NASA ocean temperature study

One of 2 related studies just out in NCC

Paul J. Durack, Peter J. Gleckler, Felix W. Landerer, Karl E. Taylor. Quantifying underestimates of long-term upper-ocean warming. Nature Climate Change, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2389

W. Llovel, J. K. Willis, F. W. Landerer, I. Fukumori. Deep-ocean contribution to sea level and energy budget not detectable over the past decade. Nature Climate Change, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2387


Llovel described above. Might attract attention from some affinity websites, even though to embrace title's conclusion also means to embrace the other aspects. Namely new grounded icemelt inputs and thermal expansion of shallower water.

Durack analysis suggests that Southern ocean (shallow) warming has been underestimated. This might get 'lost in the sauce' given that the annual Antarctic sea-ice cycle has peaked at a high level.

All the Nature journals have paywalls, but one can contact the corresponding author by email for a copy. So, no beefing about inaccessibility please.

 

What is nice is the oceans only need to be modeled to the to 800 meters or so. Since IPCC climate models look to be off, and the latest versions seem to poorly model ocean behaviour, we have a good place to look for modeling errors.

 

Depending on whether you are interested in decades, century or millennia, you would want to look at different water depths. I reckon we have not yet the technology to detect heat-content changes in the deepest waters. Circulation patterns are easier, perhaps mostly because of sulfur hexafluoride - a dandy tracer.

Is there not an oceanographer here at PC who can lead this discussion? For I cannot.

 

The IPCC models are looking at decades. Other models do look at millennia, and I am sure IPCC tries to look at those models to determine decades.

The hockey stick papers looked at many centuries, but only modeled 1 type of land based proxy. This likely would give bad information to modelers for future decades, without other proxies that show the shaft of the stick is not flat at all. The authors have redone their work based uppon other proxies now to be more in agreement with other established paleo reconstruction. That should be a learning opportunity about the pitfall single proxy analysis.

 

Actually no, there was global warming in pop culture at least as early as Slacker (1991) but it was going around in circles far before then. Hanson's testimony to congress was 1988, and this was maybe the point that the interested general public started noticing. Kyoto was in 1997 before the hockey stick. Here you can see how old things really are
Government: The View from Washington, DC

The hockey stick papers (mbh '98 and '99) might have been seen as minor papers, but reached prominence in third IPCC report (2001), and wiped out the MWP and the LIA without proper peer review. Climate science had been political before, but this use, without error bars, without the caveats in the papers thrust it firmly into the political arena. The political side that wanted to take no action was handed a lot of material to discredit climate science by the hockey sticks prominant use. You could almost draw a line from the critism of the hockey stick and canada's withdrawl from kyoto protocols.

No happy dance by me about the hockey stick. To me it is a cautionary tale about politicizing science. Things we can learn from. I would have much preferred no hockey stick, good science, and better government action to curb ghg. Those 1979 estimates still look good today, and they didn't get based on any hockey stick, those models were done with full accptance of natural variation, the lia and mwp. It is a sad dance when we throw out good science to score political points. I bring it up because there are many that feel that the ends justify the means. That we should corrupt the science to sell the policy. IMHO it has backfired in this case, and really when government lies about science what good ever comes from it?

 

There is a wiki page showing regional and global paleotemperature reconstructions from 1965-2013.

List of large-scale temperature reconstructions of the last 2,000 years - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Missing from that list are Soon & Baliunas and a few others presenting non-mainstream views; those are listed on another wiki page.

Hockey stick controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hockey Stick is one among many, using one paleo proxy among many. I got a copy of the Feng Shi et al. 2013 and as always, happy to share. There are spaghetti graphs comparing many reconstructions. Something for everyone I'd say. Focusing on the concordance of results seems more likely to get us closer to paleo truth.

One interesting part of the Feng Shi abstract states that models underestimate the Medieval Warm period compared to most reconstructions. I continue to suppose this means that oceans do things that are yet to be adequately represented in models.

 

Off topic but that is an interesting topic on its own.

It probably is no big loss to not include that paper, but it is hard to talk about peer review of MBH '98 and MBH'99 without out talking about how mann and jones reacted to that paper. Those MBH papers really were not peer reviewed, they were reviewed by friends of the authors. B&S (Great initials right) did the same type of trick to get published, when the paper would not have if properly reviewed. B&S seems like a direct political paper to refute the hockey stick. Now B&S only cheated to get published they didn't hide their data like MBH, so after publication it was easy to peer review the paper and find the problems. I'll leave aside the jones and mann emails that talked about getting the editor fired for essentially doing what they did for the other side. I mean anyone that questions the hockey stick is a denier, and it didn't need to have open data. It was fine to cherry pick reviewers on that, but if it went against warming, publications must fall. Von Storch is an interesting character here, because he was one of the editors to resign in protest of publishing the S&B paper when it was not properly reviewed. When Mann eventually released his data, von Storch was also the first one publish a paper showing how the statistics that MBH actually used (they did not properly use the technique they claimed to use in the paper) would make any data set look more or less like a hockey stick. That wasn't until 2004, but M&M had asserted that this is what MBH had done much earlier. Jones had tried to get mann to keep the data secret so M&M could not mis use it, I guess to miss use is the same as properly review. Of course von storch was accused of doing bad work, so papers in 2008 and 2009 had to be written by other authors to back up VS.

Anyway, I hope we are over the days where people like B&S and M&J can corrupt the peer review process.

 

Here is von Storch's reply to you

The decay of the hockey stick : Climate Feedback

The criticism of the hockey stick is has been about thwarting peer review on the shaft by the gate keepers like Phil Jones and Mann. The blade really was not even part of mbh '98 or mbh '99 papers, it was grafted on from thermometer reconstructions. Mann had to use statistical methods to make the reconstructions (shaft) look like they lined up with the temperature record (blade). That was known as "Mike's nature trick" but is not the statistical problem that was found with the shaft.

I am not sure what the purpose of the hockey stick was, but IMHO it was to sell kyoto and build confidence in the blade portion was wholly caused by ghg. IMHO it back fired and there has been less international governmental action than if the gate keepers had never tried to obstruct peer review. I guess it is all in how you frame the discussion. I don't doubt that MBH made an honest mistake in their bad use of statistics, but there definitely an effort to keep this mistake from being found. Do you think that accurately portraying the mwp would have hindered corrective action? I say we should stomp are feet and say no gate keepers to science. No one should get labeled heretic or denier if they are legitimately questioning the science. There should not be two standards for publishing. I hope we learn not to do science the way we did in the hockey stick again.

I actually want more government and industry action to reduce ghg output, and have worked for it. We just had the International Green house gas technologies conference in austin. I didn't attend because I didn't have time to take off work, but I had drinks with some of the attendees. The amount of government and industry money seems to be decreasing. They thought it was a good conference and there is a lot of hope, in spite of lack of helpful government actions. Aligning the governments and industries with the goals (through regulation) seems very tough in the US and many other countries right now.

 

Let's be clear on the timeline. "An Inconvenient Truth" was released after Mann finally allowed his data to be analysed, and after von Storch had published his findings that the statistics used were bad. There was nothing about the movie, or gore that tried to prevent peer review. The controversy, the gate keeping, the name calling, all started well before the movie. The controversy was about the IPCC's use in its third assessment. Certainly many tried to defend the bad statistics after the movie, but few were saying that Mann had been right to try to stop peer review. Mann and his friends tried to claim the statistical methods were not bad, which resulted in other scientists releasing papers in 2008 and 2009 showing the the same thing von Storch had shown.

Now we can agree to a couple of things. The movie brought a lot of attention to global warming. It also earned Mr. Gore a lot of money, fame, and a nobel prize. Mr. Gore is a politician and not a scientist, and I have no problem with politicians framing the conversation, and leaving out evidence against a viewpoint. That is what politicians do. I don't even expect at the time Mr. Gore knew that the hockey stick was wrong, or he might have replaced it with a less controversial chart. Since by the time the movie was out the gate keeping was over, those interested could learn other scientific viewpoints.

IMHO Phil Jones and Micheal Mann and the IPCC handed the opposition tools to delay any real action on global warming. The results of inaction may do nothing, but there is a possibility that they will be catastrophic. I think the cACC (catastrophic athropologic climate change) people have over played there hand but there is a small possibility that they are right. Simply for insurance type purposes it is idiotic that we have politicized the issue so much that effective action seems so hard. The sea levels are rising that is definitely consensus, but there are many worse possible outcomes.

 

So we have all those other studies, an increasingly detailed view of the MWP, the National Research Council's assessment of Hockey Stick


National-Academies.org | Newsroom


R Pielke Jr's assessment of the assessment

- Prometheus: Quick Reaction to the NRC Hockey Stick Report Archives

and yet one of our most thoughtful participants here can still feel a pea under his mattress. It is baffling.

 

You kids get off my lawn!

Certainly the NAS could have been written about Lund model too, no need to have gone years of gate keeping and politics to defend lack of natural variation in the past. It did spawn inhofe's prominence and that of Mann so lots of ways to use science to raise money for politics, and spawned the most popular science blog Watts up with that. Of course IMHO and many others that may have actually added to scientific illiteracy. The gatekeeping within the iPCC spawned a new kind of speech, where you had to first anounce that you agreed with the gate keepers on almost everything before you could place any criticism. I guess many don't agree that damage was done.

Certainly newer studies showing that there is actually natural variation are welcome from me. I hope we get a handle on mechanisms so that we can model better. A change of management at IPCC would also be welcome.

Still when trying to close down local coal plants or to stop mountain top removal, the hockey stick comes up. When that stops happening, I guess the pea will be gone from the mattress. The stick has, as you all have said stopped being important at all in science, but it still is a big stick in politics.

 

I think scientific peer review is a very important topic. If Mann MBH 'slid through' and later was strongly discredited, that would be a big deal. Though maybe I'd just write it off saying 'the system works'. But it wasn't so the matter remains hypothetical.

There are directly relevant studies to consider for coal-plant or particular mining decisions. If people instead look to less relevant ones because those are so well known, that's not a good thing. Should do better.

As close as I have come to publishing studies on 'climate change is this' or 'climate change does that', I have never been asked for a pledge of allegiance by editors or reviewers. Only that the work is well enough done and does not misrepresent. Of course this does not mean that others don't get asked.

There is a serious matter we could address concerning scientific review, currently underway and not at all hypothetical. Currently led by Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, who feels that peer review of National Science Foundation grant proposals is not (and has not been done) in the best taxpayers' interest. He does not offer and particular qualifications for wanting to be 'on the board' or to 'replace the board'. Can read something about it at Slate

I’m not a scientist excuse: Politicians don’t need to be experts to make good decisions.

A few months back the open discussion at Science Magazine was both more meaty and even handed. I believe it's very easy to track down.

This is a real thing and would cause me some embarrassment of Smith were my rep or even the next district over. Rohrbacher from California provides me with that even though I am not in Orange County CA any more. This is the stuff causing lumps under my mattress.

 

I thought I told you kids to get off my lawn So lets discuss what we agree upon a little instead of the bitter disagrements of how thing were handled in the past. Local coal plant, we (local environmentalist) want to close early. It is partially owned by the city parially owned by a state agency. The plant does have all the modern scrubbing and we are still paying off the bonds to install them. So additional pollution goes to ghg and mining pollution. The oposition agrees to these but... argues that mining pollution is out of state anyway and will be there weather we burn the coal or not, which is mainly true, and there is fracking pollution involed with the aditional natural gas that is more local. It will increase the cost of power to shut down the plant early as there is no price on the ghg pollution. How to procede? The argument is the ghg pollution doesn't matter so we shouldn't pay higher rates to reduce it. Ex weather chanell guy is the poster boy for the oposition, plus people that don't believe its bad to get warmer at all (we chose to live in texas after all.

Climate change is a lie: Global warming 'not real' claims Weather Channel founder | Nature | News | Daily Express

Yep that's my congressman, and I disagree with him as do my neighbors on most issues including this one. Lots of us have written to him to stop this bad stuff. The district is gerymandered badly, inteded to have just a small part of austin plus large parts of more republican areas, so that the republican primary winner wins the district. Lamar Smith is actually a smart guy, and probably understands what he is doing is bad for his constituents, but local theory is he does it to wield more power in the congress. His positions appear to be popular in the house. WIthout fear of a challengger the incumbant is going to win these districts. I don't think he is as evil as boehner or pelosi, but I sure wish we could draw regular districts and get rid of him.

It does, but you know at least half of congress is embaressing. I don't know if Louis Goehmert or Joe Barton is the most embaresing in texas.Gohmert: Gays 'Getting Massages All Day' Make The Military 'Vulnerable To Terrorism'

 

For at least a couple of decades the US National Science Foundation has been under fire to show that it makes good investments, with ebbs and flows over time. Not purely from one political party; Proximre (Golden Fleece awards) was a Wisconsin Democrat.

My personal view is that the way science is done (merits of ideas) simply st lies at odds with the 'political' mind. How can someone possibly get $200,000 (or whatever it might be) without scratching someone's back? It is outside their way of thinking. Yet, using this odd approach, American science is the envy of the world, and accomplished many things.

Writing this it has not escaped my noticed that that the worst things Mann etc. above were accused of is standard operating procedure in politics. I don't know what to make of that, except that politicians might want rights to control their lucrative invention. It ain't Science, and if it led to the ascendance of an idea not supported by subsequent research - well we'd all have good basis to squawk.

I doubt that NSF's blind peer review of grant proposals will be overturned, even by an atavistic Congress. Cooler heads shall prevail. If the Foundation invests more in 'highlighting value' of its research funding, my jaundiced view is that an even larger % of NSF budget will be spent inside the beltway. But let's not go there.

Instead let's go to AustinGreen's lawn. It is growing a bit better because of +CO2. I suggest that the fossil-burning industry should charge for that because they provided the resource. That's right - continue to ignore negative externalities, and demand payment for the positive ones.

Deep thinkers will immediately spot my ruse (getting externalities on the table), but Rep. Smith? Perhaps one of his constituents could bring the matter up.

 

Without government funding there isn't enough for the long view. Now granted some of the biggest programs like space, were really passed because of possible military applications.

The problem is the government is full of scientifically illiterate people, and they are incharge of the science. I find it incredible that the Ebola czar had no expertise in medicine or hospital management, he is a political operative lawyer who lost the Bush vs Gore case. I hope the CDC gets their act together, because there is no way this guy can actually do anything scientific to stop the spread, his job is to make the government look not responsible. Yes its been going on for a long time. Proxmire, by a quick serach, was also scientifically illiterate, with a scientifically illiterate staff. He was first sued for deflamation in 1976, the case once the court said his speach was not protected, was settled by an apology and $10K. After that he stopped naming researchers by name, but it didn't stop the taring of some good projects. For sure there is a lot of waste in the grant process, but its doubtfull that most senators are scientifically literate enough to find them.

Since we are talking NSF, I think from now on they should make clear people using their grants can not hide their "dirty laundry". That is one of the things Phil Jones encouraged Mann to do, and he did for a long period of time. The "drity laundry" refered to in the emails were the methods and algorithms man used, and were needed to replicate his work. To his credit, after threated by cucinnelli Mann eventurally released these algorithms. Certainly without the emails most would give the benefit of the doubt to this just being a bone headed move. Jones threatened to destroy his data in the emails, and although we can't place the destruction the data magically disapeared. That should never be allowed to happen.

Certainly using government money to move forward a political agenda is nothing new, but I don't think we should consider it something good either. Also certainly if this is all that happened and inividuals acted alone little harm would be done. The worst alegation is that a group including Mann, Jones, pachurri controlled what was published to push a political agenda. Certainly these 3 are much more politically literate thn inhofe, who is the main political oponent in the US. The damage really is the perception of not separating the science from the politics. Some one like Hansen who is quite political, has never been accused of putting politics in any paper he created or reviewed, except the few that dealt with politics. Certainly inhofe doesn't have much scientific stature, and people don't believe him, but he has effectively used some of the tools to spread the disbelief to some established science. Separating the politics from the science maybe too old of an idea to get back to anymore though.

I do find kind of a comic irony in the mantra the sceince is settled when it comes to global warming. If the science was settled then there is no reason for government research. I did read Lamar Smith's opinion that the science is not settled. He keyed on 3 areas - climate models, glacier melt rate, effect of rising sea levels where there maybe big disagreements from past IPCC reports. Hey I'll take it as a win if we well fund those areas of research. Ofcourse he wrote it in a much more negative way to pleas his party in the congress.

The good news is the US still has the highest spending for R&D, and China has been steadily increasing theirs. Unfortuanately some areas are not being well funded at all, and both parties look to cut science instead of other areas to help reduce the deficit.

That isn't texas style thinking, even from our corrupt politicians. The gmo crops are championed by others to get farmers to pay when they infect there fields.

There is much reseach here for using power plant co2 to grow algea for biofuels. It is state and federally supported. This summer was nice and cool by texas standards and we got plenty of rain to make things nice and green. There wasn't enough co2 in the air to help with the drought in 2011, so no benefit (and likely co2 made that drought worse). Ofcourse water management is much better than in the decade without rain (1940s and 1950s) but people keep moving here and if that happenend again we don't have nearly enough water for farms and people, and the cattle will be slaughtered, crops plowed under, and everything will be brown, other than the fires. A lot of xeroscape, following the example of ladybird johnson, and plant local more drought resistant plants instead of all grass.

Deep thinkers will immediately spot my ruse (getting externalities on the table), but Rep. Smith? Perhaps one of his constituents could bring the matter up.[/QUOTE]
Mr. Smith's gerymandied district contains 3 utilities, and they are cleaner and less coal intense than the national average. For his constituents a coal tax that offset other taxes would be a benefit, as we would be winners. We would pay higher utility bills but lower federal taxes, and would be able to close the coal power plants earlier.

Unfortunately this is the lawyerly response from Mr. Smith, that is now part of his standard talks.

 

Returning to the original post, it won't do y'all any harm to at least read the abstract of the original

W. Llovel, J. K. Willis, F. W. Landerer, I. Fukumori. Deep-ocean contribution to sea level and energy budget not detectable over the past decade. Nature Climate Change, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2387

Abstract
As the dominant reservoir of heat uptake in the climate system, the world’s oceans provide a critical measure of global climate change. Here, we infer deep-ocean warming in the context of global sea-level rise and Earth’s energy budget between January 2005 and December 2013. Direct measurements of ocean warming above 2,000 m depth explain about 32% of the observed annual rate of global mean sea-level rise. Over the entire water column, independent estimates of ocean warming yield a contribution of 0.77 ± 0.28 mm yr−1 in sea-level rise and agree with the upper-ocean estimate to within the estimated uncertainties. Accounting for additional possible systematic uncertainties, the deep ocean (below 2,000 m) contributes −0.13 ± 0.72 mm yr−1 to global sea-level rise and −0.08 ± 0.43 W m−2 to Earth’s energy balance. The net warming of the ocean implies an energy imbalance for the Earth of 0.64 ± 0.44 W m−2 from 2005 to 2013.

Having completed this assignment you will be better equipped to assess things that affinity websites might say about it.

The ± (variability range) of energy balance is quite wide, and to me it does not look like an easy thing to make narrower, even with a very large number of deep-sea thermometers. From 2000 meters to 3800 (the average ocean depth I think) is 1800. So 1 square meter represents 1800 cubic meters (let's say tons) of sea water. The temperature rise associated with 0.43 watts in 1800 tons can be calculated. And is really really small.

I don't think it's the highest priority for new data to gather. But please, for the sake of your mature brains and those around you, do not confuse the following two statements:

"It is a very hard measurement to make with appropriate levels of precision"
"It is not happening"

How much heat can the ocean conceal from thermometers?

About 4000 Joules will raise the temperature of I kilogram of water by 1 oC. Perhaps we can measure T with a precision of 0.01 oC. That is 40 Joules to the kilogram. 1800 tons of water is 1,800,000 kilograms. So now we are talking about 72 million Joules. 72 million Watt-seconds. There being about 3.2 million seconds in a year, I shall divide 72 million by 3.2 million.

22.5 watts. That rate of heating of deep ocean would be detectable by a suitable network of 0.01 oC thermometers placed down there. So, it is a pity that we probably cannot resolve anything less. I don’t know that I’d call it a travesty; that seems like an emotionally charged word.

We are simply stuck with the situation that the ocean is so large that it can pretty much do whatever it wants. Many of those shenanigans elude our measurement capability. Thermal expansion does not, so this is what Bob goes on about.