Bishop Hill Hoskins' heat haze
Dec 14, 2013 Climate: Oceans Climate: Surface 
The Guardian has obtained some more details of the meeting between Royal Society fellows and representatives of the GWPF, apparently from Brian Hoskins:
Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, of Imperial College London, said: "There was not any major disagreement on the science we presented, which is an interesting thing."
In particular, Hoskins debunked the so-called warming "pause", describing how excess heat has continued to be trapped by greenhouse gases for the past 15 years, showing that global warming is continuing.
He said air temperature alone is a very limited view of climate change, given that 93% of all trapped heat enters the oceans.
"I can't remember any challenge of that in the meeting," he said.
It would be interesting to examine Hoskins' earlier public pronouncements on anthropogenic global warming to see how often he discusses changes to ocean heat content rather than the "limited view" represented by surface temperatures.
Perhaps readers would like to take a look.
Reader Comments (188)
I'm not offering to look into Hoskins' past statements about surface v ocean temperatures - not this weekend - but wouldn't it have been nice if he'd cited Roger Pielke Sr for his long-term emphasis on the subject and insisted the Guardian pass this on?
This was rightly snipped as OT on the Slingo/Lewis/Betts post, but is anyone aware of a climate model which can suddenly dump heat into the oceans for a while then..what? Maybe we have passed a tipping point beyond which ALL the heat goes into the ocean and we don't need to worry because the bit of the earth we live on will thus be freed from the threat of catastrophe. Why doesn't anyone challenge Hoskins et al on these obvious failing of the warmist case. Perhaps we can ask him to debate us? Not the GWPF, whose emphasis is on policy, but those of us who can't see the logic of the consensus position.
Mind you, anybody who swears the other side to secrecy then trots out their own version of what happened may not be the kind of person one would want to debate with. Quite Mustelid really.
Rhoda: So that was what you wrote there! Very good question. And why didn't the wonderful models tell us in advance about the sudden hiding of the heat in the oceans that was about to happen from around 97?
Why should air temperatures increase during the latter part of last century then suddenly stop? Perhaps Professor Hoskins can explain.
From http://adbiogas.co.uk/2012/12/11/meet-professor-sir-brian-hoskins/
"Realistically we know what technologies will be around and feasible in 2050"
a few sentences later
"Perhaps in the latter part of the century fusion will take over as a significant generator of energy but who can tell."
Certain up to 2050, all bets are off by 2051. Great game prognostication, he's no more testable than Derek Acorah.
Well, since no mention was made of natural variability, we can confidently rule it out.
I for one am looking forward to hearing about the wonderful processes which cleverly despatch heat to new hideyholes just as the old mechanisms fail.
" 93% of all trapped heat enters the oceans." Oh dear! I have always been led to believe the "greenhouse effect" was the "entrapment" of OLWR in the atmosphere, and that "global warming" aka "climate change" was the consequence of this. The implication that the observed warming is only 7% of the potential heat is very concerning. Have the IPPC and the climate modellers been shielding us from this terrifying vision all this time because the sheer enormity of it will invite scepticism? Mind you, if the heat is trapped in the thermo-haline circulation we will have to wait a bit before it comes out again and we have to move to Antarctica.
In "Sustainable Solutions, the Environmental Context" the temperature of the oceans doesnt appear to get a mention
www.imperial.ac.uk/workspace/.../public/08%20Brian%20Hoskins.pdf
No, you don't want to put your thermometers on the land or in the tree rings or even in the sea - you're just wasting your time. You want to put them right in the deep ocean - or even deeper than that. That's where its really getting really hot, I reckon.
At RS climate they were discussing and downplaying the hiatus, ie everything esle was going up but global air surface temperature.
But here is Met Office - Slingo saying pause (surface warming) could be 30 yrs, PDO, ‘not out of the woods yet’ quote
http://downloads.royalsociety.org/events/2013/climatescience-next-steps/marotzke.mp3
(Slingo? in Q/A session) (she is at 44 mins 50 secs)
"......you’ve argued very convincingly and I say (said) it’s a great presentation about 15 years being irrelevant, but I think, some of us might say if you look at the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and it’s timescale that it appears to work, it could be be 30 years, not out of the woods yet, on this one">
ref:
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/10/2/a-report-from-the-royal.html
All the RSclimate audio here (click on each speaker) – the Q/A sessions for each speaker are very interesting – ie frank discussion and disagreement
http://royalsociety.org/events/2013/climatescience-next-steps/
Prof Mile Hulme is also in the audio( ~40 mins 30secs )
http://downloads.royalsociety.org/events/2013/climatescience-next-steps/marotzke.mp3
sounding sceptical about reframing the debate away from global surface temp, as this is what everyone has talked about for decades.
also- "whilst I am not saying it is my view, but how much of the warming of the 80s and 90s could be attributed to the PDO" comment from the Met Office Chief Scientist.
Hoskins appears to be intent on taking on the role of climate shamen. Unless he explains the process of how the heat suddenly began to transfer itself to the deep oceans he's simply making a bigger fool of himself than he's already been doing.
His credibility was already low but he seems intent on surpassing even that.
If the (deep) oceans are now acting as a massive heatsink, surely the panic is over and we have nothing more to be alarmed about? Or am I missing something?
Hoskin's Daemon is a funny old thing. it magiclkally grabs hotter than average water molecules from the sea surface then carries them below 2000 m where the extra heat cannot be measured.
And the really astounding aspect of this Daemon is that it only works when lower atmosphere temperatures are static or falling.
More power to the knight of academic collectors of balls of scientific dung, the chief of these glittering beetles.
I am not a physicist, but it strikes me that the tiny bit of excess industrial heat compared to the vastness of the oceans is not stored but is lost. If you could store heat, then every household would keep their generated heat for future use - it makes little or no sense to me, but physics always seemed a closed society to those taking it as is the overused phrase 'the Science' - there is little or no science here it is the fractious squealing of a discredited pseudoscience that is creating the academic heat.. Where did you get the cartoons from, they are brilliant?
Temperatures over the past century have warmed (for whatever reason) by around a degree. With a warmer surface and the depths the same, the shift in equilibrium obviously means heat is going to transfer to the depths, and will continue to do so for as long as the surface temperatures are higher than they were earlier (as it would take centuries to saturate). It's very likely been doing that since 1900, but it's only post-2000 that we started seeing it when we first had a significant coverage of sensors down there. The best indication we have of deep ocean temperatures is probably sea level rise. That's still going up at around the same pace (with wiggles), and I've seen nobody suggesting with any confidence it's going to stop doing so. It obviously won't until surface temperatures drop significantly.
Sea level rise isn't measuring continued warming, it's measuring continuing warmth. The changes they're seeing in deep ocean temperature observations are an artefact of where their sensors were/are.
So how do you think feed the Guardian the 'story' of the meeting Bob 'fast fingers ' Ward who has deep connections he built up for his pay master with both the RS and the Guardian ? After all the RS were very keen on keeping it quite before Lawson went to press , for some reason .
In the end the 'need ' for missing heat in the deep ocean is becasue of the failure of so called 'settled science' and that is always worth remembering. Of course the best thing about the deep ocean is that so little is know about it you can claim almost 'anything ' is hiding in it confident that no one can prove you wrong. Not good science of course , but then this is 'not science' in the first place.
I am soooo not going to raise a finger of action or worry a hair of my cute little head over whether or not the deep deep oceans have or haven't warmed by less than 1/10th of a degree since I was born in the 1950s. It is immaterial.
I found it difficult enough to panic about the temperatures where we live changing a bit. Indeed I hardly broke into a sweat. Imagine how much harder it is to concern myself about something two orders of magnitude smaller supposedly (but not demonstrably) happening where we don't.
@Trefor jones: here is a graph of the past decade of lower atmosphere (HADCRUT4) temperatures: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2004/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2004/trend
Temperatures are falling. However, according to Hoskins and the rest of the beleaguered 'IPCC consensual' academics, this is because heating of the oceans has suddenly switched on. No doubt, when this is also shown to be fake physics, there will be another excuse. How about a sudden change in the magnitude of the Joule, even negative Joules?
Solved the mystery!
The heating of the atmosphere caused the oceans to warm, so driving out CO2, which, in water, acts as a significant suppressor of heat gain. Now that the tipping point has been reached, the oceans now act as a “heat sponge” absorbing all the extra radiation returned by the CO2 in the atmosphere, so negating the heating of the atmosphere. One important aspect of this is that, without the benefit of CO2 in the water, the heat remains denser than water, and sinks to the lower levels, where it lurks, and becomes ever more sinister in its plots to destroy the world as we know it.
Simples!
Is that idea any dafter than those espoused by Trebuchet et al?
Mind you, I am not a scientist, so could be wrong.
Watch the pea as McIntyre would say. Is it in the atmosphere, in the arctic, in the deep ocean? Or simply piling up in Hoskins pocket as the grants keep rolling in?
It all depends on what kind of scientist you are Radical. If you are a climate scientist and part if "The Team" then naturally, of course, you can never be wrong.
Regards
Mailman
Apropos the now very pronounced tendency of IPCC consensualists to invent new fyzzicks to keep the public from sussing that it was always dodgy academic geezer stuff, it's time to quantify this evolving phenomenon by new units. Thus a 'Santer' is a period of 15 years with no warming, the maximum period the models can sustain before being disproved: we are now 1.13 Santers into the new stasis, well after that period of grace.
I propose the Hoskins', the period during which a newly invented pseudo-scientific excuse can con the public and politicians. The 'abyssal heat' hypothesis was invented in 2009. We are 4 years on and many offshore wind farm projects are being pulled. This suggests we are at the end of this game too so the 'Hoskins' is empirically a period of 4 years.
Thank you, Mailman. I have to work on my key phrases, though – only managed to squeeze one in, there. Also, I have to figure out how to hot-key words like “anthropogenic”, “catastrophic” and “Mann-made”, to save on typing; perhaps I should follow Lew’s lead, and cast our cerebration to conceptualise the formulation of extrapolating wordage to encompass the insurrectionist linguistics of “anthropogenetic” and “catastrophicisation”.
Anyway, I thought FGS meant “for goodness sake”. If I am wrong there, I could be wrong elsewhere.
A rather clumsy grab at the most likely-sounding (and unjustifiable ) location of the "missing" heat. Nul Points.
The apologists for AGW are now in the equivalent position of a religious cult defending their failed prophecies. Hoskins is playing weasel words to hide his and his fellow rent seekers inability to predict weather based on their goofy climate models. He and his pals did not emphasize OHC when they could bang the drum on air temps. In fact Dr. Pielke, Sr. was ridiculed by James Hansen in writing in a guest post at Pielke, Sr's blog over Dr.Pielke's emphasis on OHC. I would suggest that the GWPF needs to return in kind the RS leak dripping from the "off record" meeting and get it all on the table. RS hacks like Hoskins are going to otherwise seek to own the agenda by dripping out bits of deception over a ong period of time.
From his statement, I don't think that Hoskins knows what science is. What "trapped heat"? What 93%? Or is that 93.00% +/- 0.01% to 99/99% confidence? Or is it 100% BS? I'm in favour of the latter.
Hoskins has a vested interest in prolonging this rubbish so treat his words with care. There is NO empirical evidence that heat is being stored in GHG's. Water vapour holds heat, as latent heat, which removes heat from the surface and releases it on condensing at height as cloud. This heat radiates to space.
There is no empirical evidence that heat is being stored in the ocean depths and since there are chemical reactions down there that are endothermic any extra heat would be used up.
RR; your excellent theory (11:08) on ocean heating needs a slight adjustment. Those escaping CO2 molecules which have tipped the waters into a warming phase must have been hiding in the depths and have now made their way up to the surface and passed into the atmosphere, using the same magic passageways as the heat on its way down. It has to be that way otherwise the oceans would not be turning into battery acid because of all the CO2 being absorbed at the surface.
Meerkat science - would make a great video!
Mikeh: brilliant! Obviously, the heat is using the same magic pathways that you have so recently discovered, but in reverse. If you could keep your hands to yourself, we could make a grate team!
Hoskins can run, but he cannot hide.
The 0.2 Celsius per decade prediction is the only quantitative one that comes to mind from the IPCC. Now that it is falsified, he wishes to claim that it was not important anyway.
I hold out my hand for the successful important predictions made.......and receive nothing.
I know you'll laugh and think I'm silly, but when I did physics (perhaps it was different in the 1950's) I was told quite 'irrefutably' - that 'heat rises'..
Can someone therefore tell me why the oceans are suddenly able to 'hide' heat at great depth..?
I mean - these are learned scientists who are coming out with this cr*p, aren't they..?
Hunter
"religious cult"
Now that Scientology has been accepted as a religion (!) in the UK, perhaps the RS should lobby on behalf of Climatology? I'm sure Hoskins and Nurse would love to become minor deities...
Rhoda
"anybody who swears the other side to secrecy then trots out their own version of what happened may not be the kind of person one would want to debate with"
Quite. I wonder if Lawson is just keeping his powder dry? He should soon be in a position to release as much as he likes on the basis of Hoskins's own indiscretion.
Bishop, you confuse me. I thought you were a "lukewarmer", accepting the science of CO2, warming and the energy imbalance but claiming that sensitivity was low. Yet with such a position would seem to come an acceptance that the energy from that imbalance will accumulate in the sea and the atmosphere and that a "pause" in underlying warming is therefore very unlikely (given the energy imbalance, which you accept). So you post is saying, you accept all that and always have, but you think Hoskins might have been less consistent. Or what?
Irony of ironies. Jeremy Grantham, with his money manager hat on, has debunded supporters of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, saying they were jumping through mental hoops trying to force the data to fit a theory.
Now Sir Brian, head of one of the Grantham Institutes, is jumping through mental hoops, trying to force the data to fit a theory.
As one who was present at the said meeting, I do not recognise some of the Guardian report. There is no dispute, and indeed there never was any, on the basic scientific observations. The differences remain on what the future might bring, and what is the reasonable societal response now. Some believe in models and other relay on extrapolations of the empirical data, and the latter have been and continue to be much closer to the unfolding reality over the last 20 years. Furthermore, there is a distinction between advice and lobbying. The former lays out the upsides and downsides of both doing something and doing nothing about a particular issue, leaving the policy makers and politicians to decide. The latter wants some action so sets out only the upsides of doing something and the downsides of not doing anything. I think we at the Royal Society need to be much clearer in making this distinction in our statements. As soon as a possible course of action is proposed, it is lobbying.
Heat in the deep ocean is called an immunization strategy, preventing the falsification of a hypothesis at a certain prize. We know that all women are stupid. Laura is very clever. This must mean that Laura is not a real woman (perhaps she is a dike). Therefore, all real women are stupid. Our models say that with rising CO2 level surface temperatures will rise decade after decade. The last decade they didn't. So this decade is exceptional because the heat disappeared into the ocean. Therefore, our models apply at real decades only and predict that surface temperatures will rise in decades in which surface temperatures rise. Please, let them go on because it's nice to see how these people disappear into a deep ocean of trivialities.
Did you see what Hoskins did there? He made it all up as he went along. That's "Climate Science" for you.
(I made a typo once and called it "Slimate Science" - which I think is a far better name for it...)
I wonder if MJK could elaborate on this statement "There is no dispute, and indeed there never was any, on the basic scientific observations." What exactly were the "basic scientific observations" listed as 1. 2. 3. etc.? As I recall it, Professor Professor Richard S Lindzen observed a climate sensitivity of around 1C per CO2 doubling whereas the IPCC adherents were holding out for 3C average until AR5, where they could not agree on anything other than it must be somewhere between 1.5 and 4.5C. Maybe this fundamental disagreement has nothing to do with "basic scientific observations???
There more I read about leaks from this secret meeting the more puzzled I get. What about the publication of a Minutes of Meeting signed off by both parties, and if they cannot agree on that two Minutes (one from each side so we can ascertain their disagreements). What is Hoskins & Co so worried about?
I don't believe in the concept of climate sensitivity as generally understood. But if heat can disappear into the ocean or not, then surely the concept is falsified? Revealed as invalid in terms of proposing ANY figure of surface temperature change in response to a CO2 change. You must choose, CS or OHC. You can't have both.
Dec 14, 2013 at 11:01 AM | Unregistered CommenterMydogsgotnonose
"How about a sudden change in the magnitude of the Joule, even negative Joules?"
How about Dark Matter, Dark Energy and DARK JOULES?
I see we have an assertion that the explanation of 'the missing heat' is the 'churning of the oceans', followed by an accusation that to fail to understand that this increases heat transfer indicates scientific illiteracy. Two issues here:
1. The heat is supposed to be from extra 'back radiation' as pCO2 increases yet most of such heat, if it existed, would be lost as greater evaporation and there is no evidence of this. Atmospheric humidity is falling.
2. 'Churning' increases heat transfer both ways, speeding equilibrium. To fail to understand this is truly scientifically illiterate.
@ A C Osborn: In 2009, Trenberth reinvented Phlogiston!
Heat disappearing into the oceans?
And..............'The dog ate my homework Sir'.
Risible bulwarks.
"Heat disappearing into the briny"
This is about money not climate.
It's a pitiable excuse, to which and absolute speculation there is no substance. All of it, this is just delusional 'blue ocean thinking' - and not untypical of these driven men but money is the key and therefore - they simply will not [cannot] let their pet project [CAGW] go because if they do - they dissolve, disappear the whole caboodle of; lies and the attendant green palliative idiocy - which is where they come in.
Let me spell it out, [there is] no catastrophism ie that of the man made emissions of CO2= runaway warming supposition, thus no Grantham institute. Which means an end to theirs and similar misanthropic organizations who deal in selling financial vehicles to hedge for big companies and fabulously rich investors and insurance. All of this is based on furthering the Great global warming swindle and to disconcerting, bewilderment of the human condition [propaganda] through climate fear and BS prognosis agitation. By promoting and projecting, by publicly promulgating the fear of ever greater floods, sea level rise, cataclysmic weather/climate scenarios ie scare mongering and then reaping the
scamsdivis.Ultimately.
Without taxpayer funding the whole house of cards falls, this is a hearts and minds campaign by the RS and the likes of Grantham et al - a final stand.
Brian Hoskins was a founder of the Grantham Institute.
"I know you'll laugh and think I'm silly, but when I did physics (perhaps it was different in the 1950's) I was told quite 'irrefutably' - that 'heat rises'.. Can someone therefore tell me why the oceans are suddenly able to 'hide' heat at great depth..?"
I don't think you're silly, but I think if you think about it a bit more you'll be able to figure out what's going on.
The claim that 'heat rises' is a simplification. Warmer fluids are (usually) less dense, and so buoyant. But fluids are complicated and chaotic environments. Ocean currents, winds and weather systems, differential heating and changes in salinity all cause the water to swirl around and mix up, and some of these motions are in the vertical direction - localised upwelling and downwelling flows. There is a constant upward overall flow in the tropics, part of the global cycle, which counters the downward mixing of warm water with cold. In stable conditions the two effects balance - the heat continually flows down the rising escalator, slowing with depth.
If the surface temperature (and the ocean flow/mixing) remains constant, there won't be any net change in heat content with depth. The heat is flowing 'down the up escalator'. But if you pile a load more heat in at the top, the excess will spread downwards to the point of balance.
It's no great surprise that the ocean depths would warm - sea level rise says they've been doing so since about 1850. The oddity is the claim that they have only recently started doing so - at just the point in time when we started taking comprehensive temperature measurements down there. It's not the claim that it's doing it that is controversial, it's the claim that it *wasn't* doing it before.
It's not the only circumstance in which 'heat rises' is a simplification. Why are the tops of mountains so cold? You need to know *why* heat rises, so you can tell under what circumstances it doesn't.
It seems that the AGW-proponent side has at least twice violated the non-disclosure agreement by issuing their own carefully nuanced (=biased) statements concerning the supposedly secret discussions. Now that one side has reneged, I hope that the Lawson group have now concluded that any agreement on secrecy is now null & void, and will issue a full statement of their own.
I like the very Guardian-esque concept of debunking a fact. It's so nice for their readers to be able to say, in response to factual observations that the official estimates of global temperature show no warming trend for 16 or 17 years, that this fact has been "debunked". I guess it translates as putting one's fingers in one's ears and going "lalalalala".
I am also enjoying, oh never mind DNFTT.
Most comments have been very commendably on the actual issues, but can I just mention how I deplore the snide slimy way the meeting is reported by Carrington. This sort of "journalism" really is the pits.