DocMartyn’s argument is essentially arguing whether Little Billy ate 10 or 9 apples because Little Tommy said he was allowed only 9.
He got squelched over at RealClimate on the fact that he is arguing over noise http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/ocean-heat-content-model.html
In the link above, you can see this discrepancy as well, but it doesn’t repudiate the theory of diffusive transport of heat.
Rud,
Here’s what I think happens.
Tropical waters warm, and collect at the equator. At some point they’ve collected enough heat to alter winds, currents, whatever. This takes decades(?) to charge up.
Something triggers currents which start to push warm waters to the poles. In the Arctic, this causes a large amount of ice to melt. Open warm water radiates huge amounts of heat into space, that ice wouldn’t.
But the down welling water after it’s cooled is still warmer than normal, and flows into the deep ocean. While I think the oceans are very under sampled, we detect this added warmer water as the “missing warming”.
As the tropical warm water cools, the mechanisms that cause this repeating cycle “switches” off, and goes back to “charge” mode. This cycles takes 60-80 years, and would cycle time would depend on how quickly the waters warm that control the cycle.
“He got squelched over at RealClimate on the fact that he is arguing over noise”
I was ‘squelched’ over at realclimate because it is run by enviro-Nazi’s who remove posts which indicate that their analysis is wrong.
Someone with half a working brain cell, such as yourself, can clip the end of the graph and measure that the heating from 400-700m is greater than for 0-300m. Hand waving about noise just means that the plot should have been presented with confidence intervals; plots without CI’s are assumed to have CI the width of the line.
Wagathon, No need. I still do not think they pay enough taxes. By what measure? My own. Sorry if that bothers you. I could care less what you think on that topic. Wrong again about Union Labor – again who cares. Next time you can vote for a party that you think will cut Government Spending, help the working man, and cut the size of the federal Government! Good Luck with that! I’ll be rooting for you!
WebhubTelescope,
So is there a triggering set of circumstances or events that causes, or can cause heat to not sink in the ocean, and instead go into the atmosphere? If that is a dumb question – I just don’t have a more intelligent way of asking. And what danger is there – if any – if the ocean temperature is rising?
Ocean temp is not historically measurable in some way is it?
How many other industries do you despise and hope to drive off-shore?
I don’t despise oil companies at all. I just said they should pay more taxes. Why is that so emotional for you? As far as driving them offshore, that will never happen as long as they do such a significant amount of business inside the United States and draw such a significant amount of there product from the United States. However if they would like to leave that behind I am sure that there are other United States companies that would love to buy up what they leave behind. But if you are worried about Exxon Mobil re-locating to Vietnam I would not lose sleep over it. Now try not to let the idea of an oil company paying more in tax upset you. Don’t bring words like “despise” into the discussion – you want them to pay less I want them to pay more. Don’t get all worked up over it. Anyway policy is such a boring subject. Get back to growing the “climate is not warming” consensus that is what I am here for. Ready to soak it up like a sponge – maybe you can go before congress and testify one day as part of the new —- consensus.
1) The relative heat transfers between two layers mean that if you warm the lower one, then the heat flux upwards is greater than it was, so (all things being equal) the surface will maintain a higher steady state temperature. This is sort of like the GHG photonic recycling mechanism, any change in heat fluxes will affect temperature.
2) The cold water at the bottom got their from cold polar brines sinking, flowing along the bottom, displacing the slightly less dense, slightly warmer, brines that were deposited earlier. Think of a giant layer cake made by placing a fresh layer at the bottom of the cake as the top layer is eaten.
Less polar inputs mean that the overall temperature gets a little bit higher as heat slow trickles downward from the surface, but ‘cold’ isn’t added so quickly by input of ‘cold’ polar brines.
3) The lineshape of temperature vs. depth look like a second order profile, then a very long 4 degrees line.
You question makes a lot of sense, but I don’t think is answerable at the moment. The solubilities of carbonates and silicates are pressure dependent and temperature dependent. I suspect that putting heat in such a system would lead to some strange phase change effects, where heat converts solvated salts into particulates, which drop and then redissolve. A heat input may just cause a subtle change in the gradients of salts in the depths as the solvated/non-solvated transitions become exo/endothermic.
4) Slight warming at the bottom will cause slight warming at the top. It should be easy to see the thermal expansion.
If energy is being captured and hidden, my money is on some sort of chemical/biological process. More algae? Growth of coral? More vegetation? capturing the photons as they try to get to the bottom of the sea.
The issue is eddy ‘diffusion’ (which is really turbulence) is highly damped across the halocline. Storms (notably hurricanes) cause substantial entrainment of deep water in the mixed layer, then as the weather calms a shallower halocline forms and the heat is sequestered below the mixed layer (but still above 700 m). Getting heat down to below 700 m by eddy diffusion isnt really going to work, which is the problem here (read the sections in my thermo text linked to in the main post)
I was in Germany recently. There are a huge number of these windmills polluting the landscape, covering the hills with hundreds of them.
I do not believe that the measurement of fluxes inward or outward have measured with a standard deviation of +/- 1 w/m2, so the numbers you quote mean nothing.
Ron, Diffusion is a random walk process. In this case, excess heat can randomly walk up or down through vertical stratum in the ocean. About half of the time , it will move up, and if it is near enough to the surface it can exit by either latent heat of evaporation, radiation, or convection.
That is the kind of first-order reasoning supported by math that my college physics instilled in me. Most of the skeptics and deniers that comment here hate to see this kind of argument. Reducing the FUD is Necessary because the war on science is never ending.
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Just one itty bitty little link.
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Here you go.
We also need to know how it got there and, first and foremost, if it is real? The data is very bad statistically. Worrying about sequestration is putting the AGW cart well before the scientific horse.
This first order reasoning for eddy diffusion only works in conditions of neutral stability, not if there is a very stable density gradient (e.g. halocline). Molecular diffusion in the ocean is enormously slow.
Feel the vibrations.
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Roger Pielke, Sr. blogged about Voosen’s article:
Science is truth. There can’t be “old man truth” and “young man truth.” Truth doesn’t change with age.
