Time to panic:
Peter Hannam says: “The world’s oceans are heating at the rate of two trillion 100-watt light bulbs burning continuously…”
Maybe not?
Jo says: “… that’s two trillion light bulbs, plus or minus 200 trillion…”
Conclusion: Random noise is coming to get you.
Scientists used to care about measurement error. Not so much any more. The ARGO buoys are marvelous high-tech robots, but each thermometer measures 200,000 cubic kilometers of ocean. The thermometer in a buoy is accurate in a laboratory to 0.005C, but can they really detect global oceanic changes of five thousands of a degree?
Oh yessity say the scientists, because there are 3,000 thermometers. But, no no no thinks Jo. If they were all measuring the same swimming pool, having a lot of them would reduce the error, but each thermometer is measuring a different piece of ocean full of thermal noise. Some will argue that the the exact absolute temperature is not what matters, it’s the changing trend we need to measure. But these thermometers are not staying in one place measuring one tiny slice of the ocean, they roam randomly through water that varies from zero to 30C. Small eddies stir the water, and blobs of warmer and cooler tendrils circulate side by side. I hear there are internal thermal waves of heat sloshing through the ocean too. It’s a mess out there.
Imagine if our surface thermometers were roaming around the countryside. Look out — the Stevenson screens are on the move! How good would you feel about “the hottest” ever record then?
Are the oceans really warming? We’ll know in another 30 years or so.
ARGO data, updated to Jan 2015 | Graph: David Evans
Peter Hannam of the Sydney Morning Herald at least writes up the temperature change in decimals, which the ABC did not. It’s a big step forward in mainstream journalism (how low are our expectations). Perhaps skeptical criticism is getting to him? But he is still a gullible repeater, naively accepting everything he hears — he didn’t ask how big the error bars are, and whether 0.005C is remotely meaningful. Nor did he point out that if the oceans can absorb all that heat energy, and only warm by such an infinitesimally small amount, isn’t that a good thing? You know, perhaps we’ve got quite some time before we have to hit the panic button?
“Southern oceans play major role in absorbing world’s excess heat, study finds“
Oceans store about 93 per cent of the extra heat taken up by Earth. Photo: Max Mason-Hubers
The world’s oceans are heating at the rate of two trillion 100-watt light bulbs burning continuously, providing a clear signal of global warming, according to new study assessing data from a global fleet of drifting floats.
The research, published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Climate Change, used data collected from the array of about 3500 Argo buoys from 2006-13 to show temperatures were warming at about 0.005 degrees a year down to a depth of 500 metres and 0.002 degrees between 500-2000 metres.
Oceans south of the 20-degree latitude accounted for two-thirds to 98 per cent of the heat gain during the period studied, with three giant gyres in the southern Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans largely responsible for drawing down the extra warmth.
“The global ocean heat content right now is the most reliable metric of that radiation imbalance” between the energy received from the sun and what is radiated back to space, said Susan Wijffels, an oceans expert at the CSIRO and one of the report’s authors.
The ABC don’t even mention how small the theoretical temperature change is. It’s another chance to run their favourite headline “2014 hottest on record”. Reporter Bridget Brennan didn’t ask “how much warmer are the oceans”. She didn’t ask what the error margins are either. She mentioned “international data sets” but didn’t ask if the satellites (the two best data sets) agree that 2014 was the hottest ever (they don’t). She didn’t ask about “the Pause”. The pre-ARGO data has much higher, astronomic, uncertainties.
Researchers want more money. Abbott’s given the blame, but if the government’s bills are stalled, who is doing the stalling?
However, Dr Wijffels said Australia’s contribution is in doubt with about half of its Argo budget tied up with the Abbott government’s stalled higher education reform bills. Those funds run out “in a few months”, she said.
REFERENCE
Roemmich, D, Church, J., et al (2015) Unabated planetary warming and its ocean structure since 2006, Nature Climate Change, doi:10.1038/nclimate2513
Again a scientific study with an incredible accuracy of measurement, to thousandths of a degree celsius, and no standard deviations of means which renders it useless, but will, no doubt, be taken up as proof of global warming.
I wonder can a person tell the difference between, say, 25 and 27 degrees without reference to a thermometer? I can’t.
380
“Its heating up! The numbers say so! …Give us money!”
Meanwhile…
=> http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/02/shock-study-results-calling-climate-skeptics-deniers-just-pisses-them-off/
…They’ve called in a “behavioural social scientist” from Monash university to help them. They’re blaming it on “communication” for skepticism. (Yeah, they are that clueless!)
220
Really? I was always sooooo flattered to be called a denier by an hysterical follower of the global warming cult. I can’t image why it bothers anyone. Note it also says it’s a political/social problem, which I believe means if those conservatives in the US weren’t so pig headed and would just go along with massive taxes and wealth redistribution, the problem would be solved. Yeah, I also like having my carefully considered, science-based opinion dissed as “political/social”. These people have no positive communication skills whatsoever.
220
Has the Argo data been homogenised?
I do not ask this in jest.
Also, for how long have the thermometers had an accuracy of +/-0.003 degrees?
Surely satellite measurements of ocean areas are superior to the temperatures from a sparse population of buoy-mounted thermometers?
Also is the period 2003 to 2014 any more than simply a point (if that) on a graph. If you magnify these data sufficiently will be splitting hairs over the position of pixels.
320
The accuracy of the Argo thermometers is not the major issue. That is the spareness of the data. On average there is one Argo float for an area the size of Bulgaria or Pennsylvania. There are no floats in the massive Arctic ocean, nor near to Antarctica. Mostly they do not dip below 700 meters. It means that there has to be a lot of modelling of data, especially near to the surface where there are seasonal variations in temperature and where most of the warming has occurred.
240
If a buoy was measuring water that swirls and moves and just from friction alone could create a temp increase of 1/1000th of a degree, it would be useless being able to tell you whether a cubic km of ocean had heated up.
Its laughable.
70
Let’s play a hypothetical game. Had the Argo bouys shown a slight declining temperature trend for the 7 years from 2006-13, what would the CAGW adherants say?
Do I even need to provide the answer?
40
They changed instruments recently. The previous claim was +/-0.1°C accuracy. They would have recorded to the nearest mV (probably corresponding to 0.003°C)and I assume that the ‘accuracy’ is the uncertainty in the calibration curve that will also drift.
I suspect that the resolution was always that small (they could have recorded to 0.003°C) but the precision was less (large variation in readings over a short period) and the accuracy of the calibration was not that good because it drifted quickly. Only the latter is a problem if you take the average of many measurements (of the same sample). The new instruments are supposed to drift less.
If the temperature data was recorded to 0.1°C then you can’t pretend that the averages of thousands of readings will give you a precision of <0.05°C.
70
Please folk, help me out. Has the Argo data been homogenised.
The land station data for many countries was homogenised long before people twigged to it.
10
That’s why they always talk about “heat content”, never temperature.
But still, they insinuate with a straight face that this is what will cause
antarctica to melt , and woe to us all!
280
I thought volcanoes were doing a great job of melting antarctic ice…..
Mee think sthey are grasping at straws.
This is the problem when the Left dumb down education so far. When you have to drag people back up to a half-robust level of sound logical reasoning such that it throws out the sacred cow of CAGW by applying basic logic, its such an affront and massive shift for them, they cant handle it……
Sad but true.
Its interesting – I’ve studied how society really ticks ( and the blanket corrosiveness of the Left ) by participating in the CAGW battle.
30
A review of global ocean temperature observations: Implications for ocean heat content estimates and climate change
“The evolution of ocean temperature measurement systems is presented with a focus on the development and accuracy of two critical devices in use today (expendable bathythermographs and conductivity-temperature-depth instruments used on Argo floats). A detailed discussion of the accuracy of these devices and a projection of the future of ocean temperature measurements are provided.”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rog.20022/full
34
Yet to get around to reading it but this was a worry
40
I also note disturbingly that absolutism and certitude are increasingly obvious features of the lingua franca of climate change….eg. it is established; it is widely accepted. It seems that the debate is being increasingly projected as over. I find it hard to know how to push back against the meme and it is concerning to apparently witness the Australian PM frozen in the headlights…or is he? When these politicians get into power I just wonder what they are being ‘told’ by the UN and global power brokers.
20
They essentially get told what to do by the PS. These are the people who run the country and the elected politicians are more of a week leash. I’m assuming that is why Rudd had to go and Abbott had to go before he even became PM.
00
That is true. In reality, a political party will specify a desired policy outcome in their manifesto, which then becomes a policy directive if and when the party achieves power.
That policy directive then goes into the Public Service, where an impact assessment is made with regard to existing legislation, regulations, compacts, international agreements, et al. The result of this “assessment” is a schedule of amendments required to existing legislation. Each of these amendments needs to have a thorough impact assessment completed, and these have to be compared with other impact assessments, in order to make sure that there are no unintended contradictory outcomes from any possible combinations of amendment.
Having completed all of that, the order in which amendments can be made, needs to be worked through, so that there can be no unintended consequences, in law, being introduced during the change process. Also, if there is the potential for international treaties to be impacted, amendments to these treaties, by negotiation between the parties, must be agreed before any legislative changes can be made.
When done correctly, this whole process can take a full term of Parliament, so there is a good chance that there will be a change of Government before any real “damage” is done.
10
No worse than at present. As long as they were moving in random walks there should not be any difference in trend between the moving thermometers and the stationary ones. By contrast the ARGO buoys do not move in a purely random walk as they are physically constrained by the ocean currents and continents. It’s better that the ARGO buoys drift as they can indicate ocean currents as well as recording temperature. Two variables measured for the price of one.
This OHC graph is interesting though.
Is it possible to see the difference between the top 100m OHC and 100-700m OHC? They can’t double count the energy. If the deeper ocean is warming, maybe that’s because it’s also moving cool water to the top and also taking heat out of the air. So as the OHC goes up, as long as most of that statistic comes from ocean deeper than 100m, then perhaps the sea surface temperature will go down? This might explain the flatlining in satellite tropospheric temperatures while the OHC (apparently) keeps going up. Testable in the fullness of time.
The current solar cycle will finish in 2019. The AMO should also have turned the corner into cooling already. The next 10 years will be illuminating as for the first time during the satellite era the influences of solar activity and the natural AMO cycle on surface temperature will be in the opposite direction to the alleged effect of CO2 increase, so it should become easier to sort out the relative strength of each factor by around 2024AD.
So you can see the urgency of holding the Paris summit this year for a new Climate Magna Carta, they simply have to save the world before it’s proven to be safe.
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It’s a bit rich of the Prince of Wales to cite Magna Carta as an example. King John was an ancestor of Charlie and, if John had had his way, no-one would ever have heard about Magna Carta. I think all the surviving copies are exactly that: copies. The original must have combusted on account of the Mediaeval Warm Period.
40
Of the original copies made in 1215 for distribution throughout the realm only 4 survive. They will soon be on view together at the British Library for the lucky 1215 ballot winners before returning to their current abodes.
Charles is only directly descended from John because Henry Tudor married back into the line. At that distance we(that is native Britons) are probably all sharing the line from John. Good God it means I’m related to Charlie – as are many of you! At least, by the same token, I can lay claim to descent from Vlad the Impaler, the model for Dracula.
60
Or our common mother who lived in the Dordogne around 100,000yrs .Mitochondrial DNA.
50
good for a chuckle.
https://www.picotech.com/library/application-note/improving-the-accuracy-of-temperature-measurements
“Figure 1 shows sensors at three different heights record the temperatures in one of Pico Technology’s storerooms. The sensor readings differ by at least 1°C so clearly, no matter how accurate the individual sensors, we will never be able to measure room temperature to 1°C accuracy”
Now I am going to write to them and say if they average the temps in their room and then estimate to hundredths of a degree they will get far more accurate temp readings.
220
“… whether 0.005C is remotely meaningful”. It is if you’re caught up in the pathological science loop.
https://thepointman.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/global-warming-and-pathological-science/
“The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability, or many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results.”
So many of the practitioners of climate science conform to that profile. The actually seriously really believe.
Pointman
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I find it funny how Skeptical Science always refers to ocean warming in joules which seems a frighteningly large number, or my personal favourite, Hiroshima bombs. Anything to get their readers worked up into a frenzy. I fully expect them to start using the energy generated from T-Rex bites next. It sounds scary and it would doubtlessly produce a massive number.
150
T-Rex bites is a good one, they’ve done kitten sneezes.
60
I suggest that the amount of energy required to raise the whole ocean temperature by 1°C. I call the unit a ‘Reality’.
or stick to how much the average temperature measurements have changed.
20
Exactly, Richard. I knew the report was bogus when it didn’t use the accepted international unit of added heat, in numbers of Hiroshima bombs.
BTW, 100 watt bulbs have been banned here in “The Land of the Free.”
So, pretty soon, Americans won’t be able to relate to trillions-of-100-watt-bulbs. Wait . . . what?
00
How to unscientifically handwave away argo data with the power of personal incredulity.
Judging by this I wouldn’t make particularly definitive statements about the year to year record, but the trend is quite strictly contained.
43
The latest Argo data studies show that the upper ocean has warmed by a whopping 0.35 degrees between 2006-2013.
This is not going to melt anything. Antarctica is getting COLDER, not warmer.
60
Like every continent, Antarctica’s temperature profile is not uniform, but overall, Antarctica is losing land ice. There’s a gain in Antarctic winter sea ice, but that doesn’t impact on the sea level or the earth’s albedo.
02
Yes, Antarctica is losing ice along the Pacific Ring of Fire, a highly volcanic area:
http://www.utexas.edu/news/2014/06/10/antarctic-glacier-melting/
No, there is a gain in Antarctic sea ice all year.
Utter nonsense. Of course it does!
The planet is now cooling….. be happy.
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You are of course aware that Leviticus used modelling, not actual data….. are you not?
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When you look at a thermometer, you are using a ‘model’ (for the thermal expansion of mercury) to observe temperature.
When Roy Spencer releases the UAH temperature series, he has used a model to take satellite data of radiances and convert it to temperature in the lower troposphere.
I am perfectly comfortable with modelling when it the model imposes constraints on variables that are in line with our understanding of physics eg, both the examples I gave. Neither of the graphs I provided are from Leviticus anyway.
04
Oh, the first one was. hah, my mistake.
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The model used by Leviticus does not use any kind of empirical data. It is crystal ball gazing, not science.
No matter how hard they try, climate scientists cannot tell the future.
30
Ahem, I believe it is Levitus Etal.
Liviticus would be a completely different reference.
Unless you were making a funny.
10
Just a typo… I have read both 😛
10
There seems to be Etal family members, everywhere, and they are such prolific scientific paper writers, too.
10
The graph says they’ve achieved 100% Data coverage at 700m.
I suspect this means something other than what I think it means.
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Tristan,
no one is unscientifically dismissing ARGO data on the sceptic side. Josh Willis however did throw out all the cold “outliers” when he initially found cooling. Even after three “corrections”, ARGO still doesn’t show enough warming to account for a fraction of the Trenberthian “missing heat”.
The reason is simple. There is no missing heat from CO2 hiding in the oceans. Incident LWIR emitted from the atmosphere cannot heat nor slow the cooling rate of water free to evaporatively cool. The experiment to prove this is simple –
http://i42.tinypic.com/2h6rsoz.jpg
– Just fill both target containers with 40C water and observe the cooling rate under both the strong and weak LWIR sources. There is no difference. Now repeat the experiment but with a couple of drops of baby oil on the surface of each water sample. Now cooling is only by conduction and radiation, with evaporation constrained. Now the sample under the strong LWIR source cools slower. The result is clear, DWLWIR emitted from the atmosphere in no way warms the oceans.
That’s pretty much game over for the AGW hoax right there. DWLWIR slowing the cooling rate of the oceans is foundation dogma for the Church of Radiative Climastrology. They claimed that without DWLWIR from the atmosphere the oceans would freeze. They claimed the sun alone was not enough to heat the oceans above 255K (-18). They stupidly used S-B equations on liquid water. They set emissivity and absorptivity to unity and then entered 240w/m2 for average solar radiation. They got 255K. They got it utterly wrong. Our oceans are being illuminated by SW, and they are SW transparent and IR opaque. Stefan-Boltzmann equations won’t work for materials like this. Again, the experiment to prove this is painfully simple –
http://oi61.tinypic.com/or5rv9.jpg
– Both blocks have exactly the same ability to absorb SW and emit IR. The only difference is depth of SW absorption. Illuminate both with 1000w/m2 of LWIR and both blocks rise to the same equilibrium temperature. Now try with 1000w/m2 of SW. Now block A runs 20C hotter. This basic physics is utterly missing from the “basic physics”of your “settled science”.
The sun alone heats our oceans. DWLWIR plays no role in heating or slowing the cooling rate of our oceans. Radiative gases do play a role in ocean temperatures, they help the solar heated oceans cool. The rules of climate on our ocean planet are simple –
The sun heats the oceans.
The atmosphere cools the oceans.
Radiative gases cool the atmosphere.
97% of climastrologists are assclowns.
210
Touche, Konrad.
Any missing heat in the oceans is from solar influences and activity, not CO2.
The flea cannot lift the elephant. And there is no mechanism by which the flea could even try.
80
Winston,
essentially correct, however that should be properly defined as solar influences, cloud cover changes (Svensmark indicates a secondary solar influence here) and volcanic activity (as Andrew below points out).
The second experiment I linked to not only rules out an atmospheric GHE warming the oceans, it also gives the answer to much of ocean temp variability. Climastrologists went and treated the oceans as if SW absorptivity and IR emissivity were at unity, and the oceans were SW opaque. That’s were they got their ridiculous 255K figure. This is of course complete drivelling inanity. Hemispherical absorptivity to UV/SW/SWIR is around 0.9, while hemispherical LWIR emissivity is around 0.67. Further UV/SW is penetrating more than 200m below the ocean surface.
This means that the oceans are a UV/SW/SWIR selective surface, not a near blackbody as the climastrologists falsely claimed. This also means that their calculations for the effect of cloud cover changes and variation in component TSI (particularly UV) are spectacularly wrong regarding ocean heat content.
And the “Bottom line”? Climastrologists couldn’t find their Gluteus Maximus with Google Maps, both hands and someone to hold the flashlight. Out of their depth on a wet pavement doesn’t cover it. These clowns are so far out of their depth the fish have bloody lights on their noses!
30
Under Sea Volcanic activity should have some influence on ocean temperature,possibly very difficult to estimate how much warming so caused.
90
They are pretty pictures but have you actually performed the experiments?
03
Never ever yank my chain sunshine.
http://i61.tinypic.com/2z562y1.jpg
http://i57.tinypic.com/esrb86.jpg
http://i47.tinypic.com/694203.jpg
http://i42.tinypic.com/315nbdl.jpg
You need to be this high to assault the city –
http://i57.tinypic.com/23vca6v.jpg
– and you are not. Nowhere close.
Your inane comment about “pretty pictures” gives a clear indication of why my work has been exhibited in technology museums and yours has not.
Was there some part of “warmulonian drivel monkey” you did not understand?
30
Argo drifts with the currents. Do currents entrain “flotsam”? They seem to concentrate floating stuff in fairly definitive areas. Are they warmer areas?
The Argo diving machines never measure in the same place twice.
It’s just like the (land) surface temperature record except that there isn’t (yet) as much variation in how things are measured.
120
The data has been corrupted by whale farts…..
50
True, the temperature is not measured in the same place twice. Looking through the bibliography, there is more than a passing reliance on ‘estimates’, ‘modeling’ and ‘interpolation’ but according to the abstract the data is spatially homogeneous:
eg.
Palmer, M. D. & McNeall, D. J. Internal variability of Earth’s energy budget simulated by CMIP5 climate models. Environ. Res. Lett. 9, 034016 (2014).
Purkey, S. G. & Johnson, G. C. Warming of global abyssal and deep Southern Ocean waters between the 1990s and 2000s: Contributions to global heat and sea level rise budgets. J. Clim. 23, 6336–6351 (2010).
Church, J. A., White, N. J., Coleman, R., Lambeck, K. & Mitrovica, J. X. Estimates of the regional distribution of sea level rise over the 1950–2000 period. J. Clim. 17, 2609–2625 (2004).
Ridgway, K. R., Dunn, J. R. & Wilkin, J. L. Ocean interpolation by four-dimensional weighted least squares—Application to the waters around Australasia. J. Atmos. Ocean. Technol. 19, 1357–1375 (2002).
40
I am not sure the graph is correct. The way Argo floats work is they sleep and drift for 10 days at 1000 meters. They wake up, sink to 2000 meters, then rise to the aurface taking temperature and salinity measurements along the way. At the surface they report GPS position and data, then sink back to 1000 meters and begin the cycle over. For Argo only data there should be equal amounts at all depths.
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Interestingly; the “surfacing” takes a long time. It’s done over 6 hours so that a temperature-salinity profile can be measured.
Between submerging at the last reported position, diving, drifting, diving further and returning to the surface; to the next reported position, the position and depth are only “reckoned”. Depth by pressure and spatial position by inertial sensors (accelerometers).
The probes spend a week drifting at 1000m below the surface accumulating inertial errors. A re-calibration is only possible after reaching the surface and determining position by (e.g.) GPS. Intermediate positions are then calculable. Approximated.
20
Approximated to 5/1000ths of a degree, Bernd!
I can also do the same by sticking my index finger in my mouth and then holding up in the breeze to measure air temperature. It’s a finely calibrated instrument don’t you know.
20
‘Jo says: “… that’s two trillion light bulbs, plus or minus 200 trillion…” ‘, so let us all accept Jo’s flakey maths, because she is the real expert as we all know! OK the absolute temperature rise is minimal, but when the actual volume of water is taken into consideration the figure will be considerable! Watch the big picture, not just trailer!
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Please take the time to learn what error margins are, then you will know that Jo is perfectly correct with her assessment.
280
Somebody else posted this….. you will find it very useful.
30
Sir Baldrick,
I actually agree with your view:
“OK the absolute temperature rise is minimal, but when the actual volume of water is taken into consideration the figure will be considerable! Watch the big picture, not just trailer!”
It takes a whole bunch of energy to make even an ‘within error’ change, so, like you, I suggest that is is impossible for human contributions to atmospheric CO2 to be a factor.
So, yeah, SB it must be a natural factor like solar radiation, movements of earth’s core, or a combination of celestial and terrestrial physics and I’m sure you agree that it is absolute hubris on the part of alarmists to even remotely consider any human action could either cause or alter the climate on this planet.
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“Flakey maths” was it?
Climastrologists were the complete fools who went and used standard Stefan-Boltzmann equations on our SW translucent / IR opaque oceans. How do their inane claims stand up to empirical experiment?
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/02/how-to-unscientifically-hype-insignificant-noise-in-ocean-warming/#comment-1677122
They don’t.
Any rise in ocean temperature has nothing whatsoever to do with CO2.
80
What you appear to be overlooking, Sir Baldrick, is that these “two trillion 100-watt light bulbs” are lit in one huge, huge mass of water. Perhaps you are unaware of quite how vast the oceans are, but it can take a merchant ship more than two weeks to cross the Pacific (or 4 days, from Australia to NZ). More than half the oceans are more than a mile deep. It would be interesting to put it into perspective: that is approximately one 100-watt light bulb per 540,000,000 litres. Q: What would be the equivalent number of light-bulbs in a litre of water? A: one 0.0002-watt light bulb. Not so scary, though, is it? How long would it take that to raise the temperature of that water 1°C? Even assuming no loss of heat to the surroundings, I suspect that it will be a very, very long time.
110
Hopefully this might help quantify the issue:
The heat capacity of the ocean is ~3,300 x greater than the atmosphere per unit volume, and that the volume of the world’s oceans is so vast that there is insufficient atmosphere (and with insufficient variation in temperature) to be physically capable of increasing the global ocean temperatures by any measureable degree.
For every tonne (1000kg) of water per unit volume (1m3), there is ~ 1kg of air for the same volume (1kg of air to ~1.2m3)
The oceans contain:
1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 Litres of water.
To heat it by a mere 1˚C, for example, requires:
6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules of energy.
Such is the volume of water found in the world’s oceans, that the current energy generation capacity of the entire world (including the entirety of global coal, oil, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, etc- 4.74 Exajoules in 2008- source Wikipedia) would take more than 12,660 years to heat the ocean by 1 deg C, even if that power was used directly (even assuming it was physically possible to have 100% efficiency of heat transfer in the first place, and also allowing for no compensatory increase in heat loss from the ocean through evaporation, or from thermal expansion, etc, etc -otherwise the time frame would obviously be greatly extended beyond even that), which gives lie in and of itself to alarmist contentions of heating the oceans indirectly (and therefore at much lower thermodynamic efficiency) through the putative effects of CO2 emissions and LWIR “back radiation”.
After taking into account the relative masses and heat capacities of air and water, the atmosphere would have to be heated to ~4,000 deg C to affect a ~1 deg C change in ocean temperature.
Total world energy generation:
474 Exajoules (4.74×1020 J =132,000 TWh)
Total energy required to heat oceans 1 deg K:
6,000,000 Exajoules (6×1024 J)
Therefore: 6,000,000 EJ/474 EJ pa = 12,600 years*
Heat capacity of ocean water 3993 J/kg/K
Heat capacity of air 1005 J/kg/K
Heat capacity of ocean water 3993 J/kg/K
Heat capacity of air 1005 J/kg/K
1kg Air (~1.2 cubic metre) needs 1005 J energy to increase 1 deg K
1000kg (1 tonne) of water (~1 cubic metre), therefore to heat 1 cubic metre by 1 deg K requires 3993000 J of energy.
Hope that helps. Am happy for someone to correct my maths if they are astray.
150
Of course 1020 and 1024J should be to the power of 20 and 24 respectively. Apologies.
20
Thank you Winston, that is an excellent summary, duly copied for reference.
10
Whew,
That is definitely a keeper.
One question though … considering thermal expansion, how much energy would be required to expand the volume of the ocean, sufficient to raise the average height of the surface by 1cm?
10
Total surface area of world oceans 362,000,000 km2 x raising level 1cm or 0.00001km = increased volume of 3,620 km3
3,620 km3 = 3,620,000,000,000 m3, so would need 1.445,466 Exa Joules (10**18) per 1 deg K
The change in the units volume when temperature change can be expressed as
dV = V0 β (t1 – t0) (2)
where
dV = V1 – V0 = change in volume (m3) which is 3.62 x10**12 m3
β = volumetric temperature expansion coefficient (m3/m3 oC) which for salt water in our oceans at average temp of 17deg C is about 0.000160 or thereabouts depending on salinity
t1 = final temperature (oC)
t0 = initial temperature (oC) 17 deg C
So,
3.62 x 10**12 = 3.62 x10**17 m3 x 0.000160 (T1- 17)
So,
T1=17 + 1/16
Ocean average temperature would need to rise by 1/16 deg C (0.0625 degC) to effect a 1cm sea level rise through thermal expansion alone
Since 6,000,000 Exajoules are required to raise by 1 degree, therefore:
ANSWER: 375,000 Exajoules would be required to raise the sea level by 1cm through thermal expansion alone!
00
Please ignore second paragraph “so would need….. 1,445,466 Exa Joules…….1 Deg K”. In error- apologies.
The 6,000,000 Exajoules for the whole ocean volume in the penultimate paragraph is derived above from 12.5.1 above. Sorry to be so sloppy.
00
RR: I think you’ve dropped a few zeros.
(a) Two trillion 100-watt light bulbs = 2 x 10**9 x 100 Watts = 2 x 10**11 Watts
(b) Volume of Earth’s oceans = 1.3 x 10**21 litres
So power density = 1.5 x 10**(-10) Watts per litre
Equivalent to: one 100 W bulb in 65,000,000,000 litres (= 65,000 Olympic-size swimming pools)
or : one 0.00015 W bulb in an Olympic-size swimming pool
or: a bee swimming frantically on the surface of that Olympic-size swimming pool
Am happy to see my arithmetic scrutinised and corrected.
10
Whoops.
I made a blunder. Three orders of magnitude in fact -:)
(a) Two trillion 100-watt light bulbs = 2 x 10**12 x 100 Watts = 2 x 10**14 Watts
So power density = 1.5 x 10**(-7) Watts per litre (still lower than RR’s 0.0002 W/litre ?)
10
Me? Wrong? Don’t be absurd! I am a climate scientist; what are you?
/sarc
00
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20
This ocean warming nonsense is so silly in so many ways. If our world does not heat and the oceans heat instead, the underlying point of this whole business, what is the problem again?
The single prediction of man made Global Warming was clear. Our air temperatures were going up due wholly to increased man made CO2 and the greenhouse effect. They have not. The prophets were wrong, completely wrong. You would think that was the end of it.
Given the average depth of the oceans is 3.54km,and 10metres = 1 atmosphere, the oceans are 354x as massive as the atmosphere. By heat capacity then 1C in the air would be 0.03C in the oceans. Again, problem solved. The oceans can absorb the same heat as the air and change 1/354 as much in temperature.
So why the carbon taxes, ETS, RET, Pink Batts, hybrid cars and 220,000 windmills? There is no problem?
Worse, why isn’t the warming ocean the source of the extra CO2 in the first place? Isn’t it possible that steadily increasing CO2 is due to steadily warming oceans and not at all connected to our activities? Isn’t it possible that the rapid gaseous exchange with the oceans determines CO2 content and not this primitive non scientific view that the atmosphere is disconnected from the oceans and can be filled like a bucket? Rather the atmosphere is a byproduct of gas dissolved in the oceans and 50x as much CO2 is in the oceans than in the air, but who cares about physical chemistry, physics and equilibrium when the science ignorant Greens have an opinion?
As for the great idea about moving Stevenson Screens, there are a few points. Firstly if the temperature does change dramatically on moving the screen, that itself gives you the actual error in measurement! It does not matter how accurate the thermometer is, say 1/1000th C. What matters is what it is measuring and whether it is representative of the whole area. If moving the screen changes the temperature, that is the error in what you are measuring if you want to talk about the general area. Otherwise you are only measuring the temperature of the instrument itself.
So, yes the fact that the hottest day of the year in Australia was a specific amount at say Marble Bar is wrong. It may have been far hotter 1km away or 100km away, but there was simply no screen there. Talking about the hottest planetary year by 0.005C is absolutely crazy. A different set of screens in different locations would have given a different result, especially if they were not deleted, edited, culled, homogenized and adjusted. A variation of 0.005C is the resolution of the intrument or even higher, not a real and representative number. You could calculate a result to 0.0000001C but it is not meaningful.
Secondly water is a good conductor of heat and location is far less important as there are no side effects from trees, colour, radiation, humidity, wind chill, objects, local wind patterns and more. Heat will flow to cooler areas and surface effects are less important than the fact that water is not static like land. However as in teh air there are major currents and turbulence and huge bodies of moving water of a different temperature move continually at different depths. Temperatures can change dramatically with depth, as they do with height in the atmosphere. So getting a picture of the total heat content of the entire ocean must be very tricky even with 3000 buoys unless the changes are dramatic and apparently they are not. Heat moves from the equator to the artic in huge bodies like the Humboldt stream. To work out the total heat of an ocean would be a masterful and unlikely achievement.
Frankly, this hunt for the ‘missing heat’ is like the Hunting of the Snark, looking for a fictional creature which if found may turn out to be something else. If our air temperatures do not change due to man made CO2, there is no problem and never was. Searching for an explanation for being completely wrong is simply high farce.
270
Sorry, 1C in the air would be 0.003C in the ocean which could translate into 0.003C in the atmosphere. Specific heat is just a question of mass.
50
You could also put this whole narrative under “the Ocean ate my Global Warming“.
130
Great post TedF. Very well said.
70
When, oh when, will they tell us what the new “global average temperature” is now that the oceans are part of the equation??
10
Right….. so the ocean surface waters have warmed by 0.035 degrees and THIS is what is melting Antarctica!!!!!!
Run chicken littles…… run!!!!!!!!
150
This is a question I raised with the boffins of Tallblokes Talkshop. They explained that the moving thermometers, i.e. the Argo floats, cannot reliably determine the absolute temperature at any moment but they can measure the average temperature. Year over year they can then determine the change, i.e. the anomaly.
As long as the floats take measurements of the same total volume in the same statistically valid distribution,the uncertainty of the anomaly is reduced by the number of measurements because it is not a reflection of a changing, individual reading. The reliability of the average is a function of the number of readings of the averaged area.
The reliability of the answer all depends on the distribution of the readings. Some sort of equal-area or equal-area-volume corrections must be going on to correct for concentrations of floats – inevitable due to currents and gyres.
The place to investigate the Argo float anomaly meaningfulness is in the post-data-collection statistical adjustments.
50
A slight modification: The place to investigate the Argo float anomaly meaninglessness is in the post-data-collection statistical adjustments.
The only way that averaging repeated measurements of temperature improve the signal to noise ratio is for the same thing to be measured the same way at the same place and only if the composition of that place remains exactly the same. If, as in the Argo floats, the measurements are taken from a different environment for each and every measurement, there is no way to separate noise from signal or one kind of signal from another. The physical position and local heat capacity changes with each measurement. Any drift of the computed average will be an indeterminable combination of actual global change, if any, local change on all time scales, and random instrumental noise. You can’t tell the difference. The drift is especially meaningless if your average signal is at the same magnitude as your instrument precision.
However, there is a deeper reason the average of temperature measurements are meaningless. A temperature reading is dependent upon the heat content and the specific heat of the immediate enthronement at each specific position of measure. Hence multiple measures of temperature at different positions, no matter how numerous the positions, are incommensurate and cannot be properly averaged. No two readings measure the same thing except by unknown and unknowable accident. It is rather like the average of the phone numbers in the New York Phone Book. It can be computed but it has no reality based meaning.
You can get just as meaningful data from averaging the output of a random number generator. In fact, since you know its source, you know more about it than data from the Argo floats.
80
Bloody spell checker and tired eyes: enthronement = environment.
Come to think of it, the word “enthronement” is not so bad. The so called experiment was designed to give us all the royal shaft. First we tax payers have to pay for it and when the data is manipulated to point to “global warming” we are required to pay a “carbon tax”, a “breathing tax” a “transportation tax” a “mining tax”, and other taxes without end. Reportedly to “save the earth” to “save the children” to “save the underprivileged” to “save the destitute” to “save the whales” to “save the salamander” to “save the world for despots, dictators, government thugs, and other criminals against mankind”. Oh sorry, the last one is the truth. I can’t say that now can I?
170
In short Lionell,
What you are saying, is that they don’t even know how to carry out scientific measurements and report them correctly.
It would be interesting to know, as a comparison, what data is recorded, and the procedures used for “weather balloons”?
KK
40
When the change in surface water temperature of the past 7 years is only 0.035 degree (35 THOUSANDTHS of a degree), do you REALLY want me to believe that this is melting Antarctica?
70
Always so, including land-based measurements
That’s why satellite data are preferable for the atmosphere, albeit their start point is limited to 1979. These data are currently out-of-fashion though, as they don’t show the “hottest evah” and so on and forth
Interpolation/extrapolation of interstices between changing point data over a space-time domain (such as an ocean) is obviously fraught by the actual density of measurement points. One should ask: 1) what is the mean distance between Argo buoys ? 2) what is the assumed radial distance of influence of each buoy column ? 3) over what time periods are trends calculated ? 4) error bars on each of these metrics ?
20
Absolutely!!! The ice in Antartica is on such a fine balance that a minimal (non existent)alteration in the temperature gradient, will melt the whole blooming lot! It’s like when you forget the freezer door open…just a few degrees up and you end up with water everywhere!!! I am no scientist, but all this fresh water rushing into the sea should mitigate the “Acidification” should’n it??
01
“Your you are no scientist” .
Antarctica is not your freezer and the only acid that you get is from rotting meat.
00
I wonder how you take into account water moves around all the time?
If you have undersea currrents, at best you could say the water over time is approx this value, but unless you know where the water has come from and is going to so you have an idea of area of impact, the data is meaningless.
Its a bit like standing on Picadilly in London and checkingteh colour of peopes clothes to determine what the most popular coulours are. Given Londinium is not a closed system and that people come and go all the time from the UK, and pass through London, its kind of meaningless, Yes you could say “on this day on this corner the colours were this” but the next day or month it could be totally different.
Its nonsense…..
00
I looked at this last year, in connection with Skeptical Science’s little widget that shows the heat of four Hiroshima bombs a second going into the oceans since 1998. If the figures are correct, then the calculation is correct. But then I wondered how long would it take to raise the average temperature by a single degree Centigrade. Assuming the oceans contain 1,080,000,000 km3 of water, that would be about 570 years. That is around 0.0018C per year, consistent with the above. It made me realize just how massive are the oceans. After all, Britain’s biggest freshwater lake by volume is Loch Ness, contains just 9 km3 of water and yet has managed to hide a monster for thousands of years. 🙂
150
This seems to be favorite tactic of global warming believers—take some outrageous value that sounds scary and hope your audience lacks the ambition to actually check just what that number means. Can’t imagine why people don’t trust science.
100
Poor old Loch Ness monster has been KO’d by carbon dioxide.
Another conquest for the rampant carbon dioxide.
30
Brilliant!
20
Not for much longer. It will be getting far too warm.
40
Nessie doesn’t actually live in Loch Ness. She lives in a stable, behind a pub, just down the road.
She only goes for a swim when people with echo sounders turn up.
Well, it gives them something to do, and if they can figure out how to turn the sounders on, and calibrate them, then it will give them their brief moment of fame.
20
Some important points here:
* It is entirely reasonable to estimate ocean temperatures to five thousands of a degree with sufficient measurements.
* Increased OHC is statistically significant, and is already having discernable effects.
—
Ocean temperatures vary from place to place, but not by huge amounts. Levitus et al 2012 has some very clear estimates of the standard deviations of temperature over distance in the oceans, from which they draw error bars using both the ARGO and earlier XBT data. By the law of large numbers a sufficient number of observations (which we have) leads to a very _very_ accurate measurement. Those error ranges are quite small WRT the OHC trend in the last 50 years, as shown here. Unless someone can point to technical errors in that analysis, or invalidate the law of large numbers, complaints about those estimate accuracies are baseless.
From the energies involved (~25*10^22 Joules since the 1960s), we can estimate the long term radiative imbalance over that period, which is on the order of 1 W/m^2. That is just what was predicted, a very strong confirmation of the science.
Note that this energy distribution is not even – surface and mid-ocean layers are warming far more than abyssal waters, not surprising as circulation delays to abyssal waters are on the order of decades to centuries. (Mis)averaging ocean heat content change over the entire depth of the oceans is an error.
Does this energy change have effects? Yes, it does – currently it’s increased Antarctic melt rates (Pritchard et al 2012), the temperature changes are beginning to affect fisheries (Cheung et al 2013), and the increases in sea surface temperature are in large part responsible for the observed increase in atmospheric water vapor that has knock-on effects to precipitation (Chung et al 2014).
—
The energies involved are really huge – and the sea surface temperatures, the surface that most affects us, have risen at ~0.12C/decade over the last 40-50 years while natural forcings have declined. That’s not something to trivialize.
027
Unfortunately (for you KR), IPCC AR5 Chapter 3 Oceans: Observations, were not able to identify the air-to-sea flux that they speculate (no science to cite after 25 yrs) in Chapter 11 Detection and Attribution to be the anthropogenic mechanism for ocean heating.
Too much noise apparently.
141
>”* It is entirely reasonable to estimate ocean temperatures to five thousands of a degree with sufficient measurements.”
Really KR? Here’s just one:
Wave Buoy: Water Temperature
Pukehina, Bay of Plenty, NZ
http://monitoring.boprc.govt.nz/MonitoredSites/cgi-bin/hydwebserver.cgi/points/details?point=834
04-Feb-2015
02:00, 22.3
04:00, 22.2
06:00, 22.1
08:00, 22.2
A) What is the temperature of the water at just that one location to five thousands of a degree by the moored sensor?
B) Where is the nearest ARGO float and is it: a) ascending, b) at surface, c) descending, or d) at roaming depth?
C) What is the temperature of the water at just that one location to five thousands of a degree by the ARGO measurement?
D) Can you see any problems with ocean-wide temperature measurement given your results for A, B, and C?
91
>”B) Where is the nearest ARGO float and is it: a) ascending, b) at surface, c) descending, or d) at roaming depth?”
Positions of the floats that have delivered data within the last 30 days (AIC, updated daily) :
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/statusbig.gif
Zoom in to BoP NZ and the nearest ARGO float is about 100km NE of the Pukehina Wave Buoy.
There are 8 floats clustered around the east cape and SE of NI NZ, none around the west coast.
At Pukehina the temperature has varied between 21.1 and 22.8 C over the last 24 hrs (1.7 C), between 13 and 23.5 C over the last 5 yrs (10.5 C), and the warmest temperatures vary 2 C (e.g. 2011 to 2012). And no warming trend:
Pukehina 2010 – 2015
http://monitoring.boprc.govt.nz/MonitoredSites/cgi-bin/hydwebserver.cgi/points/details?point=834
Looks nothing like the ARGO profile 20S to 60S (black line in a) or the global profile for period 2010 – 2015 (c):
Figure 4:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/nclimate2513_F4.html
“0.005 degrees a year” warming? I don’t think so. The ARGO-sourced global warming appears to have passed us by lately here in BoP NZ where tenth of a degree changes occur over 2 hr intervals (who cares?) but the meaningful 10 C change occurs annually.
Talk to the fisho’s around here about 5 thousandths of a degree water temperature change and they will look at you strangely, or laugh at you.
101
KR
You obviously know NOTHING about the required procedures for processing data.
More readings do not give a license to claim increased accuracy of measurement.
MORE reading will not and cannot increase the DEFINITION of the process, that is entirely in the hands of the measuring device and the system being measured.
Lastly, laboratory reading from an instrument may allow increased claim of accuracy but unknown systems like the Ocean- Argo one do not lend themselves to laboratory level accuracy, no matter how many readings.
And there it is the warmers last resort; “the law of large or even massive numbers”?
KK
111
Some important reality here:
* estimate – transitive verb, a : to judge tentatively or approximately the value, worth, or significance of
b : to determine roughly the size, extent, or nature of.
* ARGO temperature sensor accuracy. From the UCSD ARGO site.
“Most of these errors are the result of sensor drifts. D files have passed expert QC inspection and have had sensor drifts removed…”
“The temperatures in the Argo profiles are accurate to ± 0.002°C…”
I think “estimate” is self explanatory. As for the accuracy they are attempting to adjust a data set for “drift” in millidegrees C for equipment that does not get calibrated once placed in service. According to SBE the accuracy listed here is based on the sensor’s performance in a calibration bath. That means that even if you assume you are getting (in open ocean) the same level of accuracy you got in perfect laboratory conditions, 80% of your supposed signal is tolerance. A single unit in ideal conditions without “expert” adjustments isn’t accurate enough to justify this signal. Once you add a few thousand of them in various conditions and, more importantly, different configurations and mush them all together you have a hardware platform that cannot perform within an order of magnitude (or more) of the published results. The thermal contamination from the body of the float alone would drown this signal.
61
>”[SSTs] have risen at ~0.12C/decade over the last 40-50 years while natural forcings have declined. That’s not something to trivialize.”
Actually it is KR.
Do you and the scientists you cite demand an instantaneous thermal response in the atmosphere to solar change in the sun => ocean => atmosphere system?
Do you and they understand the thermodynamic principles of inertia, lag, propagation, transport, etc with respect to ocean heat? Particularly the timeframe of basin-to-basin circulation?
Note that the above are mutually exclusive.
Do you and they understand the conditions under which heat accumulation occurs in the tropical ocean where solar heating is at a maximum i.e. energy in is greater than energy out?
Note that this is irrespective of CO2 levels.
In respect to planetary thermal lag:
‘Correlation between solar activity and the local temperature of Antarctica during the past 11,000 years’
X.H. Zhao and X.S. Feng (2014)
• The millennial variation of SSN led that of T by 30–40 years.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.nz/2014/11/new-paper-finds-strong-evidence-sun-has.html
The modern solar Grand Maximum was from about 1958 – 2005, peaking at 1986. There has been about 0.4 W.m-2 TSI decrease since 2005 relative to 1986.
If you add 35 years lag to 1986 you get 2021. Adding 35 yrs to 2005 gives 2040.
Why then would we (not you or your references) expect to observe a premature oceanic or atmospheric response in 2015 to the solar change?
41
@ Richard C: IPCC AR5 states that “…the accuracy of the observations is insufficient to permit a direct assessment of changes in heat flux…” (emphasis added), meaning that it cannot be directly apportioned between changes in skin layer gradients and IR, precipitation/evaporation, wind mixing, freshwater fluxes, etc – identifying how much comes from which source. The effect of the net change in flux, however, is directly measurable in ocean heat content anomalies. And that observation tells us what the net flux change is, regardless of how it’s split up.
To you and to other replies, the law of large numbers (first rigorously proved by Bernoulli in 1713!) still holds, and arguments from incredulity such as presented in the replies are logical fallacies. Overturn that, and your name will be enshrined in math books for centuries. Argue against it without proof, and you will quite simply be wrong.
Measures of global heat content from thousands and thousands of measurements, looking at temperature anomalies that have high spacial correlations (Levitus et al 2012, referenced above), are far more accurate than any individual measure. And in fact the random placement of those measurements gives even more confidence in the results, since we can be quite certain that we aren’t constantly missing areas that might be inconsistent.
In your last post, #18.5, you seem to be claiming that ‘it’s the sun’. It’s not. From an earlier discussion elsewhere on ENSO (with links):
All of the evidence, and all of the physics, indicates that ocean warming is due to our activities. Not the sun, not volcanoes, not natural cycles, not cosmic rays, but us.
012
If you assume that the only error is a random error you can quote the average response of the instrument to what ever was the resolution if you have taken enough samples. That doesn’t mean that you get a more precise measure of the temperature. They originally said that the accuracy was ±0.1°°C.
Then there is the sampling. You have a 10-20°C rise in temperature going up from 2000m. You have differences of about 4°C for the first 150m over a distance of 1000km and the temperature in an area can change by a couple of degrees in a month. Then there is the effect on the temperature of the wind and the waves.
You need 1000s of measurements with perfectly calibrated instruments on the same day for each 1000x1000km area for me to just accept that the Law of Large Numbers fixes everything and a a change of 0.05°C over 12 years is meaningful.
32
Thanks, now I understand what is meant by the law of large numbers.
I did Bernoulli about 48 years ago so unimportant stuff like that is not too fresh.
Good comment
KK
00
KR
>”The effect of the net change in flux, however, is directly measurable in ocean heat content anomalies.”
Exactly. But an anthropogenically-sourced flux could not be identified i.e. if it is even there it is completely insignificant amongst greater more significant fluxes e.g. solar received at surface (SSR) which changes mutlidecadally as cloudiness levels change.
CO2 “forcing”, by which even if it was valid to impute heat to the ocean (it isn’t – no physical mechanism), is only about 0.3 W.m-2/decade recently. Dimming/Brightening fluxes by comparison are in the order of 2 – 3 W.m-2/decade. See:
Martin Wild, 2012: Enlightening Global Dimming and Brightening. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 93, 27–37.
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00074.1
>”Sedláček and Knutti (2012,GRL). Two of their key findings:
“Ocean warming of the last century cannot be explained by natural variability The warming signal is visible throughout the whole ocean”
It is?
Not the “whole” ocean according to ARGO data KR:
Atlantic, Indian, Pacific 0-700m
https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/19-argo-era-ohc-atl-ind-pac.png
Atlantic and Pacific cooling.
Indian, Pacific, North Atlantic, South Atlantic 0-2000m
https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/nodc-argo-era-vertical-mean-temp-per-basin-to-2013.png
Pacific and North Atlantic flat, Indian and South Atlantic warming.
Sedláček and Knutti are obviously wrong.
>”Gleckler et al. (2012, Nature Climate Change),
“Our detection and attribution analysis systematically examines the sensitivity of results to a variety of model and data-processing choices. When global mean changes are included, we consistently obtain a positive identification (at the 1% significance level) of an anthropogenic fingerprint in observed upper-ocean temperature changes,”
Except the models have the ocean warming far too much:
Climate Models vs ARGO Data
Global Ocean Temperature 0-700m
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/ocean/global-ocean-temperature-700m-models-argo.gif
Gleckler et al are obviously wrong.
>”Santer et al. (2008, PNAS),
“For the period 1906–2005, we find an 84% chance that external forcing explains at least 67% of observed SST increases in the two tropical cyclogenesis regions.””
Chance? That’s not the physics of the tropical Ocean-Atmosphere interface KR. This is the physics:
Cool-skin and warm-layer effects on sea surface temperature
Fairall, Bradley, Godfrey, Wick, Edson, and Young (1996)
Rns 191.5 tropical west Pacific
-Q = Rnl – Hs – Hl
-168.1 = -57.1 -7.7 -103.3
191.5 – 168.1 = 23.4 W/m2 ocean heat gain in the tropical west Pacific
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/95JC03190/abstract
The sun heats the ocean in the tropics by around 23.4 W/m2 gain KR. A 0.3 W.m-2/decade CO2 forcing would have negligible effect even if valid (it isn’t).
Santer et al appear to be thermodynamically illiterate with respect to tropical ocean heat. And obviously wrong.
>Pierce et al. (2006, J. Climate),
“The observed sampling of ocean temperature is highly variable in space and time, but sufficient to detect the anthropogenic warming signal in all basins, at least in the surface layers, by the 1980s.”
According to the ARGO graphs above, an anthropogenic warming signal is NOT evident in “all” basins.
By the 1980s solar levels had reached the highest levels in possibly 11,000 years:
A History of Solar Activity over Millennia
Ilya G. Usoskin,(2010)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/13/paper-demonstrates-solar-activity-was-at-a-grand-maxima-in-the-late-20th-century/
Pierce et al have made a classic miss-attribution and are obviously wrong re an anthro signal.
>From Barnett (2005, Science)
“A warming signal has penetrated into the world’s oceans over the past 40 years. The signal is complex, with a vertical structure that varies widely by ocean; it cannot be explained by natural internal climate variability or solar and volcanic forcing, but is well simulated by two anthropogenically forced climate models. We conclude that it is of human origin, a conclusion robust to observational sampling and model differences. “
Climate models bypass the physics of the AO interface (see above), instead they impute heat by the unphysical “forcing” concept where no such mechanism exists in reality (the IPCC don’t detail one). As demonstrated above, this results in too much ocean warming in the models.
If the “signal is complex, with a vertical structure that varies widely by ocean;” then it can’t be an anthro signal that can ONLY interact act the surface because DLR only penetrates water effectively to 10 microns:
Hale & Querry (1973)
http://omlc.org/spectra/water/gif/hale73.gif
Solar forcing cannot be dismissed out of hand because there is no certainty as to the magnitude of solar change from the LIA Maunder Minimum to modern Grand Maximum. The 6 W.m-2 estimate of Shapiro et al would easily account for ocean heat gain, See:
A new approach to long-term reconstruction of the solar irradiance leads to large historical solar forcing
Shapiro, Schmutz, Rozanov, Schoell, Haberreiter, Shapiro, and Nyeki (2011)
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1102/1102.4763v1.pdf
Barnett 2005 is obviously wrong.
>From Barnett et al. (2001, Science)
“Further, the chances of either the anthropogenic or observed signals being produced by the PCM as a result of natural, internal forcing alone are less than 5%. This suggests that the observed ocean heat-content changes are consistent with those expected from anthropogenic forcing, which broadens the basis for claims that an anthropogenic signal has been detected in the global climate system.”
Chance again? All the arguments above apply again e.g. especially re unphysical “forcing” vs known physical mechanisms. Climate science has no credibility in respect to anthropogenic ocean heating until the mechanism is documented and supported by in-situ observations. To date neither has been forthcoming, the IPCC has nothing to present.
Barnett et al are hand waving, and obviously wrong.
>”All of the evidence, and all of the physics, indicates that ocean warming is due to our activities.”
The “evidence” is entirely deficient, the “physics” is missing, the attribution is spurious.
>”Not the sun, not volcanoes, not natural cycles, not cosmic rays, but us.”
This century climate science has had to concede that natural cycles ARE THE MAJOR factor contributing to the flatlinng of global temperatures. But this is just the oscillatory component (MDV) as can be identified by signal analysis. The bigger problem emerging for the CO2 conjecture is the residual secular trend (ST) which is now decelerating while CO2 levels are accelerating. See:
Macias D, Stips A, Garcia-Gorriz E (2014) Application of the Singular Spectrum Analysis Technique to Study the Recent Hiatus on the Global Surface Temperature Record. PLoS ONE 9(9): e107222. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0107222
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0107222#pone-0107222-g005
Abstract
MDV seems to be the main cause of the different hiatus periods shown by the global surface temperature records. However, and contrary to the two previous events, during the current hiatus period, the ST shows a strong fluctuation on the warming rate, with a large acceleration (0.0085°C year−1 to 0.017°C year−1) during 1992–2001 and a sharp deceleration (0.017°C year−1 to 0.003°C year−1) from 2002 onwards. This is the first time in the observational record that the ST shows such variability, so determining the causes and consequences of this change of behavior needs to be addressed by the scientific community.
The “sharp deceleration” in the ST is the death knell of AGW.
62
Changes in downwelling IR do cause the oceans to warm, by decreasing the thermal gradiant through the <1mm skin layer, discussion of empirical evidence here. Solar energy absorbed by the waters has to leave through that skin layer, which is strictly by conduction, and the thermal gradient of the skin layer acts as a limiting factor reducing the cooling of surface waters.
Tisdales ‘ENSO is everything’ theories have been discussed (and found lacking) in some detail in the ENSO thread I referenced earlier, read the comment exchanges, not to mention multiple debunkings here and here (use the ‘Search’ function for ‘Tisdale’) – his entire approach is one of cherry-picking tiny portions of the data in agreement with his preconceptions (short term, small region SSTs) while ignoring the full and contradicting body of evidence (global data including ocean depths), as he has flatly stated. I don’t consider his arguments worth consideration as a result.
10 or less year trends are simply noise, short term variation, and not climate trends – which are better analyzed with 30 or more years of data.
As to the WUWT thread you referenced, I suggest reading Leif Svalgaard’s comments, such as here – the idea of a ‘modern solar maximum’ appears to be an artifact of changes in sunspot counting methods, not any actual increase in solar activity.
Macias et al appears to consist primarily of curve-fitting with no causal connections, no forcing data, and no physics – much akin to Scafettas work, and equally uninformative. Their analysis has no physics behind it.
As to the rest, your repeated claims of “obviously wrong” are simply arguments by assertion, and the last time I checked that is still a logical fallacy.
—
IMO you are evincing confirmation bias – accepting anything including poor arguments and bad statistics that fit your opinions, while dismissing without support everything that you disagree with. In addition your assertions regarding measurement accuracy are simply incorrect. If you continue to just toss out any contrary evidence without data (or examination), I see little basis for a discussion.
04
KR
>”Changes in downwelling IR do cause the oceans to warm, by decreasing the thermal gradiant through the “Solar energy absorbed by the waters has to leave through that skin layer, which is strictly by conduction, and the thermal gradient of the skin layer acts as a limiting factor reducing the cooling of surface waters. ”
Rubbish. Energy leaves the surface by latent heat of evaporation (major component Hl), radiation (major component Rnl), and sensible heat (minor component Hs).
The oceanic heat gain in the tropics is due to the simple fact that energy ingress is greater than energy egress i.e. more IR energy is coming in and laid down to up to 19m depth (UV up to 80m in clear water) than can escape from the surface – the AO system is overwhelmed by solar input.
DLR can be around 400 W.m-2 in the tropics 24/7 (e.g. Darwin) but the CO2 component of DLR is only about 6 W.m-2 in the US standard atmosphere 1976, say 7 now. A miniscule change in CO2 (0.3/decade) is negligible.
The net LWIR radiative effect is OLR of -57.1 W.m-2 above.
The accumulated energy that does not leave the surface in the tropics (oceanic heat gain) is transported horizontally by currents and thermal gradients towards the poles where the energy differential (gradient) allows energy egress. See:
Heat transport
http://www.climate.be/textbook/chapter2_node7_2.xml
Improved estimates of global ocean circulation, heat transport and mixing from hydrographic data
http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/papersonline/ganachwunschnature.pdf
Thermohaline circulation of the oceans
http://www.marbef.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation_of_the_oceans
>”Tisdales ‘ENSO is everything’ theories have been discussed (and found lacking) in some detail in the ENSO thread I referenced earlier”
Strawman. I didn’t present Tisdale’s arguments about anything. I presented graphs of ARGO data that just happen to be sourced from Tisdale because His are ubiquitous on the net.
Why don’t you address the graphs? Are they inconvenient? If you wish to compile your own graphs (as I do continually) because you don’t trust Tisdale’s, fell free to do it yourself from the ARGO data you can access yourself here:
3-month from 1955 to present Basin time series
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/basin_data.html
ARGO begins 2003. You may also have to access KNMI Explorer for the North-South Atlantic breakdown for example.
But NOAA/NCDC data exactly as Bob Tisdale graphed. Your criticism of Tisdale is irrelevant.
>”10 or less year trends are simply noise, short term variation, and not climate trends – which are better analyzed with 30 or more years of data.”
Yes. If there was 30 years of ARGO data we would graph it but there isn’t. ARGO was only fully deployed around 2003, that’s only 12 years of data but it is the best there is and it clearly shows bulk cooling in the Pacific and Atlantic, only the Indian has been warming this century which skews the global metric.
And I would point out that linear analysis is not necessarily statistically appropriate if the data isn’t linear.
>”As to the WUWT thread you referenced,”
Again, strawman. I didn’t reference a WUWT thread, I referenced Usoskin,(2010) which just happened to be featured at WUWT. If you require a direct link to the peer-reviewed paper because reading the synopsis at WUWT is anathema to you, here it is:
A History of Solar Activity over Millennia
Ilya G. Usoskin,(2010)
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/lrsp-2008-3Color.pdf
>”I suggest reading Leif Svalgaard’s comments”
I have. Svalgaard is just one of many solar factions. He does not represent definitive science anymore than any other solar specialist does. In any event the current solar development is not on the side of his faction. SSN’s are only one solar metric there are several others. See:
Solar Terrestrial Activity Report
http://www.solen.info/solar/
That graph is SC 24 peak. Now compare the metrics to the previous SC 23 peak from the archive e.g. F10.7 radio flux. Clearly solar activity is past Grand Maximum. TSI is down about 0.4 W.m-2 by PMOD. It just remains to be seen over the next few decades how much lower it goes. The opinion of Svalgaard, or any other solar specialist, will be subject to reality whatever happens i.e. the sun will have the final say.
>”Macias et al appears to consist primarily of curve-fitting with no causal connections, no forcing data, and no physics – much akin to Scafettas work, and equally uninformative. Their analysis has no physics behind it.”
Complete ignorance of signal analysis KR. Curve fitting is an intrinsic exercise (e.g. your example Scafetta), SSA or EMD is extrinsic i.e. the analist has no say on what signal is extracted. EMD extracts noise in the first few IMF’s, then oscillations in subsequent IMF’s, and finally a residual trend. Similarly for SSA except for selection of empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs). That is why Macias et al present just MDV and ST instead of the entire spectrum of signals. See:
Singular spectrum analysis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_spectrum_analysis
In no way is that curve fitting KR, that’s the whole point of using these techniques.
Your argument re physics in respect to Macias et al is premature (or back to front). Macias et al (there are others similar) first extract the signals. The task then is to explain the signals by recourse to known phenomena (the physics). They did that. The oscillatory component is explained by MDV but they were not able to explain the ST by anthropogenic forcing or any other factor. They neglect thermally lagged solar change in the sun => ocean => atmosphere system of course (probably ignorant of that) which expalins the ST downturn.
>”As to the rest, your repeated claims of “obviously wrong” are simply arguments by assertion,”
Rubbish. In each case that is the unavoidable conclusion given the contra-arguments I presented.Deny them at your leasure – it’s your prerogative.
>”If you continue to just toss out any contrary evidence without data (or examination)”
Strawman, again. I did nothing of the sort. Just because you fail to address the contra-evidence does not mean it was not presented (it’s still there above KR – address it directly). The data and citations are given and the examinations done.
We are only just scraping the surface here KR, I’ve been over these topics over and over again and the contra-argument just keeps growing. There is much much more detail to the above in another thread at Kiwi Thinker (not me) that I suggest you visit to see what you are getting yourself into:
An Empirical Look at Recent Trends in the Greenhouse Effect
http://www.kiwithinker.com/2014/10/an-empirical-look-at-recent-trends-in-the-greenhouse-effect/
The beleaguered “Frank” went before you. That’s how he left. He came in as “More Accurate Kiwi Thinker”.
Think about that.
41
Re #18.6.2.1.1 (in moderation)
>”Curve fitting is an intrinsic exercise (e.g. your example Scafetta), SSA or EMD is extrinsic”
Wrong way round. Should be:
“Curve fitting is an [extrinsic] exercise (e.g. your example Scafetta), SSA or EMD is [intrinsic]”
Curve fitting imposes a signal on the data by external means, signal extraction is the internal nature of the data – no imposition.
10
Richard C
Increased downwelling IR does indeed cause the oceans to warm, by reducing the energy coming out of the oceans, and this has been experimentally confirmed. The major effect of CO2 (and increased specific humidity) is in the upper troposphere, as increased absolute amounts of GHGs raise the effective emission altitudes at GHG wavelengths, reducing IR to space, and causing a radiative imbalance that only gets redressed when the climate as a whole warms.
10 years of data is entirely too short for statistical significance, whether in ocean or atmospheric temperatures, which is why I previously referred to the more complete OHC record going back to the 1960s. XBT data isn’t as good as ARGO, but it is sufficient to see the 50-year trends of rising OHC in every basin.
I didn’t address the short ARGO graphs because they are indeed too short to be informative about climate trends. I will admit the sourcing from Tisdale raises flags for me because he has been so _consistently_ wrong in his claims; that data is readily available from far better sources.
—
Your reference to Macias is of some interest, although perhaps not in the fashion you intended, as it is typical of a number of attempts to analyze the temperature signals without evaluating the causes.
Taking the best estimates for forcings , and considering that ocean thermal inertia acts as a low pass filter, those net forcings show something of a rising sawtooth pattern over the last 100+ years. If you naively apply spectral analysis to a time-varying signal, you may (as in Macias et al) think that you’ve identified internal cyclic climate behavior, when in reality you’ve just tracked varying driving forces.
In effect the Macias et al analysis has an unsupported assumption, that climate change is strictly linear, and that any nonlinearities are internal cycles. That assumption is wrong, and leads to false conclusions.
That’s why spectral analysis has to be grounded in cause-effect relationships, why signal extraction cannot meaningfully be done in the dark, and why curve-fitting without physics is an exercise of little worth.
—
The ‘kiwithinker’ link on IR to space is incorrect – emissivity to space has indeed changed (Harries et al 2001 for observed spectral changes, also Evens 2006), and the constant value (s)he found reflects the constant relationship between incoming and outgoing energy. Which needs to include the ~1W/m^2 imbalance seen in OHC over the last 50 years, with temperatures rising following forcing rises.
—
You’re continuing to argue against papers by assertion, supported only by a number of (mostly short, statistically insignificant) graphs without context, ‘blog science’, some flatly incorrect claims, and a serious lack of supporting literature. I have neither the time nor interest to deal with such a Gish Gallop – I’m just going to have to disagree.
However, as I stated in my first comment: The claims of insignificance in ocean warming are based on an incorrect averaging of energy over the complete depth of the oceans, SSTs are rising at very statistically significant rates, and we in fact live at the surface. And you have gone off in multiple tangents without addressing that issue. Oh well…
Adieu.
01
KR
>”Increased downwelling IR does indeed cause the oceans to warm, by reducing the energy coming out of the oceans, and this has been experimentally confirmed.”
Firstly a note KR. Repeated use of the word “indeed” adds no technical weight to your contentions.
Minnett’s supposed insulation effect is to the conventional sea-to-air flux which as I’ve shown from observational literature is negligible compared to the major components of energy egress. And the sensible heat flux (Hs) continues anyway, it’s the greater solar energy ingress that creates the gain.
Again KR, the IPCC does not subscribe to Minnett’s conjecture. Their mechanism is exactly the opposite. They speculate an air-to-sea flux to be the anthro ocean warming mechanism. Minnett is off-side with the IPCC.
Some questions:
1) What is the observational evidence of increased DLR and how does it relate to the CO2 component of DLR?
Citation please KR. I can help you with this BTW.
2) What quantity of energy has been observed to be inhibited and how does that relate to the observed oceanic heat gain due to solar input in the tropics (e.g. 23.4 W/m2 from #18.6.2)?
Citation please.
3) Where is the reconciliation of heat gain supposed caused by the insulation effect that you quantify, hopefully, in 2) with observed ocean heat gain?
Citation please.
>”The major effect of CO2 (and increased specific humidity) is in the upper troposphere”
The major effect in the models i.e. the tropical tropospheric hotspot exhibited by the models which has not been observed in the real world.
>”reducing IR to space”
Not happening in the real world KR.
Global Average Outgoing Longwave Radiation – NOAA
http://www.kiwithinker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/OLWIR-Temp-and-SB.jpg
OLR increasing, not reducing.
Average Outgoing Longwave Radiation 90N-90S – NOAA
http://climate4you.com/images/OLR%20Global%20NOAA.gif
No OLR reduction KR.
>”50-year trends of rising OHC in every basin”
That is not a basin-by-basin breakdown you point to KR. Clearly that global 50 yr trend is not now evident in the Pacific or Atlantic this century. In fact, both cooling now in the upper 700m according to ARGO.
>”I didn’t address the short ARGO graphs because they are indeed too short to be informative about climate trends.”
You don’t consider the current trajectory of upper Pacific and Atlantic cooling to be “informative”? Speaks volumes KR.
>”I will admit the sourcing from Tisdale raises flags for me because he has been so _consistently_ wrong in his claims; that data is readily available from far better sources.”
As I explained and linked for you, Tisdale’s data sources are NOAA NCDC e.g. Atlantic basin data here for Jan-Mar:
Atlantic 0 – 700, meters (Jan-Mar)
http://data.nodc.noaa.gov/woa/DATA_ANALYSIS/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/DATA/basin/3month/h22-a0-700m4-6.dat
What other “better” sources are there than that?
>”Your reference to Macias is of some interest, although perhaps not in the fashion you intended, as it is typical of a number of attempts to analyze the temperature signals without evaluating the causes.”
Macias et al DID EVALUATE THE CAUSES. . They attribute the oscillatory component to Multi Decadal Variability(MDV) i.e. natural cyclicity. They were NOT able to identify the cause of the deceleration in ST. It is obviously not CO2 and must be a more significant forcing than CO2.
This is highly problematic for climate science.
>”In effect the Macias et al analysis has an unsupported assumption, that climate change is strictly linear, and that any nonlinearities are internal cycles. That assumption is wrong, and leads to false conclusions.”
What a load of rubbish and confusion KR. Macias et al make no such assumption. Here’s the paper again:
Macias et al (2014)
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0107222#pone-0107222-g005
The linear analysis is to show the change in warming rates of the signals – there is no assumption involved:
Figure 3. Global warming rate analysis.
a) Warming rates (°C year−1) obtained from the different signals identified in the SSA: ST (red line), MDV (blue line) and reconstructed signal (black line).
The downturn in the ST (red line) this century is contrary to the CO2 conjecture i.e. a big problem for climate science.
>”That’s why spectral analysis has to be grounded in cause-effect relationships, why signal extraction cannot meaningfully be done in the dark,”
Piffle. As I explained, and as Macias et al examined, first the signals are extracted, THEN the causes are applied. MDV is the cause of the oscillation but they were unable to identify the cause of the ST. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
An empirical mode decomposition (EMD) can have several intermediate mode frequencies (IMFs) that correspond to physical phenomena. There is a large body of literature on this. Synopsis of some of it at Climate Etc:
On the time-varying trend in global-mean surface temperature
Zhaohua Wu • Norden E. Huang • John M. Wallace • Brian V. Smoliak • Xianyao Chen
On the trend, detrending, and variability of nonlinear and nonstationary time series
Zhaohua Wu, Norden Huang, Steven Long and Chung-Kang Peng
Ensemble empirical mode decomposition: a noise-assisted data analysis method
Zhaohua Wu and Norden Huang
http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/14/time-varying-trend-in-global-mean-surface-temperature/
>”and why curve-fitting without physics is an exercise of little worth.”
Piffle again. And as I explained, curve fitting is extrinsic, signal analysis is intrinsic – no curve is “fitted”. The curves are EXTRACTED. Therefore no curve fitting was done AT ALL by Macias et al.
>”The ‘kiwithinker’ link on IR to space is incorrect – emissivity to space has indeed changed”
Huh? That’s exactly what Kiwi Thinker graphs:
http://www.kiwithinker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Derived-SB.jpg
The post shows empirically that energy is not being “trapped” in the atmosphere but has been freely radiating to space.
The point of the link was to direst you to comments and the detail there that is missing here in respect to the points raised.
>”You’re continuing to argue against papers by assertion, supported only by a number of (mostly short, statistically insignificant) graphs without context, ‘blog science’, some flatly incorrect claims, and a serious lack of supporting literature. I have neither the time nor interest to deal with such a Gish Gallop – I’m just going to have to disagree.”
When you’re overwhelmed by contra-evidence it’s “Gish Gallop”? This is laughable KR.
“serious lack of supporting literature”?
Are you blind to the citations KR? There are 8 of them. Deny then, fine. But don’t lie about them not being there.
I notice though, that you have no technical counter to my rebuttals of your citations. Why is that?
>”SSTs are rising at very statistically significant rates, and we in fact live at the surface.”
We know. Here’s HadSST3 (surface):
Global
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3gl
Northern Hemisphere
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3nh
Southern Hemisphere
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3sh
But to what exactly are you referring to that has any relation to CO2 remembering that the uptick in CO2 was only from the 1950s?
30
KR
>”Taking the best estimates for forcings , and considering that ocean thermal inertia acts as a low pass filter, those net forcings show something of a rising sawtooth pattern over the last 100+ years.”
Really? That is prior to supposed anthropogenic forcing effective since the 1950s KR. What are the “varying driving forces” and “forcings” that you allude to? What phenomena and what citation KR?
I look forward to your answer.
>”If you naively apply spectral analysis to a time-varying signal”
Well you might KR but the series is not the signal, the specral analysis identifies the signals within the series.
>”you may (as in Macias et al) think that you’ve identified internal cyclic climate behavior, when in reality you’ve just tracked varying driving forces.”
Well yes. The “varying driving forces” are the oscillatory phenomena i.e. MDV which is actually “internal cyclic climate behavior”. The cyclic (“varying”) drivers are the ocean oscillations: PDO and AMO being predominate so those combined give the approx 63 yr climate cycle.
The PDO and AMO (“internal cyclic climate behavior”) have been missing from the IPCC’s assessments and models. Only recently (e.g. Kosaka and Xie) have these cycles been introduced to models by parameterization when it became clear that this century was a negative phase of the combined phenomena.
But not a “rising sawtooth pattern” as you put it FR. The whole point of the spectral signal analysis and those similar is to separate the sawtooth pattern (MDV) from the rising component (ST). They are completely different signals.
If you look at Macias et al Figure 1 there is no “rising sawtooth pattern” except in the reconstructed series (black line):
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0107222#pone-0107222-g005
The sawtooth pattern (MDV, blue line) is flat.
The ST rise (red line) begins in 1900 – well before CO2 rise but corresponding to solar activity.
It is the secular trend (ST) that is all important KR. Climate science has only just conceded MDV, now they have another larger issue to confront – a decelerating ST.
30
Another long reply to KR #18.6.2.1 in moderation at this time.
00
Long comment responding to KR’s #18.6 awaiting moderation i.e. a point-by-point rebuttal.
00
The Earth’s core is conservatively estimated to be 4,000 deg C and possibly up to 7,000 deg C.
The Earth is close neighbour to an unlimited HEAT SINK in the form of interplanetary space.
The surrounding temperature of our Earthly environment is therefore about 1.6 C deg above absolute zero or 1.6 deg K or MINUS 271.5 deg C.
It would seem likely from my understanding of thermodynamics ( and not discounting the daily intervention of our Sun) the heat or energy or photons or whatever the warmers may use to describe it, IS LEAKING DOWN THE TEMPERATURE GRADIENT TO DISAPPEAR INTO SPACE and in the process cooling our home even if very slowly.
Our problem on Earth is to retain as much energy as we can.
That is the reverse of the IPCCC claim!
KK
11
No, it is entirely unreasonable
All of the papers you link to conspicuously evade the very questions I posed in comment 16.3 above
It is irrelevant that these papers are peer-reviewed – answering direct questions on sampling densities compared with the size of the entity being sampled is critical to the reliability of pursuant trend analyses, and the various papers simply make motherhood statements about “near-global” sampling with no attempt to quantify or justify the sample/entity size ratio … in short, I regard this as a fudge
You may reply that my view doesn’t matter. I have the same opinion of your view
As a last point, both Pielke Jr and Spencer, amongst many others, have listed several times the published papers that regard increased H20 vapour in recent times as without hard evidence (in fact, satellite measurements suggest no change). These papers may be wrong, but so is the assertion that humidity is increasing … we just don’t know
21
@ RB:
As I said above, if you can invalidate the law of large numbers (not to mention the central limit theorem), by all means do so – you would be referenced in maths for centuries. If not, you’re simply asserting personal incredulity.
[ Random errors in measurements, from calibrations, instrument drifts, local variations/weather, etc., are actually the reason the law of large numbers allows determining a value from many measurements at higher accuracy than any single instrument can provide. As long as the spread of those random errors is larger than the instrument resolutions, crossing multiple resolution steps, the distribution of readings across the measures allows you to determine the mean to accuracies that can be orders of magnitude better than the individual instruments. ]
—
@ Ian – In reply to your objections:
As an example see Levitus et al 2012, Appendix: Error Estimates of Objectively Analyzed Oceanographic Data – explicit quantification of sampling errors using observed spatial correlation in temperature anomalies. Your claim that these have not been quantified is baseless.
Dai 2006, “Recent Climatology, Variability, and Trends in Global Surface Humidity” – “In situ observations of surface air and dewpoint temperatures and air pressure from over 15 000 weather stations and from ships […] surface q [specific humidity] over the globe, global land, and ocean increases by ∼4.9%, 4.3%, and 5.7% per 1°C warming, respectively, values that are close to those suggested by the Clausius–Clapeyron equation with a constant RH.” Increases in water vapor are directly observed, as predicted. Satellite and radiosonde measures of tropospheric water vapor are of lower quality [primarily from instrument discontinuities and sparser sampling of highly variable data], but are broadly consistent with these increases. Humidity is indeed increasing.
—
The opening post claims that ocean warming is insignificant, primarily (and erroneously) by averaging energy changes across the entire depth/volume of the oceans. While those energy changes allow us to estimate long term radiative imbalance, recent changes will take considerable time to percolate into the depths; the warming isn’t uniform.
Globally, however, sea surface temperatures are rising at ~0.12C/decade, with the Arctic SST rising at ~0.5C/decade, melting the icecap and decreasing albedo, a strong positive feedback. That’s entirely, and statistically, significant – and we live at the surface, not in the abyssal depths.
02
A measure to third decimal place,
Is hardly a temperature trace.
The results from the buoys,
Is really just noise,
And no threat to the globe,or the race.
270
Absolutely no reason to panic. Here in the US 100-watt light bulbs have been phased out — replaced by CFL or high-intensity LED lights which radiate 20% and 10% respectively of the wattage. This means if we just replace all 100-watt incandescent bulbs with CFLs, we will slow the ocean warming rate from two trillion to 400 billion Bulbs Burning Continuously (BBC). Using LEDs instead will halve that rate to just 200 billion BBC.
Just this one simple change can cut the ocean warming by 90%, and when you add the feedbacks of less CO2 emitted, the cooling effect is even greater.
But even better, the cooling effect applies to any kind of warming, as long as it is expressed in units of “100-watt Bulbs Burning Continuously”. Anyone have a reference on how many 100-watt BBC make up one Hiroshima atomic bomb?
(Please tell me I don’t really need the /sarc tag.)
130
“Climate Denialist Level 7”
Heh.
40
.
Oh my Lord, the Horror inflicted on Gaia. All that mercury pollution in all those poor, innocent tuna must be from those trillion CFL’s now floating around in the ocean creating planet killing heat. Now I understand.
30
Gee, at that rate it’ll only take 100 years to be worth noticing. 😉
But get your worry hats on now so you’ll be ready for it when something does happen.
60
Even accepting the central estimate, the gain is predominantly across 40S:
Figure 3: The spatial pattern of heat gain.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/nclimate2513_F3.html
Apparently, according to the authors, this is where the excess heat is being sucked out of the atmosphere into the ocean (as if air warmth would heat water).
Man-made climate change is truly an extraordinary process. Always new twists and turns to surprise us.
81
Yep, blowing hot air at the surface of water has always been know as an efficient method of transfering heat to water — NOT!
30
jo – you are the subject of a number of comments at Dot Earth.
i find comments difficult to read these days on Revkin’s website, but u access them at the top of the article next to the date:
2 Feb: NYT Dot Earth: Andrew C. Revkin: A Fresh Look at the Watery Side of Earth’s Climate Shows ‘Unabated Planetary Warming’
In an email exchange, Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research said he was concerned that the analysis, limited to data from the relatively sparse array of Argo devices, was missing large areas of the seas that other studies, including his own, have identified as significant. As a result, he said, “their estimates look low-balled”. Here’s more from Trenberth:…
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/a-fresh-look-at-the-watery-side-of-earths-climate-shows-unabated-planetary-warming/?_r=0
the comments in question are from Doug, Robert and a Susan Anderson, the latter two being attacks on your integrity.
30
It’s a badge of honor.
Looks like the usual attempt at character assassination to avoid polite debate. Susan Anderson has nothing against the “missing heat” post, and not one example of ” known to be a source of false PR ” because there aren’t any. She seems happy to promote false PR though. Looks like projection.
My reply to Desmog was years ago: DeSmog accidentally vindicates The Skeptics Handbook. SourceWatch have errors in the first line and when I managed the Shell Questacon Science Circus I was a public servant, and also a member of The Greens. Awkward for their grand conspiracy eh?
I have published research in a peer reviewed science journal BTW. Whatever! What matters is what 28 million weatherballoons say, not my CV. – Jo
80
Jo, you were either an incredibly astute double agent for ‘big oil’ with enhanced psychic abilities or, Desmog are practitioners of shooting first then looking at the target.
I think I’ll accept the latter considering they even deigned to keep a record of one of my comments on your blog.
In the true spirit of Nova/Rockatansky “Well, I’ll add it to my threat collection.” 🙂
20
I have a very small blog and still showed up on a global warming blog as “crock of the month” once or twice. Not to say it’s not an honor, but I consider it to mean these people are incapable of an original idea and thus spend all day looking for ideas they can make fun of. It’s actually very sad—as I say, these people are the “Wizard of Oz”, tiny little people hiding behind a huge fake wizard to look important.
Just in case you missed this: Time magazine thinks we should all go home because NOAA says it’s the hottest year ever (our “fever” is up, but no mention of the “hypothermia” of the 1800’s and how bad that was—I say that because they keep comparing this to human temperatures, a sure sign they have no understanding of climate whatsoever), sea levels are rising fastest (the models say so) and marine life is “sicker” (whatever that means).
http://time.com/3672276/climate-change-oceans/
10
“The world’s oceans are heating at the rate of two trillion 100-watt light bulbs burning continuously”.
Good thing the warming rate of something that is running continuously is zero. That means the flat line of zero global warming for 18 years can be used to show that we will cool like a light bulb switched off without this “rate” in opposition to what ever is causing the cooling that the constant “warming” has prevented.
30
Relax folks.
The catastrophic global warming / climate change / extreme weather solution is close at hand.
When we get to a situation where the Green’s wind turbines are generating all the power for those two trillion 100 watt globes that are currently heating our oceans we are going to have some seriously iced up oceans within a few years
30
These ‘climate scientist’ are having to genny-up somewhere to find the ‘lost’ heat because the dumb models, and Trenberth’s energy (un)balance cartoon says its there.
Funny the rest of nature is living quite happily without it.
40
‘We can now estimate ocean heat content so accurately over such a small period of time, and the fact that the majority of the warming is in the Southern Hemisphere.’
John Church / ABC
This type of misinformation needs to be brought down by someone in the MSM like Christopher Lloyd. In the meantime I’ll have to accept that Australia is surrounded by a heat bubble which will soon dissipate when the cooler waters in the Northern Hemisphere circulate.
Any suggestion to the contrary (like the warmer southern ocean is melting Antarctica) would be madness.
40
” Imagine if our surface thermometers were roaming around the countryside. Look out — the Stevenson screens are on the move! How good would you feel about “the hottest” ever record then? ”
Oohhh ! Plenty of scope for adjustments then, when necessary.
60
This one is a lot of fun guys!
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141204-antarctic-ice-melt-sea-level-climate-environment-science
20
The comment section is interesting. As usual, it says no ad hominems and then the warmists insult everyone. Do they even understand what the term “ad hominem” means. (rhetorical question) I note that one person was making a valient effort to counteract the propaganda.
What is most interesting is that no reporter ever seems to read the words “in two hundred years”. None of this will happen in anyone’s lifetime, nor for many generations to come. There’s no way to predict what the world will be like in 200 years. Some commenter was saying “Buy beach front property and enjoy the show”—said individual obviously either cannot do math or did not actually read the article. It’s blind faith. No thought whatsoever. Very scary.
40
Oh Sheri, you don’t know how happy I am to see you say this.
Unfortunately I can’t tell you why.
But Jo knows.
By the way, Sheri, do you think this definition matches your understanding of “ad hominem”?
10
“directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining” Yes, Andrew, that is pretty much what I would call ad hominem. The insult is against the person, not the subject.
10
No. An insult CAN be an ad hominem or it could just be an insult. An ad hom is attacking a person as a means to invalidate their argument, i.e. “you are ugly and therefore wrong about climate” “You are a tax cheat and therefor wrong about climate” “your mother wears army boots therefore wrong about climate”. Just saying you are ugly, a tax cheat etc. is not an ad hom.
Rude perhaps, but some people don’t respond to polite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
10
Mark D: I thought that was what I said. You are insulting the person rather than their position, as in your examples. Just insulting people does not involve an insult directed at the person RATHER than the position they are maintaining. If there’s no position involved, then the definition does not apply.
I’m not going there on the “some people don’t respond to polite” comment. You’re on your own on that one.
10
Sheri, one should be careful that others don’t misunderstand. Some people use the word “insult” as a synonym or definition of ad hom. Insults are only ad hom when the intent or implication is as an argument. One can go all day insulting a person without the slightest notion that it is meant as an argument against the persons position. This kind of rhetoric abounds on blogs especially with certain folks here (me too when a dumbass troll presents themselves as such). Sometimes it is just fun and entertaining. Blogs would be very boring without a little troll blood once and a while.
Sometimes it is easier to go that route isn’t it?
00
Then some people would be using the term “ad hominem” incorrectly.
I’m not going there on the “some people don’t respond to polite” comment. You’re on your own on that one.
Sometimes it is easier to go that route isn’t it?
Sometimes it’s wiser.
00
Sheri,
I think, and Mark may correct me, that it is the word “insult” that is the problem. An “insult” is not required for a statement to be ad hominem.
In recruitment situations, have heard people say, “I prefer X for this position; Y makes me feel’uncomfortable'”.
That, to me is an ad hominem, and should not be a valid consideration in deciding who, out of X or Y, would be best for a job.
10
Rereke: For clarity, I will post the entire definition with which I was agreeing (though the link was there for all to check): “(Of an argument or reaction) directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining:”
Okay, now we have argument or reaction in the definition. That covers insults, references to other beliefs the person has (like conspiracy theories), and rejection of someone who “makes you feel uncomfortable”. Is everyone now happy?
(I would like to point out that while not an actual insult, the reason a comment is made against someone and not their position is generally because one does not like the position but cannot argue against it. While Rereke’s example sounds innocent enough, if it is to be interpreted as an ad hominem rather than a “gut feeling” (which may have validity in some cases, depending on the person’s experience), there has to be a negative connotation. The comment was not “I prefer X for this position, Y is just too cheerful for the position”. The comment is a veiled insult, as can be name-calling when you can’t defend your position. That could be considered indirect ad hominem if we really want to psychoanalyze and rip this thing wide open. How far do we want to go? If everyone remains polite and discusses science, we don’t even have to define this term because no one will be name-calling, using ad hominems or anything else unscientific and/or uncivil. Sure, it takes the “fun” out this, but insulting verifies completely that this is not about science. I do read blogs where the conversations are civil and there’s no problem with all of this. It can be done.)
30
Only an ’uncomfortable’ fool would misunderstand what an Ad hominem is and, as the Lord is my witness, I am he.
Is this self Ad hominemizing or am I really that fool, or maybe just ’uncomfortable’?
10
tom0mason: It’s self-evaluation. If you’re not sure who are what you are, this blog will not answer that question. I do suppose one could apply an ad hominem to themselves, but that would be a sign of very convoluded thinking. I’d go with “uncomfortable”, but it’s your self-evalutaion.
20
Sheri,
Ad hominem is specifically and exactly that an argument or position is wrong BECAUSE of some quality in the person and NOT some specific defect in the argument or position itself. It has to do with attacking the argument on an invalid and illogical grounds and nothing to do with attacking the person.
A person may hold a position and may make arguments in favor of it, but the person is not his position nor his argument. Hence, an insult is not, by itself, and ad hominem argument. However, the holding that the insult of the person is in fact true makes his position invalid is.
The difference is subtle and abstract but it is a very important distinction to make.
20
While you are technically correct, I see little difference between calling someone a childish idi*t and dismissing them versus they are wrong because they are a childish idi*t. It seems to me if you could attack the argument, you would not have resorted to name calling. So you are correct, but the distinction would not have to be made if name-calling and nastiness were not an inherent part of the global warming “discussion” on both sides. As I have repeatedly noted, it is not at all necessary.
10
That was a good conversation.
It has confirmed my conviction that one should always be polite and patient in the face of ad hominem attack from those who have nothing to add, but their anger and frustration.
10
Sheri,
That “little” technical difference shifts the focus to the quality of the argument rather than the quality of the person who presents the argument. I contend THAT is a very important difference when it comes to assessing the validity of said argument.
A person may in fact be a “childish idiot”, but if his argument is sound, the soundness of the argument is not changed by the fact he is a childish idiot. A person may be intellectually superior, but if his argument is not sound, the fact that he is intellectually superior does not change the lack of soundness of his argument. In this context it is the argument that is important. The person is simply the medium by which the argument is expressed.
Insults and ad hominem are two completely different categories of arguments. To hold they are the same is to commit a categorical error of the first order. Thereby invalidating the argument as much as it would have been by using an ad hominem or a gratuitous insult.
10
Lionell: I am not holding them to be equivalent. I am holding that the usage of the insult and the ad hominem are very often done for the same reason—trying to avoid addressing the argument at hand. Perhaps it would help if you explained why if I said “Lionell, you are a ^*^&%*&% that knows nothing about the language therefore I don’t care what you have to say” (which would be ad hominem, since I am trying to say you obviously know nothing) versus if I said “Lionell, you are a ^&$&*&&, so who cares?” Am I not basically trying to just shut you up and avoid further discussion?
It’s unclear to me why it is so important that people be allowed to call each other names and hurl insults but not use ad hominem attacks. How is an insult better? Again, it seems to me this is designed to allow name-calling while not allowing others to insult via ad hominem. How is being called a flaming idiot, a childish clod, etc any better than saying your argument is invalid because of your being a childish clod? Why insult if not to silence and shame? I just do not see the difference, Lionell. I just do not. Grammatically, yes. Intent and usage, no.
I have no idea what you mean by a “categorical error of the first order”. Also, insults are not arguments. They’re insults. They are name-calling and tauting. There is no argument involved.
00
Ah ha! now I see what the problem is. I’m sure that Lionell will have his own comment but I would like to address this.
In a perfect world with perfect people your point is certainly noble. Unfortunately, (and on both sides of AGW discussions) you have people that will never admit to a well made debate point. Indeed, the typical warmist as seen here at JN will usually not answer direct questions, won’t admit to being wrong, won’t confess to a lie when it is clear that is what they have done. For these people, I have no compunction nor regrets insulting them, shaming them (although shame is something they rarely feel), mocking them, making jokes about them and generally working hard to upset them.
Why? They deserve it.
We don’t have a court of law to compel them to correct their lies, force them to agree with a point of view they find foreign. Finally, because it is the way I’m treated when I’ve attempted to comment on their turf.
You may find that an unproductive reaction but at the point where someone is not responding honorably or productively, I don’t care anymore and I’m happy to let them know.
00
Mark D: I really wish you had seen what the problem is. It fascinates me that adults can actually argue that someone was behaving badly so that justifies said person doing exactly the same thing they criticized another for. He was mean, ignored me and that was rude and unacceptable so I’ll just do exactly the same thing, but it’s okay if I do now. Yes, that’s absolutely rational. Like when I was told the way to teach a kid who threw a kitten against a wall to have respect for things and not hurt animals was to beat the ***** out of the kid. I am familiar with this very convoluted thought line.
If you really didn’t care, you’d ignore them. Problem is, you do care. You have no comeback that the troll listens to, so you seem to get very angry at them and the only way to deal with that is to insult and berate, to behave like a bully. Obviously, you care. You care a lot. And somehow you think becoming just like a troll is winning?
You can be just as happy as you want about this. I’m sure the trolls are equally happy. Makes them look good and gives them fodder to use against skeptics.
20
Well said Sheri. I’d be very happy if it were universally adopted. Humans are not universally compliant or rational though.
00
Sheri, I’m irrational and perhaps juvenile (and whatever else you want to call me with ad hom about child abuse) but remember YOU were the one that could not and still cannot distinguish between insult and ad hom.
You are a denier of human nature. Good luck with that, and I think I know why you live in a very lonely place.
00
Oh, and while Geeee wizz is here, I’d like you both to explain how you expect to gather political clout when you are so naive? Or do you find it oddly comforting that you are used by the ones that aren’t so naive?
00
Wow, and there it is—Mark D bullying someone that he could actually not win an argument with. Most impressive.
As for political clout, I have had several victories in politics, including helping some legislation through and changing people’s minds on alternate energy. I do just fine. Very well actually. You don’t have to be rude to be successful with politicians. Blunt and to the point helps, but rude just gets things tossed in the trash bin and ignored. Politicians are used to rude—there’s so many rude people out there, after all. 😉
00
Too funny Sheri.
Now we have two expressions that Sheri doesn’t understand the meaning of: ad hominem and bully.
Actually a not so interesting example of projection. Now here for all to read if they are bored, is Sheri actually doing to me all the things she claims to find regrettable: The name calling, the ad homs, the failure to argue successfully, the failure to grasp and understand.
Nice Sheri.
00
Mark D: You did not read what I wrote or choose to ignore it. First of all, I did not call you a bully. I said you were bullying someone. The comment is about your actions. You labelled yourself: “I’m irrational and perhaps juvenile”, based on my definitions. I have not used an ad hom anywhere. I guess you really can ad hom yourself….And somehow made may example of an irrational thought patterns into an ad hom about child abuse? Or were you going for a strawman? In either case, it was not about you. You completely missed the point of that one and twisted into an insult. Michael Mann had the same problem with Mark Steyn. Reading too much into a comment.
As for projection, understanding and grasping the argument, try checking the mirror. No, I actually think you understand perfectly……….
And now he tosses out the D word because he does not like my statement. So it’s okay to call me a D of human nature, but wrong for trolls and others to call you a D of climate change? How exactly does that work? It’s only rude and bad when you say it is?
Just can’t let it go, can you? You really, really can’t.
Again, why are you arguing that insulting someone is the proper behaviour?
00
Lionell, Sheri, and Mark D.,
You have all made valid points, in a roundabout way.
Let’s remember that the full Latin phrase is “argumentum ad hominem”, so an insult outside that context is not an ad hom.
The Wikipedia article explains that AAH may or may not be fallacious.
Please read the full article before commenting further.
00
StefanL: I read the Wiki article (noting that Wiki is not a legitimate reference source since anyone can edit it and write whatever they want–I cross checked much of the information).
The idea that ad hominem may be acceptable if you ignore Aristotelian logic is interesting. Reminds me of the change in the Argument from Authority was changed to elevate climate scientists to the level of gods with whom you could not disagree. There may be some validity to the idea that ad hominems in politics and morality, etc, are not fallacious but when it comes to science, I see no way even Taylor could argue that an Ad Hominem attack has any validity. I believe we were discussing science here.
I am unclear as to why you wanted the article read. (I do realize that the terms insults and ad hominem were pretty much tossed about and not always properly used in this discussion. Much of what Mark D. labelled an ad hominem in his interpretation of what I wrote would actually qualify as straight out insults. There were other cases, too, but the discussion is complicated enough that introduction of too many variables at a time could be problematic.)
00
This statement IS the whole point to the MSM beat up:
“However, Dr Wijffels said Australia’s contribution is in doubt with about half of its Argo budget tied up with the Abbott government’s stalled higher education reform bills. Those funds run out “in a few months”, she said.”
Its all about the money and attacking the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott…..and nothing about the science….that is merely the vehicle for delivery. Notice how quickly the story came out after the press club address and the leadership ‘concerns’.
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Jo.
I really think we should no longer give Peter Hannam any space, simply because he does not accept comments on anything that he writes.
All you do is boost his ranking on Google.
20
“If we want to avoid the worst impacts of climate change then we need to start taking some mitigation action,” Dr Church said.
This included cutting carbon emissions and lifting renewable energy targets at home and overseas.”
~ ~ ~
The light-bulbs will need to be coal or nuclear powered, as “two trillion 100-watt light bulbs burning continuously” can not be powered by “renewable” solar or wind power.
This inconvenient truth is overlooked by the
CSIRO climate scientistwind/solar industry activist/mouthpiece.40
After the late 20th century’s small but abrupt warming of what was it , about 0.35 deg. C between the Eighties and the Noughties, from a quick glance at the UAH satellite record, wouldn’t you expect the Oceans to still be catching up because that’s what Oceans do being the Great dampener. If 0.035 deg C is about all they’ve got to show for it that would be quite a remarkable demonstration of just what a huge dampener they are.
Wouldn’t a small but steady rise also seem consistent with the CO2 they continue to release naturally into the atmosphere by out gassing ?
50
Those who hypothesise that the ‘missing heat’ is now in the oceans, have to live with an interesting contradiction. Years ago, the same people thoroughly rubbished Professor Ian Plimer when he outlined the vast amount of ocean water needed to cool the eruptions of undersea volcanoes.
Today, the same people happily rubbish the idea that the distribution of underwater volcanoes around Antarctica has anything to do with the strange shape of the ice sheet of Antarctica. (Why isn’t the ice sheet a perfect circle around the South Pole and equidistant from it in all directions?) They find it implausible that the truly vast amounts of heat content generated in cooling undersea volcanoes can add to the temperature of the ocean.
But they can’t have it both ways. They can’t now say that that the extra heat they claim is there, comes only by heat transfer from the atmosphere without also admitting that Plimer’s explanation is plausible.
These people – and their acolytes like Peter Hannam in the Sydney Morning Herald – now face an appalling dilemma. If they are now prepared to advance the idea that the heat from all those trillions of lightbulbs and Hiroshima bombs got absorbed by the surface of the ocean and then, at certain specific areas of the oceans, got ‘down-welled’ into the deep ocean, then they have to come back to the Plimer stuff and admit that he may just have a point.
Personally, I find the volcanic explanations of ocean heat plausible and down-welling hypothesis implausible. I challenge Peter Hannam to revisit the other side of the dilemma and write an article about undersea volcanoes as heat sources. (Not that, given the error bars about measuring ocean temperature, there is any proven problem with ocean temperatures)
120
Case-in-point: Hydrovents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent
Quate (my emphasis):
But we should be worried about 0.005 C?
Also on that page:
White smokers emitting liquid carbon dioxide at the Champagne vent, Northwest Eifuku volcano,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent#mediaviewer/File:Champagne_vent_white_smokers.jpg
40
I’m sure the oceans warm up at times. Since they can only warm or cool it’s a two-horse race. No doubt it took a bit of warming to fill up Bass Strait not that long ago. A few light bulbs worth there. Of course, things can go the other way – Romans waded ashore in England where they’d now have a long tramp to reach.
The real concern is that Fairfax are not able to sell their silly rags at a profit because the ABC is dishing the same juvenile tripe for free.
Mean ABC! Think of the Fairfax journalists’ kiddies and grand-kiddies. What sort of inner-city cafe life do you want them to inherit?
40
But what they are implying is that the heat came from the atmosphere.
Well they must know of a real new method of efficiently getting heat from the air into the sea. Blowing hot air at water just doesn’t do it.
20
“two trillion 100-watt light bulbs burning continuously” Mmmm, what are we talking here Incandescent, Halogen CFL or LED??? Difference in temperature is rather High!! 100- 120C for an incandescent, 300C for a Halogen, 60-90C for a CFL and 40-70C for an LED!!! But then again if the statement is vague enough you can always pedal back and choose another globe….. If I had been the ABC/Faifax hack I would have had a much better Headline: “The oceans of the world are E V A P O R A T I N G !!!” meaningless argument for a meaningless theory/religion! ” Beware of the ides of March”
30
What we won’t do to amuse ourselves and show some of the stupidity of those claims of being able to measure ocean heat content gains to five one thousandths of a degree;
From Jo’s headline post;
__________
Time to panic:
Peter Hannam says: “The world’s oceans are heating at the rate of two trillion 100-watt light bulbs burning continuously…”
Maybe not?
So round up the calculator and try to remember my 65 year old school days maths to work out those ultra simple maths with those big, big figures the media and climate scientists fling around with gay abandon but which I suspect hardly anyone in the MSM is intelligent enough to actually figure out what they mean in the the reality of the real world we all live in.
So;
Peter Hannam says: “The world’s oceans are heating at the rate of two trillion 100-watt light bulbs burning continuously…”
First up is that nobody really has any idea on what the number Two Trillion of anything actually represents in any perceptible way.
Its all just big impressive sounding numbers that nobody can really relate to but it is used to impress everybody with the immense knowledge and impressive intelligence of the quoter in that he / she can supposedly calculate those amazing figures.
Is the [ sarc/ ] tag neccessary here ?
So lets do a few calculations ourselves.
Archimedes now offers a way of calculating the volume of a light bulb
So out from under the sink comes the wife’s calibrated litre container.
A dig around in the shed brings to light an old 60 watt filament light bulb. That will do in place of a 100 watt globe,.
Carefully fill the container to say the 500 milliliter level.
Fully immerse light bulb.
Measured volume is now 690 milliliters .
Therefore the light bulb volume is 190 milliliters .
We’ve got Two Trillion [ 2,000,000,000,000 ] of these one hundred watt light bulb thingies in the one billion, three hundred [ 1,300,000 ] thousand cubic Kilometres of water in our global oceans.
So after much messing around on the calculator we come up with one light bulb every 650,000 cubic metres of ocean water .
A cube of water about 87 metres on each side which doesn’t sound all that much water.
Until you use that figure to calculate how many of Peter Hannam’s 100 watt light bulbs would be found in the Sydney Harbor’s 0.56 cubic kilometres or 560,000 cubic metres of water .
And for Sydney Harbour, Peter Hannam would have 86 [ eighty six ] of his light bulbs heating up Sydney Harbour to a point where the climate scientists claim that the Argo floats would be able to measure the increase in water temperature.
Thats the claimed Argo floats ocean temperature increases that climate scientists claim they can measure to and from which the press releases the MSM swallows complete without a murmur of questioning or any signs of doubt or questioning.
60
Remind self; Must have another coffee
_______
Oh for a ten minute period to correct mistakes after posting !
Sydney Harbor volume is 560,000,000 [ five hundred and sixty million ] cubic metres of water. or 0.56 cubic Kilometres of water.
Ten times the 560,000 cubic meters of water I originally posted.
Sigh!
Delete post #36
30
Having coffee .
Looked again at my corrections
Have decided my demonstrated skills as a mathematician qualifies me for a science reporter’s position in the MSM.
[ irony / ]
50
Sorry but MSM wouldn’t have you because you at least try to make some sense from the press release and don’t just repeat it unthinkingly like the rest of MSM are trained to do.
20
He could apply to be a Numerical Cartoonist! 🙂
I don’t think any warmist would be able to follow the argument, ROM, they’d neuronically overload (shades of a sputtering CFL) after the first three orders of magnitude, which indicate `serious maths.’ Warmists do not comprehend orders of magnitude. The use of Hiroshima Bombs as a measure is a good sign of that. You’re safe.
20
My problem with all those 0’s is like spelling “banana”
No problem spelling it but when do I stop!
10
If not the MSM, why not try the CSIRO or BOM where 10 minutes of work without a coffee and 5 minutes with one would give an order of magnitude improvement in their performance!
10
I think you have that the wrong way around. No Public Servant can go for 10 minutes without a coffee. They can go for 5 minutes without one, but then need to spend the next 10 minutes getting a replacement.
10
following begins with predicted date when all corals in the world are gone. BBC’s Hammond asks audience: will it be less than 50 yrs (oh quite a few people, says Hammond) within 100, more than 100 (one or two hands, says Hammond)
Mary Hagerdorn gives answer: less than 50 years. last 35 years, 50 percent of the Great Barrier Reef has gone. at approx 31 mins: Q: mentions mining. have u spoken to the Australian Govt? Hagerdorn: not my job as an American, but Governments change. i can understand your frustration, etc.
Download Audio: BBC: Exchanges at the Frontier: Saving Coral 31Jan15
Sat, 31 Jan 2015
Duration: 50 mins
Marine Biologist Mary Hagedorn has an innovative plan to save the coral reefs
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ideas
the above is from this event:
Wellcome (Trust) Collection: Events: 22 Jan 2015: Exchanges at the Frontier with Mary Hagedorn
Can the coral reefs be saved?…
Speaker: Dr Mary Hagedorn, coral reef biologist at the Smithsonian Institution and the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology
Facilitator: Claudia Hammond, broadcaster and writer (BBC World Service)
it seems like only yesterday, there was this:
22 Jan: EurekaAlert: Press Release: Small drop in sea level had big impact on southern Great Barrier Reef
University of Sydney
The idea that coral reefs have formed over millennia in a continuous process has been challenged by a study of the southern Great Barrier Reef. The research, led by the University of Sydney, shows that even small variations in sea level can cause significant change across the reef…
During rising sea levels reefs grow vertically upwards until they reach sea level. Then they grow away from the reef front, producing massive amounts of sediment which gradually fill in the reef lagoon, much like filling a bucket.
“Most current models describe this infilling as a continual process, taking place over the past 6000 years or mid-Holocene, the geological era dating to the present day, following the reef reaching present sea level,” said Dr Ana Vila-Concejo, also from the School and an author on the study.
“Instead our research suggests that the majority of lagoon infilling occurred for only four thousand years and was ‘turned off’ by a relatively small sea level fall 2000 years ago.”
The researchers analysed samples from One Tree Reef in the southern Great Barrier Reef…
Associate Professor Jody Webster said, “Our findings suggest that reefs will be sensitive to sea level changes likely to take place because of climate change, quite apart from other impacts such as ocean acidification or pollution. Based on our model higher sea level might allow for greater coral reef growth and more carbonate sediment production but that would rely on the reef systems otherwise being in good health.”
(Quan Hua from ANSTO, Associate Professor Yuske Yokoyama from the University of Tokyo and Professor Paula Reimer from Queen’s University Belfast are contributing authors on the Geology article. )
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-01/uos-sdi012215.php
00
Oh for a ten minute period to correct mistakes after posting !
Sydney Harbor volume is 560,000,000 [ five hundred and sixty million ] cubic metres of water. or 0.56 cubic Kilometres of water.
Ten times the 560,000 cubic meters of water I originally posted.
20
3 Feb: Guardian: Oliver Milman: Barrier Reef coral genetically altered in hope of surviving climate change
Coral species from different climes being mixed as a form of ‘assisted evolution’ to see if it will help them adapt more quickly to rising sea temperatures
The Australian government’s marine research agency is looking to genetically alter species of coral to help them cope with rising sea temperatures, as new modelling showed the coverage of living corals on the Great Barrier Reef could decline to less than 10% if warming continued…
Scientists at the Australian Institute of Marine Science have partnered with the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology to look at how “assisted evolution” may help corals more quickly adapt to climate change…
A study modelling the prospects of the reef using a decade of data found there was a “very high likelihood” of coral cover plummeting below 10%, with corals replaced by sponges and algae as temperatures increased.
This would take the Great Barrier Reef beyond what previous studies suggested was a key “tipping point” that would threaten the reef’s ability to recover and grow. Such a reduction, the study suggested, could occur with just 1C to 2C of further warming in areas of the reef already experiencing pressure from other impacts such as fishing and pollution. This amount of warming is virtually locked in due to the current amount of greenhouse gas emissions…
“The Great Barrier Reef used to be one of the more pristine examples of reefs globally, but it has suffered a decline and will continue to do so if action isn’t taken,” said report co-author Jennifer Cooper, a James Cook University PhD student who worked on the study with scientists from the UK and the US.
“Our model showed that reducing the impact of other human threats to the reef, such as overfishing and pollution, did mitigate coral decline. However, if temperature increases more than 2C the benefit of lowering threat levels may not be enough to stop further coral loss.
“This suggests that climate change, and more specifically sea surface temperature increase, is an important driver of change on the reef.”
The stark warning on the reef’s future prospects follows a period of decline that has seen coral cover drop to 14% – half of what it was 30 years ago. Climate change, pollution and a plague of coral-eating starfish have been identified as the main causes of the deterioration…
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/03/barrier-reef-coral-genetically-altered-in-hope-of-surviving-climate-change
10
Someone should ask Guardian: Oliver Milman: How old is the Barrier Reef, and how much climate variation has it experienced over that time.
Corals unlike humans are not recent new-comers to the planets biosphere.
Here’ some we dated earlier –
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090324091209.htm
30
As a professional metrologist (not meteorologist) with more than 35 years experience in instrument calibrations, I find uncertainties of even 0.005 C highly suspicious. This equates to some of the best laboratory rtd sensors,. And without annual recalibration, its quite probable that the temperature readings on these probes will drift. The question is how much and which direction. Even the stated measurement uncertainty over time is meaningless without some sort of recertification. Perhaps the MU on day 1 was 0.1 C. But after so many years in the water, where subjection to an unknown quantity of external mitigators has rendered the sensors in a completely unknown state of measuring accuracy. At least a sample study must be done to determine how much their measurands have drifted, before they are considered valid. For the present, though, they not valid at all.
71
Pressure sensor drift will significantly alter the depth to which the ARGO floats descent to take the temperature and salinity data.
Therefore the ARGO float data,from the depth sensor problem floats is subject to considerable variations which are related to the real depth and not the sensor derived depth at which the temperature and salinity data is measured.
***********
Pressure Sensor Drifts in Argo and Their Impacts
Abstract [ Feb 2011 ]
In recent years, autonomous profiling floats have become the prime component of the in situ ocean observing system through the implementation of the Argo program.
These data are now the dominant input to estimates of the evolution of the global ocean heat content and associated thermosteric sea level rise.
The Autonomous Profiling Explorer (APEX) is the dominant type of Argo float (~62%), and a large portion of these floats report pressure measurements that are uncorrected for sensor drift, the size and source of which are described herein.
The remaining Argo float types are designed to automatically self-correct for any pressure drift.
Only about 57% of the APEX float profiles (or ~38% Argo profiles) can be corrected, but this typically has not been done by the data centers that distribute the data (as of January 2009).
A pressure correction method for APEX floats is described and applied to the Argo dataset.
A comparison between estimates using the corrected Argo dataset and the publically available uncorrected dataset (as of January 2009) reveals that the pressure corrections remove significant regional errors from ocean temperature, salinity, and thermosteric sea level fields.
In the global mean, 43% of uncorrectable APEX float profiles (or ~28% Argo profiles) appear to largely offset the effect of the correctable APEX float profiles with positive pressure drifts.
While about half of the uncorrectable APEX profiles can, in principle, be recovered in the near future (after inclusion of technical information that allows for corrections), the other half have negative pressure drifts truncated to zero (resulting from firmware limitations), which do not allow for corrections.
Therefore, any Argo pressure profile that cannot be corrected for biases should be excluded from global change research.
This study underscores the ongoing need for careful analyses to detect and remove subtle but systematic errors in ocean observations.
[ / ]
Therefore, any Argo pressure profile that cannot be corrected for biases should be excluded from global change research.
Have they been excluded?
Who knows?
31
Thanks, Jo. That’s going to be the title of my next album. Insignificant Noise.
60
Terminating Abbott won’t knock-off the climate sceptics
Via businessspectator.com, a greenie view of 666Abbott, the Beelzebub of 97% certified Doomsday Global Warming.
* The $200M gifted to the
UN-IPCCBob Brown International Bank in these times of austerity didn’t buy this guy’s vote.40
If the oceans are getting warmer, why are the sharks seeking out the warm coastal waters; as they did (if I recall correctly) when there was an ice-age scare in the late 1970’s?
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If those temperature trends are to be taken at face value, the warming is somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5 degrees per century. Come the end of the century, we will all be dead, and no one will even have noticed any tangible effect from such small warming. If anything it will be slightly beneficial. We have no idea that the trend will continue more than one century, based on history we expect another little ice age at some point.
Only a question of how long it takes people to get bored from here and find something else to worry about.
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From:
NOAA Annual 2013
From:
NOAA Annual 2014
That makes a difference in ocean temperature of 0.09°C between 2013 and 2014. (0.57 – 0.48)
A maximum of 0.005°C, or 5.5% of that could possibly have come from carbon dioxide.
So, where the heck did the other 94.5% come from??!
anybody care?
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Peter Hannam is arguably the most hysteric journalist of the Australian MSM over the past 12-18 months. So any study like this is sure to get him aroused and as such tends to ‘tee off’.
Because the past 3 to 4 weeks has been cold in Victoria, we haven’t heard boo from him in the ‘Independent. Always’ Age newspaper. Now that we’re expecting a warm week next week, Hannam has told his better half he’ll be working this weekend!
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Heterogeneous data. Overall error > measurement error.
The graph is meaningless.
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Overall, I would say the temperature is more steady than I would imagine. At least 0.005 degrees per year ? 100 years on that’s 0.5 degree, and all within the error bars. Who would pay any tax because of this important knowledge ? and more who think any tax will have any impact on the temperature ? maybe on the temperature at the governors place, but that’s not of my concern.
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I have not got the link handy, but check out NASA’s new OCO satellite for measuring CO2 around the globe – mostly coming from sparcely populated tropical (equitorial) rainforests!
Yet only man-made CO2 can cause a problem? pulleease!.
Sadly, I already suspect the raw data from that will be “homogenised” too.
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It’s interesting to hark back to 2007 when the first Argo results came in and were processed by Josh Willis at NASA JPL.
He found widespread & unambiguous ocean cooling.
The story of the embarrassment this caused him & how his colleagues in ocean science reacted was covered in a 2008 NASA article. It explains how his colleagues “diplomatically” explained that their computer models proved his real observations were wrong – “We let Josh know, diplomatically of course, that all signs were pointing toward his data”.
In a touching little cameo, the article describes how Josh, wrought with doubt and shame the night before his presentation entitled “Ocean cooling and its implications for understanding recent sea level trends”, stares mournfully at the shameful data on his computer screen, until suddenly – everything becomes clear to him “Oh, no,” he remembers saying. “What’s wrong?” his wife asked. “I think ocean cooling isn’t real.”
No doubt his wife gave him a really big hug, as he hastily rewrote the title and prepared to rejoin the “community”.
A wonderful little parable of how climate “science” is done – well worth revisiting:-
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/
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If we look at the lower stratosphere, we see that there were two cooling steps caused by El Chichon and Mt Pinatabo eruptions.
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=902
Then if we note that stratospheric cooling usually mirrors tropospheric warming we can flip the TLS data upside down and compare to southern hemisphere SST:
https://climategrog.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/tls_icoads_70s-20s.png
Due to therminal inertia of the oceans, it takes 3 or 4 years to follow the rapid changes happening int the stratosphere but we discover that the warming that got everyone crapping themselves at the end of the 20th c. was probably a secondary effect of those major eruptions.
Fuller explanation coming soon on Climate Etc.
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