Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
Last week, several media outlets reported on a single seawater temperature of 101.1°F recorded at a buoy in Florida, claiming it was due to climate change. The is false. One single seawater temperature over one day isn’t an indicator of climate change, nor, as the data show, was it unprecedented as media claimed.
Some headlines:
- The Associated Press: South Florida waters hit hot tub level and may have set world record for warmest seawater
- The Guardian: Florida ocean records ‘unprecedented’ temperatures similar to a hot tub
Fox News: Florida water topped 100-degrees twice this week, may have set world record: ‘This is a hot tub. - Al Jazeera: ‘A hot tub’: Florida sees record water temperatures, raising alarm
The Guardian opined:
Records for ocean surface temperature are not kept, but a 2020 study suggested that the highest temperature observed was 99.7F (37.61C) in the Persian Gulf.
…
The growing frequency and intensity of severe weather – both on land and in oceans – is a symptom of the global, human-driven climate crisis that is fueling extremes, experts warn…
In the Associated Press (AP) article, which spawned many of the other articles, there was this statement:
But the buoy at Manatee Bay hit 101.1 degrees Fahrenheit (38.4 degrees Celsius) Monday evening, according to National Weather Service meteorologist George Rizzuto. The night before, that buoy showed an online reading of 100.2 F (37.9 C).
An examination of the actual data from that buoy designated as MNBF1 shows that the peak in temperature of 101.1F (38.4C) was very brief and then the water rapidly cooled off, with such a temperature not being repeated since (see Figure 1 below):
However, what the media missed is that MNBF1 is not an ocean buoy at all, in fact it is partially inland, designated as part of the Everglades National Park, and not in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, as seen in this Google Earth image in Figure 2:
On this Google Earth closeup, seen in Figure 3, we can see this buoy is in exceptionally shallow water, near the shoreline – you can see the bottom of the bay.
Note how shallow the water is, enabling you to see the dark bottom.
One of the most important things that the media missed is the fact that due to the shallow water and placement near land, this buoy is sensitive to tides and wide temperature fluctuations due to the shallow nature of the water. With very shallow water, it is very easy for the sun to heat the sand/mud beneath the buoy, which is dark (which will absorb more sunlight), which will then increase the temperature reading recorded in the water.
Indeed, the high temperature reading correlates closely to low tide. Temperature peaked at 2200 HR GMT – which was after low tide at 1:35PM – water had a chance to warm because sunlight was hitting the bottom.
The media completely missed the fact that this sort of temperature at that buoy has happened before and this was not the highest temperature ever seen there. The record for the Manatee Bay site is 102 degrees. It was set on Aug. 15, 2017. The data from that buoy only goes back to 2004. With such a short period of data, it cannot possibly be representative of any climate trend, which requires at least 30 years or more of data.
Had the media bothered to check, they would have discovered that the buoy is in shallow relatively stagnant water, somewhat inland, and not in the ocean, and therefore not representative of Atlantic Ocean temperatures. They would have also discovered that it was “not a record,” with higher temperatures previously being recorded at that particular buoy. Furthermore, if they had bothered to check tide table, they would have learned that the high temperature correlated with a lower than normal tide, which allowed the subsurface structures heated by the sun to also contribute to heating the water.
Indeed, the water is so shallow where this buoy is placed, it is entirely possible that the buoy itself rests on muddy tidal bottom during extremely low tides.
But they didn’t bother to check. Instead, following the climate crisis narrative they are pushing, they hyped tales of unprecedented ocean temperatures and warned of impending doom.
Meanwhile, as this link to the live data shows, nature has brought the water temperatures back to expected values for this time of year. It is important to note that The Guardian reported, “Normal water temperatures for the area this time of year should be between 73F and 88F (23C and 31C), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).”
The “crisis” is over, water temperatures at MNBF1 are back to normal levels, but the incompetent media isn’t reporting on that.
Anthony Watts
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
For more on Earth’s temperature go to EverythingClimate.com
I’m surprised they didn’t also claim a tie for record humidity.
Regardless, I’m not holding my breath waiting for a retraction.
The Guardian declares that records for water temperatures are not kept, but believe us when we tell you that this reading is a record.
Since I and my wife will be in Miami and Key Est in a few days I have been following weather reports. The day of the “hot tub” 101 deg F, most stations nearby were reporting 93 deg F. Remember those pesky “Laws of Thermodynamics”? You can’t heat water to 101 F with 93 F air. As Anthony points out this is a shallow water and dark bottom issue. Idiots.
The idiot warmunists still don’t get it that the oceans control the air temperature, not the other way around. Anybody who lives in a coastal area knows that, of course. That’s why, for instance, along the Pacific coast in the San Diego area, in the summer it’s foggy and rather cool often with highs in the 70s or low 80s, due to the cool Japanese current that cools the entire coast of California … yet travel inland 20 miles and the daytime temps are scorchers, routinely hitting 90s to 100s. Same “climate”, same County in the same State, yet the difference is like night and day.
Same thing here in Florida, though we don’t have a cool Japanese current along our coast, so the temperature differential between coast and 20 mi inland is much less, though still substantial at around 10 deg F.
Kuroshio Current?
California Current is a little closer.
It is also a cold one.
Kuroshio is analogous to Gulf Stream, warm, tropical.
http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/images/wsci_03_img0381.jpg
Yeah that’s it. When I lived there back in the 70s we just colloquially called it the “Japanese current” since it originates off Japan and crosses the entire Pacific to North America. Which is why the water at the beach even in extreme Southern California, San Diego area, is cold, usually not much above 70 deg F even in midsummer, while the Gulf of Mexico beaches in southwest Florida routinely hits 90+deg every summer.
Kind of a nitpick, but . . . does not apply generally to air over land and considering horizontal movement of air masses (i.e., winds and weather fronts) that disrupt any sort of “balance” between a given surface and the overlaying air.
Actually it does apply generally. The oceans are the planetary solar heat sink, absorbing and storing solar energy directly in proportion to the incident sunlight at any given location and time of year. The oceans – surface water period- are millions of times more massive than the atmosphere, with four times the specific heat capacity of either air or land surfaces, covering 70% of the planetary surface. The strength of incident sunlight per unit surface area varies with season and cloud cover, but vastly more energy is absorbed and stored and released by the oceans than by either the atmosphere or the dry land surface.
So again, what controls the climate and in particular atmospheric temperature is the oceans especially, and secondarily the dry land surfaces, not the atmosphere.
That is why meteorologists routinely refer to “maritime air masses” and “continental air masses”, because those air masses are directly controlled by temperature and moisture of the liquid and solid surfaces over which they cross.
Cause and effect are what the warmunists are always confused about. This is simple geography, physics, and thermodynamics, sciences that the ignorant warmunists utterly fail to comprehend.
Speaking of “simple geography”,
The “Little Ice Age” was a phenomena limited in extent to Earth’s northern hemisphere.
This is mostly due to the fact that Earth’s NH has much more land surface area compared to water surface area (a ratio of 0.39:0.61) compared to the SH ratio of 0.19:0.81, as well as the fact that the ITCZ along the equator somewhat thermally isolates the NH and SH air masses from each other.
The greater amount of ocean area in the SH significantly stabilizes temperatures there compared to those in the NH, all other things being equal.
Finally, many scientists would argue that the major atmospheric circulation patterns (as delineated by the Hadley, Ferrel and polar cells in both hemispheres) are just as important as ocean surface heat capacity in establishing Earth’s climate at any instant in time.
Water is heated by several mechanisms:
Is there a good explanation available for how the ocean is warmed by interaction with warmer air? I’m looking for a layman’s explanation of the mechanism and how effective it is. There’s always a lot of warmunist propaganda about telling us that the warm air caused by additional CO2 is warming the ocean and hiding its heat in the water, and I’d like to understand if this is true and how it works if it is true. Thanks.
There is only inconsequential warming of oceans by warm air. Oceans absorb solar energy, store it, and release it to the air, not the other way around as the warmunists claim. The mass of the oceans is millions of times that of the atmosphere, and also has four times the specific heat capacity on a mass basis as does air. In other words, it takes four times as much heat transfer as measured in kcal to warm or cool water one degree as it does to heat or cool the same mass of air.
But the key point that is being missed in this discussion is that when water evaporates from the ocean surfaces (as it does whenever relative humidity of the air mass over a selected region of the ocean is less than 100%), it carries away from the ocean about 2300 times as much heat energy per kg as needed to just heat air 1 Kg of air by 1 deg-C. Ref: latent heat of vaporization of water.
Evaporating water cools the remaining ocean surface. The heat exchange due to phase change overwhelms the water-air heat exchange arising from the combined effects of thermal convection and thermal conduction.
#3 is trivial; the planet’s dominant heat sink (or solar energy storage mechanisms) is the oceans.
Think Mars – the daily surface temperature swings on Mars are on the order of 280 deg F, while on Earth typical diurnal temperature swings are roughly 20-40 deg F. Why the humongous difference? Mostly because Mars has no surface water to act as a heat sink or moderator of atmospheric temperatures.
Water so shallow it was in danger of beading up?
Previously debunked in comments.
Anxious not to be left out, our own CBC had a Canadian contribution to the boiling-ocean climate catastrophe narrative:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/nl-ocean-temps-1.6914336
The piece contains this gem “And yeah, right now the Grand Banks are the warmest spot in the North Atlantic.… It’s more than five degrees Celsius on the Grand Bank warmer than normal”
I suppose it depends how you define “North Atlantic”
And the BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66387537
Technically, North Atlantic begins immediately north of equator 🙂
Use of “normal” in this sentence against a static single point temperature is abuse of averaging.
A classic alarmist misrepresentation of temperatures.
Waiting for one of our AGW trolls to come out and reiterate the truth about this…
… and taking the newspapers and scaremongers to task over bad, LYING and irresponsible reporting.
FN, Nick, bellboy, bxxxx??? where are you.
bellboy. 🤣
Back in the 1970s I lived in Abu Dhabi for a few years. One day while we were swimming off one of the beaches (actually, sitting in the water with a cold drink) someone stuck a thermometer in the water. 104F. Makes Florida look a bit of a wimp.
The world’s largest hot tub?
Someone in the group just peed?
That would be a few deg F cooler.
Yeah really. 104 is a fever that ought to have you being rushed to the hospital.
If they have been sitting in the water for awhile, there’s a good chance the bladder has warmed up to the ambient water temperature.
I know that you mean this as a joke, but homeostasis would make that impossible or you likely would have suffered some form of organ or body shutdown (ie. death)
My favorite irresponsible behavior by journalists.
Another point that may or may not be relevant is that the probe depth for temperature reading was 1.5 m below the bottom of the buoy.
You really have to wonder who it was who set up this buoy & probe. And why?
What useful information could you conceivably obtain from it?
Other than “We need to destroy Capitalism, using barefaced GangGreen lies.”
No doubt all paid for, from your taxes. Time the perpetrator went to jail.
“We’ve got to MOVE these —
[solar and wind things].
Gotta move these
[crappy EV’s]…..”
(from song, “Money for Nuthin” or whatever the title of that song was)
I want my…
I want my SUV.
Not when Greens are getting Money for Nothing
Winds, tidal status, wave height, temperatures and barometer.
The buoy is useful for reporting information at the tip of Florida.
Not about Florida, but in the vein of sensational, cherry-picked heat records with no context, this was the headline of a Reuters article last week:
China logs 52.2 Celsius as extreme weather rewrites records
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-logs-522-celsius-extreme-weather-rewrites-records-2023-07-17/
The first two short paragraphs state:
The Turpan Depression is in a very unique geological and geographical setting in remote northwest China. The depression is over 1,500 miles from the ocean and at an elevation over 500 feet below sea level. It’s in pretty much the hottest, most arid part of China and sits between a 12,000+ foot mountain range to the north and the Tibetan plateau to the south. Someone really had to scour the temp records to cherry pick this one and tie it to global boiling.
Still waiting for someone to produce data from that weather site..
…pretty sure it doesn’t even exist,
Hand-help thermometer next to a brick wall, doesn’t really count !
Depends on what you want it to count for. People pushing a radical agenda don’t think like normal people.
And people pushing junk no one will buy unless they are lied to about it,
think exactly like normal, run-of-the-mill, two-bit, con artists.
Covered a week ago:
How To Push a Climate Crisis Hoax: Florida’s Record Ocean Temperature • Watts Up With That?
164 comments
Yes, and at least one alarmist publication was claiming this record heat measured from that one buoy, was spread all around the tip of Florida.
Dozens of articles were published hyping this distortion of the truth.
I just saw four more headlines this morning hyping this ocean heat distortion, and another one hyping the bogus “hottest in 120,000 years” claim.
Assembly line climate change propaganda.
Apart from parroting the Florida hot tub nonsense, the BBC is claiming we’re doomed by a 0.01C margin new ‘record’.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66387537
There are no “thermometers” outside a lab setting that can record temperature accurately to 0.01C, and precious few inside a lab that can do that.
The trolls want us to believe that if you take two thermometers and place them in two cups of water, that by averaging the two you can make both thermometers more accurate.
That’s not how the law of large numbers work, but since it gets them the numbers they need, they keep misusing it.
Used to do snorkeling and some scuba mostly in lakes in Wisconsin. Wet suits required most of the time. In 1969 took a trip with friends to Key Largo to dive John Pennekamp State Park. Water temperature was 85-90 F and absolutely heavenly. Spent hours everyday for 4 days exploring the coral reefs.
I suppose that 50 years later climate change has totally destroyed the coral like it has with the GBR in Australia. /sarc/
Has anybody seen the English summer?
Did you blink and miss it?
We had a very nice summer here in the UK – 3 warm, sunny days in May. Since then the Autumn has set in – cold and rain.
It went to the Med for it’s holidays.
Rumours are, it’s just over the horizon
Today the BBC announced a new global record of ocean temperature, I wonder if they’ve used readings like this to bump up the numbers?
The important thing to keep in mind, aside from the stuff that Anthony points out, is that on the very same day that this “record breaking” temperature was recorded in an anomalous, highly questionable ocean temperature monitoring station, that the sea temperature in the southern Gulf of Mexico (which is always a bit warmer than the Atlantic), at the historically warmest long term (greater than 30 years) reporting station in the entire Gulf of Mexico, at Naples, FL, measured 89.2 deg F. Which is an entirely average temperature for mid-summer in Florida, if not slightly cooler than average. Everybody who has spent many years in Gulf Coastal Florida knows that Gulf temperatures hover around 90 deg F all summer, every single year.
The truly representative sea temperature data get ignored, of course, because from the news media perspective, nothing is more useless than to report “nothing is happening!”. “If it bleeds, it leads” has always been the mantra of the news media. Excitement, record breaking, unprecedented, etc. etc. generates a lot more mouse clicks and ratings points than reporting that “Hey, it’s just a typical summer”.
As for the land temperatures here in Southwest Florida where I have lived for several decades plus, this summer they are entirely average, in the low to mid 90s if it doesn’t rain, and maybe 10 deg F lower when it does rain in the middle of the day when the sun is hottest.
That, folks, is why hardly anybody lived in Florida until the 1950s when air conditioning in homes and businesses became widely available, after which our population exploded. We humans adapted to the long hot summers of Florida – which has been the case for many thousands of years – and once that happened, tens of millions moved here to enjoy those warm seas and sunny winter days, golf, boating, and beaching all year long.
Duhhh!!!!!
From the article: “The growing frequency and intensity of severe weather – both on land and in oceans – is a symptom of the global, human-driven climate crisis that is fueling extremes, experts warn…”
Well, the “experts” are wrong. The data shows that frequency and intensity of severe weather is decreasing, not increasing. This “symptom” does not exist.
The only thing “growing in frequency and intensity” is the “reporting.”
Thanks for digging the data and showing this is not even a record at that site. Plus the short record meaning it tells us nothing.
every point in every day can be said to be “after low tide”. More to the point this was also after high tide at 7:35 PM and was nearing low tide.
This may mean that shallow water up on the shore line was draining back out of the ebb tide and warming the position where the bouy was moored.
I am baffled that no one else talking about this wants to mention that the discharge from a large power station is into Card Sound, which is right next to Barnes sound, where this buoy is. The buoy is in an enclosed lagoon in the SW corner of Barnes sound.
Turkey Point has two large nuclear reactors and an even larger gas-fired power generator.
Combined capacity is some 2700+ megawatts.
Neither the two nuclear reactors nor the gas fired power station have cooling towers to dissipate waste heat. Instead, they draw water from the sound, and run it through a series of canals and then empty it back into the sound.
Tidal flow could have easily pulled the waste heat from the Turkey Point reactors into Barnes Sound. There was Sahara dust around that time, which suppresses clouds and the normal daily rain we get at this time of year.
A large roadway runs beside and adjacent to this small lagoon. There is a drainage culvert leading right to the buoy.
Florida Canal #111 is the southernmost canal, and the discharge of it is literally directly besides this buoy. There is a channel in the bottom of the lagoon that leads right past this buoy, directing hot runoff to this exact spot.
It is entirely possible a brief shower fell, that got very hot on the road and in the canal before running of into lagoon and Barnes Sound.
The eventual much cooler temps are no doubt the result of resumption of normal rainfall.
But a brief shower will often leave roads and surfaces steaming, as the amount of rain is not enough to cool the surfaces, but may be enough to lead to a short period of rapid runoff of very hot water.
And all by itself, the Sun can and will heat water, even the surface of deep water, to a very high temperature, when winds are light and sunshine near maximum intensity for this planet, as this location is at that time of year.
This is not the ocean, plain and simple.
It is not even Biscayne Bay.
It is an enclosed lagoon in a corner of Barnes Sound, not far from the discharge of the waste heat from one of the largest power plants in the country, which is also enclosed to directly connected to this spot.
Why am I thinking about air temperature sensors located near runways?
According to rusty nail and our other trolls, any record high is proof of global warming, regardless of how short the record may be.
Even if the thermometer was placed INSIDE a jet engine revving up for takeoff!
From the above article:
“Had the media bothered to check, they would have discovered that the buoy is in shallow relatively stagnant water, somewhat inland, and not in the ocean, and therefore not representative of Atlantic Ocean temperatures.”
Somewhat inland? . . . in point of fact, according to Google Earth, the buoy MNBF1 is 5.5 miles from the closest Atlantic Ocean shoreline.
And as Anthony pointed out, Manatee Bay where the buoy is anchored has NO direct tide water exchange with the Atlantic ocean.
In general, tides in that part of Florida are small, but there is some tidal flow into and out of Biscayne Bay and hence all the waters connected to it.
I agree it is unlikely much of any ocean water flows all the way down to that particular place, the flow entering Biscayne Bay and Card sound via the small inlets from the Ocean, will tend to push the water already in the bays and sounds southward. So, if Turkey Point is running at max output, and a flow is entering Biscayne Bay, water from the Turkey Point discharge may be very hot and also tend to be drawn southward towards Barnes Sound and Manatee Bay.
Turkey Point has a history of discharging very hot water at times.
Here is a great detailed map of those waters and infrastructures:
South_Biscayne_Bay_to_Barnes_Sound.pdf (wikimedia.org)
One aspect that I find particularly disturbing in this whole false reporting on an “Atlantic Ocean” record temperature above 100 deg-F is the fact that NOAA, source and publisher of the temperature data from the MNBF1 buoy, has remained silent in the matter and has not issued a press-release stating that this data is being completely misinterpreted and misreported by the MSM.
IMHO, NOAA has an ethical obligation to correct such an obvious, widespread misuse of their data . . . that they have remained silent on this speaks volumes about NOAA’s management and its basic lack of ethics regarding informing the public in an unbiased, scientific manner.
They know that if they speak up and correct the record, their jobs will be in danger.
NOAA has been taken over by the “climate fifth column” like most other government “agencies.”
Thanks Anthony. Those of us with a thirst for more truth and less propaganda appreciate every effort you make to shine a light on the nonsense.
Notice how blindly the Irish media uncritically echo the alarmist narrative:
Ocean surface temperatures reach record high
They do not give a single link to their sources or allow for any readers questions or comments unlike WUWT.
https://www.newstalk.com/news/ocean-surface-temperatures-reach-record-high-1494292
Thank you Mr. Watts! When I read this article from the AP (Seth Orenstein) I knew there was a problem with the facts. But what is despairing to me, is when I Googled this meme there where hundreds of worldwide articles all pushing the same temperature garbage. Have we lost are minds? Given the amount of money being currently spend on the ‘Climate Change Church’ I’m wondering if it’s to late for Science. I guess we’ll have to experience Europe’s fate of high fossil fuel prices, like last Winter, before we stop this nonsense. The damage caused by this movement has put another nail in the coffin of ‘Authority’ from the elites.
What this story illustrates most vividly, is how badly these media sources distort what they are reporting on.
The original outlet for the story referred to this isolated location as “Florida Waters”, implying that the temperature reported was widespread.
When it was picked up by other news outlets, this heading was altered in ways that distorted the true nature of the location of the reading even more, using such labels are near shore waters, with some even calling it an ocean water temperature.
By referring to a single reading with the term “waters”, the reportage obscures the fact of it being a single isolated location.
And by various outlets simply altering the wording into what becomes outright lies, a location that is an inland marsh is reported as being located out in the ocean.
For one thing, it proves that these so-called journalists do not check on anything at all, and are in the habit of altering the original language of the stories they pick up without regard to the truth or facts or anything real.
It is obviously deliberately done to exaggerate the details in any way they can imaginatively dream up.
Thus does a single reading of an anomalous temperature which is not even a record for that location, becomes reports of the ocean around Florida reaching record high temperatures as hot as a hot tub.
In other words, they invent outright lies and present them as legitimate news stories.
And since they never ever report a single thing about the rapid return to normal conditions, and instead just jump to the next place that has a brief excursion into warmer than average conditions, the overall impression that is conveyed is that there are disastrous things occurring all over the place on an ongoing basis, when in fact nothing of the sort is actually happening.
So even when there may be a kernel of truth to what is being said, what is actually reported is nothing but a pack of lies.
No reason to panic? WRONG!
A high reading anywhere means THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END. We should dismantle all industry, return to a state of nature, and require media to report DOOMSDAY PROPHECIES ONLY.
Then, and only then, humanity might have some chance for redemption.
A shallow water buoy that likely has water from warmer pools of shallower land adjacent near stagnant water flowing past.
Typical of NOAA and MSM. They tend to love the temperatures they see from the worst sited temperature stations. Sites that don’t and likely won’t ever show rational temperatures for deeper water.
I’ve played in tide pools that get too warm for comfort ever since I was a little kid 60+ years ago. It was a game we used to play on summer vacation, Step in a hot tide pool, squeal, then scamper through a nearby cool pool before finding the next warm one.
This was way the heck up in New England, 1200 miles farther from the equator than Florida. Little did we know we were experiencing the precursor to The End of the World. We were just barefoot kids having fun.
Idiot reporters writing for moron readers.