Chief is now starting to come around to what I have been saying. A temporarily warm season will provide a temporary large outgassing of CO2 to the atmosphere which will then get sucked back in to the ocean when the excess surface water heat diffuses into the deeper waters in subsequent years.
This is the SST for 1998:
http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/7246/sst1998.gif
The glitch of 0.5 degree increase in 1998 is multiplied by 3 to generate a temporary 1.5 PPM in CO2 concentration as measured at Mauna Loa.
Yet, I must state again for those keeping score, the most that a warming ocean can add to cumulative CO2 is only based on the absolute increase in temperature. So if the ocean warms by 1 degree C over a number of years it will add only a few PPM to the atmospheric CO2 concentration, not the 100 PPM caused by fossil fuel emissions. Fossil fuel emissions have a ratcheting cumulative effect, but seasonal temperature fluctuations don’t.
This is further evidence that the novel seasonal time series analysis that I recently posted is spot on:
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2012/03/co2-outgassing-model.html#SST_CO2
I will add the 1998 glitch to that post, so Chief should be thanked for strengthening the CO2 outgassing argument 