Ocean Heat

The relentless increase:

Lubos Motl has done the arithmetic in this post Ocean heat content: relentless but negligible. This is a good post, check it out. The punchline of his calculations: the heating in the layer 0-2000 m translates to 0.065 C +/- 20%. His calculations are essentially confirmed from this ARGO page where they confirm that since the 1960s, the warming of that layer was 0.06 °C.

So, can anyone figure out why 0.06C is a big deal for the climate? Or how all that heat that is apparently well mixed in the ocean could somehow get into the atmosphere and influence weather/temperatures/rainfall on the land? Or is sequestering heat in the ocean a fortuitous ‘solution’ to the global (surface) warming problem?

It’s “relentless” in the same (and harmless) sense that a glacial advance is.

11 thoughts on “Ocean Heat”

  1. Rand,
    Water has a lot more heat capacity than air. 0.06C worth of heat rise in the oceans would probably have equated into a much bigger heat rise had it happened in the atmosphere. That said, I agree with your conclusion that I”m not seeing a clear mechanism where that .06C (mostly in the deep oceans) is going to heat the atmosphere, or really do much of anything. Maybe our planet is more robust than people give it credit for?

    ~Jon

    1. I”m not seeing a clear mechanism where that .06C (mostly in the deep oceans) is going to heat the atmosphere, or really do much of anything. Maybe our planet is more robust than people give it credit for?

      Gosh Jon, that is awful scientific. Awesome logic.

      Do you always expose your ineptitude to the public in this manner?

      Hint : energy is conserved. Ocean currents and heat capacity DOMINATES weather and climate. It’s the once thing besides asteroid impacts that can change instantly on geological time scales. And when it changes, really bad things happen. We know this for a fact., We are headed into impact territory with this.

      1. The stupid… it burns!!! Yes, Guest, energy is conserved, but only in a closed system. If the heat in the oceans were to leak out, it would not then simply build up relentlessly in the atmosphere. It has a whole universe to which it can flee.

        1. Yes, but we know the atmosphere and the oceans continue to absorb heat. It’s not leaking out, fool, it’s staying in. There is an energy imbalance. That’s why we say it is ‘warming’. And it is not an insignificant amount of heat.

          Do you have any other sub genius turds of delight? The more the better.

  2. Dear God, he actually puts any weight or credibility on the pre ARGO ocean temperature measurements. They are garbage. ARGO has been diddled too to eliminate the cooling that was measured.

  3. Amazingly, somehow we know the temperature of the entire ocean to within a hundredth of a degree, and the error bars on the temperature didn’t get smaller when we added all the Argo probes. In fact, the baseline temperature for the 1800’s is taken from 300 soundings taken by one ship in the 1870’s, using mercury thermometers. Here they are, along with their description of their instruments and methods.

  4. “ARGO has been diddled too ”

    We all know what that word means in a vulgar context. A person has to be careful that they are not sued . . .

  5. The already old “the oceans ate my heat” dodge. Or, as I have taken to calling it, the Immaculate Convection, whereby the lower oceans absorbed heat from the atmosphere (!) without leaving any trace of its passage through the upper layers, all within a scant three or four decades. It is mind-blowing that we have reached such a nadir of scientism that this notion is seriously entertained.

Comments are closed.