by Judith Curry
There have several interesting papers on ocean heat content published in recent weeks, with some very important implications.
The first paper has a narrative that ‘the oceans are warming faster than we thought and now the ocean warming matches the climate model simulations’:
How fast are the oceans warming? [link]
Cheng, Abraham, Hausfather, Trenberth
“Climate change from human activities mainly results from the energy imbalance in Earth’s climate system caused by rising concentrations of heat-trapping gases. About 93% of the energy imbalance accumulates in the ocean as increased ocean heat content (OHC). The ocean record of this imbalance is much less affected by internal variability and is thus better suited for detecting and attributing human influences than more commonly used surface temperature records. Recent observation-based estimates show rapid warming of Earth’s oceans over the past few decades (see the figure). Recent estimates of observed warming resemble those seen in models, indicating that models reliably project changes in OHC.”
Willis Eschenbach has post that questions the error bars in the Cheng et al. paper:
“They claim that their error back in 1955 is plus or minus ninety-five zettajoules … and that converts to ± 0.04°C. Four hundredths of one degree celsius … right …”
“Call me crazy, but I do NOT believe that we know the 1955 temperature of the top two kilometres of the ocean to within plus or minus four hundredths of one degree.”
“It gets worse. By the year 2018, they are claiming that the error bar is on the order of plus or minus nine zettajoules … which is three thousandths of one degree C. That’s 0.003°C.”
Global reconstruction of historical ocean heat storage and transport [link]
Laure Zanna, Samar Khatiwala, Jonathan M. Gregory, Jonathan Ison, and Patrick Heimbach
“Before the 1990s, most ocean temperature measurements were above 700 m and therefore, insufficient for an accurate global estimate of ocean warming. We present a method to reconstruct ocean temperature changes with global, full-depth ocean coverage, revealing warming of 436 ×10**21 J since 1871. Our reconstruction, which agrees with other estimates for the well-observed period, demonstrates that the ocean absorbed as much heat during 1921–1946 as during 1990–2015. Since the 1950s, up to one-half of excess heat in the Atlantic Ocean at midlatitudes has come from other regions via circulation-related changes in heat transport.”
This paper is the subject of an article in the Guardian with the lurid title Global Warming of Oceans equivalent to an atomic bomb per second.
The Little Ice Age and 20th century deep Pacific cooling [link]
Gebbie and Huybers
“Proxy records show that before the onset of modern anthropogenic warming, globally coherent cooling occurred from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age. The long memory of the ocean suggests that these historical surface anomalies are associated with ongoing deep-ocean temperature adjustments. Combining an ocean model with modern and paleoceanographic data leads to a prediction that the deep Pacific is still adjusting to the cooling going into the Little Ice Age, whereas temperature trends in the surface ocean and deep Atlantic reflect modern warming. This prediction is corroborated by temperature changes identified between the HMS Challenger expedition of the 1870s and modern hydrography. The implied heat loss in the deep ocean since 1750 CE offsets one-fourth of the global heat gain in the upper ocean.”
From the WHOI news release:
“The ocean has a long memory. When the water in today’s deep Pacific Ocean last saw sunlight, Charlemagne was the Holy Roman Emperor, the Song Dynasty ruled China and Oxford University had just held its very first class. During that time, between the 9th and 12th centuries, the earth’s climate was generally warmer before the cold of the Little Ice Age settled in around the 16th century. Now ocean surface temperatures are back on the rise but the question is, do the deepest parts of the ocean know that?”
“Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Harvard University have found that the deep Pacific Ocean lags a few centuries behind in terms of temperature and is still adjusting to the entry into the Little Ice Age. Whereas most of the ocean is responding to modern warming, the deep Pacific may be cooling.”
“These findings imply that variations in surface climate that predate the onset of modern warming still influence how much the climate is heating up today. Previous estimates of how much heat the Earth had absorbed during the last century assumed an ocean that started out in equilibrium at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. But Gebbie and Huybers estimate that the deep Pacific cooling trend leads to a downward revision of heat absorbed over the 20th century by about 30 percent.”
A) Surface temperature time series after adjustment to fit the HMS Challenger observations (OPT-0015), including four major surface regions (colored lines) and the global area-weighted average (black line). (B) Time series of global oceanic heat content anomalies relative to 1750 CE from OPT-0015 as decomposed into upper (cyan, 0 to 700 m), mid-depth (blue, 700 to 2000 m), and deep (black, 2000 m to the bottom) layers. Heat content anomalies calculated from an equilibrium simulation initialized at 1750 (EQ-1750, dashed lines) diverge from the OPT-0015 solution in deeper layers. (C) Similar to (B) but for the Pacific. Heat content anomaly is in units of zettajoules (1 ZJ = 1021J).
From the paper’s Conclusions:
“More generally, OPT-0015 indicates that the upper 2000 m of the ocean has been gaining heat since the 1700s, but that one-fourth of this heat uptake was mined from the deeper ocean. This upper-lower distinction is most pronounced in the Pacific since 1750, where cooling below 2000 m offsets more than one-third of the heat gain above 2000 m.”
“The implications of the deep Pacific being in disequilibrium become more apparent when compared to a counterfactual scenario where the ocean is fully equilibrated with surface conditions in 1750 CE. That the deep Pacific gains heat in this scenario, referred to as EQ-1750, confirms that heat loss in OPT-0015 results from the cooling associated with entry into the Little Ice Age. Moreover, the EQ-1750 scenario leads to 85% greater global ocean heat uptake since 1750 because of excess warming below 700 m. It follows that historical model simulations are biased toward overestimating ocean heat uptake when initialized at equilibrium during the Little Ice Age, although additional biases are also likely to be present. Finally, we note that OPT-0015 indicates that ocean heat content was larger during the Medieval Warm Period than at present, not because surface temperature was greater, but because the deep ocean had a longer time to adjust to surface anomalies. Over multicentennial time scales, changes in upper and deep ocean heat content have similar ranges, underscoring how the deep ocean ultimately plays a leading role in the planetary heat budget.”
In response to my tweet of the Gebbie and Huybers paper, I received the link to the following paper that further addresses the dynamics of the Pacific Ocean heat content:
Pacific Ocean heat content during the past 10,000 years [link]
Rosenthal, Linsley, Oppo
“Observed increases in ocean heat content (OHC) and temperature are robust indicators of global warming during the past several decades. We used high-resolution proxy records from sediment cores to extend these observations in the Pacific 10,000 years beyond the instrumental record. 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. Although documented changes in global surface temperatures during the Holocene and Common era are relatively small, the concomitant changes in OHC are large.”
Nonlinearities in patterns of long-term ocean warming [link]
Rugenstein, Sedlacek, Knutti
“The ocean dominates the planetary heat budget and takes thousands of years to equilibrate to perturbed surface conditions, yet those long time scales are poorly understood. Here we analyze the ocean response over a range of forcing levels and time scales in a climate model of intermediate complexity and in the CMIP5 model suite. We show that on century to millennia time scales the response time scales, regions of anomalous ocean heat storage, and global thermal expansion depend nonlinearly on the forcing level and surface warming. As a consequence, it is problematic to deduce long‐ term from short‐term heat uptake or scale the heat uptake patterns between scenarios. These results also question simple methods to estimate long‐term sea level rise from surface temperatures, and the use of deep sea proxies to represent surface temperature changes in past climate.”
“In summary, although for subcentennial time scales and low forcing levels the linear relationship between thermal expansion and surface temperature anomaly seems to hold, our analysis suggests that we do not properly understand the centennial to millennia ocean warming patterns, mainly due to a limited understanding of circulation and mixing changes.”
CERA-20C: A Coupled Reanalysis of the Twentieth Century [link]
Loyalaux et al.
“CERA-20C is a coupled reanalysis of the twentieth century which aims to reconstruct the past weather and climate of the Earth system including the atmosphere, ocean, land, ocean waves, and sea ice. This reanalysis is based on the CERA coupled atmosphere-ocean assimilation system developed at ECMWF. CERA-20C provides a 10 member ensemble of reanalyses to account for errors in the observational record as well as model error. It benefited from the prior experience of the retrospective atmospheric analysis ERA-20C.”
5.2. Ocean Heat Content
“In CERA-20C, time series of heat content show discontinuities between streams resulting from the model drift from its initial state (Figure 10). The model drift reflects the fact that the initial conditions from ERA-20C and ORA-20C used to initialize the different production streams are inconsistent with the coupled model’s natural state. The origin of the drift remains unknown so far. The complexity of the system makes it very difficult to point toward a single explanation and this question remains open to further investigations. In the early twentieth century, when the uncertainty in the state of the ocean is high and the ocean model is poorly constrained by observations, the ocean component of CERA-20C drifts toward its preferred state. As the observing system grows, the uncertainty and the drift are reduced. The relatively well-observed upper ocean adjusts faster than the ocean interior, where the timescales of ocean processes are particularly slow and the observational constraints are very small. Further work is needed to understand and reduce the model drift so that the initial conditions and the ocean model behavior are more realistic in poorly observed periods and areas.”
Figure 10. Time series of the global average ocean heat content in the CERA-20C ensemble for the (top left) upper 300 m, (top right) the upper 700 m, and (bottom left) the entire water column. The solid lines are the ensemble mean and the shading shows the ensemble standard deviation.
This figure shows that the ocean heat content for the upper 300 m reached values during the period 1935–1955 that exceed any value reached during the period 2000–2010.
Towards determining uncertainties in global oceanic mean values of heat, salt and surface elevation [link]
Car Wunsch
Wunsch (2018) identified lower bounds on uncertainties in ocean temperature trends for the period 1994-2013. The trend in integrated ocean temperature was estimated by Wunsch to be 0.011 ± 0.001 oC/decade (note: this rate of warming is much less than the surface warming, owing to the large volume of ocean water). This corresponds to a 20-year average ocean heating rate of 0.48 ±0.1 W/m2 of which 0.1 W/m2 arises from the geothermal forcing. I have rarely seen geothermal forcing (e.g. underwater volcanoes) mentioned as a source of ocean warming – the numbers cited by Wunsch reflect nearly a 20% contribution by geothermal forcing to overall global ocean warming over the past two decades.
JC reflections
After reading all of these papers, I would have to conclude that if the CMIP5 historical simulations are matching the ‘observations’ of ocean heat content, then I would say that they are getting the ‘right’ answer for the wrong reasons. Not withstanding the Cheng et al. paper, the ‘right’ answer (in terms of magnitude of the OHC increase) is still highly uncertain.
The most striking findings from these papers are:
- the oceans appear to have absorbed as much heat in the early 20th century as in recent decades (stay tuned for a forthcoming blog post on the early 20th century warming)
- historical model simulations are biased toward overestimating ocean heat uptake when initialized at equilibrium during the Little Ice Age
- the implied heat loss in the deep ocean since 1750 offsets one-fourth of the global heat gain in the upper ocean.
- cooling below 2000 m offsets more than one-third of the heat gain above 2000 m.
- the deep Pacific cooling trend leads to a downward revision of heat absorbed over the 20th century by about 30 percent.
- an estimated 20% contribution by geothermal forcing to overall global ocean warming over the past two decades.
- we do not properly understand the centennial to millennia ocean warming patterns, mainly due to a limited understanding of circulation and mixing changes
These findings have implications for:
- the steric component of sea level rise
- ocean heat uptake in energy balance estimates of equilibrium climate sensitivity
- how we initialize global climate models for historical simulations
While each of these papers mentions error bars or uncertainty, in all but the Cheng et al. paper, significant structural uncertainties in the method are discussed. In terms of uncertainties, these papers illustrate numerous different methods of estimating of 20th century ocean heat content. A much more careful assessment needs to be done than was done by Cheng et al., that includes these new estimates and for a longer period of time (back to 1900), to understand the early 20th century warming.
In an article about the Cheng et al. paper at Inside Climate News, Gavin Schmidt made the following statement:
“The biggest takeaway is that these are things that we predicted as a community 30 years ago,” Schmidt said. “And as we’ve understood the system more and as our data has become more refined and our methodologies more complete, what we’re finding is that, yes, we did know what we were talking about 30 years ago, and we still know what we’re talking about now.”
Sometimes I think we knew more of what we were talking about 30 years ago (circa the time of the IPCC FAR, in 1990) than we do now: “it aint what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just aint so.”
The NASA GISS crowd (including Gavin) is addicted to the ‘CO2 as climate control knob’ idea. I have argued that CO2 is NOT a climate control knob on sub millennial time scales, owing to the long time scales of the deep ocean circulations.
A talking point for ‘skeptics’ has been ‘the warming is caused by coming out of the Little Ice Age.’ The control knob afficionadoes then respond ‘but what’s the forcing.’ No forcing necessary; just the deep ocean circulation doing its job. Yes, additional CO2 will result in warmer surface temperatures, but arguing that 100% (or more) of the warming since 1950 is caused by AGW completely neglects what is going on in the oceans.
Stay tuned for a forthcoming blog post on the early 20th century global warming.
Reblogged this on Quaerere Propter Vērum and commented:
Finally, the oceans are getting their due as part of the explanation for a changing climate. I have always thought it was ridiculous to assume human activity could be the sole (singular) cause of warming in the complex climate of an entire planet. Influence, perhaps, but not the sole cause. Now that will hopefully be confirmed.
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
I once read a paper that discussed the timing for transporting surface water and heat into the abysmal oceans, it was on the order of 500 to 1,000 years. I wish I’d kept a link for the paper.
Abysmal? Is that a Freudian slip?
Tonyb
What about transporting surface heat from the abysmal oceans to the surface? From the probably 7×10^21 Joules of magma and internal heat per my w.i.p. paper. Enough to deliver an ice age by a simple doubling of average magma output, which more than happens every 100Ka (see Kutterolf et al). Smoking guns in unseen places. https://www.dropbox.com/s/emc1kl4hnwrktlo/Image%20Table%203%20Magma.png?dl=0
Correction, “What about transporting heat from the abysmal ocean floor to the more hospitable ocean surface?….”
abyssal ?
Worth noting that Cheng et al. also relies on Resplandy et al., which Nic Lewis has critiqued here in 4 posts last November.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/scare-of-the-day-ocean-heat-content/
A few words relating the Gebbie et al paper. The take home message is also good to deduce from the Fig.S5 ( supplements):
https://s15.directupload.net/images/190111/5evynf73.png
The warming from the LIA is transported in the deeper (around 2000m depth) layers of the pacific with a delay of some hundret years. This influences the OHC during the LIA up to now. Some parts of some warming of the upper 1000 m comes from “lifting up” from heat generated by the MWP. Included: The MWP was a global phenomenon because it influences the global OHC , see the cited fig. 4b in the mainpost. If one declares an equilibrium around 1750 ( as estimated up to now for models) this “lifted warming” would be seen as impact from the top. This is the problem: A good part of the global heatuptake is attributed to the warming of the MWP which seems to be huge.
The model estimate of the ocean warming since 1750 is too high.
For “The warming from the LIA…” please read: The warming from the MWP… sorry!
Do I understand correctly that they have much more detailed data for years 1 to 1750 than ever since?
“Proxy records show that before the onset of modern anthropogenic warming, globally coherent cooling occurred from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age.”
No one seems to talk about it much, but it seems M.M.’s murder of the MWP and LIA by hockey stick blunt force trauma has been cancelled. Seems to me that’s something Mark Steyn might use as a defense in Mann’s lawsuit, unless that too’s been cancelled.
pokerguy
The baseline temperatures referenced in recent papers apparently have come from the HMS Challenger expedition 1872-76. This link is the report from that expedition. They used some ingenious devices to record the water temperatures at depth and this report provides some fascinating discussions of the methods used in their measurements. As much as they tried to get accurate readings they realized limitations in the devices. But let’s be honest about what is being used as a baseline for “ocean temperatures “. They made measurements at 360 locations. The oceans are 330 million sq kilometers and have a volume of 1.3 Billion cubic kilometers.
They recorded a temperature at depths at one location at one time. What were the temperatures at that location at varying depths during the previous decades or following decades? They had no knowledge of stratification or circulation or the oscillations at play or how those locations had been affected.
Even with the massive improvement in technology and huge gain in coverage there are still reasons to question today’s claims about OHC. How many more questions should we have about a baseline ocean temperature from the 1870s.
http://19thcenturyscience.org/HMSC/HMSC-Reports/1885-Narrative/htm/doc.html
I thought it was an enjoyable read.
The section on temperatures is Chapter III, page 83.
My interpritation of the Vostok Ice and my interpritation of the Ice Ages.
There are three methods of heat transfer. They are conduction, convection, and radiant heat. Heat transfer to or from the earth can only be done by radiant. All material contains heat and is radiating it to cooler surfaces or absorbing it from warmer surfaces. The difference is the heat gain or loss of the material.
The earth gains heat radiated from the sun and loses heat it radiates to outer space, called black sky radiation. Outer space is considered absolute zero.
The amount of radiant heat hitting the earth from the sun daily is relatively constant. The radiant heat lost daily by the earth thru black sky radiation is constant since absolute zero is constant. The amount of heat gained by the earth’s surface depends on the surface area of the earth covered by water relative to that covered by land. Land area absorbs a larger percent of the radiant heat relative to the water area since the surface of the water reflects a percentage of the radiant heat back to outer space. The daily access heat, or loss of heat, is transferred to the oceans thru conduction and convection where it works its way to the poles and it freezes water adding to the polar ice caps or melts the polar ice caps thus keeping the surface temperature of the oceans, thus the earth, relatively constant. As the polar ice caps grow or melt, the surface area of the earth covered by land relative to that covered by water changes. This is the definition of global warming. I call it Global Ice making and Global Ice Melting.
That radiant heat absorbed by oceans and land masses is transferred to the atmosphere thru conduction and convection. When it is winter in one hemisphere it is summer in the other and the same with spring and fall. I would think the average temperature of the lower 5,000 feet of the atmosphere changes about 10’F to20’F each day. This probably takes more heat than man has added to the earth in the last 50 years. That heat man adds to the atmosphere each day is radiated to the black sky and the infinitesimal amount left helps melt the ice during global warming, should be called Global Ice Melting.
Absolute Zero is -459.68’F and the average surface temperature of the sun is between 7,300’F and 10,000’F. If we could go back in time 18,000 years, the end of the last ice age, we would probable see that the average daily temperature of the earth was in the mid 60’F as it is today. You must understand the amount of heat gained every 24 hours is almost equal to that lost during the same 24 hours. Angle of the earth’s axis is 23.5’.
The average surface temperature of the earth is about 63.5’f. The heat loss to black sky radiation every 24 hours is constant. The average radiant heat striking the surface of the earth is relatively constant. Because the sun is an active star the average temperature will change over centuries. As the surface area of the earth covered by water increases, the more radiant heat is reflected back to the black sky increases. When the daily radiant heat gained by the earth from the sun in 24 hours became less than that lost by black sky radiation we began ice making. Looking at the ice core from the Antarctic we can see that the earth began the new Ice Age about 18,000 years ago.
The Vostok Ice core shows 4 Ice Ages in the last 4 hundred thousand years. I will assume that during that time the CO2 emitted by the actions of nature is relatively constant. The lowest CO2 level is about 190 and frozen during the Ice Making somewhere in the middle of the Ice Making cycle, but the actual end of the Ice Making cycle is much later. The beginning of the rise in CO2 is actually the beginning of the next Ice Making cycle.
The last Ice Age began about 140 thousand years ago. The Ice Making stage and Ice Melting Stage each lasted about 60 thousand years. During the Ice Making stage the land mass grows and as it grows the green foliage grows thus lowering CO2 percentage in the atmosphere. When the Ice melting stage begins the rise in the water level kills the green foliage. When it gets to the 190 mark the green foliage is over 6o thousand years old plus. That foliage can still overcome the CO2 produced by nature and it took about 10 thousand years to kill the foliage to get the level of foliage that overcomes nature.
Our weather right now is nature taking heat out of the oceans and sending it to the poles to make ice.
The Weather Channel just had a piece on a very large section of ice is about to break off a peninsula in the Antarctic. This is be because of the fact that 18,000 years ago the earth switched from Global Ice Melting to Global Ice Making. Since then the Ocean levels may have dropped a foot and the ice has risen around 250 meters in the Antarctic. It seems like that would be a tremendous amount of leverage attempting to break off that ice. The Ocean level was some 400’ lower at the changeover and the 39’ water has been melting the bottom of that ice shelf for the last 78,000 years as the ocean rose. The shoreline has been receding below the glacier for 80+ thousand years. During Global Ice Making, the thickness of the ice, which eventually becomes a glacier is getting thinner from the bottom and replaced with 39’F water. The weight of the new ice is what makes it become a glacier and break off. As the glaciers break off the new ice melts slowing the drop of the ocean level. Eventually, as the new ice continues to melt, we will get to the point where the glaciers will stop breaking off and the lowering of the oceans will accelerate.
The AntArctic ice core chart also shows the top 500’ is the beginning of the man’s discovery of fire, thus the increase of CO2 percentage rise in the atmosphere. The chart also shows that as the ocean level drops the CO2 level in the atmosphere drops. This is because the land surface area grows, thus the green foliage increases, thus the photosynthesis, which is how nature removes the CO2 from the atmosphere, lowers the CO2 level. Oceans were about 400’ lower than they are now at the peak of the ice age and global ice melting began. The last ice age lasted about 120 thousand years. That means it took about 60 thousand years to melt the ice, thus the oceans rose an average of 6.67 feet per thousand years.
The only thing I haven’t explained is how they get the date of the end of the Ice ages. It has to do with the ice melting from the top down. I say the last Ice Age ended about 18 thousand years ago. I say that point was ice deposited before the peak of the ice making and which was about 80+ thousand years ago.
As the ice melts the water flashes from solid directly into vapor and is absorbed into the cold, very dry air (SUBLIMATION).
I assume they date the ice by using carbon dating. This is on the solids they find in the ice core. As the ice is evaporated the solids are left behind. There is no way nature can take 110,000 thousand years to make the ice and melt it all in 10 thousand years.
About 18000 years ago the new ice age began. Until the land mass grew enough the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere kept growing. About 18000 years ago the green foliage was not enough to stunt the growth of carbon dioxide and as the land mass grew the carbon dioxide level began to drop. About 16000 years ago the land mass, and green foliage, was enough to overcome nature. 8000 years ago, man plus nature began to make more carbon dioxide than the growth of green foliage could overcome and the carbon dioxide began to rise until present.
ALL YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND FROM THIS IS THAT THE NEW ICE AGE BEGAN ABOUT 18,000 YEARS AGO!!!!!
The ice at the poles is not melting off. The ice at the poles is breaking off.
COMMON SENSE!!!
So there are upper OHC gains during a warm AMO phase, and upper OHC losses during a cold AMO phase, because of changes in low cloud cover. And a warm AMO is normal during a centennial solar minimum. That is a profound negative feedback.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/association-between-sunspot-cycles-amo-ulric-lyons
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I read somewhere that a major hurricane is equivalent to 10,000 nuclear nuclear explosions, or something equally huge.
There has been a marked decrease in hurricane activity off the east coast of America over the last decade or so. I wonder if they are hiding in the oceans and the ‘experts’ are counting those amongst their cataclysmic predictions without an appropriate deduction from atmospheric nuclear activity.
Absolutely, Judith. You are spot on.
As this figure shows, the temperature of the planet at the multi-millennial scale is set by orbital conditions and the amount of ice in continental ice-sheets.
https://i.imgur.com/5h2TSo3.png
The correct temperature for the planet is set by the insolation pattern on top of the atmosphere and its distribution over the seasons, although the planet is always playing catch up to orbital insolation changes due to the huge delay imposed by the oceans (observe the 6500-yr lag in the graph).
At the millennial and multi-centennial scale we can ignore the ice factor as the changes in continental ice-sheets are very small after 7.7 kyr BP. But Milankovitch continues setting a “correct” temperature from insolation patterns, and every time there is a multi-centennial departure, it will later try to return to that slowly changing “correct” temperature and might overshoot.
https://i.imgur.com/L2qM8e3.png
You can observe that the temperature decay during the Holocene also follows a rhythm compatible with the decrease in obliquity.
GHGs and temperature have been uncoupled during most of the Holocene. Disregarding the cause for the LIA, it is clear that it constituted a downward departure from previous temperature levels due to an unrecognized forcing (the evidence points to solar but let’s not get into that).
Once that forcing stopped cooling the planet, the temperature naturally gravitated upwards towards its “correct” Milankovitch temperature. In this occasion it overshooted, pushed up by anthropogenic GHGs, as it is clear that we left the “correct” Milankovitch temperature behind.
So no forcing is required to move towards Milankovitch “correct temperature,” and now that natural gravitation points downward. We will need increasingly stronger forcing to keep temperature from falling. It won’t be a problem in the 21st century but will almost certainly become one by the 23rd.
As it happened to Astronomy before Copernicus, we have the wrong reference frame for Holocene climate. It is not stable in the absence of changes to GHG levels and will not become stable if we shut down our emissions.
I have looked hard at what ends an interglacial, and the astronomical decision is taken thousands of years before it happens (temperature lag). In the case of the Holocene the decision to end it was taken one or two millennia ago when the orbital conditions were reached. We are just waiting for it to happen in two-four millennia. And temperature will go down long before we reach the glacial inception point. The point at which ice sheets start to grow in the Canadian and Russian Arctic, and sea levels start to go down. That’s a point of no return.
Present global warming will not delay the next glaciation, it will only make the next cooling phase more abrupt.
Present global warming will not delay the next glaciation, it will only make the next cooling phase more abrupt.
Javier, it would be nice if you would expound a little bit on this last point (as to why this is so)…
It’s nice to see that everyone is more or less behaving themselves these days at Climate, etc. That has to make the good Dr. C. happy ☺️. i’ve noted the absence of the co2-dependant Jim D and perhaps that may be the reason for the lack of acrimony. (nice guy, but he can be a bit pushy) It has made for some very nice discussions of late…
Afonzarelli,
Warmer interglacials don’t last more. If anything, they last less. For example MIS 5e (Eemian) lasted 11.4 kyr, which is below average. Within a certain range variability, interglacial duration is determined by obliquity. Interglacials are incompatible with obliquities lower than 23°. If an interglacial hasn’t undergone glacial inception by the time it reaches 23°, it does so soon after.
As Wim R. says climatic variability increases as we get farther from the interglacial optimum. It is well known that glacial climatic variability is much higher than interglacial variability. Both states are opposite metastable extremes that display variability in the opposite direction. Warming events (Dansgaard-Oeschger) during glacial periods and cooling events (Bond events) during interglacials. A transition from interglacial to glacial means an increase in climate variability and a changing nature from cooling events to warming events. I made this figure a couple of years ago:
https://i.imgur.com/KZY4Ox1.png
Jim D made a new year resolution of spending less time at Climate.Etc. I guess it was taking too much of his time. If one doesn’t use the forum to learn, it lacks purpose. Nobody is ever convinced by arguing, no matter how good the arguments.
Javier/Wim ,in reference to Wim’s sensible statement regarding ocean circulation and distribution i have a question. My local tide gauge on the east coast of Scotland sees a tidal range of just over 6 m,or has in the past.
In the 1990’s the upper range of spring tides over high tide would see high tides of around 6 m or just above,the range over low water on spring tides would max out about -0.2 m. For the last ten years (possibly longer, that is when i first noticed the discrepancy) the upper range of spring tides has struggled to reach a max of around 5.6 m while the low tide range has reached similar levels to the past.
This is a huge change in volumes of water flowing into and out of the North Sea. This change cannot be local to the North Sea and suggests variability of sea water distribution around the ocean basins of a huge scale on a much shorter timescale than i would have imagined.
I see much made of the lunar tidal effect over long timescales but i would suggest that closer scrutiny of not just tidal cycles but actual tidal heights around the globe might show potential for great variation in the volume of water moving between various ocean areas on shorter timescales.
Javier: “Present global warming will not delay the next glaciation, it will only make the next cooling phase more abrupt.”
WR: That is also what happens as variability enhances (as is usual in case of cooling / in case of the end of a warm period). Contrasts will be stronger. Like present warming was relatively strong, next cooling will be stronger as well.
Baseline: we will need to know more about the oceans. More and more perfect (!) measurements are needed, from surface level to the bottom. Measurements on all 360 million or so square kilometers of the oceans. We need to know and understand all horizontal and vertical movements in the oceans over longer time scales, (decades, century’s) to be able to predict.
I am not sure about that. Humans are not good at handling too much information. In fact quite the opposite, we are very good at reaching correct conclusions from little information. Schwabe described the 11-yr solar cycle with only 17 years of observations. Not even two periods.
For sure getting the information opens up a lot of possibilities. The sequencing of the human genome was supposed to lead to a revolution. That was what we were told. I was skeptical. It has opened up a lot of avenues for biomedical research but it has had very little effect on our understanding of ourselves.
We now have gazillions of climate data being collected every second, and reanalysis programs to handle it, yet our understanding of climate appears to be decreasing, not increasing. It has all been reduced to the simplest of explanations: The alteration of the radiative budget at top of the atmosphere. Are we serious?
I read scientific articles that assume that AMOC strength is controlled by the formation of deep water due to a mechanism called mass-balance. Say what? We know since antiquity that currents are determined by dominant wind patterns, and that current strength correlates to wind strength. Apparently these oceanographers of today need to do a little more of wind sailing. Giving them more data that they can handle won’t make them understand things any better.
Javier: “Humans are not good at handling too much information.”
WR: Humans are good in handling assumptions and in suggesting the outcome of their models would represent the real Earth. Which never is the case.
We have to measure before we can know. For example, we hardly do know something about the vertical movements in the oceans. Which water goes down, where and why? How deep? Which water wells up, where and why?
Who looks at weather and climate maps always can observe places of oceanic upwelling. Upwelling is instigated by specific weather patterns. Those places of upwelling are causing different weather patterns by their different temperatures. And the average of thirty year of weather is what we call climate.
We need to know before we can conclude. Knowing the oceans well (!) is essential to know weather. And to understand climate.
Wind also plays an important and unknown role. Wind is very variable also if measured over decades and longer timescales. ‘No wind’ stills the sea surface which prevents mixing of the upper layers (result: a warming of the surface layer) and no wind prevents upwelling (result: a warming of the surface layer).
We must know what causes weather patterns and therefore we must know the oceans. And we must know the oceans very well.
But of course I am also interested in ‘big lines’ in what is happening. And I am reading with interest about your findings. For hypothesizing we don’t need to know all. But for proof we do need to know everything of the essential facts.
Javier, I agree with you that orbital obliquity is the dominant factor in the glaciation cycle. Considering that and this post’s assertion of vast OHC potential variability, I am wondering if anyone has proposed a hypothesis for glacial initiation by effects of obliquity on ocean circulation. For example, what if indirect solar effect, like magnetism might affect the deep ocean currents? I believe Nicola Scafetta has some paper’s proposing the AMO might be controlled in this way. What is Scaffeta is correct? Then as obliquity changes the Earth’s magnetic moment would change relative to the Sun’s moment. Perhaps at a critical point ocean circulation could make a radical shift resulting in plunging global NH temperatures. What do you think?
I enjoyed Ralph Ellis et al, paper outlining a glacial termination hypothesis yet I saw you were very skeptical, so I’m ready for a tough critique.
As you say I am quite skeptical of anything that is not well supported by evidence. Magnetism acts on things that can respond to it, whether because they can be magnetized (compass needles), or because they have charge. Birds that follow magnetic lines in their migration do it because they have a cryptochrome in their retinas, cry4, whose chemical reactions respond to magnetism, so they actually see the orientation of the magnetic lines. And alterations in the Earth magnetic field were demonstrated because magnetic particles in ocean floor lava oriented to the magnetic field until it solidified. Even if there are magnetic particles in the currents, they are in a fluid medium. I fail to see how a magnetic field could affect an oceanic current.
In the end ocean circulation responds to thermodynamical principles. The Earth is an engine that receives energy in the tropical bands and has to transport it to the poles. Ocean currents respond to that mechanism. The more energy that needs to be transported, the more active is ocean circulation. Then everything gets complicated by the Coriolis force, ocean basin geometry, tides, vertical upwelling and downwelling, and so on. But in the end the driving force is the latitudinal temperature gradient (Equator to Pole temperature gradient), and this is stablished by the insolation gradient, and that is why obliquity, precession, and eccentricity rule the climate. When summer insolation in the northern hemisphere decreased enough, about 6000 years ago, the seasonal insolation gradient changed, the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ, the Earth’s climate equator) moved South, and the entire climate pattern of the planet got altered in what is known as the Mid-Holocene Transition. Monsoons moved South and the northern 30° band dried up ending the African Humid Period and creating the Sahara desert. The planet moved from the Holocene Climatic Optimum to the Neoglaciation.
The most important climate property of the planet, its latitudinal temperature gradient, essentially depends on the Sun that establish the latitudinal insolation gradient, but it is an emergent property of the system that instantaneously responds to atmospheric and oceanic circulation changes, like for example hurricanes or El Niño, that at the same time feed on it for the energy they need. As the world warms the gradient becomes flatter and the atmosphere quieter. Apparently scientists don’t understand why wind stilling has been taking place for the past decades. If global warming continues, wind turbines will produce less energy. I bet they don’t include wind stilling in their calculations.
While IPCC consensus scientists believe climate is determined by radiative balance at TOA over the entire planet, they are ignoring the evidence that a much more important mechanism is the energy transport within the climate system. By putting a lot of heat or very little heat in the poles in winter, the planet alters the radiative exchange a lot more than the increase in CO2. And this mechanism responds to natural variability due to solar variability, atmospheric and oceanic variability, ENSO, and volcanic activity. It doesn’t respond to CO2.
Javier, certainly the ocean currents are driven by temperature gradient as are all convection currents. But the question was what changes in the complex secondary dynamics, like the ones you mention, might throw a switch on the convection current train track. If a major change in vertical upwelling and downwelling could have a dramatic affect on surface temperatures, perhaps it’s the mystery cause of DO or other sudden climate events. If that is so then could a DO event near 23 degrees obliquity be the switch that ends an interglacial?
I withdraw my thought about magnetism; it’s unnecessary. As obliquity slowly shifts the Coriolis force, ocean basin geometry and tides all change orientation relative to the driving force of the convection currents, the Sun. Certainly, this could cause sudden shifts in the global ocean currents. Right? I have not seen this discussed, have you?
Ron,
As far as I know vertical mixing of the ocean depends only on two things that have a similar magnitude. Wind strength that affects the upper layers and that is decreasing with global warming, and tidal strength that goes all the way to the bottom and goes with astronomical cycles. The effect of increasing vertical mixing is cooling, but luckily it appears not to be a major cause of climate change during the present interglacial.
DOs are no longer a mystery. A burst of articles over the last decade have clarified them. They occur very specifically at the Iceland-Scotland ridge and the Nordic Seas, they require glacial conditions with sea levels at least 30 m. below current and very extensive sea-ice. They require meltwater production that builds a particular ocean subsurface stratification where warm waters from the North Atlantic Current are layered below a cold salty halocline that is below a cold freshwater layer. When meltwater production decreases the intrinsically unstable stratification collapses releasing the accumulated heat from the warm water layer in a very short time span.
They are warming events and can’t happen during an interglacial because the conditions are not present.
There are some papers discussing changes to oceanic currents during deglaciation, but it is difficult to distinguish how much is due to the changes in sea level.
As far as I know vertical mixing of the ocean depends only on two things…
Do you believe that the LIA or any other cooling events could have been caused by a change in ocean currents?
The LIA is definitely a solar event caused by the succession of grand solar minima every 200 years. The effect of solar events is mediated by atmospheric reorganization. The ocean is affected secondarily.
Part of the effects of the 8.2-kyr event are caused by the meltwater pulse from lakes Agassiz and Ojibway, and are mediated by the resulting reduction in AMOC and NADW ocean currents.
I recently compiled a list of Holocene ACEs (Abrupt Climate Events) by going over a set of well selected long proxies representing both global and regional climate conditions at well selected locations. I stopped at the 23 main ACEs that affect several proxies simultaneously, so there is basically two per millennia. They have several phenotypes, and the most common one is the solar phenotype, and all ACEs showing it coincide with solar grand minima (high 14C production). Other group I don’t know what causes them. Three ACEs stand out for being unique with no parallel within the Holocene. One is the 8.2-kyr ACE of known cause. A second one is the 4.2-kyr ACE of unknown cause. The third one is Modern Global Warming. It doesn’t look like changes in ocean currents is a common cause for abrupt climate change during the Holocene.
Javier, thanks for your replies. I hope you agree that if a major ocean dynamic did change it would have a major impact on climate. The global conveyor changing state, short-circuiting off the coast of Labrador, could have very easily caused the Younger Dryas period cooling, as currently postulated.
“Apparently scientists don’t understand why wind stilling has been taking place for the past decades.”
Since the mid 1990’s, surface wind speeds over land have declined, but over the oceans they have increased.
Javier, some remarks.
Both your graphs show relations between temperature and obliquity, but not in the same way. In the second graph there is no 6500 years lag for obliquity and the ratio temperature/obliquity is ~4 times lower.
The Holocene thus far did not have an overshoot as MIS 5 or MIS 9 had, may one is developing now.
As you indicate, the higher the overshoot, the stronger the drop afterwards. People are looking in the wrong direction.
For the moment, the drop in 65°N summer insolation due to decreasing obliquity cannot be challenged by CO₂ forcing.
BTW, The Spanish Wikipedia ‘stadial’ lemma is much more informative then the English one, let alone the Dutch one (my native language). I will learn some Spanish.
Teerhuis,
Two curves that have a decreasing trend can be adjusted at the axis so they coincide, in the same way increasing temperature and increasing CO2 are shown to coincide. This is visual manipulation. Once one is aware of it, the important thing is not that the curves coincide, but the evidence supporting the correlation. The evidence for the correlation temperature-obliquity comes from the first graph.
If you look at the second graph you will see that obliquity peaked at 9 kyr BP, yet temperature started to decrease after the 5.2 kyr event when temperature didn’t recover previous levels and the Neoglaciation started. So you have a 4000 year delay there. As the curves adjustment masks that delay the obliquity curve cannot be used for projections. The only thing sure is that the fall in obliquity is still accelerating, on a millennial scale the drop in temperature should accelerate. The Earth has been losing about 0.2°C per millennium during the Neoglaciation. This is quite a lot considering that the glacial floor is only 4°C below and a loss of 1.5-2°C puts you already in a glacial state. Although Earth temperature can vary by a lot in the short term, on the long term is very stable. The Quaternary Ice Age shows a loss of 1°C per million years, or about 0.001°C per millennium.
I seriously doubt it. The overshoot needs an astronomical reason that the Holocene doesn’t have. Due to very low eccentricity the increase in northern summer insolation over the next 10,000 years is going to be very small on comparative terms to other interglacials.
The green curve in the second figure is model attempt to reproduce the Holocene from Liu et al., 2014. It is clear that CO2 forcing is being overstated, while solar forcing is being understated. There will be surprises ahead.
Javier,
Thank you for your reply.
I assume that the events that led to the Younger Dryas prevented an overshoot such as MIS5e. I agree that the dynamics for a similar overshoot now are not present, but I meant to refer to anthropogenic forcing. I am not certain the temperature will stay below that of the Holocene Climate Optimum.
Well nobody knows that. The current most favored hypothesis is that the Ice Age has been cancelled for tens of thousands of years, perhaps millions. But it has so many assumptions in it that it isn’t worth the ink to print it.
The disparity between the huge change in CO2 levels we have caused and the mild temperature response we are observing, a great deal of which is probably contributed by natural factors, suggests climate is not very sensitive to CO2 changes.
https://i.imgur.com/4kp8RLe.png
We have been very lucky. By recklessly releasing all that CO2 we could really have messed up the climate of the planet. It is a very good thing that the planet is responding so little, but we didn’t think about it before doing it. Homo sapiens we are not.
https://geosciencebigpicture.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/2500-metre-age-from.png
Gebbie and Huybers did the above map of 2500m ocean age a few years back. The north Pacific and north Indian oceans seem dead ends where water much older than the little ice age resides.
The published version of the paper ‘Nonlinearities in patterns of long-term ocean warming’ is available here: iacweb.ethz.ch/staff/mariaru/pdfs/Rugenstein16a.pdf
“This corresponds to a 20-year average ocean heating rate of 0.48 ±0.1 W/m2 of which 0.1 W/m2 arises from the geothermal forcing. … the numbers cited by Wunsch reflect nearly a 20% contribution by geothermal forcing to overall global ocean warming over the past two decades.”
Assuming that geothermal forcing was the same in preindustrial times, the ocean must over the long term have been transferring all that geothermal heat input to the atmosphere (negative heat uptake from the atmosphere), giving a net zero ocean heat gain, or it would have continuously heated up. Therefore, when measuring the change in ocean heat uptake from the atmosphere (or the rate of ocean heat gain) between preindustrial times and now, the fact that some of its heat gain is from geothermal sources is irrelevant.
“Assuming that geothermal forcing was the same..”
That might be true but we have no evidence either way. Recent papers regarding Antarctica and Greenland have noted spatial and temporal variability. Over centuries the same might be true below the sea floor. Who knows what levels have existed over the last 1000 years.
Heat gain under greenhouse gas forcing is the result of a temperature gradient between oceans and atmosphere reducing heat loss. What is irrelevant is the source of the heat – and geothermal heat flux is orders of magnitude greater than the instantaneous increase in greenhouse gas forcing.
The information in Fig. 4b. of the ‘The Little Ice Age and 20th century deep Pacific cooling’ paper for the pre-Argo period is highly relevant for energy-budget based climate sensitivity estiamtion. I estimate that they show total ocean heating of 0.68 W/m2 over 1869-82 and 0.57 W/m2 over 1930-50. These are far higher than the values used in Lewis & Curry 2018, of 0.15 and 0.20 W/m2 respectively. If correct, they imply that the LC18 ECS / Effective climate sensitivity estimates are significantly too high.
Thank you. Can you say what the ECS would be if “total ocean heating of 0.68 W/m2 over 1869-82 and 0.57 W/m2 over 1930-50”.
Nic: Perhaps I am confused, but here is how I understand the situation today. The current forcing is about 2.7 W/m2, the current TOA imbalance from ARGO is about 0.7 W/m2, so the 1 K of warming (assuming it is all forced) is sending an additional 2 W/m2 of heat to space (by emission of LWR and reflection of SWR). That is a climate feedback parameter of 2 W/m2/K and an ECS of roughly 1.8 K.
Now, when you and Judith discuss these earlier periods of ocean heat uptake, my first question are they “naturally or anthropogenically-forced warming” or unforced/internal variability. If they represent internal variability, then one part of the ocean is cooling while the other part is warming. And attribution studies for 1930-50 claim this period of warming was mostly caused by internal variability, not forcing.
When there is a forcing change that effects the radiative balance at the TOA, then there can be warming “everywhere”.
franktoo: ” The current forcing is about 2.7 W/m2″
Relative to when – 1750? To estimate ECS using forcing and heat uptake data, one needs to have usable global temperature data as well, so forcing and heat uptake both need to be estimated for post-1850 time periods. Forcing relative to 1750 was pretty small in the 3rd quarter of the 19th century. But absolute heat uptake is estimated to be non-negligibly positive from 1850 to 1882. See LC15 and LC18.
“Figure 1a shows the heat flux into the ocean, and Fig. 1b shows the volume-averaged ocean temperature, which is a measure of heat content, versus time from the control and 2×CO2 runs. This confirms that the time scale for full adjustment of the deep ocean is about 3000 yr (e.g., Stouffer 2004; Danabasoglu 2004). It is set by the diffusive time scale estimated for the deep ocean using the very small model diapycnal diffusion coefficient below the thermocline. The temperatures at the end of the runs are 3.80° and 5.85°C in the control and 2×CO2 runs, respectively.” https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/2008JCLI2596.1
https://journals.ametsoc.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/ams/journals/content/clim/2009/15200442-22.9/2008jcli2596.1/production/images/medium/i1520-0442-22-9-2494-f01.gif
Diapycnal diffusion is based on consideration of the collapse of gravity waves at the surface and the creation of small regions of turbulent dispersion to depth. The theory is of course that greenhouse gases slow the release of ocean heat to the atmosphere resulting in warming oceans. Some of that heat is then transported to depth resulting in accumulation of the tiny instantaneous increase – some 10^-9 W/m2 – in greenhouse gas forcing that sums in this simple conceptual model to the total average warming rate of oceans – some 0.8 W/m2 currently. Although satellites show that there are cloud feedbacks to changing patterns of sea surface temperature that are the source of much of the current warming in oceans.
It is based on unphysical (and immeasurable) assumptions. The alternative is that heat is transported to depths through mesoscale eddies basin wide and 1000’s of meters deep. The other assumption is that heat stays in the abyssal deep. Convection carries heat to the surface. I assume that the balance of these two processes – rapid turbulent mixing to depth and convective transport as the dominant process creates the temperature profile of the oceans.
This:
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/ldeo/mutter/jcm/convection.gif
Leads to;
https://i2.wp.com/timescavengers.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/thermocline-01.jpg
Ocean surfaces warm and cool with an annual change in energy input of +/- 10 W/m2. The reflection of the variability of the surface energy input can be seem in Argo data in vertical sections. With slow diffusion – heat would instead be well mixed.
https://www.climate4you.com/images/ArgoWorldOceanSince200401%2065N-65S.gif
“We therefore suggest that previous estimates of these important characteristics of the global ocean require reconsideration.” https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016GL068184
Ocean surfaces warm and cool with an annual change in energy input of +/- 10 W/m2. The reflection of the variability of the surface energy input can be seem in Argo data in vertical sections. With slow diffusion – heat would instead be well mixed.
In warm times, more ocean is thawed and more evaporation does more cooling, the water vapor and energy are used to produce more rain and snow and IR out from changing the water vapor into water and ice in the high clouds. This causes warm times to end when the sequestered ice is flowing fast enough.
In cold times, less ocean is thawed and less evaporation does not supply enough water vapor and energy to maintain the sequestered ice. The ice depletes until sequestered ice flow rates decrease and allow warming.
So you keep saying Alex.
Mr. Lewis, do the new papers lend credence to the criticism of LC18 as posed by Dessler?
Mr. Lewis, do the new papers lend credence to the criticism of LC18 as posed by Dessler?
If Dessler’s critique was that unforced variability is high and therefore observational assumptions of energy balance without knowing the OHC have large error bars, then these papers help that situation by constraining OHC.
Nic Lewis commented above: “If correct, they [Gebbie and Huybers (2019)] imply that the LC18 ECS / Effective climate sensitivity estimates are significantly too high.”
So yes, Dessler was correct; Nic and Judith have another paper to write.
None whatsoever. LC18 used data from Cheng.
It’s taken 50 Ma for the deep ocean temperatures to cool from 14 C to -0.5 C [1]. At the current rate of heat uptake how long will it take to warm the deep oceans to the temperatures they were at 12 Ma ago [1], which was when GMST was last at 3 C warmer than now? The calculation needs to take into consideration the continual supply of water at near 0C from melting of the ice caps.
[1] Scotese (2018), page 6 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324017003_Phanerozoic_Temperatures_Tropical_Mean_Annual_Temperature_TMAT_Polar_Mean_Annual_Temperature_PMAT_and_Global_Mean_Annual_Temperature_GMAT_for_the_last_540_million_years
“It’s taken 50 Ma for the deep ocean temperatures to cool from 14 C to -0.5 C [1].” should read the deep tropical ocean temperatures..
OHC seems to have become the dog that ate the CAWG crowd’s homework. What brief and incomplete in situ data we have can be spun by the hands of non-oceanographers into the fabric of any narrative, Meanwhile, bona fide oceanographers, such as Wunsch and Gebbie, present far-more- knowledgeable physical context for the data–with far less public fanfare than afforded the far-fetched claims of the CAGW crowd.
Zeke Hausfather says: February 9, 2015 at 3:54 pm
“Ironically enough, the net effect of adjustments on global temperatures (not land-only) is to reduce the trend bias, as the pre-1940 upward adjustments to SST are larger than the (mostly pre-1940s) downward adjustment of land temperatures from homogenization. I really need to get around to putting together an adjusted vs. raw land/ocean figure at some point..”
Victor Venema February 9, 2015 at 4:02 pm
“Zeke, that would be a good plot to show the people.The ocean is big. Those adjustments downward are important.”
Steven Mosher says:February 9, 2015
“I’m having Zeke double check some work I did but I think we actually DO decrease the trends from 1979 to today ( by a tiny bit)
Steven Mosher says: February 9, 2015
(4) Is the near zero-net-effect of corrections, as cited by Mosher, due to a cancellation of an upward trend correction over land and a downward trend correction for the sea surface?
“We are looking at land only. Adjustments to SST are COOLING.”
Zeke Hausfather 15/2/15
“Turns out that global temperature adjustments actually reduce the long-term warming trend, mostly due to oceans. 2) Global adjustments increase land trends a bit. 3) That graph is from antiquated USHCN v1”
I still do not quite get why these adjustments to the raw data had to be made.
Nor the terrible insistence that the heat must still be hiding in the ocean,
Up to the 15th different study trying to disprove observations and everyone of them is so welcomed til it fails.
Nor the terrible insistence that the heat must still be hiding in the ocean,
Nobody insisted that heat was hiding in the oceans.
“Nobody insisted that heat was hiding in the oceans.”
Some nobody called Trenbath, JCH, and friends
” Resplandy et al. The interesting thing about this paper is that it uses proxies to infer the change in ocean heat content. What it finds is that the change in ocean heat content is probably at the high end of earlier estimates.
Startling new research finds large buildup of heat in the oceans, suggesting a faster rate of global warming by Chris Moody & Brady Dennis, Energy & Environment, Washington Post, Oct 31, 2018″
“Previous studies have found that the coverage shortcomings in available direct observations would be expected to result in quite large underestimation – e.g. Durack et al. 2014.
YET
Steven Mosher “It basically confirms that the range of estimates from direct measures is good.” Good old raw data,
–
“Climate scientists have long wondered where this so-called missing heat was going, especially over the last decade, when greenhouse emissions kept increasing but world air temperatures did not rise correspondingly.
The build-up of energy and heat in Earth’s system is important to track because of its bearing on current weather and future climate.
The temperatures were still high — the decade between 2000 and 2010 was Earth’s warmest in more than a century — but the single-year mark for warmest global temperature was stuck at 1998, until 2010 matched it.
The world temperature should have risen more than it did, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research reckoned.
They knew greenhouse gas emissions were rising during the decade and satellites showed there was a growing gap between how much sunlight was coming in and how much radiation was going out. Some heat was coming to Earth but not leaving, and yet temperatures were not going up as much as projected.
So where did the missing heat go?
Computer simulations suggest most of it was trapped in layers of oceans deeper than 1,000 feet during periods like the last decade when air temperatures failed to warm as much as they might have.
This could happen for years at a time, and it could happen periodically this century, even as the overall warming trend continues, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Climate Change.
“This study suggests the missing energy has indeed been buried in the ocean,” NCAR’s Kevin Trenberth, a co-author of the study, said in a statement. “The heat has not disappeared and so it cannot be ignored. It must have consequences.”
“Climate scientists have long wondered where this so-called missing heat was going, especially over the last decade, when greenhouse emissions kept increasing but world air temperatures did not rise correspondingly.
Missing heat is simple. If heat is missing, you still don’t understand the natural cycles. The temperature changes, day and night, summer and winter, cloudy and sunny, show that the earth temperature is always balanced. If heat is missing, you still don’t understand the natural cycles.
If temperatures keep cycling, then the balance is working. Don’t claim the sky is falling if you just don’t understand. If heat is missing, you clearly don’t understand.
“I still do not quite get why these adjustments to the raw data had to be made.
Nor the terrible insistence that the heat must still be hiding in the ocean,
Up to the 15th different study trying to disprove observations and everyone of them is so welcomed til it fails.”
why?
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/guest-post-skeptics-demand-adjustments/
Steven Mosher says: February 9, 2015 at 4:19 pm
” I was on the other side of the debate before I actually looked at data and did the work that I suggested or demanded that others do.”
Sad day.
Did Resplandy find the heat, Mosher?
That was attempt number 14.
Judith, Something that would be useful for someone like me is if someone would wade through all the recent papers and put their ocean heat uptake numbers in terms of W/m2. I see numbers like Wunch’s 0.48 W/m2 while you and Nic used something like 0.72Wm2 for the most recent period.
Pingback: Ocean Heat Content Surprises – Climate Collections
“Due primarily to the relatively high economic costs, desalination is
currently concentrated in high income and developed countries. There is a need to make desalination technologies more affordable and extend them to low income and lower middle income countries, increasing the viability of desalination for addressing SDG 6 in areas that developments have previously been limited by high economic costs. To do this, technological refinement for low environmental impacts and economic costs, along with innovative financial mechanisms to support the sustainability of desalination schemes, will likely be required. The expansion pattern and economics of desalination facilities in recent decades suggest a positive and promising outlook for expansion in desalination facilities around the world.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969718349167?via%3Dihub
Off topic but from the study cited in the tweet above.
The press release that is a trifle hyperbolic.
https://unu.edu/media-relations/releases/un-warns-of-rising-levels-of-toxic-brine.html
The Reuters Chinese whisper?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-brine/too-much-salt-water-desalination-plants-harm-environment-u-n-idUSKCN1P81PX
“OSLO (Reuters) – Almost 16,000 desalination plants worldwide produce bigger-than-expected flows of highly salty waste water and toxic chemicals that are damaging the environment, a U.N.-backed study said on Monday.”
The oil rich countries use thermal desalination with a recovery rate of about 25% – 75% being a moderately concentrated brine. The technology mostly used elsewhere these days is reverse osmosis with a recovery rate of some 40%. Using better recovery estimates instead of a blanket 50% assumption is the basis of the ‘increase’. How difficult do you think that dilution to background levels through pressurized diffusors is?
After infiltration by the 5th estate – is there any value left in the 4th?
The long memory of the ocean suggests that these historical surface anomalies are associated with ongoing deep-ocean temperature adjustments.
The cold water in the deep ocean is there because warm polar waters flow into polar regions, contact ice that is dumped into the oceans by sequestered ice flowing into the oceans. contacting the warm salt water, chilling the water to below zero F, mixing the cold water and sending the max density temperature water down to the deep ocean. During the Roman and Medieval warm times, it was warmer because less ice extent cooled less by reflecting less and thawing less. The ocean energy then went to evaporation and snowfall and IR out that removed energy from earth while it rebuilt sequestered ice on Greenland and other cold places. When the sequestered ice volume was sufficient, it advanced and increased ice extent and cooling by increasing reflecting and thawing. Oceans froze and reduced evaporation and snowfall and the ice depletion lasted through the cold periods when there was little evaporation and snowfall. Ice is replenished in warm times and is depleted in cold times. Common sense and ice core data and history show this to be true.
Notice that when a “they could be wrong” post comes from skeptics, it means they are once again pretending that each projection’s warming from CO2 will be shown to be overstated. When we learn that the experts were correct or too conservative, the meme switches to “sure there’s waring, but it must be something else.”
Sad to see so much effort from skeptics that never once considered that errors can be in one of two directions. Rarely will a skeptic issue a mea culpa when it is obvious their gut feelings were wrong last decade, so it’s on to a new Gish Gallop.
At some point those calling themselves skeptics have to start admitting that CO2 is the primary forcing.
At some point those calling themselves skeptics have to start admitting that CO2 is the primary forcing.
What a dumb idea!
Water is abundant, water changes state, water, in all of its changing states, is the primary internal regulator of climate.
“Water is abundant, water changes state, water, in all of its changing states, is the primary internal regulator of climate.”
Never considered the fact that water condenses and CO2 doesn’t.
As in what that means?
https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2010/2010_Lacis_la09300d.pdf
“The results, summarised in Fig. 2, show unequivocally that the radiative forcing by non-condensing GHGs is essential to sustain the atmospheric
temperatures that are needed for significant levels
of water vapour and cloud feedback. Without this
non-condensable GHG forcing, the physics of this
model send the climate of Earth plunging rapidly
and irrevocably to an icebound state, though perhaps not to total ocean freeze-over”
For that you need about 40 ppm at most. The planet will get in serious trouble if it gets below that.
Fixed Tony,
“The results, show unequivocally that the radiative forcing by water vapour and cloud feedback are essential to sustain the atmospheric
temperatures that are needed for significant levels
of non-condensing GHGs. Without this
condensable GHG forcing, the physics of this
model send the climate of Earth plunging rapidly
and irrevocably to an icebound state, though perhaps not to total ocean freeze-over”
No water vapor, no life, no CO2 as we know it. Yes you can have CO2 without plants but our world and life now depend on them. Fossil fuel is just recycled plants.
“No water vapor, no life, no CO2 as we know it. Yes you can have CO2 without plants but our world and life now depend on them. Fossil fuel is just recycled plants.”
Irrelevant to the point my friend.
Without CO2 atmospheric WV precipitates out and the Earth’s temp plunges.
An ice planet.
Hence CO2 is more important than H2O.
Without CO2 atmospheric WV precipitates out and the Earth’s temp plunges.
An ice planet.
There is no data that proves that. There are only models and theory and they have not given right answers so far. Without CO2 there would be no food and we would not be here. Water would still regulate the temperature with all of its state changes but there would be no life as we know to care.
I am just thankful that CO2 in the atmosphere is going up, which is good, and not down, which is bad.
unequivocally
When anyone uses unequivocally, it means that this big word is supposed to scare people to allow others to tax and control them.
For many of us, unequivocally always means there will be something that follows that is based on flawed models and/or flawed theory.
unequivocally
Please do not use this word when you are talking about anything that is true, it has been used incorrectly too many times and alarmists see it as on their side even when it is not used that way.
We have been conditioned to think alarmist thoughts when we hear that word.
Tony Banton “The results, summarised in Fig. 2, show unequivocally that the radiative forcing by non-condensing GHGs is essential to sustain the atmospheric temperatures that are needed for significant levels
of water vapour and cloud feedback.”
–
What sustains atmospheric temperatures is the sun and distance of said sun from the earth, full stop.
CO2, etc, when present, can help a little.
When it comes to being essential, first you have to have the heat, then it is essential to have water, enough to cause water vapour actually. The presence of CO2 while marginally helpful ( no use in snowball earth for instance) is in no way essential for water vapour and cloud feedbacks.
Chuck in or remove a couple of extra percent of water volume, turn the sun up or down, or move it closer or further away, those are essentials TB.
full stop.
You should have.
In a house with a wood stove the temperature is controlled by a damper. A damper provides no heat. You go ahead and try to control the temperature with the wood.
Tony Banton: Without CO2 atmospheric WV precipitates out and the Earth’s temp plunges.
More reasonable: without CO2 the sun shines on the Equatorial regions every day, producing warmth sufficient to produce water vapor (and its “greenhouse” effect) and melt any ice. With less GHG in the air, the overall mean temperature would be lower than now, the ice caps and glaciers larger. To get an icebound Earth you would have to decrease the insolation at the Equator or raise the freezing temperature of water. It takes a spectacular change in the physics to make CO2 into “the” control knob.
To get an icebound Earth you would have to decrease the insolation at the Equator or raise the freezing temperature of water. It takes a spectacular change in the physics to make CO2 into “the” control knob.
Nope
https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/la09300d.html
I refer to Andy Lacis’ reply to Steven Koonin ….
https://judithcurry.com/2015/04/08/are-human-influences-on-the-climate-really-small/#comment-691948
And his further paper….
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.3402/tellusb.v65i0.19734%40zelb20.2013.65.issue-s1
To whom it may concern:
It is taken for granted that this will never be accepted. Because, well we don’t know everything … and so we know nothing. (sarc)
As if we could do the experiment on this or any other Earth, that would be required for such types.
VeryTallGuy: https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/la09300d.html
Yeh, I read it when it first came out. The argument works well enough if the whole Earth is at its mean temperature 255K without GHGs, not so well if the Equator is above average and the poles below average, say 275K and 235K. But, as I wrote, daytime insolation around the Equator is sufficient to create water vapor even if the Equatorial water chanced to freeze, and from there the calculations are intractable.
matthew,
the paper estimates that removing Co2 reduces mean temperature to -21C, and water vapour to ~10% of its current level.
And your argument is there may be some ice free areas in equatorial regions in this scenario, Co2 is not the control knob on climate? OK…
Tony Banton: Because, well we don’t know everything … and so we know nothing.
I am glad that you wrote that absurdity arcastically. We have good evidence that some of the known unknowns are important enough to undermine claims that we know the future climate response to diminishing human CO2 production with sufficient accuracy.
We are as shipwreck survivors in a life raft in thick fog. Self-righteous persons among us are urging in imperative language that we paddle as hard as we can. Others urge us to conserve our resources at least until we have good evidence which direction to paddle, and urge us to examine thoroughly every claim presented as evidence. This isn’t a debate between saints and sinners.
VeryTallGuy: the paper estimates that removing Co2 reduces mean temperature to -21C,
You’ll have noticed that my example includes a mean temperature of -18C.
Even at a mean temperature of -21C, the sunlight vaporizes considerable amounts of water in the daytime between the tropic lines. That water vapor is a greenhouse gas, with a perseverative warming effect to raise the global mean above -21C.
It is a persistent problem in this field, inadequately addressed, how much you can learn by focusing on global spatio-temporal mean temperature and gross flows, while ignoring the spatio-temporal distributions and regional flows. Here the persistent (e.g. equilibrium) effects of the permanently ice-free equatorial region are intractable, so they are ignored with the assumption that the equatorial water is frozen. That is not an “absurdity”, but it is an obvious source of approximation error that undercuts their argument seriously.
This is just flat wrong. The simulation is done with a gcm. There is no assumption that the water is frozen.
From the paper
verytallguy: This is just flat wrong. The simulation is done with a gcm. There is no assumption that the water is frozen.
As far as I can tell, the authors do not in fact take account of the spatio-temporal distribution of the temperatures and energy flows in their calculations.
Because the solar-thermal energy balance of
Earth [at the top of the atmosphere (TOA)] is
maintained by radiative processes only, and because
all the global net advective energy transports
must equal zero, it follows that the global
average surface temperature must be determined
in full by the radiative fluxes arising from the
patterns of temperature and absorption of radiation.
This then is the basic underlying physics
that explains the close coupling that exists between
TOA radiative fluxes, the greenhouse effect,
and the global mean surface temperature.
They refer to the “patterns of temperature” but make no calculations of the non-radiative heat transfers between regions, as far as I can tell.
for example this:
the global sea ice fraction goes from
4.6% to 46.7%, causing the planetary albedo of
Earth to also increase from ~29% to 41.8%.
They do not in fact calculate the distributed warming effects from the daily evaporation of the remaining 53% of non-ice covered water (and night-time cloud effects), or the considerably higher daytime temperatures of dry land, but only work with the global aggregated effects.
The surface temperatures are strongly affected by the internal dynamics of the energy transfers, and the TOA imbalances result from the net warming/cooling effects of all the processes. They do not report (perhaps elsewhere?) differences between land and water, or among latitudinal bands, but the distribution matters.
In sum, I do not read where they take account of the facts that the equatorial region is warmer than the polar regions, that there is non-radiative transfer of energy from the equatorial surface to the poles, and that radiative transfer of energy to space from the poles is already mostly unhindered by condensing GHGs. Or any other facts about the spatio-temporal distribution of the temperatures and energy flows.
oops! Lacis et al fig 3 states: Fig. 3. Zonally averaged
annual mean surface temperature
change after the
zeroing out of noncondensing
GHGs.
also
We used the GISS 4° × 5° ModelE to calculate
changes in instantaneous LW TOA flux
(annual global averages) in experiments where
atmospheric constituents (including water vapor,
clouds, CO2, O3, N2O, CH4, CFCs, and aerosols)
were added to or subtracted from an equilibrium
atmosphere with a given global temperature structure,
italics added by me.
Thanks to Very Tall Guy for making me reread this more carefully. (Sounds of eating crow in background!)
If 53% of water is not covered in ice, then this sentence from the abstract is misleading: Without the radiative forcing supplied by CO2 and the other noncondensing greenhouse gases, the terrestrial greenhouse would collapse, plunging the global climate into an icebound Earth state.
Well, kudos for that response matthew, rare indeed to read anything like that on a climate blog.
Anyway, now we agree on the content of the paper, what do you say to the concept of CO2 as a “control knob”, given the ability to vary mean surface temperature by ~35C by varying CO2 from zero to current levels?
VeryTallGuy: the concept of CO2 as a “control knob”
CO2 is “a” control knob, not “the” control knob. IIRC (fwiw) that’s what I wrote when the paper was first published.
matthew, I do believe [drum roll…] we are in complete agreement!
Willard: I rather think that you’re trying to help yourself with your switch-and-baiting, RonG, as none of my points rest on a specific theory regarding ice age.
I understood your point was to dispute Javier’s assertion that CO2 is not a primary control knob for global temperature.
Willard: Even if I accept your explanation, it simply doesn’t undermine Richard Alley’s control knob, i.e. the idea that if you keep CO2 out of the many billion years of the Earth’s history, little makes sense, and if you add CO2 in everything does. You could as well have mentioned the extinction of the dinosaurs, which isn’t related to CO2.
I missed where Richard Alley said that in your linked videos, but I’m sure he believes that. I simply asked you to articulate why or find where Alley does. You said you don’t fall into traps of doing work. I said I would help you and I supplied their commonly used evidence of CO2 being involved in warming the SH during the Holocene transition. I pointed out that CO2 could well have helped warming but there is no evidence that it was needed in any way to drive climactic changes. It might but there is no evidence, so for you or Alley to say there is evidence calls for its production.
> I simply asked you to articulate why or find where Alley does.
I rather see lots of bait-and-switches, RonG:
[RG1] this reality is the opposite of what was presented as the science by Al Gore’s movie […] This important point is omitted from the SKS M-cycles post.
[RG2] if it were true Alley and SKS would have no problem spelling out why
[RG3] you of all people should be aware that one of the primary rules of climateball is: all analogies fail.
[RG4] You, Alley and SkS need to be more specific
[RG5] I will help you.
By dodging my thought experiment, you’re begging a question that might be more important than you seem to presume. This thought experiment is related to the point I made. Your failure to address it has stretched justified disingenuousness beyond its breaking point.
Alternatively, if you can find Javier’s anti-correlation test, that’d be great.
Willard, I appreciate your attempt to reply but I don’t understand your complaint. Ask Javier for his anti-correlation chart. I simply disputed your claim that nothing makes sense in the climate record without CO2.
What is the evidence of you CO2 control knob? Evidence of CO2’s fingerprint is the heart of the debate yet you say the evidence is clear, Where?
> I simply disputed your claim that nothing makes sense in the climate record without CO2.
First, that’s not my claim. Second, I’ve already shown with a very simple model of a greenhouse with a thermostat how your disputation is irrelevant. Third, you did more than simply dispute the claim – you kept evading my point while trying to bait me with squirrels and you still play “who, me?”
Willard: You missed the whole concept of thermostat.
My understanding of a thermostat is it simply limits a top or bottom temperature or both with a negative feedback. Atmospheric CO2 level is a positive feedback that ice core evidence shows is easily overwhelmed by a thermostat switch seen in the glacial cycle that has yet to be explained conclusively but that correlates with M-cycles.
By denying ownership of your own claim and Alley’s (that I quoted) and not correcting me in any productive way you seem to be simply providing yourself an exit. Just wish that it didn’t include the barbs. .
I am fully prepared to do it as soon as the evidence shows it. No conclusive evidence has been produced. Not even strong evidence. I am not believing in the absence of evidence because that isn’t different from religion.
The evidence that we have is that CO2 and temperature are anti-correlated during the past 10,000 years, and during the past 50 million years. They only correlate during the past 800,000 years when we know that CO2 is not responsible for the observed climate change, because it takes place at orbital frequencies.
So the evidence supports that CO2 is not the primary climate forcing, and at some point those believing CO2 is the primary forcing have to start admitting that it is not.
> So the evidence supports that CO2 is not the primary climate forcing […]
A correlation is not something one sees, strictly speaking, but something one infers from some evidence. Also, you mention “the” evidence when it’s clear that with your anti-correlation you disregard all the evidence for AGW. So I’m not sure how your conclusion differs from a belief in the absence of evidence, except for the fact that you wilfully make “the” evidence disappears.
That must be when absence of evidence becomes evidence of absence and everything becomes religion once again.
We were talking about CO2 being the primary forcing. It is clear it is not.
Of course I recognize the evidence for AGW, and I do accept that there is AGW, but there is also NGW that contributes in great measure to GW.
The problem is the people that disregard all evidence for NGW and pretend to control climate by controlling emissions. And it is a problem because they pretend we all do as they say based on their beliefs.
> We were talking about CO2 being the primary forcing.
No idea who’s that “we” or what “primary forcing” means in this sentence. I don’t think anyone dispute that the Sun is what warms things up around here. From Very Tall’s source, The Sun is the source of energy that heats Earth. As for your usual eyeballing, it’s been anticipated almost a decade ago:
https://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2010/01/co2-and-temperature-for-800000-years.html
You have to read the top comment of the thread by Scott Koontz. He can answer your questions.
As for the rest, cute but useless. We know the CO2 increase affects temperature, but by how much? We don’t know because for 40 years we have been unable to determine climate sensitivity.
AGW is a 40-year old story always with a 10-year window to act, and always going to get much worse at some time in the distant future. I am not buying.
“We were talking about CO2 being the primary forcing. It is clear it is not.”
Cute, but wrong. Why deny the clear super majority of experts?
Science advances because experts are usually wrong.
Scott
You mean experts like Tsonis who attributed 1/3 natural forcing, 1/3 natural variability, 1/3 to AGW.
Let’s see after the AMO flips. That ol’ Arctic Sea Ice extent gains a little traction and those graphs take on a different significance. Tick tock, tick tock.
> We know the CO2 increase affects temperature, but by how much?
Hard to reconcile this with your earlier CO2 and temperature are anti-correlated during the past 10,000 years, isn’t it?
***
> I am not buying.
Quite different than your earlier royal We, isn’t it?
Not hard at all. You are not a deep thinker, are you? Past CO2 levels depended on net production minus net sinks. Present CO2 levels depend on anthropogenic emissions. If CO2 has a small effect on temperature it can show anti-correlation for a variety of reasons, as temperature is affected by other things, but even with a small effect the anthropogenic increase might show a detectable effect on temperature. I think it does.
> Present CO2 levels depend on anthropogenic emissions. If CO2 has a small effect on temperature […]
A big if that may rely sticking to the 10K scale:
http://climatechangenationalforum.org/your-logic-escapes-me-by-john-nielsen-gammon/
Where’s your statistical test for anticorrelation, Javier?
So much ignorance about paleoclimatology and natural climate change. Each and every assumption there is wrong.
Hi Willard. We know know that M-cycles drove the glaciation cycle. Correct? And thus we know that CO2 correlates to temperature geologically as a positive feedback. Glaciation initiated at times of maximum CO2 and terminated at times of minimum CO2. BTW, this reality is the opposite of what was presented as the science by Al Gore’s movie. The obvious significance of CO2 being a follower and M-cycles a leader is that it is not explained well by today’s beliefs about the role of forcing, especially the small deltas in M-cylce total solar insolation TSI.
Skeptical Science says: “Milankovitch cycles are insufficient to explain the full range of Quaternary climate change, which also requires greenhouse gas and albedo variations, but they are a primary forcing that must be accounted for.” Yet, as I pointed out, they easily overcome a headwind of CO2 (in both glaciation and deglaciation) like its not even there. This important point is omitted from the SKS M-cycles post. https://www.skepticalscience.com/Milankovitch.html
The answer must be that the dynamics are more important than the static forcing. The largest positive feedback, certainly geologically, is albedo enhancement from ice cover.
Yes Ron, The dynamics are critical to getting the overall energy balance right. That’s the point about things like tropical convection too.
> The obvious significance of CO2 being a follower and M-cycles a leader is that it is not explained well by today’s beliefs about the role of forcing, especially the small deltas in M-cylce total solar insolation TSI.
What’s that “it,” RonG?
Instead of “but Al” and “but SKS,” try RichardA’s dance:
What’s that “it,” RonG?
Willard, the “it” is the fact that we know M-cycles are the driver and not CO2 when trying to explain the glacial cycle.
Richard Alley says that CO2 forcing is necessary to explain some aspects of the glacial cycle. This is exactly what SKS’s post says. It’s the meme or consensus approved talking point. I and skeptical of this claim. Why? Because if it were true Alley and SKS would have no problem spelling out why. In fact if the ice core resolution was not clear enough to show that CO2 lagged warming and cooling by hundreds of years at each turn Alley and SKS would be claiming CO2 was the driver. How do I know this? They actually were making this claim in the early days of the global warming movement before the ice core resolution got better. Al Gore just didn’t get that memo for the 15 years before he made his movie. And ice core temperature proxy expert, Lonny Thompson, would not correct Gore’s mass media mis-information even if he had the opportunity to do so. Who do I know this? Thompson was the science adviser on “An Inconvenient Truth” (actually a liberal sermon by a televangelist that was factually false.)
“Too fast for you? Let’s try again, based on general principles. If natural cycles are regular and repeatable, the net temperature change over one complete natural cycle will be approximately zero. The warming during part of the cycle is cancelled by cooling during the other part of the cycle. What’s left is the long-term rise caused by man.”
Natural cycles are quasiperiodic. They are only approximately regular and repeatable. They are not limited to 60 year period either. What’s left is very likely another longer oscillation.
“…. especially the small deltas in M-cylce total solar insolation TSI.”
Except the deltas are NOT small where they matter – where northern landmass is latitudinally greatest and snow-covered. To-whit at 65 deg N. The TSI there has a delta of over 100 W/m^2 in extremis.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/insolation-at-65-north.jpg
Another incorrect assumption there. There is no latitudinal band in the planet where insolation matters more than at other, and if there was you would have no evidence for that. 65°N insolation does not rule the glacial cycle. It is another fake meme. It is obliquity and insolation gradients what matter as I have already shown.
Except the deltas are NOT small where they matter – where northern landmass is latitudinally greatest and snow-covered. To-whit at 65 deg N. The TSI there has a delta of over 100 W/m^2 in extremis.
Tell this to Richard Alley and the folks at SkS who say the deltas are not sufficient to explain the glacial cycle and need help from CO2 somehow.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/insolation-at-65-north.jpg
Evidently, for the next fifty thousand years,
Mother Nature will melt more Arctic ice than present, year after year.
In this respect, kinda silly for humans to worry about CO2.
Another assumption likely to be incorrect. You clearly don’t know what happened between 402-322 Kyr BP when eccentricity was also low. We might be looking at 50,000 years of ice grow.
The magical properties of CO2 to stop a glaciation have failed every time they have been put to the test. I wouldn’t bet for that.
> the “it” is the fact that we know M-cycles are the driver and not CO2 when trying to explain the glacial cycle.
Thank you for the clarification, RonG.
That’s exactly how Richard Alley started his dance.
Ara you suggesting my thermostat can’t control the temperatures of my greenhouse because a truck once ran over it?
Willard, you of all people should be aware that one of the primary rules of climateball is: all analogies fail.
The main point I made, which you are not addressing (and Alley dances around), is that CO2’s footprint is notably absent from multi-millennial scale climate effects. Now before you use the D word on me I will qualify that with my acceptance that radiative transfer is the only mode of energy flux for a planet, and that CO2 is a GHG. However, the 4.4 W/m^2 per doubling from CO2 seems to have a weak affect. Ice albedo, OTOH, a magnitude larger in effect. Yet, both of those are positive feedbacks, which means that an even more powerful force is required to reverse them. The TSI from M-cycles do not have that power. Thus, logic would lead one to conclude it is the dynamics that is key. For example, perhaps glaciers become unstable at a certain mass. Or, as Ralph Ellis postulates the cold causes such harsh living conditions as to kill grass and foliage at a glacial maximum allowing great dust bowls to dirty the ice and reduce the albedo and setting the glaciar up for destruction for the warm turn of the M-cycle (mainly high obliquity).
RonG,
The first point I made was that Javier’s “the evidence” was selective and hid his own inferences. The second point I made was that we have evidence of the effects of CO2 before humans were here – a 0.89 correlation ain’t that bad when we consider the claims of anti-correlation, something I should add to the Contrarian Matrix. The third point I made was that Richard Alley’s dance did not discount other factors than CO2 – it’s just that without CO2, nothing makes sense.
The point of my analogy is to illustrate that the notion of “control knob” might not mean what you make it mean. It also helps me show how your argument is invalid – ice ages do not change anything about the importance of CO2 to explain climate.
I don’t know where you got your CB playbook, but you should get a refund.
The first point I made was that Javier’s “the evidence” was selective and hid his own inferences.
What inferences? Javier asserted that CO2 is not the primary control knob in paleoclimate. Tony, not disputing that, wrote that TSI at 65 degN is the key. Javier said uh uh, it’s obliquity’s affect on the temperature gradients (polar transport) that is the key.
The second point I made was that we have evidence of the effects of CO2 before humans were here – a 0.89 correlation ain’t that bad when we consider the claims of anti-correlation, something I should add to the Contrarian Matrix.
That was the point made by Gore (Dr. Thompson’s thermometer) in “An Inconvenient Truth.” It is a classic example of correlation not being causation (leading to false conclusions).
The third point I made was that Richard Alley’s dance did not discount other factors than CO2 – it’s just that without CO2, nothing makes sense.
You, Alley and SkS need to be more specific in showing CO2’s critical role in the 800 ka global temp chart. I don’t see it.
Ice ages do not change anything about the importance of CO2 to explain climate.
Why, because SkS tells you so?
I don’t know where you got your CB playbook, but you should get a refund.
I hear your coined the term. I should have said avoidance of analogies is a good rule to avoid CB.
> You, Alley and SkS need to be more specific […]
Would you like a cup of coffee too, RonG? You still try to burden me with stuff over which I have no commitment. You still try to interject “but SkS.” CB is all about describing this kind of abusive behavior. There’s no need for it to recall that analogies always break down at some point.
Your epilogues won’t tell Denizens where the analogy break down in our case. Fancy a greenhouse, and in it a well-functioning thermostat. Add the caveat that a car once ran through the greenhouse. In what way does that caveat undermines the claim that your well-functioning thermostat controls the temperatures in your greenhouse?
If you’re being serious about going full “but chaos” on climate forcings, at least have the decency to learn some basics of systems theory.
I don’t think Ron is invoking chaos to explain anything.
His point is exactly correct, viz., its not just the integral of forcing that matters but also the distribution of forcing that can cause very large changes.
This has always been a flaw in the total forcing fundamentalists’ argument. They say for example that since total solar irradiance hasn’t changed much over the last 100 years, therefore it couldn’t have caused any of the observed changes.
And this also is the critical point about climate modeling. To get regional climates with any skill (which models do not do), the dynamics of the system is critical. And those dynamics involve chaos on many levels. Tropical convection is just one example where failure to get dynamics right will change the overall energy flows in the system and thus even the integrated or total response of temperature.
Even energy balance methods require forcings that depend on dynamics and must come from either measurements or detailed models with dynamics.
The Ice Ages present another problem, climate models are unable to reproduce them. This is probably another consequence of the errors in energy flows being much larger than the changes in forcings and feedbacks.
Nonlinear feedbacks must be playing a significant role here I suspect.
There is another talking point here concerning the role of CO2 vs. H2O. Since both are positive feedback responses to temperature changes and since H2O is a more powerful greenhouse gas, one can conclude I think that they are both independently partially responsible for the response. In this context it is incorrect to think of H2O as a feedback from CO2.
I personally don’t give much credence to quantitative arguments about the Ice Ages as we simply don’t know much about the small feedbacks that combined to produce the effect. The smaller the feedback, the more relative error there will be in any estimation of that feedback.
I personally don’t give much credence to quantitative arguments about the Ice Ages as we simply don’t know much about the small feedbacks that combined to produce the effect
We have ice core data. That tells all that is needed to know.
Ice accumulation is more in warmer times when more oceans are thawed to provide evaporation and snowfall. Ice accumulation is less in colder times when more frozen ocean prevents evaporation and snowfall. Ice accumulation causes ice ages and lack of ice accumulation causes warm periods. The coldest times are when it is snowing the least. The warmest times are when it is snowing the most. This causes the ice cycles in both hemispheres.
Willard, I will help you. When Alley says CO2 has a hand in the ice ages he is assuming that the CO2 positive feedback is necessary for the large swings. The favored evidence for this is the polar see-saw seen in the ice cores of Antarctica and Greenland during the transition to the Holocene. The theory is that M-cycle insolation at 65 deg N collapsed the glaciers. That changed the NH albedo and warmed it further. After hundreds of years the NH ocean warming released CO2 and raised the temp more. The CO2 being a well-mixed gas made its way to the SH and led to warming there. The problem with this theory is that CO2 can be ex-ed out of the cast and the play would still be the same. The global conveyor and atmospheric convection are the most efficient ways in which heat gets distributed from the NH to the SH over a 1000-year interval, not CO2.
So there is nothing in climate geology or history that shows a CO2 footprint on global temperature. That is significant because that leaves only laboratory evidence for CO2 warming ability and little observational evidence in the real world complexity.
> I will help you.
I rather think that you’re trying to help yourself with your switch-and-baiting, RonG, as none of my points rest on a specific theory regarding ice age. Even if I accept your explanation, it simply doesn’t undermine Richard Alley’s control knob, i.e. the idea that if you keep CO2 out of the many billion years of the Earth’s history, little makes sense, and if you add CO2 in everything does. You could as well have mentioned the extinction of the dinosaurs, which isn’t related to CO2.
There are other pieces to the puzzle – a thermostat (even on a 500K scale) never stands alone. There could be another explanation, but mere verbalized armwaving does not a scientific explanation replace. Which returns me to the first point I made – as hard as you hammer the table with “I haz all the evidence” like Javier does, if you don’t provide a better explanation than the one we got you got nothing more than talking points.
Replacing religion with contrarian recreation myths would be silly. The former is a dignified realm of human activity. The latter may be less so – witness your “I will help you.”
And since I’m here, I will point at this:
[DY1] I don’t think Ron is invoking chaos to explain anything.
and this:
[DY2] Nonlinear feedbacks must be playing a significant role here I suspect.
That is all.
Presumably this thread is relevant here:
https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/1086732931731677184
That’s an interesting thread, thank you.
Stephen McIntyre has one thing wrong, though. Milankovitch did not propose that N Hemisphere ice sheets increased and disintegrated because of orbital-scale variations in high NH latitude summer insolation. Nobody ever reads Milankovitch anymore. That was a corruption of Milankovitch theory introduced after Berger (1978) and Kutzbach (1981) because it was much easier to code into models than Milankovitchs true proposal: caloric summer half year. Milankovitch’s brilliant proposal is the integral of the energy received at a certain latitude over the half of the year when every day receives more energy than any day of the other half. This concept that has been reintroduced by Huybers is free from calendar assumptions. Its curve is completely different from 65°N insolation, because due to Kepler’s law, the higher the insolation on 21st June, the shorter the summer, as the Earth speeds up through the Perihelion.
Almost nobody ever understands Milankovitch theory. It has been corrupted, and obviously the corruption is wrong. But that wasn’t Milutin’s fault. He got it right. His caloric summer half year for high northern latitudes is very similar to obliquity, with a 41-kyr cycle.
It took several Milankovitch cycles to start an ice age and it took several Milankovitch cycles to end an ice age.
That is because and ice age does not start until enough sequestered ice volume has accumulated to cause the ice extent to increase. That is because an ice age does not end until enough ice volume has depleted to allow ice extent decrease.
Ice extent controls ice ages and some of the Milankovitch cycles were always close enough and got all the credit.
We put ice in the ice chest to cool it. It warms when the ice is depleted.
Earth does the same thing.
Javier
I was researching the Minoan Warm Period and I came across this paper. By coincidence shortly thereafter I read one of your comments on WUWT from July, 2016 regarding temperatures at some point being 4C warmer than present, to which you took exception. The 4C is mentioned in the linked paper as well. It is pay walled.
The paper mentions MM3 and LM1 as being the period with the 4C.
My interest is not whether the 4C is correct. I would just like to understand the reference to MM3 and LM 1, both terms with which I am not familiar. Do you know what time frame MM3 and LM1 include?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959683617752840
Cerescokid, I took exception to global average being 4°C warmer. I have no problem at all with regional temperatures in the northern hemisphere being that high or even higher, particularly if they are summer temperatures as most biological proxies record. Seasonality was much higher in the northern hemisphere during the early Holocene.
The people that wrote that article are archeologists in Crete. The MM3 and LM1 are archeological levels in Crete belonging to the Minoan civilization around 3350 yr BP, but they don’t talk about it, as they are writing for other archeologists that should know.
This may be of interest then.
https://www.clim-past.net/6/525/2010/
And Tsonis – despite silly misrepresentations from the climate peanut gallery – remains a pioneering climate theorist.
As for water vapor – it is difficult to see it condensing out of the system any time soon. So the real question remains. What would you do about multiple gas emissions?
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/styles/medium/public/2016-05/global_emissions_gas_2015.png
And here we should include black carbon.
‘The best estimate of industrial-era climate forcing of black carbon through all forcing mechanisms, including clouds and cryosphere forcing, is +1.1 W/m 2 with 90% uncertainty bounds of +0.17 to +2.1 W/m 2. Thus, there is a very high probability that black carbon emissions, independent of co-emitted species, have a positive forcing and warm the climate. We estimate that black carbon, with a total climate forcing of +1.1 W/m 2, is the second most important human emission in terms of its climate forcing in the present-day atmosphere; only carbon dioxide is estimated to have a greater forcing…’ Bond, T. C. et al, 2013, Bounding the role of black carbon in the climate system: A scientific assessment, JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH: ATMOSPHERES, VOL. 118, 5380–5552, doi:10.1002/jgrd.50171
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/sources-and-processes1.png
From multiple sectors.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/styles/medium/public/2016-05/global_emissions_sector_2015.png
While retaining and increasing global economic productivity?
Willard my reply is here https://judithcurry.com/2019/01/14/ocean-heat-content-surprises/#comment-887996 Apologies for missing the thread.
> Apologies for missing the thread.
You missed more than the thread, RonG.
You missed the whole concept of thermostat.
Kid,
Why pick Tsonis who predicted 50 years of cooling in January 2010. Nine years later and somebody should interview him and ask where he went wrong. They should ask if the Global Warming Policy Foundation is still onboard with their “looks like cooling” just before the warmest decade. Reminds me of Curry, who claims that natural forces are to blame but are really explaining the movement of heat, not the reason we are warming.
http://www.maciverinstitute.com/2010/01/uw-milwaukee-professor-predicts-50-years-of-global-cooling/
As I said Tick tock Tick tock.
Then there were all those predictions of Manhattan being underwater by now, no more snow, islands disappearing, coastlines disappearing, no Arctic Sea Ice in September. Keep your eye on the ball.
Tick tock
In 1846 the Australian aborigines had noticed climate change and were most likely predicting more of the same
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Image730_shadow.png
I wonder if in 1850 they were predicting the thinning of the Jacobshavn glacier by 1903?
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Image1824_shadow.png
Could anyone forecasted in 1868 the warmer Arctic that occurred the next 50 years
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Screen-Shot-2017-02-01-at-6.48.38-AM-down.gif
They were blaming white-man for climate change!!! They can be credited with inventing IPCC 150 years ago.
The last time I checked no one was predicting the drying up of the Seine, Rhine and Danube as apparently happened in the 1300s.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2017_07_21_20_20_35-down.gif
1718 is a good heliocentric Jovian analogue of 1539. There is another 179 yrs before 1540, in 1361:
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/weather1.pdf
The link is wonderfully informative. Thanks
CERseco kid
that is a very useful link from ulric. There are two or three similar publications, several of which were written by former met office men and even one commissioned by the met office in the 1930’s
A number of events are no doubt duplicated, for others no confirmation can be found and for still more it is likely the legends, superstitions and religious fervour of the time had an impact on their accuracy.
However bear in mind that over time very many other records have been lost it is clear that there are many tens of thousands of good records that help us to paint a picture of our past climate and weather.
The trouble is they will be dismissed as ‘ anecdotes’ as they preceded the computer age. Over the years I have posted thousands that come directly from researchers and scientists and historian’s of the day that clearly paint a convincing picture. But unless they are a modern scientist, again it is all all ‘anecdotal’. So your newspaper clippings are anecdotal, reports from scientists of the day of the melting arctic at various times during the last two hundred years are also anecdotal.
NOt one mile from my hoe is a plaque to scoresby the first arctic researcher despatched by the royal society to examine the melting arctic two hundred years ago. That is obviously a figment of my imagination and he clearly did not exist
Tonyb
Thanks Tony
I find it humorous that so many want to dismiss such massive amounts of evidence. If these “anecdotes” were only extreme rarities, I’d get their point. But they can’t bury history from thousands of sources. The 1930s heat is even under attack. Lol. What a joke.
OT. My wife has been working on our genealogy for 20 years. She informed me last night I’m related to a Knight from England in the 1400s.
On the other hand he might not have existed and it’s just an anecdote. :)
Ceresco kid
Yes, all our ancestors are mere anecdotes and the weather they experienced was in their imagination, should they have existed in the first place of course
You raise an intriguing point. Why do we believe the often single source records are good enough to trace our families, but the thousands’ of records that exist on the everyday conditions our ancestors faced are not good enough to trace the evolving weather?
Do you know which knight it was from the fourteenth century?. Hope it wasn’t the one from monty python and the holy grail!
Tonyb
(Javier, since the white man brought about the industrial revolution, they were right about that, too… ☺️)
Tony
His name was Sir Stephen Merriam, Goudhurst, Kent
I assume his character was superior to my ancestor George Adams who was imprisoned in Massachusetts for selling alcohol to Native Americans in the 1600s.
Another George Adams was born in Queen Camel, Somerset in 1585.
The fear of being drowned by ice is not new as evidenced by this article. When it gets warm, attention is immediately directed at the poles.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2016-05-27-18-42-16_shadow.png
Ceresco kid
How interesting. Queens camel is close to Glastonbury and north Cadbury. They seem to have an active genealogy group
https://forebears.co.uk/england/somerset/queen-camel
Your forefather would have had a chilly early life as you may remember from my reconstruction of CET to 1538 in my article The long low thaw.
If you come cross any weather references during your research do let me know, despite them being only ‘anecdotal’
Tonyb
Climate has cycled forever, modern climate people want an average hockey stick handle and want us to adjust our CO2 to maintain that hockey stick temperature.
History and data shows that climate cycles to warmer and then colder, every time with some interesting excursions from a steady regular sine wave. Scientists do not understand why some of the correlations cause cycles to change and some do not. They claim they do not understand what caused past warm and cold times and do not understand what caused them to end, yet, they claim they know what we can do to control the future.
They say the future will be perfect if we make the renewable energy investors rich enough and make all rich countries as poor as the poor countries. Much of the world is already investing in this strange folly. Some of the world is waking from this strange disease but in other places it is spreading.
CO2 makes green stuff grow better while using precious water more efficiently. More is better, every bit of real data shows that more CO2 is better for life on earth. No real data shows any evil from CO2, only opinions and computer output from flawed computer models support this sky is falling madness. Past climate cycles have been warmer and colder than now, climate is changing in cycles, as it always has done, and we cannot create a hockey stick handle climate.
When oceans get warm enough and thawed enough, evaporation and snowfall in cold places stops sea level rise. When oceans get cold enough and frozen enough evaporation and snowfall do not replenish ice is cold places and sea level rises. Warm times are normal, natural and necessary to put ice on land. Cold times are normal, natural and necessary to allow ice to deplete. Cycles are necessary to maintain the polar ice cycles. Sequestered ice is replenished in warm times. Sequestered ice depletes in cold times. History and data and common sense show this to be true.
There is no missing heat, there is only missing knowledge of natural cycles.
Water density and ice density changes with temperature changes are magically different from other materials. The magical properties of water and the abundance of water in all of its states is the key to the wonderful climate on earth.
I think this obsession with measuring temperatures is distracting from a more intractable and wicked problem, pollution.
Which two environmental factors will have the biggest long term negative effect on the biosphere?
1) The modest rise in ocean temperature and sea levels in 50-70 years?
or
2) The accelerating changes in the chemical composition of the water?
“Around 20 billion tons of waste per year ends up directly in the oceans.”
https://www.devex.com/news/opinion-defusing-the-toxic-timebomb-of-invisible-ocean-pollutants-94083
Details in report:
https://ipen.org/sites/default/files/documents/ipen-ocean-pollutants-v2_1-en-web.pdf
As Curry noted in a recent tweet about ocean brine discharges and the rapid increase of dead zones, it’s what’s IN the water that should worry us.
I would be more sympathetic if I hadn’t discussed the desalination study above.
https://judithcurry.com/2019/01/14/ocean-heat-content-surprises/#comment-887760
Sorry I missed your earlier comment. I always figured you would would lean toward #2 being the bigger problem.
AGW has sucked the oxygen out of public discourse on critical social and environmental concerns for 30 years.
But the 5th estate is always superficial and agenda driven.
At a time when the state of the art among prominent alarmists is that global warming is real but hiding deep in the ocean where it is currently undetectable by modern science– we’re talking about something that is really more ‘art’ and politics than logic and ‘science’ or perhaps more likely, a chimera in that it can only be hypothesized… nothing more than a modern day, spirituality-based spoken word that’s based on feelings, emotions and fears instead of objective observations, a recognition of the intrinsic nature of things, historical references or even a reverence for truth.
They hide the heat where no one can currently prove or disprove it is there.
Ah yezzzz… a shell game. So, it’s a hoax! It’s happened in science before –e.g., the Piltdown Man hoax.
Over the years many deluded societies have fallen prey to bubbles, manias, derangements and hoaxes–e.g., long ago there was the Tulip mania, the Gin bubble and the Piltdown Man hoax. Not long ago, there was the dot-com bubble, Bush derangement, the housing bubble and gold mania, the free money-free lunch-debt bubble, the global warming hoax, the disruptive climate change mania, the Apple and Tesla bubble, the liberal Utopian alternative energy delusion and now the Russian collusion conclusion..
OHC consideration always raises three factors with me:
1. Pielke Sr’s point that because ocean involve a lot of millenial scale turnover, OHC increases are essentially lost to the climate system, so OHC increase is a moderator of climate change.
2. Were no horizontal mixing to occur, and the theory of ocean uptake of atmospheric imbalance to be accurate, one would expect low and mid-latitude ocean temperatures at depth to approximate the surface temperatures. This does not happen. While there is some mixing indicated by the temperature gradients, even below 2000m, the greatest depths are marked by temperatures much closer to 0C than to surface temperatures. Polar deep water formation appears to dominate diffusion.
https://i.stack.imgur.com/rugfb.png
3. The higher surface temperature anomalies climb with respect to ocean temperatures, the more stable the ocean profiles become, which opposes further mixing ( which would manifest in increased temperature trends and decreased OHC trends if so ).
#3 is important; ocean surface heating and cooling are not symmetrical
Simply look at the ocean temperature charts above. El Nino and La Nina can swing the upper surface temperature by 3 or 4 degree C. Calculate out how long the marginal W/m^2 due to man-made CO2 would take to replace the energy from just one ocean cycle. Assuming anthropogenic CO2 provides 0.94 W/m^2 and sunlight is 1,000 W/m^2, simply do the math. CO2 is like adding a garden hose to the Alaskan Pipeline. Its contribution is immaterial given the enormous energy Flux associated with natural phenomenon. Simply do the math. The cycles are way too fast for CO2 to ever disrupt the balance. Also, visible radiation warms the oceans, LWIR between 13 and 18 micron doesn’t, that is why the surface is cooler than water just 1 mm deeper. Even if CO2 does cause the warming, it can’t stop the oceans from belching it out during an El Nino. Nature has a safety valve, and all CO2 could do it trigger it sooner than it usually would. To believe CO2 can cause catastrophic warming 1) denies the geological record and 2) assumes Mother Nature is an idiot. She isn’t.
Argo temperature profiles are accurate to 0.002 K and depth to 2.4 dbar. While the Argo ‘climatology’ is the most robust available – it is far too short to capture decadal to millennial changes in coupled ocean and atmospheric circulation and consequent heat transport. The problem with earlier ocean data is the ‘climatology’ used to infill sparse and infrequent data concentrated in shipping lanes.
Heat accumulates in the upper ocean because of bouyancy. And change in OHC does require an energy imbalance at TOA.
d(OHC)/dt = energy in – energy out
By the 1st law of thermodynamics.
Energy out varies in both shortwave and infrared.
“The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) Earth radiation budget (ERB) is determined from the difference between how much energy is absorbed and emitted by the planet. Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.” Loeb et al 2012 – Advances in Understanding Top-of-Atmosphere Radiation Variability from Satellite Observations
Do greenhouses gases change the optical properties of the atmosphere? Yes of course they do.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/harries-2001.png
How, why and at what scales does planetary atmospheric and ocean circulation – and hence albedo – change?
“In 1963, Lorenz published his seminal paper on ‘Deterministic non-periodic flow’, which was to change the course of weather and climate prediction profoundly over the following decades and to embed the theory of chaos at the heart of meteorology. Indeed, it could be said that his view of the atmosphere (and subsequently also the oceans) as a chaotic system has coloured our thinking of the predictability of weather and subsequently climate from thereon.
Lorenz was able to show that even for a simple set of nonlinear equations (1.1), the evolution of the solution could be changed by minute perturbations to the initial conditions, in other words, beyond a certain forecast lead time, there is no longer a single, deterministic solution and hence all forecasts must be treated as probabilistic. The fractionally dimensioned space occupied by the trajectories of the solutions of these nonlinear equations became known as the Lorenz attractor (figure 1), which suggests that nonlinear systems, such as the atmosphere, may exhibit regime-like structures that are, although fully deterministic, subject to abrupt and seemingly random change.” Slingo and Palmer 2011 – Uncertainty in weather and climate prediction
Small changes in orbital parameters or greenhouse gases can cause perturbations in the spatio-temporal chaos of Earth’s multiply coupled flow field.
What a monster El Niño that was!
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/#tabs=Outlooks
I have contacted some national measurement institutes in various countries seeking to find the best accuracy they work to, for T measurement in pure water in their controlled labs. Answers are awaited.
In the interim, lab equipment manufacturers ask 4 to 5-figure dollar sums for water baths to allow immersion of objects at controlled temperatures. The best off-the-shelf accuracy from a quick search was +/- 0.02 deg C for a bath used in a controlled room. Ditto for expensive Pt thermometers, the best figure I found was +/- 0.003 deg C accuracy (but not much description about this number).
It would, I think, be prudent to have a deep think about how accurately we can measure open ocean T, with gear like Argo floats. Personally, as one who once owned a lab and tried for good T accuracy, I have grave doubts about claims like +/- 0.001 deg C for Argo.
Geoff.
Knock yourself out – https://www.seabird.com/product.detail-print.version.jsa?id=54627907875
Over three years ago, I contacted the ARGO team to understand the accuracy of the temperature measurements. They referred me to the manufacturer, who indicated their system was proprietary and would not provide any details. I followed up with the ARGO team, and they provided a link to this paper: https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JTECH2016.1
Although interesting, it does not explain the basis for the accuracy claim.
Calibration baths of course. Here sensor drift in recovered Argo floats is discussed.
https://www.seabird.com/cms-portals/seabird_com/cms/documents/LongTermAccuracyStabilityArgoCTDs-SeaTechFeb2016.pdf
While the sensitivity of the electronics is arbitrarily high – all sensors require calibration.
What ever weaknesses and uncertainties that might be present in the ARGO system should be multiplied by the X factor to get a sense of accuracy and reliability of the data from the HMS Challenger expedition. The report, linked above, goes into detail about the differing measurements depending on the types of devices used by the researchers. If there are questions about the current data, they cannot compare to the ones about the figures from 1872-76.
Ocean Heat Content Surprises
Tony Banton | January 15, 2019 at 12:49 pm |
“Water is abundant, water changes state, water, in all of its changing states, is the primary internal regulator of climate.”
Never considered the fact that water condenses and CO2 doesn’t.
As in what that means “ atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature
Andrew A. Lacis,* Gavin A. Schmidt, David Rind, Reto A. Ruedy
Ample physical evidence shows that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the single most important climate-relevant greenhouse gas in Earth’s atmosphere. This is because CO2, like ozone, N2O, CH4, and chlorofluorocarbons, does not condense and precipitate from the atmosphere at current climate temperatures, whereas water vapor can and does. Noncondensing greenhouse gases, which account for 25% of the total terrestrial greenhouse effect, thus serve to provide the stable temperature structure that sustains the current levels of atmospheric water vapor and clouds via feedback processes that account for the remaining 75% of the greenhouse effect. Without the radiative forcing supplied by CO2 and the other noncondensing greenhouse gases, the terrestrial greenhouse would collapse, plunging the global climate into an icebound Earth state.
It often is stated that water vapor is the chief greenhouse gas (GHG) in the atmosphere. For example, it has been asserted that “about 98% of the natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapour and stratiform clouds with CO2 contributing less than 2%” (1). If true, this would imply that changes in atmospheric CO2 are not important influences on the natural greenhouse”
–
What a lot of twaddle.
Not surprising seeing Gavin and Andy together.
To think top scientists think they can fool people.
Or even worse fool themselves. Scrub the second option, they are not foolish but certainly incredibly misleading.
As is anyone putting up this parody of science as an argument.
–
25% of total terrestrial GHG effect (with other non condensers)? Or less than 2%. What a farce that such ranges can be quoted.
Even worse the fact that water vapour ( just call it a gas, please) can be excluded from relevance because it can precipitate out. At the same time as it is constantly replenished by evaporation. Meaning it’s actual concentration hardly changes at all.
Churls who use arguments such as these to support insupportable positions should be called out every time they pop up up mouthing platitudes.
Lol. Too funny.
… Another early and widely cited estimate is from Lindzen [1991] (in a book review of the 1990 IPCC volume) states that “98% of the natural greenhouse effect” is due to water vapor and stratiform clouds, and “less than 2%” for CO2, though no source is given for these numbers. …
SOI dropping sharply may save your El Niño yet?
It’s not my El Niño. I don’t forecast ENSO. Professor Curry’s ENSO forecast is available to read. The SOI drop would be saving it.
I predicted a weak El Nino, or on the positive side of neutral, which is what we have had.
Seems a bit noncommittal:
https://i.imgur.com/WkGg5jm.png
angech,
Do you not get that they weren’t quoting the 2% as a viable answer, they were pointing out that it is quoted by some, but isn’t consistent with their detailed analysis.
ATTP, 25% is quoted by some as a viable answer and it is quoted by them in their otherwise detailed analysis but it isn’t consistent the atmospheric GHG as we know them.
If they use 25% as their stock figure then their analysis is obviously phoney and misleading.
You are aware that GHG concentrations are quite variable over the globe.
The biggest variable is water vapor. When this is lower as over the Arctic, Antarctic and some desert areas and that region of South America it is still never zero but the other gases increase as a component of the otherwise lower GHG effect in these areas.
These are the only places that you might get CO2 up to 25%. The rest of the time it is much lower than this. 2% I understood was not in anyway a realistic figure but they quoted it, they did not state in anyway shape or form that it was not viable, just that is was an assertion that they therefore seem happy to put as a lower boundary.
I see figures of 9-25 % thrown around as the range.
Would you care to comment on this as being viable or non viable for a range?
If I am right, and I must be unless you correct me then they should have quoted their paper on a range of say 17%.
Giving them some latitude.
Since their paper says 25% they are not detailed, not correct, and should be called to task.
I will cut Andy some slack, the quote must be wrong surely. I must have copied out a wrong comment.
angech,
This doesn’t even make any sense, so I don’t know how to even begin responding to the rest of your comment.
Sorry.
The 2% figure JCH has explained is a quote from a Lindzen study 1991 above.
Seeing that it is attributable to Lindzen and does exist and was mentioned by Andy Lacis and Gavin in a serious post it is very hard to read or believe that they were not quoting it as a viable number.
I did try to post on your site that the 25% figure for the effect of CO2 as a total contribution to the total global GHG effect is wrong.
The reason being that at the most, with all other GHG at their lowest possible contributing effect, CO2 would be hard pushed to reach 25%.
Most sources give ranges between 9 -24% the range varying due to water variability.This gives an average of 17% at most.
The Schmidt Lacis paper on the surface purports to work on 25% which is clearly totally wrong.
Why would one dispute this?
Attribution of the present-day total greenhouse effect
JCH | January 18, 2019 at 11:41 pm |
Attribution of the present-day total greenhouse effect.
Thanks, you are one of the few people to put up good references and back up your comments.
It is a good counterpoint to my argument.
Thank you for the referece JCH.
Strange to see climate scientists have so little critical sense. Cloud feedback bigger than CO2 forcing, and water vapor feedback 2,5 times CO2 forcing. “Motivated by the need for a clear reference for this issue, we review the existing literature and use the Goddard Institute for Space Studies ModelE radiation module to provide an overview of the role of each absorber at the present‐day and under doubled CO2. With a straightforward scheme for allocating overlaps, we find that water vapor is the dominant contributor (∼50% of the effect), followed by clouds (∼25%) and then CO2 with ∼20%. All other absorbers play only minor roles. In a doubled CO2 scenario, this allocation is essentially unchanged –”
So, Gavin A Schmidt, Reto A Ruedy, Ron L Miller, Andy A Lacis, are you still defending old failures?
It’s real simple. They’re correct; you are not.
As I read it over again, I saw that they were writing about LW absorption, and not short wave interactions. So it is not about feedback.
I would think that atmospheric circulation was also a “regulator” of climate. But there is no single primary regulator. In fact climate is not regulated.
Bear in mind that the observed oscillations in every aspect of climate are consistent with a chaotic response to constant solar energy input. In that case these changes literally have no explanation. It is just the butterfly effect in action. I call this the chaotic climate hypothesis. At this point it is looking pretty good.
In the past, climate cycles repeat, that is not any kind of chaotic response. What happened changed over time to colder and bigger cycles until twenty thousand years ago and then changed to smaller cycles over the most recent ten thousand years. The most recent ten thousand years of cycles is the new normal, this will continue. Nothing has happened to stop whatever causes the Medieval Warm Period and then the Little Ice Age and now the Modern Warm Period. After a few hundred years of this warm period, it will get Little Ice Age Cold again. Sea level will go down during this warm period as more Polar Evaporation and Polar Snowfall rebuilds ice on Greenland and other cold places in the Northern Hemisphere. Look at the snowfall this winter.
Given that chaos is a non periodic oscillator, how are these “cycles” not chaotic
repeating “cycles” are not chaotic
in a warm cycle, predict a cold cycle coming and it does.
In a cold cycle, predict a warm cycle coming and it does.
it snows more in every warmer time and more ice accumulation causes more ice extent and that causes colder It is snowing more now, after a few hundred years of more snowfall, sea level will be lower and it will get colder.
A cold period followed the Roman Warm Time.
The Little Ice Age followed the Medieval Warm Time.
Another Little Ice Age will follow this Modern Warm Time.
Total lack of chaos causes these thousand year cycles.
These regular cycles happen due to internal responses that depend on oceans and also ice that is sequestered on land in cold places.
Thanks, I needed that. Will,lighten up.
angech, nobody listens to those people anyway. For all the screeching done by the agw crowd, life still goes on as it always has. It’s only us climate change junkies that pay them any mind at all. (and we really don’t account for much either)…
“angech, nobody listens to those people anyway. For all the screeching done by the agw crowd, life still goes on as it always has. ”
A prime example of the ‘down-the-rabbit-hole-logic’ of naysayers.
Err, psssst — it’s the other way around.
Science goes on without the slightest notion that Naysayer Blogs and their denizens exist.
Just as should be the case.
A study is done.
It is replicated.
And again, and again.
New evidence uncovered.
Still fits the ~150 year radiative physics.
Naysayers say no.
Life (and science) goes on as it always has.
Banton, the point i’m trying to make is that regardless of what the science says life still goes on. The agw crowd has done a fantastic PR job in selling agw. Even skeptics concur with that. And yet, what do we really have to show for it. (not much, according to hansen himself) Nobody really needs to be called out as angech was saying, because nobody really cares…
BTW, Tony, i’ve always been curious on what your take is on CO2’s impact on the ice ages. Consensus view holds that 1/3 of the warming from glacial to interglacial is caused by CO2. But, how can this be? Tiny CO2 is competing with orbital forcing, changes in ice albedo and water vapor. And yet it claims one third of the pie? i’d be interested to hear your take on it as i’ve always enjoyed your comments (and all that you bring to the table)…
Tony
If the 150 years radiative physics is right, and of course it is, one has a problem with the amount of heat in the oceans.
This is why you cheer every time a new study comes out proving the existence of this mythical heat despite all observations (real data) to the contrary.
Only to go quiet when the study goes flat, as it must, because observations.
If the heat is not there, that the physics says should be, you are missing some factor that needs to be included.
One such factor of course is that the warming, because of the missing factor, is not there.
Science and life goes on despite people going down missing heat rabbit holes.
We need to think about what we mean by “climate”. It is not primarily semi-theoretical abstractions such as ocean heat content or volumes of the ice caps. It is the atmospheric conditions at the surface and lower atmosphere where the biosphere is situated. For instance, what if during ice ages the deepest oceans are half a degree warmer? Then the heat content of the atmosphere and ocean are the same and by the heat accounting definition of climate, the climate is unchanged. But with Berlin one km under ice, that definition would have little meaning.
Consider two facts. The ocean holds the vast majority of climate heat (1). And the oceans have a large vertical temperature stratification (2) with near freezing water at the deepest level even in the tropics where at the surface the water temperature may approaching 30 C. This means that vertical mixing of the ocean, alone, is able to change climate: more vertical mixing and it gets colder, less and it warms. It is the single most significant climate process over timescales of decades and above. Everything else, including in the atmosphere, can almost be ignored.
You don’t need to think in terms of warmth moving from the bottom up – just a reduction in vertical mixing would warm the surface, relatively.
Yes in the long term, if energy received by the sun 🌞 increases slightly, such as from CO2 back radiation, then the oceans will gradually warm. Granted. But this happens slowly since the oceans are big. On a timescale of decades or even more, there is so much ocean heat energy that the climate as a whole, in terms of heat energy accountancy, can be considered to be adaiabatic. That is to say, temperature change overall is zero sum game, warming in one place is balanced by cooling somewhere else.
We do know already that slight increase in insolation will slowly warm the oceans. How slowly? Over thousands of years. How do we know this? From palaeoclimate history: ever since the mid Pleistocene transition, every interglacial without exception has followed a peak of obliquity with a lag (delay) of exactly 6500 years. It takes 6500 years for increased insolation to make its way to the deepest ocean and bring about a change in the temperature of deep upwelled water.
So we know that the time scale over which insolation changes result in noticeable climate change is 5000-10000 years; thus we know already that the idea that increased backradiation from CO2 causing actual warming of the climate over a mere 200 years or so is very improbable. But another aspect of the primary role of vertical ocean mixing in climate change (climate is always changing, with or without humans) is that of attribution. Natural chaotic-nonlinear oscillation in ocean circulation (owing to its being an open dissipative system with mixed positive and negative feedbacks) will mean that there are always natural changes in vertical mixing. So the climate – meaning at the surface where people and the rest of the biosphere live, will be always, naturally, changing.
So the climate has warmed in the last 200 years. Is this due to (a) a process slightly increasing insolation that we know normally takes 6500 years to have a noticeable effect; or (b) from natural change in ocean circulation and vertical mixing which is chaotically changing all the time?
Low solar = a warm AMO phase = a decline in low cloud cover = increased upper ocean heat uptake.
I can’t find a solar signature. The suggestion is that – based on eliminating the impossible – is that the 20 to 30 year periodicity has something to do with the Hale cycle.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/smeed-fig-72-e1518284539722.png
https://www.ocean-sci.net/10/29/2014/
But negative NAO, cooler AMO and reduced AMOC.
This may be associated with low solar activity – e.g. – http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/5/2/024001/meta
And at any rate the cloud and energy changes in that part of the world are not that significant.
e.g. https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/6/3/62
“But negative NAO, cooler AMO…”
The reverse. Positive NAO regimes early-mid 1970’s, mid 1980’s, and early 1990’s when the AMO was colder:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/nao.timeseries.gif
It’s a ~69 year envelope not 20-30 years.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/association-between-sunspot-cycles-amo-ulric-lyons
“And at any rate the cloud and energy changes in that part of the world are not that significant.”
Hadley circulation is effected, driving changes in tropical low cloud cover, and the changes in the mid latitudes are certainly significant.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/actualmonthly/17/Sunshine/UK.gif
Re Argo accuracy, National Measurement bodies from 2 countries have replied. They do cooperative work on Argo, so quoted accuracies are likely to be the same figures, by agreement. I suspect that 0.001 degrees C accuracy has its origins from this cooperation.
One national lab noted informally that they maintain calibration water tanks at about +/- 0.004 C at the water triple point around 1 deg C. but strive for 0.001.
Another “has a water bath in which the temperature is controlled to ~0.001 °C, and our measurement capability for calibrations in the bath in the range up to 100 °C is 0.005 °C. ”
Those of you who have worked close to the lower limit (as analytical chemists often do) can attest to the difficulty of achieving consistent performance.
There is a large difference between lab performance and performance in the uncontrolled, forceful, varying open oceans. Caveat emptor. Geoff.
I gave the specifications for the sensor used in 90% of Argo floats. A sensor accuracy of +/- 0.002 K.
And yet there are more wild and unsupported claims about sensors in the wild and collusion. Making off the cuff claims about the errors of any data under discussion seems Sherrington’s sole technical recourse.
They do not of course report it to 3 decimal places.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/argo-to-may-2018-e1547331349669.jpg
Not a single comment of what I wrote. That means no one believes Water reflects Radiant Heat. There is nothing incorrect about my reading of the Antarctic ice core. We have begone the new Ice Age
“You can see spatio-temporal chaos if you look at a fast mountain river. There will be vortexes of different sizes at different places at different times. But if you observe patiently, you will notice that there are places where there almost always are vortexes and they almost always have similar sizes – these are the quasi standing waves of the spatio-temporal chaos governing the river. If you perturb the flow, many quasi standing waves may disappear. Or very few. It depends.” Tomas Milanovic
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/river-in-mountains.jpg
There are vortices in Earth’s flow field – driven by planetary rotation and non-equilibrium energy dynamics – with feedbacks in wind, cloud, heat transport in ocean currents, ice and biosphere.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/earthnull-18-7-19.png
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/equirectangular
“Climate is ultimately complex. Complexity begs for reductionism. With reductionism, a puzzle is studied by way of its pieces. While this approach illuminates the climate system’s components, climate’s full picture remains elusive. Understanding the pieces does not ensure understanding the collection of pieces.” Marcia Wyatt
With climate change it is the perturbations – orbital, solar, greenhouse gases – that push the system past transitions to abrupt regime change in coupled ‘quasi standing waves’ – ENSO, AMO, AMOC, PDO, PNA, IOD, SAM, NAM, ice ages, etc – in the planetary flow field.
Vertical heat transport in the planetary heat store is governed by two physical processes. Turbulent mixing in basin wide and kilometers deep vortices and the buoyancy of warm water.
Complexity and reductionism don’t mix. Either in biology or climate or any other chaotic-nonlinear self-organising system. Reductionism in biology has led to the great pharmaceutical failure of dry drug pipelines as linear catholic logic leads to endless surgical strikes on signalling cartoons failing again and again to yield effective medicines. Likewise in climate (politicised) science reductionism has caused Arrhenius’ cartoon to grow into the colossal error of CAGW. Effective science of complex systems must start by recognising complex systems and learning their language.
It seems that all measurements of ocean heat uptake show a robust trend, over the last years of about 8 ZJ pr year. I think that it is about the best estimate. But why should you make this into a heat contest Cheng, Abraham, Hausfather, Trenberth? And why these simplistic explanations? As scientists you should try to make the discussion constructive.
Cheng et al: “The ocean record of this imbalance is much less affected by internal variability and is thus better suited for detecting and attributing human influences than more commonly used surface temperature records.”
What do you know about that? Would you say the same amount of ocean warming 80 years ago.
Let me hear you say, Trenberth, Hausfather and friends: “The ocean record of imbalance between 1921 and 1943 was much less affected by internal variability and suited for detecting human influences.” Few people buy such slogans.
Question should be: Would you say the same about the same amount of warming 80 years ago?
I am really not sure if the heating of 8 ZJ pr year is the best estimate. There is also some cooling in deeper oceans. And there are some scientists who are not denying internal variability. “Part of the heat needed to bring the ocean into equilibrium with an atmosphere having more greenhouse gases was apparently already present in the deep Pacific,” said Huybers. “These findings increase the impetus for understanding the causes of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age as a way for better understanding modern warming trends.”
It is nice to see the support Wunsch and Heimbach now get from other scientists. Their paper came out in 2014: Bidecadal Thermal Changes in the Abyssal Ocean.
Dr. Curry,
Roy Spencer has a blog post on OHC. To quote:
“Cheng’s website also contains the yearly 0-2000m OHC data from 33 CMIP5 models, from which I calculated the average warming rate, getting 0.549 W/m2 (again, not scaled by 0.7 to get a whole-Earth value). This is amazingly close to Cheng’s 0.555 W/m2 he gets from reanalysis of the deep-ocean temperature data.”
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2019/01/media-reports-of-40-adjustment-in-ocean-warming-were-greatly-exaggerated/
Assuming 0.55 W/m^2 is correct, it has important implication for climate sensitivity. Scaled to whole Earth surface:
0.55 x 0.7 = 0.385 W/m^2
This is the heat that went to the ocean 1971-2010. For the same period, atmospheric CO2 increased 325 to 390 ppm. Radiative forcing:
5.35 ln (390/325) = 0.975 W/m^2
Difference between ocean heat intake and CO2 forcing:
0.975 – 0.385 = 0.59 W/m^2
Earth’s surface must warm to radiate this excess heat. How much warmer?
dj = e o ((T + dT)^4 – T^4 = 0.59
where: dj = change in radiative flux, e = emissivity = 0.95, o = Stefan-Boltzmann constant, dT = change in temperature, T = ave. temperature = 287 K
Solving for dT:
dT = 0.12 K
This is the warming attributable to CO2 in four decades. The temperature trend in UAH satellite data is 0.13 K/decade or 0.52 K in four decades.
0.12/0.52 = 23% of global warming may be attributed to CO2
The warming attributed to CO2 may be lower since I did not consider heat transfer by evaporation, which is latent heat and does not change surface temperature.
Are you serious. AC systems cool houses based on evaporation reducing surface temperatures. Canvas bags hung on wagon train wagons and care bumpers have cooled water for people traveling in hot dry places for as long as we have historical records. Oceans cool with evaporation that warms atmosphere and provides water vapor that travels by convection where it condenses into water and changes to ice, releasing the energy from the surface to be radiated out. This powers rain and snow storms and pipes energy out to space. Dr Strangelove, your words are very strange.
. Oceans cool with evaporation that warms atmosphere and provides water vapor that travels by convection where it condenses into water and changes to ice, releasing the energy from the surface to be radiated out.
During Global Ice making this releases heat energy to the atmosphere thus keeping the average surface temperature of the earth’s surface constant.
During Global Ice Making the radient heat reflected to outer space by the larger surface of the ocean is replaced by melting the ice at the poles, thus keeping the average surface temperature contant.
Let:
T1 = initial temperature of water, T2 = final temperature of water, +dT = increase in temperature due to radiation, -dT = decrease in temperature due to evaporation, m1 = mass of water, m2 = mass of water vapor, +Q = heat transfer by radiation, -Q = heat transfer by evaporation, Cp = specific heat of water, L = specific latent heat of vaporization
T2 = T1 + dT – dT
+Q = -Q
+Q = Cp m1 +dT
-Q = L m2 = Cp m1 -dT
Therefore:
+dT -dT = 0
T2 = T1
No change in temperature. Evaporation is a negative feedback to restore equilibrium temperature
In AC:
+Q < -Q
T2 < T1
Decrease in temperature (cooling). You adjust the power of compressor to ensure +Q < -Q
@Robert Clark Earth surface temperature is not constant. When ice extent is large, surface temperature average is lower, when ice extent is small, surface temperature average is higher. These warmer and colder cycles alternate. In the warmer times, evaporation and IR out power the making of more ice which causes the next colder time. In colder times, lack of evaporation and IR out produce little ice and ice depletes until it retreats and causes warmer times. This causes ice cycles in Polar Regions. These Polar Ice Cycle regulated temperatures are averaged with the Tropical climate temperatures where there are not ice cycles involved to get earth average temperature. The internal ice cycles are ignored by most all. They can never get their climate understanding correct if they do not understand the Polar climate and the Tropical climate is different. Ice ages are colder times caused by more ice, colder times do not cause ice it results from ice.
Stay tuned, Nic has a forthcoming post on the Cheng et al. paper
Any percent of global warming attributed to CO2 can easily be attributed to the same natural warming that caused past warm periods, like the Roman and Medieval and warm periods before that, that were actually warmer than now. Natural cycles of alternating warm and cold periods are recorded in history and in ice core proxy data. Natural climate change did not suddenly stop and require us to take over.
“Natural climate change did not suddenly stop and require us to take over.”
You think 77% = 0. You have strange math
Dr Strangelove,
Can you please clarify what is the point you are making. Are the oceans warming faster than slower that consensus estimate? What are the “important implications for climate sensitivity? Would ECS and TCR be higher than lower than consensus? What is the revised estimate based on the figures you have given?
Let:
dj = radiative forcing, dT = change in surface temperature
dj/dT = 0.975/0.12 = 8.1 W/m^2-K
This is a strong negative feedback. Positive feedback < 3.7 W/m^2-K. All TCR estimates have positive feedback (except by Lindzen and Spencer independently) The reason is heat in deep ocean is excluded in surface temperature
Dr. Strangelove,
Thank you for your reply. However, could you please put your answer to my questions in plane language for a non-specialist. My interests are for policy analysis, not science.
Q1. What are the “important implications for climate sensitivity”?
Q2. Would ECS and TCR be higher or lower than the consensus central estimates?
What is the revised estimates of TCR and ECS (in degrees C for CO2 doubling) based on the figures you have given?
‘plain’, not ‘plane’
Q1. What are the “important implications for climate sensitivity”? Lower climate sensitivity
Q2. Would ECS and TCR be higher or lower than the consensus central estimates? Lower
What is the revised estimates of TCR and ECS (in degrees C for CO2 doubling) based on the figures you have given? TCR < 1 C
Thank you. I hope Nic Lewis’ coming post will give an update on the ECS and TCR figures.
“The heat content of the World Ocean for the 0–2000 m layer increased by 24.0 ± 1.9 × 10^22 J…” Levitus et al 2012 for 1955-2010
0.43 x 10^22 J/yr
“Those in annual mean global OHC of an improved objective analysis for 0-1,500 m depth is 16ZJ on average throughout the period.” Ishii et al 2017 for 1955 to 2015
so 1.6E+22 J/yr
“A stronger ocean warming trend has existed since the late 1980s for both 0- to 700- and 700- to 2000-m depths compared with the 1960s to the 1980s. The linear trend of OHC at 0- to 700-m depth is 0.15 ± 0.08 × 10^22 J/year (0.09 ± 0.05 W/m2) during 1960–1991 and 0.61 ± 0.04 × 10^22 J/year (0.38 ± 0.03 W/m2) during 1992–2015, a warming trend four times stronger than the 1960–1991 period. The linear trend of OHC at 700- to 2000-m depth is 0.04 ± 0.08 × 10^22 J/year (0.02 ± 0.05 W/m2) in the period 1960–1991 and 0.37 ± 0.02 × 10^22 J/year (0.23 ± 0.02 W/m2) from 1992 to 2015 (nine times stronger than that from 1960–1991) (table S1). This indicates an accelerating heat input into both the 0- to 700-m and 700- to 2000-m layers. The acceleration is most probably linked to the increasing EEI with time. In particular, a new study (51) shows that the recent acceleration is partly due to recovery from the volcanic eruption in 1992 (Mt. Pinatubo), which led to strong ocean cooling.” Cheng et al 2017
“We show that the ocean gained 1.33 ± 0.20 × 10^22 joules of heat per year between 1991 and 2016,” Resplandy et al 2018
I said the last post incorrectly. The radient from the sun that is reflected by oceans to outer space is relaced by the heat removed from the oceans and turned into ice at the poles This keeps the average surface temperature of the earth’s surface constsnt during Global Ice Making. Average surface temperature is just that. The average surface of the entire globe.
I am watiing for someone to prove we are not 18,000 years into the new Ice Age. Radaient heat is reflected by water and that is all that controls the Ice Age. Man has NO AFFECT.
Ice ages are colder when there is more ice extent thawing and reflecting. Warmer times when the ice is depleted and retreated allowing the warmer times because ice is not cooling by thawing and reflecting.
It snows more in warm times when more evaporation and IR out increases ice volume until it advances and increases ice extent. This is why warm periods always end with colder periods.
We are ten thousand years into a new normal age with smaller shorter cold and warm periods. The major ice ages have sequestered enough ocean water as ice in cold places to reduce the older major warm and cold cycles to the modern Little ice age and warm cycles. Less ice and water are available to take part in the cycles. The mass of ice and water that takes part in the cycles is the mass in the mass spring cycles. Evaporation and snowfall in cold places and the thawing rate of sequestered ice determine the spring rates for these processes.
MAN DOES NOT CONTROL THESE CYCLES!
CO2 DOES NOT CONTROL THESE CYCLES!
THESE CYCLES ARE NATURAL, NORMAL AND NECESSARY!
These cycles have changed over millions of years because the circulations of warm tropical water to polar regions have changed. More warm water circulating in cold places supports more sequestered ice on land. More sequestered ice over fifty million years did cause bigger and colder cycles until we reached the new paradise of our ten thousand years of Paradise Cycles.
“The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) Earth radiation budget (ERB) is determined from the difference between how much energy is absorbed and emitted by the planet. Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10712-012-9175-1
“This study examines changes in Earth’s energy budget during and after the global warming “pause” (or “hiatus”) using observations from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System. We find a marked 0.83 ± 0.41 Wm−2 reduction in global mean reflected shortwave (SW) top-of-atmosphere (TOA) flux during the three years following the hiatus that results in an increase in net energy into the climate system. A partial radiative perturbation analysis reveals that decreases in low cloud cover are the primary driver of the decrease in SW TOA flux. The regional distribution of the SW TOA flux changes associated with the decreases in low cloud cover closely matches that of sea-surface temperature warming, which shows a pattern typical of the positive phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.” https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/6/3/62
Poor wee willies ‘but chaos’ can only be found in data. It is the response of a complex and dynamic system – in atmosphere, cyrosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere – to changes in control variables – solar, orbital, greenhouse gases and aerosols.
How we see the coupled ocean/atmosphere system responding depends on which paradigm we adopt. I opt for something real.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/ghil-e1519934086457.png
It results in perpetual change as shifts and regimes in the climate system. It is something that only data can reveal. It is chaotic and not random.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/nile-e1527722953992.jpg
Crude and eccentric climate narratives – of which there are an abundance here – just don’t come close. Let alone poor wee wiliie’s empty verbosity and devotion to the AI economic overlord.
“We emphasize that the NE Pacific cloud
changes described above are tied to cloud changes that span the Pacific basin. Despite much less surface sampling in the Southeast (SE) Pacific, cloud and meteorological changes in that region
generally occur in parallel with those in the NE Pacific (Figs. 2 and 3). Also, we find that the leading mode in an empirical orthogonal function
analysis (15% of the variance) of global cloud cover (fig. S3) has a spatial pattern similar to that in Fig. 3 and the time series shows the same
decadal shifts as in Fig. 1, indicating that the changes in the NE Pacific are part of a dominant mode of global cloud variability.
The regression of adjusted shortwave and longwave cloud radiative effects from the ISCCP Flux Dataset on NE Pacific SST reveals that the
change in net cloud radiative effect warms the ocean by about 6 W m^−2 K^−1.”
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/325/5939/460
The question of the day given the lack of ‘recharge’ in the western Pacific and the dissipating warm blob in the central Pacific – is when the system will flip to La Nina and a cooler ocean and atmosphere.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/wrap-up/archive/20190108.sub_surface_anom.png
It periodically experiences La Niña, and its makes not a bit of difference. You need something much bigger, and it doesn’t exist.
Something bigger?
https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/8000/8703/sst_anomaly_AMSRE_2008105.jpg
So what? That happened. It did nothing.
And, today:
https://i.imgur.com/F4DzpQ5.png
On that subject, that El Niño that several were predicting for this new year didn’t really amount to anything except usual Christmas climatology:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/#tabs=Outlooks
It is well after Christmas and it is still snowing, and it is not going to stop soon.
And then there is this. Southern Ocean cool for 20 years. Very warm off New England and Nova Scotia for 15 years.
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2019/anomnight.1.17.2019.gif
I was talking about the next La Nina – which will cool both oceans and atmosphere.
Longer term? More salt is La Nina.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/vance2012-antartica-law-dome-ice-core-salt-content-e1540939103404.jpg
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00003.1
It depends on the volume of upwelling in the eastern Pacific – that modulates TOA radiant energy and climate. Cloud changes this century caused most ocean warming – as in the post hiatus study cited. Strong SW warming largely in response to warmer SST in the Pacific.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/ceres_ebaf-toa_ed4.0_anom_toa_shortwave_flux-all-sky_march-2000tojuly-2018-1.png
Cheng et al:
“About 93% of the energy imbalance accumulates in the ocean as increased ocean heat content (OHC). The ocean record of this imbalance is much less affected by internal variability and is thus better suited for detecting and attributing human influences than more commonly used surface temperature records.”
Greater rates of OHC rise from 1925 and from 1995 dominate the variability, and would be due to declines in low cloud cover associated with the warm AMO phase. But the elephant in the room is that the AMO is normally warm during centennial solar minima, due to an increase in negative North Atlantic Oscillation conditions. So why the post 1925 AMO warming? Regardless of the sunspots numbers then, there must have been periods of weaker solar wind to produce the negative NAO anomalies.
The ocean record of this imbalance is much less affected by internal variability THAT IS TOTALLY WRONG!
Ocean evaporation temperatures do provide the ice core data that is the measure of the internal response, internal variability.
When ocean temperatures are colder, polar oceans freeze and cut off evaporation and ice that is sequestered in cold places depletes and then retreats and causes warmer times to follow.
When ocean temperatures are warmer, warmer thawed oceans evaporate to cool the oceans and use the water vapor and energy creating IR out from forming ice in the high clouds. This increases ice sequestered in cold places until it advances and causes colder times to follow.
This is recorded in ice core data and in history.
Hypotheses that don’t explain data should be modified or discarded.
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/smeed-fig-72-e1518284539722.png
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/vance2012-antartica-law-dome-ice-core-salt-content-e1540939103404.jpg
Ah….. https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/greenland_mass_variation.png
Robert, which region are those sea salt values from? And what point are you trying to make with the AMO chart?
It is Law Dome ice salt in an ENSO proxy – and the link is given above. It was posted again here in error.
Smeed et al 2014 seems much more relevant for you. I noted here that you realized that your hypothesis hasn’t any explanatory power and you invent a new narrative about solar wind. You did the same thing above when I mentioned that north Atlantic SST and cloud feedback have a minor influence on global energy. You then decided it did with teleconnections to the Pacific.
AMO does not cause ENSO. So perhaps Vance et al 2013 is relevant after all.
There is certainly an AMO signal in the southern hemisphere, the AMO influences the PDO, the effects are not confined to the North Atlantic region.
I have not invented a new narrative about the solar wind, it is a rational deduction, and is supported by this study:
‘Responses of sea-surface temperature to solar wind speed on
the seasonal timescale have been found, and in the North Atlantic
region in winter they resemble the North Atlantic Oscillation. At
the locations of the peak (negative) response in the North Atlantic
the SST decreases by approximately 1°C for 100 km/s increase
in solar wind speed.’
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682616300360
So the AMO would be warm in negative Northern Annular Modes (NAM) – the alternate and improved nomenclature for the AO – it it were not for solar winds?
Surface pressure fields at both poles the waviness of the polar annular modes (SAM and Nam) – and these drive winds and currents in all the world’s oceans. Negative modes drive storms and winds into lower latitudes and spin up ocean gyres. Wavier annular modes may be associated with low solar activity. AMOC and AMO are expressions of changed heat transport patterns as a result – the latter not all that significant climatically. It’s a climate dog and you focus on the tail and not the dog.
Initially incoherent, then wrong about the significance of the AMO. Take the example of the mid latitudes, positive NAO/AO episodes drive short term reductions in cloud cover, but the multidecadal signal with the warm AMO phase associated with less cloud cover, is driven by negative NAO/AO. Elephants trump dogs.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/actualmonthly/17/Sunshine/UK.gif
AMO cloud feedback:
https://patricktbrown.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/786236_1_merged_1459456277.pdf
This is an AMO related signal:
http://www.climate4you.com/images/HadCRUT3%20and%20TropicalCloudCoverISCCP.gif
So positive NAM causes a warm north Atlantic at interannual scales and a negative NAM a warm north Atlantic at decadal scales? And that impacts tropical cloud and global sunshine?
It may be more a case of the parable of blind men and the elephant.
“So positive NAM causes a warm north Atlantic at interannual scales and a negative NAM a warm north Atlantic at decadal scales?”
No, positive NAO episodes drive seasonal to annual scale reductions in cloud cover, but negative NAO drives a warm AMO and hence reductions in cloud cover at inter-decadal scales.
“It may be more a case of the parable of blind men and the elephant.”
Only you being blind to what I had stated.
Off topic. Despite the next 7 days of 40 C in Victoria, Australia the rest of the world is showing signs of cooling.
Arctic and Antarctic about to make recoveries.
Tropics perhaps cooling down [the oceans, on topic].
The Arctic swings have been incredible this last 3 months, staggering, worth an article or 3 as totally at odds with all standard deviation changes.
If one had all 3 coalesce at the same time what a wonderful world it would be.
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Thanks for the info! I was always convinced that it is human activity that is the primary factor in climate change. But today, there is a lot of information refuting this fact. Would like to share this article – https://allatra.tv/en/article/why-is-the-climate-changing, which examines the reasons for climatic changes.
Ocean Heat:
1,368 W/m^2 ISR, 1,368 W/m^2 * .7 = 957.6 W/m^2 ASR.
A Watt is 3,600 J/h.
The oceans are 70% of the surface.
In 1 year of 8,760 hours the oceans receive 2.69E24 Joules.
Between 1950 and 2020 the oceans have accumulated about 20 E22 Joules.
Over 70 years 1.89E26 arrived at the oceans.
The accumulation is about 0.11% of the amount that arrived.
A rounding error.
I think this thread gleefully ignores post WW2 rapid industrialisation and electrification sulphur dioxide emissions and their role in masking the greenhouse impact from the CO2 atmospheric content. Now with those aerosols substatially reduced ocean heat content is rising rapidly as your graphs clearly show.