by Judith Curry
So, exactly how are the oceans sequestering heat below 700 m? And how might this heat return to the surface to impact the surface climate?
In a recent thread Has Trenberth found the missing heat?, we discussed the Balmaseda et al paper, which concluded:
In the last decade, about 30% of the warming has occurred below 700 m, contributing significantly to an acceleration of the warming trend. The warming below 700 m remains even when the Argo observing system is withdrawn although the trends are reduced. Sensitivity experiments illustrate that surface wind variability is largely responsible for the changing ocean heat vertical distribution.
The physical mechanisms whereby heating from the atmosphere is sequestered below 700 m are not obvious.
A useful summary of the role of the oceans in climate variability and change is provided by the draft U.S. CLIVAR Science Plan:
Understanding what processes are critical to climate variability and change in the ocean is of importance for several reasons. Primary among these is that the first-order physical processes need to be correctly represented in climate models for improved simulation of ocean climate variability. Various physical processes determine the climate variability of oceans over different space and time scales. Examples of such processes, include ocean mixing; wind driven ocean circulation; heat and freshwater fluxes at the interface of ocean with atmosphere and sea ice that control buoyancy fluctuations and buoyancy driven ocean circulation; penetration of shortwave radiative fluxes and interactions with biological processes in the upper oceans; influence of continental shelves on boundary currents etc.
The fundamental physical processes that influence the ocean, in turn, determine the modes of ocean variability on various space and time scale. Oceanic eddies and waves dominate this variability on time scales of days to months and can be thought of as the oceanic counterpart of weather in the atmosphere. There are various physical mechanisms that lead to generation of ocean eddies – sudden changes in the direction of surface winds and their speed; dynamical instabilities associated with the ocean thermal fronts; interactions between oceanic flows and bottom topography. However such mechanisms are poorly understood.
Due to their ability to exchange energy with the large-scale oceanic state, mesoscale eddies can influence variability in the oceanic circulation and stratification on the variety of time scales. In the Southern Ocean, eddies may also transport heat, salt and biogeochemical tracers (such as carbon) poleward, and therefore, play a key role in the oceanic uptake of heat and carbon. Most climate models lack the ability to resolve ocean eddies and must rely on empirically derived parameterization schemes. Despite advances in the development of such schemes, the inability of models to resolve the mesoscale eddies still counts as a major source of uncertainty in climate simulations. On even smaller scales, sub-mesoscale currents are potentially equally important for the ocean variability, but are even less well understood. Finally, diapycnal mixing associated with breaking of internal gravity waves in the interior and near rough topography likely plays a critical role in the transformation of water properties and also in the dynamics of long space and time scale processes such as Atlantic Meridional Overturning circulation (AMOC).
On seasonal to interannual time scales, modes of ocean variability, such as El Niño – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Atlantic Meridional Mode (AMM), dominate. Ocean variability on this time-scale is governed by dynamical processes in the ocean, and coupled air-sea interaction, including changes in surface winds. Although important advances in understanding the physical mechanisms of these modes have been made, our understanding is not complete and further research is needed.
On longer time scales, variability in the North Pacific and Atlantic has considerable fluctuations in decadal frequencies, and is often referred to as the Pacific Decadal Variability (PDV) and Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (AMV), respectively. Various mechanisms leading to decadal variability in the oceans have been posited, but remain poorly understood. Basic science questions on the role of stochastic atmospheric forcing; role of tropical-extratropical interactions and coupling with the atmosphere; role of interactions between large-scale circulation, mesoscale eddies and slowly propagating Rossby waves in governing ocean variability on decadal time scales remain an area of active research.
On centennial time scales, ocean variability is dominated by the global thermohaline circulation that extends throughout the water column, with one example being the AMOC. On these time scales the buoyancy driven ocean circulation is of fundamental importance. Although the difference in ocean density determined by surface buoyancy exchanges in the high latitudes is the primary factor leading to the thermohaline circulation, oceanic processes such as mixing on much shorter time and space scales are also believed to play a fundamental role.
Interactions across modes of variability can also occur over different time and spatial scales that modulate the full range of ocean climate variability. In the Indian Ocean variability associated with ENSO and the Indian Ocean Dipole influences the interannual variability of the MJO. ENSO variability in the tropical Pacific also has low-frequency modulation, with some epochs having larger variability compared to other epochs, and models disagree on the dominant mechanisms. Higher frequency variations associated with tropical instability waves in the equatorial eastern Pacific has been hypothesized to affect ENSO variability and prediction on the seasonal time scale, and have been proposed as a potential mechanism for asymmetry in the amplitude of warm and cold ENSO events. Interactions between modes of oceanic variability across different time and spatial scales, along with the mechanisms that govern such interactions, are currently not well understood.
For background on some of these physical processes, I recommend Chapter 11 of my text Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans, which is posted [Ch 11] [chapter11 figs]. The table of contents for this chapter are:
Chapter 11 Thermohaline Processes in the Ocean
- 11.1 Radiative Transfer in the Ocean
- 11.2 Ocean Surface Layer
- 11.3 Surface Density Changes and the Ocean Mixed Layer
- 11.4 Instability and Mixing in the Ocean Interior
- 11.5 Deep Water Formation
- 11.6 Global Thermohaline Circulations
It is rather easy to imagine the heat transfer processes in the upper 700 m, see this recent paper published in Nature Climate Change:
Retrospective prediction of the global warming slowdown in the past decade
VIrginie Guemas, Francisco Doblas-Reyes, Isabel Andreu-Burillo
Abstract. Despite a sustained production of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, the Earth’s mean near-surface temperature paused its rise during the 2000–2010 period1. To explain such a pause, an increase in ocean heat uptake below the superficial ocean layer2, 3 has been proposed to overcompensate for the Earth’s heat storage. Contributions have also been suggested from the deep prolonged solar minimum4, the stratospheric water vapour5, the stratospheric6 and tropospheric aerosols7. However, a robust attribution of this warming slowdown has not been achievable up to now. Here we show successful retrospective predictions of this warming slowdown up to 5 years ahead, the analysis of which allows us to attribute the onset of this slowdown to an increase in ocean heat uptake. Sensitivity experiments accounting only for the external radiative forcings do not reproduce the slowdown. The top-of-atmosphere net energy input remained in the [0.5–1] W m−2 interval during the past decade, which is successfully captured by our predictions. Most of this excess energy was absorbed in the top 700 m of the ocean at the onset of the warming pause, 65% of it in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Our results hence point at the key role of the ocean heat uptake in the recent warming slowdown. The ability to predict retrospectively this slowdown not only strengthens our confidence in the robustness of our climate models, but also enhances the socio-economic relevance of operational decadal climate predictions.
However, how to sequester heat below 700 m is not obvious and ocean circulations seem to be required, since turbulent mixing doesn’t occur much below 700 m and mixing in the ocean interior is a slow process. On such short time scales as evident in figure 1 of the Balmasda et al paper, it seems that mesoscale eddies rather than the large-scale organized circulations would need to be the mechanism for the heat transfer to deep layers. I haven’t looked at the ocean reanalysis data in any detail; there may be regional clues as to how this heat sequestration is occurring.
And then assuming that the heat storage in the deep ocean occurs as described by Balmaseda et al., here is what Kevin Trenberth thinks will happen.
From a National Science Foundation article on April 15th, 2010:
“The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later,” says NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, the lead author. “The reprieve we’ve had from warming temperatures in the last few years will not continue. It is critical to track the build-up of energy in our climate system so we can understand what is happening and predict our future climate.”
If the heat is well mixed in the deep ocean below 700 m, exactly how could that heat return to the surface? The second law of thermodynamics suggests that a well mixed heat reservoir in the deep ocean would actually be very inefficient at returning heat to the surface.
We need to understand how the ocean exchanges heat vertically, between the upper ocean and deep ocean, and whether mixing in the deep ocean is more efficient than currently thought. Until we understand this, we won’t know to what extent this heat will remain sequestered in the deep ocean.
“We need to understand how the ocean exchanges heat vertically, between the upper ocean and deep ocean, and whether mixing in the deep ocean is more efficient than currently thought. Until we understand this, we won’t know to what extent this heat will remain sequestered in the deep ocean.”
I would think mixing in the deep ocean would vary in efficiency. That is one of the problems with varying the rates of deep water formation, it would vary the mixing efficiency. Thinking that deep ocean mixing efficiency is something instead of a range values is likely a mistake.
We also need to know how it got there and, first and foremost, if it is real? The data is very bad statistically. Worrying about sequestration is putting the AGW cart well before the scientific horse.
The data doesn’t look much worse than other data. The real uncertainty is about 20% of the range. At least it is better than tree rings. As far as heat getting there, not a problem. Every perturbation or shift changes the overall mixing efficiency. The shift in sea ice extent and polar circulation will change the rate of energy transfer and the depth of transfer. There is no “jumping” over the 0-700 meter depth required, just a degree shift in the polar “average” circulation or sea ice edge.
Latitude 50 south roughly has the Antarctic convergence zone where surface temperature drops from 8C to 4 C in less than 60 kilometers at times. The southern oscillation shifts that around and changes OH uptake. Trenberth would not have been looking for missing heat if he had a decent ocean model. The models obviously missed the Arctic sea ice changes that impact the rate of Atlantic bottom water formation.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-hqYPbjDh_8g/UcCT1uFGYiI/AAAAAAAAIqw/lTwofFclI3g/s973/NH%2520sst%2520do.png
That is the NH SST with deep ocean temperatures instead of OHC. The ~1976 shift started a warming trend, the ~2000 shift started a flat trend, when the AMO shift there will be a cooling trend. So I wouldn’t doubt there has been an increase in OHC. I would doubt people trying to dig out an extra 0.02C degree changes to justify their failed energy budgets.
Capt: I have no idea where you get your error estimate. The so-called ocean temp/heat data is the output from a statistical model along the lines of the Jones type surface model, HadCRU et al. Except it is estimating for a huge volume not a surface. And there are no fixed stations just a convenience sample of submarine and deep submersible readings. And it is to hundredths of a degree not tenths. So the uncertainties are very large, probably considerably larger than the claimed changes.
David Wojick, The 20% is a bit of a wag using comparison to just about everything else I can find to compare with, even the stratospheric temperature change, I have little doubt there is warming in the oceans, that it is closely related to the surface warming of the oceans and that there is a bit of an inertia lag. The magnitude of the warming is not all that exciting though. Trenberth appears to be building it into something more than it is.
The most recent warming of the oceans started in 1976 with the Great Pacific Climate Shift and the reduction in the rate of NH deep ocean warming coincides with Tsonis’ 2000 climate shift. That is natural variability that Trenberth bills as “global warming really kicked in in the mid 70s.” which is horse hockey.
There is some NH divergence between the deep ocean and surface prior to 1976, but that isn’t all that unexpected. Perturbations are good calibration points. Once you have things calibrated, the deep oceans temperature doesn’t change much so the largest error is likely in the depth readings.
Considering all the problems with the measurements and “averaging”, the products look great, the analysts just suck.
Here David, this compares the actual global ocean temperatures from the surface to 2000 meters.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/06/deep-ocean-temperature-versus-surface.html
What they come up after creative reanalysis may be different, but the actual data is not too shabby.
Capt, those are not actual temps they are statistical modeling results. Here is a physics question. If the ocean warming started in 1976 how come the atmosphere did not warm? The sats (which are measurements) say there was no warming 1978-1997, which is where the stat models show steady ocean warming. Did the heat forget to go up?
It is not the data that is bad it is the statistical models. And the difference between volume averaging and area averaging makes the OHC models much worse.
David, ” Here is a physics question. If the ocean warming started in 1976 how come the atmosphere did not warm?”
The oceans have been warming since 1700. The likely best indication in past OHC is the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-0Ljwh9NTkS0/Ubx9dAfZtAI/AAAAAAAAInM/UROadZys8_k/s800/giss%2520and%2520ersst%2520with%2520ipwp%2520from%25200%2520ad.png
Since there is an asymmetrical distribution of land mass plus differences in the hemisphere mixing efficiencies, with the occasional perturbation, Volcanoes etc.thrown in just for grins, the warming has breaks or pseudo-cyclic recurrences. Based on the Oppo proxy reconstruction it has take about 400 years to regain the energy loss during the period following the MWP. That rate is perfectly consistent with the current rate of ocean heat uptake and reversion to the long term “mean”.
The “not warming” based on satellite data is not statistically significant. UAH and RSS have different weightings for the “lower troposphere” and because of the two volcanic events in the beginning of the records, it is unlikely there has been “no warming” during the satellite period.
While you cast doubt at the deep ocean temperatures, I check the data against other data set to see if it makes sense. It does, there is a large margin of error, but not much different than the actual margin of error of the satellite MSU or surface temperature data. The estimates of OHC can have a larger margin of error, but I am comparing apples to apples
The data indicates that “sensitivity” to CO2 from a 1980-2012 baseline is about 0.8 C and the range of natural variability is about +/- 0.8 C using SST as a reference to eliminate the ridiculously noisy land “surface” data.
If you want another check, the average energy of the oceans at 4C is ~334.5 Wm-2 which is approximately equal to the best estimate of DWLR. 3.6 Wm-2 additional atmospheric forcing, whatever the cause, will have ~0.8 C impact on both.
If you want to make it more complicated, you can transfer the 334.5 Wm-2 emitted from ~70% of the “surface” to an idealized surface and have a radiant pseudo-shell energy of 236 Wm-2 then have a ball amazing your friends with the complexity.
The moral of the story though is that “natural variability” was underestimated by 4 and the settling time by about 3.75 centuries.
The magnitude of the warming is not all that exciting though. Trenberth appears to be building it into something more than it is. …
I do not get this argument. To me the magnitude is irrelevant. What is relevant is what would have been its effect on the surface if it had appeared there instead of at 700 meters to 2000 meters? Because inevitably the thing that created the missing heat that has been found in the oceans, the ever enhancing GHE, is still up there slowing down the loss if heat from the earth system, and the place it is going to show up is the haunted surface.
JCH, ” To me the magnitude is irrelevant. What is relevant is what would have been its effect on the surface if it had appeared there instead of at 700 meters to 2000 meters?”
Figure it out. The specific heat capacity of the oceans is about 1000 times greater than the atmosphere. The water/air heat transfer coefficient averages around 100:1. Plus there is another minor issue, the break was closer to 100 meters. Saying that it is 0-2000 meters is a bit of a red herring. The difference between 0-700 and 0-2000 which includes the 0-700 is not statistically significant. There is likely more warming deeper because the change in the deep water supply at the poles, the shifting sea ice extent at BOTH poles and the changing surface wind velocities at BOTH poles, but nothing that appears particularly abnormal, considering El Chicken and Pinatubo followed by the super El Nino.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-hqYPbjDh_8g/UcCT1uFGYiI/AAAAAAAAIqw/lTwofFclI3g/s973/NH%2520sst%2520do.png
Normalized, or as Webster would say, tortured, for ease of comparison.
Figure out what? It went into the storage in the oceans. By vast majority, it’s not coming back out. It coming back out is not what is going to haunt us ’cause it ain’t coming back out.
It’s what created it that is going haunt us. We’re talking about a tiny little fraction of the energy stored in the earth system each day. It can only haunt us if it is no longer stored in the oceans, and instead stored for a thermometer moment on the surface.
BTW David,
Since you mentioned the satellite data,
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-nVs_9UFiZ5U/UcHYjCYF7GI/AAAAAAAAIsM/zoskauefMmY/s945/squiggly%2520mess%2520with%2520curve.png
If you go back to the original black body cavity / radiant shell model that started all this mess, the oceans are the closest thing we have to a black body cavity and the MSU lower stratosphere (since AQUA is wonky) is the closest we have to a measurable radiant shell. Unfortunately, the LS response is inverted, that whole stratospheric cooling thing, but you can see that the ocean temperature data and the lower stratosphere in the Northern Hemisphere are on the same page. Kinda looks like they are approaching an asymptote. Like the battery is recharged or delta Q is getting pretty small. That would be the “equilibrium” that doesn’t really exist but is useful as a reference.
Solomon seems to think that SST doesn’t have much impact on stratospheric cooling. She is right. Total ocean heat content has an impact on stratospheric cooling if you are using a radiant model.
JCH, “It’s what created it that is going haunt us. We’re talking about a tiny little fraction of the energy stored in the earth system each day. It can only haunt us if it is no longer stored in the oceans, and instead stored for a thermometer moment on the surface.”
Right, that tiny fraction is the change in system total capacity, the delta Q part of the “equilibrium” climate “sensitivity”. That increase in energy is just an increase in the average temperature of the “black body” that emits energy which CO2 and other atmospheric components respond to. Since the start of the ocean heat capacity data, the oceans have warmed approximately 0.08 C or about 1/10th the amount the surface has warmed.
Since the start of the period, 1955 to 1980 is the baseline, 0.06 C of the 0.08 C is implied to be due to WMGHGs, but we really don’t know what “average” should be. If you want to estimate the impact of WMGHGs you need to figure out what should be average so you can figure out impact.
Then is the “natural” part going to haunt us about the same or more than the anthropogenic part?
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-0Ljwh9NTkS0/Ubx9dAfZtAI/AAAAAAAAInM/UROadZys8_k/s800/giss%2520and%2520ersst%2520with%2520ipwp%2520from%25200%2520ad.png
On such short time scales as evident in figure 1 of the Balmasda et al paper, it seems that mesoscale eddies rather than the large-scale organized circulations would need to be the mechanism for the heat transfer to deep layers.
This would seem to be the case and the result of a couple of potential mechanisms. Flow over rough bathymetry and surface mixing by wind and waves shown schematically at the WHOI. – http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/viewImage.do?id=4606&aid=2328 –
Here is the entire page that is worth reading – http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/viewArticle.do?id=2328&archives=true
We find that the horizontally averaged turbulent heat flux for our study region, based on the microstructure data now in hand, is in near accord with that derived from the bottom water heat budget. Our results suggest that vertical diffusion in the deep ocean is dominated by turbulent mixing near rough bathymetric structures, a refinement of Munk’s hypothesis that it occurs generally near the bottom. Greater average turbulent fluxes may be achieved at depth than in the upper ocean because a larger fraction of the deep ocean is in close proximity to the bottom. Spatially variable mixing in turn implies existence of horizontal circulations to distribute modified waters from these mixing zones throughout deep basins. Moreover, given the dynamical links between mixing, upwelling, and circulation, our findings hint that the deep gyres predicted by Stommel might be highly distorted in the real ocean.
The scientific community is just beginning to document the intensity and patterns of mixing in the ocean abyss. It is not surprising that mixing in ocean climate models has so far been generally taken as spatially uniform. Much work remains to be done, both observational and theoretical, to fully understand the role of turbulent mixing in the ocean’s thermohaline circulation.
Heat concentrates at the surface because of convection – warm water is buoyant. It is distributed to depth by turbulent dissipation (diffusion is the wrong idea entirely) which is both spatially and temporally variable. There is a third process of cold, deep water upwelling that occurs in a few places on Earth – notably the eastern Pacific. This dilutes the mixed surface layer and results in a cooling of the top few hundred metres.
The oceans drive climate. They are heated by sunlight to 100m metres or so with the heat primarily concentrated at the surface. This both moderates and forces atmospheric temperature. Heat is released and lost through the atmosphere to space. The atmosphere is the heat sink rather than the oceans. Heat released as latent heat forces global land temperatures.
The results suggest that natural ocean temperature variability will lead to variability with amplified magnitudes in surface temperature over continents. However, the study here only considers global mean values, but the effect that natural ocean variability will have on continental temperatures will strongly dependent on the size, pattern, and region of the ocean temperature variability. http://oceanrep.geomar.de/13338/
The difference arises from the difference in water availability over water and land and the resultant differences in atmospheric lapse rates.
Ocean warming over the last decade means very little in the bigger picture. The changes in ocean heat content are driven by changes in the radiant balance at top of atmosphere. This in turn in driven by changes in solar intensity and much more by changes in cloud cover related to secular changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation. The warming in the past decade is a result of changes in cloud cover changing reflected short wave. I use this graph because it has convenient trend lines and shows the derivation of net flux. The y-axis is in W/m2.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif.html?sort=3&o=107
Here’s one from Norman Loeb that is well worth spending some time staring at to see the nature of the ‘lost heat’.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/AdvancesinUnderstandingTop-of-AtmosphereRadiationVariability-Loebetal2011.png.html?sort=3&o=39
The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) Earth radiation budget (ERB) is determined from the difference between how much energy is absorbed and emitted by the planet. Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture. http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf
The bigger change seems to have occurred pre-CERES around the turn of the century related to the 1998/2001 climate shift. Regardless – the surface temperature seems unlikely to increase for a while yet as the cool mode of the Pacific Decadal Variation intensifies.
It may someday be possible reveal the obvious mathematically. UCSB researchers studied it by filling cylinders with water and then heating the water from below and cooling the water from above to better understand the dynamics of atmospheric circulation.
The phenomena — common in nature — is known as swirling vorticies. So, maybe it will someday be possible to use mathematics to demonstrate conclusively what everyone already knows–i.e., that Trenbreth is never going to find the global warming that he is looking for in the deep recesses of the ocean.
It is simply is not there. It can’t be there. It’s not there because no matter how much AGW True Believers may wish otherwise global cooling is not proof of global warming. It is however a fact in the real world that, given differences in ocean temperature, cold surface water sinks to the bottom.
In our water world with the Earth rotating on its axis with warm water at the bottom of the ocean, why will cold water on the top sink? It is the difference in the temperature itself from top to bottom that is a ‘causal factor’ that drives the flow. Let’s hope that someday the mathematics of ‘swirling natural phenomena’ will help contribute to a global politic where government science authoritarians of a secular, socialist Education Industrial Complex will be prevented from acting like persecutors of Galileo. Let’s hope better math skills will prevent anti-capitalist government bureaucracies like the EPA — based on the superstition and dogma of communist ideology — from destroying the country’s free enterprise, capitalist economy because they refuse to admit cold water sinks to the bottom.
Likely, any deep ‘missing heat’ will return at the end of the Holocene. If it exists, it’s a layer of fat for the hibernation.
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IF the “missing heat” were real (and that’s a BIG “if”), it would be “teeny weeny” when taken over the entire deep ocean (measured in ten-thousandths of a degree, if we had devices that could measure this reliably and comprehensively over a period of time that is statistically significant).
To postulate that this infinitesimal amount of heat will miraculously jump back out of the depths of the ocean to heat up a much warmer atmosphere (as Trenberth has done) takes several leaps of faith (and a bit of desperation).
This is not serious science.
It’s plain voodoo.
Max
Nobody said it was going to jump back out.
“The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later,” says NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, the lead author. “The reprieve we’ve had from warming temperatures in the last few years will not continue. It is critical to track the build-up of energy in our climate system so we can understand what is happening and predict our future climate.” …
Here is Kevin Trenberth’s figure showing heat in the 0-300 (gray) and 0-700 (blue) oceanic layers. Using distance for the ‘Y-axis’, you can calculate that 0-300 m gives a change of 3 units of heat in five years, whereas the 0-700m layer heats by 7.5 units. This means that the 300-700m layer heats some 4.5 units. Thus, 0-300m heated at 1 unit per 100m per unit time and 300-700m heated at 1.125 units per 100m per unit time.
All the heat comes into the system at <10 m, so heat is traveling from 0-10 m to 400-700 m more rapidly than it is traveling to 10-300 m.
I find this to be thermodynamically impossible.
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/deepoceanJPEG_zpsc6585990.jpg
This the esteemed Doctor Moolten defends, and the equally esteemed Doctor Pirila doubts.
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DocMartyn’s argument is essentially arguing whether Little Billy ate 10 or 9 apples because Little Tommy said he was allowed only 9.
He got squelched over at RealClimate on the fact that he is arguing over noise http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/ocean-heat-content-model.html
In the link above, you can see this discrepancy as well, but it doesn’t repudiate the theory of diffusive transport of heat.
Hey Webby,
you finally got to a level even YOU might be able to deal with!!
“Little Billy ate 10 or 9 apples because Little Tommy said he was allowed only 9.”
Better graph that up for us before Peak Orl wipes out our power and ya can’t post no more!! 8>)
“He got squelched over at RealClimate on the fact that he is arguing over noise”
I was ‘squelched’ over at realclimate because it is run by enviro-Nazi’s who remove posts which indicate that their analysis is wrong.
Someone with half a working brain cell, such as yourself, can clip the end of the graph and measure that the heating from 400-700m is greater than for 0-300m. Hand waving about noise just means that the plot should have been presented with confidence intervals; plots without CI’s are assumed to have CI the width of the line.
Trenberth’s language seems wrong and therefore confusing. I think what he means will come back to haunt us is not the actual heat in the deep ocean. What will come back to haunt us is what created that heat, and that will become obvious once deep ocean warming flattens, which it will inevitably do. Then the additional heat being created and sequestered in the deep ocean will instead show up on the surface, and the paws will go paws up.
The deep oceans will only release significant amounts of stored heat when the imbalance at the TOA reverses.
Draw me a picture, please.
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any picture will be an optical illusion.
JCH, you write “and the paws will go paws up.”
How long do we have to wait for the pause to cease, and temperatures start rising at a rate commensurate with CAGW, before we conclude that the pause is not going to cease?
Because OHC is going up in the deep oceans, you can wait if you want, but you’re wasting your time.
You can wait for the end of the Holocene for the heat to come back. You know it yourself.
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JCH, you write “Because OHC is going up in the deep oceans, you can wait if you want, but you’re wasting your time.”
You have not answered my question. How long do we have to wait for SURFACE temperatures to start rising at a rate commensurate with CAGW, before we conclude that they are never going to start rising again? If the heat stays in the deep oceans, there is no reason to suppose it will have any effect on surface temperatures.
The heat that is stored in the deep oceans will remain, in preponderance, stored for a very long time.
Perhaps you think in a dynamic system deep ocean warming will be ceaseless. Just like it wasn’t in the past.
JCH seems to think it is a ‘very long time’ to the end of the Holocene. But Marcott, but Marcott.
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JCH, you write “Perhaps you think in a dynamic system deep ocean warming will be ceaseless. Just like it wasn’t in the past.”
I have no idea what you are talking about. Since you haven’t a clue in the world how long the pause is going to last, it seems reasonable to think that it will last for 10,000 years. And in which case, there will never be a problem with CAGW for any of us
I was hoping he’d understand with paper and pencil.
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Kyle Swanson said the flattening will end around 2020.
Kyle Swanson for the Crayola Poster.
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JCH, you write “Kyle Swanson said the flattening will end around 2020.”
Assuming that is true, would you agree to the following. If CAGW is real, by 2100, global surface temperatures need to have risen by n C above what they were in 2000; whatever flavor of the day n is in numeric terms. So the average rate of rise to surface temperatures, following the cessation of the pause in 2020, must be n/0.8 degrees per century, since the full n C rise must occur in 80 years. Do you agree?
OK, Kyle Swanson is declared ineligible, and I regret my last cartoon. I misunderstood your ‘flattening’. If it ends around 2020, when presumably the oscillations part company, it will have demonstrated small anthro CO2 effect. The slope of the next rise will be critical to observe, to compare with the three previous rises, described so elegantly by Phil Jones to Roger Harribin.
This presumes that the shown 60 year cycle persists, which it probably won’t forever, and that the sun doesn’t get into the act with a mechanism correlated with sunspots.
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Kyle Swanson said this in a realclimate post – http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/warminginterrupted-much-ado-about-natural-variability/
The paper it is based on talks about an indeterminate period.
There is nothing to suggest either that the pattern of warming to cooling to warming will be repeated in the 21st Century. The natural pattern has to peak sometime – and move from cooler to yet cooler. The opening of the Arctic, the decrease in solar activity and the propensity of ENSO to shift from El Padre (currently) to La Madre (between the Medieval optimum and the current warm period – big momma ruled the little ice age) modes are all suggestive of shifts to cooler conditions.
WRT arctic ice.
However, the atmospheric circulation change linked to the reduction of sea ice shows much broader meridional meanders in mid-latitudes and clearly different interannual variability than the classical Arctic Oscillation. This circulation change results in more frequent episodes of blocking patterns that lead to increased cold surges over large parts of northern continents. Moreover, the increase in atmospheric water vapor content in the Arctic region during late autumn and winter driven locally by the reduction of sea ice provides enhanced moisture sources, supporting increased heavy snowfall in Europe during early winter, and the northeastern and mid-west United States during winter. We conclude that the recent decline of Arctic sea ice has played a critical role in recent cold and snowy winters. http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/pnas.pdf
Increased snow translates to the potential to build ice sheets when the orbital dynamics allow or increased snowmelt and the reduction of thermohaline circulation. Both have significant implications for climate.
JCH,
Is this really you? Your comments on OHC are not coherent.
He flattened me with two uses for ‘flattening’.
==========
When ‘that heat’ comes up to the surface it will radiate out into space within a few hours. Where I live, the max day temp=28C then it goes down to 18C during the night. Where does all that energy go? Out towrds space.
This myth of the heat hiding in the oceans is similar to the ‘here be dragons’ of ye olde geographers.
If the “heat” comes up from the oceans i fear we will be freezing.
The deep oceans are only 4 to 5 centigrades, so i wonder how that very cold water could heat anything.
Perfeck. All that missing heat is pushing up cold from the deep and freezing us. I’m not sure I like this way of laying in a supply of energy for the ending of the Holocene.
===================
The deep oceans are colder then that – I think I remember something around 0 to 1°C. Saltwater has the minimum volume at lower temperature.
Judith, good point: a scary scenario is heat being sequestered at shallow depth, as that could readily lead to a sharp uptick in sea surface temperatures later which would give us a sudden burst of warming. This has been the basic critique of the ipcc model derived estimate–the models are well fit to the 1980s surge in temperature but dont have the fidelity to ocean processes to rule on whether that period of warming was average, below average, or above average. We could well have experienced just such a sudden release of heat during that period following years of cooling.
a picture
another picture
dog acting out the dead pause: paws up
Your pictures are static and the dog antic. Where’s the dynamic cartoon for your 11:27 AM?
=============
two other books, both by Professor Henk Dijkstra:
Nonlinear Climate Dynamics
(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521879175/ref=pe_174270_30559300_nrn_title#reader_0521879175) Just Released.
and
Nonlinear Physical Oceanography: A Dynamical Systems Approach to the Large Scale Ocean Circulation and El Niño
(http://www.amazon.com/Nonlinear-Physical-Oceanography-Circulation-Oceanographic/dp/140202262X/ref=la_B001JS3W1G_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1371570384&sr=1-2#reader_140202262X) Second Edition of this one is expensive.
Rather than having a discussion about the ocean heat content, there should be a discussion of the precision of these measurements. First of all the heat is not measured, temperature is. With a heat capacity of 1000x that of the atmosphere, small changes in temperature (on the order of the accuracy of the thermocouples) can have huge changes in heat In fact Bob Tisdale indicated that the increased amount of heat going to the depths of the ocean beyond 700m is not a result if differences in temperature changes but of doubling the mass temperature changes are applied to. So before we get wrapped up in the heat, it is possible to look at delta T to see if we even have enough precision to begin to draw any conclusions.
The data looks pretty good, interpretation is the problem.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-zb_S-rNwY6U/UcCTt67GytI/AAAAAAAAIqk/l80lZeuG2TI/s857/SH%2520sst%2520do.png
If you normalize the deep ocean temperatures instead of the OHC you can compare that with the SST. The deep ocean responses a bit different to perturbations since it is buffering surface heat loss, but the general trends are about the same in the Southern hemisphere.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-hqYPbjDh_8g/UcCT1uFGYiI/AAAAAAAAIqw/lTwofFclI3g/s973/NH%2520sst%2520do.png
In the Northern Hemisphere there is a little divergence early, but finish nicely. A little bit different responses to volcanoes, but there is not a huge change in temperature.
The response to the 98 Nino is pretty interesting, but on the whole the OHC thing is pretty much a strawman.
Sean | June 18, 2013 at 12:03 pm |
Sean, I’ve done that exact analysis in a post called The Layers of Meaning in Levitus. See in particular Figure 4.
The short answer is that according to Levitus, the upper layer (0-100m) has warmed the most, about 0.3°C in forty years. The middle layer (100-700m) has warmed about 0.1°C over the same period.
Finally, the deepest layer measured by Levitus (700-2000m) has warmed the least, about 0.04°C since 1975.
This is subject to the usual caveats about the huge difficulty in resolving the differences and errors between three measuring systems (reversible drop thermometers in scientific expeditions, expendable bathythermographs [XBTs], and the Argo float system). Given that, and the fact that the measurements are near the limits of resolution of the measuring devices, I don’t put too much weight on the Levitus data. I’ve discussed some of these issues in the post Decimals of Precision, although there are many more.
But as in much of climate science, it’s what we have to work with, so we have to make the best of it …
w.
If the excess “missing” heat was somehow transferred to/absorbed by the deep oceans during the “pause, why wasn’t the heat similarly transferred/absorbed prior to that? Why won’t future heat be similarly transferred/absorbed/magically teleported to the deep sea?
How much heat could the deep ocean, with a much greater relative density to the atmosphere, hold without appreciable changes in surface climate? How does cold water below 700m at anywhere from 0C to 4.5C warm upper levels of water at much higher average temps, let alone the atmosphere? (I tried to find reported deep sea temps, good luck with that. The closest I could find was this, which has references that are all over the map – http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2007/LilyLi.shtml)
Climate scientists don’t have a clue how the oceans work. They don’t have a clue how clouds work. They don’t have a clue how the climate works. And they sure as hell don’t have a clue how an economy works.
But, Gad, are they and the politicians glued together.
==================
A nest has fallen to the ground.
Though cunningly made it could not withstand
The sudden Spring storm that brought it down
From its niche in a tall pine.
See how meticulously its maker has woven
Each blade of grass in and out. Each
Brought in by air and glued together
With cobweb by the small beak, then
Shaped by the bird’s round breast
And inlaid with its soft down. Already
The ants are investigating the broken
Egg-shells scattered on the ground.
BC
You post a bunch of vague questions that you cannot find answers for using google – and then summarily declare that climate scientists are clueless about economics.
Dunning & Kruger, meet GaryM.
No, I post questions that I have seen climate scientists admit they don’t know the answers to (except on climate and economics in general, that’s all mine). By all means, link to the answers you have found.
The demonstration that ‘climate science’ bought into the farcical Stern Report is clue enough. And vice versa with the politicians. Glued, superglued. Who will rid me of these troublesome fastenings?
==============
Of course climate scientists are, by and large, clueless about economics. Just like chemists are, by and large, clueless bout physics. What is your point?
”
By all means, link to the answers you have found.
”
Why? – So that GaryM can deign to render another personal opinion?
Funny that it is always up to someone else produce evidence.
Do you honestly believe that your personal incredulity of climate science is the least bit troublesome for anyone but you?
Burden-of-proof can be a bitch.
You seem to miss an extremely important point; there is incredulity about catastrophe not fundamental effect. You conflate the two at your own peril.
==================
”
You seem to miss an extremely important point; there is incredulity about catastrophe not fundamental effect.
”
So what?
If your incredulity were important, you would actually do some science and publish the results.
Instead, you strike skeptical poses on a blog.
See the difference?
I’m incredulous? No, the thermometers are incredulous.
============
Dunning & Kruger, meet kim.
The last refuge of the uncurious.
===========
heinrich,
thanks for personally demonstrating the Dunning & Kruger efffect for us unwashed masses. It was educational.
The word is “incurious.”
heinrich, I’m uncredulous about that.
Joanna
Yeah.
Climate scientists are clueless about economics, for sure.
But the climate scientists that wrote this paper are clueless about climate science.
It’s trash bin material.
Max
Sorry for misspelling your name, Johanna
Max
so heinrich,
what exactly do you do? besides acting like a rude dolt here.
Heinrich,
How about answering just one? I’ll break them down for you.
1. If the excess “missing” heat was somehow transferred to/absorbed by the deep oceans during the “pause,” why wasn’t the heat similarly transferred/absorbed prior to that?
2. Why won’t future heat be similarly transferred/absorbed/magically teleported to the deep sea?
3. How much heat could the deep ocean, with a much greater relative density to the atmosphere, hold without appreciable changes in surface climate?
4. How does cold water below 700m at anywhere from 0C to 4.5C warm upper levels of water at much higher average temps, let alone the atmosphere?
Actually, I would settle for evidence that these questions have even been asked by climate scientists, let alone answered. (Leaving out the “magically teleported” bit of course.) There must still be an iota of curiosity in some climate scientist somewhere that isn’t related to finding out how much worse it is than we thought..
Just one itty bitty little link. Surely that can’t be too much to ask? If you can’t answer, don’t worry. I would be astounded if you could.
And I would be happy to be put in my place by any of the other CAGWers who want to slap me down for my snarkiness by posting the obvious answers to such simple questions, with a link to the respective research. (I am going out on a snark limb here because the “finding” of the missing heat is such a recent phenomenon, and has been so poorly argued, that I am fairly certain the underlying research that would answer these questions does not exist, or the arguments would be much more coherent.)
1) The relative heat transfers between two layers mean that if you warm the lower one, then the heat flux upwards is greater than it was, so (all things being equal) the surface will maintain a higher steady state temperature. This is sort of like the GHG photonic recycling mechanism, any change in heat fluxes will affect temperature.
2) The cold water at the bottom got their from cold polar brines sinking, flowing along the bottom, displacing the slightly less dense, slightly warmer, brines that were deposited earlier. Think of a giant layer cake made by placing a fresh layer at the bottom of the cake as the top layer is eaten.
Less polar inputs mean that the overall temperature gets a little bit higher as heat slow trickles downward from the surface, but ‘cold’ isn’t added so quickly by input of ‘cold’ polar brines.
3) The lineshape of temperature vs. depth look like a second order profile, then a very long 4 degrees line.
You question makes a lot of sense, but I don’t think is answerable at the moment. The solubilities of carbonates and silicates are pressure dependent and temperature dependent. I suspect that putting heat in such a system would lead to some strange phase change effects, where heat converts solvated salts into particulates, which drop and then redissolve. A heat input may just cause a subtle change in the gradients of salts in the depths as the solvated/non-solvated transitions become exo/endothermic.
4) Slight warming at the bottom will cause slight warming at the top. It should be easy to see the thermal expansion.
”
Just one itty bitty little link.
”
Here you go.
heinrich,
Thanks, that’s climate science in a nutshell.
feligs, the cat
The surface radiation balance has more do to with ocean heat gain than the TOA. Surface radiation measurements from 1992 to 2012 have shown an increase in 3 w/m per decade of shortwave (global brightening) vs a 2 w/m increase in downwelling longwave. The flat global ocean SST since 2005 despite the increased sw imbalance tells me that the ocean is upwelling cold water through Ekman pumping which increases with surface wind increases associated with La Ninas and the associated Walker circulation. Likely the most important component of upwelling cold water is the Antarctic circumpolar current which is currently at record levels resulting in an anomalous cold Southern Ocean. The extreme current also is also encouraging the dowelling of extratropical ocean heat at the convergent zone between the two oceans. The ocean heat gain below 700 meters is in my opinion the result of cold water upwelling more than heat entering. The record ACC is associated with a record positive SAM or anomalous pressure difference between Antarctica and the southern hemisphere extratropics. The record Antarctica sea ice creates an albedo feed back that is likely reinforcing the ACC. Therefore we have a situation where the ACC is bringing cold water to the surface faster than the AMOC can bury the heat.
I do not believe it is a coincidence that the global SST stall corresponds with the drop in Southern ocean SST.
Would not the quantity of upwelling cold water have to be offset by down welling of a roughly equivalent amount of warmer water?
I believe it takes about 4500 years for equilibrium to be achieved between the two poles for the great ocean conveyor belt. However I saw one paper that claimed an initial response on the order of six years.
The six year response to the drop in Southern Ocean SST is related to Kelvin wave propagation. Kelvin waves are slowly propagating ridges of upwelling cold water that run into the west coast of equatorial South America and West Africa likely reinforcing the adjacent cold water that is currently occurring as Bob Tisdale has pointed out in Nina 1.2. Cold equatorial water off West Africa is currently very La Nina like. The waves then transport cold water up the coasts into the northern Hemisphere. http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom_new.gif
The Southern Ocean finished its decline in SST in 2007 so might we expect a similar drop in global SST six years later or about now due to Kelvin waves set off by the sudden drop in Southern ocean SST?
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/14-southern.png
I do not believe that the measurement of fluxes inward or outward have measured with a standard deviation of +/- 1 w/m2, so the numbers you quote mean nothing.
There are a few recent posts at Lucia’s blackboard regarding recent claims by Trenberth that do not look very good for him.
Kevin Trenberth damned himself with thermometers when he ordered ‘Full Speed Ahead’ after the ARGO torpedoes failed to document deep transport of heat.
================
There were no AGRO torpedoes aimed at that target so there was no failure. Willis thinks the answer could be teased out of data. Nobody appears to be doing that. Perhaps because it would be a total waste of time given the heat is down there.
Sure they didn’t measure deep heat, but they also didn’t measure it being transported deep, right through the depths of their purview. I’d tease Josh Willis, but feel sorry for him, as he must be one of the most conflicted men on earth.
==============
No, ARGO made no attempt to detect the transport. It can’t fail to detect what it was not assigned to detect.
Deep Heat. That’s Pachauri’s next novel. He wants to resurrect Linda Lovelace to play the lead in the movie.
The data is there, JCH; you know it yourself.
==============
Please, JCH, you told me yourself that Josh Willis thinks he can tease it out of the data.
==============
Sure, Josh Willis can torture anything he wants to out of the data.
Right now, he’s more tortured than torturing. Have some pity.
=======================
Why would he bother? It’s warmer down there. It came from up here. It’s like you’re claiming somebody can’t be fat because their mouth was empty at every observation.
Despite a lack of observation, a lot of freakin’ ice cream went down the hole, not up one.
kim
Umm…is that a “torturee” as opposed to a “torturor” (in the legal sense)?
Max
Roger Pielke makes the point that heat is ‘sequestered’ in the oceans.
Is it wrong to believe that the calculated RF from CO2 doubling ( 3.7 W/m^2)
is actually too high because it represents forcing for the troposphere,
but some of that energy ‘leaks’ downward into the oceans and upward through tropospheric-stratospheric exchange?
Both processes mean the true forcing is less than the calculated.
And both processes should increase as tropospheric temperature increases.
Short answer. The land gets all the excess heat, while the ocean SST gets only half as the rest is sequestered by effective diffusion into deeper waters. A straightforward model which reflects empirical observations.
@whut,
diffusion, is that what happens to facts that enter your consciousness??
As the carnival barker says:
“Now ya sees it, now ya don’t”
Look what the kuhnkat dragged in. Did you get a science education yet?
“Travesty”, in bitter air
Did find some heat that wasn’t there
It wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish it’d go away
+1
Verse #2
It’s missing still, oh me!
But how about the deep blue sea
This hiding place could be ideal
No one can prove it isn’t real!
alex | June 18, 2013 at 11:41 am | Reply
“When ‘that heat’ comes up to the surface it will radiate out into space within a few hours. Where I live, the max day temp=28C then it goes down to 18C during the night. Where does all that energy go? Out towrds space.”
Not only does it do this at your house, it does it everywhere.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/17/an-analysis-of-night-time-cooling-based-on-ncdc-station-record-data/
Judith, thanks for posting the relevant chapter of your book. Ignoring the heat re- emergence thermodynamics problem you point to, there is also no plausible mesogyre mechanism for the initial transport to depth.
Heat moves three ways: radiation, conduction, convection. As you point out radiation at depth is ruled out. Conduction is from hot to cold. That is certainly possible, but as many have pointed out, Trenberth’s missing heat would have had to be present in warmer upper layers first, and Argo does not find it there. (Pielke’s main point).
That leaves convection. Things sink (to lower depths) when they are denser. Ocean waters get denser in two ways. They can be colder. Or they can be saltier. The mixed layer and the thermocline guarantee that pockets of colder water seldom form above warmer water. And to sink below 700 meters, it would have to be very cold water indeed as those depths are typically around 2-3C. That leaves saltier, which happens with arctic ice formation in the wintertime (since is is fresh, the adjacent water is saltier) leading to the thermohaline circulation. Ah, but Trenberth complains that arctic ice has been diminishing in volume (hence more rapid summer melting and areal coverage) during the last decade when heat transfer to the depths allegedly increased. It should have slowed.
His model driven deep ocean heat lacks a mechanism. His deep heat is higher than others have estimated (NCDC), and is arguably within the instrumentation error or Argo thermometers. On balance, one has to judge his explanation for the pause dubious at best.
Rud,
Here’s what I think happens.
Tropical waters warm, and collect at the equator. At some point they’ve collected enough heat to alter winds, currents, whatever. This takes decades(?) to charge up.
Something triggers currents which start to push warm waters to the poles. In the Arctic, this causes a large amount of ice to melt. Open warm water radiates huge amounts of heat into space, that ice wouldn’t.
But the down welling water after it’s cooled is still warmer than normal, and flows into the deep ocean. While I think the oceans are very under sampled, we detect this added warmer water as the “missing warming”.
As the tropical warm water cools, the mechanisms that cause this repeating cycle “switches” off, and goes back to “charge” mode. This cycles takes 60-80 years, and would cycle time would depend on how quickly the waters warm that control the cycle.
Rud,
I fully agree. By the way, the NODC (Levitus) data for Argo only over the period 2005 through 2012 yields an average heat flux into the ocean of approximately 0.47 +/- 0.08 W/m^2 to a depth of 2000m. This is significantly less than Trenberth’s 0.84 W/m^2 for the 2000’s and, in my opinion, not enough to account for the “missing heat” needed for the GCMs. At some point the climate-science community is going to have to take seriously the fact that their model sensitivities are too high.
If Trenberth thinks he has found his missing heat, when is he going to find his missing rise in sea-levels. Or has he already done so, and it went over my head?
The sea level is half way up a duck, but Kevin’s is a decoy and now laden with leaden pellets, sinking lower with each shotgun blast.
============
Judith have you seen this article/paper about Moon atmospheric tides regulating amplitudes and timing of ENSO events?
It’s an interesting hypothesis and perhaps another factor to consider.
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/06/can-the-moon-change-our-climate-can-tides-in-the-atmosphere-solve-the-mystery-of-enso/
What missing heat are you talking about? A diffusional process does not contain itself to strict boundaries unless the constraints are strong. With all the eddy diffusion and upwelling processes occurring, it is straightforward to model the system as an effective diffusion process.
Since that Guemas paper is behind a firewall, see this blog posting I wrote to model the empirical observations of Levitus and Balmaseda
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/ocean-heat-content-model.html
WebhubTelescope,
So is there a triggering set of circumstances or events that causes, or can cause heat to not sink in the ocean, and instead go into the atmosphere? If that is a dumb question – I just don’t have a more intelligent way of asking. And what danger is there – if any – if the ocean temperature is rising?
Ocean temp is not historically measurable in some way is it?
Ron, Diffusion is a random walk process. In this case, excess heat can randomly walk up or down through vertical stratum in the ocean. About half of the time , it will move up, and if it is near enough to the surface it can exit by either latent heat of evaporation, radiation, or convection.
That is the kind of first-order reasoning supported by math that my college physics instilled in me. Most of the skeptics and deniers that comment here hate to see this kind of argument. Reducing the FUD is Necessary because the war on science is never ending.
This first order reasoning for eddy diffusion only works in conditions of neutral stability, not if there is a very stable density gradient (e.g. pycnocline). Molecular diffusion in the ocean is enormously slow.
If the ocean was like a northern latitude freshwater lake, no question that the entirety of the volume would turn over come winter. That would be a complete effective diffusional mixing.
But since this is saltwater, that doesn’t happen and we have to infer that the diffusional mixing slows down eventually with depth.
My calculations show that 60% of the heat is contained within the top 700 meters, and 40% of the heat in water deeper than that is inferred if the effective diffusion coefficient is maintained.
Is it 40% or perhaps 20% if the diffusivity starts to slow? Or are there occasional large upwellings that act like an effective diffusivity? Water is mobile, the solid earth isn’t.
WHT, have a read of http://www.princeton.edu/~gkv/papers/Gnana_etal-oceenergy05.pdf
You might learn a bit
Thanks for the ref.
Here is another very important one that mentions the key finding.
D. Dommenget, “The ocean’s role in continental climate variability and change,” Journal of Climate, vol. 22, no. 18, pp. 4939–4952, 2009.
The observed land-sea warming ratio is 2.1. This is essentially saying the land warms 2X as fast as the ocean. In other words, 1/2 the heat is entering the deeper ocean, which precludes it from raising the temperature of the surface.
It is all very consistent.
If you have the land temperature and the ocean temperature, you can compose the global temperature from the relationship:
Where f=1/2 and p_o and p_l are fractions of ocean area (0.71) and land area (0.29).
This works amazingly well.
The results suggest that natural ocean temperature variability will lead to variability with amplified magnitudes in Tsurf over continents. However, the study here only considers global mean values, but the effect that natural ocean variability will have on continental temperatures will strongly dependent on the size, pattern, and region of the ocean temperature variability. Many natural modes of SST variability (e.g., El Nino) are far away from the main continents and often the patterns are multipoles, with positive and negative temperature variability at different region at the same time, which may cancel each other out once they reach the land. Furthermore, the amplification may be related to evaporation over oceans, which is clearly a function of the mean temperature of the oceans and will therefore have clear regional differences.
D. Dommenget, “The ocean’s role in continental climate variability and change,” Journal of Climate, vol. 22, no. 18, pp. 4939–4952, 2009.
Which I introduced you to yesterday. The oceans force temperature over land. They accumulate heat which is released as latent heat adding to heat over land. The differences in temperature is related to the difference in water availability over land and oceans and therefore lapse rates.
Oceans are the heat source and atmosphere the sink. Write that down as big dave would say.
As usual you get the wrong end of the stick and go off on some absurdly simple minded algebraic excursion.
CH, check out what happens when the land and ocean are both forced strongly. The land warms faster than the ocean. What is this situation, you ask. You may know it as summer. There are examples every year.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/DIETMARDOMMENGET_zps939fe12e.png.html?sort=3&o=0
Oceans force land temperatures even in summer.
CH, it turns out the sun forces it more strongly than the ocean in the summer, or do you honestly believe that the ocean has to start warming before the continents can warm up. The clue is which one lags: not the land. You even have your seasonal mechanistic argument somewhat distorted by your belief system. To recap, in the summer, the additional solar forcing drives the land, with a lower thermal inertia, to warm up faster than the ocean. In fact, any uniformly distributed forcing would do the same. It’s just thermal inertia. Do you really want to argue with that?
The chef will never find anything interesting as he swims against the tide of scientific reasoning.
The results suggest that natural ocean temperature variability will lead to variability with amplified magnitudes in Tsurf over continents. However, the study here only considers global mean values, but the effect that natural ocean variability will have on continental temperatures will strongly dependent on the size, pattern, and region of the ocean temperature variability. Many natural modes of SST variability (e.g., El Nino) are far away from the main continents and often the patterns are multipoles, with positive and negative temperature variability at different region at the same time, which may cancel each other out once they reach the land. Furthermore, the amplification may be related to evaporation over oceans, which is clearly a function of the mean temperature of the oceans and will therefore have clear regional differences.
D. Dommenget, “The ocean’s role in continental climate variability and change,” Journal of Climate, vol. 22, no. 18, pp. 4939–4952, 2009.
If you are going to engage – refer to actual science rather than whatever is swirling around the fetid swamps you call brains.
WHT, now that you have the link, check out the vertical temperature gradients.
Phattie.
Heat does not respond to temperature gradients. Thermal excitation is not a charged particle that can respond to electric fields, nor is it a mass that can respond to gravitational fields. The gradient is a result of the movement of heat, not necessarily the cause of the movement of heat.
If you can start to understand this, you are well on your way to becoming a physicist. Go ask Pekka.
Good luck.
webbie, if you cut the snark for a few seconds you might see that that’s exactly the point I was trying to make.
What you need to ask yourself is, if the heat moves the way you seem to think it does then why is the thermal gradient shaped the way it is, especially seeing as the surface layer heat has had literally billions of years to diffuse into the depths.
These kinds of gradients are the result of nearly equivalent flows balanced in each direction.
The idea behind effective diffusion is that there is not just one diffusion coefficient, but that there is a range in coefficients and you use specific uncertainty quantification arguments to arrive at that range.
Clearly we see these occasional burps or upwellings from the deep. Because of conservation laws, these have to exchange heat spatially. And to first order, one can describe thus as a low probability random walk with a temporarily high diffusivity.
This is how nature operates, energy is dispersed across many scales and it is up to us to stochastically describe this disorder.
I gave it a shot in the blog post I have referenced and it matches the data fairly well. It will be a useful formulation in years to come. If you don’t like it, tough nougies.
You obviously don’t spend sleepless nights then pondering the physical properties of water – like why ice floats.
The issue is eddy ‘diffusion’ (which is really turbulence) is highly damped across the pycnocline. Storms (notably hurricanes) cause substantial entrainment of deep water in the mixed layer, then as the weather calms a shallower mixed layer forms and the heat is sequestered below the mixed layer (but still above 700 m). Getting heat down to below 700 m by eddy diffusion isnt really going to work, which is the problem here (read the sections in my thermo text linked to in the main post)
I don’t understand why simple conduction wouldn’t move heat downwards in the ocean. As I pointed out above, the surface (0-100m) has warmed the most (0.3°C in 75 years). The middle 100-700m layer has warmed less than the surface (0.1°C) and the lowest 700-2000m layer has warmed the least (0.4°C).
Even if there were no winds or currents at all, this combination of different warming rates is explainable by conduction, no? I know that eddy diffusion is way low at depth, but that just make conduction more efficient, doesn’t it? What am I missing here?
Thanks (again) for your textbook, by the the way.
w
Chapter 4 of the 2010 ozone assessment has some very detailed discussion of the so called heat transport problem and the application of mesoscale physics to coarse grained ocean models.
(and vice versa )eg
Since we can attribute much of the poleward shift
in the surface wind stress to ozone forcing (Gillett and
Thompson, 2003; Cai and Cowan, 2007; Son et al., 2009b;
Fogt et al., 2009), we can infer that ozone forcing in the
1970–2000 period contributes to the observed subsurface
warming in the Southern Ocean. That is, the stratospheric
ozone-induced change in the Southern Ocean opposes the
effects of global warming of the Earth’s surface; greenhouse
gas forcing warms the ocean surface and increases
high latitude precipitation, which stratifies the ocean surface
and thereby reduces oceanic mixing of heat (and, by
extension, the uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide). In
the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory coupled models
CM2.0 and CM2.1, Russell et al. (2006) find that the
enhanced Ekman transport signal associated with positive
Southern Annular Mode-related wind trends counteracts
this and contributes to an increased heat uptake.
The issues are also constrained by our understanding of the physics , the mathematical and its philosophical connotations, where the inclusion of analogy muddies the waters, and voyages into mesocale resolution is uncharted waters where dragons sleep and laws become saws.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/nlin/0305006.pdf
Willis Eschenbach | June 18, 2013 at 4:36 pm | I don’t understand why simple conduction wouldn’t move heat downwards in the ocean. As I pointed out above, the surface (0-100m) has warmed the most (0.3°C in 75 years). The middle 100-700m layer has warmed less than the surface (0.1°C) and the lowest 700-2000m layer has warmed the least (0.4°C).
Even if there were no winds or currents at all, this combination of different warming rates is explainable by conduction, no? I know that eddy diffusion is way low at depth, but that just make conduction more efficient, doesn’t it? What am I missing here?
Water is a poor conductor of heat – called an insulator not conductor – mostly from its great heat capacity; it takes a lot of energy to heat up water, takes longer to heat up and so takes longer to cool down.
But there’s more to it than that, because water on heated will expand and become lighter and so rise which is how we get our big circulation currents in the ocean, convection currents as denser colder water sinks beneath, (just as do the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen of our atmosphere where we call them winds). And water heated more will evaporate, phase change, so in this also is using that heat energy for itself not passing it on.
Because liquids and gases are fluids they move easily in expanding and condensing, becoming less dense so lighter and more dense so heavier under gravity they rise and sink – they move heat by convection as they expand and rise.
Conduction is the heat transfer processes of solids whose movement is restricted by being more densely packed together.
Conduction is the heat transfer processes of solids whose movement is restricted by their molecules being more densely packed together.
Myrrh | June 18, 2013 at 6:51 pm |
Myrrh, my friend, I fear that is mostly misinformation.
First, heat capacity, the amount of energy necessary to warm a given mass of a substance by 1°C, is measured in joules per degree. It has a close relative, specific heat, which is the amount of energy necessary to heat one gram of a substance by 1°C.
It is a different measurement from thermal conductivity (the rate at which heat passes through a given material), which is an intensive property measured in watts per meter per degree. So your claim that water is a poor conductor because of its high heat capacity is not true at all.
For example, the specific heat of graphite is about 50% higher than that of diamond. But the thermal conductivity of diamond is about 800 times that of graphite. In other words, the two qualities are not related.
Second, water is not an insulator by any means. It has about the same thermal conductivity as concrete or brick, about 0.6 W/m/°K, and I don’t know of anyone insulating their house with concrete. An insulator like fiberglass or cork has a conductivity less than a tenth of that, about 0.04 W/m2/°K.
Now, if you heated a block of concrete the size of the ocean from the top for 75 years, you’d expect the heat to penetrate down a ways … so why not for the ocean?
(I do understand that the ocean is constantly circulating, in a most complex manner. However, wouldn’t heat still flow (in general and in overall average) from warm to cold, that is to say, from the ocean surface to 2000 metres depth?
Conductivities here. Turns out that the conductivity of ice is about three times that of water.
w.
Myrrh | June 18, 2013 at 7:04 pm |
Again, not true at all. In addition to solids, heat is certainly transferred by conduction in both liquids and gases. Mercury is a good example for a thought experiment.
If you heat a flask of mercury from the top, it will not develop thermal circulation. It will be quiescent. Despite that, the heat will most certainly flow from the warm top surface of the mercury to the cold bottom surface. Since there is no circulation, there is no convective heat transfer, and it’s not transferred by radiation … that just leaves conduction.
In fact, mercury conducts heat quite well. The thermal conductivity of mercury is about 13 times that of water. This is because thermal conductivity is related to electrical conductivity, since they both use the same transport process (movable loose electrons). That’s why we have copper-bottomed fry pans and copper electrical wires. Copper conducts both heat and electricity very well, as does mercury.
In addition, gases have thermal conductivities. As you can imagine, they are small. Air has a conductivity about a 20th that of water, and on a par with foam insulation.
w.
Eddy diffusion coefficient has the same magnitude as a metallic conductor. Heat at the surface can quickly travel downwards.
The rest is taken care of by a very straightforward dispersive diffusional model which captures the salient characteristics reported by Levitus and Balmaseda/Trenberth
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/ocean-heat-content-model.html
Willis Eschenbach | June 19, 2013 at 2:12 am | Myrrh | June 18, 2013 at 6:51 pm |
Myrrh, my friend, I fear that is mostly misinformation.
Willis, this is basic thermodynamics. Heat transfer is by conduction in solids, by convection in fluids. Liquids and gases are fluids.
I’ve given a basic simple explanation of why water is not a good conductor; air and water are not good conductors, they are both known as insulators.
That is how they are described in real physics as still traditionally taught, by some, and what gobbledegook AGWScienceFiction fisics thinks is and you regurgitate is irrelevant to the facts.
AGWSF’s Greenhouse Effect doesn’t have GRAVITY (sorry, did that hurt..?). I’ve never met anywhere else men who are scared of the words gravity and convection.
But why should I be surprised when you don’t even know you’re living in a world where not only is there no heat from the Sun but which has no atmosphere at all, because you’ve replaced the real gas atmosphere with the fake fisics empty space of ideal gas.
Why should you know anything about real gases and what they do, their properties and processes?
Here’s an experiment you can do to test your conductivity of water:
Take one fat test tube, pack around three quarters with ice, top up with water and heat the water by direct flame to get it boiling. Do let us know how it goes.
The results suggest that natural ocean temperature variability will lead to variability with amplified magnitudes in Tsurf over continents. However, the study here only considers global mean values, but the effect that natural ocean variability will have on continental temperatures will strongly dependent on the size, pattern, and region of the ocean temperature variability. Many natural modes of SST variability (e.g., El Nino) are far away from the main continents and often the patterns are multipoles, with positive and negative temperature variability at different region at the same time, which may cancel each other out once they reach the land. Furthermore, the amplification may be related to evaporation over oceans, which is clearly a function of the mean temperature of the oceans and will therefore have clear regional differences.
D. Dommenget, “The ocean’s role in continental climate variability and change,” Journal of Climate, vol. 22, no. 18, pp. 4939–4952, 2009.
If you are going to engage – refer to actual science rather than whatever is swirling around the fetid swamps you call brains.
“The physical mechanisms whereby heating from the atmosphere is sequestered below 700 m are not obvious.”
Especially so when “forcing” due to CO2 is used to evaporate extra water into the atmosphere so Kevin can get his water-vapor feedback!!
If energy is being captured and hidden, my money is on some sort of chemical/biological process. More algae? Growth of coral? More vegetation? capturing the photons as they try to get to the bottom of the sea.
Roger Pielke, Sr.:
1. If heat is being sequested in the deeper ocean, it must transfer through the upper ocean. In the real world, this has not been seen that I am aware of. In the models, this heat clearly must be transferred (upwards and downwards) through this layer. The Argo network is spatially dense enough that this should have been see.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/torpedoing-of-the-use-of-the-global-average-surface-temperature-trend-as-the-diagnostic-for-global-warming/
(Apologies if I have overlooked the answer in chapter 11!)
-Roughly how many joules/yr or watts (or even better watts/m2 of earth!) are estimated to be ‘taken down’ into the depths by all the various ocean mixing processes?
-i.e. I was wondering how much of a percentage increase in the usual exchanges would be required to ‘disappear’ the current ‘missing energy’?
Heat is not being stored in the deep ocean, for several reasons. But before I explain the reasons, consider the implications if heat IS being stored in the deep oceans: the surface will not warm as much as feared. Another way of putting it is that no-one needs to cut CO2 emissions in order to keep global warming below, say, 2 deg C because the oceans will do it for us. So this is very good news, and everyone should now relax and be happy. Why aren’t the doomsters picking up this simple fact? Can’t they see wonderful news when it is staring them in the face?
Now, I had better explain the reasons why heat is not being stored in the deep ocean:
1. The upper layers and lower layers don’t mix. This is generally well known and understood, and the subject of much of this thread.
2. At around 21 Sv, the THC is simply not large enough or fast enough to have the required impact.
But those are the minor reasons. The major reason is this:
3. The warming by CO2 occurs mainly in the mid troposphere over the tropics, as shown in the IPCC report AR4 figure 9.1(c) and (f) on page 675. But comparison of the real tropical troposphere and the tropical troposphere in the computer models shows that the warming is only occurring in the models:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/still-epic-fail-73-climate-models-vs-measurements-running-5-year-means/
In the real world, there is no heat to be stored.
How long does it take, on average, a photon, released at sea level, to reach outer space? It was 31C today’s maximum, now at 10.30 pm local time the temperature at our local weather station reads 22C and expected to go down to 21C, a drop of 10C in 12 hours. Where has all that energy gone?
I’m sorry I didn’t reply directly to your earlier post.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/17/an-analysis-of-night-time-cooling-based-on-ncdc-station-record-data/
According to NCDC surface station data on average there’s very little difference between how much the temp went up today, and how much it drops tonight. You can see a difference as the length of day changes as the seasons change, but at the end of the year, the difference is minute. Warmer temperature years tend to cool more, cooler years less. 100+ million records from 1950-2011 when averaged show a slight cooling (17.465460F rise,17.465673F fall daily average).
alex | June 18, 2013 at 4:37 pm | Reply
“How long does it take, on average, a photon, released at sea level, to reach outer space?”
Good question. A day maybe? In all likelyhood the photon will be absorbed by a water molecule which then rises by convection after a number of hours or days or even weeks to form a cloud where it is released by condensation but since it’s in a cloud unless it happens to be on the top of the cloud with a clear sky above it then it’s going to make a few more trips in and out of water molecules.
There’s a problem though. Technically it isn’t the same photon. Only 15% – 30% of photons make it from the surface to outerspace. It ceases being a photon when absorbed by matter and a new photon is created later.
“It was 31C today’s maximum, now at 10.30 pm local time the temperature at our local weather station reads 22C and expected to go down to 21C, a drop of 10C in 12 hours. Where has all that energy gone?”
It could have moved horizontally if a front is passing through. Otherwise for that much of a temperature drop you need a partially clear sky and modest amount of humidity. I see 20C diurnal temperature change fairly often in south central Texas when sky is clear and humidity low. High deserts get as much as 50C diurnal change and get it every day as they don’t have much change in weather. Over the ocean diurnal range is limited to about 2C but even more energy exchange is taking place because the ocean absorbs much more efficiently than land and if it didn’t give up an equal amount when the sun wasn’t shining it would boil.
Alex, here is a picture of Earth, measuring only IR, at 10.7 um,
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/images/goes_first.png
White is bright and black is cold. You can see that most of the IR goes right out of the atmosphere.
If the entire imbalance, ostensibly 0.5W/m2, at TOA is taken up by the global ocean it is enough to raise basin temperature 0.2C in 100 years.
I’m not much interested in how the lower bulk of the ocean takes it up I’m interested in how an increase in basin temperature in the thousandths of a degree is going to, as Trenberth puts it, come back to haunt us?
That appears to be nonsense on the face of it. Law of entropy dilutes much higher magnitude surface heating into drastically smaller magnitude change in ocean basin temperature. Entropy being what it is the diluted energy cannot concentrate itself on the surface again.
So exactly how does Trenberth of any of the other usual suspects propose that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics gets, sooner or later, nullified?
I likened this to the moral equivalent of saying “The Ocean Ate My Global Warming”. Yes son, it did. And like the homework your dog ate your global warming is gone and isn’t coming back. Funny how entropy works the same with ocean heating as it does with a dog’s digestive tract huh? But there it is.
Me, I prefer a parent bird swallowing worms for later regurgitation for his children. In our case it will be many generations of grandchildren, including James Hansen’s.
=====================
Yeah well Trenberth Parrots (TM) eat sunflowers seeds then 20 years later they uneat sunflower seeds.
There’s an old expression for laypersons that covers this fact of nature: You can’t unbake a cake. 2LoT for masses. Frosting optional.
Springer you are wrongly assuming what Trenberth means. He doesn’t mean that heat will literally burst from the depths of the ocean. When he says it will come back to haunt us he’s talking about the implications of the deep ocean gaining heat and what those implications mean for the future. He’s not saying that heat itself will bubble up to haunt us.
Oceans gaining heat will lead to a net thermal volume expansion, leading to a measurable sea level rise
WebHubTelescope (@whut) | June 19, 2013 at 3:21 am |
“Oceans gaining heat will lead to a net thermal volume expansion, leading to a measurable sea level rise”
Right you are. Sea level rise by thermal expansion is given at 0.2-0.4 meters per degree C. Knutti and Stocker (2000)
So if basin temperature increases 0.2C in 100 years there will be as much as (0.2C * 0.4 meters) 0.08 meters of sea level rise due to it.
Tghat’s about 3 inches. In a hundred years. God save us.
It would be nice for you to be objective, Webby. I think you’re as well aware as I am that the ocean’s average temperature is a bone chilling 4C and if something were to increase the mix rate substantially between the mixed layer and the frigid bulk of the ocean that it could cool the planet in a big frickin’ hurry down to, wait for it, about 4C from today’s 16C. Hello ice age, huh?
You also need to be objective in admitting we don’t know very much about all the factors governing the net mix rate between between warm surface and frigid bulk of the ocean nor do we know much when, if, or how they may change.
It it varies much it’s the whole ballgame, Webby. If it were to slow down a lot the surface layer would heat up rapidly and take the continents up with it and if it slows down a lot the surface will chill and and again take the continents along for the ride.
“If it were to slow down a lot the surface layer would heat up rapidly and take the continents up with it and if it slows down a lot the surface will chill and and again take the continents along for the ride.”
And this is exactly what it looks like is happening. I keep point to this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/17/an-analysis-of-night-time-cooling-based-on-ncdc-station-record-data/
I do that because for all intents and purposes it will cool tonight as much as it warms today. This nightly cooling is superimposed on something that is varying up and down, something that looks to be varying on a 60-80 year cycle. Something that looks like the PDV and AMV.
SpringyBoy, I said measureable. I didn’t quantify.
We depend on you for theatrical hysteria, and you came through. Congrats.
3 inches!
Damn that’s scary.
Almost a third as scary as the 10 inches we get at the current 3mm/yr rate.
Who needs physics when arithmatic tells you what you need to know.
WebHubTelescope (@whut) said: ”Oceans gaining heat will lead to a net thermal volume expansion, leading to a measurable sea level rise”
Crackpot, let me point you few important factors: about 80% of all the water combined in every sea and ocean, is below 4C
2] Water below 4C (39F) when cooled more – expands / ”WHEN WARMED, IT SHRINKS. Therefore: if the seawater is warming up – it will shrink and the sea-level should get lower. Stop using the pagan’s science on the run!!! you and Springer: fill up a bottle with seawater at 4C temp and put it in the freezer – bottle will explode 2] fill up another bottle of seawater (or put salt in it to imitate seawater , because of Switzerland’s sea is full of rocks) ”at zero degrees or colder” and warm it up 2-3-4 degrees, you will see that the water will SHRINK by at least 5% — if it was 2km deep sea average -> should shrink by 5% = 100m. Com-on do it, both of you! if you believe in your own eyes…
+1
I’d suggest it a better use of time to worry about a bus hitting you than worrying about Dr Trenberth’s missing heat. That busses are real is not disputable and if you are following this thread on your smart phone while walking, the risk is real as well.
If the ocean isn’t absorbing heat, why has sea level been rising as fast as ever?
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Has greenland and antarctic melt sharply accelerated?
A better question is why has the ocean been rising for thousands of years when anthropogenic CO2 has only been around for two centuries. Hmmm? Riddle me that, batman.
The probable answer, IMO, is explained by Alexander Pope’s climate theory, or at least a part of his hypothesis.
You see, in past interglacials sea level crested about 9 meters higher than it has in the Holocene Interglacial. And it did it very soon into the melt not thousands of years later. Ostensibly, accoring to Pope, the most recent interglacial melt was interrupted by what’s called the Younger Dryas which in turn was caused by the premature burst of a massive ice dam between north American interior and North Atlantic. Flooding the north Atlantic with fresh water stopped the melt and prevented the Greenland glacier from melting a lot more than it did.
Pope goes on to say that without most of Greenland’s ice mass entering the ocean it makes the ocean colder and a colder ocean puts less moisture in the atmosphere, hence less snowfall, hence no rebuilding of the glaciers. In other words we’re stuck in a no-man’s land of never ending interglacial. Or maybe it’s just a 50,000 year interglacial while Greenland very very slowly finishes melting and we get the manly-man snowfalls that build the glaciers that end the interglacial period.
Sounds reasonable to me.
The moral of the story is that when sea level stops rising then be afraid. Be very, very afraid. Pray for continued global warming.
Trenberth physics:
I have a cold thermos of coffee that holds 12 cups. I took out one cup and heated it up in the microwave boiling hot. But then I decided I didn’t want it and poured the hot coffee back into the thermos making the whol thermos luke warm. Acorrding to Trenberthian physics I can unpour the cup of boiling water tomorrow.
Believe it not this is a exactly the horseshjit that a top notch climate scientist expects you to believe when he says ocean heat will re-emerge to haunt us some day. That’s exactly as likely as getting my hot cup of coffee back out of that lukewarm thermos. The world doesn’t work that way. Trenberth is asking me to believe the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is null and void when it comes to diluted energy re-concentrating itself out of the ocean. Someone needs to rescind his PhD or convert it to something in the humanities if believes his own bs.
That is nothing like what Trenberth is suggesting.
Think about heat injected into the upper ocean with a) a deep ocean containing more heat and b) a deep ocean containing less heat.
No that’s exactly what Trenberth is saying. Dr. Curry pointed it out too only I hadn’t read down to what she wrote about Trenberth and 2LoT because I went ballistic as soon as I read the Trenberth’s colossally ignorant utterance.
Christmas Gift Idea for Trenberth. Put a bookmark in at part IV. Make a dull bookmark as something glittery or shiny will distract him.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470903244/ref=rdr_ext_tmb
No, it’s definitely not what he is saying.
But lots of people have wondered. Somebody asked Gavin on RC and I think he said they would have to ask Trenberth. Rather than risk interpreting Trenberth.
Trenberth is talking about the next totally natural regime shift to rocketing upward surface temperatures.
The next natural regime shift scheduled for rocket duty is to the downside. Where do you get ‘next totally natural regime shift to rocket upward surface temperatures’. Is this from the same active imagination as ‘missing heat’?
===========
No, it’s from reading AA Tsonis. You know, that spacey dynamo anrchaoist.
Let me get this straight, JCH.
You don’t know what Trenberth is saying but you know what he’s not saying. And his colleague Gavin Schmidt doesn’t want to even hazard a guess about what he’s saying. And atmospheric physicist Judith Curry point blank said he seems to be saying something that’s not copacetic with the law of entropy.
It will certainly be amusing reading whatever clarification Trenberth offers up in an effort to make himself look smarter than a fifth grader.
You need to read these Tsonis papers with a little more attention to the details and understanding of the mechanism. There is no guarantee
of warming with the next shift and there is an appreciable risk that the changes will be more extreme – on either side of the spectrum – and abrupt than linear considerations would suggest.
His sentence allows people who do not like Trenberth to conflate future haunting heat with past sequestered heat, which is physically impossible so it ain’t likely what he meant. The past sequestered heat resulted from the interaction of SW from the sun with the earth system. When the earth system stops sequestering it in the deep ocean, it will instead warm the surface and it will haunt us. To further haunt us, El Nino and ENSO neutral do not need heat from down there.
JCH, Tsonis shifts, lately haven’t rocketed. D-O events rocket.
=================
The last time you rudely lectured me the moron on what I thought AA Tsonis said, he refereed it.
Being perfect, you came out, of course, still perfect.
Goddard played with rockets; Tsonis not so much.
=======
What do you mean he refereed it? You seem to remain as utterly clueless as ever.
But they did, Kim, like in a tractor pull for flattish, and like a rocket for uppish.
Is that what you meant? The rate of increase is nothing to be alarmed at – particularly as it levels out again after 1998.
OK, it’s just a terminology thing. You’re just talking about the (little) oscillation around the recovery line from the LIA, similarly shaped since before the CO2 rise. ‘Rocketing’ in your terminology and diagram, sputtering in reality. Now, D-O events, well they will rocket.
The Chief also alludes to an interesting point. Extremes seem to increase just before a shift between glaciation and non-glaciation. So if we really get extremes, not just hype, better beware.
==============
The 21st Century did not start at around 290 ppm, and it will not end at around 370 ppm, so could get the chit surprised out of your little egotistical self.
The Chief also alludes to an interesting point. Extremes seem to increase just before a shift between glaciation and non-glaciation. So if we really get extremes, not just hype, better beware.
Common the press ( does not exaggerate) with the help of the local MET the forthcoming NZ weather bomb.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/videos/8814555/Winter-is-coming
‘…as the future evolution of the global mean temperature may hold surprises on both the warm and cold ends of the spectrum due entirely to internal variability that lie well outside the envelope of a steadily increasing global mean temperature.’
ftp://starfish.mar.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/pub/ocean/CCS-WG_References/NewSinceReport/March15/Swanson%20and%20Tsonis%20Has%20the%20climate%20recently%20shifted%202008GL037022.pdf
You cite Tsonis as saying that warming will resume when it is clearly not essential to synchronous chaos and then you reply with the tedious, trivial and unsubstantiated. I clearly can’t be surprised because I have no expectation that climate shifts are at all predictable – your silly little misapprehensions notwithstanding.
Are we overlooking potential abrupt climate shifts?
Most of the studies and debates on potential climate change, along with its ecological and economic impacts, have focused on the ongoing buildup of industrial greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a gradual increase in global tempera- tures. This line of thinking, however, fails to consider another potentially disruptive climate scenario. It ignores recent and rapidly advancing evidence that Earth’s climate repeatedly has shifted abruptly and dramatically in the past, and is capable of doing so in the future.
Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earth’s climate can shift gears within a decade, establishing new and different patterns that can persist for decades to centuries. In addition, these climate shifts do not necessarily have universal, global effects. They can generate a counterintuitive scenario: Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates.
This new paradigm of abrupt climate change has been well established over the last decade by research of ocean, earth
The global ocean circulation system, often called the Ocean Conveyor, transports heat throughout the planet. White sections represent warm surface currents. Purple sections represent deep cold currents.
and atmosphere scientists at many institutions worldwide. But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy mak- ers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world lead- ers may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur.1
It is important to clarify that we are not contemplating a situation of either abrupt cooling or global warming. Rather, abrupt regional cooling and gradual global warming can un- fold simultaneously. Indeed, greenhouse warming is a desta- bilizing factor that makes abrupt climate change more prob- able. According to a 2002 report by the US National Acad- emy of Sciences, “available evidence suggests that abrupt cli- mate changes are not only possible but likely in the future, potentially with large impacts on ecosystems and societies.”2
The timing of any abrupt regional cooling in the future also has critical policy implications. An abrupt cooling that hap- pens within the next two decades would produce different climate effects than one that occurs after another century of continuing greenhouse warming. …
I have quoted the WHOI and the NAS committee on abrupt climate change many times.
‘Large, abrupt climate changes have affected hemispheric to global regions repeatedly, as shown by numerous paleoclimate records (Broecker, 1995, 1997). Changes of up to 16°C and a factor of 2 in precipitation have occurred in some places in periods as short as decades to years (Alley and Clark, 1999; Lang et al., 1999). However, before the 1990s, the dominant view of past climate change emphasized the slow, gradual swings of the ice ages tied to features of the earth’s orbit over tens of millennia or the 100-million-year changes occurring with continental drift. But unequivocal geologic evidence pieced together over the last few decades shows that climate can change abruptly, and this has forced a reexamination of climate instability and feedback processes (NRC, 1998). Just as occasional floods punctuate the peace of river towns and occasional earthquakes shake usually quiet regions near active faults, abrupt changes punctuate the sweep of climate history…
Researchers first became intrigued by abrupt climate change when they discovered striking evidence of large, abrupt, and widespread changes preserved in paleoclimatic archives. Interpretation of such proxy records of climate—for example, using tree rings to judge occurrence of droughts or gas bubbles in ice cores to study the atmosphere at the time the bubbles were trapped—is a well-established science that has grown much in recent years. This chapter summarizes techniques for studying paleoclimate and highlights research results. The chapter concludes with examples of modern climate change and techniques for observing it. Modern climate records include abrupt changes that are smaller and briefer than in paleoclimate records but show that abrupt climate change is not restricted to the distant past.’
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10136&page=19
We might also get global cooling in as little as a decade. Your point is?
Maybe the WHOI added this statement all because of you:
It is important to clarify that we are not contemplating a situation of either abrupt cooling or global warming. Rather, abrupt regional cooling and gradual global warming can un- fold simultaneously. …
If they did, would you listen? I didn’t think so.
‘…as the future evolution of the global mean temperature may hold surprises on both the warm and cold ends of the spectrum due entirely to internal variability that lie well outside the envelope of a steadily increasing global mean temperature.’
Can we predict this? Stop being a tedious passive aggressive little fool.
Chief Hydrologist driveled: ”Oceans force land temperatures even in summer”
HALF WRONG!!! Oceans force the surrounding land temp in summer ”only at night” AND in winter!!! Daytime AND in summer it keeps the surrounding lands cooler! Repeat it 3 times, my get into your brain-bleached head…!!!.
Stefan,
You are a phuckwit with nil credibility.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/DIETMARDOMMENGET_zps939fe12e.png.html?sort=3&o=0
JCH,
“Trenberth is talking about the next totally natural regime shift to rocketing upward surface temperatures.”
The movie, planned for release next spring, is already in the works. Rumor has it Russell Crow plays the renowned climate scientist and Pitt the role of everyday dad who has to save his family.
lolwot,
Can you tell us what the amount of rise will be by 2100, based on the information in your link?
Hint: it’s about 10 inches. SCARY!!!!!
“If the heat is well mixed in the deep ocean below 700 m, exactly how could that heat return to the surface? The second law of thermodynamics suggests that a well mixed heat reservoir in the deep ocean would actually be very inefficient at returning heat to the surface.”
Suggests? SUGGESTS?!
Is that some sort of tribal or maternal protection mechnism kicking in for the terminally stupid among your colleagues? It doesn’t suggest. It requires.
Go easy on the poor girl, David. A scholar and a gentleman like yourself knows one should go easy on the weaker sex. You might not be familiar, however, “suggest” is a very common weasel word used everyday in Earf Sciences. As I’m sure you know, thermo is but a single mechanism that moves heat around in the ocean, there is density flow, advection, the Coriolanus effect, etc. But you are right, “suggests” is such a weak feminized modifier to soften the blow for the warmist fancy-boys. You can dress them in frumpy pantsuits and give them affirmative action titles, but they can never completely suppress their mama instincts.
It’s like when some little bully-braggart keeps running his pretty mouth around claiming to be a big bad war hero, we say it “suggests” that he is an impotent hen-pecked shell of a man standing on the corpses of fallen grunts to make himself tall. Or when some little dim-wit twitters on and on about what a tech giant he was “back in the day” and rubbing peoples noses in lapsed patents of little import, we say that “suggests” he is a pathetic almost-was revisionist historian trying to impress the peanut gallery. You know the type: the small man, a peacock, skinny white legs against black socks with shorts and penny loafers at the beach, the stringy comb-over, struggling to perfect his titration between Maalox and ex-lax just to get through the daily fifth of Smirnoff’s.
Everyone says that the pathetic little weasel’s tells “suggests” what they and he knows in their hearts for certain. There, there, mamma will rock you close David and it will all get better.
LOL
Lame.
Ah, but the portrait he draws of himself.
=============
When gravity acts upon solids, liquids and gases it helps to restore thermodynamic equilibrium. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that a process occurs spontaneously with a propensity towards thermodynamic equilibrium with the greatest accessible entropy.
One day climatologists will realise (as some physicists have since the 19th century) that the thermodynamic equilibrium is an isentropic state in which there must be a temperature gradient, cooler at the top.
This gradient is the only explanation (and sufficient explanation) for all that 33 degrees of warming, and what happens to missing heat, be it is the oceans or the solid crust. There is a propensity for warmer temperatures in the depths of the oceans, but it tends to be eclipsed by the much warmer temperatures in the thermocline. Downward convection of thermal energy is possible in the oceans because of the thermocline. But Solar energy can also “creep” into the crust and actually go up the temperature gradient and even into the mantle.
Fascinating isn’t it? When you apply valid physics you sometimes find it establishes counter-intuitive results – just like relativity. Read more in my paper “Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures” which shows why there is no radiative forcing of any significance – or any greenhouse effect.
Sorry, folks, but this is all just a bit too hairy fairy for me.
It hasn’t warmed for over a decade despite unabated GHG emissions and concentrations reaching record levels, so there is a mad scramble to find the “missing heat” – and voila! Balmaseda et al think that maybe they might have found it in the deep ocean!
And Kevin Trenberth is already warning us that it will “haunt us” in the future by miraculously coming back out of the depths to warm our atmosphere.
But wait!
Before we get all worried about this “missing heat”, let’s answer some basic questions:
1. Is it real?
2. How is it being physically measured?
3. How many thousandths of a degree has the lower ocean warmed since when?
4. How reliable and comprehensive are these measurements?
5. Have they covered a statistically significant period of time in order to be meaningful?
Once we have satisfied ourselves that it is, indeed, real, and have reliable and comprehensive physical measurements over a statistically significant period of time, which confirm this, we can move on to the next questions:
6. Will this heat remain in the deep ocean forever and, if so, how many thousandths of a degree warming will this cause there?
7. What will be the expected ecological impact of this warming and on what basis has this been established?
8. Or, alternately, will the heat come out of the depths to “haunt us” by warming the atmosphere?
9. If we seriously believe #8, by what mechanism is it supposed to come out of the depths to warm a warmer atmosphere?
10. What physical evidence do we have that this mechanism exists in real life?
11. When and how has this mechanism been measured?
12, Are these measurements reliable and comprehensive, and have they covered a statistically significant period of time?
I personally think this is all just a bit of voodoo science until all these questions have been completely answered.
My advice to the authors (and to Trenberth, for that matter):
Come back when you’ve got answers to all the open questions, but don’t bother giving us a tentative report based only on your expert judgment before you do.
Max
“It hasn’t warmed for over a decade”
Oh so there’s a mad scramble to deny global warming by climate skeptics and voila Manacker “discovers” it hasn’t warmed for over a decade. How convenient.
But wait!
1) How reliable are your measurements?
2) How is it being physically measured?
3) Does it cover a statistically significant period of time in order to be meaningful?
I personally think this claim that it hasn’t wamred for over a decade is all just a bit of voodoo science until all these questions have been completely answered.
Come back when you’ve got answers to all the open questions, but don’t bother giving us a tentative “it hasn’t warmed for over a decade” report based only on your expert judgement before you do.
Lolwot, relevant questions concerning the “missing” ocean heat
posed by Max (not the Max_who_says_he’s_ok )
‘is it real?’
‘How reliable and comprehensive is its measurement?’
Oh there’s a mad scramble to accept global warming by climate
warmists and voila lolwot “de-nighs” it hasn’t warmed for over a
decade. How convenient.
Bts
lolwot
Thanks for your reply and challenge.
The fact that it has not warmed (or actually cooled) for the past decade is borne out by the “globally and annually averaged land and sea surface temperature anomalies”, to wit: GISS, HadCRUT3 and 4 (see chart).
One of the two tropospheric records (RSS) also shows cooling while the other (UAH) shows very slight warming.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2002/trend/plot/rss/from:2002/trend/plot/uah/from:2002/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/trend
Trend over past decade (°C per decade):
-0.045 HadCRUT4
-0.083 HadCRUT3
-0.089 GISS
-0.079 RSS
+0.013 UAH
Got it now?
Max
Trenberths Neutrino.
Manacker, all I have to do is change your start year to 1999, and I get rising trends for all time series.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1999/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1999/trend/plot/rss/from:1999/trend/plot/uah/from:1999/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1999/trend
This would indicate that your limited data selection is not condusive to developing a competent analysis, thus obviously invalidating the assumptions inherent in the entirety of the remainder of your loaded questions.
It *is* warming, and the physics that explains it is quite well-known.
” it *is* warming, and the physics that explains it is quite well-known.”
If this is the case, explain how nightly cooling is equal to day time warming in the same surface data you use to “prove” warming?
See the link in one of my posts up the thread. This is based on NCDC 120+ million global summary of days, the same data that went into cru, bests and GISS anomaly data, i just calculate a daily rise and the following nights falling temp.
If on average its as cold tomorrow morning as it is this morning, it doesn’t matter if you start in 1999 or 1950.
@Craig
According to Phil Jones, HCSIC of Hadley Climate Research Unit, in 2010 there was no statistically significant warming. He’s widely quoted. Here is what he was looking at when quoting it which shows 0.15C of warming during those 15 years. 0.10C warming per decade is not considered statistically significant.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1995/to:2010/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1995/to:2010/mean:12/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1995/to:2010/mean:12/trend/detrend:0.15
In 2011 Phil Jones said that adding the year 2010 to the record made the period from 1995 have statistically significant warming.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1995/to:2011/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1995/to:2011/mean:12/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1995/to:2011/mean:12/trend/detrend:0.166
As you can see the decadal average in the insignificant period was 0.10C warming and in the second period exactly 0.101C.
Yes he was weaseling in 2011 but here we have a stake driven in the ground about what constitutes statistically significant warming and what doesn’t. Jones said 0.10C/decade is not statistically significant but more than that is. That would be a 1C increase by the year 2100.
I just want to be clear it was Hadley CRU who positioned the goalposts not me.
Now lets add on 2011 and 2012 and see what Phil’s metric tells us:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1995/to:2012/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1995/to:2012/mean:12/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1995/to:2012/mean:12/trend/detrend:0.148
Now we have 17 years in the record and 0.148C in warming. This is 0.087C/decade warming which is behind the 0.10C per decade threshhold for significance.
No moving goalposts. This is why the usual suspects are all painfully admitting there’s a pause. It’s been 17 years and then some with no statistically significant warming. That wasn’t supposed to happen especially with anthro-CO2 pouring into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate the whole time. This just wasn’t supposed to happen. But it did. Nobody knows how yet. But whatever the reason the applecart is upset.
Craig Thomas
Lolwot and I were debating the validity of my sentence
Not “the past 14 years”
So the rest of your comment is irrelevant, since that’s not what we were discussing.
We all know that it has warmed since the early 1970s.
And we all know that it now appears that, since around 2001 or 2002 this warming cycle has stopped or reversed itself, as it did for ~30 years once before in around 1944, after another ~30 year warming cycle, which was statistically indistinguishable from the most recent one.
This cyclical pattern, all on an underlying warming trend of ~0.6C per century, is easy to detect in the past.
The real question now is whether or not the current period of slight cooling is the start of another ~30 year cycle of slight cooling or not.
And neither you nor I (nor lolwot) know the answer to that question.
Max
Looking at the phenomenon known as convection and applying the development of swirling vortices to the oceans, it is the difference in temperature of fluids to begine with that causes warm fluid at the bottom to raise as cold fluid at the top sinks. The Earth’s rotation is a part of the process. A very slow rotation is all it takes to begin the flow process when you have a container — i.e., the oceans filled with fluid — in a situation where the container is exceedingly wide (almost without boundary) in relation to its depth. That’s the science of the phenomenon: vortices appear, as the Earth spins on its axis, that transport warm fluid from bottom to top and vice versa.
Weiss S, Ahlers G, Zhong J, Stevens J, Lohse D, Herman, Clercx JH. Finite-size effects lead to supercritical bifurcations in turbulent rotating rayleigh-benard convection. Phys Rev Lett. 105:22 (2010)
Oceans of the N. and S hemispheres are quite different. The N. Atlantic has many Heat islands on both sides, so we would expect there would be a plume of warm air over the N.Atlantic. This would increase the natural thermohaline cicculation and eventually transport this extra heat to the S. hemisphere. The heat profile in the oceans depends upon the density of water with its starting level in the deepest oceans at about 4C. Any change in that level due to thermohaline circulation from the north, will push the whole column above higher or lower in temperature, altering the surface temperature. So the heat from the north Atlantic eventually resurfaces in the southern hemisphere, but the transport delay is about 30 years.This is evident because extra heat from 1940 took to 1970 to affrct the planets average temperature again.
Wheb temperatures rise or fall, the effect seems to be continuous, but we know from quantum theory it actually proceds in ‘steps and stairs’. If a large proportion of CO2 (or H2o) molecules arrive at the sane step at rge same time this will cause a pause in rising or falling temperature. This I believe is what happened in 1940 and 1998, because global average temperature actually fell after 1940 and remained constant after 1998. If CO2 has reached its lowest vibrational level now. the pause could be permanent because CO2’s remarkable heat absorption powers depend on its available vibrational modes.
Judith: Balmaseda et al (2013) has been given way too much credit. It is presented with over-confidence, as is much of climate science, yet it is nothing more than computer-aided speculation.
First, it relies on the ECMWF Ocean ReAnalysis System 4 (ORAS4), which is not data. It’s based on a computer model that has ocean heat content data as one of its inputs. At their webpage here…
http://www.ecmwf.int/products/forecasts/d/charts/oras4/reanalysis/
…ECMWF provides the following disclaimer:
“There is large uncertainty in the ocean reanalysis products (especially in the transports), difficult to quantify. These web pages are aimed at the research community. Any outstanding climate feature should be investigated futher and not taken as truth.”
Hmm. What part of “should…not be taken as truth” did Balmaseda et al overlook?
Second, in addition to ocean heat content data, the standard run-of-the-mill climate forcings are used as input to the ORAS4 reanalysis, but the ocean heat content data already contains the influences of any forcings. That’s why the ORAS4 reanalysis has variations that do not exist in the data. The most obvious are the responses to volcanic aerosols. Willis Eschenbach illustrated that with this comparison of OHC data and the output of the ORAS4 reanalysis:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/figure-14-eschenbach-oras4-reanalysis-vs-levitus-data.jpg
Willis’s post is here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/10/why-reanalysis-data-isnt-2/
Third, Balmaseda et al basically blame La Niña events for the additionally warming below 700 meters—through an unidentified mechanism to boot. But Trenberth understands exactly how and why that extra heat is created by La Ninas. He presented it in Trenberth et al (2002):
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/papers/2000JD000298.pdf
There they write in paragraph 57:
“The negative feedback between SST and surface fluxes can be interpreted as showing the importance of the discharge of heat during El Niño events and of the recharge of heat during La Niña events. Relatively clear skies in the central and eastern tropical Pacific allow solar radiation to enter the ocean, apparently offsetting the below normal SSTs, but the heat is carried away by Ekman drift, ocean currents, and adjustments through ocean Rossby and Kelvin waves, and the heat is stored in the western Pacific tropics. This is not simply a rearrangement of the ocean heat, but also a restoration of heat in the ocean.”
Did Trenberth forget that downward shortwave radiation (sunlight), not downward longwave radiation (infrared radiation), increases during La Niña events?
Maybe Balmaseda et al should have examined the NCEP/DOE Reanalysis-2 outputs. Over the equatorial Pacific (5S-5N, 120E-80W), it’s downward shortwave radiation, not downward longwave radiation that’s increased since 1979, and it’s downward shortwave radiation that increases during La Niña events:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/figure-24.png
Fourth, the speculated-about increase in ocean heat content from 700m to 2000 m relates to a change in temperature measured in hundredths if not thousands of a deg C. The suggestion by Balmaseda et al that we have in place instruments that can measure that change in temperature for the global oceans at depths of 700-2000 meters to the required accuracy strains common sense.
Those points and others were presented in my recent post:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/open-letter-to-the-royal-meteorological-society-regarding-dr-trenberths-article-has-global-warming-stalled/
For those who wish to see additional comments, refer to the cross post at WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/04/open-letter-to-the-royal-meteorological-society-regarding-dr-trenberths-article-has-global-warming-stalled/
Fifth, curiously, in the recent Washington Post op-ed by Oppenheimer and Trenberth, they failed to cite Balmaseda et al (2013):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/climate-science-tells-us-the-alarm-bells-are-ringing/2013/06/07/ca81cb84-cef6-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html?hpid=z2
I discussed that in the post here:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/06/09/a-couple-of-comments-about-the-oppenheimer-and-trenberth-washington-post-op-ed/
Regards
“The second law of thermodynamics suggests that a well mixed heat reservoir in the deep ocean would actually be very inefficient at returning heat to the surface.”
I figure it at 6% efficiency ideal case entering the tropics at 24C and diluted to 4C. So the excess heat that builds up in deep ocean over a decade is released over the course of about two centuries. Or put another way the 0.5W/m2 imbalance entering the surface re-emerges from the deep ocean at 0.025W/m2. Once can estimate the impact (zero) that this will have on any human concerns. For all practical purposes the ocean ate my global warming and it’s lost & gone forever oh my darling Clemetine.
David Springer
Let’s hypothesize about the “missing heat”.
Let’s say that 1 °C atmospheric warming has gone into the deep ocean since it stopped warming the atmosphere (probably a high estimate)
The atmosphere has a mass of 5,140,000 Gt (of air) with a specific heat of 1,000 J/kg.
The ocean below 700m has a mass of around 1,175,000,000 Gt (of sea water) with a specific heat of 4,000 J/kg.
So the “missing atmospheric heat” has (allegedly) warmed the deep ocean by:
1°C * (5,140,000*1,000) / (1,175,000,000*4,000) = 0.001°C
Who measured this and how?
Now that the deep ocean has warmed by 0.001°C, is there any sane reason to believe that this “heat” is going to miraculously come back out of the deep and fry us all?
Gimme a break, folks. This is simply not credible.
Max
Lets call the missing heat, Trenberth’s Neutrino
“Neutrinos were hypothesized in 1931 by Wolfgang Pauli to resolve a crisis in physics that threatened the bedrock principle of the conservation of energy. In a spontaneous nuclear reaction called beta-decay, one nucleus was observed to decay into an electron and another nucleus with one more unit of charge, as shown in the diagram. In this kind of reaction, conservation of energy demands that each decay product be created with a unique energy. But much to their dismay, physicists found the electron had a wide range of energies that could not be explained if the electron was the only particle emitted. Some physicists were so distressed at this result that they were willing to abandon the conservation of energy in this case. To save the day, Pauli hypothesized that the nucleus emitted a second particle that could carry away this unaccounted-for energy. Since the charges of the extra proton and the emitted electron cancel, he concluded the neutrino was neutral. Since no second particle had been detected, he concluded that the particle had no mass and no charge, since it could hardly interact with anything at all. Pauli had replaced one dilemma with another, by explaining a paradoxical experiment result with a particle that could not be observed.
There it stood for 25 years”
In short. The history of successful science is sprinkled with examples of scientists making all manner of silly claims which end up being correct.
In this case the experimental data lead to a “falsfication” of the conservation of energy. Luckily physicists ignored philosophers and kept the law intact by inventing a unicorn.
You max remind me of this guy when you say “Who measured this and how?”
http://www.marinsek.com/files/e–neutrons_don__t_comprise_neutrinos.pdf
Go figure science moved forward by some guys positing an unobservable unicorn..
Hehe.
Not even close. The ‘missing heat’ was seen in CERES.
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif.html?sort=3&o=107
He is right – it should be there. Perhaps a slight wrinkle is that it is all SW.
I’d call it Trenberth’s tribble. We all know what the trouble with tribbles is.
I’d call it Trenberth’s Monster, but the biologists would rightfully object.
================
Jesus Christ.
I show you guys a wonderful example from the past where scientists posited the existence of an undetectable thing to preserve a theory and none of you can muster a counter argument.
Popper turns in his grave.
There is no missing heat. The 0.6C increase in temp of the first 300m of ocean surface would explain by expansion, all of the sea level rise of 5cm after 1980 (till 2009-2010 when I did the calculation). If the deep ocean was warming there’s be a lot more of an increase in sea level.
Trenberth’s Null is a simply gorgeous creature, less her invisibility cloak, that is.
============
Could also be Trenberth’s epicycles
Your first mistake was placing the names Trenberth and Pauli in the same sentence.
Somehow the parallels between the conservation of energy and the results of simplistic models based on cramming a complex non-linear system into a Procrustean bed of linear preconceptions just don’t jell in my mind. But it’s hardly worth debating. Debating religion is a waste of time. IMO.
An utterly inapplicable example in this instance.
‘The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming…’
It was observed.
Steven Mosher | June 19, 2013 at 12:40 pm |
“Jesus Christ.”
Yeah, whaddaya want?
kim,
he has lines open to all of us. One just has to pick up the phone.
Steven Mosher, That note on the neutrino was interesting.
Sci American of April 2013 has an article on them.
I also agree w Max that one can’t measure deep ocean delta 0.001 *C and if we could it still would not impact global climate.
Scott
I think Mosher’s story is relevant and instructive. Now that the missing heat has been hypothesized to be in the deep ocean, we now need some ingenious method to measure it, elusive tho it may be.
Haven’t we wasted enough money hunting snipes already?
Mi Cro | June 19, 2013 at 12:55 pm |
“There is no missing heat.”
Maybe.
“The 0.6C increase in temp of the first 300m of ocean surface would explain by expansion, all of the sea level rise of 5cm after 1980 (till 2009-2010 when I did the calculation). If the deep ocean was warming there’s be a lot more of an increase in sea level.”
Deep ocean is only warming 0.002C per year. Don’t let those big numbers of Joules fool you into thinking that the temperature rise is a big number too. Maybe big expressed in pico degrees C. heh
That’s thermal expansion of about 3 inches per century. Less than a millimeter per year. With all the noise added from subsidence and rise from sources ranging from aquifer depletion to glacial rebound, and meltwater, it’s pretty much impossible to say 1mm per year of ostensibly 3mm measured isn’t coming from deep ocean expansion. It would just mean less attribution from something else and maybe a dash of measured rate being on the low side of what’s really happening.
While I don’t really disagree with what you said, I do think it’s irrelevant, and a waste of time and money.
I also think the nightly cooling work I did(I’ve posted the link 2-3 times here) show no sign of a loss of cooling due to Co2, it’s all been a big waste of time and money.
jim2 | June 19, 2013 at 4:32 pm |
“Now that the missing heat has been hypothesized to be in the deep ocean, we now need some ingenious method to measure it, elusive tho it may be.”
No. What we need is some ingenius method for how it’s going to concentrate itself on the surface again in order to cause significant climate change.
Perhaps you’ve heard of Maxwell’s Demon?
Well Trenberth needs to either schit a demon or get off the pot.
So to speak.
Mosh
The problem with your example is this:
For every invisible, undetectable, imaginary, hypothesized phenomenon that turned out correct (you gave one example) there are hundreds that do not and are forgotten by history. (Phlogiston comes to mind)
Most of those that DO end up being real are backed by some theoretical laws of nature that can be rationally explained.
Trenberth’s “missing heat that comes back to haunt us” remains one of the latter category until it really does miraculously emerge from the depths.
Since this hypothesis is not even backed by any theoretical laws of nature that can be rationally explained, I’m not going to spend a lot of time worrying about this happening.
Are you?
Max
Looks like we’ve evolved from
Trenberth’s “travesty” (it’s missing and we can’t find it ) to
Trenberth’s “trickery” (it’s hidden in the deep blue sea, but it’s gonna come back and haunt us… trust me, baby)
”The physical mechanisms whereby heating from the atmosphere is sequestered below 700 m are not obvious”’
NO, no; it’s not possible – apart on the polar caps – the rest of the oceans have the warmest water ALWAYS on the surface!
When water deep down gets warmer because of volcanic activity -> warmer water expands and zooms to the surface, doesn’t stay ”below 700m, not for one minute! That makes evaporation on the surface to increase / evaporation is cooling process… equalizes in a jiffy!
Has Dr Leif weighed in on Kevin’s notion of solar reduction being responsible for 10-15 % of energy imbalance reduction?
Excellent question. Mechanism, mechanism, MECHANISM. If this is Kevin’s contention, then it ain’t just the TSI.
====================
The argument of the deep minimum in SC 23 does not hold,it is a statistical artifact arising due to instrumental error( degradation) on Virgo.
PMOD in the previous minimum 1996 over estimates by 0.2 wm^2. eg Krivova
http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.3077
Chief Hydrologist said: ”The oceans force temperature over land. They accumulate heat which is released as latent heat adding to heat over land. The differences in temperature is related to the difference in water availability over land and oceans and therefore lapse rates”
Chief, you are onto your prunes again, with your avalanches of dysentery…
The sea warms the surrounding lands at night and at winter time, BUT, they cool the same areas at the remaining of the year === therefore: those two influences cancel each other, you need to study some honest hydrology!!!.
Stefan – here’s a cartoon for you. You are an utter phuckwit.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/DIETMARDOMMENGET_zps939fe12e.png.html?sort=3&o=0
Chief Hydrologist | June 19, 2013 at 2:26 am | Reply
Stefan – here’s a cartoon for you.You are an utter phuckwit.
phuckwit… stop talking to your mirror!!!
1] to know the sea effect on the land temp; you compare Sydney and Cooper Pedy – same latitude and altitude – days are cooler in Sydney, but nights are warmer / same comparison Brisbane and Birdsville – because Birdsville is far from the sea, has hotter days and summers than Brisbane.
B] those theories of sea heating over land during the day comes from the ”pagan” confusion that makes human warmer in humid places.
C] That has no influence on the thermometer or crocodile, or rocks or wood – it is the combined of local temp plus 12C extra heat produced by the human body.that humidity prevents evaporation of sweat, confusion. Be fair to yourself and update your knowledge / forget the pagan cartoons and your brainwashed education, get the real truth from a genius: http://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/water-vapor/
The ‘cartoon’ comes from the Journal of Climate. I suggest you read some science instead of retailing anything that comes into your silly little head. Go away – I have been patient with your nonsense long enough.
Chief Hydrologist | June 19, 2013 at 9:21 pm said: ”The ‘cartoon’ comes from the Journal of Climate”
The Chief is a fanatic demagogic bigot!
The word “heat” is used incorrectly. Heat is not a property of a system like energy is. Just read the third sentence in the Wikipedia article on Heat.
Two thirds of the thermal energy which is transferred from the surface to the atmosphere is transferred by non-radiative processes. This includes evaporative cooling of oceans. (Source: NASA net energy diagram.)
Why then do we suppose that we should be able to calculate surface temperatures just from the radiative flux? The truth is, we can’t and never will be able to, because there is no causal connection.
It is the gravity effect which determines planetary surface temperatures, not any radiative forcing or greenhouse effect.
1. There is no such thing as “buoyancy driven ocean circulation”, that’s only part of a cycle, driven by the other half.
2. Density of seawater (unlike that of fresh water) is highest just above freezing.
3. Downwelling happens where density is highest, that is, somewhere along the ice edge.
4. Sea ice / sea water interface is not expected to go away soon, not even with insane rates of projected warming.
5. Downwelling can only occur if density of abyssal water is lower than that of nearly frozen one at surface.
6. It can only happen if deep water is warmer / fresher.
7. With downwelling it is becoming colder / more saline.
8. Until it gets saturated, at which point downwelling stops.
9. It can only resume if another, independent process pumps heat / fresh(er) water into the abyss.
10. Heat conduction or diffusion is far too slow to do that, geothermal heating is negligible on decadal time scales.
11. No thermodynamic process keeps ocean circulation going.
12. It is pure mechanical energy input, half tidal, half wind driven (80% over the southern ocean), internal waves breaking at bottom / shoreline, inducing vertical turbulent mixing.
13. Temperature of downwelling water is not determined by climate, but by physical properties of water.
14. Temperature of deep ocean is regulated, even mechanically driven processes can only warm it up slightly and temporarily.
15. No long term sequestration of heat is possible at depth until sea ice exists anywhere.
16. The roughly 2×10^23 J heat which is measured to have gone into the ocean during the last several decades is nothing. It is equivalent to an average warming rate of 1 mK/annum.
17. What are we talking about?
“11. No thermodynamic process keeps ocean circulation going”
Trivially wrong. Uneven heating causes less dense warm surface layer in tropics to spread poleward.
Into the crank catetory you go.
The trouble with that is it would make a very shallow circulation, which is not observed. Deep overturning needs buoyancy being replenished at depth.
You may go to a category of your own choice.
It would make a circulation as deep as the mixed layer which is about 1000 feet. Prevailing winds, coriolis forces, and continental shelves add shape, depth, eddies, and lateral direction. This is EXACTLY what we observe. You’re a crank. Go away.
David, I am sorry to tell you that 1000 feet is 304.8 m. You are free to educate yourself that overturning circulation is much deeper than that.
You may want to start with e.g. this one, I am confident it would not tax your mental capacity to terminal exhaustion.
Introduction: The Ocean’s Meridional Overturning Circulation
“This deep water, called Antarctic Bottom Water, is distinctly colder and fresher than North Atlantic Deep Water, and flows northward underneath it in the Atlantic below 4000m in depth.”
Yep, just like that.
The only constant is that nobody has a clue and nature makes fools of them all. But at what point did they reject Occams razor?
Occams wore a beard.
Occams razor is pragamatic tool. nothing more.
By the way, moshe; cloud/herd blew a fuse. Too many chaotic outcomes to process.
=======
That doesn’t invalidate his question. Nor does it answer it. That makes your response a classic example of dodging the question. I’d say nice but it really isn’t. It’s Little League rhetoric.
Mosh
Yeah.
A pretty good one at that.
Max
Steven Mosher | June 18, 2013 at 10:47 pm |
“Lets call the missing heat, Trenberth’s Neutrino”
Your major is showing. I’d like to play.
Let’s call the missing heat “the music of the spheres” and Trenberth’s Neutrino we’ll call “Spinoza’s God”.
heheh
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/watanabe-strengthening-of-ocean-heat-uptake-efficiency-associated-with-the-recent-climate-hiatus/
Thanks for this link, good post by Lucia and I will include the Watanabe paper in a forthcoming post
I love lucia’s last coupla paragraphs.
========
The paper’s informal title will be
“It’s the OHC, stupid”
It makes some sense from a bookkeeping perspective. If more heat goes into or is retained by the ocean, less is available for the surface, reflected in lower or at least more stable surface temperatures. I will polish up my equation for the proportional land/ocean model to demonstrate this effect.
I had a feeling something like this effect was brewing in the research queue.
They also state that this effect can not maintain itself and something has to give eventually.
It will start warming again sometime over the next couple of decades? The surface will be cooler for decades? This has been said for a decade – although more recently it seems that a resurgent surface warming is far from necessary.
The wheels have fallen off the AGW wagon – so sad too bad.
Heating and cooling is of course driven by energy flux – it is not a zero sum game. The total energy in the system changes substantially all the time driven by secular changes in the system.
‘The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) Earth radiation budget (ERB) is determined from the difference between how much energy is absorbed and emitted by the planet. Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.’ http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf
It seems par for the course that this data is ignored unless it is ‘great’ in terms of sulphates or net flux shows the planet is warming – something that unequivocally supports the AGW meme while glossing over the detail.
Webster, it has always been about the accounting.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/06/carnot-efficiency-ohc-and-commander.html
And the hits keep on coming …
The research results of Watanabe at al claim that the ocean has been adjusting its heat uptake in the last few years as a result of transient changes in the large-scale hydrodynamics. This has the effect of suppressing the warming in terms of temperature, although the heat uptake from the AGW forcing still exists. So the implication is that what is lacking in a temperature rise is made up for by the heat sinking of the ocean.
The ocean heat uptake efficiency measure of Watanabe is related to the ratio f between ocean and land temperature defined on my blog post
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/05/proportional-landsea-global-warming.html
The idea is that — similar to the aim of the Japanese research study — to see if we can detect changes in f over the last few years.
To do this we need to take great care with the numbers. Instead of using the WoofForTrees data, I used the CRU data directly. The sets were CRUTEM4 (Tl=land), HadCRUT4 (TG=global), and HadSST3 (To=ocean). The composed set looks like the following chart for a value of f = 0.5, which is the nominal fraction assumed for the original proportional land/sea analysis.
http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/1622/5vj.gif
The composed temperature lies on top of the HadCRUT4 global temperature
If we look at the error residual between the HadCRUT4 global temperature and the fractionally composed model, we get the following chart. Note that as an absolute error, the value is obviously decreasing over time, likely attributed to better and more accurate record keeping with current temperature measurement techniques.
http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/5863/uvt.gif
The absolute error decreases with more recent records.
(The last data point is 2012, which often undergoes corrections for the next update.)
The high resolution and low error in recent years indicates that perhaps we can try to more accurately fit the fraction f. So essentially, we want to zero out the error by solving the proportional land/sea warming model for a continuously varying value of f.
0=TG-1/2(f*po+pl )Tl+ 1/2(po+pl*f)To
This turns into a quadratic equation for f, which we can solve by the quadratic formula. The set of value calculated by minimizing the error is shown below. Note that the average remains around f = 0.5, but it shows a distinct decreasing trend in recent years.
http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/4509/n5t.gif
The fraction ratio of ocean to land temperature appears to be decreasing in recent years, leading to an apparent flattening in global temperature rise. Lower values of f cause the global temperature signal to appear cooler for a given AGW forcing.
If this is a real trend (as opposed to some type of accumulating systemic error or noise) it is telling us that more of the heat is accumulating in the ocean, consistent with the claims of Watanabe et al. It is possible that the fraction is actually decreasing from a past value of around 0.6 to a current value of 0.4. Although this is a subtle effect in terms of the fit (probably the not most robust metric one can imagine), it has significant effect in terms of the global surface temperature signal.
This is seen if we deconstruct the proportional model in terms of the land temperature alone, assuming the area land/ocean split as po/pl=0.71/0.29 :
TG = (0.71*f+0.29)Tl
Note that with a slowly increasing land temperature signal Tl , the declining f can compensate for this value and actually cause the global temperature value TG to flatten.
To take an example, reducing the value of f from 0.6 to 0.4 causes the global temperature to decline from 0.716*Tl to 0.574*Tl. If the land temperature is held constant, the global temperature will decline, while if the land temperature rises by 25%, the global temperature rise will look flat.
That is exactly what Watanabe et al are claiming. Moreover, they assert that this decline can’t remain in place for the long term, and eventually the ocean hydrodynamics will stabilize or even reverse, with a concomitant rebound in global temperature.
To review, the essential premise of the proportional land/ocean model is:
1. The land surface reaches the steady-state temperature quickly
2. The ocean sinks excess heat, thus moderating the sea surface temperature rise.
3. The fractional ratio of ocean temperature to land temperature is given by f.
4. The global surface temperature is determined as combination of land and sea surface temperatures prorated according to the land/sea areal split.
From this set of premises, we can algebraically estimate the amount of ocean heat sinking from global temperature records as gleaned from the Climatic Research Unit.
How’s them apples?
Gavin Schmidt contradicts Trenberth re; coming back to haunt us.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/10/global-warming-and-ocean-heat-content/
“Neither is this heat going to come back out from the deep ocean any time soon”
Don’t you just love those precise scientific terms like “any time soon”. :-)
I suppose there’s still weasel room with terms like that.
Yes, yesterday I referred to the “tension” between GISS and Trenberth that shows up once in awhile on RC.
You’d have to ask him. … – Gavin
But you are dead wrong if you in your belief that Trenberth has ever thought deep-ocean warming is going to reassemble and jump out of the ocean. The guy just has a knack for muddled speech.
Actually, not true, KT was arguing from a 1st law of thermodynamics perspective (neglecting the 2nd law) as per a conversation I overheard.
Neither is this heat going to come back out from the deep ocean any time soon (the notion that this heat is the warming that is ‘in the pipeline’ is erroneous). Rather, these measures are important for what they tell us about the TOA radiative imbalance and it is that which is important for future warming.
In the pipeline is an idea that has always worried me. Glad to see it bite the dust officially at realclimate. The surface is the source of most heat in the atmosphere – heated via short wave radiation from the sun. The atmosphere influences the rate of energy loss from the oceans. A warmer (more CO2) atmosphere reduces the energy loss such that the oceans warm and the atmosphere cools – the warmer atmosphere is shedding energy at a higher rate in all directions but there is less IR up from the surface until the oceans warm and more IR up from the surface restores the balance. That a small proportion of the heat is dissipated into the depths in meso-scale eddies seems quite irrelevant. Ultimately there is a new balance at a higher atmospheric temperature – but the higher surface temperature is determined by the radiative properties of the atmosphere and not the heat in the oceans.
Simple in principle but probably describes the tail wagging the dog. Data shows the OHC following TOA net radiant flux closely which itself is hugely and rapidly variable as a result of an amalgam of natural processes. El Nino warms the atmosphere and OLR increases, clouds influence both OLR and RSW, volcanoes cool, etc.
In the pipeline is not in dispute at RC. They have always carefully explained the concept. In the pipeline means not in the earth’s system.
Many skeptics write about warming in the pipeline as being hidden/stored in the ocean. One is Max. That is what Gavin is saying is erroneous. The oceans are part of the earth, so the pipeline ain’t in them.
‘In the pipeline means not in the earth’s system.’
Well who really gives a rat’s arse then. You’re a weirdo JCH
The energy is entering the system at around 25C (tropical ocean surface temperature) and gets diluted down to 4C (global ocean mean temperature). For a delta-T of 21 Kelvin Carnot’s Law states that with a perfect heat engine the efficiency is 6%. The ocean is probably close enough to a perfect heat engine to ignore it’s actual efficiency. In other words the 0.5W/m2 excess entering the ocean reemerges at 6% of the original power or 0.025W/m2. A hundred years’ worth of this excess getting stored will take nearly 2000 years to be released. The rate of release is too slow and drawn out to have significant warming effect. This is due to second law of thermodynamics. In other words 100 years of sequestering 0.5W/m2 in the deep ocean will keep the atomsphere above the ocean 0.2C warmer for the next 2000 years. It’s a non-concern. We have bigger fish to fry such as running out of fossil fuel.
ENSO uses vast pools of ocean water of varying temperatures. It does violate the 2nd law.
No it most certainly does not violate 2LoT. You’re babbling.
David, “The energy is entering the system at around 25C (tropical ocean surface temperature) and gets diluted down to 4C (global ocean mean temperature). For a delta-T of 21 Kelvin Carnot’s Law states that with a perfect heat engine the efficiency is 6%. ”
I think it is better to include the maximum range, ~30 C surface and ~2 C for the deepest of the deep oceans. That gives you ~10% efficient which agrees better with the SST versus OHC data. That btw results in 154 Wm-2 difference, about the total atmospheric effect with about 15 Wm-2 of work done in the oceans.
Sometimes I leave out fairly important.
I meant to say ENSO does not violate the 2nd law.
Nor does Trenberth.
JCH, “I meant to say ENSO does not violate the 2nd law.
Nor does Trenberth.”
No, what Trenberth is doing is violating or coming close to violating the first law of thermo. As David pointed out the Carnot Efficiency can give you a good estimate of the maximum efficiency of a system. If Trenberth exceeds the Carnot efficiency, then he violated the law if he can’t find some mechanical energy, “natural variability” as in tides and Coriolis effect to fill the gap.
This is the point that everyone has been making, a large percentage of the ocean mixing work is not thermal but mechanical.
JCH
You wrote:
Hold on there, JCH. Is Gavin tossing his old boss (and himself) under the bus here?
Let’s compare what you just wrote with the Hansen et al. “hidden in the pipeline” paper of 2005 (which ocean heat content expert, Josh Willis, co-authored along with Gavin Schmidt, himself):
In the abstract Hansen, Willis, Schmidt et al tell us:
There are two main take-homes from this paper.
1. First, it is a marvelous piece of circular logic:
– Our models tell us it should have warmed by X.
– The thermometers tell us it has only warmed by X/2.
– Therefore, the difference (= X/2) is still “hidden in the pipeline (NOT “let’s go back and correct our models, which would have been Occam’s suggestion).
2. And second, the “pipeline” is alleged to be an increase in “ocean heat content”, with a significant portion of that hidden out of sight “at greater depths” than “the upper 750 m of the ocean”.
So your statement is flat-out wrong (or Gavin is back-tracking on his earlier claims).
And since this was written before there even were any half-way reliable measurements of upper OHC (ARGO only started in 2003) and there still aren’t any reliable and comprehensive measurements of deep ocean temperature changes, the paper is “circular” and “trust me, baby” logic combined in one big bit of mumbo jumbo.
Toss it in the trash can (along with Gavin’s recent retraction).
Max
Max – there is no hope for you.
The pipeline is future sunlight interacting with a future earth system. Neither are fixed. The energy that comes in tomorrow was in the pipeline today.
There is no backtracking.
Max,
OK, that 2005 paper is really at odds with the paper David Springer linked to. Just when i start to see some rationality on the side of the warmists….
Worse than the “in the pipeline” phrase is the term “thermal inertia” which makes the picture of this heat dragon lurking in the depths waiting to pounce on civilization even more dramatic.
“The thermal inertia of the ocean, with resulting unrealized warming
‘in the pipeline,’ combines with ice sheet inertia and multiple positive feedbacks during ice sheet disintegration to create the possibility of a climate system in which large sea level change is practically impossible to avoid.
…
If the time for a substantial ice response is as short as a century, the positive ice-climate feedbacks imply the possibility of a system out of our control.”
Imagine that, a climate system beyond our control. Who could imagine such a thing?
JCH,
Nonsense. “The thermal inertia of the ocean, with resulting unrealized warming ‘in the pipeline'”
The warming in the pipeline “results” from the heat in the ocean, not the CO2 in the atmosphere. English 101.
JCH
Looks like you have swallowed the dogma, hook, line and sinker.
Hansen, Willis, Schmidt et al. tell us (in 2005) that roughly half of the warming to date is hidden “in the pipeline” and that the “pipeline” is the ocean (as “confirmed by precise measurements of increasing ocean heat content over the past 10 years”). It further suggests that a significant portion of this heat is stored “at greater depths in the ocean” (beyond 750 meters).
Now you tell me that Schmidt says it is NOT hidden “in the ocean”, but that:
“future sunlight”?
“future earth system”?
“energy that comes in tomorrow was in the pipeline today”?
Huh?
Sorry, JCH, you may fall for this bit of mumbo-jumbo, but I don’t.
And it is a definite switcheroo from the earlier story, whether you realize this or not.
Max
Max you are just profoundly wrong.
When KT figured out there was missing heat, he didn’t wonder why it didn’t come back out of the deep ocean. He’s not as confused as you are.
He said it either went into the oceans or was sent off into outer space. In 2005, the missing heat to which he was referring was not in the oceans.
In 2005 what would become the missing heat was future sunlight interacting with a future earth system. Get it? Not yet here on earth. Not in the sky. Not in the land. Not under the ice. Not in the deep ocean. not here.
And what that future system did was reflect some of it back into outer space and sequester some of it in the deep ocean.
JCH | June 20, 2013 at 4:17 pm | Max you are just profoundly wrong.
When KT figured out there was missing heat, he didn’t wonder why it didn’t come back out of the deep ocean. He’s not as confused as you are.
He said it either went into the oceans or was sent off into outer space. In 2005, the missing heat to which he was referring was not in the oceans.
In 2005 what would become the missing heat was future sunlight interacting with a future earth system. Get it? Not yet here on earth. Not in the sky. Not in the land. Not under the ice. Not in the deep ocean. not here.
In other words there has been no global warming. It’s a travesty there has been no global warming he said. Gaia promised him there would be global warming. She was joking. Or, he was making her up.
And what that future system did was reflect some of it back into outer space and sequester some of it in the deep ocean.
It didn’t arrive. There continues to be no global warming. There never was global warming all the time they were screaming at us that there was global warming. Eventually even Trenberth had to agree that there had not been any global warming.
It’s a travesty that they have been deliberately lying to us. Don’t you think?
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/trenberths-missing-trends/#comment-116040
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/20/monckton-challenges-the-ipcc-suggests-fraud-and-gets-a-response/#comment-1311386
Temperature fixing is science fraud.
And from so long ago in the pipeline..
Like Salinger after two years at CRU went back to New Zealand to fraudulently manipulate their temperature records:
http://sppiblog.org/news/kiwigate-is-a-carbon-copy-of-climategate
re “The pipeline is future sunlight interacting with a future earth system. Neither are fixed. The energy that comes in tomorrow was in the pipeline today.”
I thought you might be saying that this was carbon dioxide heating up the Sun further..
..gosh, I wonder how much doubling of CO2 would heat the Sun? What do you think – to get from the 6000°C it isn’t now to the millions of degrees it is?
David Springer,
That was a helpful article to understand the consensus view on OHC, “heat in the pipeline, and a few other issues.
For one, in the comments there was what appears to be their definition of “heat/warming in the pipeline.”
“Icarus says: 4 Oct 2011 at 6:01 AM
Heating ‘in the pipeline’ doesn’t refer to any heat already absorbed by the planet, but instead to heat that *will* be absorbed before the TOA radiative imbalance reaches equilibrium.”
In other words, heat in the pipeline is heat still not released by the sun, but that will be released, and will be retained by GHGs in the atmosphere in the future because we haven’t already decarbonized the world economy. Not very pithy when you spell it out, and not as persuasive as when you characterize it in a way that makes even people who follow the debate closely misunderstand it.
And it’s not just skeptics that have taken the phrase to mean what it certainly seems to mean:
“Not unexpectedly the authors confirmed that heat is continuing to build up in the sub-surface ocean, which agrees with other recent studies on ocean heat. The persistent energy imbalance measured by this study is essentially future global warming, or “warming in the pipeline”. It puts paid to wishful thinking-based claims that global warming has halted.”
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Search-For-Missing-Heat-Confirms-More-Global-Warming-In-The-Pipeline-.html
What I really liked about the Real Climate article is that it confirmed my beliefs on an unrelated issue, about why “global warming” is defined by just surface air temps.
” I’m not aware of anyone who has ever thought that surface temperatures tell us everything there is to know about climate change, but nonetheless in practical terms global warming has for years been defined as the rise in this metric. It is certainly useful to look at the total heat content anomaly (as best as it can be estimated), but the difficulties in assembling such a metric and extending it back in time more than a few decades preclude it from supplanting the surface temperatures in this respect. ”
Translation: global warming is defined by surface temps because that’s what we’ve got. The rest of the discussion about the slower changes in temps of the oceans also confirms that surface air temps make for more scarier PR.
And Gavin also agree with skeptics that transfer of heat to the ocean below 700 meters is unlikely to have any substantial negative effect, and that there is no way to know how much heat has been transferred there. (Could it be that the oceans, and not CO2, are the Earth’s thermostat, and beyond man’s control?)
All in all a fascinating article.
You’re amazingly close. Many many months ago, back when Fred Moolten was a regular, there was an extensive discussion about warming in the pipeline. I said it was future sunlight interacting with the future earth system. The last go started around 330 ppm. The next go will start well into the 400 ppm range.
Gavin is not likely to agree with skeptics because it is not about stored heat reassembling and shooting out of the deep ocean. That is not what is going to come back to haunt us.
So to recap:
•Meehl (2011) is a climate model-based study that shows hiatus decades, of little or no increase in global surface temperatures, are relatively common even under conditions of global warming similar to the present.
•This see-sawing pattern of global surface temperatures has been apparent in climate model projections for some time now.
•These hiatus decades are simply the cool phase of a cool-warm natural cycle where heat is exchanged between the surface and subsurface ocean.
•The deep ocean warms during these hiatus decades because heat builds up in mid-latitude regions and is quickly funneled downwards.
•Heat buried in the deep ocean remains there for hundreds to thousands of years. It is not involved in the heat exchange occurring in shallower layers.
•Oceanic patterns in the hiatus decades are very similar to both La Niña and the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation. So the model is simulating well-observed phenomena.
•The ocean, as a whole, is still steadily building up heat, so the next warm phase of this natural cycle may drive global temperatures to new record highs (the ocean heat coming back to haunt us).
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Ocean-Heat-Poised-To-Come-Back-And-Haunt-Us-.html
None of this is true – and the imbalance nonsense is equally unlikely.
I argue that heat in the pipeline will never be fully felt because there aren’t enough economically recoverable fossil fuels to keep atmospheric CO2 driven out of equilibrium with the ocean for long enough. As soon as humans stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an accelerating it’s going to get pulled back to equilibrium as fast as it was driven out of equilibrium. The heat in the pipeline argument presumes that atmospheric CO2, once in the atmosphere, stays there for thousands of years. Piffle. That’s not how equilibrium systems with infinite reservoirs (the ocean CO2 reservoir is essentially infinite compared to atmosphere) work. An equilibrium point for atmospheric CO2 is established by ocean temperature. Ocean basin temperature isn’t changing much until the interglacial period ends so the equilibrium set-point is fixed for the nonce at what empirically appears to be about 280ppm. The farther human industry drives it away from equilibrium the greater the force acting to restore equilibrium. So if we stop pushing the ocean won’t stop pulling and equilibrium should be restored in a matter of decades. The pipeline has no teeth.
David Springer
What you write makes sense.
If 280 ppmv was some sort of “pre-industrial” CO2 equilibrium, we will return to that level when human CO2 emissions slow down or come close to ending.
WEC 2010 has told us that the total inferred recoverable fossil fuel resources left on our planet represent around 85% of the total that was ever on our planet; this tells us that the CO2 level that could asymptotically be reached when all FF are gone is around 980 ppmv.
We see that the %age of the CO2 emitted by humans that remains in the atmosphere is at around 50% today and the above concentration assumes that this will remain at 50%.
However, we have seen that this %age has diminished by around 1%age point per decade since Mauna Loa measurements started.
So do we, in effect, have a half-life relation for CO2 as suggested by Zeke Hausfather at a recent Yale Symposium? (ZH estimated this at 100 to 120 years, even with “unfavorable feedbacks”).
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/pics/1210_ZHfig5.jpg
Table 1 of the IPCC TAR WG1 report says that the CO2 lifetime in the atmosphere before being removed is somewhere between 5 and 200 years with the footnote: No single lifetime can be defined for CO2 because of the different rates of uptake by different removal processes. (So that isn’t much help.)
Using Hausfather’s half life and the standard decay rate equation, this would represent an annual decay rate of 0.58% of the concentration or around 2.3 ppmv per year, which happens (by coincidence?) to be equal to the amount of “missing” CO2 today.
So I’d say that there is some physical evidence supporting your idea of an “equilibrium” that will again be reached when human CO2 emissions diminish as fossil fuels become more difficult and expensive to extract and are slowly replaced with something more economical.
With this is mind, I’d see 980 ppmv as maximum CO2 concentration that will be asymptotically approached but never actually reached some day in the far distant future, after which time the concentration will again begin to decline as it asymptotically approaches the “pre-industrial” equilibrium value.
What do you think?
Max
‘Some of the penetration of heat into the depths of the ocean is reversible, as it comes back in the next El Niño. But a lot is not; instead it contributes to the overall warming of the deep ocean. This means less short-term warming at the surface, but at the expense of greater long-term warming, and faster sea level rise. So this has consequences…
The second point is that we have found distinctive variations in global warming with El Niño. A mini global warming, in the sense of a global temperature increase, occurs in the latter stages of an El Niño event, as heat comes out of the ocean and warms the atmosphere. The ocean’s temperature is also affected by volcanic eruptions, which also affect the perceptions of global warming…
Normal weather also interferes by generating clouds that reflect the sunshine, and there are fluctuations in the global energy imbalance from month to month. But these average out over a year or so.’ http://climatecrocks.com/2013/06/01/the-weekend-wonk-trenberth-on-ocean-heat-and-surface-temps/
‘Tropical variations in emitted outgoing longwave (LW) radiation are found to closely track changes in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). During positive ENSO phase (El Niño), outgoing LW radiation increases, and decreases during the negative ENSO phase (La Niña). The coldest
year during the last decade occurred in 2008, during which strong La Niña conditions persisted throughout most of the year. Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) observations show that the lower temperatures extended throughout much of the troposphere for several months, resulting in a reduction in outgoing LW radiation and an increase in net incoming radiation. At the global scale, outgoing LW flux anomalies are partially compensated for by decreases in midlatitude cloud fraction and cloud height, as observed by Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer, respectively. CERES data show that clouds have a net radiative warming influence during La Niña conditions and a net cooling influence during El Niño, but the magnitude of the anomalies varies greatly from one ENSO event to another.’ http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf
OHC heat content follows net TOA flux quite closely.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Wong2006figure7.gif.html?sort=3&o=118
Cloud changes over decades at least.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png.html?sort=3&o=5
All of what Trenberth is saying here is simplistic nonsense – repeating it does little for anyone’s credibility.
Poor Kevin is “haunted” by hobgoblins of his own imagination.
Sad.
Take the Cli- Sci Quiz.
Put in order, the of likelihood the following.
(5 points will also be awarded for neatness.
Which of these disasters brought about by evil humans’
emissions of CO2 are most likely to happen, ie with 95%
probability?
*Apocalyptic tipping point in temperature,
* Boiling oceans
*Conflagration
*No more snow.
* No more rain.
* Tornados every second Tuesday
*Travesty resolved by some indeterminate
but truly terrifying scenario.
When are the disasters most likely to happen?
Same probability applies.
*Any day soon
*The day after tomorrow.
*One of these days.
*In 10 …20 …50.years time
*A hundred years from today.
Thank you for paricipating.
Beth
Is there a slot for a “none of the above” answer (for me), or an “all of the above” answer (for dour and fearful ones, like JCH, lolwot and Webby)?
Max
Wrong scenarios Beth. If you really open your eyes, look around you, read some science and research, you’ll find the right ones.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/watanabe-strengthening-of-ocean-heat-uptake-efficiency-associated-with-the-recent-climate-hiatus/
Most importantly, Trenberth has to be slimed. It’s gets old.
JCH
Believe it’s called self-sliming, JCH.
Max
Hah, lucia is so funny.
============
Marvelous job of rationalization, followed by the usual warning of bad things to come.
Yawn!
Been there, heard that…(IPCC’s rationalization of the “mid-century cooling”)
Max
David Springer
Three-line summary of the paper you cited:
As the deep ocean canard was exposed,
it miraculously metamorphosed
into an invisible black swan of the future
Max
Let’s face it – all this attention focused on ocean heat content is intended to somehow explain why it does not appear in the atmosphere as greenhouse warming. The answer to it must be that it somehow sneaks by without being noticed by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and quickly hides itself in the ocean bottom. Or else gets lost as Trenberth and Fasullo told us. That one was actually funny if you think about it. Everything was normal until 2004 when Argo floats entered the picture in order to give them “…a new confidence in ocean heat content assessment.” What actually happened is that those 3000 Argo floats had a ravenous appetite for energy and by 2008 they had eaten up eighty percent of it. To lose eighty percent of the energy in four years is no mean feat. I have no idea why the reviewers and the editors did not send them back at that point checking the buoys to learn how they operate. But no, the paper was published with a beautiful picture of that “lost energy” and sent everyone out looking for it. Oh, and by the way, carbon dioxide is actually incapable of causing greenhouse warming. Some of you may actually have noticed this already since It is not hard to find data confirming it.
Arno said:
“Oh, and by the way, carbon dioxide is actually incapable of causing greenhouse warming.”
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Perhaps you are referring to some alternative universe with different laws of physics. On this planet, in this universe, CO2 is quite capable of causing GH gas warming.
R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | June 21, 2013 at 12:02 am | Reply Arno said:
“Oh, and by the way, carbon dioxide is actually incapable of causing greenhouse warming.”
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Perhaps you are referring to some alternative universe with different laws of physics. On this planet, in this universe, CO2 is quite capable of causing GH gas warming.
Of course it is in your imaginary fantasy AGW Greenhouse Effect whorld of fake greenhouse gases, anything is possible.
You can imagine many more impossible things with Al in your world in your universe, in fact it is encumbent on you to imagine impossible things about your world before allowed breakfast, so I’ve heard from Alice.
In a different universe which you can reach if you can ever find the mirror to step through you’ll find our world, where nature is real and tangible all around us.
Come back to our real world where we feel the great invisible longwave infrared heat from our millions of degrees centigrade blazing hot Star we call the Sun. Step out of yur whorld where yur fantasy Sun is a puny cold 6000°C which gives off insignificant invisible heat and even that you’ve stopped from reaching yur whorld by erecting an invisible barrier to it, and instead in your silly whorld visible light heats your imaginary land and water.
In our real tanglible world Carbon dioxide recycles through our real gas atmosphere because it comes back to continue feeding our real flora at the surface waiting for it with open stomata on the underside of their leaves, because it is heavier than air so separates out and sinks displacing air, and because it joins with water in atmosphere forming carbonic acid and comes down in rain which has a pH of 5.6-8 from water in the atmosphere attracting all the real gas carbon dioxide around it.
In yur imaginary whorld thru the looking glass with Al you don’t have our real gas atmosphere, you have instead empty space from yur imaginary ideal gas with no mass so no weight under gravity which you keep from diffusing at great speeds to the ends of yur fantasy universe by putting an invisible container around yur imaginary whorld.
Yur imaginary massless properyless carbon dioxide can accumulate for hundreds and thousands of years trapped in this invisible container because you have no gravity to give it weight and no attraction to change its form.
Without real gases with real properties and so real processes from their interactions with each other you have no Water Cycle, no rain in yur carbon cycle, no convection to transport yur imaginary heat away from the surface so no cooling convection currents which are winds in our real world.
Real gas winds which are created from the expanding and condensing behaviour of our real gases nitrogen and oxygen by first transferring heat by convection through the heavy under gravity fluid ocean of air we have around us as lighter hot air rises, and so colder heavy pressure air spontaneously sinks flowing beneath into the hot low pressure areas at the surface.
Which ocean of real gas also acts as a thermal blanket stopping the heat from our real world from escaping too quickly as it does on the Moon which has no atmosphere because without them.
Who first imagined yur cold fantasy whorld with no atmosphere only empty space around it with its strange impossible fisics? Do you know?
Who first decide to make yur Sun cold so you could pretend that any downwelling longwave infrared measured in the real world came from backradiation from yur greenhouse gases of your empty space atmosphere trapped in its invisible container?
Unknown to real physics as still traditionally taught by some in the real world..
Does he/she get royalties every time it is used in models? Every time the comic cartoon of the AGWScienceFiction’s Greenhouse fake fisics energy budget is depicted?
Who first decided to change the meaning of greenhouse to warming only taking out the cooling cycles of water and the real gases nitrogen and oxygen?
Who first decided to give the figure of -18°C, which in the real world is absence of all our atmosphere which is mainly nitrogen, to absence only of these fake AGWSF greenhouse gases?
Who first decided to give the thermal blanket effect of our real gases nitrogen and oxygen which with the absence of water would prevent our Earth’s heated surface from cooling too quickly as does the Moon’s and would give us a temperature of 67°C, to yur imaginary carbon dioxide which is a trace gas practically all hole blanket in the real world’s real gas atmosphere?
It’s very clever, as a magician’s trick. Kept going by brainwashing through the general education system and distractions thereafter..
..who are the Red and White Queens yur side of the mirror? Is the Red Queen CAGW and the White AGW? The White Queen is a bit wimpy..
http://sabian.org/looking_glass9.php
“‘Which reminds me—’ the White Queen said, looking down and nervously clasping and unclasping her hands, ‘we had such a thunderstorm last Tuesday—I mean one of the last set of Tuesdays, you know.’
Alice was puzzled. ‘In our country,’ she remarked, ‘there’s only one day at a time.’
The Red Queen said ‘That’s a poor thin way of doing things. Now here, we mostly have days and nights two or three at a time, and sometimes in the winter we take as many as five nights together—for warmth, you know.’
‘Are five nights warmer than one night, then?’ Alice ventured to ask.
‘Five times as warm, of course.’
‘But they should be five times as cold, by the same rule—’
‘Just so!’ cried the Red Queen. ‘Five times as warm, and five times as cold—just as I’m five times as rich as you are, and five times as clever!’
Alice sighed and gave it up. ‘It’s exactly like a riddle with no answer!’ she thought.”
So who created yur fantasy world where a trace gas with no heat capacity to speak of is a massive thermal blanket around it trapping heat and heating it up by, oh, how every many degrees you feel like saying ..?
When you seem to want to ignore the basic dynamics if what is going on, as you do, we can’t possibly have a more advanced conversation. For those who want to understand, I suggest:
http://scienceofdoom.com/roadmap/co2/
R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | June 21, 2013 at 8:14 am | When you seem to want to ignore the basic dynamics if what is going on, as you do, we can’t possibly have a more advanced conversation. For those who want to understand, I suggest:
http://scienceofdoom.com/roadmap/co2/
Ha, ha ha ha ha… Spencer?? Who thinks shortwave from the Sun heats the Earth’s land and water..? Who thinks gas molecules are the imaginary gas in the imaginary empty space they create because they are massless and they go zooming off at great speeds bouncing off each other and the walls of an invisible non-existant container in elastic collisions? Who wouldn’t recognise gravity if it pulled an apple onto his head..
Who says we get no direct thermal infrared, aka longwave infrared, from our real blazing millions of degrees hot Sun!
How do your great fantasy scientists like Spencer calculate this? By some weird planckian screw up where they have taken the thin 300 miles ring of visible light atmosphere around the Sun and calculated that makes the Sun 6000°C so it doesn’t give off any significant longwave infrared heat and any that does is insignificant of insignificant that heads for Earth – and you say that anyway can’t get through your imaginary “greenhouse glass barrier at TOA”.
I really wish you could see how funny this is.
You can take him and all your other fantasy scientists seriously if that’s what rocks for you, but in the adult world of real physics as still traditionally taught in the real world where we produce glass and film for windows to keep out the direct radiant heat longwave infrared from the Sun and maximise entry of visible light to keep rooms cool, the fake fisics of the AGWScienceFiction’s Greenhouse Effect is a joke. So are the scientists who teach it.
Spencer: “Of course, the hotter parts of the globe radiate out more longwave energy.
“Downwards Longwave Radiation
But what does it look like at the earth’s surface to an observer looking up – ie the downwards longwave radiation? If there was no greenhouse effect we should, of course, see zero longwave radiation”
Why not? Because he’s in the world through the greenhouse looking glass where he can imagine as many impossible physics as he wants.., as he does.
A world were you’ve decided the Sun is only 6000°C, so that you can pretend that any real world direct from the Sun downwelling measurements of its great longwave infrared heat doesn’t exist – why?
So your brilliant fanasy scientists can attribute it to your massless therefore not subject to gravity molecules of pretend carbon dioxide backradiating it from your empty space atmosphere where they are busy busy accumulating prevented from escape from the Earth to the ends of your fantasy universe by your imaginary “invisible container like the glass of a greenhouse”.
This is a straight sleight of hand con. You can believe the fake fisics they’ve designed to pull it off, your choice, but if you don’t like being conned I suggest you watch the magician’s hands a bit more closely and learn to deconstruct his patter where he mixes up real physics terms to make it appear his trick isn’t a trick of the light..
The Spencer quote I gave from this choice your link: http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/02/11/co2-%E2%80%93-an-insignificant-trace-gas-part-six-visualization/
“Upwards Longwave Radiation
So let’s try and look at it again and see if starts to make sense. Here is the earth’s longwave energy budget – considering first the energy radiated up: http://scienceofdoom.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/longwave-upward-flux-clear-sky1.png?w=500
“Of course, the earth’s radiation from the surface depends on the actual temperature. This is the average upwards flux. And it also depends slightly on the factor called “emissivity” but that doesn’t have a big effect.
“The value at the top of atmosphere (TOA) is what we measure by satellite – again that is the average for a clear sky. Cloudy skies produce a different (lower) number.
“These values alone should be enough to tell us that something significant is happening to the longwave radiation. Where is it going? It is being absorbed and re-radiated. Some upwards – so it continues on its journey to the top of the atmosphere and out into space – and some back downwards to the earth’s surface. This downwards component adds to the shortwave radiation from the sun and helps to increase the surface temperature.
“As a result the longwave radiation upwards from the earth’s surface is higher than the upwards value at the top of the atmosphere.
“Here’s the measured values by satellite averaged over the whole of June 2009.
http://scienceofdoom.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/olr-200906-globe-499px.png?w=500
“Of course, the hotter parts of the globe radiate out more longwave energy.
Downwards Longwave Radiation
But what does it look like at the earth’s surface to an observer looking up – ie the downwards longwave radiation? If there was no greenhouse effect we should, of course, see zero longwave radiation.”
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This quote summarizes the misperceptions related to heat flux from ocean to atmosphere quite well:
“The physical mechanisms whereby heating from the atmosphere is sequestered below 700 m are not obvious.”
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Not only not obvious, by physically impossible. You might as well as how the heat from a jacket gets into your body core when you’re wearing it on a cold winter day. Answer: it doesn’t. The net flow of energy on Earth is from ocean to atmosphere, just as the net flow of energy when you’re wearing a jacket is from body to jacket. It is a thermodynamically rediculous question to ask how the heat from the atmosphere gets sequestered below 700m. But what GH gases do, and wearing a jacket does, is alter the thermal gradient. They restrict the flow of energy outward. The primary source of energy in the ocean is solar SW. Continue to increase GH gases, and the thermal gradient gets less and less steep. The oceans will continue to increase in heat content. The slightly warmer atmosphere acts as a highly leveraged control valve restricting the flow of energy from ocean to atmosphere.
Heat wont move from the mixed layer to below the 700m level without a mechanism of some sort. You then have to explain why it does not show up in the 10 to 700m zone. If you bothered to read the post you might find that meso-scales eddies were posited. So less pontificating about baby stuff and more reading I suggest.
Nice dodge there Chief. You know as well as I do that the net flow of energy is from Ocean to atmosphere. This “baby physics” as you call it, makes it impossible to have the atmosphere warming the ocean, which was the subject of the quote I referenced. A jacket does not warm your body, but keeps your body from losing heat as fast.
I believe the oceans control the base of which daily/seasonal temps cycle, hence why the PDO/AMO matter to land temps.
But, tonight’s temp drop is an almost exact match to today’s temp increase. In this respect there is no coat. Follow the link in my name to surface data analysis proving this.
Mi Cro,
Take away the oceans and see how much the temperature drops. Just spend a night in the desert. Rocks and soil really don’t hold thermal energy as well as water.
I think they actually hold it just fine, it doesn’t conduct heat so well though. It’s this reason you dig down a little ways, and even in winter the grounds 50 some degrees (at least here in Ohio).
But the real point is that tonight’s temp drop carries away today’s heat. Increased Co2 isn’t causing it to get warmer. In fact during the warmer years, it cools more at night than it warms during the day. At least according to 120 some million NCDC surface station records.
The subject was redistribution of heat from the mixed layer to the deeps. How the mixed layer warms is a different problem. Try to keep up.
I suggest you look at the context of that quote
Do something for others just because you can.