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 second Richard Drake's promotion of Rhoda's point. Even if future, yet to be developed, techniques turn out to prove the current claim that the warming of the past 15 years has passed from tropical tropospheric carbon dioxide capture to the arctic bathypelagic dihydrogen monoxide sequester without detectably affecting the average of sampled global surface temperatures, ( a claim and scenario I suspect would fall short of attracting a 97% consensus of expert opinions) doesn't that claim stand in unequivocal forthright denial of the IPCC ensemble of models? Wouldn't measurement of the proposed ocean heat uptake require complete revision of all past GCM work to model the mechanisms of such teleconnected fluxes?
If the heat IS in the ocean, then the IPCC's GCM CO2 models are wrong. If the IPCC's GCM CO2 model consensus is accepted, then the heat remains in the atmosphere, somewhere. I don't see how the two can be reconciled. But perhaps there are experts who can enlighten me...
"93% of all trapped heat enters the oceans"
Heat is measured by temperature and is not a quantity. Therefore 93% of a zero quantity is zero.
Temperature is the potential energy of a substance. Kinetic energy is that substance loosing temperature.
Flux is the quantity of kinetic energy flowing from a warmer body to a colder one.
The average sea surface temperature is higher than the average surface air temperature. The flux is from the ocean to the air.
However, if you are a climate scientist, you confuse potential energy with kinetic. This leads you to believe that there is such a thing as a flux from a colder to a hotter body whose units can be expressed as Trapped Heat and with quantities of that expressed as percentages.
Sad, really but explains why Climate Science is a new science and not a branch of a established one.
Those magnificent men in their funding machine
Heat goes up tidily up up Heat goes down tidily down down
They enchant all the models to make them more green
And b_gger the science for their funding machine.
As a physicist I am quite willing to accept substantial amounts of heat are transferred from the ocean surface into the 4 deg C band at the bottom of the ocean and advected through it poleward moderating the phase and amplitude of seasonal and multidecadal surface temperature variations. I think it is possible that at least in part the rise in temperatures of the 1990s caused the subsequent reduction in northern hemisphere sea ice through this mechanism but if the models were of the faintest scientific use they would have predicted the phase lag and the recovery of the sea ice we are now observing. Of course they did not - this is a gigantic negative feedback and if introduced would tend to make the models predictions less scary.
Now when so much work has been put into fictions about the response of atmospheric humidity to surface temperature rises, and from that, the ridiculous idea of positive cloud feedback I can not see the magnificent men rushing to put this mechanism into their models.
Why can't the heat now be found in the oceans? Its already left - if the heat was ever there it was an inconvenient negative feedback which would be kept out of the models - now it is nothing but a figment of Hoskins imagination - So my prediction is a bit of model tuning by his magnificent men and perhaps he can get any other "science" he needs from re-reading "The Kraken Awakes".
Hoskins certainly has his fingerprints all over this: http://wwwf.imperial.ac.uk/blog/reporter/2010/04/09/new-partnership-with-sainsbury%E2%80%99s/
I had a good laugh recently, when I saw an employee of Sainsbury's wearing a jacket in the car-park proclaiming
Now back in 2003/4 at Reading University, Science Minister Lord Sainsbury unveiled a new
for[No, that's not a spelling mistake on my part. Perhaps Reading is Lewandowsky's next port of call.]
When, together with Keith Browning, he met the Queen and Phil, Hoskins is reported as saying
Now, is he referring to his climate prediction skills, or the state-of-his-art in setting Sainsbury's on the road to bankruptcy? At some point, shareholders will ask questions.
Experiment for Sir Brian:
Apparatus. One patio heater. One bucket of salt water. One wooden spoon. Two thermometers.
Method. Clamp one thermometer one inch above the bottom of the bucket. Clamp the other one inch below the surface of the salt water. Record the temperature at both places. Position the patio heater over bucket and turn on. Stir and churn the salt water with the wooden spoon in any way for fifteen minutes. Record the temperatures again.
Repeat 1,000 times with increasingly imaginative stirring patterns. Report back if you ever record the temperature at depth having increased more than the temperature at the surface.
I suppose scripts for experiments should have a risk assessment these days. So employ a friend at any hint of repetitive strain injury. Though come to think of it, I imagine your wrist is quite well conditioned.
At 2:27 Nullius in Verba says:
"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."
I think I understand the basic idea you are presenting here, even though I don't quite get some of the terminology.
But if hot regions of water are being forced downwards by tidal and convection currents - which I think is more or less what you are saying - then why wouldn't they lose heat continuously on the way down, thereby warming up the water above the deep level? How is it that the deep water gets warmed in this process, but not water at the intervening levels?
One obvious way to bring about the suggested effect would be to drop depth charges primed to explode at deep levels. These would not warm the intevening levels as the fell through them, but would have a direct heating effect on the deep levels. If not that or some naturally occurring equivalent process, then what?
I think this is something many people find hard to understand about this deep ocean heating proposal.
Can you suggest anything I could carry out with a tank of water in my kitchen, that would demonstrate the proposed effect in a way that would elucidate the corresponding real-world issue?
Team Nigel have replied in a letter to the Spectator... http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/letters/9099232/letters-jeff-jarvis-defends-web-companies-scientists-answer-the-royal-society/
Neil McEvoy, can you point us to the research that finds that the temperature at depth has increased more than the temperature at the surface?
I am not aware of any convincing science showing cause for acute alarm, for fears of cagw, thanks to our releases of CO2, and so I think agreement over that is plausible with the GWPF team. This also explains why Hoskyns et alia did not want public coverage - they would be mortified if this news got out.
Variations on a theme:
I posted these questions on my blog a while back. They ought to be good for Hoskins.
[1] At once it is claimed that skeptics are illusionists for seeing and showing ‘pauses’ in meandering temperature where none exist, and, that there is a ‘pause’ which is explained by “heat” going into ocean depths. Which one is it?
[2] If the explanation for the pause is obvious, why was the pause not predicted? How do you know it is a ‘pause’? You didn't know there was going to be one.
[3] If heat that’s going into the oceans will come back to ‘haunt us’, how do we know the heat which haunted the 2nd half of the 20th century wasn't from a previous episode, but due to CO2?
[4] If ocean temperature is the “real deal”, why were you measuring atmospheric temperatures all these years?
[5] Why is global warming hiding in the deep oceans where no one can measure it?
[6] Why did scientists fervently research deep ocean warming all the while mocking people for asking where the heat was?
[7] Why did the heat suddenly decide to go into the oceans now?
[8] The climate models did not contain any pause because they do not include the mechanism that produces it. Why are you using them?
[9] If the oceans are now determined to have such a profound influence on global surface temperature, how did you manage to blame the previous temperature rise on anthropogenic CO2 using models that did not include this effect?
[10] If the flat trend is real, the rate of warming is slower that predicted. This means it is not as worse as you thought, isn’t it?
[11] You did not predict it. This means you did not know what was going on, isn't it?
The heat has disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. Simples.
"How is it that the deep water gets warmed in this process, but not water at the intervening levels?"
Water at the intervening levels *does* get warmed. But it does so a lot faster and earlier, so short-term fluctuations at the surface can happen while the heat below is still spreading downwards.
For kitchen experiments, you need to think about something that flows a bit slower than water. Treacle, say. You pour it out on the table top, slowly at first and then faster. It spreads out, but at the same time piles up. Now slow down the pouring rate at the centre. The level stops rising in the middle, but is still rising at the edges, because you've still got a big pile of treacle in the middle of the table, which is not a state that treacle finds naturally tenable in the long term.
The analogy is not perfect. I'm still trying to think of a better one.
Have I misunderstood Neil McEvoy's contribution to this discussion or are the troll's interventions getting more out of touch with reality by the day?
Unless I am much mistaken, Neil's point was that there could be no increase in heat greater than that at the surface.
I'm perfectly willing to accept that there might be a mechanism to get the heat down there. But there is no bathtub experiment which would prove or disprove the idea. But if people are proposing such a mechanism they have to give us a clue of how it works and what switches it off and on. And then a way of observing whether they are right or not. That isn't what is happening here. OHC or CS, which is it to be?
Thanks Nullius:
You say:
"How is it that the deep water gets warmed in this process, but not water at the intervening levels?"
Water at the intervening levels *does* get warmed. But it does so a lot faster and earlier, so short-term fluctuations at the surface can happen while the heat below is still spreading downwards."
You are right: I should have realised that water at the higher level will rise in temperature. That was careless of me. The logic of this proposed effect is not at all impossible - I can see that. If a hot object, or mass of water, moves fast enough to the bottom and more or less stays there, then most of its heat will be released at depth - so warming the deep more than the higher levels. I guess that dropping a hot piece of lead into a tank of water would show that - small loss of heat in its brief journey to the bottom, large loss during its subsequent long stay there.
But that, of course, is highly contrived. The logical framework for this effect exists, but can it really be that natural processes could bring about that same sort of heat distribution - with heat building up at depth and more or less staying there for a long time? I still find it hard to believe.
Thanks for trying with the treacle analogy, but I didn't really get it. It would be nice if you could come up with something that could be done, or at least visualised, with a tank of water. I also didn't quite see the significance of the 'short term fluctuations at the surface' you refer to. How do they fit into the argument over the reality of this proposed effect?
Best wishes
MCT
Here is a related post: http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.ca/2013/12/has-puzzle-of-hiatus-been-solved.html?spref=tw
" But if people are proposing such a mechanism they have to give us a clue of how it works and what switches it off and on."
Quite so. I'm proposing that nothing switches it off and on - it's always been on. We've only just noticed it because we've only just started making comprehensive measurements down there.
The mystery is not about why heat is spreading to the deep ocean. We *know* the temperature has risen over the past century. We *know* that heat spreads from hot to cold. The mystery that people like Trenberth need to answer is why and how they think it wasn't doing it *before*.
I think it's just too much of a coincidence that the warming started just when we started getting measurements down there, and that actually it's always been going on. It's just a consequence of the surface being warm. And as such, it is no 'explanation for the pause'. Similarly, while it is true that it means there is heat entering and being stored in the Earth-Ocean system, that doesn't at all mean that it would raise the surface temperature by huge amounts if it wasn't being stored. The excess would just have radiated away, along with all the rest. It's like saying all the excess heat radiated away upwards is 'still there' in outer space.
Clearly ocean currents can carry warm water down into the depths: my scant understanding is that is what the Gulf Stream does.
The puzzle is how this process has suddenly accelerated - with no change in surface conditions - to compensate for the sudden plateau in warming.
Amazingly this enhanced "sequestration" has suddenly kicked up to exactly the level needed to hold the surface and atmospheric temperatures constant without under- or over-shooting.
It's just as if someone was tweaking the controls of a giant computerised thermostat.....Ahh, light is dawning.
(I have in mind Josh's excellent cartoon where one of the climate cadets pops out from behind the giant machine saying "hey, I've found one that does oceans")
NiV and others are barking up the wrong tree. The mechanism that produces 'abyssal heat' is well known. It is a decrease in the sinking mass of the cold, dense water from Antarctic Sea Ice melt in its summer. The last time this happened was the MWP which ended in the 1400s. It takes typically 700 years for the mass of water to affect the equatorial sea surface, so any effects being seen now, and I don't see any data, would be from atmospheric effects a long time ago.
Bear in mind that the end of this circulation can give reverse fl;ow of warm, anoxic water to the deeps, leading to major changes to sea life.
Heat (temperature) is a quality of a substance, not a quantity. To raise a temperature there has to be something at a greater temperature to do the work necessary to change that quality. When there is, energy will flow from the hotter to the cooler. The only significant object in the Earth-sun system that has that quality is the sun.
CO2 has nowt to do with the process of energy circulation in the ocean which goes on unmolested by it.
MCT,
Do you have access to a spreadsheet program, like Excel, or Open Office Calc?
If so, try this.
Fill in the top row A1-Z1 with an initial temperature profile versus depth (column A represents the surface). Just make some numbers up, it doesn't matter. Then fill in a fixed surface temperature in column A. Finally, in cell B2 use the formula =AVERAGE(A1:D1) and then drag the little black square at the bottom right of the selected cell to extend the formula first across from B2 to Z2, and then down. Each cell should then have a similar formula in it referring to the cells immediately above it.
The formula represents mixing of water from a neighbourhood that extends slightly below each cell, to account for the water slowly rising as part of the global circulation. Depth runs across the page and time runs down the page.
You ought to see that the temperature differences rapidly even out, and the profile settles down to a characteristic 'decay' of temperature with depth.
Now you can fiddle about with the left hand column, and see the effect of temperature changes at the surface propagate downwards. If you vary the temperature at the surface rapidly, the wiggles only penetrate to a shallow depth. Slower wiggles penetrate deeper. It's quite easy to get the deeper levels still going up when the surface level is going down.
It's a crude model and I make no claims as to its accuracy. But it gives the general sort of idea.
Let's look at it from a different angle. The whole CAGW argument is based on a plausible conservation of energy hypothesis. If a couple of watts per sq m are retained in the system there must be a rise in surface temperature. Plausible but not certain. Needing to be proven. Now if you equate the system to the atmosphere you might end up with CAGW, but as the system is really the planet as a whole, as soon as you allow energy transfer to a heat sink you lose the claim that it is all going to heat up the surface. And you need another switchable mechanism to get that 1/100 degree out of the ocean and back into the atmosphere at 1 degree or more. Uphill against entropy.
I'm waiting to hear how all that is supposed to work.
Dec 14, 2013 at 1:59 PM | Unregistered Commenterrhoda
Yes. If heat can be sequestered in the deep oceans for who knows how long then some fundamental assumptions in all of Warmists' energy balance calculations are mistaken. To use an analogy from business, if you discover that your accountant has been skimming funds for years then you know that all your cash flow statements for those years are wrong.
Dec 14, 2013 at 5:03 PM | Unregistered Commenterrhoda
Right again. The Trenberth "heat in the deep oceans" demands empirical work. Ocean mechanisms that transport heat to the depths must be discovered and described. Then the output of those mechanisms must be included in the Earth's energy balance (the radiation in - radiation out calculation). Ironically, Trenberth's "heat in the deep oceans" hypothesis requires that he get up from the supercomputer and do some experimentation in the oceans. Of course he will try to get by with more computer simulations.
rhoda
That has always been my problem with this contention.Given how massive the oceans are and the volume of water contained therein any heat would surely dissipate long before it reached the depths that are being talked of and there doesn't seem to be any mechanism that could conceivably "re-constitute" that heat to a degree (pun not intended) that would enable it to re-enter the atmosphere in a way that would cause any sort of problem.
Or perhaps (and somebody better versed than me would be needed to explain it) there is a mechanism and that during inter-glacials it works to balance the earth's climate within natural bounds. Ice ages presumably being events that overwhelm this ebb and flow of heat and only when conditions change does this mechanism re-assert itself.
It could explain why we get Ice Ages and not the other extreme.
NiV
You are assuming water heated up in what is effectively the ocean "skin" can penetrate deeper to mix rather than the energy being lost because of surface effects, such as in random wave motion and evaporation (or in simpler terms - thermal loss). Also skin effects like this tend to increase thermal resistance. For low energy densitites such as 4W/m2 getting heat down to more than half a metre is a big ask in such a lossy system. UV light is better at heating water due to the much larger penetration depth (at least a few metres) - so the energy already penetrates past the skin. IR is mm penetration. It's hard enough to heat still water using IR, moving water would be much harder.
I suspect there is also an energy threshold - an activation energy that unless the W/m2 is larger than this nothing happens.
Nullius, thanks once again.
You say:
"It's quite easy to get the deeper levels still going up when the surface level is going down."
Yes, I can see how that could happen. I take it that the surface wiggles involved increasing and decreasing the surface temperature periodically. Since heat travels with a finite speed, a deep position will receive heat that was already in transit before any given surface decrease occurred. [Like a metal bar heated at one end by a source of oscillating strength, with diffusion occurring along its length.] So, yes, you might well find times when the deep water is getting warmer while the surface is getting cooler - namely those times when you are cooling the surface, but the effect of that cooling has not yet had time to ripple down to the depths. (I hope I have not misunderstood what you are saying here.)
But is this really the mechanism the proposers of deep ocean warming are suggesting - especially since average surface temperatures are said by them not to be decreasing? I suppose what I am asking is this: Is heat actually trapped at depth long term (e.g. 17 years) and if so how? Are you saying that the above mechanism is the answer to that question?
Hoskins is misrepresenting what happened at the meeting.
As long as hand-waving and plausible-sounding scenarios are allowed, how about this one?
I. Heat, captured in the tropical troposphere, is wafted by currents to the polar regions and ground level (where instrumentation is sadly lacking and so this can't be measured. Such tropic-to-polar warming and surface temperature changes are, however, "not inconsistent" with the physics as published in the major journals and so may be taken entirely for granted.)
II. Heat is absorbed by polar /coastal ice, some of which melts and some of which sublimates. (Because, as everyone knows, solid ice at several degrees below freezing melts (( and sublimes)) easily in the vicinity of air at even a fraction of one degree Centigrade above zero.)
III Near-zero degree (Centigrade) water vapor from sublimated ice is carried back towards the tropics by wind currents, creating snow and general weather weirdness. That is, warm AIR from one place creates cold WEATHER in another. (My model therefore BEGINS with empirical observation, ((except for the part about "warm air" but we can assume the tropical troposphere's air is warm because: Arrhenius+CO2 + physics + consensus.))
IV. Near-zero degree liquid water, being WARMER than the ice formerly in the region, and carrying additional kinetic energy, being in motion from the wind and runoff, raises the average temperature of the polar oceans -- presumably from about 4 degrees C to something like 4.1 C. (That is, mixing two small quantities of water at zero and four degrees, respectively, results in a larger quantity of water at 4.1 degrees.)
V. Slightly warmer, moving, polar water floats toward the equator until it reaches regions where the surface temperatures are at present warmer, and the water less dense. At that latitude, the "warm" polar-origin water suddenly sinks. There is no temperature flow, just near-surface currents. Almost like atmospheric weather patterns where cold air be transported over warm air, and suddenly drop through various layers.
The addition of 4.1 degree water at this inversion latitude to the "normal" deep water reservoir at 4.0 degree water raises the heat sequestered by the "deep oceans" but only barely affects the deep ocean temperature, raising that from 4.0000 to (hypothetically) 4.0001 degrees.
Please send me several million dollars and I will flesh out the mathematics and general circulation simulation computer models using fluid dynamics, chaos theory, and HARRY.READ.ME style programming.
"For low energy densitites such as 4W/m2 getting heat down to more than half a metre is a big ask in such a lossy system."
Why? It might take a while, but I don't see why it should be depth-limited.
"But is this really the mechanism the proposers of deep ocean warming are suggesting - especially since average surface temperatures are said by them not to be decreasing? I suppose what I am asking is this: Is heat actually trapped at depth long term (e.g. 17 years) and if so how? Are you saying that the above mechanism is the answer to that question?"
As I said, the mystery is not about how heat would get down there, but about how they think it hasn't previously. I don't think it's the answer to their question about what caused the pause.
I don't see a problem with "the sea receives 75% of the incoming IR radiation". I see a big problem with " 93% of all trapped heat enters the oceans". What does it mean ? Is he saying that (93% of) energy from radiation trapped somewhere else (other than the sea, that is)
In the absence of a warming atmosphere decreasing the temperature gradient between the ocean and it (current situation), all else equal other than ACO2 the only mechanism to increase average ocean temperature is an acceleration in ocean circulation.
Hardly credible that this was a sudden occurrence at the turn of the millennium given the mass of the oceans and a few ppm of CO2 being the driver (as it is for all things in AGW theory).
Mike Jackson, "Neil's point was that there could be no increase in heat greater than that at the surface."
Those were not his words. He said, "Report back if you ever record the temperature at depth having increased more than the temperature at the surface.". Your summary and his statement might be equivalent in skeptic-world, but nowhere else.
"For low energy densitites such as 4W/m2 getting heat down to more than half a metre is a big ask in such a lossy system."
Why? It might take a while, but I don't see why it should be depth-limited.
Well, if a system is lossy the 4W/m2 won't result in hotter water at depth. And secondly, on experiments with milk using over 1kW/m2 there was a marked deterioration of temperature over just a few mm. ( K Krishnamurthy - 2006
Now he did use small samples and there may be conduction losses but it still demonstrates how tricky it can be to heat fluids with IR.
MJK said
"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."
I have commented a few times that anyone with a 20 pence piece of graph paper 25 years ago, who just drew a continuation of the Multi-decadal Oscillations of the previous 150 years would have come close to where we are now.
They started with an answer, never considered any natural variation, and have worked towards fitting anything that happens into the theory.
"What does it mean ? Is he saying that (93% of) energy from radiation trapped somewhere else (other than the sea, that is)"
Heat enters the system at the surface, some escapes upwards, some escapes downwards, some stays to warm the atmosphere and surface. Of the heat that doesn't escape upwards, 93% escapes downwards. But it's no more significant a number than the percentage that escapes upwards and is 'stored' in outer space. It's just saying the ocean depths have a much bigger heat capacity than the surface.
"Now he did use small samples and there may be conduction losses but it still demonstrates how tricky it can be to heat fluids with IR."
Who said anything about "heating fluids with IR"? It's heated by convective mixing.
So, Sir Brian, what was the point of taxpayers, world wide, being forced to pay millions of dollars for, so called climatologists, to produce loads of models: to predict global surface temperatures?
Wrong again, Chandra
"Report back if you ever record the temperature at depth having increased more than the temperature at the surface" means the same as "there could be no increase in heat [perhaps the word 'temperature' would have been better] greater than that at the surface" to anyone who is familiar with idiomatic English.
NiV
You can only heat by convection if there is heat there in the first place. As this thread is about "missing heat in the oceans" and that AGWers believe that this is a result of IR heating ( or "back radiation" ) then that's why I am talking about IR. In fact that's all that's relevant. If the heat was due to UV then it's just natural variation and we are just seeing a natural effect which would include a "pause".
So my point is that other experiments have shown that IR heating isn't that effective and so no it's going to be pretty hard to have deep ocean heat irrespective of convective mixing
I wish more people adhered to the post's topic!!!
Anyway, if nobody else has answered the Bish's question, this 2010 NAS report reviewed by Hoskins made it clear that ocean heat content was not the focus at all, rather surface temperatures were. OHC was only seen as a contributor to changes in surface temperatures.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/nas_12878.pdf
Dec 14, 2013 at 7:23 PM | Registered CommenterMike Jackson
DON'T FEED THE TROLL !!!! Mike, you know better as tempting as the idiot makes it.
"You can only heat by convection if there is heat there in the first place."
The heat's enters the water at the surface as sunlight, and is mixed in by wind and current-driven turbulence. IR has nothing to do with it.
"and that AGWers believe that this is a result of IR heating ( or "back radiation" )"
Some do. But the actual AGW theory in the deep technical literature doesn't work by back radiation. It's off-topic, and only leads to huge and unproductive arguments so I'll not go there. If you're interested, there's an explanation here:
http://judithcurry.com/2010/11/30/physics-of-the-atmospheric-greenhouse-effect/#comment-16901
It's a complete waste of time arguing about or against 'back radiation', since it doesn't work that way anyway. But that doesn't seem to stop people. I think some people just like arguing.
Mike Jackson, as I said to Neil McEvoy, show me the research that finds that the temperature at depth has increased more than the temperature at the surface, which was his suggestion. Only an idiot would think that relating a change in surface water temperature to a change in deep ocean temperature is the same thing as relating a change in surface water heat content to a change in deep ocean heat content (hint for idiots, there's much more deep ocean water than surface water).
Dec 14, 2013 at 7:02 PM | Unregistered CommenterNullius in Verba
You completely missed my point. OTYH. Please read it carefully again. I didn't mention heat. It has no place in this discussion. Radiative energy and heat are not the same. Heat is the kinetic energy effect of radiation when it is absorped. We 'feel' heat because energy is absorped by our skin in the form of kinetic and absorped energy. This is critical. The oceans, most particularly in the tropics, receive the vast majority of solar radiation ( the full spectrum of that which reaches the bottom of the atmosphere). That radiation penetrates only a relatively short distance into the surface. In order for that 'energy' to penetrate into the depths it would have to be in the form of kinetic energy (heat).
Now what Hoskins said was " air temperature alone is a very limited view of climate change, given that 93% of all trapped heat enters the oceans." Do you see why I asked the question and what that question was.
"93% of all trapped heat" You cannot trap heat. Where did he think that heat was trapped and if it was trapped how would it "enter the oceans". ???
Heat is kinetic energy. It's like trapping a rageing bull. How does it become selectively "untrapped" so that it can enter into salt water and penetrate to great depth.
It's the net biggest connerie after AGW.
The heat's enters the water at the surface as sunlight, and is mixed in by wind and current-driven turbulence. IR has nothing to do with it
If heat is entering the surface then it can on ly do so in the form of kinetic energy transfer from the atmospheric gases. This is an EXTREMELY inefficient mechanism because the water is 1000 times more dense than the atmosphere.
You talk a good story but I am very unsure of your terminology.
Stephen Richards
I grovel! :-(
Sometimes I can't resist. It's the pedant in me in the face of crass imbecility. I shall try to repent!
"Do you see why I asked the question and what that question was."
Yes. And I agree that what he said is wrong and misleading. But it's no good if the counter-argument is wrong and misleading, too. That just enables them to get away with it.
NiV
ah I see that you have a different view of things from the Judith Curry comment. Well fair play then.
I was reading something else into it he previous comments. My bad.
My point was more that if the AGW theory is taken as a starting point and if iR is back radiated its still very hard to heat water with it at those levels without some loss.
Hence the missing heat is a very big stretch. Notwithstanding the whole AGW in the first place.
Stephen Richards,
And
This seem like a contradiction, unless you think sunlight is kinetic energy. If you think the second quote is true, try standing in the sun on a sunny day and imagine you are a bucket of water (which of course you are). Now try thinking that the only thing heating you up is air molecules hitting you. Pretty, kind of, stupid, don't you think Mary?
And of course IR has to do with heat gain, indirectly. The ocean emits IR to the atmosphere and absorbs IR from the atmosphere. More CO2 in the atmosphere shifts the equilibrium point between these transfers.