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).
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
If the Planet gains more heat than it radiates away then planetary temperatures rise
If the Planet gains same heat as it radiates away then planetary temperatures do not change
If the Planet gains less heat than it radiates away then planetary temperatures fall.
So its the imbalance that causes the temperature change.
Now we are told that on average there is a 0.58w/m^2 gain over the recent past
So use this to find out how long the Oceans would take to increase the Ocean temperatures by one degree Kelvin or Celsius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#Earth.27s_energy_imbalance
Scientists calculate that the total mass of the oceans on Earth is 1.35 x 1018 metric tonnes, which is 1/4400 the total mass of the Earth. In other words, while the oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface, they only account for 0.02% of our planet’s total mass.1 Dec 2014
Approximately 360 million square kilometers (140 million square miles), or 71 percent, are represented by the oceans and marginal seas.”
one metric ton = 1000Kg
10^9 cubic metres = one metric kilometre
10^6 sq metre = one sq kilometre
Formula used P.A.t = C .M. deltaT
P = imbalance of power/unit area = .58w/m^2 A = surface area of Ocean
t = how long the Oceans would take to increase the Ocean temperatures by one degree K
C = specific heat capacity of water = 4180 J/kgK
M = mass of Ocean water = 1.35 x 1018 metric tonnes
deltaT =temperature change of water =1 K
Plug in the numbers and calculate t = 870 years
Readers can try this easy formula for yourselves
If this is correct then this level of global warming is completely negligible
Fortunately, the heat intake by the oceans can not be measured. A golden (and lifesaving) opportunity for models.
The Abstract of the paper:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2915.html
Borenstein’s article is risible to anyone with training in thermodynamics and heat/mass transport. Amazingly enough the New York Times still publishes him. My sister, an English teacher and no dummy, buys every word. She is on her second Prius and thinks that because I currently work in the auto industry I am lying about the Bad Science rampant with the Warmistas.
I am not sure there is anything to be done about this, as the universities and academics have all decided to lie, in furtherance of their AGW Climatism…
What do they think the sun has been doing to land, ocean, and air all this time? They must be assuming that source of energy has remained constant in there “modeling”.
Credibility of the entire article underlying this discussion is undermined by the use of the term ‘gazillion” as if it was a defined unit of measurement. It is not. It is a colloquial term that means “extremely large” but has no numerical value attached to it. This is in contrast to “zetta” which is a prefix standing for 10^21 (10 raised to power 21).
Jaroslaw Sobieski, Hampton, VA
The literature is wrong about “emission from the troposphere”, since non-polar N2, O2 and Ar, the main components of the atmosphere (99.9%) cannot and do not absorb or emit infrared (IR) radiation. There IS emission from the stratosphere, as shown by IR spectra obtained by satellites in space looking downward on a cold thunderstorm anvil at 210 K, too cold to power the observed 220 K CO2 and ozone emissions, which total only 16 + 3 = 19 W/m^2, nowhere near the 240 W/m^2 needed for energy balance. The bulk of the IR radiated to outer space is that part of the surface (solid and liquid) emission NOT absorbed by greenhouse gases like CO2, water vapor and methane in the troposphere. Since N2, O2 and Ar molecules outnumber CO2 by a factor of 2500:1, most of the energy absorbed by CO2 is transferred during non-radiative collisions to non-emitting molecules whose translational and rotational energies are increased. I.e. the troposphere warms up, the greenhouse effect. The power in W/m^2 emitted as IR in a Planck black body spectrum depends only on the surface temperature (by the Stefan-Boltzmann law). So as CO2 increased over the last 18 years, if it significantly increased the greenhouse effect, decreasing the amount of IR emitted to outer space, it should have increased the surface temperature of both land and water in order for energy balance to be approached (the Sun’s incoming radiation being constant on average, yearly). The mechanism of hiding “heat” in the deep ocean is not only difficult to understand, but is irrelevant, since it is the temperature of the emitting surface skin that is important in the Stefan-Boltzmann law. OK, then maybe the non-warming of the oceans was compensated for by a disproportionate warming of the third of the Earth’s surface that is land. But there are questions about land surface temperature measurements being overestimated as it is, especially near urban heat islands, at busy airports, etc. Appealing to a mysterious cause in a lag between increasing CO2 and actual measured temperatures contradicts the assumption of immediate or close cause-and-effect for the measured warming between 1950 and 1998. Time for a paradigm shift: the standard model of the CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) or Climate Change establishment is irreparably wrong and must be abandoned.
The volume of the oceans are 1.37 billion km^3 = = 1.37 * 10^24 cc
Hiroshima bomb = 20 kilotons of explosive (producing 1000 cals /gm) = 2*10^13 cals
Multiply by 75*365*86400 to get 4.73 * 10^22 calories
Assumption a specific heat of 1 , the warming would be about 0.034 C over 18 years.
No wonder we can’t find any warming of the whole ocean.
According to IPCC AR5 atmospheric CO2 increased by 40%, from 278 ppm around 1750 to 390.5 ppm in 2011, a difference of about 240 GtC. The foregone assumption is that this cannot possibly be caused by natural sources therefore it can only be due to mankind.
In the same time frame anthropogenic sources produced about 555 +/- 85 GtC (+/- 15%!!). That’s twice the increase and a problem IPCC et al have been trying kick under the rug. Suggesting that it’s not anthro, just natural variability doesn’t cut it.
IPCC AR5 Table 6.1 attempts to partition this 555 Gt anthro source (375 +/- 30 FF & Cement, 180 +/- 80 land use) through the various sinks (rugs).
IPCC AR5 Table 6.1………GtC……..+/- GtC……..+/- %
Anthro Generation………555………….85……….15.3%
FF & Cement……………….375………….30…………8.0%……..67.6%
Net land use………………..180…………80……….44.4%……..32.4%
Anthro Retained………….240…………10…………4.2%………43.2%
Anthro Sequestered……-315……………………………………-56.8%
Ocean to atmos…………..-155………..30……..-19.4%
Residual land sink……….-160…………90……..-56.3%
So the CO2 increase between 1750 & 2011 cannot possibly be ‘splained by natural processes (Considering the huge uncertainties how would they even know?), but sinking half of the anthro contribution under the rug can be easily explained by natural processes. That 1/3rd of the anthro CO2 has nothing to do w/ FF doesn’t get much play.
Same for the missing heat. Have to dry lab it or admit to being wrong.
“WTF is “man-made heat”???” is a rhetorical question of course and the equally rhetorical answer is: “the opposite of man-made cold!”
Thank you NW. I think it’s time for some Theroflu.
Light on evidence, heavy on models. Par for the course.
Lordy. There are no other words to describe my opinion of climate science.
The oceans contain 1,000x+ the energy of the atmosphere, how could the atmosphere ever warm the oceans? Made made warming comes from CO2 which absorbs between 13µ and 18µ, which doesn’t penetrate the oceans, and I’ve seen no evidence that those wavelengths warm water at all. Visible light penetrates and warms the oceans. I’d love to see someone provide evidence that the 13µ and 18µ at 1.3 W/M^2 can warm the oceans, especially considering that the air above the oceans is humid, negating any additional radiation absorption of CO2. The warming oceans is the smoking gun that CO2 isn’t causing the warming. What is warming the oceans is warming the atmosphere above it. Record high day time temperatures also aren’t caused by CO2, so warmer days are proof of a natural cause of the warming.
http://www.ces.fau.edu/nasa/images/Energy/GHGAbsoprtionSpectrum.jpg
1) There isn’t that much heat in the atmosphere
2) CO2 only traps a small fraction between 13µ and 18µ
3) That energy has to come from the visible spectrum
4) Record daytime temperatures prove more visible radiation is reaching the oceans
As it happens, there is some man-made ocean warming, but it’s not CO2.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2016/01/20/man-made-ocean-warming-yes-but-its-not-co2/
BTW, doesn’t that imply the temperature increase over the past 18 years is equal to the previous 150 years? Assuming the layers warm the same. Anyway, how could they know the heat content of the ocean back then? They don’t even now it today?
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2016/01/20/man-made-ocean-warming-yes-but-its-not-co2/
I’ve made that point a 1,000x. How can a constant cause local variations? This entire AGW theory, based on regional temperature changes makes no sense. The physics of CO2 are constant, the concentration of CO2 is constant, so it can’t cause these local anomalies.