“I still do not quite get why these adjustments to the raw data had to be made.
Nor the terrible insistence that the heat must still be hiding in the ocean,
Up to the 15th different study trying to disprove observations and everyone of them is so welcomed til it fails.”
why?
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/guest-post-skeptics-demand-adjustments/
Nic: Perhaps I am confused, but here is how I understand the situation today. The current forcing is about 2.7 W/m2, the current TOA imbalance from ARGO is about 0.7 W/m2, so the 1 K of warming (assuming it is all forced) is sending an additional 2 W/m2 of heat to space (by emission of LWR and reflection of SWR). That is a climate feedback parameter of 2 W/m2/K and an ECS of roughly 1.8 K.
Now, when you and Judith discuss these earlier periods of ocean heat uptake, my first question are they “naturally or anthropogenically-forced warming” or unforced/internal variability. If they represent internal variability, then one part of the ocean is cooling while the other part is warming. And attribution studies for 1930-50 claim this period of warming was mostly caused by internal variability, not forcing.
When there is a forcing change that effects the radiative balance at the TOA, then there can be warming “everywhere”.
“Nobody insisted that heat was hiding in the oceans.”
Some nobody called Trenbath, JCH, and friends
” Resplandy et al. The interesting thing about this paper is that it uses proxies to infer the change in ocean heat content. What it finds is that the change in ocean heat content is probably at the high end of earlier estimates.
Startling new research finds large buildup of heat in the oceans, suggesting a faster rate of global warming by Chris Moody & Brady Dennis, Energy & Environment, Washington Post, Oct 31, 2018″
“Previous studies have found that the coverage shortcomings in available direct observations would be expected to result in quite large underestimation – e.g. Durack et al. 2014.
YET
Steven Mosher “It basically confirms that the range of estimates from direct measures is good.” Good old raw data,
–
“Climate scientists have long wondered where this so-called missing heat was going, especially over the last decade, when greenhouse emissions kept increasing but world air temperatures did not rise correspondingly.
The build-up of energy and heat in Earth’s system is important to track because of its bearing on current weather and future climate.
The temperatures were still high — the decade between 2000 and 2010 was Earth’s warmest in more than a century — but the single-year mark for warmest global temperature was stuck at 1998, until 2010 matched it.
The world temperature should have risen more than it did, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research reckoned.
They knew greenhouse gas emissions were rising during the decade and satellites showed there was a growing gap between how much sunlight was coming in and how much radiation was going out. Some heat was coming to Earth but not leaving, and yet temperatures were not going up as much as projected.
So where did the missing heat go?
Computer simulations suggest most of it was trapped in layers of oceans deeper than 1,000 feet during periods like the last decade when air temperatures failed to warm as much as they might have.
This could happen for years at a time, and it could happen periodically this century, even as the overall warming trend continues, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Climate Change.
“This study suggests the missing energy has indeed been buried in the ocean,” NCAR’s Kevin Trenberth, a co-author of the study, said in a statement. “The heat has not disappeared and so it cannot be ignored. It must have consequences.”
Steven Mosher says: February 9, 2015 at 4:19 pm
” I was on the other side of the debate before I actually looked at data and did the work that I suggested or demanded that others do.”
Sad day.
Did Resplandy find the heat, Mosher?
That was attempt number 14.
Afonzarelli,
Warmer interglacials don’t last more. If anything, they last less. For example MIS 5e (Eemian) lasted 11.4 kyr, which is below average. Within a certain range variability, interglacial duration is determined by obliquity. Interglacials are incompatible with obliquities lower than 23°. If an interglacial hasn’t undergone glacial inception by the time it reaches 23°, it does so soon after.
As Wim R. says climatic variability increases as we get farther from the interglacial optimum. It is well known that glacial climatic variability is much higher than interglacial variability. Both states are opposite metastable extremes that display variability in the opposite direction. Warming events (Dansgaard-Oeschger) during glacial periods and cooling events (Bond events) during interglacials. A transition from interglacial to glacial means an increase in climate variability and a changing nature from cooling events to warming events. I made this figure a couple of years ago:
Jim D made a new year resolution of spending less time at Climate.Etc. I guess it was taking too much of his time. If one doesn’t use the forum to learn, it lacks purpose. Nobody is ever convinced by arguing, no matter how good the arguments.
More and more perfect (!) measurements are needed, from surface level to the bottom. Measurements on all 360 million or so square kilometers of the oceans. We need to know and understand all horizontal and vertical movements in the oceans over longer time scales, (decades, century’s) to be able to predict.
I am not sure about that. Humans are not good at handling too much information. In fact quite the opposite, we are very good at reaching correct conclusions from little information. Schwabe described the 11-yr solar cycle with only 17 years of observations. Not even two periods.
For sure getting the information opens up a lot of possibilities. The sequencing of the human genome was supposed to lead to a revolution. That was what we were told. I was skeptical. It has opened up a lot of avenues for biomedical research but it has had very little effect on our understanding of ourselves.
We now have gazillions of climate data being collected every second, and reanalysis programs to handle it, yet our understanding of climate appears to be decreasing, not increasing. It has all been reduced to the simplest of explanations: The alteration of the radiative budget at top of the atmosphere. Are we serious?
I read scientific articles that assume that AMOC strength is controlled by the formation of deep water due to a mechanism called mass-balance. Say what? We know since antiquity that currents are determined by dominant wind patterns, and that current strength correlates to wind strength. Apparently these oceanographers of today need to do a little more of wind sailing. Giving them more data that they can handle won’t make them understand things any better.
Javier, some remarks.
Both your graphs show relations between temperature and obliquity, but not in the same way. In the second graph there is no 6500 years lag for obliquity and the ratio temperature/obliquity is ~4 times lower.
The Holocene thus far did not have an overshoot as MIS 5 or MIS 9 had, may one is developing now.
As you indicate, the higher the overshoot, the stronger the drop afterwards. People are looking in the wrong direction.
For the moment, the drop in 65°N summer insolation due to decreasing obliquity cannot be challenged by CO₂ forcing.
BTW, The Spanish Wikipedia ‘stadial’ lemma is much more informative then the English one, let alone the Dutch one (my native language). I will learn some Spanish.
what if indirect solar effect, like magnetism might affect the deep ocean currents?
As you say I am quite skeptical of anything that is not well supported by evidence. Magnetism acts on things that can respond to it, whether because they can be magnetized (compass needles), or because they have charge. Birds that follow magnetic lines in their migration do it because they have a cryptochrome in their retinas, cry4, whose chemical reactions respond to magnetism, so they actually see the orientation of the magnetic lines. And alterations in the Earth magnetic field were demonstrated because magnetic particles in ocean floor lava oriented to the magnetic field until it solidified. Even if there are magnetic particles in the currents, they are in a fluid medium. I fail to see how a magnetic field could affect an oceanic current.
In the end ocean circulation responds to thermodynamical principles. The Earth is an engine that receives energy in the tropical bands and has to transport it to the poles. Ocean currents respond to that mechanism. The more energy that needs to be transported, the more active is ocean circulation. Then everything gets complicated by the Coriolis force, ocean basin geometry, tides, vertical upwelling and downwelling, and so on. But in the end the driving force is the latitudinal temperature gradient (Equator to Pole temperature gradient), and this is stablished by the insolation gradient, and that is why obliquity, precession, and eccentricity rule the climate. When summer insolation in the northern hemisphere decreased enough, about 6000 years ago, the seasonal insolation gradient changed, the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ, the Earth’s climate equator) moved South, and the entire climate pattern of the planet got altered in what is known as the Mid-Holocene Transition. Monsoons moved South and the northern 30° band dried up ending the African Humid Period and creating the Sahara desert. The planet moved from the Holocene Climatic Optimum to the Neoglaciation.
The most important climate property of the planet, its latitudinal temperature gradient, essentially depends on the Sun that establish the latitudinal insolation gradient, but it is an emergent property of the system that instantaneously responds to atmospheric and oceanic circulation changes, like for example hurricanes or El Niño, that at the same time feed on it for the energy they need. As the world warms the gradient becomes flatter and the atmosphere quieter. Apparently scientists don’t understand why wind stilling has been taking place for the past decades. If global warming continues, wind turbines will produce less energy. I bet they don’t include wind stilling in their calculations.
While IPCC consensus scientists believe climate is determined by radiative balance at TOA over the entire planet, they are ignoring the evidence that a much more important mechanism is the energy transport within the climate system. By putting a lot of heat or very little heat in the poles in winter, the planet alters the radiative exchange a lot more than the increase in CO2. And this mechanism responds to natural variability due to solar variability, atmospheric and oceanic variability, ENSO, and volcanic activity. It doesn’t respond to CO2.
Both your graphs show relations between temperature and obliquity, but not in the same way. In the second graph there is no 6500 years lag for obliquity and the ratio temperature/obliquity is ~4 times lower.
Teerhuis,
Two curves that have a decreasing trend can be adjusted at the axis so they coincide, in the same way increasing temperature and increasing CO2 are shown to coincide. This is visual manipulation. Once one is aware of it, the important thing is not that the curves coincide, but the evidence supporting the correlation. The evidence for the correlation temperature-obliquity comes from the first graph.
If you look at the second graph you will see that obliquity peaked at 9 kyr BP, yet temperature started to decrease after the 5.2 kyr event when temperature didn’t recover previous levels and the Neoglaciation started. So you have a 4000 year delay there. As the curves adjustment masks that delay the obliquity curve cannot be used for projections. The only thing sure is that the fall in obliquity is still accelerating, on a millennial scale the drop in temperature should accelerate. The Earth has been losing about 0.2°C per millennium during the Neoglaciation. This is quite a lot considering that the glacial floor is only 4°C below and a loss of 1.5-2°C puts you already in a glacial state. Although Earth temperature can vary by a lot in the short term, on the long term is very stable. The Quaternary Ice Age shows a loss of 1°C per million years, or about 0.001°C per millennium.
The Holocene thus far did not have an overshoot as MIS 5 or MIS 9 had, may one is developing now.
I seriously doubt it. The overshoot needs an astronomical reason that the Holocene doesn’t have. Due to very low eccentricity the increase in northern summer insolation over the next 10,000 years is going to be very small on comparative terms to other interglacials.
For the moment, the drop in 65°N summer insolation due to decreasing obliquity cannot be challenged by CO₂ forcing.
The green curve in the second figure is model attempt to reproduce the Holocene from Liu et al., 2014. It is clear that CO2 forcing is being overstated, while solar forcing is being understated. There will be surprises ahead.
The long memory of the ocean suggests that these historical surface anomalies are associated with ongoing deep-ocean temperature adjustments.
The cold water in the deep ocean is there because warm polar waters flow into polar regions, contact ice that is dumped into the oceans by sequestered ice flowing into the oceans. contacting the warm salt water, chilling the water to below zero F, mixing the cold water and sending the max density temperature water down to the deep ocean. During the Roman and Medieval warm times, it was warmer because less ice extent cooled less by reflecting less and thawing less. The ocean energy then went to evaporation and snowfall and IR out that removed energy from earth while it rebuilt sequestered ice on Greenland and other cold places. When the sequestered ice volume was sufficient, it advanced and increased ice extent and cooling by increasing reflecting and thawing. Oceans froze and reduced evaporation and snowfall and the ice depletion lasted through the cold periods when there was little evaporation and snowfall. Ice is replenished in warm times and is depleted in cold times. Common sense and ice core data and history show this to be true.
“Climate scientists have long wondered where this so-called missing heat was going, especially over the last decade, when greenhouse emissions kept increasing but world air temperatures did not rise correspondingly.
Missing heat is simple. If heat is missing, you still don’t understand the natural cycles. The temperature changes, day and night, summer and winter, cloudy and sunny, show that the earth temperature is always balanced. If heat is missing, you still don’t understand the natural cycles.
If temperatures keep cycling, then the balance is working. Don’t claim the sky is falling if you just don’t understand. If heat is missing, you clearly don’t understand.
Javier, certainly the ocean currents are driven by temperature gradient as are all convection currents. But the question was what changes in the complex secondary dynamics, like the ones you mention, might throw a switch on the convection current train track. If a major change in vertical upwelling and downwelling could have a dramatic affect on surface temperatures, perhaps it’s the mystery cause of DO or other sudden climate events. If that is so then could a DO event near 23 degrees obliquity be the switch that ends an interglacial?
I withdraw my thought about magnetism; it’s unnecessary. As obliquity slowly shifts the Coriolis force, ocean basin geometry and tides all change orientation relative to the driving force of the convection currents, the Sun. Certainly, this could cause sudden shifts in the global ocean currents. Right? I have not seen this discussed, have you?
Ocean surfaces warm and cool with an annual change in energy input of +/- 10 W/m2. The reflection of the variability of the surface energy input can be seem in Argo data in vertical sections. With slow diffusion – heat would instead be well mixed.
In warm times, more ocean is thawed and more evaporation does more cooling, the water vapor and energy are used to produce more rain and snow and IR out from changing the water vapor into water and ice in the high clouds. This causes warm times to end when the sequestered ice is flowing fast enough.
In cold times, less ocean is thawed and less evaporation does not supply enough water vapor and energy to maintain the sequestered ice. The ice depletes until sequestered ice flow rates decrease and allow warming.
What about transporting surface heat from the abysmal oceans to the surface? From the probably 7×10^21 Joules of magma and internal heat per my w.i.p. paper. Enough to deliver an ice age by a simple doubling of average magma output, which more than happens every 100Ka (see Kutterolf et al). Smoking guns in unseen places. https://www.dropbox.com/s/emc1kl4hnwrktlo/Image%20Table%203%20Magma.png?dl=0
Correction, “What about transporting heat from the abysmal ocean floor to the more hospitable ocean surface?….”
Notice that when a “they could be wrong” post comes from skeptics, it means they are once again pretending that each projection’s warming from CO2 will be shown to be overstated. When we learn that the experts were correct or too conservative, the meme switches to “sure there’s waring, but it must be something else.”
Sad to see so much effort from skeptics that never once considered that errors can be in one of two directions. Rarely will a skeptic issue a mea culpa when it is obvious their gut feelings were wrong last decade, so it’s on to a new Gish Gallop.
At some point those calling themselves skeptics have to start admitting that CO2 is the primary forcing.
Climate has cycled forever, modern climate people want an average hockey stick handle and want us to adjust our CO2 to maintain that hockey stick temperature.
History and data shows that climate cycles to warmer and then colder, every time with some interesting excursions from a steady regular sine wave. Scientists do not understand why some of the correlations cause cycles to change and some do not. They claim they do not understand what caused past warm and cold times and do not understand what caused them to end, yet, they claim they know what we can do to control the future.
They say the future will be perfect if we make the renewable energy investors rich enough and make all rich countries as poor as the poor countries. Much of the world is already investing in this strange folly. Some of the world is waking from this strange disease but in other places it is spreading.
CO2 makes green stuff grow better while using precious water more efficiently. More is better, every bit of real data shows that more CO2 is better for life on earth. No real data shows any evil from CO2, only opinions and computer output from flawed computer models support this sky is falling madness. Past climate cycles have been warmer and colder than now, climate is changing in cycles, as it always has done, and we cannot create a hockey stick handle climate.
When oceans get warm enough and thawed enough, evaporation and snowfall in cold places stops sea level rise. When oceans get cold enough and frozen enough evaporation and snowfall do not replenish ice is cold places and sea level rises. Warm times are normal, natural and necessary to put ice on land. Cold times are normal, natural and necessary to allow ice to deplete. Cycles are necessary to maintain the polar ice cycles. Sequestered ice is replenished in warm times. Sequestered ice depletes in cold times. History and data and common sense show this to be true.
There is no missing heat, there is only missing knowledge of natural cycles.
At some point those calling themselves skeptics have to start admitting that CO2 is the primary forcing.
What a dumb idea!
Water is abundant, water changes state, water, in all of its changing states, is the primary internal regulator of climate.
