0.92, 1.36, 1.69
2015, 8, 0.99, 1.43, 1.97
2015, 9, 1.04, 1.48, 1.80
2015 10, 1.04, 1.51, 1.91
2015 11, 0.92, 1.41, 1.78
2015, 12, 0.58, 1.04, 1.20
January 1998 was just about the turning point into a deep La Nina, quickly followed by higher solar activity during the next few years, whereas within months we are about to plunge into the inevitable La Nina phase following this now-peaked El Nino, only this time temperatures aren’t going to be supported by a solar cycle maximum as in the years following 1998, but by lower solar minimum conditions lasting at least into the early 2020s. I expect temperatures and OHC to drop until the rising phase of the solar cycle, just like they did after the solar cycle 23 maximum years, until cycle 24 TSI started its rise.
2015 was a warm year because of the second TSI peak of solar cycle 24 in February that kicked off the El Nino, followed by a fall spike that pushed temps into record territory. From http://lasp.colorado.edu/lisird/tss/sorce_tsi_24hr.csv, yearly averages, 2016 as of this morning:
2015, 1361.4321
2014, 1361.3966
2013, 1361.3587
2016, 1361.3204
2012, 1361.2413
2011, 1361.0752
2003, 1361.0292
2004, 1360.9192
2010, 1360.8027
2005, 1360.7518
2006, 1360.6735
2007, 1360.5710
2009, 1360.5565
2008, 1360.5382
There is no significant man-made ocean or global warming. SSTs and OHC rise and fall on TSI alone.
Ah, the always reliable “Hiroshima bomb dropped ever second for……” to get the tribe gnashing their teeth and spittle flying.
But clearly much, much, much, much……much less effective than an Hiroshima bomb
This is one of the major errors in the global warming scam. It is simply impossible for the observed increase in downward LWIR flux from a 120 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration to heat the oceans. The increase in flux from CO2 is nominally 2 W.m^-2. The oceans are heated by the sun – up to 25 MJ m^-2 per day for full tropical or summer sun. About half of this solar heat is absorbed in the first 1 m layer of the ocean and 90% is absorbed in the first 10 m layer. The heat is removed by a combination of wind driven evaporation from the surface and LWIR emission from the first 100 micron layer. That’s about the width of a human hair. In round numbers, about 50 W.m^-2 is removed from the ocean surface by the LWIR flux and the balance comes from the wind driven evaporation. Over the Pacific tropical warm pool the wind driven cooling rate is about 40 W.m^-2.m.s^-1 (40 Watts per square meter for each 1 m/sec change in wind speed). This means that a change in wind speed of 20 cm.s^-1 is equivalent to the global warming heat flux. (20 centimeters per second). There is a lot of useful information on ocean surface evaporation on the Woods Hole website http://oaflux.whoi.edu/data.html
The ocean warming fraud goes back to the early global warming models. In their 1967 paper, Manabe and Wetherald used a ‘blackbody surface’ with ‘zero heat capacity. They created the global warming scam as a mathematical artifact of their modeling assumptions. These propagated into the Charney Report in 1979. Then an ‘ocean layer’ was added to the model. The layer had thermal properties such as heat capacity and thermal diffusion, but the CO2 flux increase had to magically heat the oceans. This is computational climate fiction. Any computer model that predicts ocean warming from CO2 is by definition fraudulent. The fraud can be found in Hansen’s 1981 Science paper and has continued ever since.
Hansen, J.; D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind and G. Russell Science 213 957-956 (1981), ‘Climate impact of increasing carbon dioxide’ http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html
“This means that a change in wind speed of 20 cm.s^-1 is equivalent to the global warming heat flux.”
“The ocean warming fraud goes back to the early global warming models. In their 1967 paper, Manabe and Wetherald used a ‘blackbody surface’ with ‘zero heat capacity. Etc.”
WR: R. Clark, impressing and usefull information. Thanks!
The CAGW theory drowns in the first 5 microns of the ocean. Along with the 33C greenhouse effect.
How can water vapor (the most powerful GHG):
Evaporate, losing energy in the phase change
Lower the temp of the ocean left behind
Burn energy while rising
And then turn around and magically warm the water below by 33C?
It makes the magic bullet from JFK seem mundane.
“tracked how much man-made heat has been buried in the oceans in the past 150 years.”
“150 years?”
The consensus of the climate warmist community is that the human footprint in global warming is not potentially observable until somewhere in the 1950’s to 1970’s period. 150 years goes back a lot further than that. From NASA’s Global Climate Change page: http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES
From their: Statement on climate change from 18 scientific associations [note: 16 of the 18 say nothing about prior to 1950]
American Geophysical Union (ACS): “Humanity is the major influence on the global climate change observed over the past 50 years.”
American Meteorological Society: “that the dominant cause of the rapid change in climate of the past half century is human-induced increases . .
The Geological Society of America : . . “that human activities (mainly greenhouse‐gas emissions) account for most of the warming since the middle 1900s.”
International academies: Joint statement from 11 academies: “It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities (IPCC 2001).”
U.S. Global Change Research Program: “The global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases.”
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change : “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely* due . .”
However, at the top of the page, NASA says, “over the past century.” And, of course, they quote Cook’s 97% nonsense to boot.
150 years give or take a 100. Reminds me of the line.
“Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?” – Animal House
Leave these climate guys alone. They are on a gazillion joule roll…
We’re all doomed….
http://granitegrok.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/HadCRUT4-RSS-UUAH-GISS-Global-Mean-Temperature-change-1-2001-to-02-2014.png
” Scientists have long known that more than 90 percent of the heat energy from man-made global warming goes into the world’s oceans instead of the ground.”
Really? So only 10% of the rise in temperature can be attributed to co2? I guess that explains the pause, but then they also proved there wasn’t a pause. So which is it, a pause occurred because 90% of the heat went in the oceans or there was no pause, and there was so little retained heat that there was a pause. How does this information fit with the math that shows catastrophic warming? I see a lot of people blow the math off, but that’s like the MWP they are trying to disprove. Let’s not talk about the math at all. Le bottom line, the math describing CAGW is the only thing they have. Otherwise, it’s spotty, like the one glacier that disproves the MWP. This week a brutal snowstorm is to hit most of the US. I remember headlines ” Winters last hurrah! ” Somehow, this was suppose to be an exciting and rare occurrence rather than another one.
I saw on here a comment about how even skeptics of AGW seem to focus on only one thing, whether its its the sun or orbital changes or space dust that hangs out in a geo stationary orbit or the sun burbing out a super cold cloud of helium .. Without exception it’s the CAGW crowd that can’t accept any other variable besides the one and only co2..
I have seen little research from the IPCC that isn’t so convoluted and twisted that much of it makes no sense. No explanation of how that heat gets into the ocean. What’s the process ?
Since 1997, the 0-2000 metre ocean has risen in temperature by …
… 0.07C
http://data.nodc.noaa.gov/woa/DATA_ANALYSIS/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/DATA/basin/3month_mt/T-dC-w0-2000m7-9.dat
In Kelvin, which would measure the total energy content, the 0-2000 metre ocean has risen
… from 277.75 K to 277.82 K
That is not doubling anything. That is only an increase of 0.02% in heat content.
Bill, maybe he meant that the warming prior to 1997 was 0.035…and we doubled that? LOLOL 🙂
0.035 in 18 years…about the same as the increase in the 18 years before that….and the 18 years before that…How is it that the ocean knows how to heat so evenly even with “all that increased Co2”?
Anyone who owns a heated swimming pool can attest to the fact that the heat transfer rate from air to water and water to air is quite rapid. Here in south Florida, the average air temperature suddenly dropped about 10 F in the last 48 hours. My pool heater is off, and the water temperature is already down by 8 F.
Any heat added to the atmosphere will transfer to the oceans until the temperatures equalize and this process is rapid.
Have the equations for heat transfer down through the thermocline? your pool doesn’t have much of a thermocline…
Peter, I see you raised the issue of transfer through the thermocline and into the the bulk of the ocean in another comment above, so I thought I’d add another comment of my own here. There are places in the oceans where surface water generally sinks (sources of bottom water) and this water must rise back to the surface again in other places (like the tropics). The scale size of the ocean is so large that thermal conduction is an ineffective means of transferring heat. In fact, equilibration (thermal and dissolved salt content) are so slow in the oceans that the temperature and salinity of water combined are useful in identifying the source of water. These are considered to be conserved quantities in the short term.
Instead of conduction, most ocean heat is transferred by eddy diffusion–advection of water masses. The largest scale “eddy” is the overturning of the ocean which has a time scale of a couple thousand years.
OK physics major. What is the difference in scale between your pool and the oceans? Does this different scale size mean the transfer mechanisms might be different? If scale size means nothing, then maybe I should just note that my coffee cools to room temperature almost instantaneously.
(Preheat the mug and it will stay warm a bit longer ; )
… Or tell the heat it shall hide.
The transfer from water to air is rapid, but from air to water is not. I assume you do not have a screen over your pool. A pool in FL with a screen and significant shade will struggle to reach 80F in summer. It reaches equilibrium with the ground temp (about 68F) more readily than the air temp.
It is the summer sun that heats it, not the air. Air can’t heat water effectively due to its limited heat capacity.
Physics Major
What I see you describing anecdotally is HEAT LOSS from your pool, not GAIN. Let us establish the experimental parameters please.
-How are you differentiating between RADIANT heat loss, EVAPORATIVE heat loss, and CONDUCTIVE/CONVECTIVE heat loss? (Is your pool covered with any evaporative or conductive barrier?)
-Do you heat your pool using a blanket of CO2 enriched air? A heat exchange loop that pumps water through a solar radiant energy collector? Or a gas fired boiler? Or a passive solar (radiant transmissive) pool cover (which also stops evaporative cooling)?
It is my understanding that the predominant pathway for Ocean Heat Uptake is through absorption of full spectrum solar radiant energy. Can you tell me what percentage of this total radiant energy uptake is theoretically contributed by CO2, and what percentage is actually measurable ?
And if the atmosphere warms 10 degrees, I’m pretty sure it will take longer than 48 hours to warm it up 8 F. It’ll take even longer if it’s not in the direct sun. The ability of air to warm water is a lot harder than water to warm air…
rishrac,
Are you sure about that? I thought the heat transfer equation is dT/dt=-k*delta(T) with the same k whether delta(T) is positive or negative.
I agree with the comments that there is more going on with my pool that just heat transfer with the atmosphere. There is radiant cooling, solar heating (not enough!), evaporative cooling and other effects. But I’ll let you know how fast it warms when the air warms.
Impedance is not in your equation. Which is the 4 lane highway and which is the 2? The change in time related to the change in temperature is not the same in all substances that interface with each other or spatial dimensions.
Evaporation! Powerful stuff! 1,000 Btu/lb.
How long has your poor heater been off? JUST for the past 48 hours? Or weeks? If it’s been off for weeks, then you just proved that the water temperature is STILL warmer than the drop in air temperature. Your pool water will probably stay at about that temperature even as the day temps fluctuate above and below that, because air conducts heat faster and more efficiently than water does.
The ocean mixes by gravitational pull of the moon-tides, winds, and other currents. Not to mention that a heated pool maintains a constant water temperature, whereas the ocean does not. The only thing that equalizes between the atmosphere and the ocean is the layer in which they are in constant contact and the heat is transferred by conduction/convection.
“Any heat added to the atmosphere will transfer to the oceans until the temperatures equalize and this process is rapid.” You are correct if you mean the heat transfer process from the atmosphere to the oceans is rapid, i.e. the IR warms the top one mm of the ocean; otherwise the statement is ambiguous, as you could also intend to signify that the atmospheric and oceanic temperatures rapidly equalize.
Since the oceans contain 1k times the energy of the atmosphere, there won’t be any temperature equalization any time soon.
” My pool heater is off, and the water temperature is already down by 8 F.” Thermodynamically speaking, that indicates the pool water is losing energy to the atmosphere.
“…heat transfer rate from air to water and water to air is quite rapid.” Depends on the ratio of the portions of the involved substances – so it can be quite slow also.
Perhaps someone can explain (I am definitely not a scientist and am genuinely curious): If warm water rises and cold water sinks how does this not cause deep sinks to cool as surface temperatures rise?
Thom
I’m no expert but the ocean is mostly divided in layers, the deeper you go the colder it is because cold water is denser and sinks. A thermocline is a separation of colder and warmer water, generally horizontal, depending on many things, including currents. If I continue I may steer you wrong, so someone else may be of assistance to you with better descriptions of ocean conditions concerning temps at various depths.
Studied up on this to write Missing Heat. Surface waters in the mixed layer can approach air temperatures (until polar sea ice forms, or tropical evaporative cooling sets in). Mixed lauer depth varies mostly thanks to wave/wind/current action. At the bottom of the mixed layer, the thermocline zone sets in. It can be a sharp transition in a summer freshwater Canadian lake, but in the oceans it is usually a transition zone complicated by salinity differences. (saltier water is heavier, so colder less salty water can ‘float’. Zonal Depth varies by season and by latitude: greatest depth in tropical summer, virtually zero depth in polar winter. The thermocline transition zone where heat moves down toward colder lower water layers is mainly diffusive rather than conduction driven, complicated by inverted ‘turbulent’ convective cells, called eddies. The region below the thermocline is always real cold thanks to waters enormous specific heat capacity and the sheer volume of ocean water.
Hypothermia induced Tourette syndrome
The following video contains language of a sort that is entirely unbecoming of any self-respecting ichthyologist , or, for that matter, any self-respecting scientist of any field or discipline.
Seth says 90% of the sun’s energy goes into the oceans and this has doubled since 1997? So it’s 180% now going into the oceans. That’s gotta hurt.
“Scientists have long known that more than 90 percent of the heat energy from man-made global warming goes into the world’s oceans instead of the ground”.
The article leaves no doubt that the atmosphere has no role to play in dispersing heat to space. It’s only the ocean or the ground for the ‘man made heat’. No word about the natural stuff. That must go into next summers warming and also packed into atomic bombs.
Since the heat energy from man-mad global warming is zilch, 90 percent of zilch is less than zilch.
“It takes 4.186 J to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water 1 °C. ”
Actually, this is supposed to read It takes 4.186 J to raise the temperature of 1 GRAM of water 1 °C…. or °K if you want to be scientific.
Fixed.
This ‘heat’ which magically passes through the atmosphere without warming it and then cannot be found?
It must be the same heat that magically passes from the 0-700 meter zone to the 2000 meter zone without warming the water in between.
It should be evident that the energy flow is from the sun to the ocean to the atmosphere.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/05/10/empirical-evidence-oceans-make-climate/
I noticed yesterday that they were re-running this angle in the press. I think someone saw Stephen King’s Firestarter, where Drew Barrymore ‘put the heat in the water’ and thought – ‘hey, suspension of disbelief’ – appropriate for any good boogeyman story.
Keep in mind, all this supposed ocean-warming is also at the same time the polar ice caps are supposed to be melting all that ice into the sea.
As far as I see, we all know this one to be bogous.
No-one would try to cook water by taking the can away from the stove, leave the heat on, and use a lid to try and reflect the heat from the plate through the air, up to the lid in ones hand, and then back down into the water,
And no-one would after this tedious excersise expect the water to magically start boiling, without it’s temperature rising, from it’s current average temp of 18 deg C.
The oceans are not warmed by reflected CO2 radiation, from its’ own surface, they are warmed directly by infrared rays from sunlight.
So it’s a fools exersise to refute this one.
Only a hysterical warmer with no scientific or practical sense would fall for this.
What advocates of IR warming oceans claim is that the additional IR from the atmosphere at the surface will slow the cooling process from what it would have been without the additional IR from the atmosphere. They conclude that slowing the cooling is akin to warming. So it’s a question of semantics. Does keeping it warmer equate to making it warmer?
But according to the “theory”, the greenhouse effect increases the temperature 33C. So the advocates are saying that it slows the cooling to a temperature 33C higher than it started at.
Is that something like ‘saved’ jobs?
If you filter the satellite data on only ocean pixels, the global average temperature varies by about 2C on a yearly basis with as much as 0.5C in difference between year to year averages. The monthly average temperature of N hemisphere oceans seasonally varies by about 6C while S hemisphere oceans seasonally vary by about 4C (hence the 2C global variability since the hemispheres don’t exactly cancel).
Anomaly analysis cancels out the massive seasonal temperature swings which provides the illusion that the planet responds to changes in total forcing far slower than it actually does. The average time constant of the 2 hemispheres to seasonal variability is the order of 1 year, meaning that about 2/3 of the final effect from a change in average forcing will manifest in the steady state within 12 months, although the 2 hemispheres have significantly different time constants with the S being longer than the N.
Conventional analysis blindly combines the hemispheres, which is wrong since the average net flux that crosses the equator is close to zero and the p-p energy flux that crosses the equator is dwarfed by the p-p energy flux arriving at each hemisphere from the Sun, moreover; the significantly different responses of the hemispheres, owing to different fractions and placement of land and water is ignored, yet this asymmetry is responsible for amplifying the effects of the precession of perihelion.
If again you filter on ocean pixels and subtract the output power of the planet from the solar input power, the p-p variability is about 200 W/m^2 for the S hemisphere and 150 W/m^2 p-p for the N hemisphere on a seasonal basis. This p-p variability is centered on zero and half the year each hemispheres oceans receive more power than they emit and warm and during the other half the opposite happens and they cool. Given this massive p-p variability, establishing an average that’s a fraction of a W/m^2, vs. an average of zero is impossible within the accuracy of the available data which at its best is within about 5%.
With this kind of bold guesstimate work, he should be able to break out the heat added by cows, pigs, and pets too.
Boringstone is never dull to read, however inaccurate he is. I love the idea that the ‘heat’ suddenly decided to stop going into the atmosphere and instead, go into the World’s Oceans, for a change or holiday. I also love the accompanying Trenberth idea that it will suddenly change again and come ‘roaring’ out like a Haboob to fry us all.
I also just love the term ‘gazillion’, I had no idea it had become an official term, I will use it frequently.