Global Warming

[Super Nova]

You mean like 18 years on no warming but claiming there is still warming?

OR... Global Warming doesn't exist so let's do nothing about it and claim it is a sham that is not based on good science.

[IQS.RLOW]

You mean like 18 years on no warming but claiming there is still warming?

OR... Global Warming doesn't exist so let's do nothing about it and claim it is a sham that is not based on good science.

Has it warmed significantly over the last 18 years or will you deny the science?

[Super Nova]

You mean like 18 years on no warming but claiming there is still warming?

OR... Global Warming doesn't exist so let's do nothing about it and claim it is a sham that is not based on good science.

Has it warmed significantly over the last 18 years or will you deny the science?

I admit that surface temperatures have not warmed significantly over the last 18 years however also admit that the energy of our oceans has increased significantly. When the heat sinks reach a level the surface temperatures will then increase dramatically. This is what we must avoid through action. I also admit that over the last 15 years we have had the hottest years on records that would be highly improbable without manmade contribution to the change in our environment.

Head in the sand is not the preferred risk mitigation strategy.

[IQS.RLOW]

however also admit that the energy of our oceans has increased significantly

You have been shown this is not the case. Why do you ignore the science. The heat is not disappearing into the oceans. This is scientifically proven.

Why do you ignore the science?

[Super Nova]

however also admit that the energy of our oceans has increased significantly

You have been shown this is not the case. Why do you ignore the science. The heat is not disappearing into the oceans. This is scientifically proven.

Why do you ignore the science?

Oh... I don't... why do you?

Ocean Temperature

Warmer oceans put coastal communities at risk, increase infrastructure costs, endanger polar creatures and threaten coral reefs and fisheries. Perhaps most alarmingly, rising ocean temperatures accelerate the overall warming trend.

Take action on global warming now!

For details on the wide-ranging—and dangerous—effects of warmer oceans, see the pages on Sea Level, Sea Ice, Ocean Chemistry and Salt Water Species.

Not only are ocean surface waters getting warmer, but so is water 1,500 feet below the surface. These increases in temperature lie well outside the bounds of natural variation.

In fact, the ocean has absorbed so much heat—about 20 times as much as the atmosphere over the past half-century—that some models suggest that it is likely to warm the air another degree Fahrenheit (0.55° Celsius) worldwide over the coming decades.

Although ocean temperatures are more difficult to measure than land temperatures, scientists can use several methods to create an extensive ocean record.
•Dropped from ships or airplanes, probes gauging the ocean's conductivity, temperature, and density provide nearly continuous surface-to-bottom measurements at specific times. However, these probes rarely reoccupy an exact location.
•Remote vehicles can measure the temperature of deep ocean waters, and periodically surface to transfer the information to satellites.
•Moorings on the ocean bottom can measure temperatures at fixed distances above the bottom, until a ship retrieves the instruments—typically after a few months or years.
•The most common measurements, however, are taken at the sea surface. Scientists combine these measurements with land surface measurements to calculate the global average temperature.
•Scientists also know that ocean temperatures are rising because warm-water species are moving into areas that were formerly too cold, while cool-water and cold-water species are likewise on the move.
http://www.climatehotmap.org/global-war ... ature.html

And our own Dr Karl.

Now about 93 per cent of all the extra heat of global warming goes into the oceans, and only about one to two per cent remains to heat up the air.

Welcome back to my epic miniseries on the so-called pause in global warming.

So what is this 'pause'? Did the relentless rise in the Earth's temperature come to a halt? No. Was there an easing off in the rate at which the Earth's surface temperature is increasing? Yes, but unfortunately, only slightly.

I previously mentioned two causes for this. One was that the observation window (only nine years) was much too short to see a long-term trend. Plus, the temperatures in the Arctic, which is the fastest warming part of the planet, were excluded — for various technical reasons.

Let's combine these two causes with a whole bunch of cooling factors. These cooling factors include volcanic dust and increased pollution from industrial processes (which reflect the Sun's incoming solar energy back into space), La Niña events in the Pacific Ocean, slightly reduced power output from the Sun and so on. All of what I have just mentioned accounts for roughly half of the pause.

The other half of the reason for the pause is that less heat is staying at the surface, and instead, is going into the oceans.

Now this is a little complicated, so let me introduce you to a technical term that is very relevant — heat capacity. Heat capacity is a measure of how much heat energy a substance can store. Mathematically, it's the ratio between how much heat energy enters a material, and the resulting temperature change.

You might have noticed that when you unload the dishwasher, the ceramic plates are dry, while the plastic plates are still wet with a myriad of droplets.

At the end of the washing cycle, a heater switches on and heats everything inside the dishwasher. Plastic has a lower heat capacity, and can't store much heat energy. So there's not enough heat energy to evaporate off the water droplets. But ceramic has a much greater heat capacity. So when the ceramic plates get heated to the same temperature as the plastic plates, they can absorb and store much more heat energy. This extra heat energy can then heat up, and evaporate away, the water droplets. So the ceramic plates come out perfectly dry, while the plastic plates are sparkling with water droplets.

It turns out that, volume for volume, water has over 3000 times the heat capacity of air. If you shove the same amount of heat energy into the same volumes of water and air, the air will get a lot hotter than the water. The air's temperature will increase over 3000 times more than will the temperature of the water. Water has a massive heat capacity, as compared to air.

Now about 93 per cent of all the extra heat of global warming goes into the oceans, and only about one to two per cent remains to heat up the air. So you need only a tiny increase in the percentage of heat energy going into the oceans to slow down the rate of increase in air temperature.

The Earth's oceans form a very complex system. They cover some 70 per cent of the Earth's surface, and are hard to access because they have an average depth of some 3.7 kilometres.

Even so, we have taken tens of millions of measurements of ocean temperature and saltiness across the globe since 1970. These have been collected by buoys, ships and the Argo profiling floats. As a result, we have very good evidence that a few conveyor belt of various ocean currents have pushed the warmer surface waters into the depths — below 700 metres.

Recently, a very small part of the eastern Pacific, amounting to just 8.2 per cent of the Earth's entire surface, has become unusually cool. It has been sending warm surface waters into the deep Pacific Ocean. It turns out that there are roughly 30-year natural cycles in the Pacific Ocean involving the movement of heat energy - the so-called Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Since around the late 1990s, this cycle has been in a phase where the surface water in this patch of the central and eastern tropical Pacific is cooler. This has caused a rapid build-up and storage of heat in the deeper ocean below 700 metres.

A similar pattern, with the same result, has been happening on the other side of the Americas, in the Atlantic Ocean.

Over the last 50 years, the oceans have stored 250 zetajoules of energy. That's 500 times the total annual energy generation capacity of the human race.

Much of this heat will be transferred back into the atmosphere over the next few decades. Next time, I'll finish off by talking about what we can do about this ...
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/ ... 097388.htm

However, recent research implicates natural changes in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans as the prime culprits.

Since 2000 global surface temperatures have risen less than expected, a fact seized on by climate change 'sceptics'. But indications are that the surplus heat has been building up all along, writes Richard Allan - in deep oceans where it does not influence observable climate. Not yet, anyway.

Recent measurements of ocean temperature indicate that heating has continued at a rate equivalent to every person worldwide using about 20 kettles each to continuously boil the oceans.

There seem to have been a dozen or so explanations for why the Earth's surface has warmed at a slower rate over the past 15 years compared to earlier decades.

This is perhaps not so surprising given the complexity of the climate system - the world's best detectives will inevitably struggle to disentangle the factors which influence every lump and bump in the surface temperature record.

However, recent research implicates natural changes in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans as the prime culprits. Just as the apparently random motions in a river's flow can shift before our eyes from one minute to the next, the gradual sloshing about of our vast ocean waters can influence Earth's climate from one year to the next and from one decade to the next.

Natural variability and long term trends

It is clear that natural variability has and always will influence the climate. In addition to chaotic ocean fluctuations, changes in the brightness of the sun and variations in the frequency and intensity of volcanic eruptions (which cool the planet temporarily with sunlight-reflecting aerosol particles) influence the surface temperature.

The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working report found that these natural factors have contributed toward the slowing rate of surface warming since 1998.

However, recent measurements of ocean temperature made by thousands of automated buoys and observations of Earth's radiative energy budget by satellite instruments indicate that heating has continued at a rate equivalent to every person worldwide using about 20 kettles each to continuously boil the oceans.

This is consistent with what is expected from the rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases due to human activity. If anything, Earth's heating rate increased between the 1985-1999 and 2000-2012 periods, despite a slowing in the rate of surface warming.

In search of the hidden heat - the Pacific?

So, how is it possible for increased heating to not directly correspond with surface warming?

The Earth's heating is caused by an imbalance between the amount of absorbed sunlight and the heat emitted back to space. This surplus of heat is primarily absorbed by the oceans since they command the lion's share of storage capacity compared with other parts of the climate system such as the land, the atmosphere or the cryosphere (ice and snow).

This large heat capacity of water is noticeable from the amount of time it takes to heat up your pan of vegetables. And there is a lot of water in the oceans - nearly a fifth of a cubic kilometre of water for each person on the planet.

Crucially, the temperature at the Earth's surface depends upon where this heat is deposited in the oceans. If the upper levels warm, so too will the atmosphere above. However, if ocean circulations cause more heat to be drawn down to deeper depths (or less heat to be moved upward toward the sea surface) then surface temperatures will reflect this.

Recent research has implicated our largest ocean, the Pacific, as the most likely mechanism for subducting heat to deeper levels. Indeed, atmospheric and ocean conditions in the Pacific have been unusual in the past decade and computer simulations show that decades of slow surface warming despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations are associated with increased heating below 300m depth.

The mechanisms for heat absorption are less clear; the simulations show that similar patterns appearing to originate from the Pacific are associated with the draw-down of heat in the North Atlantic and Southern Ocean as well as the Pacific.

Or is it the Atlantic?

New research published in Science now shifts the focus towards the Atlantic Ocean. Xianyao Chen and Ka-Kit Tung of the University of Washington show that heating from rising greenhouse gas concentrations has preferentially warmed the ocean's 300-1,500m layer since about 2000, thereby depriving the upper layers of this surplus heat and causing surface warming to slow.

The authors say these changes are part of a natural cycle of knock-on effects, involving ocean circulation responses to changes in how salty (and therefore dense) the upper Atlantic Ocean layers are.

This cycle is thought to last around 30 years, contributing a sustained cooling effect then a warming influence on surface temperatures. When combined with steady heating from greenhouse gas increases this leads to a 'staircase' effect of stable temperatures followed by rapid warming.

They argue the previous focus on the Pacific was based upon simulations that were unable to fully capture the intricacies of the Atlantic Ocean circulation. An observed decline in the North Atlantic Ocean circulation over recent years has also been identified as part of a longer-term shift based upon evidence from computer simulations.

Climate complexity disallows simple answers

The changes in ocean circulation have also been shown to influence seasonal extremes and, based upon the proposed Atlantic mechanism, may persist for another decade before rapid warming is re-established. However, the nature of internal ocean fluctuations means it is difficult to pin down timings with any confidence.

While it is human nature to seek a single cause for notable events, in reality the complexity of the climate system means that it is unlikely there is one simple reason for any extreme weather event or a decade of unusual climatic conditions.

Nevertheless, the recent hiatus in global surface warming has encouraged scientists to further scrutinise and learn in even finer detail than before the workings of our climate system.
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_a ... pause.html

[Super Nova]

One more... and this is the real crux of the matter.

"Global warming is still happening; there is still sea-level rise; we are still sucking up more heat than spitting back out to space," Willis said. "What we are arguing about is the nitty-gritty."

Mystery of Ocean Heat Deepens as Climate Changes

Better measurements deepen the mystery of global warming heat stored in the oceans
October 7, 2014

When British Capt. James Cook undertook his second voyage in the Southern Ocean in 1772, scientists on board measured the temperature 183 meters below the surface. It was colder than at the surface.

Scientists have since graduated to vastly improved technologies for measuring the ocean's temperatures. By 2004, they had launched Argo ("swift" in Greek), a network of 3,000 floating devices spread out throughout the world. The devices record the temperatures down to 6,500 feet, where only the deepest divers, like sperm whales and great white sharks, visit.

Scientists are decoding the oceans using these instruments. The oceans are major players in the climate system, absorbing about 90 percent of the heat of global warming. To understand global warming, scientists must first understand the oceans.

"When we think about global warming, what we should really thinking about, to be honest, is ocean warming," said Paul Durack, a climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

Improved data about the oceans from the Argo floats caused a splash this week as two studies in Nature Climate Change challenged conventional thinking.

Durack and his colleagues at LLNL found that the Southern Hemisphere's oceans have warmed at a higher rate over the past 35 years than previously thought.

If that is true, the repercussions would be huge. It would mean that scientists have missed accounting for a portion of the heat resulting from human emissions. Scientists have calculated that a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations would warm the planet by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. Durack's results would place the planet's sensitivity to CO2 toward the higher end of this range.

A second study, also published in Nature Climate Change, found that the deepest parts of the ocean, beyond 6,500 feet, have not warmed by very much in the past decade. Much of global warming's impacts are playing out closest to the surface, said Joshua Willis, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and co-author of the study.

The study set off a furious debate among scientists and oceanographers studying climate change. The world's surface temperatures have risen at a slower rate over the past 15 years than at any time since 1951, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Some scientists have tied the phenomenon, called the global warming "pause," to the deep oceans' taking up more heat. But the NASA study suggests that may not be the case.

Resolving the reasons for the "pause" would require even better measurements. Scientists are on the case and the Argo devices are plunging to ever greater depths and surfacing with new information.

"We are getting better equipment, better instruments, more of them," Willis said. "Both of these studies are looking at how [ocean temperature] is changing over time. And the more we can learn about what happened in the past, the better we'll be able to predict what is going to happen in the future."

The puzzle of the missing heat
One way to think about global warming is as an imbalance of energy. Solar energy enters the planet and, due to the greenhouse effect, gets trapped within the atmosphere instead of being reflected back into space.

Scientists estimate that every square meter of the planet has received between 0.5 to 1 watt (an average light bulb emits 60 watts of heat) of excess energy in the last few decades. And more than 90 percent of that energy has entered the oceans and warmed them.

The oceans contain 252 billion billion gallons of water, and the energy imbalance caused by climate change is so huge that it affects this vast system. If water is warm, the oceans expand and rises. The energy has contributed to a global sea-level rise of 3.2 millimeters every year since 1993. Sea levels have also risen due to melting glaciers and ice sheets at the poles.

Scientists have been measuring the heat in the warming upper layers since the 1970s, but these measurements have not been very accurate. The Southern Hemisphere's oceans, especially, have been a dark spot.

So to cross-check the heating of the oceans, Durack of LLNL and his colleagues took a roundabout route. They first verified that climate models are accurate using real-world satellite data of sea-level rise. Then they used the climate models to simulate by how much ocean heat content has risen since the 1970s.

Their simulations did not agree with measurements of ocean heat made by scientists since the 1970s, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere. Prior to the Argo initiative, very few measurements were taken in the south, said John Abraham, a professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., who was not involved in the study.

"They find the warming of the ocean since 1970 is biased low," he said, "which means there really was more warming than we've thought."

Since the advent of the Argo project, the measurements have improved and the ocean's heat content has matched the predictions of climate models, Durack said.

An argument over the 'nitty-gritty'
The Durack paper suggests that the upper oceans have been warming much more rapidly over the past 35 years than previously thought.

A second paper, by Willis and his colleagues, suggests that the deeper oceans' warming has not contributed to global sea-level rise in the last 10 years. Sea-level rise occurs due to glacier melt and thermal expansion of warming water.

The scientists used data from the Argo floats to figure out by how much the upper oceans have warmed and expanded. They also knew from satellite data the amount of water added to the oceans from glacier melt.

The two measurements, plus warming of the deep ocean, would equal the global sea-level rise of 2.78 millimeters over the last decade. So, through the process of elimination, they figured out the contribution of deep-ocean warming to the observed sea-level rise.

It was negligible.

The study was called "deeply flawed" by Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He faulted the authors' choice of data and sampling methodology.

The challenge goes to a key problem in climate science today. Sea surface temperatures over the last decade have essentially been at a standstill, which is a problem, since the ocean warms from the top down. So, it would appear, global warming has "paused."

Trenbeth and others have used simulation-based studies to suggest that the ocean is continuing to warm, but the deeper layers have been warming up more in the last decade.

Willis' study suggests this is not the case. That's not to say Willis believes global warming has paused; he does not. He simply thinks other mechanisms are likely to account for it.

"Global warming is still happening; there is still sea-level rise; we are still sucking up more heat than spitting back out to space," Willis said. "What we are arguing about is the nitty-gritty."

The arguments will eventually be resolved by better data, some of which will come from the "Deep Argo" project, by which ocean temperatures will be sampled down to 19,700 feet. The first two floats were launched off the coast of New Zealand in June this year.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... e-changes/

[Rorschach]

Statistically insignificant...

You will note that the supposed increase to create the "hottest year on record" was 0.02 deg C with a measurement tolerance of +/- 0.09 deg C.

I'd explain the clusterfuck of homogenisation but it would be wasted on you.


Keep drinking that kool aid SN

This is not statistically insignificant.

"A Climate Central analysis shows that 13 of the hottest 15 years on record have all occurred since 2000 and that the odds of that happening randomly without the boost of global warming is 1 in 27 million."

Ah yes it is... did you do Physics at school, if so you will remember a little things called standard error and standard deviation. Oh and of course margin of error.

[Super Nova]

Statistically insignificant...

You will note that the supposed increase to create the "hottest year on record" was 0.02 deg C with a measurement tolerance of +/- 0.09 deg C.

I'd explain the clusterfuck of homogenisation but it would be wasted on you.


Keep drinking that kool aid SN

This is not statistically insignificant.

"A Climate Central analysis shows that 13 of the hottest 15 years on record have all occurred since 2000 and that the odds of that happening randomly without the boost of global warming is 1 in 27 million."

Ah yes it is... did you do Physics at school, if so you will remember a little things called standard error and standard deviation. Oh and of course margin of error.

OK so you want to argue over the 'nitty-gritty'... that's OK.

Using the same error range.... they still are statistically the 13 hottest of the 15 hottest years on record..... all other years use the same margin of error calculations one would assume.... so you point is what.....

Are you saying they are not????

[Rorschach]

What don't you understand about scientists saying it is STATISTICALLY INSIGNIFICANT!!!

The "nitty-gritty" is fanatics trying to make a mountain out of a grain of sand.

[Rorschach]

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/18/i ... y-stopped/
Cant post graph....