There are mistakes, and then there are mistakes that only happen when you already know the answer you want.
The newly published paper “Ocean Heat Content Sets Another Record in 2025” reports a year-to-year increase in upper-2000-meter ocean heat content of about 23 zettajoules (ZJ), depending on dataset. Fine. Ocean heat content (OHC) is a possible diagnostic metric, and most people studying the Oceans believe that the oceans have been warming since the end of the Little Ice Age. However, as we recently pointed out in the WUWT post “Measuring Climate Change Without a Ruler,” from a strict epistemological standpoint, we do not know—at high confidence—whether the total energy of the Earth’s climate system is increasing, decreasing, or remaining approximately constant.
But then came the Twitter/X post — and this is where physics quietly left the room, and narrative building took its place.
Zeke Hausfather, a coauthor, triumphantly announced:
This is not a harmless simplification. It is flatly wrong — and it is wrong in a way that a supposedly competent “climate scientist” absolutely should know better than to make. He’s attributing the increased energy retention solely to a single variable – Carbon Dioxide. Earth’s climate system is far more complex than that.
What happened here is not a math error. It is confirmation bias, plain and simple: starting with the conclusion (“GHGs did it”) and backfilling the interpretation, even if it violates basic energy accounting.
Let’s walk through it slowly, because apparently that’s necessary.
What the paper actually says (and what it very carefully does not.) The paper is here.
The paper reports that global upper-2000 m ocean heat content increased by ~23 ± 8 ZJ from 2024 to 2025 in one dataset (IAP/CAS), with smaller increases in others.
That number is:
- an observed year-to-year change
- a net storage term
- the residual of everything that happened to the climate system that year
It already includes:
- greenhouse gas forcing (from all prior years, not just 2025),
- aerosol changes,
- ENSO evolution (the paper explicitly mentions La Niña development),
- atmosphere–ocean heat exchange,
- internal variability,
- circulation and mixing,
- and, yes, measurement uncertainty.
It is the entire balance sheet, not a line item. Nowhere does the paper calculate:
- heat from 2025 emissions,
- a partition of OHC change by forcing agent,
- or an attribution showing that GHGs alone account for 23 ZJ.
Because it can’t — at least not from this analysis.
As the great Steve McIntyre is fond of saying, “Watch the pea under the thimble.”
Hausfather’s tweet commits a textbook category error.
It takes:
- a change in stored energy (ΔOHC, a stock),
and rebrands it as:
- heat added by that year’s emissions (a flow).
This is Climate Science 101 stuff. You don’t get to do this. By that logic, one could just as easily say:
- “In 1998, CO₂ emissions caused El Niño,”
- or “In 2023, SUVs caused the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.”
Correlation plus narrative is not causation — especially when you skip the accounting.
It’s a basic conservation-of-energy test (which the tweet fails.)
Let’s take the claim literally.
If “2025 human emissions added 23 ZJ to the oceans”, then one of the following must be true:
- Every other process affecting ocean heat that year added zero net energy, or
- Some other process removed an equal and opposite amount of heat — and we can quantify it.
Neither is shown. Neither is even attempted. Instead, the tweet simply assigns 100% of the observed net heat gain to one favored cause. That’s not attribution. That’s myopic storytelling. Whether he meant cumulative emissions over time and phrased it badly, or he really believes the increase of CO₂ added all that extra heat is unclear. What is clear is that one year of increased emissions could not have added all that extra OHC.
Here’s the incremental forcing problem with the math shown. This is the part that completely breaks Zeke’s claim.
Atmospheric CO₂ increased by roughly 2–3 ppm during 2025 (consistent with CO2 global means).
Radiative forcing from CO₂ is commonly approximated as:
Taking a representative case:
That is the incremental forcing added in that year.
Now convert that forcing into energy over one year:
That is:
- 0.43 zettajoules (ZJ)
Not 23 ZJ.
Not even close Zeke. Maybe Zeke should create his own heat units. I propose Zekajoules – a fictional unit. That way, he’s never wrong.
Even allowing for generous assumptions, the incremental effect of 2025 emissions is well under 1 ZJ, not tens of ZJ. The climate system responds to the accumulated forcing from decades of emissions, not to the incremental bump from one year’s emissions — which is exactly why pretending that “2025 emissions added 23 ZJ” is nonsense.
This is the difference between forcing and storage, and confusing the two is inexcusable for a professional “climate scientist.”
ENSO, Zeke’s inconvenient elephant in the room.
The paper itself notes that evolving La Niña conditions likely contributed to the 2025 OHC change. ENSO redistributes tens of zettajoules of heat between ocean layers and the atmosphere on annual timescales. This is not controversial. It’s in the textbooks. Yet in the Zeke version of events, ENSO mysteriously vanishes — because it’s inconvenient to the preferred narrative. That’s confirmation bias at work.
Why this matters (and why this deserves calling out.)
Zeke Hausfather is not a random blogger. He is routinely presented as a serious “climate scientist,” cited by media outlets as a trusted explainer. That makes this worse, not better.
A graduate student might be forgiven for confusing:
Observed OHC change with heat attributable to a specific year’s emissions.
A published “climate scientist” should not. When a scientist allows narrative alignment to override physical meaning — especially in public communication — that’s not “simplifying for the public.” That’s lowering standards. And it wrongly trains journalists, policymakers, and the public to think energy accounting is optional.
It isn’t. But that’s the common narrative from “climate science” these days. Sigh.
What Zeke should have said:
Here’s a version of his Tweet that would have been technically correct, and without the biased and ambiguous language, nor placing blame on a single climate variable that is one of many in a complex climate system:
“Global upper-2000 m ocean heat content increased by ~23 ZJ from 2024 to 2025, reflecting the ongoing long-term planetary energy imbalance plus year-to-year variability, including ENSO evolution.”
That’s accurate.
That’s defensible.
That doesn’t require abusing units.
But it doesn’t make for a good viral climate scary tweet, does it?
The public is told to “trust the science.” But science only deserves trust when scientists:
- respect definitions,
- respect conservation laws,
- and resist the temptation to turn diagnostics into propaganda.
When a “climate scientist” takes a perfectly valid observational number and repackages it as “heat added by emissions” — without doing the attribution — that’s not science communication.
That’s confirmation bias with a PhD.
And non-PhD. people like me that are tired of this shit, notice.
It is alarming that physics quantities like work, power, energy and their correct units are not being used in the traditional way that was taught as correct at universities in my era of the 1970s.
If the undergrad could not show proficiency in exams about them, the outcome was a fail and no degree, let alone a PhD.
But, in fairness and balance, we graduated without knowing much about beliefs, like unicorn properties. Geoff S
“traditional way” should be emended to read “scientific way.”
In real physics, there is no such thing as “forcing”, or “heat content”, or “electromagnetic flux” measured in Watts. These are fantasies and hallucinations, nothing more. And whenever we respond to a climate alarmist while continuing to use their nonsense words, we give them more credibility than they deserve, which is none.
Very nice Anthony. This is why people are less impressed with PHDs. Here is a bigger problem though.
“Global upper-2000 m ocean heat content increased by ~23 ZJ from 2024 to 2025, reflecting the ongoing long-term planetary energy imbalance plus year-to-year variability, including ENSO evolution.”
To the average guy (high school graduate) they are going to say oh my god even Anthony Watts admits that the global upper-2000 m ocean heat content has increased by ~ 23ZJ in one year. That has to be human CO2. Without context that sounds a hell of a lot more distressing than reaching a 1.5C increase since pre industrial times.
This is proof that some PHD’s should have their credentials revoked.
I contacted Zeke Hausfather and asked him to convert the funds in my offshore bank account from dollars to euros. I’m ecstatic to report I’m now a multi-billionaire………
“What the paper actually says (and what it very carefully does not.)”
What the paper actually says, in the first words of the abstract, is:
“Global ocean warming continued unabated in 2025 in response to increased greenhouse gas concentrations and recent reductions in sulfate aerosols, reflecting the long-term accumulation of heat within the climate system”
Just what Zeke said. And in conclusion, the paper says:
“In the long term, consistent with projections
from state-of-the-art climate models, global OHC is
expected to continue breaking records until net-zero green-
house gas emissions are achieved, given the persistence of a
positive EEI.”
The oceans heat content allegedly went up. CO2 went up.
Obviously, the warmer oceans caused CO2 to go up?
Or was it the other way around.
Nick, you claim to be a scientist, but you make the classic correlation/causation error.
I’m not making any error. I’m just pointing out that, contra this article, that is what the paper said.
You do make the error even if only reporting what the abstract says because it means you agree with it.
.” in response to increased greenhouse gas concentrations” means that GHG’s were responsible. That has not been shown.
Did you read the paper? It’s the paper that said it – Zeke reported accurately.
The paper who has one Michael E Mann as co-author, was not even worth reporting on, seemingly with approval. 😉
But it seems to have disapppeared. The latest date is Dec 12 2025
The paper has not disappeared – the link in the article works.
The paper says what it says, and you could try arguing with that. My point is that Zeke said accurately what it says.
So you believe what what was quoted was the truth. Goodo. Zeke’s post seems to have disappeared.
He accurately reported an inaccuracy. 🙂
He’s dimwitted. Nobody has ever made a thermometer hotter by adding any “greenhouse gas” to air.
Both you and Zeke Hausfather are ignorant and gullible fantasists.
What the paper said and what Zeke said are very different.
Nick trying to run cover for the stupid statement tweeted without his brain engaged.
Nick, there are several problems. The first is that Zeke doesn’t say what the paper says. The paper says the warming was from GHGs and reductions in sulfates.
Zeke leaves out the SO2 and flatly says that it’s from GHGs. So no, Zeke did NOT say what the paper says.
Next problem is that the estimates of 2025 change in SO2 forcing are on the order of 0.07 to 0.20 W/m2. And while the high end of this estimate is on the order of seven times the CO2 forcing, so call it a couple of zettajoules, we’re still very far from the claimed 25 zettajoule increase.
Next problem is that the figures above for CO2 and SO2 forcing are about 40% too high, because they’ve used the surface of the earth for the calculations … but the ocean isn’t heated by radiation hitting the land.
So regardless of your issues, it’s neither CO2 nor SO2 that’s caused the putative increase in OHC. The two together are still too small by an order of magnitude.
w.
Willis,
“on the order of seven times the CO2 forcing”
No, the calculation in the article is completely wrong. The 23 ZJ is not due to the forcing from the increment in CO2. It is not the case that if CO2 did not increase, the ocean would not have warmed. The warming is due to the whole forcing 2.32 W/m2, or most of it. That is what forcing means. 2.32 W/m2 would give 38 ZJ, which is more than enough to explain 23 ZJ warming, and also greatly exceeds the effect of SO2.
It is not true that the calc should be downrated by 40% for the ocean fraction. Sun falling on land does not directly heat the ocean, but it adds heat to the atmosphere, most of which ends up in the ocean.
So
_1 Zeke was right – the added effect of SO2 is small, and warming is mostly due to GHG, and
_2. GHG forcing does explain the 23 ZJ rise, and is responsible for it.
“Sun falling on land does not directly heat the ocean, but it adds heat to the atmosphere, most of which ends up in the ocean.”
You and Zeke are both wrong: the atmosphere does not warm the ocean.
Globally, sunshine warms the ocean via ASR, then the ocean warms the atmosphere.
Yes.
And thank you for paying attention to this matter. 👍
Gotta watch Nick’s pea under the thimble, too. Anthony was addressing Zeke’s misleading tweet about the report, which is what most people will see. To ignore the tweet you bring up what the report says.
Mr. R: Gotta watch the pea every time with Mr. Stokes. I do enjoy catching it out, as you do here, good work.
I must be missing something. I calculate the temperature increase needed to put 23ZJ into the oceans as follows:
Total mass of oceans = 1.37 x 10exp21Kg
Heat capacity of water = 4181 J per Kg
Increase in enthalpy = 23 x 10exp23J
Delta T = 23 x 10exp21 / (4181 x 1.37 x 10exp21)
= 23/5728
= 0.004 degrees C or K.
which is utterly negligible and unmeasurably small, except by Climate “Scientists”, of course.
Where am I going wrong?
Correction: increase in enthalpy of the oceans is 23 X 10exp31J, not 23 X 10exp23 J.
Upper 2000 meters is not the total water in the oceans.
Since the average depth of the oceans is 3700m, this calculation is perhaps 2 X to small.
Typo: replace “to small” by “too small”
“Where am I going wrong?”
Assuming the heating is uniform. In fact most of the ocean doesn’t change.
Thanks for confirming that you have no idea about the temperature of most of the ocean.
You are quite right. The tiny and unmeasurable temperature change is why the temperature change is never mentioned, only the few X 10^22 joules of putative heat content increase. ARGO is an expensive mission. It has GOT to produce SOME result. It is actually quite a fine effort, but its limitations are always blurred because the nice clean finding that humans are destroying the planet eludes the mission.
Swing and a miss, Nick.
The article was not addressing the paper.
The article was addressing the twitter/X post.
How many of the deplorables will read the technical paper?
How many of the deplorables will read and repost the tweat?
The twitter was correctly describing the paper (as you would expect from an author). That is my primary point.
Color me confused! Emissions are not heat. There would have to be additional steps that might, or might not, influence the ocean. Perhaps shortwave solar energy might be involved. Perhaps emissions had nothing to do with ocean heat. Perhaps 200 million people peed in ocean water or a stream tributary to the ocean. There’s a heat-emission for you.
CO2 cannot create energy. Kirchhoff’s Law.
If the ocean heat content increase were due solely to the increase in the atmospheric concentration of well-mixed greenhouse gases it would be uniform across the global oceans.
From your graphs it looks very likely any increase in temperature in mid-latitude oceans is negated by declines elsewhere.
GHGs do not add ANY “heat” to the oceans.. what an incredibly stupid sentence. !
Energy in the oceans mostly come from the SUN and underwater volcanic action.
That is correct, what GHGs do is make it harder for the energy that short wave radiation put into the oceans, to get back out.
Not true.. Mass air movement absolutely overwhelms any theoretical tiny effect from CO2
CO2 has absolutely ZERO warming effect on the ocean.
Slower cooling is still cooling, not heating.
It’s heating if the amount of energy being added by the sun remains constant.
But the absorbed solar has NOT remained constant.
It has increased because of cloud changes
No, cooling is cooling, and you can redefine “cooling” to mean “heating” all you like, but cooling is defined as dropping temperatures.
After four and a half billion years of continuous sunlight, the Earth has cooled – slowly.
You may call this temperature drop “heating” or “warming” if you like.
Anthony seems to be getting quite annoyed about a possible missing comma. Perhaps Zek should have written “we find that in 2025, human emissions …”
or alternatively “we find that in 2025, cumulative human emissions …. “. And then you can quibble over whether the post was aimed at other scientists who would
know what Zek meant (and hopefully cite his paper) or for the general public for whom a 250 word tweet is never going to explain anything.
Not missing a comma.
I thought of that, then reread the twitter post.
Look at the last statement, more than 39 times the ANNUAL energy produced.
But the last statement correct: i.e. 23 Zeta-Joules is more than 39 times the annual energy produced by humans in 2025.
See my calculation above. The temperature change needed to increase ocean enthalpy by 33 ZJ is so tiny it is far less than instrumental resolution.
OHC.. look at the little red squiggle, that is the part they pretend is due to human CO2.
Dr. Yair Rosenthal stated in the study’s university press release:
“Some climate change skeptics have pointed out that global atmospheric temperatures have been stable, or even declined slightly, over the past decade. They claim it’s a sign that global warming has either ceased, slowed down or is not caused by human activity.
So, where did all that heat that we’re supposedly producing go?
Climate scientists say it went into the ocean, which over the past 60 years has acted as a buffer against global warming. However, a new study led by Rutgers’ Yair Rosenthal shows that the ocean is now absorbing heat 15 times faster than it has over the previous 10,000 years. Although the increased heat absorption by the ocean may give scientists and policymakers more time to deal with the issue of climate change, Rosenthal says the problem is real and must be addressed.”
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/global-warming-viewed-deep-ocean
That’s because it was LOSING Heat for most of the last 10,000 years. !!
There is no “problem to be addressed, as we are only a tiny bump above the COLDEST period in 10,000 years.
CO2 DOES NOT PRODUCE ANY HEAT. !
Heat in the oceans comes mostly from solar energy with maybe a small amount of ocean bottom heat from volcanos and seismic activity.
Bnice believes his interpretation of Rosenthal et al. is more accurate than that of Dr. Yair Rosenthal himself.
“Climate scientists say… blah , blah….”
ROFLMAO !!!
climate soothsayers say….
[comment deleted]
“Rosenthal says the problem is real and must be addressed.”
As a libertarian, I think Mr. Rosenthal, should be free to follow his dreams.
So go for it, Yair.
(and pls don’t ask me to help you with your costs. That’s what gofundme is for.)
Go FUnd Me!
Humor – a difficult concept.
— Lt. Saavik
“Scientists say” is a red flag indicating it is time to stop reading.
Sorry, that should say:
Dr. Yair Rosenthal stated in the study’s university press release:Rosenthal et al. summarized in the university’s press release:
That is not OHC, and it is not Rosenthal’s Fig 4B. Someone has added the yellow and the red, and the annotation box. The plot is, as it says, intermediate water temperature (IWT) at a specific location in Macassar strait.
Have a look here:
https://notrickszone.com/2019/03/11/new-paper-widespread-collapse-of-ice-sheets-5000-years-ago-added-3-4-meters-to-sea-levels/
Yes, Kenneth Richard has a track record of doctoring other people’s graphs. But even he did not claim it was a graph of OHC.
So you are saying OHC is not related to temperature and can’t be converted..
How droll !
The temperature in Macassar Strait, at 500 m depth (which is what is graphed) cannot be converted to OHC.
Thanks for the link..
It reveals the fact that….
Well done!
Here is a similar graph done , iirc , by Ross McKitrick..
… showing just how insignificant the current rise in OHC is.
Another version of the Rosenthal plot of temperatures it 500 m depth in the Macassar Strait. It is not OHC, nor a proxy for it.
Why not?
That someone was S McIntyre according to the link provided by Eldrosion.
The change in solar intensity across the seasons is causing an increase in advection from Equator to poles.
The solar intensity during the heating season is trending up in both hemispheres and the solar intensity in the cooling season is heading down in both hemispheres.
The increased poleward heat advection is most evident in the Ferrel Cells in both hemisphere.
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So ocean heat uptake is concentrated around 45 degrees in both hemispheres with SH showing more heart uptake due to greater extent of oceans in the SH.
There is more precipitation in the mid latitudes as more warmer air moves poleward and condenses thereby deepening the thermocline.
This year was an above trend year for NH heat advection hence all the new snowfall records.
In addition, water is opaque to infrared radiation. It will be adsorbed by the first few molecules at the surface of a water body and will locally raise the temperature of that film. This will cause an increase in evaporation at the surface which will disperse some of that energy. Not all of it will be retained by water. Hausfather is even wronger that you thought.
None at all will be retained. The surface cools at night, and the process results in deep bottom water at a depth of 10 km being around 2 C, where the surrounding basin rock is around 200 C.
Clearly some of the heat is retained by the water. Try swimming in the ocean in the middle of winter and compare it to swimming in the middle of summer. Clearly the water has warmed up and therefore the water has retained some of the infrared radiation.
Well, of course. Until it cools.
Now try swimming in a frozen lake or river. The ice is still emitting IR.
Heat is not stored or accumulated. You are playing with semantics, no doubt trying to justify your belief that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter.
Am I right?
Michael you stated that “none at all will be retained”, now you are claiming that it is retained “until it cools”. So which is it? Energy is retained in the oceans and is stored as heat. This isn’t semantics but just basic physics.
As I said, you’re playing semantic games – with the word “stored”, for example.
If you agree that “heat is the transfer of thermal energy from a system or body at a higher temperature to a system or body at a lower temperature due to a temperature difference” (as one source puts it), then heat cannot be “stored” at all.
I apologise for if my meaning was not clear enough for you to comprehend. Maybe I should have said that matter above absolute zero has a degree of hotness known as temperature.
i don’t really care, as you are obviously ignorant and gullible, and believe that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter. Feel free to try to convince anyone otherwise.
Maybe he had too many Horsefeathers ?
https://www.jriegerco.com/cocktail-recipes/horsefeather
a potent drink mix … originating from a liberal city …
😉
The atmosphere does not determine the amount of heat energy held by the oceans. The heat energy content of the oceans is approximately 1,100 times that of the atmosphere. This is because the ability of water to hold heat is 4.2 times that of dry air and the mass of the oceans is about 270 times that of the atmosphere. All of the energy in the atmosphere would warm the oceans very slightly. The oceans are not warmed by the air. it is vice versa.
Well, that is not generally true. The direction of “warming” is determined the fact that heat energy always flows from hot to cold (the Second Law of Thermodynamics). There are times when air immediately above the ocean surface is hotter than the water, but other times when the air is colder than the water.
Sunlight falls directly on oceans with most of its energy being directly absorbed by the surface waters and only a relatively small reduction of that energy being caused from clouds, atmospheric absorption or surface reflection.
In addition, the surfaces of the world’s oceans continuously radiate away far more energy than is captured and retained by Earth’s atmosphere.
Somewhat misleading. Warming only occurs if the amount of heat energy in one direction is greater than that in the other direction, a fact which escapes “climate scientists” and their ignorant and gullible disciples.
An example is the meteorological phenomenon “radiative frost”, where water on the surface freezes, even though the air temperature is above freezing. The phenomenon has been utilised in arid desert areas to make ice at night, even though the air temperature is above freezing.
You can see why I refer to people (even those who have PhDs) as ignorant and gullible, if they don’t appear to have even the most basic idea about everyday meteorological phenomena which have been exploited for thousands of years.
Also, global cloud cover has been declining in recent decades. See climate4you.com for the data. Sunlight (the visible part) is not stopped by the surface film and instead, penetrates to a depth of a few hundred feet. It is the principle source of heating of ocean water. Less clouds, more sunlight, more heating. Does Hausfather not know that?
Does Hausfather not know that?
I suggest that it is not a matter of what he knows. If he supports Net Zero, it is a matter of what he can get the masses who lack any scientific literacy to believe. Not unlike a cult.
You have to understand Zeke… He is the same level of climate CON-MAN as Mickey Mann
Basically everything he puts out is twisted and disingenuous and full of half-truth and non-fact made to look like its real.
You see his name on something.. look for the CON. !! (As our esteemed host has done)
Interestingly, all the energy expended by humanity in one year amounts to less than one hour of sunlight falling on the planet’s surface (about 50 minutes, the last time I calculated it). All that ocean heat is equivalent to 32.5 hours of extra sunshine per year, which seems like it would be well within the range of natural variability.
No, that’s nonsense. Heat cannot be stored or accumulated. The only long-term planetary energy imbalance is the one that Fourier (and anyone who understands physics) refers to – the Earth loses all the heat it receives from the sun to outer space, plus a little internal heat.
Hence, the four and a half billion years of planetary cooling.
Some people believe that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter, but that’s nonsense too.
Sad but true.
Heat content. Jules input and specific heat capacity.
At least that ocean heat content is similar to scientific definitions.
Harold The Organic Chemist Says:
“CO2 Doe Not Cause Warming Of Air”
Shown in the chart (See below) are plots of the average annual seasonal temperatures and a plot of the average annual temperatures at the Furnace Creek weather station from 1922 to 2001. In 1922 the concentration of CO2 was ca. 304 ppmv (0.60 g CO2/cu. m. of air) and by 2001 it had increased to ca. 371 ppmv (0.74n g CO2/cu. m. of air), but there was no corresponding increase in air temperature at this remote desert. The reason there was no increase in air temperature is quite simple: There is too little CO2 in the air to absorb out-going long wavelength IR light emanating from the earth’s surface to cause warming of the air. in 1921 Tavg was 25.1° C
To obtain recent Death Valley temperature data I went to:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/death-valley/average-temperature-by-year. The Tmax and Tmin data from 1962 to 2025 is displayed in a table. For 2025 the computed Tavg was 26.1° C. Note that slight increase in average annual temperature is within the range of natural annual average temperature variation.
At the Mauna Loa Obs. in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in air is currently 427 ppmv (0.84 g CO2/cu. m. of air), a 15% increase since 2001. This small amount of CO2 in the air can not cause any heating of not only of the air but also the oceans.
NB: The chart was obtained from the late John L. Daly’s website:
“Still Waiting For Greenhouse” available at: http://www.john-daly.com. From home page go to end and click on “Station Temperature Data”. On the
“World Map” click on “NA” and then page down to U.S.A.-Pacific. Finally scroll down at click on Death Valley”. John Daly found over 200 weather stations that showed no warming up to 2002.
Repeating Al Gores hockey stick lies.
Where is there any evidence that CO2 in the atmosphere heats the oceans, or that CO2 is the principal cause of ocean warming?
The sun warms the oceans. Any warmth atmospheric CO2 adds is insignificant and “lost in the noise”.
The sun warms the oceans.
The oceans warm the atmosphere.
Not in absolute terms, of course, but more so than an innocent, insignificant molecule.
(deleted due to being being repeat of post below, but was lacking attached figure)
Wow. 23 ZJ increased the upper 2000m ocean heat content. Let’s see, that’s 0.13 degrees. C temperature increase average over the ocean. I am just amazed that we are able to make that accurate of a measurement across the world oceans with all the mixing and ocean oscillations. I wouldn’t bet the farm on that number much less attribute it to CO2.
“23 ZJ increased the upper 2000m ocean heat content. Let’s see, that’s 0.13 degrees. C temperature increase average over the ocean.”
NOAA’s processed ARGO data is available from the following webpage :
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/data/oceans/woa/DATA_ANALYSIS/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/DATA/basin/
The “*_mt/” directories give the temperature readings from the ARGO floats, averaged by basin and worldwide (the “*-w0-*” files in each sub-directory).
Extracting the first two columns of the “./yearly_mt/T-dC-w0-2000m.dat” file gives us :
YEAR WO [= “World”]
…
2020 0.097 [°C]
2021 0.103
2022 0.107
2023 0.111
2024 0.115
2025 0.123
NOAA calculated the increase in temperature of the top 2000 metres of the world’s oceans during calender year 2025 as 0.008 Celsius degrees.
You appear to be off by a factor of (just over) 16 … which is very easy to do when talking about “zeta-joules”, I can never remember if that’s “x10^22” or “x10^23” …
Yes. Thank you much for checking that. I was just thinking what I did and messed up kcal per (C m3) and not sure what else. Redid it and got .007C. 🙂
ARGO does not have much coverage.
Anthony, just excellent analyses and rebuttal to Zeke Hausfather’s post on X and the paper he co-authored!
To your takedown, I would add that one should always consider changes in instrumentation as being a possible source of error/uncertainty when measurements of any physical parameter—such as ocean water temperatures that lead to calculated ocean heat content—are made over time.
Here are some relevant important facts on this very subject available from https://argo.whoi.edu/argo/maps/deployment/ , where one can obtain yearly positional plots and counts of total Agro float deployments around the world, fully appreciating that Argo floats have limited lifetimes and not all that expire are necessarily replaced year-to-year:
— Atlantic basin: 224 total floats in 2024, 321 total floats in 2025 . . . a 43% increase
—Pacific basin: 411 total floats in 2024, 282 total floats in 2025 . . . a 31% decrease
—Indian Basin: 166 total floats in 2024, 169 total floats in 2025 . . . a 2% increase.
Comparing 2025 to 2024, not only have the total numbers of Argo floats in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans changed drastically, the geographical distributions of those floats have likewise changed greatly, as shown in the attached graphic for the Pacific that I composited from two images downloaded from the above-cited website.
My bottom line: I can easily envision most, if not all, of the claimed 23 ± 8 ZJ increase in global upper-2000 m ocean heat content (the range of depths for water temperatures measured by the vast majority of Argo floats) from 2024 to 2025 as just resulting from sampling differences between Atlantic and Pacific basins over the period of 2024 to 2025 without there being any REAL change in global ocean heat content.
WOW.. how can they possibly claim they know anything about OHC change with that sort of change in measuring locations.
I mean, all the southern ocean measurements have disappeared..
Maybe, like Phil Jones from CRU said.. “mostly made up” !!!
A temperature increase far smaller than the resolution of the thermistors in the ARGO buoys.
Why should anyone take this nonsense seriously?
(It was suggested that I regularly repost the following. Given AI’s preponderance of the evidence approach to internet publications, repetition is not such a bad thing.)
Even at +2°C or +3°C or +5°C we would not suffer any more than those optimum eras that say the population flourish.
And surpassing 1850?
What evidence is there that 1850 was the climate optimum.
No one has yet to define the climate optimum in measurable metrics.
How do we know we are not moving towards the optimum?
Without knowing the optimum, no claims that things are getting worse are valid.
If climate science cannot decide on an optimum temperature, why should we believe +1.5°C is a problem.
The Holocene Climate Optimum occurred in the interval roughly 9,500 to 5,500 years BP, with a thermal maximum around 8000 years BP.
(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum )
The Wikipedia article cites numerous paleoclimatology proxies/evidence that support the Holocene Climate Optimum being real.
I have never heard anyone previously referring to 1850 (BC or AD) being “the climate optimum” . . . but perhaps I missed that declaration. Instead, the year 1850 is commonly stated to be the end of the Little Ice Age (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age )
Repetition of falsehoods does not eliminate such being falsehoods.
The warming since the LIA has been a MASSIVE BENEFIT to basically all the planet…
… as has the increase in atmospheric CO2.
There is no “problem” except in the twisted minds of scientifically-illiterate, chicken-little, climate-history-denying, so-called “climate scientists”
There is no Twitter.
No twitter but lots of twits.
No physicist would write a billion trillion.
Hausfather wrote 23 billion trillion joules. This implies Hausfather is no physicist. Perhaps he is emulating “Nye the science guy”, who was no scientist either.
The number is purely for public consumption: Perhaps the article was really an editorial opinion?
WOW – it is a BIG number! The consequences will be terrible.
One can suppose the readership of Nature is now the general public.
Ocean heat content (OHC) change is always written in units of 10^22 joules, in this instance 2.3 x10^22 joules. That number is opaque to most people. It would be informative to write that OHC “putatively” increased by X zetajoules, which is a temperature rise of about 0.002C. Then, the layperson would have understood that 2 millidegree decrees C is not a measured, but an inferred value.
In a thousand years, the 0-2000 meter depth, the part of of the ocean included in the opinion piece, MIGHT see a temperature rise of 1C, if heat were added constantly at that same rate for 1000 years
Since the average depth of the ocean is 4000 meters and the ocean north and south of 60 degrees in latitude is not included, 75% of the ocean is not even measured.
This paper required no less than 53 authors to write so little. Little wonder it is inconsequential.
Who are generally ignorant and gullible, unfortunately. As one American author said “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people”.
If 53 authors contributed to this fairytale, at least their share of their payment to have it published in the vanity press would be bearable.
Quality fairytales like Cinderella and Snow White, only required two authors – the brothers Grimm. 53 authors is overegging the pudding just a bit, particularly if nobody at all is prepared to pay to read their nonsense.
23 ZJ spread out in the upper 2,000 m of the oceans would raise the bulk temperature 0.034 C. That isn’t measurable.