by Judith Curry
A paper published Science finds reconstructed Pacific Ocean heat content has been significantly higher throughout the vast majority of the past ~10,000 years in comparison to the latter 20th century.
“The findings support the view that the Holocene Thermal Maximum, the Medieval Warm Period, and the Little Ice Age were global events, and they provide a long-term perspective for evaluating the role of ocean heat content in various warming scenarios for the future.”
The paper also finds that several significant past climate fluctuations — including a warm spell that peaked around 1100 A.D. called the medieval warm period and the so-called little ice age from the 1400s through the 1700s — were global in scope. This finding is in sync with some other recent work, but challenges some previous conclusions that these changes were constrained Northern Hemisphere phenomena.
Here’s how Linsley put this in our taped talk:
Things are more interconnected, I think, than we thought. We can’t think of these as just European events or Northern Hemisphere events. We’re in the middle of the warm pool in the western Pacific on the Equator or south of the Equator and still we’re seeing these century-scale events – the medieval warm period and the little ice age. The Holocene thermal maximum 10,000 years ago was [also] thought to be the Northern Hemisphere at first. I think these events are global and we would expect other events to be, as well.
Here’s another core point in the video:
Linsley: I think this shows we need to focus some more attention on the places in the northern and southern hemispheres where the deep ocean is talking to the atmosphere and absorbing this heat and I think we need to spend some more time to understand how that water makes its way towards the Equator. We’re essentially running a large experiment where we’re putting this heat into the deep ocean and we don’t quite know what the downstream effects are going to be. There could be positive effects, buffering effects, there could be some pretty big negative effects.
Revkin: In a way, doesn’t the early Holocene provide at least a hint of what that might look like?
Linsley: Our results would suggest that there was more heat in the oceans in the early Holocene but it absorbed that heat much more slowly than it is now, when there are much more rapid changes going on.
Yair Rosenthal: The fact that 300 years ago the ocean heat content was so low, I use the word capacitor in the paper. We can charge it a lot…. Maybe the ocean is taking the heat more and won’t exhale it as much. That’s the challenge I have for the modelers.
Braddock Linsley: I think this shows we need to focus some more attention on the places in the northern and southern hemispheres where the deep ocean is talking to the atmosphere and absorbing this heat and I think we need to spend some more time to understand how that water makes its way towards the Equator. We’re essentially running a large experiment where we’re putting this heat into the deep ocean and we don’t quite know what the downstream effects are going to be. There could be positive effects, buffering effects, there could be some pretty big negative effects.
Revkin: In a way, doesn’t the early Holocene provide at least a hint of what that might look like?
Our results would suggest that there was more heat in the oceans in the early Holocene but it absorbed that heat much more slowly than it is now, when there are much more rapid changes going on.
BRAD: We have fossils that have been bioturbated … we have pretty high accumulation rates, but we don’t have annual resolution .. You could say that we probably have century-scale resolution at best… It’s possible that the sediments just didn’t record similar warmings in the past.”
YAIR: The deep ocean tends to average and smooth the record … I think it’s fair to say that it’s unlikely that very rapid changes on the order of, let’s say, years or even decades … would show up in the record.”
They argue that, while the present rate of ocean warming is unprecedented, the actual level of ocean heat content (which depends not just on surface temperature, but also sub-surface ocean temperatures) is not as high as during Medieval times, i.e. during what they term the “Medieval Warm Period”.
Finally, we need to maintain a healthy skepticism about broad conclusions about global climate based drawn from one specific region like the tropical IndoPacific. It is surprising in this context that the article didn’t mention or cite two studies published in the same journal (Science), a few years ago: Mann et al (2009) and Trouet et al (2009) which demonstrate a high degree of regional heterogeneity in global temperature changes over the past millennium. Both studies attribute much of that heterogeneity to dynamical climate responses related to the El Niño phenomenon. The tropical Pacific appears to have been in an anomalous La Niña-like state during the Medieval era. That makes it perilous to draw inferences about global-scale warmth from this region.
It is also puzzling that the article doesn’t show or even cite the most comprehensive hemispheric reconstruction to date, that of the PAGES 2K consortium published in the journal Nature Geoscience two months before the present paper was submitted to Science. That reconstruction demonstrates modern warming to considerably exceed the peak warmth of the Medieval period, closely resembling the original Mann et al “Hockey Stick”. It would have been useful to see all of these reconstructions, each of which demonstrate recent warmth to be anomalous in a long-term context, compared on the same graph against the sediment series of this study.
In summary, the Rosenthal study is interesting and it provides useful new paleoclimate data that give us an incrementally richer understanding of the details of climate changes in pre-historic times. However, there are a number of inconsistencies with other evidence, and debatable assumptions and interpretations, which will require sorting out by the scientific community. That is, of course, the “self-correcting” machinery of science that Carl Sagan spoke so eloquently of.
Well it is good to see that Michael Mann is skeptical about paleoclimate reconstructions, even if only the ones that find a MWP, and that he he has faith in the ‘self-correcting’ machinery of science. So, who was the journal editor that let this paper through?
Assertion by Curry, literature by FOMD.
https://www.sindark.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/ccattribution.PNG
We are in the time following a cold period. We are supposed to be warming. If models without CO2 show no warming, they are wrong.
Ice has been retreating since the cold part of the LIA. Albedo has been decreasing since then. We Warmed because Albedo has decreased. That decrease has stopped and temperature has paused.
You can’t use the models in that way. They can show catastrophic global warming, but are otherwise unreliable and not to be trusted.
Fan
The study by these two arch CAGW alarmists surely contradicts the very modest rise evident in the Uni of Colorado site you like to quote?
tonyb
The flat handle of the hockey stick has been substantially misleading
Yes, we have ten thousand years of ice core data that shows temperature going up and down and up and down.
They would now have us believe that is was flat until the recent turn up of the Hockey Stick;
The data shows up and down alternating in the same bounds for ten thousand years. We are in the current up because that is exactly what is supposed to be happening now.
The new modern polar ice cycles turn snowfall on and off to adjust Albedo and Bound the upper and lower limits. NO HOCKEY STICK1
Warm periods happen because it don’t snow much in cold periods;
Cold periods happen because it does snow much in warm periods.
That is why they ALWAYS alternate.
Each one ALWAYS causes the other.
http://popesclimatetheory.com/page41.html
Mr Pope
Vostok records are quoted as going back 650,000 years.
Hmmm….yet data used even in the “stadium wave” hypothesis stated they started filtering out the AGW signal in the 1930’s.
Not exactly. “The removal of the long-term [since 1900] trend from the data effectively removes the response from long term climate forcing such as anthropogenic greenhouse gases.”. ie, they removed the linear trend to see the wiggles. It is quite irrelevant whether AGW provided any part of the linear trend.
The CO2 contribution started even earlier than the 1930’s. What skeptics and deniers still don’t realize is how a log sensitivity function can tend to linearize an accelerating growth function. According to all estimates, humans began adding accelerating amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere starting in the 19th century, when coal was picking up speed and crude oil was just getting started.
Select “Underlying CO2 signal” and you can see how well a log sensitivity fits to explaining the warming trend over the entire span of the last 130+ years:
http://entroplet.com/context_salt_model/navigate
Team Skeptic has no other alternative to explain the growth and especially the characteristic knee in the curve indicating where the CO2 started to really emerge form its background pre-industrial levels. The CSALT model linked above serves to remove the major natural variations in temperature from the original quite noisy curve. It is still noisy but no doubt we can add some other noise reduction techniques, should the fake skeptics want to actually lift a pencil and pursue an interesting line of analysis.
Webster, where would I be without you or Gates providing a Saturday morning chuckle :)
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/10/more-land-use-versus-climate.html
Most of the “CO2” enhanced warming is in the 30N to 60N range since land temperatures are amplified by a variety of factors. Ain’t it funny how “land use” CO2 tends to fit that amplification, shows the “pause”, explains the DTR shift and a host of other blips that tend to not fit well with the “Nothing But CO2” meme
Deniers such as Cappy like to practice the meme ABCD.
The human race can turn the surface of the earth into the effective albedo of an asphalt parking, yet that would be OK as long as it is anything but carbon dioxide
Watch how the deniers operate.
1950 +/- 20 years is good enough.
I wonder how well these data compare with ice core data from Antarctica?? Do both correlate warming and cooling periods??
@Fanny
Judith Curry asserts “AGW at best is detectable since about 1975 1880.“
Assertion by Curry, literature by FOMD.
Yes we know all about that “literature” :
– CO2 went up
– temperature went up
Therefore cO2 caused temperature. Case closed. Stifle criticism. Get on with taxing bejesus out of everyone. Enforce a switch to staggeringly expensive energy.
Step 3 – send everyone who doesn’t toe the line to UNtopia Minnesota.
That’s what we call a STRAWMAN argument. The politics of the outcome have nothing to do with the science of identifying the AGW mechanisms.
No Gail, temps went up, then Co2 went up. Its a result of, not the cause…
Web
The politics of the outcome have nothing to do with the science of identifying the AGW mechanisms.
Yeah, right – there’s no such thing as the funder’s vested interest in science. Tobacco-funded science was never biased to conclude that smoking was safe, so therefore government-funded climate science would never bias its conclusions to support the case for more more government.
This is because science is such an elevated existence, always pristine and beautiful. Ugly things like Climategate just couldn’t happen.
FOMD is to troll as bread is to toast.
FOMD said;
The linked paper, Sea-Level Acceleration Based on U.S. Tide Gauges and Extensions of Previous Global-Gauge Analyses, does not contain the text, “1880”. Discussion does not focus on the late-19th C, but on earlier & later eras.
The charted sea level acceleration values (the topic of this report) actually show a long (ahem) “pause” throughout the late 1800s, then fall increasingly strongly through the early 1900s, and don’t begin their ‘signature’ rise (indicating warming/AGW, etc) until the 1930s.
The so-called ‘little ice age’ scare of the 1960s-70s is clearly visible in an abrupt and sharp (‘switch’-like) level-acceleration fall, and then subsequently goes ‘flying’ off the chart in a quasi-asymptotic fashion right_at_about … 1975.
=====
The motive for this reply, is not just to defend Ms. Curry’s honor. Rather, the graphs in this nice, compact, easily-read paper, strongly exhibit a very-nicely time-shifted correspondence with the graph of Annual Mean Surface Temperature Anomaly in Alexander Biggs’ paper, An Alternative Theory of Climate Change.
Download both PDFs and glance back & forth at their respective graphs. “Hmmm!”
Shifted correspondences, phase-shifting, or ‘displaced curve-matching’, are especially-good forms of corroboration.
(The sea-level data are displaced from temperature data, because changes in the later lead to a delayed change in the former.)
Ted
Maybe someone could help me.
I recall seeing an article a year or two ago, at present I can’t find that paper, discussed ocean sediment core samples off the coast of Japan which showed the presence of both the MWP and LIA.
Chapter and verse floating in the ether within the lacunae of my brain.
MWP and LIA are not in Hockey Sticks, but they are in History Books.
OK, ignorant question here, but I’d like to know what happened to Ocean Heat Content from the depths of the last glaciation to the early part of the Holocene.
=======
There are no ignorant questions Kim, as long as you really want to understand. Ocean heat content of course increased rapidly from the height of the last glaciation, until we came up to the Younger Dryas period, in which OHC declined rapidly for approximately 1,000 years or so (but not back as low as it was during the height of the last glaciation). After the Younger Dryas cooling, OHC began increasing again, peaking at the Holocene Thermal Maximum. OHC then began a slow decline (based on less solar insolation) as per Milankovitch cycles. There were some peaks in the decline (Roman Warm period, MWP), as well as some notable more rapid spikes down in the 8.2 ky event and the LIA. But beginning with the industrial revolution and the increasing GH gas concentrations brought about from that, OHC has began increasing. Certainly some of that increase was a rebound from the LIA, but in the past several decades especially, OHC has been rising faster than at any time since the spike up from the Younger Dryas to the Holocene Thermal Optimum.
So it’s clear that Nature can do these rapid rises?
==================
It was an ignorant question, RG, and I make some effort to distinguish them from stupid ones. I consider myself less ignorant thanks to your input, and can now get into the stupid territory.
If CO2 has the power you imagine, and this is the artificial Anthropocene, isn’t that a heck of a good thing, else we’d be glaciating or very near?
====================
http://popesclimatetheory.com/page9.html
Earth temperature has been well bounded for ten thousand years.
That does mean that Ocean Heat Content has also been well bounded for ten thousand years and it is still well inside those well behaved bounds.
Ice Core Data Temperature is Ocean Temperature and Ocean Temperature is the best Measure we have of Ocean Heat Content.
@kim: If CO2 has the power you imagine, and this is the artificial Anthropocene, isn’t that a heck of a good thing, else we’d be glaciating or very near?
There’s a big difference in rates. The typical glaciation takes around 90% of the whole sawtooth-shaped glaciation cycle or around 90,000 years to cool off. That’s about a hundred times slower than the 1 °C rise during the 100 years starting 1910.
One can do a lot of damage speeding things up by a hundred. Imagine if you bumped into someone in the street walking at 300 mph instead of 3 mph.
“…but in the past several decades especially, OHC has been rising faster than at any time since the spike up from the Younger Dryas to the Holocene Thermal Optimum.”
Do the proxies that this statement relies on have the temporal resolution to back this statement up? I’m not sure they do, but please correct me if I’m wrong and point me to the appropriate study – thanks.
Note, too, increased amplitude and speed of changes around the glacial/interglacial/glacial interfaces.
=====================
‘The climate record for the past 100,000 years clearly indicates that the climate system has undergone periodic–and often extreme–shifts, sometimes in as little as a decade or less. The causes of abrupt climate changes have not been clearly established, but the triggering of events is likely to be the result of multiple natural processes.
Abrupt climate changes of the magnitude seen in the past would have far-reaching implications for human society and ecosystems, including major impacts on energy consumption and water supply demands. Could such a change happen again? Are human activities exacerbating the likelihood of abrupt climate change?’ http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10136
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/temp/vostok/graphics/tempplot5.gif
Zilch but clumsy rhetoric from Gatesy – par for the course when he is not being a nasty little dweeb.
There are probably three elements that are germane.
1. Change is chaotic and abrupt – assuming that OHC varies smoothly over long periods is incorrect.
2. Most recent warming is entirely natural – something that seems unmistakable in the temperature record.
3. The LIA and the MWP were global.
CO2 – btw – responds more to respiration changes related to temperature than ocean outgassing. The temperature changes in glacial/interglacial transitions are driven by albedo – CO2 is a feedback. Indeed CO2 seems to have been as high at the end of the last glacial transition as now.
e.g. http://www.academia.edu/2949675/Stomatal_proxy_record_of_CO2_concentrations_from_the_last_termination_suggests_an_important_role_for_CO2_at_climate_change_transitions
There was some mention of anomalous La Nina in the Medieval period?
Not true – http://www.academia.edu/2949675/Stomatal_proxy_record_of_CO2_concentrations_from_the_last_termination_suggests_an_important_role_for_CO2_at_climate_change_transitions – more salt in the Law Dome ice core is La Nina. The anomalies were all El Nino – as it is in the modern period. But although ENSO is the most obvious of influences – it is probably more decadal to millennial variability of the pan Pacific state that is the bigger influence over longer periods.
Nothing wrong with the method of this study – which we have seen before – but the song and dance surrounding it seems entirely wonky.
Chief Hydrologist: Change is chaotic and abrupt – assuming that OHC varies smoothly over long periods is incorrect.
“Smooth” is relative to the sampling interval. Surely any accurate model would be twice continuously differentiable.
But abrupt has a couple of definitions in climate science.
Chief Hydrologist: But abrupt has a couple of definitions in climate science.
I don’t think it has any “definition”, but I am open to information.
Oh for God’s sake – http://lmgtfy.com/?q=abrupt+climate+change
Chief Hydrologist: assuming that OHC varies smoothly over long periods is incorrect.
I disagree. OHC varies smoothly over any time span you happen to specify.
‘The climate system has jumped from one mode of operation to another in the past. We are trying to understand how the earth’s climate system is engineered, so we can understand what it takes to trigger mode switches. Until we do, we cannot make good predictions about future climate change… Over the last several hundred thousand years, climate change has come mainly in discrete jumps that appear to be related to changes in the mode of thermohaline circulation.’ Wally Broecker
Abrupt change is the fundamental behaviour of climate at scales from minutes to eons. It is a coupled, complex, chaotic and dynamic system. Not to understand this is to miss the entire point. Not a chance of getting anything right a all. Sorry.
Chief Hydrologist: ‘The climate system has jumped from one mode of operation to another in the past
Jumped!
You are not comfortable with comparative notions like fast and slow, but insist on discontinuities. No absolutely continuous trajectories for you!
Well I think you should blame Wally Broecker – the basterd.
And climate sensitivity is….
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Ghil_fig11_zpse58189d9.png.html?sort=3&o=16
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/bifurcations.png.html?sort=3&o=68
Vaughan Pratt,
You mention typical cooling rates.
How fast are atypical cooling events? Are they atypical because they cool faster, or slower?
What is the fastest rate of cooling you are aware of?
How dangerous would this be in comparison to the slowest?
I hope you have no objection to me responding to your irrelevant analogy with one of my ow.
Typically, motorists stop at red lights. In this case you will not lose your life due to a motorist speeding through, by definition.
Atypically, one or more motorists ignore the red light, and death or serious injury to one or more persons may result. Am I acting reasonably by paying more attention to the possibility of an atypical event known to have occurred in the past?
Enough analogies already!
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
@Mike Flynn: I hope you have no objection to me responding to your irrelevant analogy with one of my own.
Touché. No objection. ;)
Flynn said:
“… one of my own”
Flynn brings irrelevance to new heights of irrelevance.
WebHubTelescope,
I once asked a question of Webby,
His answer was “Yes, no, or mebbe”,
I said “I’d prefer
just one answer, kind sir”,
He pouted, and cried like a bebbe.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Vaughan Pratt | November 1, 2013 at 7:49 pm |
“One can do a lot of damage speeding things up by a hundred. Imagine if you bumped into someone in the street walking at 300 mph instead of 3 mph.”
Thanks for giving us a prime example of the hyperbolic imaginings of Stanford warmists. It’s very illuminating.
http://www.1728.org/energy.htm
200 lb standard mass moving at 3mph has 81 joules of kinetic energy
200 lb standard mass moving at 300 mph has 800,000 joules of kinetic energy
200 lb stanford asss moving at hyperbolic velocity is infinitely weak
Autonomous vehicle navigating unrehearsed at 25 MPH through the rocky terrain of Death Valley.
Ah, my favorite topic. Rosenthal, Linsley & Oppo paper is a very important piece in the overall study of how increasing anthropogenic GH gas emissions are affecting ocean heat content. This does not need to be “spun” to see the significance of what their data seems to be telling us. Oceans are warming at their fastest pace in 10,000 years, completely in line with GH gases rising to levels not seen in 3.2 million years. This is completely in line with basic thermodynamic theory and the well-understood physics of greenhouse gases. the only “spin” that will be put on this will be by the so-called “skeptics” as they try and find reasons why the rapid rise in GH gases shouldn’t be doing this– which leads to all sorts of non-scientific discussion.
Gates, you are right, it should not need to be “spun” Incompentent statistical analysis that attempted to rewrite history by removing the importance of the IPWP was “spun”. This is just science correcting itself.
It does have a huge impact of the CO2 forcing estimates though and once NH land amplification is removed from the equations CO2 forcing falls right in line with the more realistic no feedback sensitivity estimates. Since solar has a significant impact on the tropical oceans, solar forcing is restored to a reasonably value and then more emphasis is place on longer term ocean heat transport which should have been square one of the modeling process.
Your QBO is an ~27 to 29 month oscillation directly related to solar and equatorial settling time required for an annual solar forcing imbalance. The MJO is directly related to the interseasonal equatorial imbalance and QBO lag. ENSO is directly related to solar and the combined QBO/MJO interactions. All of which shift with the Thermal Equator in the Toggweiler sense.
http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/6/369/2010/cpd-6-369-2010.pdf
Simply, solar/volcanic forcings have been grossly underestimated by the minions of the Great and Powerful Carbon in pursuit of saving a theory and the world in the process.
Captn,
I think you really miss the point of the rapid rise we’re seeing in OHC. It is the fastest rise since the spike up from the Younger Dryas to the Holocene Thermal Optimum. That spike was caused by both changes in solar insolation AND the positive feedback effect from increasing CO2 being outgassed from the oceans as they were getting warmer. The current spike upward in OHC in being driven almost entirely by the rapid rise in anthropogenic GH gases. The increaseed forcing from the increase of these gases doesn’t change from year to year. Somewhere around 0.8 w/m^2 of TOA imbalance exists, and the bulk of that is going into the oceans. The warming oceans have buffered the atmosphere from the forcing, and internal and natural variability will cause the flow of that heat from ocean to atmosphere to vary from year to year and decade to decade…but the energy is being added to the system quite constantly and without pause at the fastest rate since the rise to the Holocene Thermal Optimum.
No Gates, as usual you miss the point of the rapid rise in OHC. The battery only accepts a charge when it is low, i.e. recovery form the LIA is not over.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-wK8A7OXTmXU/UnMBtAwIaDI/AAAAAAAAKTg/qCUcyXOkYFA/s783/ipwp%2520solar%2520and%2520north%2520ex.png
It is close to full recovery which you can tell from the decay of the weakly damped recovery oscillations. All the wiggles are clues.
BTW Gates, the battery analogy is something I have been using for a long time. If you hook a charger to a fully charged battery, not much happens. When you hook it to a charged battery, you get useful work done. That simple means the “sensitivity” to solar is dependent on the charge of the oceans, i.e. it is not linear. So dT=lambda*dF is a crock if you include solar.
opps second should be discharged battery useful work is done.
Can AnthroGHGs breathe life into Nature’s dead cat bounce? I doubt we can gas off anything like the oceans outgassed after the last glaciation.
==============
Capt’nDallas
“When you hook it to a charged battery, you get useful work done. That simple means the “sensitivity” to solar is dependent on the charge of the oceans, i.e. it is not linear.”
You made a correction: “opps second should be discharged battery useful work is done.” which I view as needless. The states of charge of the battery; i.e. from fully charged to fully discharged, are but two states. There are innumerable states of battery charge in between and the sensitivity to solar is non-linear for each state, I believe.
Query: does the ocean have an upper and lower boundary to the state of charge? If so, what are those boundary limiting influences? Could they be exceeded? This all goes back to my wondering about why earth has remained in a relatively narrow temperature band?
Regards
RiH008, “Query: does the ocean have an upper and lower boundary to the state of charge? If so, what are those boundary limiting influences? Could they be exceeded? This all goes back to my wondering about why earth has remained in a relatively narrow temperature band?”
The boundaries are related to the thermohaline density gradients. If the gradients are stable, there would be less OH uptake and a warmer SST. High SST means less charging and more evaporation. With more efficient mixing, lower SST more OH uptake. Mixing efficiency varies with the equator-pole temperature gradients which vary with Volcanic, other imbalances including anthropogenic and solar precessional forcing.
That is why the southern oceans, which are naturally smoothed by excellent mixing and the western Pacific (IPWP) provide excellent paleo references while the NH is full of noise.
Kim said:
“I doubt we can gas off anything like the oceans outgassed after the last glaciation.”
____
Now, as to the actual physical reality of the situation, the outgasssing from the warming oceans at the end of the last glaciation brought the atmospheric CO2 up from about 180 ppm to the early Holocene average of about 280 ppm. During this time we saw a net decrease of CO2 in the oceans, and thus the oceans actually became slightly more basic. With the eruption of the human carbon volcano beginning around 1750 and continuing with increasing vigor through the current time period, we are seeing a net increase of CO2 being ABSORBED by the oceans as the carbon is being transferred from lithosphere to hydrosphere through the actions of the human carbon volcano. Furthermore, and most importantly for the increase in ocean heat content, the atmsophere has exceeded the average Holocene concentration of CO2, now approaching 400 ppm, as the Holocene enters into the Anthropocene, which looks to be a climate period similar to the mid-Pliocene at approximately 3.2 mya.
the positive feedback effect from increasing CO2 being outgassed from the oceans as they were getting warmer
Which allows the biological reservoirs to open, sinking C at rates greater then the ocean diffusion.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/ecosystems/gajewski.gif
The mid-Pliocene co2 levels were lower then the present
( 300-380ppm) and T was significantly higher.Resolve the paradox.
“…the positive feedback effect from increasing CO2 being outgassed from the oceans as they were getting warmer.”
“Which allows the biological reservoirs to open, sinking C at rates greater then the ocean diffusion.”
As if the Oceans want to help the land plants.
So Carbon goes from Oceans to air to plants during a warming.
To simplify, that’s the assumed interglacial flow.
The expected glacial flow would be from plants to Oceans. The carbon flows should balance.
Today’s attempt at irony, When was most of the material for our carbon fuel reserves formed?
“The mid-Pliocene co2 levels were lower then the present
( 300-380ppm) and T was significantly higher.Resolve the paradox.”
_____
No paradox at all. We’ve only recently (by geological timeframes) come into this near 400 ppm. The Pliocene saw tens of thousands of years at those levels. Be patient my friend…we’ll get there at the current eruption levels of the human carbon volcano.
ragnaar asks:
“When was most of the material for our carbon fuel reserves formed?”
____
Well, during the millions of years ago that it was formed, CO2 levels were higher and lots of happy plants thrived in hot steamy jungles. The very distant ancestors of we homo sapiens were tiny tree shrew like animals, scurrying around to keep away from nasty dinosaurs. Now all that carbon was stored as fossil fuels (think of it as ancient stored sunlight), to be released during the eruption of the human carbon volcano. How interesting that the tiny tree shrews ancestors would go on to release ancient sunlight and alter the climate of the entire planet. An amazing universe, eh?
“The mid-Pliocene co2 levels were lower then the present
( 300-380ppm) and T was significantly higher.Resolve the paradox.”
Lower albedo prior to the formation of the major ice-sheets?
R. Gates:
I was hoping for, Most of our carbon fuel reserves were formed during interglacials.
R Gates blathers:
“This does not need to be “spun” …”
So then, of course, he spins …
“Oceans are warming at their fastest pace in 10,000 years, …”
Completely ignoring the author, who says …
YAIR: The deep ocean tends to average and smooth the record … I think it’s fair to say that it’s unlikely that very rapid changes on the order of, let’s say, years or even decades … would show up in the record.”
And then has the gall to project his own behavior onto others, saying …
“… which leads to all sorts of non-scientific discussion.”
Tsk.
JJ,
You sure your initials are not DJ, as you seem to be an excellent “spin doctor.”
The results were clearly stated:
“…middle depths have warmed 15 times faster in the last 60 years than they did during apparent natural warming cycles in the previous 10,000.”
——
This is hard for “skeptics” such as yourself to accept, so all you have left is spin and unscientific dribble.
R Gates dissembles:
“The results were clearly stated:”
So was the caveat that demonstrates the “results” are not within resolving power of the data. Here it is again:
YAIR: The deep ocean tends to average and smooth the record … I think it’s fair to say that it’s unlikely that very rapid changes on the order of, let’s say, years or even decades … would show up in the record.”
The author refutes the validity of the warmist talking point from the press release by explaining that the data used in the paper do not support that conclusion.
This is how “climate science” is done. To get published, you can’t just present your rigorous results, such as the fact that early Holocene OHC was bajillions of Hiroshima bombs higher than it is today.
First, you aren’t allowed to present results like inconvenient OHC in Joules, or use the Hiroshima bombs metric. That’s only allowed when the results follow the party line. Second, you just can’t present inconvenient OHC results without also presenting “results” that give pudgy, goateed narcissists and shameless fellow-travelling liars like R Gates something to talk about. So, you kow-tow up a warmist talking point, while presenting the methodological invalidation of that talking point in a manner that is not readily apparent, but which may be used to CYA later when the whole charade implodes.
The results of this paper are that the Medieval Warm Period is reconfirmed for the umpteenth time as a global event, and that the OHC during the Global Medieval Warm Period was much higher than it is today.
JJ,
Why must you keep avoiding the most important point– it is the RISE in OHC during the past 60 years that is of interest here, and comparing that RISE to previous increases. We know quite well what caused the past rapid RISE in OHC 10,000 years ago– an external forcing to the system (Milankovitch astronomical cycles causing increased solar insolation reinforced by positive feedback from CO2 outgassing from the oceans, etc.). The current spike over the past 60 years, most likely GH gas induced from anthropogenic sources.
Now, do continue on with your denialist antics, as you must do so to support your world view…I understand that…
Heh, ‘world view’ he says as he gazes at one locale. You’ve suddenly extrapolated rapid OHC rise globally in the absence of other indicators.
==========================
R Gates continues its propaganda effort with:
“Why must you keep avoiding the most important point– “
What you’re blathering about isn’t even a point, let alone the most important one. Sub-century rate of OHC change is not resolvable from the data presented in this paper. The author is very clear about that. Here, we’ll let him tell you:
YAIR: The deep ocean tends to average and smooth the record … I think it’s fair to say that it’s unlikely that very rapid changes on the order of, let’s say, years or even decades … would show up in the record.”
“it is the RISE in OHC during the past 60 years that is of interest here, and comparing that RISE to previous increases.
You can’t compare to previous increases. Rate of previous increase for comparable periods is not resolvable from available data. Here, lets have the author explain it to you:
YAIR: The deep ocean tends to average and smooth the record … I think it’s fair to say that it’s unlikely that very rapid changes on the order of, let’s say, years or even decades … would show up in the record.”
On the other hand, if you are want to make comparisons, why not compare the difference in OHC from the Global Medieval Warm Period to now. The authors actually endorse that use of their paper, and in fact they include such a comparison right in the abstract. Neat, huh?
They say OHC was much warmer in the past! Fancy that!
In fact, it was so much warmer during the Global Medieval Warm Period that at the current rate of increase, we won’t be anywhere near the OHC of the Global Medieval Warm Period until long after your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren are dead. That is the appropriate comparison to be made between current rate of increase and the results of this paper. It shows that the current rate of increase is irrelevant to any human concern, except in the sense that it means a long wait for the return of temperatures like those that our ancestors enjoyed during the Medieval Warm Period. You’ll note that the Medieval Warm Period is also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum, because it was such a pleasant global climate to live in.
Hopefully by then, the gene for pathological dishonesty will have worked its way out of your family line, so that your descendants (and the people around them) won’t have their experience of a Climate Optimum marred by a bunch of politically motivated lies.
R Gates – when you say “it is the RISE in OHC during the past 60 years that is of interest here”, you are both cherry-picking and obfuscating.
Cherry-picking because you are ignoring the fact that the temperature appears to have been higher than now over most of the last 10,000 years. Obfuscating because the recent warming period is too short to be meaningfully related to the study.
Judith Curry explains it well : “On the one hand, we have the very high rate of increase at the end of the time series, but it seems that the temporal resolution is pretty low, century resolution at best. So if the signal from AGW is say since 1970, this seems well below the resolution of the analysis, so I am not sure how significant this rapid rate of increase in context of AGW attribution. The most interesting issue is the high level of ocean heat throughout the time series, which looks to be higher than the 20th century for nearly all of the past 10,000 years (except for the LIA 1600-1800 AD).”.
Temporal resolution is low, so the signal since 1970 is well below the resolution of the analysis. In other words, it is not possible to determine whether the recent past warming c.1970-2000 [~30 years not 60] is any faster than in any more distant past similarly short period.
Mike Jonas,
The study is about past rises in ocean heat content over the past 10,000 years. The contrast is when comparing those to what we’ve seen by actual measurements over the past 60 years. One in paleo-reconstruction and one is actual measurements. Both have ranges of uncertainty, but within those ranges (the entire range moves) we see the fastest increase in OHC in the past 60 years since the time the climate pulled itself up from the depths of the Younger Dryas.
R Gates ups the dishonest ante with:
‘The study is about past rises in ocean heat content over the past 10,000 years.”
No it isn’t. When a scientific paper is published, the authors provide an explanation of what their study is about. This explanation is called an “abstract”. For your convenience, JC put the abstract for this paper right at the top of the page. You will notice that ‘rises’ are not mentioned.
On the other hand, what is mentioned is a comparison between present ocean temps and those of the Medieval Warm Period. In particular, they say that their paper is about the fact that the Medieval Warm Period is seen in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, reconfirming that the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon. They also say that the OHC during the Global Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today.
“Both have ranges of uncertainty, but within those ranges (the entire range moves) we see the fastest increase in OHC in the past 60 years since the time the climate pulled itself up from the depths of the Younger Dryas.”
No. Your claim is false. The problem is not the range of uncertainty. The problem is the temporal resolution. Irrespective of the uncertainty, the simple fact of the matter is that the data are not capable of resolving 60 year trends. The author of the paper explains this very clearly:
YAIR: The deep ocean tends to average and smooth the record … I think it’s fair to say that it’s unlikely that very rapid changes on the order of, let’s say, years or even decades … would show up in the record.”
But then, you knew that.
R Gates – As Judith explained, the temporal resolution is too low for the temperature change over any period less than at least a century to be quantified. So you are incorrect when you say “we see the fastest increase in OHC in the past 60 years since the time the climate pulled itself up from the depths of the Younger Dryas”, because in the paper they could not see any 60-year period. There is nothing there for the ~1970-2000 warming to be compared to. JJ has explained it well, too.
JJ | November 1, 2013 at 1:08 pm |
Dynamite post. I was searching for some discussion of the methods used to measure rates of warming. Because the authors have no resolution below a period of one century, as you explain, there is no reason to search further.
On a related note, I am still trying to find some sense behind claims by people such as Mann that rates of warming on decadal scales can be inferred from paleo data. Seems impossible to me.
Rgates
If we can know the temperature of the oceans over the last 10000 years, one much wonder why such relatively simple things as a cure for the common cold remain so elusive?
The wording of the press release sounds as if the authors have an agenda
Use the ‘sceptical’ bit in your name and just wonder if we are so clever that we can really know the sort of information you enthusiastically endorse.
tonyb
Smells like Marcott Spirit.
==============
And the same lesson: We are at the cold end of the Holocene.
================
Tony,
This was definitely an “in your face” press release, but the study itself was conducted quite methodically. See my reply to Kim releated to the past 10,000 years or so of ocean heat content, and see how it correlates with your assumptions:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/11/01/pacific-ocean-heat-content-for-the-past-10000-years/#comment-407052
Lol. Well, I’m skeptical they have an agenda, but on the other hand an agenda would know an agenda.
And the same question: How cold would it now be without man’s input?
================
Kim said:
“We are at the cold end of the Holocene.”
___
Certainly if only “natural” forcing were involved we might well be. Most experts would tell you that this interglacial is most similar to MIS 11. But that is where the similarity ends. Quite possible we may have broken the cycle of interglacial/glacials and are heading back to something akin to the mid-Pliocene– hence the very valid thought that we left the Holocene and are in a new era called the Anthropocene. I know “skeptics” hate this idea as it would invalidate som much of their world view.
It would be a lot colder. What F is the point of that question?
But it’s not colder, and it ain’t gonna be for a very long time. Because natural variation is a toothless tiger. Growls a lot. Bites like a jaw armored with cotton balls.
Right, a cuddly Polar Bear. You don’t know the nature of the beast.
============
RG, better the Pliocene than glaciation, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Seems a vain hope.
==============
captn said:
“recovery form the LIA is not over.”
____
I really expected better from you captn…really.
Of course there was some recovery from the LIA ocean cooling involved in the general rise from that period until about 1900 or so. But remember, the general trend since the Holocene Thermal Optimum has been down down down. The rapid spike up in OHC, especially in the past 60 years or so is quite uncharacteristic of anything in the past 10,000 years (even the recovery from the 8.2. ky cooling). This rapid spike up in the past past 60 years is very likely a strong indication of anthropogenic warming of the oceans.
You obviously have issues reading charts. The Oppo IPWP is a very good match for instrumental SST. The IPWP has not reached the pre-LIA mean meaning that the IPWP recovery from the LIA is not complete. The ASSUMPTION that LIA recovery GLOBALLY was over is ~1900 was just that an ASSUMPTION. You continually mix fact and fiction.
Captn,
Let’s focus on the “spike” upward over the past 60 years, rather than quibble about whether or not a small fraction of warming was caused by “recovery from the LIA”– which in itself is not a scientific explanation. There has to be a real, known EXTERNAL forcing to cause OHC to increase — such as astronomical forcing, or increasing solar output, reductions in aerosols allowing more SWR to hit the oceans, or increases in greenhouse gases. The spike upward in OHC in the past 60 years seems most likely associated with the rapid rise in GH gases during that period. No other known external forcing matches this rise in energy content of the ocean.
Gates, “There has to be a real, known EXTERNAL forcing to cause OHC to increase — ”
Actually no, there just has to be temperature gradients. The SST is always warmer than the average ocean and the complete overturning time scale is ~1700 years. There is a constant EXTERNAL forcing, the sun available to recharge as required. The original forcing of the LIA was likely a combination of slightly reduced solar and increased volcanic activity starting around 1240 AD. The Northern extra-tropics depths of the LIA was close to 1600 AD and the IPWP depths close to 1700 AD.
Then if you really what to get involved with lags, the North Atlantic ocean warming is related to the southern oceans which are out of phase with the NH precessional cycle. So the north Atlantic ocean Peak SST is about 5,000 years after the NH precessional peak.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9ywRPAB0P7M/UnErcZD1e-I/AAAAAAAAKRc/Bd7MmDsA_NM/s640/moss+5ka+21ka.png
The normal range of variation is SST over the past 120000 years has been about +/- 1.25 C which appears the perfectly “normal”.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rRs69Ekl9Zc/T_7kMjPiejI/AAAAAAAAChY/baz0GHWEGbI/s640/60000+years+of+climate+change+plus+or+minus+1.25+degrees.png
As I said, dT=lambda*dF is ridiculous over-simplification that is WRONG. There are millennial timescales to be considered.
Gates said: “There has to be a real, known EXTERNAL forcing to cause OHC to increase — ”
Captn: Actually no, there just has to be temperature gradients.
______
When OHC increases in all ocean basins at all measured depths, including some measurements even at abyssal depths, this can only be an external forcing (i.e. something is forcing the earth system to retain more energy). Natural internal variabilty isn’t goiong to cause a net increase or spike in OHC such as we’ve seen over the past 60 years. Most likely culprit: the rapid rise in GH gases, which represents the largest forcing to the Earth system in at least the past 10,000 years.
Gates, Wrong, OHC is not increasing in all Layers of all basis at the same rates. The north Atlantic basin has a lagged spike that correlates with the resumption of stronger NH SSW events. The southern ocean basins have had a steady rise consistent with LIA recovery SST. The 0-2000 data is too short to carry much weight.
Plus there is a difference in Q, heat capacity of air and ocean. Since I can rescale BEST “Global” and get nearly a perfect fit with SST and IPWP temperatures with nearly zero “post” industrial curve, the recovery from LIA is much more convincing that magic CO2 for the majority of the “global” warming.
That is what is missing in the dT=lambda*dF simplification by the way, dQatm and dQocean.
R. Gates thinks all the experts in heat transport are wrong in thinking that changes in heat transport can change the albedo of the world and thus the effective forcing. He truely is a skeptic.
BTW Gates, since this paper has breathed life into the IPWP which I have been looking at for some time, take a look at this,
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/–hk05PyzaUU/UkA6c9JVmlI/AAAAAAAAJnI/vo-1rzZCR2w/s927/What%2520Uncertainty.png
Global OHC (0-700) SST and the original Oppo 20009 IPWP reconstruction. Show me where the CO2 magic began.
CO2 no feedback is approximately 0.8 C per doubling and will require about 316 years to raise the average ocean temperature by 0.8 C.
Steven said:
“R. Gates thinks all the experts in heat transport are wrong in thinking that changes in heat transport can change the albedo of the world and thus the effective forcing.”
_______
No, not at all. As the energy in the Earth system increases (as it has been steadily, without pause, for many decades) we are seeing more energy being advected to the polar regions, especially the North Pole, but also the abyssal depths of the Southern ocean. This increased energy at the poles is already removing large amounts of ice from Greenland and Antarctica, which will inevitably have a positive feedback effect and warm the poles even faster. A good article on how this happened 3.2 mya is found here:
http://robertscribbler.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/lake-elgygytgyn-study-shows-ice-free-arctic-at-400-parts-per-million-co2/
And here is a quote:
“This research, along with a growing body of Paleoclimate science, indicates that climate is much more sensitive to CO2 increase than current climate models may suggest. Overall, Paleoclimate may well be a far better determiner of the end result of human fossil fuel emissions than models which seek to pin down extraordinarily complex processes and are still in the early stages of development. And if past climate indicators do prove to be the best guide, sustained CO2 levels above 400 PPM will push for a long term temperature increase of around 3-4 degrees Celsius globally and 8-10 degrees at the poles. More importantly, these high levels appear to wipe out most ice in the Arctic environment.”
R. Gates,
“…climate is much more sensitive to CO2 increase than current climate models may suggest.”
Boy, I hope the more prominent CAGWers buy into this. I can’t wait to see them start telling the public:
“Yes, our carefully adjusted ‘globa'” temperature reports show temperatures that are much lower than predicted by our carefully tuned models. We admit therefore that the models are wrong. They should in fact be predicting even higher temperatures.”
There are three possibilites if the quoted statement is correct.
1. The reported global temps are crap.
2. The CGMs are crap.
3. Climate scientists know crap about the climate.
(And I am using “crap” in its technical sense here.)
R. Gates, and if the transport change is from internal variability? Could that cause warming such as we have seen or not?
Steve asks an excellent question:
“steven | November 1, 2013 at 4:31 pm |
R. Gates, and if the transport change is from internal variability? Could that cause warming such as we have seen or not?”
—-
That exact dynamic would then be something we do not know about and has not occurred in the past 10,000 years. The rapid rise in ocean heat content is consistent with what would be expected from the similar rapid rise in greenhouse gas concentrations. Heat that is simply “sloshing around” between various parts or layers of the ocean is not what is being observed. There is an external forcing to the system. If it is not GH gases, then it involves something not in our known physics. Possible…but highly improbable.
Outside of known warminista physics that is.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Loeb2011-Fig1.png.html?sort=3&o=70
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png.html?sort=3&o=32
Praise the Lord – it matches one of the OHC reanalysis.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/oceanheat_zps2cb4a7a1.png.html?sort=3&o=10
‘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
Climate forcing – teeny weeny – natural – large. Which bit don’t they understand? All of it apparently.
R. Gates, I don’t know what forced the changes in heat transport of the Gulf Stream and I don’t know if the changes were forced. You do? How? Forced by what? The authors state they don’t know if it is an internal oscillation or a feedback to an external forcing. You must know since this was clearly within the last 10,000 years. LUND et al Gulf Stream density structure and transport during the past millennium Nature 30 Nov 2006
the only “spin” that will be put on this will be by the so-called “skeptics” as they try and find reasons why the rapid rise in GH gases shouldn’t be doing this
We don’t need to put a spin on this one. Just wait and watch data.
Data will show it is not even happening.
R. Gates, Skeptical Warmist: Oceans are warming at their fastest pace in 10,000 years, completely in line with GH gases rising to levels not seen in 3.2 million years.
Check out table S3 in their supporting online material. Unless there is a typo in that table, this is not the fasted “warming” in 10,000 years.
What is a “so called” skeptic? Is a “true” skeptic a “true believer” pretending to be skeptical?
No paradox at all. We’ve only recently (by geological timeframes) come into this near 400 ppm. The Pliocene saw tens of thousands of years at those levels.
as there is no “instantaneous” response to the perturbation,the dampening is probably due to the oceans eg a potential response.Hansen suggests the fast feedback response ( the pipeline) is troublesome, what he does not tell you (by affixing a cardinal number) is how long the response time is.
Prevdi admits to the reviewers questions,that the response to the so called ocean fast feedback is around 2^40 generations.Sell that one to the policymakers.
“On the one hand, we have the very high rate of increase at the end of the time series, but it seems that the temporal resolution is pretty low, century resolution at best. So if the signal from AGW is say since 1970, this seems well below the resolution of the analysis, so I am not sure how significant this rapid rate of increase in context of AGW attribution.”
YES! WHEN is essential.
“Braddock Linsley: I think this shows we need to focus some more attention on the places in the northern and southern hemispheres where the deep ocean is talking to the atmosphere and absorbing this heat and I think we need to spend some more time to understand how that water makes its way towards the Equator. ”
Most of the ocean heating is from solar SWR, not the atmosphere. Anyone disagree?
Jim,
I absolutely agree that the bulk of energy entering the ocean comes from SWR– directly from the sun. GH gases don’t force more energy into the oceans as the net flow of energy is always FROM ocean TO atmosphere. Over 50% of the energy in the atmosphere at any given time came from the oceans. Increasing GH only increase ocean energy through the alteration in the thermal gradient between ocean and space– i.e. they slow the rate of flow of energy from ocean to space. If SWR remains relatively constant, then increasing GH gases will increase OHC as the rate of flow of energy out the oceans slows.
R. Gates, Skeptical Warmist: If SWR remains relatively constant, then increasing GH gases will increase OHC as the rate of flow of energy out the oceans slows.
Regular readers will be expecting this: How is it known that the effect of increased GH gases will not be to speed up evaporation from the surface of the ocean instead of increasing OHC? The effect could be dependent on geography, with increased warming near the poles where the vaporization rate is low, but increased vaporization near the Equator where the vaporization rate is high.
Does anyone have a handle on how much heat comes up from the Earth’s core to warm the oceans, and what ocean’s floor gets the majority of that heat?? It most likely is mid-ocean and have many fumaroles.
Less than a Watt/m^2 is heat from the mantle escaping. It’s negligible for almost all purposes. The majority comes up through the ocean floor beyond the continental shelves because that’s where the crust is the thinnest and that’s where the majority of the earth’s surface area resides. It were much faster than that small amount the earth’s core would be cooled off by now like Mars or the earth’s moon.
R. Gates says …
“If SWR remains relatively constant, then increasing GH gases will increase OHC as the rate of flow of energy out the oceans slows.”
That may be true. But if the “heat engine” of convection speeds up, the heating will be less than if the rate of convection is constant. So, yes, the ocean will retain more heat, but maybe not as much as you think.
That increased convection/advection, especially in the atmosophere, is already being observed and was predicted by global climate models more than a decade before it was observed. You are right, like all advection, it might help the oceans rid themselves of a bit of the heat, as well as the atmosphere, but it just depends on how much of it makes its way to space and doesn’t stay somewhere in the Earth system, either as latent or sensible heat, or some other form of energy.
And then there is the secondary effect of the clouds atop the convection. That effect actually blocks more SWR from entering the ocean. Of course there are other knock on effects as well, one being more heating due to the air sinking after rising, warming the area under it. I guess you saw the charts done by Willis and others before him that suggest a 31C limit to SST. I thought that was interesting.
R. Gates, Skeptical Warmist: That increased convection/advection, especially in the atmosophere, is already being observed
Imagine my surprise reading that! My suggestion that increased downwelling IR might increase vaporization and the rate convection/advection of sensible and latent heat from lower to upper troposphere would be supported by such observation. Where can I read about it.
The flat handle of the hockey stick has been substantially misleading in this regard. The connotation being… knowingly deceptive fantastically incompetent?
Always the same question, the same question; ignorant or disingenuous?
================
True, true, it’s just more of the same convoluted and colliding, vectors with novel spectroscopy, spinning in waves of pulsing microscopy, affluent inflows and influential up-flows and outflows and no-shows and congruent no-goes, with regular predictions and prognostications, forecasts and projections of perturbations forcing additional contributions to current observations outside past paradigms into alternate spheres of utmost atmos of partial irradiance aplenty anomalously increasing while decreasing oscillators in synchronous ablution hasten our decline.
Omigod, Wag, like from the Peaks of Darien.
==========
Oops, that is with respect to kim’s excellent query: Always the same question, the same question; ignorant or disingenuous?
In some ways Obama’s been a Teflon President. The bad stuff, as bad as it’s looked at the time, hasn’t really hurt him too badly. But that’s changing. The NSA spying debacle, and the Obamacare lies will surely sink him.
Lame duckhood, here we come.
I have to admit that I liked Obama 8 years ago. That he’s turning out to be as bad as George, is absolutely stunning to me. I’ve never been more wrong about something in my life…unless you want to count my first wife…
Yare, he shore talked purty.
Nothing will sink Obama. The only reason the MSM is even talking about his lies in the context of Obamacare is the utter incompetence of those who built the web site. Which has nothing to do with Obama’s lies.
This too shall pass. Progressives always circle the wagons when there is a risk to their movement. (See eg. Clinton’s perjury in a federal court case to cover up his serial harassment and molestation of women). If the media were ever to cover Obama honestly, there would be no way of hiding their own complicity.
How do you tell your viewers/readers that the president you support, in doing exactly what he promised to do as a candidate, has been telling blatant lies, that everyone knew were lies, without answering the question of why you didn’t tell them that earlier.
Trust me. in another couple months, the media will be explaining that the NSA problem is Bush’s fault, and the collapse of Obamacare is the fault of Ted Cruz.
The default progressives will lap it up, and the “moderates” and “independents” will yawn, say “they all do it”, and vote for Hillary Clinton so she can do the same things, and they can tell themselves that they are superior to both conservatives and progressives.
Obama might be able to answer that one…
All who made the same mistake twice are… twice fooled. What a shame. Period.
If you like the President you have, you can keep him. Period.
===================
Gary, you’re smokin…”they all do it” indeed.
Man if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that one.
In the video the author states the current surface temperature could equal or exceed the surface temperature of the MWP.
FOMD,
“Though people have had the largest impact on our climate since 1950,”
source : http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page4.php
Since 1950, global temps have only been going up since the late seventies.
Ah, the serene Pacific, smoothing itself through time, and erupting ferociously here and there and now and then. Maybe I better read the paper, er, uh, read some more informed commentary on it before I further speculate so abstrusely.
=================
Yeah Kim, that’s why they call it, er, the Pacific. Now what gets me is why they call the Atlantic the Atlantic – is there something to this “fabled lost city” stuff after all?
“It seems a substantial portion of the new insights we are gaining (over the past year) are coming from paleo proxy analyses. The real significance of this is as a baseline for understanding recent climate change, and assessing whether the recent change is natural or anthropogenically forced. ”
1. Sensitivity is a critcial parameter in cost/damage estimation
2. Paleo, not models, constrain uncertainty in sensitivity estimates.
3. on an effectiveness scale it makes more sense to spend more on
paleo and less on modelling… provided that money is not wasted on the likes of Mann.
“provided that money is not wasted on the likes of Mann.”
plus a bunch
Actually Steven, the most effective means of constraining sensitivity is a combination of paleo with dynamical modelling. The models will never be right in the exact details because of the nature of chaotic systems, even if they have the dynamics correct. The paleo data contain all the feedbacks, slow, fast, positive and negative. So the paleo data can give us a good idea what might happen, and the dynamical climate models can give us a good idea why. Both are essential. And this, of course, is exactly what Hansen has been saying for years.
Comparison of models with paleo in principle is a good idea. However, in practice, both models and paleo reconstructions often show variability that is too low, especially on decadal to century timescales, which is the main timescale of interest. So agreement of artifically weakly varying paleo reconstructions with models that also show little variability can result in misleading conclusions.
Judith said:
“…both models and observations often show variability that is too low…”
___
Did you mean “both models and paleo reconstructions often show variability that is too low…”
This would of course reflect back on the nature and resolution of the paleo reconstruction, for we certainly have no actual “observations”. However, we are getting some much higher resolutions for paleo reconstructions and these are certainly showing how rapidly the climate has changed in the past, for example, the exceptionally rapid onset of the Younger Dryas event. But going back to the issue of anthropogenic forcing and GH gases, the most interest and promising area of paleoclimate reconstruction to find a close analogue of our potential future climate seems to be the data coming from the mid-Pliocene and Lake El’gygytgyn. This data does show great variability and some higher resolutions are becoming available. Comparing it to the dynamica climate models is useful only in looking at trends, as of course the models can never show internal variability. The data from Lake El’gygytgyn seems to confirm that the climate models have the trends correct and that climate sensitivity as measured by tropospheric temperatures are at least 2C per doubling of CO2 from preindustrial levels.
yes, should be paleo reconstructions
Gates,
i wouldnt disagree. However, I will note this interesting exchange with Eugene Wahl at AGU 2010. or was it 2011?
The session was on combining GCMs and Paleo. using GCMs as a prior and also looking at forward modelling
Buck spoke, I think emile-gay was also a presenter, bradley was there asking good questions.
At one point folks were looking at a GCM recon and a paleo recon
of precipitation in iberia.
the paleo disagreed with the GCM
Wahl stood.
‘How do we know which is right?”
good question.
Bradley laughed. John Mashey turned and smiled at him.
Rgates
You are very find of citing this lake. I went to Skeptical science (where I note you do not seem to be a sceptical Warmist) and saw their video. It is stated;
“The Lake El’gygytgyn region was not glaciated during any of the ice ages.”
The region is very far north. How do we know it wasn’t glaciated and WHY wasn’t it?
tonyb
I really like that story Steven, really made me smile as well. It reminds me of why paleo studies need to be multi-proxy and as broad geo-spatially as possible. There is a convergence occurring and I really think that within the next 5 years or 10 years at most we’ll be able to tighten up the sensitivity issue much more. I still see it converging somewhere higher than 2C, though even higher for the longer-term Earth system sensitivity. The speed of the forcing (just like the speed of a punch) means just as much as actual net forcing measured simply in ppm levels. How fast we get to 560 ppm means something…
R gates.
5-10 years sees about right. i wish more folks would follow up on hansens LGM work.
one would hope that people would take the low hanging fruit– switch to NG, work on black carbon, i wouldnt want to test the doubling of co2 by actually getting to 560.
Oh, sure, highly amusing, certainly. I suspect it will take well into the next phase of the oceanic oscillations unless there is a break to the cold or the hot side. We can wrangle over the meaning of paleo for the next decade or several, easily.
===========
LGM? Little Green Monsters?
” It reminds me of why paleo studies need to be multi-proxy and as broad geo-spatially as possible.”
My Gypsy fortune teller tells me hers are the most accurate predictions around. She uses a suite of tea cups, reading the leaves of over 20 types of tea, brewed in a variety of pots.
She assures me her findings are robust.
Tony asks: (regarding Lake E)
“The region is very far north. How do we know it wasn’t glaciated and WHY wasn’t it?”
____
The entire N. Hemisphere was not covered with glaciers during glacial periods. Certain areas quite far north simply are too dry, too low, wrong micro-climate etc. to form glaciers. The Lake undoubtedly froze over during the winter, but that is a far different process than actually being covered by a very thick glacier.
I submit that it makes a lot more sense to reflect on the possibility that the knowledge which can possibly be extracted from either will never come close to justifying the expense.
This is OT, but we don’t yet have an open thread for the weekend. I’m wondering why the Fed is doing this when the private sector already has a tech solution and company to do it: joule unlimited. This looks like another example of the government wasting our money on “green” projects.
”
Energy Dept. Seeks Company to Turn Sunshine Into Gasoline
8:26 AM, Nov 1, 2013 • By JERYL BIER
Single Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts
Although CO2 is considered a “greenhouse gas” that contributes to climate change, if the Energy Department (DOE) finds partners to capitalize on the research of one of its laboratories, someday cars might run on sunshine. Technically, cars would run on the product of sunlight, CO2, and water using a “two-step solar thermochemical cycle” developed by the Albuquerque, New Mexico government lab. The DOE posted the special notice seeking interested companies on the Federal Business Opportunities website on Tuesday:
Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) is conducting ongoing research and development into solar fuels, the conversion of sunlight, CO2, and H2O into high energy density, gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel pre-cursors…
Sandia is seeking a company or companies interested in this unique opportunity which will lead to the demonstration and deployment of this technology.
Researchers have been working on this idea for some time, according to a 2007 press release from the Sandia lab. At that time, one of the researchers speculated that although a prototype of a device to carry out the chemical process was already under development, it was “a good 15 to 20 years away from being on the market.”
The special notice released this week did not contain a timetable, but did note that companies interested in the project “must have a significant interest in developing this technology to the demonstration and deployment stage.””
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/energy-dept-seeks-company-turn-sunshine-gasoline_765700.html
Jim2
Even here in the UK it isn’t the weekend yet. Just contain your eagerness for a while
tonyb
No offense (this one time) but this is a pretty dumb question. Obama’s strategy for “renewable” energy was “all of the above”, i.e. as many different approaches as possible. This is a completely different pathway for converting sunlight into chemical energy than the biological approach used by “the private sector”. In practical terms, it uses concentrating mirrors rather than biocontainers exposed to sunlight. The parameters are different.
We don’t know, at this point, which of these approaches will turn out to be most efficient, or if they will be close enough that the optimum will depend on the circumstances. Not only that, but spin-off, and downstream developments of the original concepts, will more than pay for themselves in cultural terms regardless whether any particular approach works for its original intent.
I’m fine if the Fed supports BASIC research, but I want the government to stop giving preferential treatment to specific corporations or other types of businesses. We are already being tag teamed here in the US by the government-business complex, immigration for example, maybe even spying on us for another. The biological approach worked, to the current extent of development, because there was a good business case. That isn’t true for wind and solar and I can say with 99% certainty it isn’t true of the chemistry-only approach. If it were a viable business model, it would already be happening.
What you want is one thing, what you’re surprised at is another. Given his stated strategy, you shouldn’t be surprised, or wonder why it’s happening.
Like the Internet?
Well, Saints Alive, a new Executive Order today.
========
AK – the internet isn’t a business. I suspect it probably isn’t a viable business, but I would have to research that question. If everyone involved in it charged money, it probably wouldn’t exist. It looks like a bad example to me.
@jim2…
Most of the interstate highway system isn’t a business either.
And the internet and interstate highway system have zero to do with the Fed giving money to businesses – which was my original point – they shouldn’t be.
What have the interstate system and the internet in common?
They both are being used primarily for something different from the original intended use.
Matter of fact, 50 some years after the interstate system was built, we have yet to evacuate a city due to nuclear attack. I do think a microscopic fraction of the data traffic that has traveled over the internet to date did have something to do with military/academic cooperation, though.
Government doesn’t seem very good at building big systems for their original intended use. How many people know that the original Grand Coulee Dam project wasn’t going to generate electricity?
There’s a ole EPA orror, ere.
=================
Michael E. Mann discusses this paper
yep he responded quickly and on the Huggington Post, the last bastion of liberal science.
Last bastion of the young and gullible…..oh, and of course Liberal.
he responded quickly and on the Huggington Post
Rewrites historicity.
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/headlines.png
Interesting to read the comments at Huffington Post. Mann writes the article, points out the parts that support AGW, or maybe do, points out that the parts that are problems for him are contradicted by just loads of other studies – and most of the commenters respond reflexively. The conservatives dismiss the study – one more stupid UN-funded climate hoax study. The liberals mock the stupid conservatives who hate science, and in this case I agree with them. I didn’t see one comment yet (I don’t plan to read them all) that noted the really big problems this study would potentially pose for any Mannian Hockey Sticks, including the recent IPCC conclusion.
The study itself made no difference to the discussion at all.
Many contrary comments were not allowed.
Not only do most commenters not read the study, they dont even take the time to read the articles. They take the quick and dirty route. They read the headline, get in and make a nasty comment and then move on to another headline, with only one purpose in mind-bash the conservatives.
CO2 concentrations
A complimentary issue is higher CO2 in previous centuries than conventionally modeled. Murry Salby developed equations for gas diffusion in ice cores and found an order of magnitude higher CO2 in the past.
Combining such evidence puts suggests much lower climate sensitivity.
Will Michael Mann become skeptical enough to examine ALL the evidence?
Please, don’t bring Salby’s long discredited nonsense into this.
R. Gates, Skeptical Warmist: Please, don’t bring Salby’s long discredited nonsense into this.
I would appreciate links to the discrediting of Salby.
Salby’s exact mathematical model for the diffusion may not be sound, but diffusion of the gases in core samples is a well-known problem. Almost for sure one result is the underestimation of peak concentrations; another is uncertainty in the times of the estimated peaks.
R. Gates, ad hom dismissals further undermine science. Try scientific rigor as Matthew noted.
By the bye, speaking only for myself maybe, a lot of these paleoclimate temperature proxies thingies leave me awfully confused. Upside-down Tiljander… I don’t really understand the basics of how anyone measures temperatures from the distant past, from ice cores, tree rings, sediment cores, you name it. How do they know that these are accurate proxies and how are they calibrated? Are some more accurate than others? Especially when you tell me, as they seem to say frequently, that there are all kinds of factors contaminating the most recent cores/tree rings/sediments, so that we can’t expect agreement with the modern temperature record. So what can we expect agreement with?
How does anybody sort out what can really be trusted in this field?
It’s easy. If a proxy supports your political believes, it’s astoundingly accurate. If it head butts your political beliefs, it’s a pile of chit.
B I N G O…+1000
I gather those chits can only be redeemed at the Company (CAGW) Store?
;)
‘Now imagine that you have never seen the device and that it is hidden in a box in a dark room. You have no knowledge of the hand that occasionally sets things in motion, and you are trying to figure out the system’s behavior on the basis of some old 78-rpm recordings of the muffled sounds made by the device. Plus, the recordings are badly scratched, so some of what was recorded is lost or garbled beyond recognition. If you can imagine this, you have some appreciation of the difficulties of paleoclimate research and of predicting the results of abrupt changes in the climate system.’ http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10136&page=13
Compare and contrast – take every data set with scepticism – use different data sets for the same information where possible – compare corals with speolthems with lake sediment for instance – more modern data has tighter errors – the usual data reliability tests,
Paleo data is incomplete at best. I tend to assume data is correct unless it is contradicted by other data – e.g. ARGO and altimetry – ice cores and stomata. ARGO is a lot more likely because it is consistent with the satellite record, data points are independent and I imagine the problems of measuring and modelling millimetre sea level differences from space are considerable. Stomata show greater means and variance than ice cores.
If all else fails – pick a tree and contemplate the sound of a tree falling in the forest if no one can hear it.
.
I found the paper to be very interesting, and it even sparked some debate between like minded individuals. But I guess I am a bit saddened by the comment:
The study itself is valuable as it adds to our knowledge and understanding. While I have not delved into the mindset or intentions of the author, I do not see why anyone would want to spin it (Mann excepted). It really is not about providing proof for other hypotheses, but it seems to be about getting a greater understanding about what happened. Perhaps I am just too naive in this debate.
Mann’s article is classical and it sure came out as fast as a blitz. The only part of the study that he has no doubts about and even elevates it to the headline, ise the rapid increase in recent times, that happens to be the main part of the study of which the authors themselves, in the interview to Revkin, seem to have the lowest confidence (because of temporal resolution and the fact that oceans “smooth” the records). The rest of it, that contradicts his paradigm, his cause and his work, is all crap. And as proof to this been crap, he mostly refers to Mann, Mann et al, Mann and Jones, Real Climate (Mann) and so on. I guess it’s time to gather the Team and get the editor of Science sacked. And this is the behavior of a world reknown scientist…
“..he mostly refers to Mann, Mann et al, Mann and Jones, Real Climate (Mann) and so on.”
Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?
“It seems a substantial portion of the new insights we are gaining (over the past year) are coming from paleo proxy analyses.”
When Mann’s hockey stick became the object of ridicule, we learned that paleo climate isn’t all that important to CAGW. It’s all about the observations.
When the observations flat lined, we learned that observations aren’t all that important to CAGW, it’s all about the models.
Now, as 15+ years of unhelpful observations show the models are crap at predicting future temperature, we are being led back to paleo climate.
And the beat goes on….
Your world is a world of fantasy Gary. Paleoclimate studies are only increasing in importance. It is only the skeptics that must constantly figure out what holds the most promise for them to refute AGW…which is exactly what they should be doing.
“…It is only the skeptics that must constantly figure out…”
You and Gary are both wrong. Both of you accuse the other side of spinning, and selective bias, and the ever popular motivated reasoning, and claim near virginal purity for yourselves. Truth is, we all do it.
Mosher’s right. We’re animals after all. Animals with egos and big brains, so that our survival these days is usually not literal but symbolic. We push little buttons and little squiggly lines appear. They have no actual substance or weight. They have no meaning at all, but the meaning we decide they have. And yet these insubstantial, weightless, inherently meaningless lines have the power to infuriate us, or give us pleasure, or even humiliate us. We hurl them at one another just as if they were rocks and spears of our ancestors.
No hope for any of us, until we can all concede our true natures…
pokerguy,
When have I ever denied “spinning and selective bias?” I deny lying. I deny that I lack the capacity to engage in critical thought. And I have repeatedly challenged the progressive CAGW advocates here to an exercise demonstrating their capacity to do so as well. No takers to date.
You are wrong in claiming a moral equivalence between those whose who choose an ideology that includes integrity as a core principle, and those who choose an ideology that includes as a core principle that integrity should not be allowed to stand in the way of achieving the desired end.
Alinsky, Schneider, Mann, Gleick, et al., are not exceptions, nor are they ostracized by their progressive peers. They are embraced, lionized even.
You may have left progressivism behind, but you are still burdened by the progressive mis-definition of conservatism, and conservatives. You finally looked at progressivism for what it actually is. Maybe some day you will do the same for conservatism.
“You will soon find it factually and theologically true that man by nature is a damn mess.” –Norman MacLean
It seems the planet is doing the refuting, not the skeptics.
GaryM, when pokerguy condemns both sides for using immoral rhetorical means, this doesn’t imply that he thinks advocating for truth and advocating for fiction are morally equivalent. This distinction goes back at least to Plato, I think, and I’ll bet much earlier than that.
NW,
No, his moral equivalence is between progressivism and conservatism, both of which do not include dishonest rhetoric as an approved means to a political end.
Pokerguy said:
“No hope for any of us, until we can all concede our true natures…”
_____
The bottom line of our “true” nature?
Bellum omnium contra omnes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellum_omnium_contra_omnes
‘No hope for any of us, until we can all concede our true natures”
yup.
You go first.
Somewhere between chimpanzees and bonobos, with language added.
Say, pokerguy, some serfs, me f’r instance, happen ter think
squiggles can have meaning, such as a statement that
corresponds ter the facts, as a judge in a court proceding
accepts, according ter stated ‘evidence,’ true of false,’
guilty as charged – or not. And if we don’t consider we can
critically argue cases, present measurements, sea temps
etc, y r w e here @ JC? Hmm … Y – r – we – here ??? )
bts(true or false.)
AK said:
“Somewhere between chimpanzees and bonobos…”
___
“Ouch!”, said the chimpanzee and bonobo.
When I learned the bonobos use the missionary position I bought a zoo membership.
Rgates
I have now read half a dozen papers on the lake.
What do you think the results to date are actually telling us, other than it has been much warmer than today and much colder than today?
Tonyb
Tony,
Glad to see you are getting a bit interested in the paleoclimate data from Lake E.
I think the data is telling us many things- but most important IMO is that climate sensitivity is trickier than most think, and not going to be solved by models alone. The data seem to say that we could get some unanticipated feedbacks around the CO2 levels we are at will easily lead us to the 3C of warming per doubling level once all Earth system feedbacks are taken into account. Hansen has been beating the table about this for years, but it is really the Lake E data that is finally hinting he may be right after all and the models not too far off– though they would be right for some of the wrong reasons.
R Gates,
You said : –
“Hansen has been beating the table about this for years, . . . ”
There is a story about advice a wise old lawyer gave to an inexperienced associate. He said “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law (theory) is on your side, pound the law. When neither the facts nor the law are on your side, pound the table.”
See anything at all familiar happening here?
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
PS all your sarcasm belong to us. resistance is futile.
I think the first person to actually say here at CE that models might not be handling heat uptake by the oceans correctly was James Hansen.
models might not be handling heat uptake by the oceans correctly was James Hansen.
Hansen 2011 blamed Pinatubo,solar irridiance, and the arabs for the slowing of ocean heat uptake.
Besides the explicit admission that the resolution is too low, there’s the fact that, according to the surface temperature record, the first half of the 20th century shows (practically) the same rate of warming as the past 60 years. So we know that as far as that record is concerned, it’s not true that the past 60 shows “far faster” warming. Some kind of explanation for the discrepancy would be needed if we are to take the claim about an unprecedented rate of warming seriously.
“Then, over the last 60 years, water column temperatures, averaged from the surface to 2,200 feet, increased 0.18 degrees C, or .32 degrees F. That might seem small in the scheme of things, but it’s a rate of warming 15 times faster than at any period in the last 10,000 years, said Linsley.”.. It’s unclear to me whether this past 60-year rapid warming is based on actual proxy data or if they are making the classic apples to oranges comparison error (prior proxy vs. modern thermometer data) with obvious frequency and sample size issues
Hmmm suggests that paleo proxy data shouldn’t be compared with modern thermometer data. It always is the case because paleo proxy data is too low resolution, geo spacially and geo temporally to get even close to comparable modern era measurements.
Even if it were possible to obtain relevant samples of modern era ice cores, it would be highly likely to be to contaminated for practical purposes. Contamination is a constant issue when handling paleo ice cores in any case.
If they comparing past proxies to like modern proxies, I’m left wondering whether other effects (besides temperature) have been investigated. Some possibilities may be modern and anthropogenic: aren’t we fertilizing the ocean with agricultural runoff (can that increase plankton yield)? Or perhaps this data is just showing that prevailing currents are now coming from a different direction at the site(s) studied? I’m guessing the assumption of good ocean mixing at the site is supposed to alleviate the small sample size and geographical coverage limitations?
Paleo-climate leaves me with so many questions I am left in wonder at how certain these scientists can be they are divining temperature data so precisely from such imperfect thermometers / data loggers. I don’t prefer any one study over another unless it honestly covers uncertainty, even if the resulting answer is “We don’t really have a clue”. Much better than “We picked this reality of the many plausible. Buy a wind farm.”
“Paleo-climate leaves me with so many questions I am left in wonder at how certain these scientists can be they are divining temperature data so precisely from such imperfect thermometers / data loggers.”
So we really CAN reconstruct the planet wide temperature of the ocean for the last 10,000 years, from the surface to 2200 feet down, with temperature resolution in the hundredths of a degree C. and temporal resolution adequate to proclaim with what appears to be certitude that the rate of change in the last 60 years is unprecedented over the period?
I am reminded of the observation often made by myself and my fellow Navy techs long ago when confronted with some seemingly improbable (but admittedly not THIS improbable) ‘fact’: ‘Modern science knows no limitations!’. This would seem to present a golden opportunity to drag it out of retirement.
Bob Ludwick
In other sciences such as Chemistry and physiscs the error bars on the graphs provide estimates of the accuracy. These would cover the whole graph paper here.
Scott
The Maniacs are not pleased to find out that the hockey stick is really junk.
But weren’t we led to believe the sudden AGW leap into the depths is a recent phenomenon, coinciding with the “pause?”
? Your statement makes no sense. The oceans (as the primary heat sink of the planet) have always taken the bulk of any increase in energy in the Earth’s system. Otherwise, the atmosphere would see even greater variability than it does and life would be far more difficult and it would be doubtful if homo sapiens would have evolved. Next time you visit the ocean, thank them for making advanced life possible on this planet.
`Thanks, Gates, I’m not surprised my statement makes no sense. Much of this stuff is pretty confusing to me, I readily concede. So, what is the current explanation for the pause over land? “Natural variability” sounds like ad hoc hand waving, especially given the lack of emphasis on same pre-pause…
Pokerguy,
The tropospheric “pause” has a multifaceted cause, but more on that in a moment. First, you really need to get a good grasp of the energy flows on the planet. Over half of the energy in the atmosphere at any given time comes directly from the ocean. Think about that and get a feel for this large flow of energy pouring out of the ocean in various forms into the atmosphere. Furthermore, get a feel for the huge difference of the thermal inertia between the two. The atmosphere has very little and can have its energy content moved up and down relatively easily. The ocean has high thermal inertia and it takes a lot to nudge it. Finally, think about the overall energy content. The oceans is much much larger, by many orders of magnitude.
What all this amounts to is this: even tiny changes in the rate of flow of energy from ocean to atmosphere have huge affects on the atmosphere. Over the past 10 to15 years we’ve seen slightly less energy flowing from ocean to atmosphere (i.e. negative PDO)- it it still always very positive, just slightly less. Additional factors, less important, but still factors, we’ve seen slightly lower output from the sun with the weak solar cycle 24, and slightly higher natural aerosol levels from slightly higher volcanic activity. All of this has given us a tropospheric pause. Personally I suspect the “pause” will be over well before 2020 globally, and it looks already over for regions such as Australia.
R. Gates: First, you really need to get a good grasp of the energy flows on the planet.
That is what I keep writing: and then you need to study the effects of increased CO2 or increased downwelling LWIR on all of those processes.
For another example, energy is transported from the Equator to the poles by wind and water currents, and by radiation; and from the poles to space by radiation. What happens to those heat transport processes if the concentration of CO2 doubles?
M. Marler,
See my other post to you with these links:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/11/3937/2011/acp-11-3937-2011.html
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JAS-D-11-0265.1
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/13/4839/2013/acpd-13-4839-2013.pdf
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JAS-D-11-0265.1
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/13/4563/2013/acp-13-4563-2013.html
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009JD012777/abstract?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false
http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/32356/InTech-Future_changes_in_the_quasi_biennial_oscillation_under_a_greenhouse_gas_increase_and_ozone_recovery_in_transient_simulations_by_a_chemistry_climate_model.pdf
http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/25587/3/Wilcox_part2_centaur.pdf
R. Gates: See my other post to you with these links:
Thank you. It will take me a while to read the links.
R. Gates, Skeptical Warmist, those were excellent links. I have read all of the abstracts and parts of the whole papers, when I could download them. I am thinking of re-introducing some of them when there is an open thread. I think I get a sense that increased CO2 speeds the transport of energy away from the warm Equatorial surface, but I may need correction.
I did not see anything specifically related to the effect of extra downwelling of LWIR at the ocean surface. I’ll have to reread them.
I thank you very much. I appreciate your effort to come up with those.
R. Gates, I admit to no scientific smarts, but I have a good smeller.
Why is the “pause” being called the “tropospheric pause”
but all warming and change is global warming or climate change?
Why do we have these narrow, technical descriptors for when it isn’t warming, but big, general, easy-to-understand slogans for when it is warming?
This study of ocean heat content ans temperature profile gives us s lot to think about’ My theoretical model (underlined above) has always assumed a strong N and S hemisphere coupling owing to deep ocean currants, This study increases the importance of those currants. By studying the propagation of major geological events, like Krakatoa, we should be able to determine the speed of this N – S transport delay.
Further to my theoretical model referred to above, this new research gives more credibility to my assumption that the oceans function as a copier, copying heat from the N hemisphere to the southern. I suspected this was true when I noticed that the shape of the global average temperature rise between 1970 and 1997 was almost the same as that between 1910 and 1840. This also solved the problem of what happened to the heat peak tn 1940. It went under water for 30 years, reappearing in 1970. If this is correct then the transport delay. N to S, is 30 years. If you don’t agree , give me a better explanation
Sorry. 1910 to 1840 above should read 1910 to 1940. See fig.1 of my theoretical paper.
I’ve been working, getting in touch with my inner grunt, and have only had a quick scan of the Post & comments, so far.
But no doubt, it’s a surprising & meaty finding. Do I see correctly, that it was done at a single site? It should only take one or a few other ‘check’ confirmations, to indicate that the pattern is not isolated…
For sure, this sounds like grist for independently developed models … more so perhaps than for the GCMs. That heat is building rapidly, recently, but through normal-range temperatures, poses some nice ‘brackets’.
I look forward to a better read, and comparison with the BOM and other records. Has the smell of fertile ground! ;)
It appears they have compared recent instrument to paleoproxy. That (with Calibration) would be legit for relative comparisons to today to LIA and MWP concerning the globality issue. If so, confirmatory of other paleoproxy studies suggesting global effects.
But would not be legit for determining relative recent rate of change, since the authors say they do not have better than 100 year resolution. Same PR refuted by methodology as the Marcott mess.
So appears to support natural variation, and cannot show the past few decades are extraordinary. Maybe good paper, definitely more bad PR.
Time will tell. Oppo (2009) though did a 2000 year IPWP reconstruction with 10 year binning for splicing to instrumental. The fit is pretty remarkable and along with the newer Christiansen & Ljungqvist 2012 Northern Extra-Tropical reconstruction tend to remove a good deal of Mannian confusion.
The ratio of magnesium to calcium in the shells correlates to the temperature: the more magnesium, the higher the temperature. Wonder how tightly these correlate.
I looked this up beige fly for my book. Depends on salinity also. So some uncertainty.
““self-correcting” machinery of science”
childishly naive — context is too corrupted for that to work
“Linsley: I think this shows we need to focus some more attention on the places in the northern and southern hemispheres where the deep ocean is talking to the atmosphere and absorbing this heat and I think we need to spend some more time to understand how that water makes its way towards the Equator. “
Could indicate an awakening – wind’s driven by gradients – (too much focus on global average & not enough on (large-scale-flow-driving) gradients).
Paul Vaughan suggests less attention to global average and more attention to gradients. +1 and the best way to study gradients? Regionally based models of weather over periods of around 100 hours seems to be the way to go.
“places in the northern and southern hemispheres where the deep ocean is talking to the atmosphere”
http://imageshack.us/a/img839/6548/9g4.gif
Wow, PV! Could I get some wallpaper like that?
Credit: The wave height animation was assembled using Australian Department of Defence images developed from GlobWave Project data.
More smoothing for the study, Paul, and thanks. You can see that those waters of Southeast Asia have more turbulence than any other spot where the two hemispheres speak to each other.
=====================
Well, superficial turbulence. I wonder if Bob could tell me its importance.
=========
That’s a really nifty animation Paul. Thanks for sharing it.
It probably should have an orange peel projection to not give the wrong impression of relative strength
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goode_homolosine_projection
“Its equal-area property makes it useful for presenting spatial distribution of phenomena.”
Different projections come with different pros & cons.
More insight into the waves:
http://imageshack.us/a/img856/1999/01u6.gif
Paul Vaughan: Could indicate an awakening – wind’s driven by gradients – (too much focus on global average & not enough on (large-scale-flow-driving) gradients).
For sure.
Paul Vaughan: Could indicate an awakening – wind’s driven by gradients – (too much focus on global average & not enough on (large-scale-flow-driving) gradients).
Yes.
In the animation that you presented after the Peter Davis comment, what do the colors signify?
colors defined in the 2nd animation
OHC is not something I have great knowledge of in detail but I am fairly sure that the ARGO data shows that OHC uptake has slowed significantly since around 2002, a decade ago. If we are seeing no surface warming for around 16 – 17 years then why has OHC also slowed significantly for the last decade, according to the ARGO data.
John,
Quite the opposite is what ARGO data have shown. The rate of increase in OHC over the past decade is higher than the average per decade from the previous 40 years. Less heat on average has been going from ocean to atmosphere during the past decade.
After looking at the graphs again it appears I was correct in my recollection. Unless you can supply data to support your claims.
After looking at the graphs again it appears I was correct in my recollection.
I looked again at the sheet of paper where “2+2=5” was written and it hadn’t changed. I was correct in my recollection that that’s what it said.
J. Benton,
What data exactly are you looking at? There’s been no slowing in the past decade 0-2000m:
http://tinypic.com/r/303aj60/5
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/oceanheat_zps2cb4a7a1.png.html?sort=3&o=10
ARGO heat content increased with less reflected SW. Data before that is problematic as is satellite altimetry on sea levels.
She was once a Tomboy. Able to give as good as she got. Now she’s experimenting with makeup and practicing kisses on a mirror. Waiting for a little boy to warm her to the hottest she’s ever been in her record.
The question was, why doesn’t it cool?
claims graph made from ARGO data
I can never quite see what point you are making JCH – apart from La Nina is a pansy of course.
Of course ARGO is consistent with CERES – http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n2/full/ngeo1375.html?WT.ec_id=NGEO-201202
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/vonSchuckmannampLTroan2011-fig5PG_zpsee63b772.jpg.html?sort=3&o=56
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif.html?sort=3&o=134
@CH: I can never quite see what point you are making
One of the more politely worded expressions of a basic problem with Climate Etc. ;)
Well I thought calling La Nina a pansy a bit much. She is after all a girl. Butch more likely.
“attribute much of that heterogeneity to dynamical climate responses related to the El Niño phenomenon.”
ENSO’s just a mixer — it’s not a driver
deliberate misconception of this precludes sensible discussion and is therefore being used tactically — beware
Paul,
You speak the truth but don’t expect many receptive ears here.
And you believe that you have a list of all and only the drivers. What utter hubristic nonsense. If the temperature where you live fell one hundred degrees overnight, you would not recognize natural variation. No, you would look down your list for the driver. You have totally closed your mind to experiment and to the world.
Theo Goodwin, assuredly, without experimentation or deeper knowledge of the subject, declared: (about R. Gates)
“You have totally closed your mind to experiment and to the world.”
it seems to be with you gatesy – and with most other progressive denialists it seems. But the evidence is clear that this is not just redistribution of energy between oceans and atmosphere.
Ignorance is not a sin – but bad faith is certainly deplorable.
ENSO drives large variability in toa radiant flux.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Loeb2011-Fig1.png.html?sort=3&o=70
But it is a mistake to focus exclusively on ENSO and not longer term variability.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png.html?sort=3&o=32
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/WongFig2-1.jpg.html?sort=3&o=65
Chief Said:
“ENSO drives large variability in toa radiant flux.”
This is a great revelation?
Here – lucky it is worth repeating.
It seems to be with you gatesy – and with most other progressive denialists it seems. But the evidence is clear that this is not just redistribution of energy between oceans and atmosphere.
Ignorance is not a sin – but bad faith is certainly deplorable.
“But the evidence is clear that this is not just redistribution of energy between oceans and atmosphere.”
—-
No one said it was “just” one thing, but the essential dynamic results in an increased amount of energy moving from ocean to atmosphere. That flow is always very strong, but during El Niños, it is enhanced further. This is seen ultimately in TOA radiant flux changes.
Internal variability is always defined by space cadets as the transfer of energy between ocean and atmosphere – ultimately with them energy imbalances all come back to CO2.
There is an energy dynamic that is separate from, very much larger than and indistinguishable from the the so called carbon signal. The so called noise is a deal greater than the so called signal on objective data that they seem congenitally incapable of dealing with. It can’t be reconciled with simplistic memes of AGW.
What we get from gatesy is the usual simplistic narratives of the true believers – a narrative that frequently shifts ground – along with the obligatory sneers and insults.
My opinion of gatesy has been confirmed time and again. He is a nasty little dweeb who specialises in misleading polemic, bad science and bad faith.
Only one spike of unattributed significant noise in the temperature record of the last 130+ years. That would be a couple year span starting in late 1943. It is either a highly amplified SOI spike, something to do with the war, measurement error, or some other unknown noise source.
This is for the curious as the overall attribution is solid.
Chief Creator of Diatribes spewed:
“Internal variability is always defined by space cadets as the transfer of energy between ocean and atmosphere – ultimately with them energy imbalances all come back to CO2”
Once more, Chief Creator of Diatribes pretty much gets the whole thing wrong and tries to confuse the issue of the role of external forcing versus internal variability. There are of course multiple external forcings to the climate system, with CO2 (and other greenhouse gas concentrations) being just one. So too, because of the chaotic nature of the climate system, internal variability causes the system to fluctuate over many timeframes, from hourly to decadal and longer. Internal variability is of course not defined as the “transfer of energy between ocean and atmosphere”, though Chief Creator of Diatribes would like to suggest that his beloved and imaginary “space cadets” think so. Internal variability will always however, be measured (not defined) by the transfer energy between all the various parts of the climate system, whether that be from ocean to atmosphere, atmosphere to biosphere, ocean to cryosphere, etc.
Space cadet is of course shorthand for the Borg collective cult of AGW groupthink space cadets (BCCAGWGSC).
Rolls off the tongue doesn’t it. Someone described ENSO as a mixer not a driver – and gatesy heartily endorsed this a few comments above. webby is utterly irrelevant as usual – he has all the capacity of a trained attack gerbil – but none of the intellectual integrity. gatesy is so lost in dishonest discourse that following any discussion takes mental gymnastics that I am incapable of. He will suggest in this post that there is an energy transfer between oceans and atmosphere and there is a radiant imbalance of 0.8 W/m2 due entirely to CO2 – and then seemingly suggest something else entirely while weaseling around definitions of internal variability and external forcing. Entirely data less of course and each post-hoc rationalisation looking increasingly insane.
People in this post have suggested that ENSO is a zero sum game – the oceans cool and the atmosphere warms with no net change in global energy. gatesy has suggested this himself on a number of occasions.
I linked the data conveniently labelled with ENSO events – it is called cloud radiative forcing and is intimately connection – as one might expect – with changes in ocean and atmosphere circulation. Thus internal variability leads to large changes in cloud radiative forcing and is inseparable from global energy dynamics.
‘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. An illustration of the variability in TOA radiation is provided in Fig. 1, which shows a continuous 31-year record of tropical (20S–20N) TOA broadband outgoing longwave (LW) radiation (OLR) between 1979 and 2010 from non-scanner and scanner instruments.’ http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf
The assumptions – both explicit and implicit – is that albedo is constant. This is utterly dishonest and looks more like progressive science denial than the reality we are otherwise accustomed to. But perhaps it is just serial incompetence.
Chief of the Dia-Tribe said:
“People in this post have suggested that ENSO is a zero sum game – the oceans cool and the atmosphere warms with no net change in global energy.”
____
ENSO of course is hardly the major driver of ocean to atmosphere energy exchange. Just noise in the system. Here’s a visual for exactly what the ENSO process amounts to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=dMeHJzO3kfE
Watch the “internal variabililty” of this system for hours, and see if the bird ever fills up with water (i.e. energy).
ENSO drives large variability in toa radiant flux.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Loeb2011-Fig1.png.html?sort=3&o=70
But it is a mistake to focus exclusively on ENSO and not longer term variability.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png.html?sort=3&o=32
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/WongFig2-1.jpg.html?sort=3&o=65
It is like talking to a goldfish.
ENSO is a zero sum game.
Look at the SOI over the last 130+ years and see that there is no bias and there is no trend.
http://imageshack.us/a/img34/1558/8s6.gif
You can use your own two eyes, yet the Deniers deny it.
‘The global climate system is composed of a number
of subsystems – atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere – each of which has distinct characteristic times, from days and weeks to centuries and millennia. Each subsystem, moreover, has its own internal variability, all other things being constant, over a fairly broad range of time scales. These ranges overlap between one subsystem and another. The interactions between the subsystems thus give rise to climate variability on all time scales.’ http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/tcd/PREPRINTS/Math_clim-Taipei-M_Ghil_vf.pdf
There are several aspects to consider.
– ENSO itself is merely one aspect of the global climate system. To focus on one aspect only is misguided.
– ENSO is part of the pan Pacific system that has variability over years to millennia at least.
– The latest warming period is characterised by a warm PDO and intense and frequent El Nino. We can exclude large ENSO transitions in 1976/77 and 1998 from the record to get a residual warming of about 0.2 degrees C. Most of this was cloud radiative forcing – based on satellite data. Warming occurred in 2 decades in the last 70 years.
– It is almost certain (>99%) that the planet will not warm for a decade to three more.
I swear it is like talking to a goldfish.
What are the results when we Google:
enso is a zero sum game
?
Like back in the good old pansy-free days.
.
Just variance around the solar attractor:
http://s17.postimg.org/7k6n9yky7/ENSO_and_OLR_Jan13.png (h/t Bill Illis)
That’s pretty much the Loeb graph Paul – but Loeb extends his back through ERBS. It is cloud feedbacks from ENSO of course as you graph says. There does seem to be solar control variable.
http://imageshack.us/a/img843/5126/gnp.png
http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/3161/zlp.png
I = integral = cumulative sum
(compare with early 20th century JF (January-February) integral for SOI & CET if you’re ready for a more challenging 4D geometric puzzle (spatiotemporally-cumulative circulatory topology trace) than what we usually discuss around here…)
now, back to reconfiguring wavelet algorithms for annual, QBO, & solar zonal total column ozone…. (kim & Salvatore are going to love this stuff — people who like uncertainty are going to HATE it…..)
Paul Vaughan: ENSO’s just a mixer — it’s not a driver
How do you know that? the relatively cloudless states permit more incoming broad spectrum radiation to warm the ocean, and the El Nino states transfer more energy to the atmosphere than the other states.
It is neither a pure “mixer” nor a pure “driver”, but a regulator, in the same sense that a transistor is a regulator.
Matthew, clouds are just one component of a coupled system, so such narrow focus isn’t helpful. Recall rgb@duke’s spatiotemporal T^4 notes on the recent tisdale wuwt thread. Then think in absolutes (not anomalies) and remember THE POLAR NIGHT.
We need to look at the coupled whole, otherwise we’re just wasting our time chasing mirage correlations (which are actually real — “mirage” is a misnomer) in the turbulence. Take the time to appreciate the beauty of Dickey & Keppenne’s (1997) hidden gem. The “steering wheel” is multi-axial, so a transistor isn’t a good analogy. Jean’s showing you a (VERY) clever way to reduce the dimensionality of the problem (…and she accomplishes this without ever mentioning it in the text — razingly brilliant).
Advice:
You need to role up your sleeves and do the calculations outlined by Jean Dickey. Otherwise our exchanges will almost certainly never go anywhere. We’ll type 1000s of words and for what?? Just to arrive at yet more misunderstandings? It’s not worth the trouble.
Please do the calculations I challenged Judy & A Lacis to do. Otherwise, we’re at a communication dead end and I might as well go hiking & sea-kayaking, knowing that someone will rediscover all I’ve shown someday down the road anyway, as the math is actually dead simple for anyone not artificially trapped in a culturally-constrained conceptual straight-jacket.
Show me a graph of your cyclic volatility estimates once you have them.
Matthew R. Marler :
Listener to what your buddy PV is saying.
He does even less pencil-lifting than you!
Like you, its all in his mind :
See how you can glean information that is not even written down!
It’s all so easy if you just follow what MM and PV are trying to convey via mind-waves.
rgbatduke (October 29, 2013 at 12:57 pm) wrote:
“Last time I looked, the rate at which the various components of the Earth’s surface structure radiate energy away to outer space all depend on the temperature in absolute degrees, not the temperature anomaly, whether it be the global anomaly or the local anomaly of the particular patch or slab of surface structure in question. Total outgoing radiation is very sensitive to precisely how absolute temperature is spatiotemporally distributed because of the T^4 in the Stefan-Boltzmann equation (or better yet, because of the way the actual Planck distribution shifts around with temperature across the various absorptive/radiative cross-sections involved). Note T^4, not ΔT to any power.
To help one understand the impact of this, one can actually radiate away more heat at exactly the same average temperature by simply increasing the amplitude of a completely systematic oscillation around that average temperature. The T^4 ensures that as long as the hottest times are a bit hotter and the coldest times are equally a bit colder, the rate of energy loss during the warmer part of the sinusoid will exceed the rate at which energy is retained (relative to the original mean at constant temperature) so that the time average rate of energy loss will increase even though GAST remains unchanged.
Precisely the same result can be obtained spatially — one can increase the rate at which the planet loses heat at constant temperature by increasing the mean temperature of half of the area and decreasing the mean temperature of half of the area by the same amount. Radiation rate is not proportional to the temperature anomaly, and it depends in detail on the spatiotemporal distribution of absolute temperature.”
–
If I had to pick the most crucially informative figure I have ever seen in the solar-terrestrial-climate literature, it would be Dickey & Keppenne’s (1997) Figure 3 (a&b).
The figure has powerful implications.
There’s no elaboration in the text of Dickey & Keppenne (1997), which frankly I consider a generous stroke of Jean Dickey’s subtly expressed genius — a concise snapshot of the DNA quietly whispered by one of a privileged special few, to be efficiently recognized as buried treasure by those laying aggregation criteria foundations with sufficient care.
The same fingerprints can be found in total column ozone records if false assumption (statistical paradox) is culled from naively aggregated summaries.
Bear in mind that in stat inference, p-values are conditional probabilities. Some of the conditions are never stated explicitly. Worse: Some never even enter the stream of consciousness of practitioners — e.g. omitted lurking variables, including the parameters of aggregation. Herein lies the philosophically deepest root of mainstream academic solar-climate exploratory failure.
With 2 images Dickey & Keppenne (1997) teach how to leverage the laws of conservation of angular momentum & large numbers to slice effortlessly with a sharp, precise razor right through ENSO scrambling to clearly expose the roots of multidecadal climate variability.
IMPORTANT:
__
WHT,
Are you ahead of Judy & A Lacis in your efforts to reproduce Dickey & Keppenne’s (1997) Figure 3a&b?
If you honestly answer “yes”, we’ll know you’re attempting to be a serious, sensibly-informed contributor to the solar-climate discussion.
Anyone who can’t complete this exercise has NO hope of sensibly interpreting the ‘stadium wave’.
The ‘stadium wave’ won a lot of hearts, but ALL heads failed to understand the DNA underpinning it.
Visualize flow-driving gradients in ABSOLUTES, not anomalies. Circulation differs QUALITATIVELY towards the polar night of the winter hemisphere.
http://imageshack.us/a/img850/876/f0z.gif
http://imageshack.us/a/img109/1479/lq2.gif
Funny thing, civilization developed right there where it is hottest. Yeah, I know it was the river valleys. So now, pay attention to Paul, kim; he’s on to something.
==================
kim has a good knows
Semantic preferences aside, if you take the time to visualize in 4 dimensions, ENSO’s just the variance around the solar attractor.
There are definitely some serious misunderstandings at play in comments here if ignorance of OLR coupling was suspected as a first instinct.
Bill Illis has illustrated that along with other components of ENSO coupling countless times at WUWT. Temperature, mass, velocity, & chemistry are coupled, as Jean Dickey has counselled. We should all know this by now and so we should not be distracted by chicken-egg tail-chasing.
Years ago I warned about the generalizability — people need to think it through first — we can only discuss sensibly & efficiently after that happens.
Piers Corbyn appeared surprised when I pointed out the generalizability. I suspect it had escaped his notice.
The lesson I had for Piers Corbyn & Ulric Lyons was that you absolutely do not need to know the details of the event series to see the tuned aggregates clearly.
We each have different roles to play. Piers & Ulric focus on event series. My role is to help the mainstream see where they’ve gone off track by not exercising due attention to aggregation criteria fundamentals, an area of deep, deep, deep ignorance in the climate discussion.
Just how deep?
Let me put it this way:
Tomas Milanovic is the only individual I’ve encountered in the climate discussion in 5 years that might not be deeply ignorant of aggregation criteria fundamentals.
Enough dreams about mysterious physics that violate laws — it’s time to start visualizing in 4D the hard constraints on tuned aggregates indicated with crystal clarity by earth orientation parameters — which are by far the most well-constrained climate indicators we have on record.
Making big shiny things that distract your eye, ENSO’s just a giant stir-stick — or steering-wheel if you prefer (technically a balanced multi-axial differential). The sun’s our only driver.
All most grateful for its almost constancy, which has almost made all the difference.
=========
Paul Vaughan: Making big shiny things that distract your eye, ENSO’s just a giant stir-stick — or steering-wheel if you prefer (technically a balanced multi-axial differential). The sun’s our only driver.
OK, but if a steering-wheel is an adequate analogy, what’s wrong with the transistor analogy for the clouds? “The sun is the only driver” rather understates the complexity of the system, which includes LWIR reflected back to the surface from clouds while the clouds block incoming full spectrum light; complemented by clear skies that permit free travel of incoming full spectrum light and outgoing LWIR; etc.
Enough dreams about mysterious physics that violate laws — it’s time to start visualizing in 4D the hard constraints on tuned aggregates indicated with crystal clarity by earth orientation parameters — which are by far the most well-constrained climate indicators we have on record.
How much data do we have for plotting the 3D projections of the 4D system — or are you meaning the 3 spatial dimensions and the time dimension? What exactly do you mean by “tuned aggregates”, and where is the “crystal clarity” of their association with earth orientation parameters?
I can’t disagree, but I think your writing is unclear.
Given the choice:
a) Engage in yet more (!) tedious climate discussion.
b) Go hiking & sea-kayaking.
I went with (b).
[ :
( (a) another day! … )
Cheers!
It would be nice if the climate skeptics could get their act together and agree on whether climate is simpler or more complex than the warmistas claim.
Chaos in a box that pulses with the solar cycle …so less complex if you look at the box — more complex if you insist on looking at the turbulence inside the box (an inferior choice, for sure).
Matthew, a suggestion:
Read up on methods for detecting cyclic volatility. You can also use search terms like clustering and burst bunches. There’s some variation in what people call this stuff that’s mathematically basically the same thing — i.e. detecting cycles in the variance structure (envelope) when:
a) the cycles are changing in length.
b) there’s high-amplitude “turbulence”.
Let me be clear: Conventional approaches to cycle detection HARD FAIL at this task. Even the very most precise best-of-the-best conventional methods fail — and it’s simple enough for a good mathematician to PROVE WHY they fail IF they understand why they fail (could make for an interesting paper — well, interesting for people who are interested in that sort of thing at least — certainly not a popular topic in mainstream culture!)
These discussion trees make such a MESS of the conversation. Accidentally added a reply to Matthew over here. Discussion will be orders of magnitude more efficient if we drop the order-scrambling nuisance tree structure that GUARANTEES repetitiveness and misses. (We’re not all retired from working life. Time is extremely valuable.)
The utility of the tree structure seems to be only to make the discussion look hopelessly tangled & confused, useful for promoting the appearance of severe uncertainty, if that’s the aim.
So the ocean (the part they studied) cooled during the MWP and warmed during the LIA? Does that make sense. Or am I reading the paper wrong.
Wouldn’t the ocean sea level have fallen during the MWP then?
I was under the impression that the ocean has been rising (at a changing, but positive rate) for the last 12,000 years?
Or maybe I am reading the delta T’s wrong in figure S8a – c.
Does anybody know if those delta T’s are relative (only for each period) or absolute, so you can compare them to each other 8a to 8c for example?
From the abstract, “We show that water masses linked to North Pacific and Antarctic intermediate waters were warmer by 2.1 ± 0.4°C and 1.5 ± 0.4°C, respectively, during the middle Holocene Thermal Maximum than over the past century. Both water masses were ~0.9°C warmer during the Medieval Warm period than during the Little Ice Age and ~0.65° warmer than in recent decades. “
The availability of warm heat reservoir at surface and colder one in the abyssal brine is a necessary condition for heat transfer but insufficient. The means for heat transfer must also exist. The means for heat transfer from surface to the ocean floor does not exist. The heat increase in the ocean floor cannot come from the surface: it is earth’s internal heat generated in the earth’s core.
Nabil Swedan said:
“The heat increase in the ocean floor cannot come from the surface: it is earth’s internal heat generated in the earth’s core.”
____
Not true. Downwelling, such as is observed off of Antarctica where abyssal (below 6000m) warming and freshening occurs. This is adding net energy to these abyssal waters that was recently at the surface. It is true that geothermal energy is also transferred to abyssal water, but the THC is a bigger player through massive downwelling at various locations such as off of Antarctica.
Did you thunk this up all by your liddle ole self gatesy?
It is utterly wrong – but by all means come back with an actual reference and not just rhetoric.
About time you showed up here Chief to begin your diatribes and rabid nuttery cut-n-pastes.
Now, back to the science…regarding the warming and freshing of abyssal Southern Ocean water off of Antarctica, see:
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2010JCLI3682.1
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013EGUGA..15.1640J
How long do you think the extra energy stays there?
Warming has the effect of reducing the density of the water. And less-dense water tends to float on top of more dense water.
Cooling has the same effect – which means that the abyssal water tends to remain at much the same temperature.
Gates, the “freshening” of the Southern Abysmal waters is due to changes in the shifting southern westerlies.
“This points to massive changes in the wind-driven upwelling around Antarctica during the transition out of the last ice age and suggests that the westerlies were closer to (or stronger next to) Antarctica during the transition than they are now. Climate scientists have attributed changes in the westerlies over the past 50 years to the warming from higher CO2. The changes predicted by climate models in response to higher CO2 are fairly small, however, and tend to be symmetric with respect to the equator. The observed changes have been quite asymmetric, with much larger changes in the Southern Hemisphere than in the north (3). The results of Anderson et al. (7) suggest that in the past, the westerlies shifted asymmetrically toward the south in response to a flatter temperature contrast
between the hemispheres. The magnitude of the shift seems to have been very large. If there was a response to higher CO2 back then, it paled in comparison. Changes in the north-south temperature contrast today are not going to be as large as they were at the end of the last ice age, but even small changes could be an additional source of modern climate variability.”
http://www.woodhous.arizona.edu/geog453013/Toggweiler2009.pdf
Then if you actually look at the basin temperature data, the southern Pacific has not changed enough to get outside of the measurement error and most of the dramatic OH uptake in the SH is in the south Atlantic. That is related to the changes in Antarctic sea ice extent and wind patterns.
Rabid nuttery? Diatribe? You are an ignorant and nasty little dweeb gatesy.
‘Several possible mechanisms could affect the warming reported here, perhaps in combination.’
You should really try to read and understand references rather than simply linking and making up your own fantasies.
Phatboy, “How long do you think the extra energy stays there?
Warming has the effect of reducing the density of the water. And less-dense water tends to float on top of more dense water.
Cooling has the same effect – which means that the abyssal water tends to remain at much the same temperature.”
In the Antarctic Convergence Zone there is a tight (~200 km) range of temperature/density breaks from near zero C to 10 C. Each of the breaks provides a conduit for sinking Antarctic water which the Antarctic Circumpolar Current tends to “feed”. If you have more water sinking above 4C, the southern deep oceans are warming. More sinking water less than 4 C and the southern deep oceans are cooling. It is a lot like pouring a layered cocktail like a B52 or a Black and Tan.
Thanks for performing a pretty much thankless task, RG.
This paper is being spun in the usual Contrarian fashion.. ie. trawled for any paragraphs or sentences that appear to help Contrarian propaganda.. those cherry picked morsels are then shouted from the rooftops,, even though the authors and the conclusions are not Contrarian.. and the Collective moves on to ‘assimilate’ another report.. WUWT does it with virtually everything that gets published about Climate and has done for years.
“Then, over the last 60 years, water column temperatures, averaged from the surface to 2,200 feet, increased 0.18 degrees C, or .32 degrees F. That might seem small in the scheme of things, but it’s a rate of warming 15 times faster than at any period in the last 10,000 years” – Linsley.
Wow, just wow, sharkboy. Shout that little morsel from the rooftops, why don’t you!
Capt, I’m talking global long-term average
Nice try Phatboy, but no cigar.. that morsel was posted here by Judith Curry.. i just re-quoted it.. you saying JC was cherry picking?.. how very dare you!
:)
The report is not Contrarian and the authors are saying the Ocean is being heated ’15 times faster than at any period in the last 10,000 years’.
Sharky, I don’t care who quoted it or otherwise – I was merely pointing out your use of it in virtually the same breath as your berating others over “cherry-picked morsels”
Phatboy, “Capt, I’m talking global long-term average”
Up to thousands of years. North Atlantic SST temperatures lagged the Holocene maximum by about 5000 years. Deep ocean temperatures lag SST by an average of 1700 years. Gates current “rapid” rate of OHC would increase average ocean temperature by about 1 C per 400 years or so if it was sustained.
Chief Presenter of Diatribes said: (related to my explanation that downwelling occurs off of Antarctica, and brings energy to abyssal levels)
“It is utterly wrong.”
_____
This is a pefect example of why Chief Presenter of Diatribes brings much confusion to the discussion here. Every expert on the oceans knows that much downwelling and the formation of cold bottom water occurs off of Antarctica. Moreover, the most recent research would show that the abyssal water here is warming (i.e. more energy is being brought down). But apparently Chief Presenter of Diatribes would like to disagree with their assessments. His pomposity seems unbounded, but he’s got a reputation to uphold as Chief Presenter of Diatribes.
Phatboy, Here is a comparison of the IPWP, reconstructed solar dTSI and reconstructed northern extra-tropical temperature (30N-90N) correlations. It is a lot like a three body orbital problem.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-624h1uKZbvo/UnQ2bKHhM8I/AAAAAAAAKUg/T-fRFmyAlGA/s993/ipwp%2520solar%2520and%2520north%2520ex%252050yr%2520correl%2520plus%2520100%2520year%2520smooth.png
I’m sure you don’t Phatboy, the fact remains my quote reflects the paper’s content, so I don’t need to quote the rest.
This paper confirms there is ocean warming and says nothing about international conspiracies by the scientific community, so you are just waving shadow puppets…
0.18 degrees!
Some would call that clutching at straws.
Lamna nasus
You need to keep in mind that 0.18 increase is from the spliced on Levitus reconstruction and and applies to only a small region of the ocean in this study. The entire ocean over the same time frame according to Levitus has warmed only 0.06 deg C over the same referenced depth.
Lamna nasus
Another tidbit, the authors present three scenarios of mixing at a particular area of interest, from 25% to 75% so the rate of warming comparing proxies to reconstructed data ranges from 5 to 15 times only in a small region. I think there is some cherry picking to create a fabulous headline for the uninformed and media hype. Too bad Wyatt and Curry lacked the big money quote in their papers press release.
Dalyplanet said:
“Too bad Wyatt and Curry lacked the big money quote in their papers press release.”
Such as: “Next Stadium-wave promises to do what it’s been doing for the past 10,000 years…” That would be a real grabber, eh?
More like “Stadium Wave adds a +/- 0.1 variability and no trend to global temperature over the last 130+ years”
Easy to show — any college student could solve this as a homework problem. The data is all there.
Maybe “Miraculous paper causes blind man to see” eh Web
R. Gates,
The thermohaline circulation (THC) cannot transfer heat from surface to the abyssal brine because it has to cool first to a temperature equal or less than that of the abyssal brine. Otherwise the density of surface brine will not be heavy enough to cause it to sink.
Nabil Swedan,
You are correct, of course.
The Wild and Witless Warmist Warriors will immediately try to puncture your factual armour with their soggy noodle lances. High farce! The audience rolls in the aisles, convulsed with laughter!
The Warmist scientivists obviously assume the Earth was created cold, and has heated up by overexposure to the Sun. They also have to ignore the fact that night follows day, and that hot things cool, all by themselves, when you remove internal and external heat sources.
Proof that Intelligence and education are no absolute defence against gullibility.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Gates is a laughably nasty little dweeb who threatens to make life intolerable for anyone who disagrees. This is both another example of leaping to a narrative without any depth of understanding of hydrodynamics or oceanography and defending the resultant nonsense with insults and calumny. Not a balanced individual.
Bottom water formation is not in doubt – merely the simplistic narrative of warming of the depths by buoyant sinking of warm and less saline water arrived at to become the subject of gatesy’s latest ill-informed lecture. In reality neither freshening or warming in Arctic water promotes bottom water formation. Gatesy has made the The actual mechanisms involve turbulent mixing of one source or another.
e.g. http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/new-data-on-deep-sea-turbulence-shed-light-on-vertical-mixing
He has made another great mess of things and typically responds with insults.
Their resolution is worse than a century, but the last decades are the fastest evah? Do tell.
More Mannian duct-taping of recent hi-res variance onto lo-res paleo proxies, I wot. Hey, it worked once or twice before!
+1
I think you may mean its been Marcotted & Shakuned.
The resolution is quite fine I understand – but the averaging is over long periods. You would need to look at the actual data set – I can’t find it.
DeltaT’s over 200 years. The supplemental is linked at the top of this post .
Linsley: Our results would suggest that there was more heat in the oceans in the early Holocene but it absorbed that heat much more slowly than it is now, when there are much more rapid changes going on.
there is always the claim that current warming is much more rapid that previous warming, but there is no sufficient justification for that claim. Not only are the measurements from the past subjected to random variation by nature and the measuring techniques, but so are the estimates of the times of those measurements. If in fact the warming of the Medieval Warm Period had occurred as rapidly as the 150 year warming since the LIA, it would look in our data tables as though it has occurred much more slowly because the estimated times would be so much more spread out. Tree rings can be pretty accurate, but these dates are taken from core samples, and the constituents of the core sample diffuse, which blunts the signal somewhat and perturbs the time estimate.
I got the paper, but not yet the supplemental material. Perhaps the authors address the limits of accuracy of the time estimates.
The method is based of foramifera – which don’t diffuse as CO2 does in ice cores – but the point about the rapidity of past transitions is obviously the case.
I take the point – bioturbation is my pet peeve for sediment pollution studies.
Of course, Brad is wrong, the sediments did “record similar warmings in the past”, if they occurred.Then they were stirred up. I wonder if they could be “unstirred” somehow, or perhaps select out the tiny portions that were never stirred and use those.
Didn’t the Schwartz paper (Heat capacity, time constant, and the sensitivity of Earth’s climate system) find that there is an upper limit on the heat storage capacity of the oceans? If so, doesn’t it make sense the oceans were warmer back in the days of the Minoans and later, the Romans?
Counter intuitively, the Western Pacific Warm Pool generally cools during a large El Nino event, which tends to warm the entire climate system:
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/oceanography/wrap_ocean_analysis.pl?id=IDYOC007&year=1997&month=12
So can this area of the global which stores most of the heat be extrapolated to sea surface data? Maybe. Although, the way a capacitor works is by creating a differential, so an acceptable theory may be an increase in ocean stratification since 7.5 Kyr ago, with OHC cooling and surface temperatures warming.
Interesting that WPWP BWT has potentially been the lowest it ever has been during the holocene…..just a few clicks ago..
…maybe its the sun spots /sarc
Not “[c]ounter intuitively” at all if you understand the basics of how an El Nino works.
I think that Bob Tisdale was saying that when the trade winds slacken, the equatorial counter currents carry more water from the western pacific warm pool eastward, and that’s an El Nino. I could see how maybe if a bunch of warm water was carried eastward, what was left westward could be a little cooler.
Corrections anyone?
That’s only part of it, IMO. IIRC (I don’t have time to dig up ref’s) during an El Nino the Equatorial Westerlies are far lower and longer, which drives the Equatorial Counter Current all the way to South America. It seems to me to be a sort of switch: when the combination of very warm water and Equatorial Westerlies (at the surface) are that close to the Andean Plateau, upslope flow and a sort of equatorial (i.e. without geostrophic winds) monsoon combine to produce a strong low-pressure area which continues to pull the Equatorial Westerlies all the way to that end of the Pacific.
In other times, when the Equatorial Westerlies lift from the surface fairly far west, the Equatorial Counter-Current fades out well west of South America, and the water off the coast is cooler, driving less of a low-pressure area (if any).
As several commenters have repeatedly pointed out at CE, there seems to be a tendency for warm water to accumulate in the Western Pacific between El Nino events, which is then drained during the El Nino events themselves as warm water spreads over the Eastern Pacific.
The warm pool tends to provide energy for the northern oceans through the PDO type transfers and the THC which can have a variety of long lag times. With volcanoes adding their lags, you can end up with several centuries of weakly damped response.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-vgbFByFl7as/UmyPuUPdm8I/AAAAAAAAKMs/1pH73wWgidY/s563/damped%2520oppo.png
X said:
“Counter intuitively, the Western Pacific Warm Pool generally cools during a large El Nino event.”
—
Why is that counterintuitive? When the the normal easterlies that piled up all that nice warm water die down and the warm water migrates back to the Eastern pacific, you’d expect the western warm pool to cool. The net effect of all of it is that energy eventually goes from the warm pool to the troposphere, and some of it right into space.
Because the OHC as measured by BWT in the Indo pacific is rising inline with the surface since 1600AD, yet during El Nino, which results in a net surface warming, deep ocean temps are cooler. Mother nature (on very short time scales) is demonstrating that surface warming and BWT don’t have to warm together, in fact the exact opposite can occur.
So any extrapolation of BWT, to surface temperature, which is quite logical given the importance of the warm pool to global climate (you only need to correlate gistemp and OHC to see they are basically the same), could quite in fact be incorrect on longer time scales. And that could be a big deal, and not something one would expect given the current AGW theory. As the authors note, OHC has been much higher in the past, yet the surface changes have been small in comparison. SO similarly, we have OHC “dropping like a bag of cement” since 7500AD, yet the surface changes are not that significant..still nice and warm…That is strong evidence of negative feedback, your westerly winds have decreased in response to decreasing OHC.
p.s. where is the radiative forcing responsible for the very significant trend in OHC since 1600 – 1880AD?
Oops! The desperation of the warmists is getting comical.
X yes it is extremely comical. Surface temperatures didn’t play along so they created some fantasy about “unprecedented” OHC increases in 10^22 Joules per year for a squirrel. Of course they never bother to check if that “unprecedented” OHC warming of nearly 0.2C since 1954 with a +/-0.2 C margin of error in the 0-700 meter range actually might correlate with the surface temperatures that where not playing along.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-gBvk75KfqNs/UnRdvDZe8vI/AAAAAAAAKU4/h4yuaqr8Ps4/s833/nh%25200-700%2520versus%252030N-60N.png
Surprise! Surprise! The deeper ocean temperature seems to be rising with SST and even has the same natural internal variability that SST has in the mid to higher latitudes where ocean mixing efficiency is impacted by internal variations related to the AMO/PDO/Centennial Pacific oscillation.
They were completely happy with land surface temperatures until they realized they were amplified by SST variations related to all those nasty “oscillations” that could never have more than +/-0.1C of impact on GLOBAL climate. Everywhere they turn another squirrel becomes a speed bump.
X Anon. asks:
“p.s. where is the radiative forcing responsible for the very significant trend in OHC since 1600 – 1880AD?”
____
Seems X has not heard of the greater volcanic activity nor the reduced solar activity prior to the period in question, such that net solar insolation to the oceans reach a minimum during this period, and then recovered up to around 1880AD. Time for you to hit the books X Anon!
X Anon. also writes (confusingly):
“As the authors note, OHC has been much higher in the past, yet the surface changes have been small in comparison. SO similarly, we have OHC “dropping like a bag of cement” since 7500AD.”
_______
Were they in fact predicting the futue (i.e. 7500 AD?)
Gates, go and ask a real climate scientist, its not called a hockey stick for no reason! Ask them whether any natural external forcing can explain these trends in BWT. I’m all ears (but my eyes are looking at all the previous IPCC pseudoscience garbage about holocene stability being related to no significant external forcing. what short memories we have.)
Maybe the BWT data is wrong, that seems to be Mann’s defense? Good luck with that…what did ray pierre say about climap and Lindzen? Oh, thats right, I remember, a beautiful theory destroyed by an ugly fact.
Seems appropriate.
I would expect deep ocean heat content to be at least partly dependent on the integral of average surface temp (over time), as well as or perhaps instead of the temp itself. I’d also expect it to be especially sensitive to ENSO, given the importance of the South China Sea in mixing surface heat into the depths.
Of course, averages don’t really drive anything, so I’d expect to find all sorts of different correlations using averages with different time-frames.
I found an interesting apparent disparity in their table S3. They report extremely rapid inflows of heat during the 1955 – 2010 era compared to the 1600 – 1950 era (15 10^22 Joules/century compared to 1.5 10^22 Joules/century, respectively); but a slower temperature change in the 1955-2010 era compared to the 1600 – 1950 era (0.032 K/century vs 0.09 K/century, respectively.) I took these numbers from table S3B; tables S3C and S3A show the same reversal of rank ordering of rates. Why would the greater rate of heat flow correspond to the lesser rate of temperature change?
I will say this for them: they discuss the uncertainties in the measurements at considerable length, estimates of times as well as estimates of temperatures and water flow rates..
It’s possible one of the authors talks about this in one of the taped interviews, but I can’t exactly what you mean.
Temperature change in the oceans, or temperature change on the earth’s surface?
I think they are posting an error Matt It makes no sense.
If anyone is still looking for a visual of the OHC apparently from the study, it’s here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/10/31/study-pacific-ocean-now-warming-15-times-faster-than-in-past-10000-years/
I am guessing they’ve done one of the top 10 most influential climate science papers of the year.
15 times faster.
As the headline in the linked article says.
Doing a rough comparison of the drop from bar 3 (0-1000 CE) in their graph to bar 4 (1600 – 1800) and using the middle of the date ranges (500 and 1700 CE) we get a change of about 1.75 per 100 years. Then using this same method for bars 4 and 5, we get a rise of about 2.67 per 100 years.
“A paper published Science finds reconstructed Pacific Ocean heat content has been significantly higher throughout the vast majority of the past ~10,000 years in comparison to the latter 20th century.”
Doesn’t seem kind odd to be measuring the temperature of Pacific Ocean
in sediment in region of most volcanic regions of the Ring of Fire?
gbaikie, my sense is that undersea volcanic activity doesn’t affect Pacific ocean temps very much. Just an impression, partly based upon the notion that over eons, volcanic activity is probably pretty constant. That said, however, there is a bit of science that supports what you say, at least a bit.
Daniel Walker, a undersea tectonics researcher, found statistical correlations between earthquakes in the East Pacitic rise — an underwater rift that runs N/S for several hundred miles, several hundred miles west of S America — and El Ninos. El Ninos, of course, are characterized by warm waters and muggy air off the west coast of S America. So Walker published two articles, several years apart, one of which was in Eos, suggesting the possibility that the increased heat underwater which he presumed occurred as a result of the volcanism, might make its way to the surface and cause El Ninos to start, or extend them, once started. I can’t now find the articles themselves, but here is a 1995 NY Times article on the subject:
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/25/science/hot-vents-in-the-sea-floor-may-drive-el-nino.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
As the article says, El Nino scientists never took the research seriously, they presumed their models captured all that needed to be captured, and I don’t know if any further research has been done. However, one reason Walker wrote the second article in 1995 is that researchers in Washington State had discovered huge “megaplumes” of rising hot sea water, when undersea eruptions occurred in a similar rift off the NW US coast. That is in the NY Times article.
I can guarantee that everyone on this blog will enjoy this article, whatever your take on it.
John,
For myself, I do not know how much energy from the incandescent interior is absorbed by the sea, or the rate at which this occurs, or how or if the rate of transfer occurs over time, or how long the radiation of this energy to space takes.
Neither do any of the Warmists. On this we are agreed. They can adduce precisely zero facts to the contrary.
In the absence of fact, one surmise is as good as another. My assumption is that the disparate parts that comprise the Earth system act chaotically. If this be so, then arbitrarily small changes to the system made now eg by heat transfer from the molten parts, may have unknown consequences.
In essence, the future is unknowable. Seers, augurs, oracles, and future sellers seem not to have proved otherwise – so far.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
John,
That’s actually a very interest notion, but one should be wary of ascribing causation because two events happen together (i.e. the seismic activity and El Ninos). They could in fact, have a common cause. See:
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/368/1919/2481.full
“gbaikie, my sense is that undersea volcanic activity doesn’t affect Pacific ocean temps very much. Just an impression, partly based upon the notion that over eons, volcanic activity is probably pretty constant. That said, however, there is a bit of science that supports what you say, at least a bit. ”
But this about small region of pacific ocean.
How about if foot ash falls on chunk of ocean and it’s falling on ocean within one day. Does that one aspect have any effect in terms of temperature at ocean floor which kilometers deep?
This is near a supervolcano- like Yellowstone. Or it’s cluster of super volcanos, like Yellowstone.
Plus it’s on tectonic plate boundaries kind of unlike Yellowstone.
Other than Atlantic ridge I can’t of more volcanic region in the world. They picked location because of the rapid sediment- due to volcanic eruption activity.
I don’t know much about the area, but it’s strait, on the Ring of Fire, within region of cluster of super volcanos, and tectonic boundaries:
http://whatonearth.olehnielsen.dk/plates/sunda.asp
What does this have to do with temperature of the pacific ocean?
“Daniel Walker, a undersea tectonics researcher, found statistical correlations between earthquakes in the East Pacitic rise — an underwater rift that runs N/S for several hundred miles, several hundred miles west of S America — and El Ninos. El Ninos, of course, are characterized by warm waters and muggy air off the west coast of S America. So Walker published two articles, several years apart, one of which was in Eos, suggesting the possibility that the increased heat underwater which he presumed occurred as a result of the volcanism, might make its way to the surface and cause El Ninos to start, or extend them, once started. I can’t now find the articles themselves, but here is a 1995 NY Times article on the subject:
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/25/science/hot-vents-in-the-sea-floor-may-drive-el-nino.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
Well, for particular issue, it’s not so much about volcanic activity affecting the pacific as much putting weather station in a parking lot or being affected by airplane jet exhaust.
Plus he studies corals, other drilling holes in ocean floor what known about region which the holes are being drilled.
to R.Gates at 11:03 PM:
An interesting idea, that REDUCED pressure due to the El Nino cycle, might cause plates on the sea floor to be able to flex more due to a very slight reduction in the weight of sea water above them, thereby allowing or causing more sea floor seismicity. The key sentences from the Abstract:
“…We propose that increased seismicity is associated with ENSO-driven sea-surface gradients (rising from east to west) in the equatorial Pacific, leading to a reduction in ocean-bottom pressure over the EPR by a few kilopascal. This relationship is opposite to reservoir-triggered seismicity and suggests that EPR fault activity may be triggered by plate flexure associated with the reduced pressure.”
Clearly, more science is needed. If you asked me to chose between the two unproven theories, I would have to get a better sense from seismologists as to whether the tiny reduction in pressure could allow for a large increase in seismicity. It seems unlikely to me, but it isn’t my field, so I simply have to wait for more science.
My assumption is that the disparate parts that comprise the Earth system act chaotically. If this be so, then arbitrarily small changes to the system made now eg by heat transfer from the molten parts, may have unknown consequences.
Earth temperature and sea level has not gone out of bounds for ten thousand years. It is not headed out and it will not go out.
Temperature does not get pushed out of bounds.
The random or regular things that push temperature around only operate inside the bounds.
Herman Alexander Pope,
The absolute upper limit on surface temperature would appear to be unknown, but at least 5000K.
The lower limit would be the temperature achieved after the “heat death” of the Universe. 3 or 4 K?
I point out the blindingly obvious, meaning no offence, that averages are meaningless to individuals. Jumping into a pit of lava will kill. Being unable to outrun hot gases as in Pompeii, kills. Immersion in the North Atlantic for a sufficient length of time, kills.
My point was that nobody has a better idea of what the future holds than you or I. My assumption is that the Earth will continue to lose energy. Slowly. Remorselessly. Maybe. If this causes an increase in surface temperature, then so be it.
I’m betting my life on it.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Herman A. Pope mused:
“Earth temperature and sea level has not gone out of bounds for ten thousand years. It is not headed out and it will not go out.”
____
Such certainty. Of course, someday it will go well “out of bounds”, perhaps very high or very low, or both, rapidly one after another. We are creatures who have enjoyed the fruits of the Holocene and the benefits of igniting our own carbon volcano that allowed to tap into ancient stored sunlight and swell our population to 7+ billion and rising. Can the party go on forever? Nope. Someday the game will end and entropy will eventually win. Thanks for all the fish…
amazing watching RG taking on all the deniers and through logic making mincemeat of all their arguments.
Lil Kim claims to not understand how OHC works yet can say that global heating is good for the planet. That’s the extent of Team Denier’s braintrust.
Yeah, He just got back from meme refresher camp. Lions, squirrels and Strawmen, oh my
WebHubTelescope,
I don’t deny that weather changes, and hence the average of weather, climate.
I am more of a non believer in the dogma of the Church of Latter Day Scientism, or the religion espoused by the Warmist cult.
RG is a perfect example of the a Wild and Woolly Warmist Warrior flailing about with a well boiled lettuce leaf as his weapon of choice. After everybody else except the Warmist acolytes have departed the field with sore ribs from excessive laughter, RG reigns triumphant!
“See,” he cries, “I have triumphed over the unbelievers . They walk away slowly, with downcast eyes. Their shoulders shake, they clutch their bodies, and tears run copiously from their eyes!”
Yes. Well.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike Flynn said:
“RG is a perfect example of the a Wild and Woolly Warmist Warrior.”
___
Well, I’ve been called much worse. Though the warrior part is a bit silly. I’m a skeptic after all, in the truest sense of the word, whereby skeptcism is not a badge or social club or destination, but a tool I use to find the “most likely” explanations for the way this amazing universe works. Mostly, it seems, I’ve been using it to carve through the tons of BS that get thrown up on these blogs. Is there a BS factory somewhere…maybe in the basement of Heartland or Faux News?
You should know gatesy – where do you get your endless supply.
R Gates,
A too-clever fellow named Gates,
Embarked on a name change to Bates,
‘Twas quite a disaster,
The lads called him “master”.
We all know what that indicates.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
R. Gates, Skeptical Warmist: I’m a skeptic after all, in the truest sense of the word, whereby skeptcism is not a badge or social club or destination, but a tool I use to find the “most likely” explanations for the way this amazing universe works.
For you, “true” global warming skepticism is total belief in anthropogenic greenhouse gas induced warming (AGW); someone like me who believes almost all the science but doubts claims that future warming will produce future bad temperature increases is a “fake” global warming skeptic. Your definition excludes doubt that the “most likely” (so called) explanation might be unlikely, incomplete, inaccurate, or inadequate.
If all the explanations have less than 1% likelihood and one has about 10%, then the 10% likely explanation is simultaneously “most likely” and “unlikely”.
Web, isn’t this a bit overstated? I certainly agree that GHGs are warming the planet, but there is a reasonable argument to be made, based on peer reviewed science (some of it highlighted at Climate Etc.), that increased CO2 has been increasing agricultural yields and increasing plant growth across the planet. Increasing warmth has been expanding areas where agriculture can flourish. Taken on its own, these are beneficial developments, in a time frame of rising populations.
Of course, the balance of cost and benefit also, critically, depends on the costs. The costs — such as, will sea levels rise 10 inches, or 20 inches, this century? — depend on the nuances of the science we are discussing every day here at Climate Etc. For the moment, I’m leaving out policies, such as cleaning up black carbon emissions (Steven Mosher characterized such a policy as “low hanging fruit” earlier), which adds other degrees of nuance.
When costs of increasing CO2 and warmth begin to overwhelm benefits depends on a range of science, to me principally on climate sensitivity (regarding climate science) and on when solar becomes economic (regarding materials science). Our policies for dealing with GHGs should depend on how great the costs are, how great the benefits are, and when the costs they cease to be manageable.
I’m certainly not a denier, but I don’t think the world we are in is all that simple. Here is an analysis (of a peer reviewed paper) which suggests that benefits may outweigh costs through 2080:
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-probable-net-benefits-of-climate-change-till-2080.aspx
Matt Ridley, who wrote this analysis, has published many books on various aspects of modern science. Here is a list of his publications:
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/publications
Matt Ridley is coming to Melbourne Oz on
the 14th of November a date ter remember.
Politicing the outcomes is a separate issue from understanding the climate.
Compartmentalizing the arguments should be as obvious as subjective vs objective and qualitative vs quantitative analysis.
This seems to support the view that we’ve passed the peak of the current interglacial and we are now in the cooling phase towards the next glacial maximum (about 70,000 years to go), if we don’;t do some smart geoengineering to prevent it. :)
Except of course for the fact that the the general cooling since the Holocene Thermal Optimum has now been interrupted by the beginning of the Anthropocene, and the apparent return to more Pliocene-like climate conditions.
Same old, same old…
R.Gates, during the Pliocene, many things were different, including ocean circulation (water flowed from the Pacific to the Atlantic, where Central America later rose up to block such flow). The differences in flows apparently influenced the climate.
Sea levels in the Pliocene were between 65 meters lower than today (in the coolest periods) to 25 meters higher than today (in the warmest). In other words, the Milankovitch cycles still appeared to operate, but with higher highs, and higher lows, in sea level. The reference is: Dwyer and Chandler, “Mid-Pliocene sea level and continental ice volume based on coupled benthic Mg/Ca palaeotemperatures and oxygen isotopes,” Phil Trans R Soc A (2009); see Fig. 2.
It doesn’t seem that we are yet near the Pliocene, when we are discussing sea level rise of one foot, or possibly more, in the coming century.
John said:
“Sea levels in the Pliocene were between 65 meters lower than today (in the coolest periods)…”
and also notes:
“It doesn’t seem that we are yet near the Pliocene, when we are discussing sea level rise of one foot, or possibly more, in the coming century.”
_______
The Pliocene is of course a pretty long epoch, covering the stretch from about 5.3 to 2.5 mya. So when talking about it, it really is best to be much more definitiive as to what part of the Pliocene you are referring to. I try to do just that, especially when talking about the paleoclimate data and the study of what could be close analogs for our modern higher CO2 levels. Thus, I’ll often say mid-Pliocene, about 3.2 mya etc. There were warmer and cooler periods in the Pliocene, but the mid-Plioccene in particular saw CO2 levels around 400 ppm for a several thousand years, and during that time (if the paleoclimate data has been interpreted correctly) it appears that the Arctic ocean was ice free, and the Arctic in general was maybe 8C to 10C warmer. Sea levels during this same part of the mid-Pliocene were much higher than today. We’ve barely had a few decades near 400 ppm, but GH gases continue to rise as the human carbon volcano is quite active, so as they say, “this thing is just getting started”.
Yours is a statement of belief, not fact.
Peter Lang:
All paleoclimate data is reconstructed and thus are “proxies” and thus a statement of belief in the validity of those reconstructions, both in how they were carried out and the theory behind them. What is most encouraging about the paleoclimate research in general is that multiproxies, using different techniques and from geospatially different areas are beginning to give us better and better confidence in our ability to accurately reconstruct pictures of what past climates looked like. Also, since I am a Skeptic (using skepticism as tool for understanding, not for denial), I take all “truth” or “facts” as provisional, not denying they may be valid, even likely, but never adopting them as 100% certain.
From about 7,000 years ago until the start of the Medieval Warm Period in northern Europe, at about 1100, the water cooled gradually, by almost 1 degree C, or almost 2 degrees F. The rate of cooling then picked up during the so-called Little Ice Age that followed, dropping another 1 degree C, or 2 degrees F, until about 1600. The authors attribute the cooling from 7,000 years ago until the Medieval Warm Period to changes in Earth’s orientation toward the sun, which affected how much sunlight fell on both
BS – From 7000 years ago there were up and down cycles. Not the gradual hockey stick cooling. TOTAL BS
You can not change what happened with just words.
Ice core data shows no hockey stick. Ice core data is the best data for Ocean temperatures. Ocean temperatures are the best measure of the grandaddy of all heat sinks on the Earth surface, the oceans.
Herman A. Pope confusingly said:
“From about 7,000 years ago until the start of the Medieval Warm Period in northern Europe, at about 1100, the water cooled gradually…”
____
Really? Did you just disappear the Minoan and Roman warm periods? The are saying, “Herman, please don’t disappear us!”
http://www.seafriends.org.nz/issues/global/gisp2-apica.gif
Didn’t you read the OP, Gates?
Herman was simply quoting that, although he left the quotation marks off.
Blame Linsley for ‘disappearing’ those periods.
The chart showing rate of heat accumulation is biased and misleading. The 1st period (7500-2000 BP) is 5,500 years. The 2nd period (1100-1700 CE) is 600 years. The 3rd (1600-1970 CE) is 370 years. The last (1955-2010 CE) is 55 years. Why compare different period lengths? Linsley should compare equal 55-year periods, say 1600-1655 or 1100-1155. If he doesn’t have enough resolution to get 55-year periods, then don’t conclude warming in the last 60 years is 15 times faster than any period in 10,000 years.
BTW if we compute the change in temperature over change in time (dT/dt) during MWP, LIA and recent period from the study:
“Both water masses were ~0.9°C warmer during the Medieval Warm period than during the Little Ice Age and ~0.65° warmer than in recent decades”
We get these results:
MWP to LIA: dT = 0.9 C; dt = 1700 – 1100 = 600 yrs
dT/dt = 0.15 C per century
LIA to recent period: dT = 0.9 – 0.65 = 0.25 C; dt = 2010 – 1700 = 310 yrs
dT/dt = 0.08 C per century
It appears nature can cool the ocean almost 2 times faster than humans can heat it.
This was my question as well. The paper (press release anyway) seems to want to draw the conclusion that “man is causing a problem” even though the data shows that current OHC is not unprecedented. I wonder if political pressure to “tow the line on the debate” has any effect on this paper?
anyone that can read what was the temperature 7000-10 000y ago deep in the ocean, is a shameless liar
Or a very brilliant and dedicated scientist. Something deniers can’t quite fathom…honesty, brilliance and science.
I don’t understand how the temperature record at the Indonesia Throughflow (IT), however carefully inferred from painstakingly extracted core samples there, can tell us much if anything about fluctuations in the overall ocean heat content for the Pacific Ocean.
As can be seen from Plate 10 here, the bulk of the 4 Sv (4 million cubic meters/second) of westward IT flow is a warm upper layer current that flowed some 11,000 miles clear across the Pacific. It welled up from below at around 40 S 100 W, headed some 2000 miles north towards the Galapagos, warming as it went, and then turned west to run very slowly along the equator for the remaining 9,000 miles, spending a century or two basking in the tropical sun.
The fluctuations measured in the Indonesian cores are those of the top 400 m of equatorial water in the Pacific, down to the main thermocline. Since that portion can be expected to fluctuate far more than the abyss below, I don’t see how the Indonesian measurements can give us any idea at all of the fluctuations of the total Pacific Ocean heat content. They’re simply measuring fluctuations of a very small and sensitive portion of the Pacific Ocean. It should not be a surprise that these fluctuations are large.
Incidentally to get an idea of the magnitude of a 4 Sv current, it would take around 10,000 years to pump Earth’s oceans through a nozzle flowing at that rate. Compared with the 125 Sv flow of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current it’s a relatively small flow.
So maybe what being mostly measured is El Nino and La Nina?
“They’re simply measuring fluctuations of a very small and sensitive portion of the Pacific Ocean. It should not be a surprise that these fluctuations are large.”
It makes them large enough to measure. If you measure the Drake passage there is not much information given the noise of the proxies. Then when you compare to instrumental data that has a NH bias thanks to asymmetrical land distribution you get fruit salad.
The western pacific/indo-pacific warm pools have a strong correlation to instrumental which brings apples to apples back into play.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/10/for-all-best-fans.html
That shows how once BEST is scaled to allow for NH/land amplification there is a good correlation with the IPWP.
So if you are basing “Global Warming” on a small very sensitive portion of the global, 30N-60N, it would seem prudent to compare with the small, very sensitive parts of the oceans that “drive” the instrumental data.
Vaughan, here are a couple other comparisons.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-xhLsgDWzNH8/UnT0ePn0ZnI/AAAAAAAAKVY/JHam8KXAr5w/s601/0-700%2520NH%2520by%2520Basin.png
That is NH basin 0-700 temperature not OHC.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-wK8A7OXTmXU/UnMBtAwIaDI/AAAAAAAAKTg/qCUcyXOkYFA/s783/ipwp%2520solar%2520and%2520north%2520ex.png
That is the Oppo 2009 IPWP with the C&L 2010 northern extratropical temperature reconstruction. Notice anything?
The obvious thing to notice is the considerably greater variance way up north (C&L). One can see the same greater variance, as well as the significant rises at 0 BP and 1000 BP, in the GISP2 ice cores. Easterbrook loves to trot out the GISP2 temperature plot as proof that things are cooler now than back then.
Vaughan, once you get into GISP you are really getting into amplified noise. I was just comparing the 0-700 meter North Atlantic deep ocean temperature to the SST (AMO with trend). In that area SST is an ~3 times amplification of deep ocean temperature.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ddTCSsLYr9c/UnUdEt5zzPI/AAAAAAAAKWU/YK0Vwg4WEL0/s742/0-700%2520NA%2520versus%2520AMO%2520SST%2520region%2520scaled.png
Going past ~65N requires too much scaling and allowance for sea ice stability. The tropics seem to produce better “Global” results with the mid to high latitude more of the natural variability influences, which if not scaled properly produce all sorts of “Amazing” conclusions.
As for your first comparison, my interpretation is that the Atlantic Ocean is better coupled to some fluctuating source of heat than the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The latter are well coupled to each other at the equator, namely via the Indonesian Throughflow which is warm and therefore not subject to the strong cooling of the Atlantic’s couplings via the ACC (Antarctic Circumpolar Current).
The ACC connection explains why the Atlantic is colder on the left of the comparison, but what about the rapid warming on the right? Two possibilities:
1. An increase in lithosphere/upper mantle temperature is being transmitted to the Atlantic via the mid-Atlantic ridge, which is a particularly thin part of the crust that makes the Atlantic more sensitive to mantle temperature fluctuations.
2. The smaller size and more intimate contact of the Atlantic with the continents, making it more sensitive to rising land temperatures since 1970. CRUTEM4 shows land temperatures to be rising faster than sea surface temperatures since 1970, which (importantly in my view) is backwards from the global rises in 1850-1880 and 1910-1940 where the surface sea temperature rises dominated.
Or both, making it hard to tell which effect on the Atlantic is stronger.
The tropics seem to produce better “Global” results with the mid to high latitude more of the natural variability influences, which if not scaled properly produce all sorts of “Amazing” conclusions.
That was already the conclusion from GISP2 (I even calculated the appropriate scaling factor for it in some comment in CE a couple of years ago). I take it your point here is that the comparison between IPWP and C&L is stronger evidence for the same conclusion. Speaking as a logician I am strongly in favor of stronger evidence, so great!
Vaughan, It is hard to tell. One thing I’ve noticed is that volcanic impacts are much more strongly felt in the North Atlantic/northern extra-tropics. The ACC has to replace a large portion of that heat loss. So volcanic, directly and likely indirectly is a major factor.
If I get the longer term SST for each ocean basin to scale to the 0-700 meter temperature, I might be able to tease out some of the THC impact and lags between basins.
Vaughan, “That was already the conclusion from GISP2 (I even calculated the appropriate scaling factor for it in some comment in CE a couple of years ago). I take it your point here is that the comparison between IPWP and C&L is stronger evidence for the same conclusion. Speaking as a logician I am strongly in favor of stronger evidence, so great!”
If you get into NH scaling you should remember that the (Tmax+Tmin)/2 estimate also amplifies different impacts. BEST noted the 30N-60N amplification and the shift in DTR appears to be due to combine natural and anthropogenic land use/hydrological issues. Any correlation that is “real” should fit a large number of regional and global data sets.
Any correlation that is “real” should fit a large number of regional and global data sets.
Regional is good for the short term. The long term gives enough time for the influence of regional fluctuations to spread out over the whole globe, making global data sets the preferred ones for understanding long term climate change.
For the latter, spectral analysis to the rescue. The global temperature fluctuations for 1850-1950 don’t seem to contain any significant cycles with periods longer than 60 years. Assuming that continues, the upper halves of cycles since 1970, starting and ending at their inflection points, should be at most 30 years wide and consist of a < 15-year upswing followed by an equal downswing. CO2 on the other hand is on an upswing that hasn't yet even reached an inflection point, which should make it straightforward to separate the impact of CO2 from that of the known natural cycles.
One can of course question that assumption, as Mike Rossander pointed out here by showing that the recent rise could be accounted for with a 215-year cycle together with a few more large-amplitude cycles, with no exponential component.
But as Fourier pointed out early in the 19th century, one can always represent a (suitably smooth) function as a sum of cycles. With orbits in place of functions, Ptolemy beat him to that idea by a couple of millennia with his epicycles until Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, Galileo and Newton proposed a more physically motivated heliocentric model.
Certainly one can explain recent climate as a sum of cycles with no exponentially growing component, just as Ptolemy explained planetary motions with no gravity. The latter remained an option for the heliocentrically challenged in the 16th century just as the former does for the CO2-challenged today.
Vaughan, “The long term gives enough time for the influence of regional fluctuations to spread out over the whole globe, making global data sets the preferred ones for understanding long term climate change.”
If the data is properly baselined. The data is baseline dependent. No spectral analysis can overcome basic data screw-ups. If you look at the C&L versus IPWP that is on a 1945-55 baseline. That agrees with more NH regional volcanic impact than global volcanic impact. Pick a baseline of 1700 to 1800 and there is no volcanic impact only CO2. Recovery from a lower regional temperature would also have an ln(2) recovery curve to a balanced or near equilibrium condition.
Remember the Marcott “dimple”?
@cd: No spectral analysis can overcome basic data screw-ups.
Sorry, not following. I would have thought change of baseline could only affect the DC component of spectral analysis. Presumably you have something else in mind.
Oh wait, I guess you’re thinking of the exponential component. That becomes baseline-dependent if the exponential you’re fitting has the form b^(t-t0) where b and t0 are the two parameters. To make the fit independent of baseline one must instead fit b^(t-t0)+a, three parameters.
Vaughan, “Oh wait, I guess you’re thinking of the exponential component. That becomes baseline-dependent if the exponential you’re fitting has the form b^(t-t0) where b and t0 are the two parameters. To make the fit independent of baseline one must instead fit b^(t-t0)+a, three parameters.”
Exactly. For attribution you need to have a common and realistic baseline since the normal ln(2) responses to internal variability and volcanic forcing depend on the secular trend. Just averages anomalies is fine, but it doesn’t provide all the information. The regional rate of recovery from any perturbation helps determine if the selected baseline makes sense.
Exactly
Excellent. (For a moment there I was mystified).
The nice thing about modeling an exponential as a+b^(t-t0) instead of b^(t-t0) is that the model automatically takes care of the baseline a. Unfortunately Excel’s easily used exponential trend curve is the latter kind, leaving you in the dark as to what baseline best models the data. One must resort to Solver. Similar hassle in MATLAB.
Vaughan, openoffice’s exponential trend curve is about useless so I am forced to think more :)
One of the more fun issues is that in the NH there is a recovery trend of roughly a+b*e^(-t/RC) which is basically an ln(2) recovery that is amplified by the stronger land a*ln(?)/ln(2). Also the ocean has an amplification due to the flow bottleneck in the 30N-60N region which is amplified by the land based a*ln(?)/ln(2) response. Once you scale some of that out you can see that land use/snow field reduction is also amplified by the a*ln(?)/ln(2).
Looking at BEST, the overall amplification is about 1.81 times the SST, back that out and you can use BEST as a good SST proxy back to 1750. That is an exceptionally good fit to the Oppo 2009 Indo-Pacific Warm Pool. That implies that Little Ice Age recovery either hasn’t ended or may have end circa 1985 when the Diurnal Temperature Range trend shifted. The LIA recovery didn’t end because of continued primarily NH volcanic activity including the volcanic imbalance that caused your ~1918 SAW start.
Crowley and Untermann 2013 has the approximate volcanic forcing by hemisphere.
All of that would have been fairly easy to see, but the GISS and HadCrut baselines include a period of NH volcanic activity that tends to suppress the summer portion of the seasonal cycle they remove to get their anomalies.
Mosher and Brandon are supposed to be digging into the seasonal cycle issues, but as it stands, “sensitivity” to CO2 equivalent forcing appears to be less than 1.5 C per doubling once you remove the mixed data base issues.
I was catching up on some posts here I hadn’t read when they were new, and I came across this. I don’t know if you’ll read this captdallas 0.8 or less, but the collaboration between Steven Mosher and I is apparently not going to happen.
The abstract claims to be able to gauge the temperature of large swaths of ocean, 10,000 years ago, to within 0.4 C.
The abstract says: “We show that water masses linked to North Pacific and Antarctic intermediate waters were warmer by 2.1 ± 0.4°C and 1.5 ± 0.4°C, respectively, during the middle Holocene Thermal Maximum than over the past century.”
Waters connected to?
From the press release: “To look back farther in time, scientists have developed ways to analyze the chemistry of ancient marine life to reconstruct the climates in which they lived. In a 2003 expedition to Indonesia, the researchers collected cores of sediment from the seas where water from the Pacific flows into the Indian Ocean.”
So the average temperature of the intermediate waters of the Northern Pacific from 10,000 years ago are discernible to within 0.4C from cores taken in waters where the pacific waters run into the Indian Ocean.
It looks to me these are not proxies, they are proxies of proxies of proxies.
Yamal, ocean style.
@GaryM: So the average temperature of the intermediate waters of the Northern Pacific from 10,000 years ago are discernible to within 0.4C from cores taken in waters where the pacific waters run into the Indian Ocean.
It the Indonesia Throughflow (IT) was a uniform sample of the Pacific Ocean I’d have no complaint, “proxies of proxies of proxies” notwithstanding. The main problem with the paper is that it makes no mention whatsoever of the driver of the IT, namely the Thermohaline Circulation (THC). The currents in the THC flow along relative narrow corridors, and the IT’s corridor is a multithousand mile one along the equator and near the surface as can be seen from Plate 10 referenced above. The authors seem oblivious to this.
Vaughan Pratt, fwiw, I have liked your comments in this thread.
If the Pacific Ocean were well-mixed, I think the authors might counter that although they can’t actually estimate the OHC, nevertheless the changes that they estimate should be representative of ocean-wide changes. Since, as you point out, the Pacific Ocean is not well-mixed, they can not make such a claim.
They do have a good study of the IT, but it can only have a regional significance, it seems to me.
What did you think of my comment on their table S3?
Thanks, Matthew.
What did you think of my comment on their table S3?
Good catch. This looks like a case of wishful thinking. The discrepancy seems to come from using
Levitus et al’s data for 0-2000m in the 2010-1955 CE entry. If I’m right that the Indonesian cores are only measuring temperatures for 0-400m across the equatorial Pacific then they’re comparing apples and oranges. Temperatures below the main thermocline at ~400m fluctuate much less than above it. I’m surprised this discrepancy didn’t bother the authors—were they paying attention?
Incidentally these cores were collected a decade ago, in 2003 in a joint collaboration between Indonesian scientists and researchers at Rutgers, WHOI, and SUNY Albany. The third author, WHOI’s Delia Oppo, was part of that collaboration. You’d have to ask her whether she expected in 2003 that anyone would use those cores to draw inferences about Pacific Ocean heat content. Given the ten-year lapse, one is tempted to guess that the inference drawn in the present paper is more an opportunistic use of old data than carefully reasoned deduction.
Oops, you need to click on one more link to get to the Levitus et al paper.
It looks like the present paper is using the OHC and temperature figures from that paper for 700-2000m, not 0-2000m. That makes even less sense than 0-2000m. I wonder if they meant to use the figures for 0-700m. Very strange.
Vaughan Pratt, thank you for your reply, and the link.
They use OHC for Pacific only and their number agrees with that for 0-2000 m according to Figure S1.
Pekka, Table S3 gives 8.4E22 J for the change in OHC for 2010-1955 CE. For this value Rosenthal et al cite the Levitus et al paper. Where are you finding 8.4E22 J in the Levitus paper?
There is something wonkie in the Joules column between their the Leviticus, but it doesn’t look like confusing 0-700 with 0-2000, perhaps they didn’t scale Leviticus down for the 50% of the Pacific basin?
Vaughan,
In the Levitus et al supplementary material Figure S1 the value is about 8 for the Pacific.
@PP: In the Levitus et al supplementary material Figure S1 the value is about 8 for the Pacific.
Levitus et al 2010 has no Figure S1, but their Figure 1 shows an increase of 8E22 J for 700-2000m (the black curve). Rosenthal et al has a Figure S1 but that’s just a map of salinity. Please clarify.
Vaughan,
You gave this link to the Levitus et al paper. Check the page 7 of that pdf-file.
Oh, sorry, you’re absolutely right, I overlooked that. Let me return to this at (*) below.
Going back to Rosenthal et al’s Table S3A on p.13 for a moment, I can’t make sense of any of it. For 2-7.5 Ka B.P they give a temperature change of -1.1K and an OHC change of -25E22 J. Using 4E6 J/K/m3 for the specific heat of a cubic meter of seawater, that would make the volume 25E22/4E6/1.1 = 5.7E16 m3. This is only 8.6% of the volume of the Pacific (which is 66E16 m3). What do they mean by “50% Pacific volume?”
The next two lines give essentially the same volume. But the last line gives a volume of 8.4E22/4E6/0.11 = 19E16 m3, which is 29% of the Pacific.
But in any event 8.4 and 0.11 aren’t the numbers in (*) Table S1 of Levitus et al, which are instead 7.9 and 0.06. Now that gives a volume of 7.9E22/4E6/0.06 = 33E16 m3, which is exactly 50% of the 66E16 m3 volume of the Pacific. Presumably that’s the volume Levitus is using for the 0-2000m portion of the Pacific, which seems plausible given that the area of the whole Pacific is 180 million square km (1.8E14 m2).
Unless I’ve made at least two errors, Table S3 of Rosenthal et al leaves a lot to be desired, quite apart from concerns about what part of the Pacific the IT is sampling.
I’ve convinced myself that the line for 2010-1955 CE in Rosenthal’s Table S3 should read
2010-1955 CE | 0.11 | 5.7 | 55 | 10.4 | 0.2
This is based on the entry for the Pacific in Table S2 of Levitus 2012, which is for 0-700m. Why they’ve used the S1 data for 0-2000m is a mystery—surely just a mistake.
As for the rest, I’ll wait until Rosenthal et al have responded to their critics. Hopefully they’ll clear up some of the more mysterious bits, like why lower percentages of the Pacific are associated with lower temperature changes. The OHC changes seem to depend quadratically on the percentage, which is even weirder.
Neither Steve McIntyre at CA nor Michael Mann at Huffington Post seemed able to explain any of these mysteries any better than anyone else. Instead they took the (very reasonable in my view) position that there was no satisfactory explanation of the enterprise as a whole and that therefore it was implausible.
Apropos of the Meridional Overturning Current, Plate 10 remains relevant as proof that one can’t hope to infer much if anything about OHC of the Pacific as a whole from the Indonesian Throughflow. Conceivably the IT has something to say about 0-700m at the equator, but even that seems a big stretch.
Vaughan Pratt, you put a lot of good effort into this. It might be worth a letter to the authors.
Thanks, Matthew. Normally I don’t comment on many CE threads, but I found this one particularly interesting.
Hopefully oceanography is sufficiently “self-correcting” that Rosenthal et al’s peers will be able to sort this out. It would be something of an eye-opener if that job had to be left up to those not working in oceanography. Let’s see how that pans out.
Meanwhile it might be worth taking an opinion poll in that community. It would be interesting to know for example what Arnold Gordon thinks of it, he’s been studying the Indonesian seas for over quarter of a century.
One could also spend many hours walking around polling the many hundreds of poster presenters in the oceanography section of next month’s AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco. There ought to be a lot of opinions—the article has gotten so much press coverage in the last few days that my wife (who doesn’t normally follow these things) drew my attention yesterday to a Mercury News article about this paper as something she thought might interest me. :)
Gary M
Right you are. It is shameful to make such claims about accuracy in a scientific exploration. It is unlikely that those temperatures can be determined wih that accuracy today. It is heartbreaking to see where science is going.
Scott
M Mann:
“…but also sub-surface ocean temperatures) is not as high as during Medieval times, i.e. during what they term the “Medieval Warm Period” (this is a somewhat outdated term; The term “Medieval Climate Anomaly” is generally favored by climate scientists because of the regionally variable pattern of surface temperatures changes in past centuries–more on this later).”
In the lab we used to call it flattening the top:
http://autumndoucet.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/12a-flattening-the-top4.jpg
Michael Mann: “which demonstrate a high degree of regional heterogeneity in global temperature changes over the past millennium.”
How interesting – so much for teleconnections, eh?
AFOMD,
An odd sort of fellow was Fan,
Hitched his cart to the horse of Mike Mann,
But the tree rings of history,
Became such a mystery,
He now turns to drink, when he can.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
A very nice lady, Prof Curry,
Told a student of hers “Please don’t hurry,
You’ll find that it’s tragic,
believing in magic.
Use science – it’s less of a worry”
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn..
Tol, R.S.J. (2011) “The Economic Impact of Climate Change in the 20th and 21st Centuries”
http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/climate_change.pdf
Based on this paper I suggest:
1. The best way to combat the negative impacts of climate change is to assist the poorest countries to become richer.
2. By far the greatest negative contributor to impacts is the cost of energy (see Figure 3). I expect this analysis does not properly allow for the large reduction in costs that is likely as we move from fossil fuels to nuclear energy this century. For example, if the cost of electricity reduces at the rate of 10% per doubling of capacity of small modular nuclear plants, the cost of nuclear generated electricity would be half the cost of coal generated electricity by about 2040. Therefore, the second best way to combat the impacts of climate change is to remove the impediments to nuclear power and allow it to become cheaper.
3. This paper demonstrates how poorly we understand the impacts of climate change. The explanation here shows we have almost nothing to go on. The economic analyses and the studies of impacts of climate change are very immature at this stage.
So the anthropogenic heat, gazillions of Hiroshima-bombs-equivalent, that was supposed to keep warming the planet for the past 16 years but didn’t, did not only go hiding in the deep oceans, but also built a time machine and sent it into the past.
That’s why the oceans are now found to be warmer than previously proxied (can I use ‘proxied’? My word-processor hasn’t accepted it.
One for the road.
An interesting fellow, young Gates,
The envy of all of his mates,
He could stand on one toe,
Like a statue, you know,
Spouting rubbish at various rates.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
With the caveat that my muse does not speak for me:
Notwithstanding the recent hiatus,
There are some who would still mitigate us.
When I asked one such duffer
What species would suffer,
He replied, “Sapiens Climategatus“.
That R-word rears it’s head again in the first sentence of the abstract.
I was given to believe that the Argo-float system (from~2003 ?) was built precisely because measurement of ocean heat content was NOT robust over several decades, or any other time period.
Does anyone have a good link to the Argo system float output?
Scott
I recommend Josh Willis. Good man there.
=======
There once was a warmist name Josh,
whose claims had the texture of squash,
His prose was not soaring
in fact ’twas so boring
in tears I would cry “oh my gosh.”
This work is another line of evidence for this type of record since the last ice age.
http://www.connect4climate.org/images/uploads/Temperature_record-wheelchair.png
We see that the downward curve of the Milankovitch effect in the Holocene was interrupted by a sharp rise. Natural variations show up in the tenths of a degree while forcing changes show up in the degrees. There is an order-of-magnitude way to distinguish these things, and we are now beginning a somewhat large forcing change that reverses the Holocene trend. It is more than an “LIA recovery”, which is well passed, but more a Holocene-scale “recovery” and beyond.
Science fiction!
IPCC AR4:
CO2 is more soluble in colder than in warmer waters; therefore, changes in surface and deep ocean temperature have the potential to alter atmospheric CO2
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch6s6-4.html#box-6-2
So is it not the case that the observed increase in CO2 is the result of the ocean warming?
The Salby idea is wrong. The CO2 in the atmosphere as risen by an amount x. Man’s emission has added 2x. Salby says the earth either absorbed those 2x, or those 2x didn’t exist in the first place, and that the ocean would have somehow emitted x independently. Does that sound reasonable? No, Man emitted 2x and the earth was able to absorb x. Use Occam’s Razor to eliminate poor ideas.
Girma, stop digging yourself a deeper hole and quit while you are behind.
You have not even begun to understand the implications of your deeply misguided theory. If, as you say, that the enormous CO2 excess is being caused by a temperature rise and then CO2 outgassing, then just wait until the GHG positive feedback effects kick in.
The sad fact is that Team Denier consists of incompetent science wannabees that are only good at scoring own goals.
Jim D and Web
That is not my sentence.
It is IPCC’s:
CO2 is more soluble in colder than in warmer waters; therefore, changes in surface and deep ocean temperature have the potential to alter atmospheric CO2
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch6s6-4.html#box-6-2
Girma, yes, and that part is correct. Otherwise how else could we explain how much CO2 increased after the last Ice Age? It can increase 10-15 ppm per degree, but an increase of 100 ppm in the last century is clearly something different.
Temperature rise from CO2 is some 0.1 degrees C over a couple of decades late last century – including pissant feedbacks.. The rest of the increase is all natural. The increase in natural CO2 flux – from vegetation, soils, marine organisms and oceans is of the same order as anthropogenic emissions. The references on changes in natural fluxes have all been provided and discussed before.
As the system passes the Bond Event Zero threshold on the way to a thousand year cooling – the natural CO2 increases will slow and reverse.
webby has about the same scientific credibility as a trained attack gerbil – and less intellectual honesty.
@Girma: So is it not the case that the observed increase in CO2 is the result of the ocean warming?
A fair question. However humans have added around 2000 gigatonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere during the past two centuries (counting land use changes), during which time the net gain of CO2 in the atmosphere has been about 900 gigatonnes (~ 250 GtC). If as you say this 900 gigatonnes of CO2 came from warming the ocean, by what mechanism could Earth absorb the whole 2000 gigatonnes of our contribution while emitting 900 gigatonnes of its own?
I’ll be very interested in the explanation.
Girma and the Chef, the worst of Team Denier — Aussie division. Their technique is to deny everything, doesn’t matter what because their gullible followers will lap it up regardless of whether it is right or wrong.
@CH: The increase in natural CO2 flux – from vegetation, soils, marine organisms and oceans is of the same order as anthropogenic emissions.
While it is true that vegetation emits CO2 at night by respiration, just as animals do, during the day vegetation consumes CO2 by photosynthesis, with a net loss of CO2 from the atmosphere over 24 hours. The only way for vegetation to increase CO2 flux to the atmosphere therefore is by depletion, e.g. deforestation. Is that what you were referring to? If so, the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center estimate for that contribution to atmospheric CO2 is currently around 1.5 GtC, vs. around 10 GtC for our fossil fuel emissions.
‘Soil respiration, RS, the flux of microbially and plant-respired carbon dioxide (CO2) from the soil surface to the atmosphere, is the second-largest terrestrial carbon flux. However, the dynamics of RS are not well understood and the global flux remains poorly constrained. Ecosystem warming experiments, modelling analyses and fundamental biokinetics all suggest that RS should change with climate.’
http://environmentportal.in/files/Temperature%20associated%20increases%20in%20the%20global%20soil.pdf
Tropical vegetation likewise.
‘The researchers discovered a temperature increase of just 1 degree Celsius in near-surface air temperatures in the tropics leads to an average annual growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide equivalent to one-third of the annual global emissions from combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation combined. In tropical ecosystems carbon uptake is reduced at higher temperatures. This finding provides scientists with a key diagnostic tool to better understand the global carbon cycle.
“What we learned is that in spite of droughts, floods, volcano eruptions, El Niño and other events, the Earth system has been remarkably consistent in regulating the year-to-year variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels,” said Weile Wang, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author of a paper published Wednesday, July 24, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study provides support for the “carbon-climate feedback” hypothesis proposed by many scientists. This hypothesis asserts a warming climate will lead to accelerated carbon dioxide growth in the atmosphere from vegetation and soils. Multiple Earth system processes, such as droughts and floods, also contribute to changes in the atmospheric carbon dioxide growth rate. The new finding demonstrates observed temperature changes are a more important factor than rainfall changes in the tropics.’
http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/july/tropical-ecosystems-boost-carbon-dioxide-as-temperature-rises/#.UnV7sxDKjLQ
So the processes involve both biokineics and solubility – and the increase in flux is of the same order of magnitude as anthropogenic emissions. In northern climes – primary production exceeds respiration in the cool periods and vice versa. It is not just plants but organisms and especially microorganisms. This leads to a build up vegetative matter or a drawdown of organic matter as temperatures change. This leads to large changes in atmospheric CO2 at times of temperature transitions.
e.g. http://www.academia.edu/2949675/Stomatal_proxy_record_of_CO2_concentrations_from_the_last_termination_suggests_an_important_role_for_CO2_at_climate_change_transitions
CO2 seemingly reached current levels in the atmosphere at the time of the last glacial termination.
I might add that the carbon feedback – like other feedbacks – depends on the warming due to greenhouse gases – at most 0.1 degrees C of the last warming period – the planet is almost certain (>99%) not to warm for a decade to three more and we are on the threshold of Bond Event Zero and a 1000 years of cooling.
The science seems to point in one direction – but to say so is the great sin of scepticism.
@CH: the planet is almost certain (>99%) not to warm for a decade to three more
Tell that to the planet. Use the same stentorian tone King Canute addressed the tide with.
And lose that note of desperation. Gaia can smell desperation.
More apt had Canute’s tide been ebbing.
================
Unlike El Niño and La Niña, which may occur every 3 to 7 years and last from 6 to 18 months, the PDO can remain in the same phase for 20 to 30 years. The shift in the PDO can have significant implications for global climate, affecting Pacific and Atlantic hurricane activity, droughts and flooding around the Pacific basin, the productivity of marine ecosystems, and global land temperature patterns. #8220;This multi-year Pacific Decadal Oscillation ‘cool’ trend can intensify La Niña or diminish El Niño impacts around the Pacific basin,” said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The persistence of this large-scale pattern [in 2008] tells us there is much more than an isolated La Niña occurring in the Pacific Ocean.”
Natural, large-scale climate patterns like the PDO and El Niño-La Niña are superimposed on global warming caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and landscape changes like deforestation. According to Josh Willis, JPL oceanographer and climate scientist, “These natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities. Or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it.”
I believe you have mistaken science for your own desperation Vaughan old buddy. I believe also that I have shown this to you before and that there is little excuse for on going ignorance – apart from the usual and quite persuasive excuse of being a failed physicist.
We are in a cool mode – and these last for 20 to 40 years in the proxy record. So what are the chances? It seems quite easy to speculate that the system will persist for decades hence – and number of actual climate scientists (not I hasten – failed physicists with little understanding of these physical systems) ) have done so including Judith Curry. Why the surprise?
CH, record warmth in a cool mode. Any red flags there?
@kim: More apt had Canute’s tide been ebbing.
Oh come on, kim, no fair making us guess the preceding four lines. Out with them.
@CH: We are in a cool mode
You’re getting colder, CH. Try again.
The Chief NoOp said:
This semester I have been helping with a CompSci class curriculum and a classic paper on “Top Down Operator Precedence” was used. In science we constantly build on the work of others.
And we do figure out who can’t make the cut. Sorry about that Chief, you missed it by that much.
““The stadium wave signal predicts that the current pause in global warming could extend into the 2030s,” said Wyatt…”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/10/new-paper-from-dr-judith-curry-could-explain-the-pause/
@WHT: This semester I have been helping with a CompSci class curriculum and a classic paper on “Top Down Operator Precedence” was used. In science we constantly build on the work of others.
Wow, I’m glad this 40-year-old paper of mine continues to have an impact. At question time after I presented it at POPL I in 1973, Jeff Ullman (of Aho Hopcroft and Ullman fame) stood up at the back of the audience and complained that I was destroying all the good work that automata theory and formal languages had done for compiler writers.
Even after 40 years I still wish I’d come up with a snappy response in the few seconds available to think of one. In the meantime my paper seems to have developed quite a following.
‘Stay tuned for the next update by November 9th to see where the MEI will be heading next. El Niño came and went during the summer of 2012, not unlike 1953. We have just witnessed our first ENSO-neutral winter since 2003-04 (2005-06 was an ENSO-neutral winter, but much closer to La Niña, and dipped into La Niña rankings during March-April). It appears as if La Niña had its turn in 2013 to come and go again. While we have now reached the time of year when drastic transitions are much less common than in the first half of the calendar year, the upward jump of +0.4 standard deviations last month indicates unusual volatility. While ENSO-neutral conditions are the safest bet going forward into boreal winter, I would not be surprised if this status were to end by early 2014.’ http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
Claus Wolter is the world’s leading ENSO expert – with the most respected ENSO index around. If you want to know where ENSO is going tune into Wolter’s site every month.
It is a bit wobbly at the moment – as it has been for much of the century so far. But watch for the big blue V in the Pacific (PDO+ENSO=IPO) to evolve much frequently and strongly in the cool mode discussed in the NASA page. We are talking decadal probabilities and not individual wiggles.
Record temps in a cool mode? Seems very unlikely. Perhaps check again.
Failed physicist? Sorry if I offended – I was mislead by the logician claim. I assumed that was where old physicists went to die.
Chief,
In the CSALT model I use the SOI unadorned. I suppose I could use the multivariate ENSO but that does not go back to 1880, which makes it less comprehensive than the SOI.
There is a multivariate ENSO that goes back before 1950 (MEI.ext) but this hasn’t been updated since 2005 and it is normalized differently than the recent MEI.
In any case, one uses the data that is available and right now the CSALT model does not provide any indication that what you say will pan out. How you can assert that there will be a cooling for 30 years is completely without merit and looks like it is more a hope than a scientific conjecture.
The stadium wave is providing some minor long-term changes and the SOI is providing the subdecadal changes and the latter can change at any time about its historical mean of 0. Other than that, the main driver is the CO2 trend and that is still going up. If the contribution of the SOI tilts more in the positive direction instead of hovering around zero, then we will see the temperatures respond with a faster warming fluctuation.
When you actually have something substantial and of some merit, perhaps I will consider your input more critically, but as it is, you seem to be as reliable as a fortune teller.
Why can’t Wyatt ad Curry do something similar to the CSALT model?
I thought they were in the forecasting business !
Here we have a model (CSALT) which can accurately hindcast the main trend and all the fluctuations of the past 130+ years — using 5 component factors, including a Stadium Wave component — yet all we see is a subjective handwavy guess that “the current pause in global warming could extend into the 2030s.”
You can all do much better than that.
KIng Canute made the mistake of commanding the tide. He should have been addressing the AMOC which is now slowing and why it isn’t likely to warm for a few decades if we are lucky. Longer if we aren’t.
He exposed sycophantic true believers in his power over Nature. There are lessons still from that old wiseguy.
============
JimD, that is because the temperature records, Paleo and OHC are like apples oranges and pears. You just assume that Instrumental is directly comparable. There are quite a few issues with that assumption.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ddTCSsLYr9c/UnUdEt5zzPI/AAAAAAAAKWU/YK0Vwg4WEL0/s742/0-700%2520NA%2520versus%2520AMO%2520SST%2520region%2520scaled.png
If you scale the North Atlantic SST and compare to the North Atlantic 0-700 meter temperature you can see why there is so much amplification of SST and surface air temperature relative to naturally smoothed higher specific heat capacity measurements. Land surface air temperature in the NH is amplified by another factor of 1.81.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-wK8A7OXTmXU/UnMBtAwIaDI/AAAAAAAAKTg/qCUcyXOkYFA/s783/ipwp%2520solar%2520and%2520north%2520ex.png
In Paleo the tropics, in this case IPWP versus northern extratropical you ca see that 1.81 factor.
Since you are into scary picture you like to show the huge instrumental era “unprecedented” spike without actually wondering why. Climate Science is moving away from the “operator error” phase.
The generator’s failing(ed). Can we anthropically charge the battery fast enough to keep the engine running? With this perspective, our vast store of hydrocarbons seem pitifully inadequate. Now if we could get into the carbonates.
========
kim, we have a choice as to which part of that red area you want to be in. Do you prefer to be in a part that is just higher than all of agricultural history, or several degrees higher than that with its concomitant sea levels? Those are your choices. No going back.
I suspect we can’t break enough hydrocarbon bonds to bring the heat content of the Earth back to Early to Mid Holocene levels, but we can try.
============
kim, each 500 Gt C gives you a degree C. There’s plenty of C for many more C’s.
JimD, “kim, each 500 Gt C gives you a degree C. There’s plenty of C for many more C’s.”
Prove it
Best guess. Some say more, some say less, so it is a working assumption for planning purposes only.
JimD, So was that “best” guess based on data ending prior to 2000? Has there been any recent reason to question that “best” guess? You seem to have a remarkable amount of confidence in a guess, best or otherwise.
captd, not seeing the “skeptics” even provide such a number with a credible tracking of how they do it, these are not only the best guesses, but the only guesses on the science side of the debate.
@JimD: each 500 Gt C gives you a degree C. There’s plenty of C for many more C’s.
Jim, the dependence of temperature on atmospheric CO2 is not linear but logarithmic. With a climate sensitivity of say 2 °C/doubling, each 41.4% increase gives you a degree C. At 3 °C/doubling you only need an increase of 26% for the same rise.
With a linear dependence you consume carbon-based fuels at a linear rate. With a logarithmic dependence you consume them at an exponential rate.
JimD, “captd, not seeing the “skeptics” even provide such a number with a credible tracking of how they do it, these are not only the best guesses, but the only guesses on the science side of the debate.”
I don’t know is a more valuable answer that an over-confident guess. I have said and it is even part of my CE name, the 0.8C is about as close to an educated guess that there is per 3.7 Wm-2 of atmospheric forcing from a satellite era baseline. That doesn’t assume unsustainable exponential increases in CO2 production, unsubstantiated water and cloud feedbacks or magical unicorn fart forcing.
Vaughan Pratt, yes, I have also seen the argument that increasing warmth makes the ocean less efficient at taking up the excess, and this effect may be large enough to offset the logarithmic slowing. You can also see in AR5 Figure SPM.10 that it is quite linear through the range of one to two doublings which is the only range to consider for this.
If you limit the range then one can ask what climate sensitivity would be needed for 500 additional GtC to add 1 °C starting now. Taking atmospheric CO2 to be 850 GtC today, the climate sensitivity would have to be 1/log2((850+500)/500) which turns out to be 1.498, i.e. essentially 1.5 °C/doubling.
If 1.5 (with all feedbacks and delays) is on the low side, so is the figure of one extra degree resulting from adding 500 GtC.
Vaughan Pratt, take 500 Gt C emitted as 250 Gt C added to the atmosphere and the sensitivity doubles into a reasonable range.
TCRE is defined in linear terms as warming per 1000 GtC. That must be based on the observed near linearity that’s, however, true only for some scenarios.
Pekka, the deviation from linearity keeps it within the uncertainty range. It turns out to be more conservative for lower values and less conservative for higher values, but within error bars and I would not push the factor much past 2000 Gt C.
take 500 Gt C emitted as 250 Gt C added to the atmosphere and the sensitivity doubles into a reasonable range.
Oh, emitted, sorry. (You just said “each 500 GtC”.) I use the multiplier 0.42 to convert emitted to retained, making it 210 GtC. Required CS is then 1/log2((850+210)/850) = 3.14 °C/doubling. Pi in the sky…
Jim,
Deviations from linearity are not too bad for any of the IPCC scenarios up to 2100, but might get much worse over longer periods and for scenarios where the amount of emissions varies in a very different way.
Pekka, “Deviations from linearity are not too bad for any of the IPCC scenarios up to 2100, but might get much worse over longer periods and for scenarios where the amount of emissions varies in a very different way.”
Deviations from IPCC linear “projections” are becoming non-linear.
Here is a recent paper on TCRE
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00476.1
Pekka, I think TCRE is a useful concept, but I would prefer it if they expressed it in terms of equilibrium temperature, because that is the committed amount. This measure amounts to a transient sensitivity, and my 500 GtC per K is at its upper end, because I mean the equilibrium temperature change.
Vaughan, the emitted amount is more useful, even though it adds the extra uncertainty associated with the surface absorption fraction. When policymakers see cause and effect so starkly, I think that is a plus. Moreover, all the carbon burned so far amounts to just over half a trillion tonnes. A severe mitigation to 2 C warming limits us to only burning that much in the future (the trillion tonne limit idea). Business as usual would burn several trillion tonnes in the next century or so. There are several degrees C of difference between these extremes, given 1 C per half trillion tonnes.
JimD, “When policymakers see cause and effect so starkly, I think that is a plus. ”
Of course you see it that way. Grossly over-estimated “guesses” attract more attention until the gross over-estimators are completely ignored. Until then, more rational and pragmatic voices have to just have to deal with insults.
Until then, more rational and pragmatic voices have to just have to deal with insults.
Makes sense for a voicocracy. Is that what it’s come to?
Grossly over-estimated “guesses” attract more attention until the gross over-estimators are completely ignored.
Policymakers should not be setting mitigation targets arbitrarily. They can choose to get these from Singer, Lindzen, Michaels, Ball, Baliunas, Soon, etc., or from Pierrehumbert, MacDonald, Tans, Kiehl, Solomon, Nordhaus, etc. depending on which side of the climate debate the voices that elected them generally stand. The policymakers are going to have to be the ones to decide which camp has the “grossly over-estimated guesses.”
My recommendation would be to ignore whichever camp’s arguments depend more heavily on accusing the other camp of “grossly over-estimated guesses” and less on meticulously worked out details that admit that both sides have valid points.
Jim,
There’s no equilibrium on the relevant time scale due to several dynamic factors including warming of oceans, removal of CO2, and slow feedbacks. A better comparable number is the sensitivity of the peak temperature. AR5 WG1 Chapter 12.5.4.2 tells
Thus TCRE is a reasonable measure of the peak climate response for a range of possible outcomes. No single number can tell everything, but TCRE is one of the best taking into account both the relevance and the possibility of estimating the value from present understanding.
Jim D,
This longer term chart tells a different story:
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0134849d3fd9970c-pi
Are you practicing due skepticism about extending further back in time using just Antarctic data? Does that negate the recent instrument warming trend or Holocene datasets.
see below
“Are you practicing due skepticism”
If I did try to practice anything, I’m sure they’d eventually catch up with me and shut me down and imprison me.
i am a little skeptical about your chart though. I’ve been mostly looking at solar right (extracting everything in the AR5 report first; actually looks fairly comprehensive) now just to narrow my focus of learning. It looks like we’re headed for a minimum and I suspect that will effect co2 levels no matter what humans do. That a complete guess on my part though. I do think that big picture climate says we’re (right now) just turning the corner on the Milankovitch cycle and still pretty much in a circular orbit. the Milankovitch cycle agrees with temp just like co2 over the 100,000 year records. From NOAA:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/temperature-change.html
You may not agree but this tells me the sun is the big driver and CO2 is a hitchhiker.
“currently, we are in an orbit of low eccentricity (near circular)”
http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu/classes/met130/notes/chapter16/mil_cycles.html
We are also due for a Gleissberg cycle minimum. Supposedly when temperature drops CO2 sinks.
I’m sure CO2 causes warming and the last warming was to a large degree due to that, but I’m not so sure of the projections on your chart.
Jim D “Does that negate the recent instrument warming trend or Holocene datasets.”
No
The chart I posted shows the general quantification on sensitivity and human potential influence that I agree with. Humans really (in theory) do have control over which part of the red area they want to be in. The lower end (the 2 C target) requires strong mitigation starting now and tapering linearly to zero emission over a century, and the upper parts involve using all the fossil fuels and exploiting new estimated reserves with a continuing rise in global per capita carbon footprint.
Well since India and China are going to continue to stoke the CO2; I guess that put’s us squarely in the CAGW territory with your scenario. I know you want to see the skeptics come up with solutions but the only one there is nuclear war.
I just point out the problems.
“I know you want to see the skeptics come up with solutions but the only one there is nuclear war.”
____
Wow, dark visions. Either CO2 increases or nuclear war. Quite a box you’ve come up with.
Well I gave it my best shot:
GOING NEGATIVE WITH HEMP AND BECCS
http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/04/open-thread-weekend-35/#comment-393124
Now you go give the good news to India and China :-)
Since my historic post Jerry Brown got the message
California here we come:
http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2013/09/27/industrial-hemp-legal-california
I tend to be sceptical of anything and this paper certainly leaves room for some sceptical considerations.
Assuming that their proxy interpretation is correct, how can you claim that local ocean heat contents in Indonesia, will project to global response all in the same direction.
If there was much more heat in the Indonesian waters, could this also not signify that the thermohaline heat exchanges between tropics and higher lattitudes were reduced (leaving the tropics warmer)? Not saying that it was, but you’d have to consider that.
Also if the heat content in the upper oceans are higher, you’d expect more evaporation, hence more clouds and less insolation, leading to cooling of maritieme climate zones. On the other hand, colder oceans lead to less evaporation, less clouds and more insolation, leading to warm and arid conditions in maritieme zones.
Just saying that I think that it’s way more complex than the assumptions in the paper.
The beauty of your last sentence is that encapsulates nearly everything written on climate science so far. Lit chirp chirp.
===============
Its kind of curious how a few mosses from a small Arctic island allow proclamation of warmest temperatures since the middle of the last ice age, but data from the Pacific ocean covering half the world has only regional implications, apart from a fraudulent Marcottian claim to fastest temp rise based on comparing sharply resolved recent data with more smoothed older data. (In image processing this trick – subtracting smoothed from unsmoothed – is called the “unsharp mask”. Perfect for un-sharp scientists.)
I agree, the more important region would the driver equatorial areas. It’s interesting though to look at the less stable far North NH regions.
Unprecedented recent summer warmth in Arctic Canada …
In WoodForTrees it’s called the Isolate operation. Perhaps Paul Clark should rename it the Unsharp operation for conformity with usage.
JC said: “paleo proxy analyses […] is [as] a baseline for understanding recent climate change, and assessing whether the recent change is natural or anthropogenically forced.”
In my: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4r_7eooq1u2VHpYemRBV3FQRjA
it can be seen how anthropogenic attribution was due historically to Charney’s report (well in fact, to a political abuse of science) and, modernly, to montecarlo simulations (well, in fact to the dummiest abuse of science I have ever seen in my life: it is ok to substract two RF when you do not know [you just imagine what is] the value of one of them).
JC is wrong. Paleo proxy analyses carry so much uncerteinties by themselfs that it invalidates her “baseline for understanding”.
Un físico said,
Negative data are always valuable. In the modern science-game, they are also always in notoriously short supply.
There is also such a thing as “academic diplomacy”. Like;
“What an intriguing hypothesis! [How many other surviving idiots does your mother have?]”
====
But I have to agree. Ocean currents flip-flop & squirm ‘all over the place’. Extrapolating global conditions from any given locale sounds … intriguing.
They themselves signal that resolution could be an ‘issue’. Ya think?! Third-part commentators clear their throat discreetly (cough), and turn aside to roll their eyes, not-quite-off-camera.
Ted
They are certain that the 0% of data that supports their theory in the past 17 years proves that they are 97% right. WOW
FYI:
CA has an post on this.
The denizens of CA (starting with McIntyre) are no more aware of the Meridional Overturning Current than Rosenthal et al. Plate 10 here pretty much blows their analysis away.
There is no significant vertical flow between the Indonesian Throughflow (IT, red) and the deep cold current (blue). The latter is where the bulk of the Pacific Ocean heat content resides, and it has essentially zero influence on IT. Hence measurements at the Indonesian end of the IT tell us essentially nothing about the OHC of the Pacific.
However if I were McIntyre I would leap at the opportunity afforded by Rosenthal et al to put recent temperature fluctuations in the 700-2000m portion of the Pacific beside earlier ones of the 0-700m portion. If that’s not sufficient to convince those few infidels who still believe temperature is going through the roof, what in the name of heaven is?
Vaughan, ” Hence measurements at the Indonesian end of the IT tell us essentially nothing about the OHC of the Pacific.”
That is not completely true. It is just one of the THC choke points, but being a part of the THC it would provide information on the status of the overall state of the THC. If you have for water hose connected to the same manifold with different flows, you can still get an indication of the total flow by measuring the weakest flow. What you have to do is validate the IT reference.
When I first saw the Oppo 2009 IPWP paper that is what I started doing. The IPWP and tropical SST have an outstanding correlation, It has an outstanding correlation with 60S to 30N SST. At 30N-60N you start getting some anti-phase correlation consistent with ENSO. and like I said scaling BEST to remove amplification the correlation is excellent to 1750.
The region does appear to be a “teleconnection” region just like ENSO.
“The denizens of CA (starting with McIntyre) are no more aware of the Meridional Overturning Current than Rosenthal et al. Plate 10 here pretty much blows their analysis away.
There is no significant vertical flow between the Indonesian Throughflow (IT, red) and the deep cold current (blue).”
Isn’t this flow very slow, and significant because it’s so massive?
@cd: If you have for water hose connected to the same manifold with different flows, you can still get an indication of the total flow by measuring the weakest flow.
Flow, yes, but these guys are measuring temperature, not flow. Furthermore the flow they’re measuring the temperature of spends on the order of a century crossing the equatorial Pacific at 0-400m.
If you let your water hose sit out in the sun and run it very very slowly, the water will come out very hot even if it was very cold when it entered the hose. This is what Rosenthal et al are dealing with when they claim to be measuring the temperature of the Pacific by measuring it in Indonesia. They’re measuring the temperature coming out of an 11,000 mile stretch of hose that’s been lying on top of deeper cooler Pacific water with no vertical flow between the two. Look again at Schmitz’s Plate 10.
@gbaikie: Isn’t this flow very slow, and significant because it’s so massive?
A fair question. In cubic metres, the volume of the Pacific Ocean is 66E16 m3. The equatorial portion of the IT current in round numbers is say 15E5 m (1,000 miles) wide by 400 m deep by 15E6 m (9,000 miles) long for a volume of about 1E16 m3, or 1.5% of the Pacific Ocean.
This small portion is at (a) the surface and (b) at the equator. Inferring the heat content of the remaining 98.5% of the Pacific Ocean from such a tiny and biased fraction of it is an exercise in wishful thinking.
Even if you double the width to 2,000 miles, that still leaves 97% of the Pacific Ocean unmeasured by the Indonesian cores.
The results are no surprise – compare with this discussion.
http://www.usgs.gov/climate_landuse/clu_rd/projects/artic_paleo.asp
Although it seems unlikely that modern climate change – or SST – is more abrupt than in the past.
http://www.usgs.gov/climate_landuse/clu_rd/pt_abrupt_cc.asp
The source of the water in the Indonesian Throughflow is the central Pacific – which itself is well mixed in the Pacific gyres. I wouldn’t assume that you need wider coverage if the water is coming to you.
Vaughan, “If you let your water hose sit out in the sun and run it very very slowly, the water will come out very hot even if it was very cold when it entered the hose.”
In this case the hose is constantly in the sun. That is why there is a strong correlation with solar.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-wK8A7OXTmXU/UnMBtAwIaDI/AAAAAAAAKTg/qCUcyXOkYFA/s783/ipwp%2520solar%2520and%2520north%2520ex.png
There is also a strong correlation with “Global” temperatures.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-Zt1oH-PdG38/Ubx-Yc4PFjI/AAAAAAAAIng/B7BvlEPm0kY/s809/giss%2520and%2520ersst%2520with%2520ipwp%2520baseline.png
And a strong correlation with the high North Atlantic.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-TDMa8Kcfrt4/UnMBsjCiU6I/AAAAAAAAKTc/GWMTl8h6S8g/s743/IPWP%2520and%2520Sub%2520polar%2520Atlantic%2520marked.png
If you consider that the Leviticus 0-700 meter temperature has a margin of error equal to the year 60 range of variation, the odd man out appears to be Leviticus due to the Buckets to intakes to XTB issues.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/–hk05PyzaUU/UkA6c9JVmlI/AAAAAAAAJnI/vo-1rzZCR2w/s927/What%2520Uncertainty.png
Vaughan, I have a post in moderation with too many links, but the main point is that the paleo results are more believable that the 0-700 meter results due to all the instrumentation changes.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/–hk05PyzaUU/UkA6c9JVmlI/AAAAAAAAJnI/vo-1rzZCR2w/s927/What%2520Uncertainty.png
Vaughan, BTW, it is kind of interesting that the Pacific OHC derived from the Pacific 0-700 meter vertical temperature anomaly is about 15 times more accurate per the standard errors listed than the vertical temperature anomaly :) That is pretty damn impressive reanalysis
Vaughan, If I have the masking right these SST comparisons might be interesting.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-8urct_pCenA/UnaeAH64llI/AAAAAAAAKXg/fvNRo4qkgOw/s831/Southern%2520ocean%252060S%2520to%25200.png
The southern pacific appears to have been recovering for about 140 years and approaching a lower slope. The South Atlantic and South Indian were more effected by NH volcanoes. Pinatubo had lower impact because it was more uniformly distributed between hemispheres and occurred at a higher more uniform heat content condition.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-F_tW1msWGgI/UnakKCy-KMI/AAAAAAAAKX4/A58PL9JCs1E/s709/Northern%2520ocean%252060N%2520to%25200.png
The northern oceans have a lot more internal noise and greater sensitivity to volcanic and just about every other forcing. But notice the Northern Pacific. Same recovery rise with just more noise.
“Global” warming should be global and not recovery for natural impacts like volcanoes. The past 10000 years in the Western Pacific pretty much show what has been going on about the only thing that paints a different picture is re-analyzed OHC that magically is more accurate than the data it is derived from.
“The denizens of CA (starting with McIntyre) are no more aware of the Meridional Overturning Current than Rosenthal et al.”
And what has this got to do with the SM’s criticisms? Zip, nada, ziltch!
Vaughan Pratt: Plate 10 here pretty
Thank you for the link to that paper..
Thanks Kneel – ‘Richter scale’ understatement by SM.
I note one interesting thing on this study. The Pacific ocean was warmer 7 kya, it cooled 2 C until the Little Ice Age, then warmed 0.25 C in recent period. It seems 7 kya is the thermal optimum and cooling is the long-term trend. The brief 300-year warming and relatively small 0.25 C is just a “noise” in the long-term cooling.
The last interglacial period lasted 17,000 years. The present interglacial started 18 kya, or at least the melting of glaciers. Interglacial optimums occur in the middle of interglacials. That would be 9 kya. That explains the ocean cooling since 7 kya. We might be nearing the end of the present interglacial. Is the ice age coming?
“According to the astronomical theory of climate, variations in the earth’s orbit are the fundamental cause of the succession of Pleistocene ice ages… a time-dependent model is developed that simulates the history of planetary glaciation for the past 500,000 years. Ignoring anthropogenic and other possible sources of variation acting at frequencies higher than one cycle per 19,000 years, this model predicts that the long-term cooling trend which began some 6,000 years ago will continue for the next 23,000 years.”
(Imbrie & Imbrie, 1980)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1980Sci…207..943I
Here’s the full paper. This is an important scientific paper by John Imbrie, a pioneer in the study of ice ages, written in 1980 before AGW became fashionable.
http://www.whoi.edu/cms/files/imbrie80sci_53864.pdf
Perhaps you meant “Modeling the Climate Response to Orbital Variations”.by John Imbrie and (his son?) John Z. Imbrie.
We might be nearing the end of the present interglacial. Is the ice age coming?
Sure. Your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren might have a crack at seeing its onset.
Sure smart Bratt. I’m sure the Vikings in Greenland were saying the same thing. Then the Little Ice Age came and they froze and starved to death. 23,000 years of cooling. Naahh it’s just interglacial.
It’s interesting to extrapolate a one-degree decline over the next century out to 23000 CE. Pretty close to the temperature of Pluto.
Haven’t seen you at CA, what’s keeping you away?
Blogs are a huge timesink. I need fewer, not more.
The return on time invested is higher there than anywhere else. I doubt your mileage would vary.
===========
Doubling the return is only an incentive when it’s positive.
Vaughan,
Do as Bjørn would do:
Go nuclear.
Get yourself an RSS reader.
Tune up time, ‘cuz your mileage stinks. Mebbe it’s tire pressure.
=========
Tune me up, Scotty.
The engine testing equipment is over there; dare you venture?
======================
That’s the lamest excuse I’ve seen so far. Apparently you did find some of your precious time to read the blog otherwise you would’t have made the remark.
Huh? Reading doesn’t take time.
“Mark as all read” takes even less time.
Try theoldreader.com, Vaughan.
Vaughan,
You point to Plate 10 which comes from a 1995 paper on Thermohaline Circulation. Do you know if there have been any recent papers on Global TC derived from ARGO data? A quick Google didn’t really point to anything obvious. I’m just wondering because a few plots I generated seemed to indicate that this data could greatly resolve the TC picture in the top 1 or 2km:
https://sites.google.com/site/climateadj/argo-animations
AJ,
Your plots of temperature over time/longitude are great!
Figure 2 (to 1000m): Fascinating to see that cold wedge coming up from below at the equator. Amazing that at 7°N it would be cold at 200m yet at 35°S be (relatively) warm at 800m. I have no idea how either of those phenomena works.
Figure 4 (Pacific to 1000m): That cold spot at 30°S and 600m depth in the Eastern Pacific is very eye-catching. West of the date line (180E) it seems to be displaced by a hot upwelling plume that rises while flowing north from 40°S to 20°S. It would be interesting to know what direction the flow is there.
Trend plots: A Rorschach inkblot nicely describes them. (Tomorrow is Rorschach’s 129th birthday, Google should have something to say about that.)
a few plots I generated seemed to indicate that this data could greatly resolve the TC picture in the top 1 or 2km:
Are you proposing to infer velocity of flows from temperature data? I would think the data for deep meridional and zonal velocities such as at
http://apdrc.soest.hawaii.edu
would help a lot there—click on Data > Oceanic > Ocean currents. Love to see some plots that combine these data sets. (What language are you programming those plots in?)
Ironically I ran across Schmitz’s 1995 Plate 10 by following a pointer in Huang’s 2010 book on Ocean Circulation. The 2010 date notwithstanding, I couldn’t find much about Argo in his book.
Some interesting Argo factoids at
Hi Vaughan,
I’m programming in R, there’s a link to the source at the bottom of the page.
I’m guessing that APDRC’s velocity data doesn’t use ARGO data. I was wondering if flow could be inferred, at least in part, from ARGO data? When I did a quick Google, I saw that studying currents was one of the goals, but not much seemed to show up in a Scholar search. I would naively expect that heat flow would primarily follow current flow, but that’s just an uneducated guess.
There’s other variables available in the dataset I was using (e.g. Salinity). If it’s not possible to infer velocity, I’d expect the data to be valuable in validating GCM’s that do. Perhaps the dive location, resurfacing location, and time spent at each level might help in this cause?
Thanks for your reply, AJ
BTW… I like the idea about combining the temperature and velocity data. I imagine representing the flow vectors with arrows somewhat like this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Ocean_surface_currents.jpg
I’d have to find the data and R functions to add the arrows. It wasn’t obvious which dataset I should be looking at on the ocean current page you pointed me to. Anyway, it’s not a priority for me right now, but if you’d like, feel free to use my code (if you find it useable :). My guess is that some Oceanographer somewhere must have already done something like this.
A couple of years ago I asked a question over at Isaac Held’s pointing to similar plots as the ones on my page. He responded something to the effect that the pattern emanating from the tropics was due to the Coriolis Effect and Ekman Transport. Kinda makes sense to me that an Aqua-planet would have mirror images of the atmospheric Hadley and Ferrel Cells.
You must have some insider information of Google Doodles :) Rorschach it is. Maybe you cheated and went to google.nz :) Nah… it must have shown up when you googled Rorschach :)
@AJ: A couple of years ago I asked a question over at Isaac Held’s pointing to similar plots as the ones on my page. He responded something to the effect that the pattern emanating from the tropics was due to the Coriolis Effect and Ekman Transport. Kinda makes sense to me that an Aqua-planet would have mirror images of the atmospheric Hadley and Ferrel Cells.
Ah, that makes sense. In the Hadley cells (between 30S and 30N) the wind has a strong easterly (i.e. westward) component (geostrophic flow induced by Coriolis force in the atmosphere). Ekman transport then predicts poleward surface currents near the equator (geostrophic flow induced again by Coriolis force, with net rotation 90+90 = 180° from the original equator-ward atmospheric flow at the bottom of the Hadley cell) . This would drive the hot equatorial surface water polewards. If it behaved like a Hadley cell this hot polewards surface current would then dive down at 30 degrees latitude in each hemisphere, exactly as shown in your second figure. In the meantime the flow from the equator will draw cold water up from below the equator. That would explain the upwelling there.
If that’s not the explanation I’d love to know what is.
Interestingly Ekman worked out his eponymous transport when his advisor Vilhelm Bjerknes passed along Fridtjof Nansen’s problem of why ice floes in the Arctic Circle traveled at an angle to the wind. Ekman transport applies just as readily to the tropics as to the Arctic.
Thanks again Vaughan… your feedback was valuable. As an alternative to the horizontal wind stresses, I picture the low at the ITCZ sucking the ocean upward and the high at the tropical margins pushing the ocean downward. Tomato / Tomatoe :)
Why would a low at the ITCZ suck upwards, as opposed say to sideways? I have difficulty picturing a low pulling water upwards from the depths. Wind creating surface currents is a lot easier to imagine.
Well isn’t the motion both upwards and sideways? Can’t one picture the upward motion having similarities to a paper strip rising when one blows on it’s topside? Isn’t aviation built on this principle?
Conversely, when one is stuck in the high pressure doldrums, isn’t there little wind and the ocean sinks?
Oops… substitute “doldrums” for “horse latitudes”.
Assuming you have all day, it’s at least a billion times harder to raise a body of ocean a meter than it is to move it sideways a meter. These lateral currents are on the order of centimeters per second. By comparison with the energy needed to raise water against gravity, negligible energy is needed for the bulk motion of an ocean current.
Vaughan… this conversation is bordering on retardedness. Perhaps I should have phrased my initial response as “In addition to ” as opposed to “Alternatively”. I think an actual Oceanographer would first point out that it’s not possible to completely separate wind stresses from pressure gradients. As for the relevance of horizontal wind stress vs. vertical lift, I’m inclined to agree with you. At the very least though, I’d say that the low pressure at the equator makes the wind stress more efficient.
But what do I know?
Looking at the graphs, I think the only conclusion one can draw is that there is no proof temperatures rose faster in the past than today. That is, it is possible to create a function within the margin of error in which heat did not rise faster than it has recently.
Recently, it is easier to see how fast temperatures have risen, because the margin of error is smaller. But there is no instance from the reconstruction where the two points that can not be explained by the error in margin.
As an example, given the big deltas between 310 AD and 320 AD for buest guess temperatures, the rise is enormous. But within the margin of error, the actual rise may have been 0.
As near as I can tell, the statement is somewhat meaningless. It compares high margin of error minimal to low margin of error minimal. If this is what they indeed did, I think there is an argument that can be made that the best data indicates there is nothing exceptional about temperature rise at all.
“The denizens of CA (starting with McIntyre) are no more aware of the Meridional Overturning Current than Rosenthal et al. Plate 10 here pretty much blows their analysis away.”
Plate 10 has exactly what to do with McIntyre and the “denizens of CA” noting seemingly incorrect table data, questioning the comparison of 55 year time periods with those much longer, questioning where “15 times faster” comes from, and noting graphically that something is not true?
My “their analysis” was referring to Rosenthal et al’s analysis, not that of the commenters at CA. Sorry I didn’t notice the ambiguity sooner.
The denizens of CA starting with McIntyre… Denizens of wot exacly? Or is it that ambiguity thingie again? Not facing direct discussion but lobbing grenades from a foxhole creates an impression of being afraid for an open discussion.
Why aren’t you complaining that I haven’t discussed this with Rosenthal et al? I’ve lobbed a lot more at them from the CE “foxhole” than at CA.
Dr. Pratt is too busy working on his Woods debunking project and he is still looking for the missing tooth for that quasisawtooth milikelvin annual poster thingy. Did you get the roll of Premium Saran Wrap I sent you doc?
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