"Old water": The latest explanation for the Antarctic Ice Anomaly

Taylor Glacier, Antarctica, author Eli Duke, source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taylor_Glacier,_Antarctica_2.jpg
Taylor Glacier, Antarctica, author Eli Duke, source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taylor_Glacier,_Antarctica_2.jpg

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

A new research paper claims that the Antarctic Ocean is staying cold, because it receives large infusions of “old water”, water which has been sitting in the freezing cold ocean depths since before the start of the machine age.

Antarctic Ocean Climate Change Mystery Could Be Explained By Deep, Old Water

A new study suggests that the Antarctic Ocean has remained unaffected by climate change and global warming due to deep, old water that is continually pulled to the surface.

A new University of Washington study reveals why the Antarctic Ocean might be one of the last places to experience the effects of global warming and human-driven climate change.

Over the years, the water surrounding Antarctica has stayed roughly the same temperature even as the rest of the planet continues to warm, a fact often pointed out by climate change deniers.

Now, a new study uses observations and climate models to suggest that the reason for this inconsistency is due to the unique currents around Antarctica that continually pull deep, old water up to the surface. This ancient water hasn’t touched the Earth’s surface since before the machine age, meaning it has been hidden from human-driven climate change.

“With rising carbon dioxide you would expect more warming at both poles, but we only see it at one of the poles, so something else must be going on,” said Kyle Armour of the University of Washington and lead author of the study. “We show that it’s for really simple reasons, and ocean currents are the hero here.”

Read more: http://www.hngn.com/articles/199928/20160530/antarctic-ocean-climate-change-mystery-could-explained-deep-old-water.htm

The abstract of the study;

Southern Ocean warming delayed by circumpolar upwelling and equatorward transport

The Southern Ocean has shown little warming over recent decades, in stark contrast to the rapid warming observed in the Arctic. Along the northern flank of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, however, the upper ocean has warmed substantially. Here we present analyses of oceanographic observations and general circulation model simulations showing that these patternsā€”of delayed warming south of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and enhanced warming to the northā€”are fundamentally shaped by the Southern Oceanā€™s meridional overturning circulation: wind-driven upwelling of unmodified water from depth damps warming around Antarctica; greenhouse gas-induced surface heat uptake is largely balanced by anomalous northward heat transport associated with the equatorward flow of surface waters; and heat is preferentially stored where surface waters are subducted to the north. Further, these processes are primarily due to passive advection of the anomalous warming signal by climatological ocean currents; changes in ocean circulation are secondary. These findings suggest the Southern Ocean responds to greenhouse gas forcing on the centennial, or longer, timescale over which the deep ocean waters that are upwelled to the surface are warmed themselves. It is against this background of gradual warming that multidecadal Southern Ocean temperature trends must be understood.

Read more: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2731.html

The world’s oceans contain enough cold water to quench any imaginable anthropogenic global warming for hundreds, more likely thousands of years. If that deep water is upwelling around Antarctica, keeping the Southern Ocean cold, it is difficult to see how significant global warming can occur, or significant Antarctic contribution to sea level rise can occur, until that reservoir of freezing cold deep ocean water is finally depleted.

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Marcus
May 31, 2016 6:50 am

..Wow, they get more and more desperate everyday !! LOL

Bryan A
Reply to  Marcus
May 31, 2016 10:22 am

I thought that the Antarctic was Melting, Losing Ice Mass, and that it was this thinning of the ice that was allowing for greater intrusion of Cold Fresh Water into the Southern Ocean that was creating the greater Ice Extents that have been recorded recently. Now it seems that it is rather (C)old Water from the ocean depths (That is supposed to be hiding the warmth ALA Kevin Trenberth) is upwelling and negating the effects of Warming in the southern region???
Still waiting for the Straight Story
NObama 16

RoHa
Reply to  Bryan A
May 31, 2016 6:47 pm

Does this mean that the models (a) weren’t quite right (gasp!), (b) as right as they have always been, or (c) righter than ever, but in a different way?
I’m pretty sure we’re still doomed, regardless.

Reply to  Bryan A
June 2, 2016 9:02 am

My college freshman class are laughing at this article. The one girl said that it reminded her of the glacier ice scene in the “Water Boy” movie by Adam Sandler. Too Funny!!!

Reality Observer
Reply to  Marcus
May 31, 2016 6:54 pm

Yep. Now it’s the cold that has been hiding in the oceans.

The other Phil
Reply to  Reality Observer
May 31, 2016 7:28 pm

That’s really funny.

Reply to  Reality Observer
May 31, 2016 9:34 pm

That was my first thought. First it was the heat hiding in the deep oceans and now it is the cold! Do they listen to themselves?

Reply to  Reality Observer
June 1, 2016 12:43 am

Not cold– Dark Heat….

Reply to  Reality Observer
June 2, 2016 9:06 am

Isn’t it the change of state energy requirements that makes ice so good at “storing cold?” This must be SUPER WATER. LMMFAO!

Reply to  Marcus
May 31, 2016 10:00 pm

The depicted Taylor glacier belongs to the area: “The Dry Valleys, McMurdo”. And why are the Valleys dry, and why are the glaciers melting instead of building up frontal moraines. I’m sure most People don’t know this, and the climate scientists don’t like this. It has to do With the sub-surface geology of the dry Valleys.
If you sprinkle salt on ice and snow – what happens? It melts. Well, beneath the Taylor glacier there is salt in the soil and the glacier melts from below and upwards! Scientists have been wondering for centuries, why the Dry Valleys are devoid of fresh snow and ice. It’s a trick of Nature again. It has to do With physics and chemistry, as always…

Reply to  Martin Hovland
May 31, 2016 11:53 pm

You’re neglecting katabatic winds, it seems.

Reply to  Marcus
June 1, 2016 11:49 am

Who in G’s Name would publish this trash. OMG Please make these morons stop. The desperation is truly building and when it crashes I hope EVERYONE is watching!

Pablo an ex Pat
May 31, 2016 6:56 am

I can also think of a really simple explanation as to why the waters around Antarctica aren’t warming as predicted. The theory that CO2 drives global temperature is wrong. Can I have my grant check now please ?

Eric H
Reply to  Pablo an ex Pat
May 31, 2016 7:36 am

Sorry but I thought all of the extra heat that the climatists predicted would be in the ocean, is supposed to be “hiding” in the deep ocean (via Trenberth). So if all of the missing heat is in the deep ocean, how can deep old water being keeping the Antarctic cold? Shouldn’t it be heating it up?
It would be nice if they could keep their theories straight….

Eric H
Reply to  Eric H
May 31, 2016 7:40 am

BTW I have started calling them “climatists” because they certainly are not “scientists”…

Rob Morrow
Reply to  Eric H
May 31, 2016 8:05 am

+1 Eric
Great term, “climatists”. I’m going to use it too.

Jon
Reply to  Eric H
May 31, 2016 8:22 am

the extra heat is UNDER the cold water pushing it up of course!

Walt The Physicist
Reply to  Eric H
May 31, 2016 9:10 am

Perhaps the climatists’ theory is that the heat hides into the ocean carried down by the warm water that goes down into the ocean driven by the weatherological currents that oppose Archimedes (“natural”) convection. In the meantime the climatological upwelling currents bring cold, -“old”, -ld, -d water to the surface (climatists here stutter a lot since the “old” water is really cold). And that is explanation for the hidden heat, issue is closed, finem scientia…

G. Karst
Reply to  Eric H
May 31, 2016 9:34 am

A climatist is created, when scientist cannot supress the ego enough, to utter the words “I was wrong”. It is a condition that has become absolute in climatology. GK

Tom Judd
Reply to  Eric H
May 31, 2016 9:43 am

Climapaths?

Reply to  Eric H
May 31, 2016 9:50 am

Eric H
This is the ‘missing cold’
… try to keep up

David Ball
Reply to  Eric H
May 31, 2016 10:12 am

Seems like a major malaise going on in this article.

Reply to  Eric H
May 31, 2016 10:23 am

They are neither to me, “climatists” appears to give some sort of title with implied knowledge, a group of “scientists” ( 90 of them ) just send a letter to the Minister of the Environment in BC Canada. In it they claim further exploration and use of NG will increase GHG’s by 22 % over the next what ever years. They are all “professors” at UBC but none of them actually tell us what their real background is, but a little research shows the usual list of shrinks , prof’s of English, biologists and so on.
What they claim is that BC cannot because of this reach the targets set in Paris last year. They do not mention that those targets were set by themselves and their fellow “Professors” .

Bryan A
Reply to  Eric H
May 31, 2016 12:17 pm

Very similar to the Scientific Findings De-Jour that get peer reviewed and published one day to solve a mystery (vis-a-vis missing Heat in hiding in the lower oceans and that is why there is no real hiatus on global temperature increases) then others are peer reviewed (by the same people??) and published the next day (week, Month, Year in the same Scientific Magazines) that say (C)old water upwelling from the ocean depths is causing the observed southern ocean cooling in Antarctica, practically refuting the first paper yet, at some point in time, it’s very likely that either or both papers will be cited in future research and perhaps in the same research as consensus papers.

Reply to  Eric H
May 31, 2016 2:09 pm

Climatists of Gang-Green. That has a certain ring to it. Sounds like a book title, a fantasy tale where Climatists of Gang-Green are the bully-boys of the rainforest, out there swinging in the trees and stealing everyone’s bananas.
Sorry, I get carried away sometimes…

mark
Reply to  Eric H
May 31, 2016 5:37 pm

I think this is deeper deep water. There are deeper patches of water all the way down.

bill johnston
Reply to  Eric H
May 31, 2016 5:53 pm

“keep their theories straight”?? Naw, that would take all the fun out of it.

Reply to  Eric H
May 31, 2016 9:40 pm

Gang-Green? Who came up with that? It’s brilliant!

Ian Macdonald
Reply to  Pablo an ex Pat
May 31, 2016 8:42 am

No.

Bernie
Reply to  Ian Macdonald
May 31, 2016 9:09 am

But Ian, think of the children. If Antarctica begins to warm in only 300 years or so …

john harmsworth
Reply to  Ian Macdonald
May 31, 2016 11:29 am

Think of the penguins! Think 0f the penguins children!

Fraizer
Reply to  Pablo an ex Pat
May 31, 2016 10:52 am

Bad Pablo!
No Grant for You.
Come back 6 months.

indefatigablefrog
Reply to  Pablo an ex Pat
May 31, 2016 11:54 am

Don’t be silly.
The CAGW theory is the ONLY correct theory.
Since, for it to be a correct theory, we must accept that all other theories are wrong.
And that the data is wrong.
Or maybe we’ve been studying the wrong planet.
Occam’s razor – it’s the best a man can get.
Or was that the other brand?

Alex
May 31, 2016 6:58 am

What the hell are ‘climatological ocean currents’?

TonyL
Reply to  Alex
May 31, 2016 7:00 am

Climatological ocean currents go up, Weatherological ocean currents go down. Just like temperature.
Glad I could help.

Alex
Reply to  TonyL
May 31, 2016 7:05 am

Thanks for that. It’s much clearer to me now

PiperPaul
Reply to  TonyL
May 31, 2016 10:11 am

Is that sort of like ‘up’ and ‘down’ on a map with reference to the north arrow?

TonyL
Reply to  TonyL
May 31, 2016 10:29 am

@PiperPaul
It depends on how you look at it.

Pamela Gray
Reply to  TonyL
May 31, 2016 6:15 pm

TonyL, OMG that was funny!

phaedo
Reply to  Alex
May 31, 2016 7:39 am

Climatological ocean currents are a nice fat funding cheque.

BallBounces
Reply to  Alex
May 31, 2016 8:38 am

You prefer the term climatillogical ocean currents?

BFL
Reply to  BallBounces
May 31, 2016 9:11 am

Climatillogical ocean currents are probably the result of Climatastrology:
http://modernvedicastrology.com/node/189

Harry Passfield
Reply to  Alex
May 31, 2016 8:53 am

ā€˜Climatological ocean currentsā€™ are caused by Climate Change. When they occur they cause Global Warming. Do keep up. /s

MarkW
Reply to  Alex
May 31, 2016 9:16 am

That depends. Are they AC or DC?

Greg
Reply to  MarkW
May 31, 2016 10:40 am

Oh, their probably ‘non-binary’ .

Tom in Florida
Reply to  MarkW
May 31, 2016 2:28 pm

They could be transC

TonyL
May 31, 2016 6:58 am

Looks like another excuse for the Pause. A bit late, but that’s OK, we will count it.
Excuse #37
I thought that deep ocean overturning taking hundreds of years was very well known. Maybe this is new because they used a model?

Chris4692
Reply to  TonyL
May 31, 2016 7:10 am

In order to make an excuse for the pause, they have to acknowledge that there is a pause.

TonyL
Reply to  Chris4692
May 31, 2016 7:15 am

Ah, you are correct. Excuse # withdrawn.

george e. smith
Reply to  TonyL
May 31, 2016 7:17 am

Well the whole Atlantic and Pacific Oceans go sloshing back and forth twice a day, between the Antarctic Peninsula and the tip of South America, so it gets pretty rough down there and the waters are well mixed.
Southern Winters are much colder than Northern Winters, because the earth spends a longer time at a greater distance from the sun during Antarctic winters.
Conversely, the earth spends a shorter time closer to the sun during the Antarctic Summers, than it does during the Northern Summers.
G

ferd berple
Reply to  george e. smith
May 31, 2016 1:23 pm

not to mention that every 18 years or so the moon cycles between 18.5 degrees and 28.5 degrees declination, which definitely will affect the mixing rate of the oceans, and will likely give rise to warming/cooling oscillations north and south. bipolar see-saw?

Newminster
Reply to  TonyL
May 31, 2016 8:01 am

But you have to give them some credit. They keep trying!

Hank Hancock
May 31, 2016 6:59 am

Doesn’t this finding fly in the face of earlier assertions that the reason why we’re not experiencing as much warming as the models predicted is because the extra heat was hiding in the deep?

Louis
Reply to  Hank Hancock
May 31, 2016 10:03 am

The extra heat must have found a good place to hide in the deep oceans because even these researchers can’t find it.

PiperPaul
Reply to  Hank Hancock
May 31, 2016 10:19 am

Reality changes daily depending on the widely-publicized press releases’ contents. It’s like that Twilight Zone episode with the kid who could manifest stuff with just his mind.

Paul Jackson
Reply to  Hank Hancock
May 31, 2016 11:10 am

Oh no, the new Warm water going into the deep is what’s pushing the old cold water out!

May 31, 2016 6:59 am

How sick can things be before even the media is able to smell the stench?

MarkW
Reply to  Telehiv
May 31, 2016 7:23 am

They smell it now. It’s just that they choose to ignore it.

DaveK
Reply to  MarkW
May 31, 2016 7:29 am

Heck, they can’t smell the gangrenous stench of their own corruption. Why should we expect them to sniff out corruption elsewhere?

Reply to  Telehiv
May 31, 2016 8:12 am

They have learned to love that stench, like some delicacies have a stench, and assume it goes with global warming.

george e. smith
May 31, 2016 7:01 am

There’s that evil “could” word again.
And models all the way down.
Hey Washington University, I have a much simpler explanation than yours, and the thing is that I can PROVE mine. And it is not a computer model, but actual factual real world Antarctic Ocean experimental measurements.
The real reason that The Antarctic Ocean has not warmed up, is because Antarctica is surrounded by freezing cold water. We know it is freezing cold, because we have measured the water Temperature many times and it is freezing cold.
That’s why it is cold in the Antarctic; very low water Temperature.
And it stays cold because it doesn’t get much sunshine down there.
“Old water” my a*** !!
G

ShrNfr
Reply to  george e. smith
May 31, 2016 8:14 am

Hey, that dihydrogen oxide is billions of years old. Those hydrogen atoms have mostly been around since the Big Bang. See, it is real, real, real old. I admit the oxygen needed a supernova or two. Now that is warming.

Jon
Reply to  ShrNfr
May 31, 2016 8:47 am

So modern wager must have more of that supernova oxygen in it. No wonder it’s hotter than the old water!

Reply to  ShrNfr
May 31, 2016 11:58 am

If it’s not man-made, it’s not global warming.

FJ Shepherd
May 31, 2016 7:01 am

FFS. I have heard them reference “old ice” versus “new ice” in order to explain why things are not happening the way they should be according to the AGW hypothesis. So now it is “old water?” Does this mean that “new water” is warmer? LOL! Well, I guess even idiots can be creative.

DaveK
Reply to  FJ Shepherd
May 31, 2016 7:31 am

Well, it must be that old water is heavier than new water. That’s why it stays down there keeping the oceans from warming up.

John M. Ware
Reply to  DaveK
May 31, 2016 9:20 am

I thought “heavy water” was radioactive or had an extra electron or something; would that affect its temperature?

Brian H
Reply to  DaveK
May 31, 2016 11:09 am

Extra neutron. Science!

Steve Fraser
Reply to  FJ Shepherd
June 1, 2016 8:13 pm

The study does not use the ter, only the article.

Catcracking
May 31, 2016 7:02 am

How much did this nonsense cost the tax payer??

Tom Halla
May 31, 2016 7:03 am

“The dog–I mean the deep ocean–ate my homework–global warming” šŸ™‚

john harmsworth
Reply to  Tom Halla
May 31, 2016 11:34 am

I gotta write that one down!

May 31, 2016 7:13 am

more unsettled science?

Dodgy Geezer
May 31, 2016 7:13 am

…Antarctic Ocean Climate Change Mystery Could Be Explained By Deep, Old Water…
It could also be explained by corruption and lying on the part of Climate Scientists…

GTL
Reply to  Dodgy Geezer
May 31, 2016 8:41 am

Climate Scientist or Climate Fictionist

Reply to  GTL
May 31, 2016 4:02 pm

What’s wrong with the old favourite, “climate scientologist”?

PiperPaul
Reply to  Dodgy Geezer
May 31, 2016 10:25 am

Could be this, may be that, might be this other thing. Meh, whatever. Good enough for government work government-funded climate speculation work and PR messaging.

tty
May 31, 2016 7:15 am

Now this is an interesting 180-degree turn. Hitherto it has been generally accepted that the very cold bottom water in the Oceans is created around Antarctica by the very cold catabatic winds coming off the continent, sinks because of its high density and spreads northwards along the bottom. Google “Antarctic Bottom Water” or “AABW”.
Now apparently it’s suddenly the other way around. This cold water (created where, by the way, in the tropics?) comes to the surface around Antarctica instead.

Reply to  tty
May 31, 2016 7:41 am

Yes they are actually suggesting very cold water sits atop relatively warm water as the cold water passes the warm water on it’s way to the surface.
LMAO
More lost in a concept cack.
The only thing we know for certain is climate science now accounts for 5.51% of all models in science now šŸ˜€

Reply to  Mark - Helsinki
May 31, 2016 7:42 am

55.1%

Jon
Reply to  Mark - Helsinki
May 31, 2016 8:49 am

ditto 55.1% – it’s about 4% of total funding.

PiperPaul
Reply to  Mark - Helsinki
May 31, 2016 10:27 am

Why not 97%?

Mickey Reno
Reply to  tty
May 31, 2016 8:01 am

I thought it had bee fairly well established that ultra cold very dense (highly saline) water was SINKING in a more-or-less steady way, thereby pushing deep cold water currents outward and Northward, away from the Antarctic continent, causing major up-welling on the Western coast of South America? And now I see that tty has already posted a similar question.

Mickey Reno
Reply to  Mickey Reno
May 31, 2016 8:06 am

Oh, and the mandatory feminine cryosphere narrative: Antactica is a frigid bitch.

Reply to  Mickey Reno
May 31, 2016 2:29 pm

Don’t confuse them with facts, they don’t like it. It upsets them. They’ll need cookies and blankets and a safe space.

DonK31
May 31, 2016 7:15 am

ā€œWith rising carbon dioxide you would expect more warming at both poles, but we only see it at one of the poles, so something else must be going on,ā€ said Kyle Armour of the University of Washington and lead author of the study. ā€œWe show that itā€™s for really simple reasons, and ocean currents are the hero here.ā€
Perhaps the something else that is going on is that the hypothesis is wrong.

george e. smith
Reply to  DonK31
May 31, 2016 7:37 am

No Kyle, I would NOT expect anything of the kind.
With rising CO2 I would expect there to be more clouds, which block more sunlight and cool the earth, by lowering the total solar energy that reaches the earth’s surface.
But I do agree with your principal conclusion.
It IS for ” really simple reasons .” Too simple to even bother modeling; and yes it has even been MEASURED.
Is “measurement” something that they teach at the University of Washington ??
G

May 31, 2016 7:17 am

Is there a separate “climate science” curriculum in today’s universities? If so, I wonder if a mandatory course is “Coming up with bullshit excuses for natural events that refute the climate change meme.”

Myron Mesecke
May 31, 2016 7:19 am

But I thought all the heat was going into the deep ocean so how is there any cold in the deep ocean?
And Antarctic ice is magical now? Able to be less affected by CO2 than Arctic ice?
These people are so caught up in their delusions they have lost any semblance of common sense.

Jon
Reply to  Myron Mesecke
May 31, 2016 8:51 am

It’s all those penguins they protect it against the heat by blocking the sun’s rays with their bodies šŸ™‚ and their happy feet too

Reply to  Myron Mesecke
June 1, 2016 1:18 am

Myron, if you were a real scientist you understand these things.
The deep water is warmer, but due to quantum uncertainty, it turns cold as soon as it’s measured.

Bruce Cobb
May 31, 2016 7:20 am

The quest for an excuse as to why gaia isn’t following the CAGW script continues. You can smell the desperation and fear of these “researchers”. The end of the CAGW gravy train is nigh.

MarkW
May 31, 2016 7:22 am

Since the rest of the ocean has only warmed by about 0.001C, how can you tell the difference?

TA
Reply to  MarkW
May 31, 2016 10:02 am

Yeah, they act like the North Pole has warmed up just like the CAGW theory predicted. It’s just that presky South Pole that is not cooperating, but now we know why.
Meanwhile the tempertures are dropping. I guess we’ll have a new measurement tomorrow.

john harmsworth
Reply to  MarkW
May 31, 2016 11:38 am

Which of course is an unmeasurable amount

Latitude
May 31, 2016 7:35 am

AH makes sense…
The deep cold water is coming up….and behind it it’s sucking the hot water back down…
I think we found the global warming that’s been hiding in the deep oceans
….my headache just came back

John B
May 31, 2016 7:42 am

The global warming ‘science’ is something of a magic act, with a top hat containing an infinite number of hidden white rabbits to be pulled out as the occasion warrants to amaze and distract, and a magic wand to change data before our very eyes.

May 31, 2016 7:43 am

See:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL066749/full
ā€œWe investigated this in detail and show that for central Antarctica an increase in CO2Ā concentration leads to an increased long-wave energy loss to space, which cools the Earth-atmosphere system. These findings for central Antarctica are in contrast to the general warming effect of increasing CO2.ā€

Latitude
Reply to  Werner Brozek
May 31, 2016 8:17 am

woops………..

FJ Shepherd
Reply to  Werner Brozek
May 31, 2016 8:39 am

Excellent link to a fairly recent scientific paper, Werner. So higher concentrations of CO2 in central Antarctica actually cools the atmosphere. I think the climate alarmists should simply ignore Antarctica because all of their nattering on about why it is becoming colder there versus warmer is drawing attention to the fact that it really IS becoming colder there. This defeats their purpose.

tty
Reply to  Werner Brozek
May 31, 2016 12:17 pm

That seems physically reasonable. Above the tropopause where radiative transport dominates over convection and temperature increases with altitude greenhouse gases have a cooling effect. And in Central Antarctica there really isnā€™t any troposphere or tropopause, at least in winter, so yes more greenhouse gases would presumably cause cooling there.

fizzissist
May 31, 2016 7:50 am

Finally, the science is settled. All we needed after all was simple reasons and heroes.

May 31, 2016 7:51 am

Now any time the Antarctic is brought up, they have an obfuscation to apply, “it’s the last place to show global warming you denier”
Yawnn.. nothing but creating obfuscation.
Models are not science.

AndyG55
Reply to  Mark - Helsinki
May 31, 2016 3:19 pm

“ā€œitā€™s the last place to show global warming you denierā€”
That’s because of “polar amplification” šŸ˜‰

TonyL
May 31, 2016 7:53 am

Anybody want to have some fun?
I followed the link back. It appears to be a trendy, current events, “news magazine” type of web site with a very “millennial” type of vibe. Chances are that the editor, or at least the copy writer is fully absorbed into the whole millennial ethos, so prevalent on college campuses these days. That includes charges of racism, sexism, white privilege, and calls for safe spaces, perpetually offended, and all the rest. And of course, censoring speech they do not like.
They used the term “den*er”, in the piece, and we can’t even use that word here without getting sent to the doghouse.
How about some of us surf over there and complain about the use of “den*er”. Say it is racist, techno-privilege, offensive, and makes us feel threatened. Demand an apology issued here at WUWT. Then we can make them grovel for forgiveness.
That would be one news outlet that never uses that term again.

May 31, 2016 8:01 am

Whoops! This, cough cough, research is another one of those confirmation bias hunting expeditions.
State a desired finding.
Claim to use observations.
• ‘Find’ an upwelling current.
• Claim to find where the displaced surface current flows.
• Claim that the surface water ‘warmed’ while on the surface near Antarctica.
• Claim that the surface water ‘carried away the Antarctica CO2 warmed water’
• Claim that the warmed surface water then are subducted on their way north… (another tropical hot spot?)
Observations show cooling waters near Antarctica, so these researcher yahoos turn to models and CMIP5 to ‘show’ warming near Antarctica.
To no one’s surprise, they then use NOAA’s fabulous nebulous zeta-joules to highlight the alleged warming.
What these yahoos fail to explain is how this upwelling ancient current flows unfrozen to the surface, swirls around in sub-zero temperatures; then flows northward warmer?
These University of Washington yahoos are playing a rigged shell game proving their warming water is imaginary modeling.

Toneb
Reply to  ATheoK
May 31, 2016 8:21 am

“What these yahoos fail to explain is how this upwelling ancient current flows unfrozen to the surface,”
Well it would certainly be a turn up for the book if the water froze below the surface and bobbed up as an iceberg. Physically impossible my friend.
“…. swirls around in sub-zero temperatures; then flows northward warmer?”
The average freezing point of Antarctic ocean waters is ~ -1.8C.
Considering that the stated reason for the up-welling is an increase of surface winds (created by the increased deltaT between the SH temperate zone and Antarctica) then increased turbulent mixing would (at some point going away from the continent) prevent freezing …. and so the waters start their journey north.

Reply to  Toneb
May 31, 2016 10:47 am

Arguing false straw men Toneb?
I state unfrozen, you state frozen.
And you make fun of the ‘frozen’ concept you just stated.
Then you write about the ‘average freezing point of Antarctic waters is’, but I wrote about the sub-zero temperatures.
Toneb also points out that the reason for the up-welling is an “increase of surface winds” along with increased turbulent mixing, somewhere to prevent freezing.
Wouldn’t the upwelled water being CO2 warmed prevent freezing? Or do their use of the term ‘delayed’ imply the warming happens later?
Now about that upwelling in a circumpolar current being caused by winds? How does that work?
Toneb; you’ve stepped in a hole of your own digging.
Without providing any evidence that the waters surrounding Antarctica, upwelled or not, are made warmer by CO2 before they travel north?
Nor did you provide any rationale for the alleged warming, instead you argued against your own straw men writing.
At least the researchers above included a “Southern Oceanā€™s meridional overturning circulation” as part of their circumpolar wind beliefs.
Though just how the researchers northward flow of water is:

“…anomalous northward heat transport associated with the equatorward flow of surface waters; and heat is preferentially stored where surface waters are subducted to the north…”

Then they claim that the anomalous process is centennial; anomalous centennial process? Makes one wonder just what is normal in the climate world.
Normal certainly can not be storing warm water preferentially subducted to depth…
Confirmation bias!

tty
Reply to  Toneb
May 31, 2016 12:31 pm

“Well it would certainly be a turn up for the book if the water froze below the surface and bobbed up as an iceberg. Physically impossible my friend.”

Physically impossible?
Some strange things happen in Antarctica. IĀ“ve personally seen snow fall on the sea-surface and cover it without melting since the temperature of the water is below zero (this only works in an absolute dead calm, which is not common in Antarctica).

Toneb
Reply to  Toneb
May 31, 2016 3:07 pm

“Arguing false straw men Toneb?
I state unfrozen, you state frozen.
And you make fun of the ā€˜frozenā€™ concept you just stated.”
Yes, because….
You said “What these yahoos fail to explain is how this up-welling ancient current flows unfrozen to the surface”.
Sorry, that implies that sub-zero water should have “frozen”.
“Then you write about the ā€˜average freezing point of Antarctic waters isā€™, but I wrote about the sub-zero temperatures.”
Correct. So?
“Wouldnā€™t the up-welled water being CO2 warmed prevent freezing? Or do their use of the term ā€˜delayedā€™ imply the warming happens later?
Now about that up-welling in a circumpolar current being caused by winds? How does that work?”
No, it means that the extra warming incurred by surface waters due AGW is removed becasue the waters are – and replaced by cooler waters from below.
See my other posts re up-welling. But same thing happens in the E Equ Pac during a La Nina.
“Toneb; youā€™ve stepped in a hole of your own digging.
Without providing any evidence that the waters surrounding Antarctica, upwelled or not, are made warmer by CO2 before they travel north?
Nor did you provide any rationale for the alleged warming, instead you argued against your own straw men writing.”
No “hole” my friend.
I do not need to provide “evidence”. My post was countering yours and the paper (I assume – pay-walled) provides evidence in that regard.
The paper is regarding increased up-welling of cold bottom waters due to increased wind-stress of surface waters, overcoming warming that *would have* taken place were surface waters to have remained. That is all.
“Then they claim that the anomalous process is centennial; anomalous centennial process? Makes one wonder just what is normal in the climate world.
Normal certainly can not be storing warm water preferentially subducted to depthā€¦
Confirmation bias!”
I read that comment to mean that the process has taken ~100yrs in order for it to kick-in. You know?
Like, things don’t happen instantaneously.
And no I would suggest the “bias” lies elsewhere.

SAMURAI
May 31, 2016 8:13 am

I guess the paper is saying, “What happens in Antarctica, stays in Antarctica”…

H.R.
Reply to  SAMURAI
May 31, 2016 8:35 am

Like!

O R
May 31, 2016 8:13 am

But the waters around Antarctica are in fact warming, Here is 0-700 m temps south of 60S:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/inodc_temp700_0-360E_-90–60N_n_mean12_12v_anom_30.png
Is the heat welling up from below, slightly warmer slightly saltier water..?

Latitude
Reply to  O R
May 31, 2016 8:19 am

Well yeah….last year it was the warm water melting the ice
Now this year it’s the cold water freezing it

Reply to  Latitude
June 1, 2016 1:48 am

It’s not the Southern Ocean! It says 60N!

SAMURAI
Reply to  O R
May 31, 2016 8:26 am

OR-san
I notice the sudden temp rise coincides when ARGO data went online in 2003.
Perhaps that’s the reason. Prior to ARGO, ocean area temperature coverwge was spotty.
It would also like to know how much (KARL2105) raw data adjustments have had on ocean temp records.

Richard G
Reply to  SAMURAI
May 31, 2016 9:25 pm

It would be interesting to know if those numbers are an artifact of ARGO coming online or if they have been Karlized. Not sure if anyone saved the ARGO data for that area before Karl 2015.

Reply to  O R
May 31, 2016 8:39 am

2 points:
1. Gotta love data wiggles that show 2 to 6 one-hundredths of a degree changes in temp. Even changes +/- a whole one tenth of a degree are hilarious when one considers the accuracy implied by that graph when no error bars are shown.
2. I would strongly suspect that a systematic measuring process changed in about 2003-2004 to cause the discontinuity and the higher amplitude swings post 2004. And the name of that systematic change in measuring methodology would be called Argo.
So O R, before you get too excited about that graph you posted, the data post-2003 cannot be stitched to the post 2004, to find some trend across the interval. Mann did that bit of dishonesty on another graph.

Reply to  Joel O'Bryan
May 31, 2016 8:44 am

Errata: pre-2003.

Reply to  O R
May 31, 2016 8:46 am

O R, you seriously cannot call changes in hundredths of a degree “warming”!!! Get a life, mate.

FJ Shepherd
Reply to  O R
May 31, 2016 9:17 am

Oh, but those measurements must be for “new water” only.

Reply to  O R
May 31, 2016 9:18 am

Argo data 0 – 2000m do not seem to show much warming in any of the polar oceans:
http://climate4you.com/images/ArgoGlobalSummaryGraph.gif

SAMURAI
Reply to  Karl W. Braun
May 31, 2016 10:33 am

Karl-san:
Do you happen to know the extent of KARL2015 “adjustments” have had on ARGO final-temp data (0~2000 meters)?

Richard M
Reply to  Karl W. Braun
May 31, 2016 5:20 pm

Looks like all the warming is across the tropics over the past 2 years of El Nino conditions.

MarkW
Reply to  O R
May 31, 2016 9:22 am

Do the probes actually measure down to a hundredth of a degree?
If not, then your chart is garbage.

Reply to  O R
May 31, 2016 10:20 am

How about this:comment image?w=470&h=262

john harmsworth
Reply to  O R
May 31, 2016 11:55 am

First: This is surface down to over 2 km
Second: This is millions of sq. km all the way around the globe
Third: This is a range of .1 degree C
Lastly, and forever more: This is completely meaningless measurement

indefatigablefrog
Reply to  O R
May 31, 2016 12:44 pm

Does that graph contain the motivated ARGO adjustments of Josh Willis?
He who banished the mysterious post millennial cooling observations, with this brilliant explanation:
ā€œFirst, I identified some new Argo floats that were giving bad data; they were too cool compared to other sources of data during the time period. It wasnā€™t a large number of floats, but the data were bad enough, so that when I tossed them, most of the cooling went away. But there was still a little bit, so I kept digging and digging.ā€
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/

AndyG55
Reply to  O R
May 31, 2016 3:31 pm

There were basically NO temperature readings taken down there before 2003.
NOAA has used a “model” to invent these numbers.comment image

Reply to  O R
June 1, 2016 1:45 am

There is something wrong with this graph! The Southern Ocean is cooling! Sixty degrees NORTH*! That would be Siberia!
* The graph lists 60N, which is Sixty North.

Reply to  Scott Wilmot Bennett
June 1, 2016 1:46 am

I was responding to the graph by O R above!

TobiasN
May 31, 2016 8:15 am

The maps of world thermohaline circulation show a underwater current coming south off the east coast of South America and joining the thermohaline current that circles Antarctica.

William Astley
Reply to  TobiasN
May 31, 2016 9:11 am

The discrete thermal haline urban legend was started by Wally Broeker. Wally invented the concept of a discrete deep water conveyor to try to explain the polar see-saw which is the name given for the fact that the Antarctic ice sheet warms slightly when the Greenland ice sheet cools and vice versa.
The idiots in pure science ignore the piles and piles of observations that disprove their pet theories. The planet warms and cools cyclically. Internal forcing functions are chaotic and affect only one hemisphere.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2003/2003GL017115.shtml
Timing of abrupt climate change: A precise clock by Stefan Rahmstorf
Many paleoclimatic data reveal a approx. 1,500 year cyclicity of unknown origin. A crucial question is how stable and regular this cycle is. An analysis of the GISP2 ice core record from Greenland reveals that abrupt climate events appear to be paced by a 1,470-year cycle with a period that is probably stable to within a few percent; with 95% confidence the period is maintained to better than 12% over at least 23 cycles. This highly precise clock points to an origin outside the Earth system (William: Solar magnetic cycle changes cause warming and cooling); oscillatory modes within the Earth system can be expected to be far more irregular in period.
The analysis goes in circles as there are piles and piles of urban legends and zombie theories that have been thrown at the problem what causes cyclic warming and cooling and sometimes abrupt cooling of the earth.
Solar cycle changes are the cause of all of the cyclic warming and cooling in the paleo record. The planet resists rather than amplifies forcing changes (the amplifying urban legend has also started by Wally Broeker to try to explain cyclic abrupt climate change in the paleo record.) The explanation for cyclic abrupt climate change is the sun is different than the standard model and changes in a manner to cause the cyclic abrupt climate change in the paleo record.
First the following is the observation that supports the assertion that there is no discrete deep water thermal haline conveyor system to interrupt.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090513130942.htm

Cold Water Ocean Circulation Doesn’t Work As Expected
The familiar model of Atlantic ocean currents that shows a discrete “conveyor belt” of deep, cold water flowing southward from the Labrador Sea is probably all wet.
A 50-year-old model of ocean currents had shown this southbound subsurface flow of cold water forming a continuous loop with the familiar northbound flow of warm water on the surface, called the Gulf Stream.
“Everybody always thought this deep flow operated like a conveyor belt, but what we are saying is that concept doesn’t hold anymore,” said Duke oceanographer Susan Lozier. “So it’s going to be more difficult to measure these climate change signals in the deep ocean.”
The question is how do these climate change signals get spread further south? Oceanographers long thought all this Labrador seawater moved south along what is called the Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC), which hugs the eastern North American continental shelf all the way to near Florida and then continues further south.
But studies in the 1990s using submersible floats that followed underwater currents “showed little evidence of southbound export of Labrador sea water within the Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC),” said the new Nature report.
Scientists challenged those earlier studies, however, in part because the floats had to return to the surface to report their positions and observations to satellite receivers. That meant the floats’ data could have been “biased by upper ocean currents when they periodically ascended,” the report added.
To address those criticisms, Lozier and Bower launched 76 special Range and Fixing of Sound floats into the current south of the Labrador Sea between 2003 and 2006. Those “RAFOS” floats could stay submerged at 700 or 1,500 meters depth and still communicate their data for a range of about 1,000 kilometers using a network of special low frequency and amplitude seismic signals.
But only 8 percent of the RAFOS floats’ followed the conveyor belt of the Deep Western Boundary Current, according to the Nature report. About 75 percent of them “escaped” that coast-hugging deep underwater pathway and instead drifted into the open ocean by the time they rounded the southern tail of the Grand Banks.
Eight percent “is a remarkably low number in light of the expectation that the DWBC is the dominant pathway for Labrador Sea Water,” the researchers wrote.
Studies led by Lozier and other researchers had previously suggested cold northern waters might follow such “interior pathways” rather than the conveyor belt in route to subtropical regions of the North Atlantic. But “these float tracks offer the first evidence of the dominance of this pathway compared to the DWBC.”

Polar See-saw.
As Svensmark notes (see Svensmark’s attached paper that discusses the polar see-saw) there is no delay in the cyclic Antarctic ice sheet slight cooling and warming which correlates in time but is out of phase with the Dansgaard-Oeschger warming and cooling cycle warming of the Greenland ice sheet in the Northern hemisphere. The fact that there is no delay in the polar see-saw warming and cooling rules out ocean currents as the cause as there is a theoretical 1000 year plus delay in the ocean current change in the North hemisphere to cause a change in the southern hemisphere if there was a discrete deep water conveyor which there is not.
It is important to note the planet cyclically warms and cools (both hemispheres in sync except the Antarctic ice sheet is out of sync and cools and warms slightly). This paper notes that the Southern hemisphere cools and warms with the same periodicity as in the Northern hemisphere.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/davis-and-taylor-wuwt-submission.pdf

Davis and Taylor: ā€œDoes the current global warming signal reflect a natural cycleā€
…We found 342 natural warming events (NWEs) corresponding to this definition, distributed over the past 250,000 years ā€¦. …. The 342 NWEs contained in the Vostok ice core record are divided into low-rate warming events (LRWEs; < 0.74oC/century) and high rate warming events (HRWEs; ā‰„ 0.74oC /century) (Figure). … …. "Recent Antarctic Peninsula warming relative to Holocene climate and ice – shelf history" and authored by Robert Mulvaney and colleagues of the British Antarctic Survey ( Nature , 2012, doi:10.1038/nature11391),reports two recent natural warming cycles, one around 1500 AD and another around 400 AD, measured from isotope (deuterium) concentrations in ice cores bored adjacent to recent breaks in the ice shelf in northeast Antarctica. ….

Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alleyā€™s paper. William: As this graph indicates the Greenland Ice data shows that have been 9 warming and cooling periods in the last 11,000 years.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
What we are currently experiencing is the end of a Dansgaard-Oeschger warming cycle. The D-O warming and cooling is caused by solar cycle modulation of high latitude cloud cover.
As the albedo of the Antarctic ice sheet is higher than cloud cover, a decrease in cloud cover over the Antarctic ice sheet
The cooling of the Antarctic ocean is due to cooling of the Antarctic ice sheet.
P.S. Observations continue to support the assertion the solar cycle has been interrupted and we are going to experience a Heinrich event.
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0612145v1

The Antarctic climate anomaly and galactic cosmic rays
Borehole temperatures in the ice sheets spanning the past 6000 years show Antarctica repeatedly warming when Greenland cooled, and vice versa (Fig. 1) [13, 14]. North-south oscillations of greater amplitude associated with Dansgaard-Oeschger events are evident in oxygenisotope data from the Wurm-Wisconsin glaciation[15]. The phenomenon has been called the polar see-saw[15, 16], but that implies a north-south symmetry that is absent. Greenland is better coupled to global temperatures than Antarctica is, and the fulcrum of the temperature swings is near the Antarctic Circle. A more apt term for the effect is the Antarctic climate anomaly.
Attempts to account for it have included the hypothesis of a south-flowing warm ocean current crossing the Equator[17] with a built-in time lag supposedly intended to match paleoclimatic data. That there is no significant delay in the Antarctic climate anomaly is already apparent at the high-frequency end of Fig. (1). While mechanisms involving ocean currents might help to intensify or reverse the effects of climate changes, they are too slow to explain the almost instantaneous operation of the Antarctic climate anomaly.
Figure (2a) also shows that the polar warming effect of clouds is not symmetrical, being most pronounced beyond 75ā—¦S. In the Arctic it does no more than offset the cooling effect, despite the fact that the Arctic is much cloudier than the Antarctic (Fig. (2b)). The main reason for the difference seems to be the exceptionally high albedo of Antarctica in the absence of clouds.

TobiasN
Reply to  William Astley
May 31, 2016 2:01 pm

Thanks for that. Not just about the currents. polar see-saw; Clouds with a different effect depending on the albedo of what is beneath
I am going to read it a second time.

RMB
May 31, 2016 8:18 am

Old water, you have to be joking. The Surface of water does NOT obey the laws of thermodynamics because god got there first with surface tension.
The SURFACE of water will only allow radiated energy through its surface physical heat is blocked.
As the sun’s Radiated energy reaches the planet it first passes through the atmosphere heating the gases including co2.That heat is blocked only the radiated energy is allowed to pass and you can’t add to it because god got there first with Surface tension. There is NO such thing as AGW

knr
May 31, 2016 8:26 am

When your practicing ‘heads you lose tails I win ‘ “science” then of course you can square the circle .
meanwhile
‘a fact often pointed out by climate change deniers.’ has no relationship at all to any science , it just throwing around a silly insult .

PiperPaul
Reply to  knr
May 31, 2016 1:20 pm

Well, it is after all, important to reinforce who the “enemy” is and who the “bad people” are so that the newly-enraged crowd knows who to attack for destroying the planet. Oh is it done pour encourager les autres?

Whatsacomeanago
May 31, 2016 8:26 am

It’ heavy, and it’s old, cos it’s dinosaur piss!

May 31, 2016 8:31 am

Yesterday a report on Yahoo had the temperature in Antarctica at -93 for some British Station. Don’t know if that included wind chill but it is very hard to conjure up “ice loss” at those kind of temperatures.

john harmsworth
Reply to  fossilsage
May 31, 2016 12:03 pm

I wonder what it was before they fiddled it warmer

May 31, 2016 8:33 am

I’m no scientist or anything but I would think that all the water in the ocean is the exact same age.

Reply to  Elmer
May 31, 2016 8:47 am

Not all of it, no.

Bernie
Reply to  Elmer
May 31, 2016 9:24 am

Right. Most water is ancient. New water is created when hydrocarbons burn. It takes work to destroy water.

Steve Reddish
Reply to  Bernie
May 31, 2016 10:05 am

Photosynthesis is a water destroying mechanism at work in the oceans.
SR

Steve Reddish
Reply to  Bernie
May 31, 2016 10:08 am

And those burning hydrocarbons were produced in the first place by photosynthesis.
SR

South River Independent
Reply to  Bernie
May 31, 2016 10:06 pm

But can you pick out the one new water molecule in a line up of old water molecules?

Steve Fraser
Reply to  Elmer
June 1, 2016 11:03 am

The comment about the ‘old water’ is in the article, but not in the paper.

Rob Dawg
May 31, 2016 8:36 am

On a hot day I like a nice cold beer. Sure enough not long after I produce new water. Much warmer just like their theory predicts. The difference of course is that my new water is worth more than their theory.

Reply to  Rob Dawg
May 31, 2016 8:50 am
London247
Reply to  Rob Dawg
May 31, 2016 11:31 am

+10 šŸ™‚

Reply to  Rob Dawg
May 31, 2016 2:53 pm

+100

bit chilly
Reply to  Rob Dawg
May 31, 2016 4:21 pm

in a list of replies that has had me rofl ,that one takes the biscuit rob šŸ™‚

May 31, 2016 8:53 am

Colder, saltier water floats to the top. Who knew?

Richard M
May 31, 2016 9:07 am

This is another example of the denial rampant among climate pseudo-scientists. There is already an easy explanation for the differences seen at the poles. The AMO drives changes in the ice in the Arctic.
As the AMO index warms, the water melts ice which allows energy to be released into the atmosphere from the water. This warms the air but eventually cools the water sufficiently that ice reforms and starts to insulate the water. The full cycle takes 60-70 years.
But hey, once the Arctic warming is shown to be natural the entire claim of dangerous warming is toast. They now have shown the Antarctic is not going to warm and to admit much if not all of the Arctic warming is natural would end the silly field of climastrology.

May 31, 2016 9:07 am

Most of the water in the lower portions of oceans is the old water, after all the Earth is an old planet, but by no means the oldest. According to astronomers in Lund, there is a lot to indicate that Planet 9 was captured by the young sun and has been a part of our solar system completely undetected ever since, there should be some even older water in form of a veeeeerrryyy old ice.
https://youtu.be/gVSEK9yvr3s
http://phys.org/news/2016-05-theft-planet-solar.html#nRlv

MarkW
Reply to  vukcevic
May 31, 2016 9:26 am

I thought it was Plan 9 that came from outer space?

South River Independent
Reply to  MarkW
May 31, 2016 10:13 pm

No, Revolution 9 by the Beatles.

Steve Reddish
Reply to  vukcevic
May 31, 2016 10:19 am

So…he doesn’t see any way a planet could form at such a great distance from our star, therefore it must have formed at the outer edge of some other star system? How does that work?
SR

Reply to  Steve Reddish
May 31, 2016 11:17 am

In approximately six billion years, our galaxy will start to physically collide with the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) with gravitational warping beginning at four billion years.
One model I watched, estimated that from initial gravitational warping the whole collision will last for approximately three billion years.
There is a strong possibility that Andromeda’s satellite companion galaxy (M33) will join in the fun.
I’m sure there will be plenty of planetoids wandering in search of a solar system then.
That’s all it takes to free up planets is a gravitational source strong enough to kick one free. There are plenty of binary and triple star solar systems out there that kicked out planetoids in the wrong positions early on.

RACookPE1978
Editor
Reply to  ATheoK
May 31, 2016 12:27 pm

We better be kicked free of the sun … It will expand into a red giant and kill everyone on the planet if not transferred to (1) another solar system by gravity loops and kicks or (2) another planet (by technology and energy).

MarkW
Reply to  Steve Reddish
May 31, 2016 11:39 am

Let me put that on my calendar.

Reply to  Steve Reddish
May 31, 2016 4:14 pm

Aye RACookPE1978!
We need strip the Earth of everything usable, strip the Asteroid belt of anything that we’d need, herd all of the biological life we like into stock transports, then find a nice cozy spot to watch the galaxies merge.
When they’re mostly finished, we can look for a fresh new solar system, move an ideal planet into position, load it up with all of the goodies and move in. After we send all of the interior designers, unreformed climate team descendants and beauticians back to the old ‘newly terra-fried’ Earth.
i.e. unless mankind and critters have managed to evolve into beings of pure energy by then.
Four billion years to evolve before the merger.
Three billion years to evolve during the merger.
Old Sol will have expanded and either consumed the Earth or barbecued it thoroughly.

Reply to  vukcevic
May 31, 2016 1:59 pm

British Astronomer Royal Lord Rees has gone BB nuts.

Reply to  vukcevic
June 1, 2016 1:09 pm

Hello Vukcevic, good to see you again, always with thought-provoking ideas (seriously)
You said:

According to astronomers in Lund

Which planet is Lund again?

May 31, 2016 9:08 am

does this mean we can’t hide heat in the ocean depths anymore?

May 31, 2016 9:08 am

Here is a transect from Antarctica to Australia sampling CFCs. Rather than cold water rising up to nefariously hide our preconceived idea of warming, that cooling around Antarctica is creating more cold water which is sinking, dragging with it absorbed CFS ( and CO2 ) to the depths:
http://mersaustrales.mnhn.fr/blog_mission/images/10%2001%202008/Image%202V.jpg

MarkW
May 31, 2016 9:14 am

As I get older, I find that I get cold more easily.
Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with the water.

tom s
May 31, 2016 9:20 am

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED DAMMIT!!!!

Reply to  tom s
May 31, 2016 2:59 pm

What, AGAIN?

betapug
May 31, 2016 9:25 am

My theory is that Trenberth’s “hidden” AGW heat is actually hiding much deeper… in the earth’s core! Our reckless production of CO2 is actually causing the core to melt from it’s pre-industrial solid state.

May 31, 2016 9:31 am

Did they forget that cold water is denser and sinks? Sure displacement by the wind can upwell some old cold water, but the wind isnā€™t always present, isnā€™t always strong enough to cause this upwelling and the S pole is a powerful source of new cold water to replace anything that upwelled to the surface. It will not take mere centuries to exhaust the cold (old or new) water, but will take until the Sun reaches its red giant phase and consumes the Earth..
This is a classic case of acknowledging only the small slice of reality that can be spun to support a cause while ignoring anything else. This is how politics works and this is how Nature reports.

London247
Reply to  co2isnotevil
May 31, 2016 11:38 am

My thoughts exactly. Water i(frsh or salt) s at its densest at around 4 degress C. This report suggests that denser fluids rise. On this basis the Laws of Thermodynamics and Archimedean principles are poor science and the proponents of AGW global change give us a new “science” where conjecture overrules observation and determinisatic theory.

Reply to  London247
May 31, 2016 12:42 pm

No, saltwater has it’s maximum density at its melting/freezing point, the 4ĀŗC maximum density only applies to freshwater.

john harmsworth
Reply to  London247
May 31, 2016 1:12 pm

Density depends on salinity as well as temperature. Also, much of this water is colder than 4C. Throw in surface temperature interactions and evaporation along with wind and subsurface currents and it’s obviously too complcated for your (below) average climate scientist.

Tom Judd
May 31, 2016 9:50 am

Seriously. This time they’ve really got a handle on something. And, despite all the past pronouncements that predicted catastrophes that just didn’t occur, this time it’s true. We’re doomed. Once that “old water” applies for Social Security benefits it’ll bankrupt the system. The economies will collapse.

Reply to  Tom Judd
May 31, 2016 3:58 pm

I thought of Old Water crawling out of the ocean and eating people like in the old-fashioned monster movies. Never thought of it lining up at the Social Security Office – somehow that’s much scarier.

May 31, 2016 9:57 am

If this has continued thousand years it can not be explanation resent cooling South waters, just eplanation of cold South as general.
But there is some faint claims that winds of the area are now more powerfull than before. Make sense if tropic is a bit warmer then there is larger thermal gratient = more energy to use.
So “missing heat” is on a way to the North Pole not to the bottom of southern seas.
And you may ask if this is negative feedback because colder sea surface means lager sea ice.
A funny thing is that the reality is in this case quite opposite to climate sciences claims about missing heat.

Bob Quartero
May 31, 2016 9:58 am

All deep water is cold. Around 4 degrees C. Simply because of the high pressures at that depth. Water has its highest density at 4C. Nothing to do with Old or New water.

john harmsworth
Reply to  Bob Quartero
May 31, 2016 1:21 pm

As salt water freezes the water separates from the salt so the remaining water becomes more saline. This occurs at less than 0C. The resultant cold, extra saline water sinks through the surrounding water in columns much like cold air in thunderstorms. When Arctic or Antarctic ice forms, it creates very cold, extra saline water in proportionate amounts that sinks until it either hits bottom, finds fresher water to mix with or else finds a source of heat to warm up.
[Only in very still, undisturbed water uniform in temperature and salinity vertically from top to bottom. Add waves, under-ice currents, surface winds and mixing …It gets messy. Like thinking super-cooled liquids that freeze instantly are a common occurrence. They “can” happen, but it takes very, very unusual circumstances. .mod]

May 31, 2016 10:05 am

“With rising carbon dioxide you would expect more warming at both poles, but we only see it at one of the poles, so something else must be going on,”
Classic ! The author doesn’t consider even for one nanosecond that the CAGW hypothesis might be wrong & the “something else that is going on ” is that CACW isn’t what’s going on.

allanJ
May 31, 2016 10:06 am

Many years ago on WUWT there was a beautiful essay, I think written by Willis Eschenbach, about the incredible complexity of the climate and the hubris of scientists who believe they captured its essence in a rather simplistic set of models.
Every discovery of a new factor interacting with the climate validates that essay. Wouldn’t it be nice if the climate modelers come to accept that the system is really really complicated.

Louis
May 31, 2016 10:13 am

“and heat is preferentially stored where surface waters are subducted to the north.”
The heat “prefers” to go north? Who knew?

Bruce Cobb
Reply to  Louis
May 31, 2016 10:20 am

Well of course. It goes north to cool off. No one likes being hot.
Duh.

Latitude
Reply to  Louis
May 31, 2016 10:29 am

that’s cause heat rises

son of mulder
May 31, 2016 10:22 am

Warm water rises to the top of the earth and cold water sinks to the bottom. Easy but /sarc off in case anyone thinks I’m really stupid.

Latitude
Reply to  son of mulder
May 31, 2016 10:30 am

two great minds….look up

David Smith
Reply to  Latitude
May 31, 2016 2:32 pm

Or is that “look down”?
Depends which way your holding the map, I suppose.

Reply to  son of mulder
May 31, 2016 10:34 am

Not in climate science, no. In climate science, warm water can hide inside cold water.

May 31, 2016 10:41 am

We show that itā€™s for really simple reasons, and ocean currents are the hero here.ā€

So you’ve woken up to the THC? Yes it’s real simple. Ocean currents are responsible for the cooling trend around Antarctica. Such currents and changes in vertical mixing are also causing the warming elsewhere. In fact, ocean circulation influences climate globally on century and even millennial timescales.
Sadly this leaves little role for CO2.

May 31, 2016 11:06 am

Every cloud has a silver lining. One of the consequences of climate scientists tearing themselves away from computer modelling/gaming in a distressed attempt to find reasons for global non-warming is that in the process they sometimes, even if, accidentally and in spite of themselves, they learn some climate science. So now the great effort of dissembling about Antarctic cooling, they have stumbled on the global thermohaline circulation. But it’s clearly baby steps at first, they have a steep learning curve ahead of them. What they will find if they do more reading is that Antarctica is the world’s biggest source of formation and downwelling of cold deep water. Not too surprising, one would think, since it’s the coldest place on earth. Antarctica is actually the “grand central station” of the THC – the most important hub of circulation at all levels.
So cold water flows away from, not towards, Antarctica. So they’ve got cause and effect inverted as usual. I remember reading in a history book somewhere that deliberate inversion of cause and effect is a trademark of propaganda narrative of fasc1st regimes. What a curious coincidence!

tadchem
May 31, 2016 11:19 am

Didn’t they also claim that the ‘missing heat’ was ‘hiding’ in the ocean depths? The existence of “unique currents around Antarctica that continually pull deep, old water up to the surface” would seem to contradict the hypothesis that “deep, old water” has remained at the ocean depths for hundreds of years.
Physics tells us that water has almost zero tensile strength and so cannot ‘pull’ anything – water gets pulled DOWN by gravity, and water with lower density gets pushed out of the way as gravity pulls water with higher density (cold and/or salty and/or silt-laden) even harder.
The upwelling water MUST be less dense (i.e. warmer or fresher) than the surface water it is displacing. Since there is very little ‘fresh’ water in the ocean, I suggest that it is getting a little heat from another source: submarine vulcanism. The reason that it is not melting the glaciers is that the upwelling water is simply not hot enough to do that. Depressurizing the water as it rises cools it – just a little bit: http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/images/water_phase_diagram_3.gif

afonzarelli
Reply to  tadchem
May 31, 2016 11:40 am

Tad, one way that warmer surface ocean water sinks is by trade winds which blow water to the western pacific. The water piles up and the weight of all that extra water pushes it down into the depths. The opposite sort of thing happens in the eastern pacific where we get upwelling of cooler water from the deep. In this case, the less dense (warmer) surface waters sink and the denser (cooler) deep water rises…
[??? .mod]

afonzarelli
Reply to  afonzarelli
May 31, 2016 2:40 pm

Sorry, about that mod {8^o)…
The words “In this case” refer to my paragraph on the whole (which is to say, the downwelling of warm surface waters in the western pacific). I probably should have put the sentence about upwelling water in parentheses…

Toneb
Reply to  tadchem
May 31, 2016 2:20 pm

“The upwelling water MUST be less dense (i.e. warmer or fresher) than the surface water it is displacing. ”
No it MUSTN’T.
It is akin to water being *sucked* up due to the removal of surface waters as they are blown northwards (is general) by surface winds.
It is conservation of mass.
In order for the column of water to remain at it’s total mass content then deeper waters get forced upwards. It is a *pulling* and NOT a rising due to density difference.
Same thing happens in the east equ Pacific during a La Nina.

afonzarelli
Reply to  Toneb
May 31, 2016 2:59 pm

Tony, it seems to me that agw skeptics are missing a golden opportunity with this trenberthe thing. As a skeptic, i view it as a case of be careful what you ask for because you just might get it (for agw proponents). The more warming that we see, the faster heat sinks into the ocean, thereby making it more difficult as time goes on for agw to sustain surface warming. There is also the possibility that a warming ocean should see a greater outgassing of CO2 even if surface temps are flat or perhaps falling. (this is consistent with the carbon growth rate tracking with temperature) I think that the polarization of thought on this issue does a good deal of harm to the skeptical cause…

afonzarelli
Reply to  Toneb
May 31, 2016 3:02 pm

I’m sorry; “Tony” should read “Toneb”… (as you can see, i’m not having the best of days)

bit chilly
Reply to  Toneb
May 31, 2016 5:05 pm

except that is not how it works around the antarctic. the katabatic winds create polynas where new ice begins to form , increasing the density of the water below the new ice due to it expelling the salt while freezing. this water then sinks. this is apparently how the cooler antarctic bottom water is formed. the immediate ocean surrounding the antarctic continent appears to be dominated by sinking cold water.
http://www.anta.canterbury.ac.nz/documents/GCAS_7/Brockett_D_Lit.Review.pdf

May 31, 2016 11:29 am

The most interesting sentence is at (almost) the end of the article: “Although these results do not explain the observed cooling of the SO over the most recent few decades (Fig. 1a),…comment image
All they write would makes sense if the SST between 65S and 50S were unchanged..anyway: they cooled down between 1981 and now, and they have no explanation for this. The paper is… unfinished!

PA
Reply to  frankclimate
May 31, 2016 12:01 pm

The bigger problem is the South Pole is cooling (which is attributed to CO2 – because everything is CO2’s fault).
The runaway melting scenarios aren’t compatible with a cooling continent.
Further the huge amount of sea ice is due to cooling not warming. Does the South Pole look hot to anyone. Does blue signify warming?
Hopefully something will happen with these cooling trends because that sea ice is sending a lot of energy into space. Runaway cooling would not be a good thing.

Marcus
May 31, 2016 11:43 am

…Oh FFS….I’m still waiting for Ontario, Canada to “heat up” !! It is well known in the Northern Hemisphere, that that the amount of beer allowed to be consumed in one given day is proportional to the actual temperature outside of my Air Conditioned abode ! Cheers….

Logos_wrench
May 31, 2016 11:59 am

Wow. Hidden old water that is super cold yet somehow rises to the surface. Amazing.

TG
May 31, 2016 12:14 pm

There you go – Old cold water is new again!

E.M.Smith
Editor
May 31, 2016 12:19 pm

Yet this image
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/material/conveyor2.jpg
from this site
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/thc_fact_sheet.html
shows “deep water formation”, not upwelling, at the south pole…
I do wish they could all agree on at least the direction of their vectors… I know magitudes are beyond them, but just a clue about up vs down or more snow from hotter vs more from colder at S.P. would be a nice start…

Reply to  E.M.Smith
May 31, 2016 4:14 pm

E.M.Smith, I don’t think they can think beyond their next grant. How to get it doesn’t include anything smart, like facts or science. They are doing tricks for treats now, is the way I see it.

Reply to  E.M.Smith
May 31, 2016 6:02 pm

The diagram shows deep water flowing from the north towards the antarctic and surface water leaving the antarctic by the law of continuity some deep water must rise. There are two regions shown of deep water formation also.

afonzarelli
Reply to  Phil.
June 1, 2016 12:41 pm

Yes, Phil, “polar cells” are similar to “hadley cells” (trades) in that they both blow away from the poles toward the equator at the surface. (“mid latitude cells” head the other way) Anyway you slice it, there will be down welling of warm surface waters and upwelling of cool deep waters…

May 31, 2016 12:23 pm

Here is a 3D-style diagram of ocean currents around the “Grand Central Station” of the THC, Antarctica:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_RXGJAF_XL5N0lOVHdxSVNGZTQ/view?usp=sharing
Cold water flows away from Antarctica along the bottom, as you would expect.
Warm water flows toward Antarctica near the surface, as you would expect.

Reply to  ptolemy2
May 31, 2016 2:55 pm

Helpfully reposted by Vuk a little downthread, this time as a displaying image:
http://arizonaenergy.org/WaterEnergy/Soceanracetrack.jpg

hunter
May 31, 2016 12:27 pm

This explanation conflicts with earlier explanations in significant ways. And this latest explanationn of the climate apocalypse does not reconcile with the known facts very well. The one explanation that is actually supported by the data is that there is no climate apocalypse to come. But that is rejected by the climatocracy out of hand.

pochas94
May 31, 2016 12:29 pm

All new cold deep water is produced by fractionation of seawater as it freezes at the poles. The ice is freshwater and the salt stays behind as cold dense brine, at the freezing point of the brine, which never changes. So old cold deep seawater is at the same temperature as new cold deep seawater, independent of CO2 concentration. I see no rationale for the idea that Global Warming will affect the temperature of cold deep seawater.

Reply to  pochas94
May 31, 2016 2:53 pm

The ice is freshwater
Actually no. Salt is extruded but gets physically entrapped as seams of salt. As shown in this microCT image of sea ice:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_RXGJAF_XL5b0VGWkZ2ZmEtSjA/view?usp=sharing

John Robertson
May 31, 2016 12:52 pm

In the spirit of such genius.
It is obvious to the inteligensi why the southern pole fails to warm.
Heat rises and cold falls.
Therefor as every (insert Hans Christian’s description of easily gulled from The Emperor’s New Clothes)knows,the world is working as ordained by Climatology.(Herein approved by the Cult of Calamitous Climate).
As the Southern Pole is the lowest spot on this globe, it will also be the coldest.
We will of course ignore the fact that the Northern Pole by this logic should be glowing hot desert.
Climatology; it ain’t science.

Barbara Skolaut
May 31, 2016 12:58 pm

“old water”
I think they misspelled “cold.”

PiperPaul
Reply to  Barbara Skolaut
May 31, 2016 1:23 pm

Yeah, but now it’s too late and they’re too embarrassed to admit their mistake so… hey waitaminit, something sounds familiar!

pochas94
Reply to  Barbara Skolaut
May 31, 2016 1:33 pm

Actually, I meant “old.” I was trying to say that the deep seawater produced a millennium ago was produced in the same way as that produced last winter, at the same temperature, independent of CO2 concentration.

Christopher Hanley
May 31, 2016 1:36 pm
jones
May 31, 2016 1:53 pm

ā€œWith rising carbon dioxide you would expect more warming at both poles, but we only see it at one of the poles, so something else must be going on,ā€
With the sole exception of AGW of course.

ulriclyons
Reply to  jones
May 31, 2016 2:44 pm

Funny how they think that warming from CO2 would bypass the polar see-saw effect.

May 31, 2016 2:01 pm

“Over the years, the water surrounding Antarctica has stayed roughly the same temperature even as the rest of the planet continues to warm, a fact often pointed out by climate change deniers.
Now, a new study uses observations and climate models to suggest that the reason for this inconsistency is due to the unique currents around Antarctica that continually pull deep, old water up to the surface. This ancient water hasnā€™t touched the Earthā€™s surface since before the machine age, meaning it has been hidden from human-driven climate change.
ā€œWith rising carbon dioxide you would expect more warming at both poles, but we only see it at one of the poles, so something else must be going on,ā€ said Kyle Armour of the University of Washington and lead author of the study. ā€œWe show that itā€™s for really simple reasons, and ocean currents are the hero here.ā€
This “denier” has been stating the fact that our oceans have 1,000 times more heat capacity than the atmosphere and that climate models do not and can not dial that into projections.
Ironically, the term denier is still being used here, even as the explanations from this study sides with us so called “deniers”.
Even in the face of more and more evidence that the science is NOT settled, explanations for contradicting empirical data/observations are twisted and spun to read like they actually support the busted CAGW theory, even as they strongly suggest the opposite.
What will be the next new piece of information discovered that “deniers” have been shouting from the rooftops for the last 2 decades?
The oceans are finally getting a bit more of the respect that they deserve. Maybe in a few more years, we can get the gatekeepers to the climate science kingdom and authors of the IPCC climate science bible to come around to looking much closer at the sun.too.

john harmsworth
May 31, 2016 2:13 pm

This article appears to be extremely simplistic if not flat out wrong. There does not appear to be any comprehensive measurement basis for conclusions that are incomplete and somewhat contradictory both internally as well as with previous conclusions with better data. If, and if it’s a half a hemisphere.
If, this assessment is correct, then one might expect that Australia will see cooler, drier conditions under this paradigm while in the Northern Hemisphere we will have warmer and wetter weather. Bad news for the Aussies, good news for Canada and Russia.
Regardless, This newer climatic structure has to have limits. Any heat that accumulates at any location on or within the planet will find it’s way to somewhere colder on it’s way back to space. If necessary, “old water” currents will establish new pathways to redistribute heat. The Earth’s weather systems are a heat engine. What comes in must go out. Residence time in any geographic area is always limited by the fact that the engine is very active. Any excess of heat in -versus heat out merely speeds up the engine.

May 31, 2016 2:23 pm

ā€œThis diagram depicts the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans essentially as continent-enclosed arms radiating from the central Southern Ocean, the diagram is schematic rather than a realistic map.ā€
http://arizonaenergy.org/WaterEnergy/Soceanracetrack.jpg

ulriclyons
May 31, 2016 2:33 pm

“With rising carbon dioxide you would expect more warming at both poles..”
If it had any considerable climate forcing power, rising CO2 would cool the Arctic because it would increase positive NAO/AO.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-3-5-6.html

ulriclyons
Reply to  ulriclyons
May 31, 2016 2:52 pm

The polar atmosphere of Venus is at some levels colder than the freezing point of CO2:
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Venus_Express/A_curious_cold_layer_in_the_atmosphere_of_Venus

Shanghai Dan
May 31, 2016 3:34 pm

Why is this a surprise? Everyone knows that old people are always cold and never heat up, even in insanely hot temperatures. So why wouldn’t old water do the same thing?

lyn roberts
May 31, 2016 4:17 pm

hahahahahahahahahahahahaha

indefatigablefrog
Reply to  lyn roberts
May 31, 2016 5:20 pm

Would you care to elaborate?

Michael Carter
May 31, 2016 4:18 pm

One would need a heck of a lot of accurate field data since the industrial evolution to make such assumptions (sorry, ‘could’)
How much do we really know about Antarctic marine currents and temperatures at depth? – sweet F all
Another case of chair polishers waving their arms I would say

Michael Jankowski
May 31, 2016 4:43 pm

Stokes hasn’t appeared to defend this because he knows it’s garbage. On the other hand, he won’t speak-out about it knowing that it’s garbage because it supports “the cause.”

indefatigablefrog
May 31, 2016 5:15 pm

Most of the supposed special processes which exclude the South Pole from warming are simply observations of long-term processes which have not changed during the period of interest.
The point is – that additional CO2 in the atmosphere is supposed to create a warming effect – all other things being equal.
In order for the CAGW grant-seekers and their fans to explain the Antarctic cooling then they would need to establish that a new climatological phenomena has occurred concurrently with their post-industrial apocalypse.
We can not just blame the circumpolar current for off-setting the warming effects of CO2. Since the circumpolar current has existed ever since South America abandoned Antartica and fled northwards.
(Actually, I don’t really know when it started. I should look it up. But clearly before the industrial revolution.)
So, they need to come up with something which offsets their magic all controlling heat trapping gases during the period in which those gases have been produced by humans.
I love all these excuses, since they are getting more and more feeble and smack of desperation.
But, I suppose that everybody in climate studies needs a post hoc for their post doc.
Publish or perish. Even when what you publish is unmitigated donkey-poop.
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/SP-RSS-UAH-April-2011.png

Michael Jankowski
Reply to  indefatigablefrog
May 31, 2016 5:41 pm

Not just “publish”…get quoted all over major media outlets and make a name for yourself. Might eventually be part of the team!

indefatigablefrog
Reply to  Michael Jankowski
June 2, 2016 2:34 pm

Absolutely, “shock value” is essential.
Climatology is now the “modern art” of science. Wow factor and attention are the commodities being traded.
Most modern art is not really art.
Most climate science is not really science.
The culprits, in either case, do not seem to care.

Michael Jankowski
May 31, 2016 5:48 pm
Pamela Gray
May 31, 2016 6:25 pm

So if they think old cold water will run out and be replaced by warmer old water, me thinks a Freshman level class in hydrology is in order. Might I suggest a simplified version? Just in case longer words stump the authors.
http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/ees/climate/lectures/o_strat.html

May 31, 2016 6:33 pm

Hello all, I am in my 90 th year on this planet, so of course I know nothing as Sgt.Schultz would have said. But how can heat be hiding in the deep Ocean. Heat rises and cold falls, so what is going on. Before cars had water pumps we had tall radiators, they worked by convention, the warm water rose and cooled, then it dropped and went into the engine.
So what is different about the Oceans ?
Michael Elliott.

May 31, 2016 7:16 pm

Is this why old ice cubes ruin a good whisky?

Steve Fraser
Reply to  usurbrain
June 1, 2016 8:52 pm

Two words: no, onions.

Bob Hinckley
May 31, 2016 7:43 pm

Why am I LMAOROFL with this thread? It seems funnier than 97% of any other threads I’ve ever read!!! .Could we have passed the “tipping point”?

Richard G
May 31, 2016 8:23 pm

Another grant trough study in Nature that is full of bollocks.

May 31, 2016 9:18 pm

And there is no evidence of any warming in the abyssal deep. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/06oct_abyss/

mikebartnz
May 31, 2016 11:38 pm

Do they actually read what they write?
Quote *old water that is continually pulled to the surface.*
They appear to be getting dumber every day.

Brian H
June 1, 2016 12:56 am

Old water holds old cold. Is that any different from new cold? Inquiring minds want to know. Uninquiring minds, not so much.

Tim
June 1, 2016 3:10 am

What no one actually explains on a website such as this is exactly how increasing the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere avoids increasing the energy content of the atmosphere. I think because most folks on these blogs having only the sketchiest idea as to what the molecules of GHG actually do to increase the energy at the surface of the planet.
How many of them believe that it actually acts in the same way as a greenhouse because of the name ? How may actually understand the quantum process that explains that the absorption of a photon of IR radiation by a GHG molecule excites the bonds within that molecule into a higher quantum energy state ? How many then realise that as the molecule spontaneously drops back to its’ ground state energy it remits exactly the same amount of energy as a photon of IR in a random direction ? Some goes up and some goes down.
Do these folks understand the energy cascade that then happens up through the atmosphere to finally emit that photon back into space ? Do they understand that in fact the temperature of Earth as seen from space remains exactly the same irrespective of the amount of trapped heat due to the basic laws of thermodynamics ? But do they realise that the energy at the surface increases but the effective level in the atmosphere at which the thermodynamic balance with space occurs gets higher.
Hence GHGs are not heating the planet as such, just the lower atmosphere. In fact it is true that the stratosphere will cool as more of it’s energy is redirected back to the surface.
If you find on reading this post that there are physical processes happening that you didn’t understand or even realise existed then I suggest that a few hours studying these processes would stand you in good stead.
These processes are not conjectural they have been known about for over 100 years. Now you will understand that GHG do increase the energy near the surface of the planet you can start debating where that energy is going. That is what climate science is currently trying to discern. They are not debating the fact that energy at the surface has increased. That is a given from very basic physics.
And as a theory it has already been tested on other planets. Venus for example, which has a runaway greenhouse gas warming that is enough to melt lead at the surface despite the fact that the radiation balance at the top of its’ atmosphere gives a black body radiation temperature of just 231.7K.
The Earths’ black body radiation temperature is 254.3K. However the surface temperature of Venus is 737K and that of the Earth 288K. So you can see that the GHG effect gives a surface temperature on Earth, with its’ thin atmosphere compared to Venus, of 34K greater than is black body temperature (thank God for the GHG effect !). However Venus with it’s thicker atmosphere of green house gasses has a surface temperature that is 506K greater than its’ black body temperature.
This demonstrates the fact that increasing GHG concentration does indeed increase the surface temperature despite the black body temperatures being very similar.
So when you are criticising the scientists who are engaged in trying to understand the effects of this build of heat (used in the scientific sense. Heat is NOT temperature in science speak) at the Earths’ surface then bear in mind that the fact of that increase in heat is actually a given from very basic physics. The science is trying to understand the flow of that heat through the oceans and the atmosphere and how it will effect the climate. This I will admit is a very very complex topic with many possible pathways that the heat can take. And it is this that the computer models are trying to predict, not the build up of heat but its’ distribution.
As a side note : I think scientific language also confuses some folks when they read the science. Heat is a great example. Used in common language it tends to mean temperature. In scientific language, as used in scientific papers it has a very different meaning. http://physics.about.com/od/thermodynamics/fl/Heat-Current.htm

Bill Illis
Reply to  Tim
June 1, 2016 4:51 am

Nice theory,
But there is always the question of what really happens at the quantum level. Does it really do that.
Regarding Venus, what would the temperature on Earth get to in the day-time if the time from Sunrise to Sunset was 116 days long like it is on Venus – 2,800 hours straight. If you understand physics as well as you say, you will be able to calculate that the Earth in a daytime of 2800 hours long would reach about 700K just like Venus. All the water boils away, anything in the crust that can emit gases will be baked out and release it just like Venus. CO2 has nothing to do with it. But that is more like real physics again so you can just ignore that and go back to the simple theory stuff that climate science is based on.

Tim
Reply to  Bill Illis
June 1, 2016 7:34 am

It’s not really a theory as it’s backed by very solid evidence from the laboratory where they can measure the absorption spectra and the energy levels that the absorption lines correspond to.
Regarding the long days on Venus this does not really effect the overall average of the planets’ average atmospheric temperature. The simple reason being that it does have an atmosphere which is a fluid body which can easily transport energy from the dark side to the light side. One of the reasons weather of any kind exists of course is the tendency for a fluid body to redistribute heat to a uniform concentration. On Earth a lot of this redistribution is between the cooler poles and the hot tropics. This is on a planetary scale and for more information try googling the Hadley Cells.
This is of course what the topic of this article is about. The oceans are also a fluid and try to equalise the heat throughout the body of water. Of course the process is much much slower in the ocean as the viscosity of water is so much greater. The ocean version of the Hadley cell takes a molecule of water around 1000 years to complete the cycle ( http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/currents/06conveyor2.html ). Thus the reference to “old” water. Some of that water will not have been in contact with the atmosphere for 1000 years and hence not had the opportunity to absorb the energy that has been added by GW. This is a good thing for us as it will slow climate change since there is a large reservoir of cold “old” water available to absorb some of the energy the increase in GHG is trapping.
The reason a body like the moon does have huge surface temperature variation is that there is no atmosphere to transport that energy and no GHGs to keep the energy near the planet surface whilst that transportation takes place. Of course an atmosphere without GHGs would from the point of view of energy balance be the same as no atmosphere at all. Energy would be able to enter the atmosphere as UV and heat the surface, but equally there would be nothing to stop the radiation of energy straight back into space. That’s why desert nights are so cold. Water vapour is a very good GHG and so most of the planet has a good mechanism to prevent IR going straight into space. Not so over a very dry desert of course.
I would like to see scientific evidence that shows that my case for the way GHGs work is in error and that will then explain why many folks consider the possibility of increasing GHG concentrations at the surface will not trap more heat near the surface. If you can’t find a peer reviewed paper that shows that increasing GHG concentration results in more heat in the surface layers then maybe you could consider the possibility that it does. Once you have considered that possibility then maybe it would be better if this website engaged more in a discussion as to where that heat is going and what the effects will be on human living comfort on the planet in the future.

Reply to  Tim
June 1, 2016 8:10 am

Tim,
Since global warming stopped for almost twenty years while CO2 was steadily rising, the observational (empirical) evidence clearly demonstrates that CO2 doesn’t have the claimed effect.
CO2 may cause some minuscule warming. But since it is too small to measure, it can be disregarded as a non-problem.

seaice1
Reply to  Bill Illis
June 1, 2016 7:44 am

Bill Illis. You theory is interesting, but surely wrong. The temperature on Venus is roughly the same, day or night, because the thick atmosphere distributes the heat effectively.
From Univerese Today: ” But on Venus, the surface temperature is 460 degrees Celsius, day or night, at the poles or at the equator.”
Space.com: “The nights on Venus are as warm as the days.”
Moonphases.info: “On Venus, the temperature is set to around 460 degrees whether it is day or night at any section of the planet.”
Planets for kids “This means that temperatures on Venus remain relatively consistent, and the nights are not significantly cooler than the days.”
You contention that daytime temperatures are so high because the day is so long fails miserably when you realise that night-time temperatures are about the same.
Ulricyons ” very chilly layer at temperatures of around ā€“175ĀŗC in the atmosphere 125 km above the planetā€™s surface.” These cool polar regions are 125km above the surface.

Bill Illis
Reply to  Bill Illis
June 1, 2016 11:16 am

seaice1,
The thick atmosphere, equal to the pressure of the ocean at 900 metres depth, plus the intensely strong winds given that extreme density are sufficient to transfer the energy across the dark side. Some layers of the atmosphere have winds over 700 kms/hour.

Bill Illis
Reply to  Bill Illis
June 1, 2016 11:28 am

Surface ocean temperature a few days ago.
The White are sea ice and are below -2.0C. After that, the Arctic sea surface temperature is the same as the Antarctic sea surface temperature (mostly below 0.0C) so the “old water” story does not hold any water. Its the same temp in the Arctic as in the Antarctic.
The ocean is cold in the polar regions and it is just not warming (except in the fake numbers for the Arctic).
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/50km_night/2016/sstnight.5.30.2016.gif

ulriclyons
Reply to  Bill Illis
June 5, 2016 1:33 pm
ulriclyons
Reply to  Tim
June 1, 2016 5:52 am
Shanghai Dan
Reply to  Tim
June 1, 2016 7:49 am

There is actually a link in this very thread that talks about how increasing CO2 in the atmoshphere actually INCREASES the loss – yes loss – of longwave emission:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL066749/full
The net effect is that higher CO2 levels actually COOL a place like Antarctica. Meaning the accepted theory that everyone hews to (more CO2 = more warming) is turned upside down depending upon the conditions.
Isn’t physics wonderful? ESPECIALLY when it’s backed up – and matches – empirical measurements.

Tim
Reply to  Shanghai Dan
June 1, 2016 8:20 am

If you read the whole article which you link to you’ll find out that in the Antarctica there is an unusual if not unique situation in that the surface temperature is colder than the stratosphere. It is this temperature inversion that results in the finding that increasing CO2 levels increases the amount of radiation escaping into space in this region. The article makes clear that this is not a result that can be applied to the whole planet but might help fill in some of the missing details which will enable the models to become more accurate.
So your assertion that this article claims that increasing CO2 levels will cool the planet in it’s entirety points to the conclusion that you only read the part of the article that gave that information. Reading the whole article should have left you impressed that the scientists involved realised that there was a flaw in the models when comparing observation with theory and went to find the explanation. In fact the explanation did not involve discovering new physics just the application of known physics to an unusual situation i.e the surface being colder than the top of atmosphere.
I would also have thought that if you truly feel that scientists are fixing the data and science in order to con the population into “believing” in climate change then they would have burnt these findings and put the ashes out of reach. However they have done what a good scientist should, which is publish a result that can now be checked by anyone with the expertise to do so.
p.s I am NOT a scientist and never have been thus I have no vested interest in defending them. I’m a pilot by profession and study climate change as I have flown around the world for 30 years and have witnessed change happening. This piqued my interest in the subject.

June 1, 2016 4:01 am

Mother Earth is simply applying a cold compress to it’s fevered patient. This is easily understood and is settled science. Anyone who doubts this should to be incarcerated and sued blue (cold blue).

Tim
June 1, 2016 9:07 am

dbstealey
In reply to your assertion about the “pause” (which many dispute as ever happening by the way) proving that CO2 cannot be linked to increases in global temperature then I invite you to look at the basic physics. Without GHGs then the surface of the planet would be the same at the black body radiation temperature of the planet which is some 34 degrees cooler than we currently enjoy (SI units by the way, not Fahrenheit). So we have the GHGs that are present in the atmosphere to thank for the fact that we are here at all. If you want to explore what the planet would be like without them try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth and then scroll down to the section Mechanisms.
So if removing CO2 from the atmosphere causes the Earth to cool to that extent could you suggest why increasing the concentration of GHG will not increase the energy in the atmosphere ?

Reply to  Tim
June 1, 2016 10:14 am

Tim says:
…could you suggest why increasing the concentration of GHG will not increase the energy in the atmosphere ?
Sure. That’s been explained so many times I’m surprised you missed it. Look at this chart:comment image
As you can see, radiative physics demonstrates the declining effect of adding more CO2. If CO2 increased from where it is now by 30%, 50%, or even 100%, any resulting warming would still be too small to measure.
Currently, CO2 is ā‰ˆ400 ppm. Use the chart to extrapolate from 400 ppm, out to where 800 ppm would be. How much global warming would that cause?
Answer: Doubling CO2 would result in only minuscule global warming ā€” far less than one-tenth of a degree C.
Thus, the “carbon” scare is debunked by real world physics. The mistake is made by the alarmist belief, which incorrectly assumes a linear rise, when in reality the effect is logarithmic.
Also, the “pause” was so real that there were close to a hundred documented examples posted here showing scientists trying to explain the “pause”. So now the new talking point is that the “pause” (or “hiatus”) never happened! But that’s just backing and filling with an alarmist fabrication. They can’t explain why global warming stopped for nearly 20 years, so they simply lie about it now, claiming that it never happened.

Reply to  dbstealey
June 1, 2016 10:53 am

Tim,
In reasearching the last question (the “pause” never happened?), I found more info:
Prof Richard Lindzen sent Anthony Watts an email in 2008, confirming that global warming had stopped. It didn’t resume again until the recent El Nino.
Next, the IPCC also verified the existence of the “pause” in global warming.
And the “pause” was reported in the mass media, quoting the scientific establishment. The Globe & Mail published a chart showing that global warming had stopped.
Finally, all the hoo-hah over ‘global warming’ is put into perspective when we look at the lack of temperature changes over the past century:
http://catallaxyfiles.com/files/2012/05/Mean-Temp-1.jpg
The truth is that we’ve just been through the most benign century in the global temperature record. And there is no indication that will change any time soon.
So forget the “carbon” scare. There are too many other things to worry about. And…
Don’t worry ā€” be happy! ā˜ŗ

John West
June 1, 2016 10:21 am

Itā€™s dĆ©jĆ  vu all over again:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/27/ipcc-fails-to-come-clean-over-global-temperature-standstill/
————————————————
John West says:
September 27, 2013 at 10:19 am
A reminder as to one of the reasons why ā€œthe pauseā€ is important:
Back in 2007 Norman Page asks in comments @ RC:
ā€œwhat year would you reconsider the CO2 ā€“ Warming paradigm if the CRU Global annual mean temperature is cooler than 2005 ā€“ 2009ā€¦?ā€
Gavin Schmidt answers:
ā€œYou need a greater than a decade non-trend that is significantly different from projections. [0.2 ā€“ 0.3 deg/decade]ā€
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/a-barrier-to-understanding/
At that time it was outside the paradigm for there to be a decade without a warming trend. Now that weā€™re at a decade and half theyā€™ve shifted the paradigm to accommodate the lack of warming as if they always expected this sort of thing to happen and it doesnā€™t change a thing. But something has changed; their paradigm has shifted in the ā€œskepticalā€ direction (theyā€™ll deny that). Consider one of the early skeptical arguments to catastrophic warming: the ocean is a massive heat sink that will moderate the warming. Here we are now with moderated warming and suddenly the past skeptic position is the alarmist position and they wonā€™t even admit we were right. Oh no, they saw this coming all along while calling us ā€œdeniersā€ for predicting exactly what has happened. WUWT?
The paradigm has shifted towards lower sensitivity as well, again they canā€™t bring themselves to say skeptics were right.
Starting to look like a pattern to me.
————————————————–
No Doubt, it’s a pattern alright.

Tim
June 1, 2016 1:11 pm

So what everyone is relying on is the temperature record to debunk climate change. That would be the one they say is false in other contexts when it shows a warming effect. What they don’t look at is the fundamental physics of the phenomenon and ask “so where is the heat going” ?
So what you are depending on is that the basic physics that can calculate what the radiative forcing effect of anthropogenic co2 production is and the climate sensitivity to that forcing is completely wrong http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=257
Let’s accept that there is uncertainty in this science. But let us accept the within that uncertainty there is still the possibility the AGW is a concern. What probability of practically all the peer reviewed papers being wrong are you willing to accept in order for there to be no effect that will damage the environment to the extent that it makes life for humans uncomfortable. Maybe there is just a 5% chance in your mind that just possibly all the scientists are right. A 95% chance they are wrong.
Would you get on a Boeing aircraft if the manufacturers said that there was a 95% chance of it getting you to your destination. Or would you just perhaps say “I’m not taking that risk”.
Are you so certain that all these scientists are wrong that you will take the risk with the whole planet and everyone you know on it so that you can continue to use carbon based energy where a non-polluting alternative can be found ? It seems to me that if that is the case then you have a faith that is way way stronger than mine.
It also suggests that you should probably not trust scientists in other disciplines as they are probably only in it for the money as well. So I would steer well clear of an oncologist if you get cancer. After all he probably only uses expensive cancer treatments because the drugs company takes him out for dinner from time to time. And as for computers that all those quantum physicists had a hand in designing they are clearly suspect. After all that’s the same discipline that offered an explanation of emissivity of CO2 so they must be wrong as the emissivity of the atmosphere has no effect on the surface temperature.

Reply to  Tim
June 2, 2016 12:35 pm

Tim says:
So what everyone is relying on is the temperature record to debunk climate change.
Tim, you need to re-think your premise, because the climate always changes. And linking to skeptical science is a non-starter. Look on the right sidebar. They have their own special classification: “Unreliable”. Why would you link to unreliable information?
Next, skeptics (real skeptics) do use the temperature record. It shows that what’s happening now is very benign. Look at the chart I posted above. How could that possibly scare anyone?
And yes, as you say it is ‘possible’ that AGW is a concern. But first you need to quantify AGW. How much is it? Is it 10% of global warming? Or maybe 3%? Or, maybe it’s 0.03%. Or maybe 0.00001%.
The fact is, we don’t know. But we do know one thing for sure: AGW must be very small, since no one has been able to measure it.

Resourceguy
June 1, 2016 1:21 pm

Well, actually Jerry Brown sees warming there now. That makes it instrumental in getting the Federal dollars for high speed rail based on rising seas from warm waters there now. Win-the-day courtroom tactics are in play everyday in the Great Climate Con.

Observant
June 2, 2016 1:11 pm

“The glaciers of Switzerland, like those of the Sierra, are mere wasting remnants of mighty ice-floods that once filled the great valleys and poured into the sea. So, also, are those of Norway, Asia, and South America. Even the grand continuous mantles of ice that still cover Greenland, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Franz-Joseph-Land, parts of Alaska, and the south polar region are shallowing and shrinking. Every glacier in the world is smaller than it once was. All the world is growing warmer, or the crop of snow-flowers is diminishing. But in contemplating the condition of the glaciers of the world, we must bear in mind while trying to account for the changes going on that the same sunshine that wastes them builds them.”
— John Muir, The Mountains of California, 1894

David Williams
June 2, 2016 1:12 pm

“The glaciers of Switzerland, like those of the Sierra, are mere wasting remnants of mighty ice-floods that once filled the great valleys and poured into the sea. So, also, are those of Norway, Asia, and South America. Even the grand continuous mantles of ice that still cover Greenland, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Franz-Joseph-Land, parts of Alaska, and the south polar region are shallowing and shrinking. Every glacier in the world is smaller than it once was. All the world is growing warmer, or the crop of snow-flowers is diminishing. But in contemplating the condition of the glaciers of the world, we must bear in mind while trying to account for the changes going on that the same sunshine that wastes them builds them. ”
–John Muir, The Mountains of California, 1894

blow it out your ear
June 4, 2016 8:11 pm

Since satellite records of the Antarctic ice mass began over 35 (?) years ago, that overall mass has relentlessly continued to increase. I figure that it will slow (probably already is) as the circulation rate of water into and out of the atmosphere declines as the globe cools.
Record sea ice around the Antarctic continent in recent years… caused by rising cold water apparently making itself suddenly colder against the “warming” atmosphere; thermodynamics moving in reverse time, self-decreasing system entropy. Wow!! Quite a claim! Must be where Dr Who is hiding out. If we could harness this, we could make engines that suck CO2 out of the atmosphere into the exhaust pipe and produce oxygen and octane and still magically produce a positive power output — hey, over-unity systems!!! This is essentially the outcome of what greenies believe, since their ideologies are based in fairyland fantasies and the like.
The thing about a drowning moron is that any straw will do.
CAGW causes all of this (http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm), apparently.