NOAA baffled over ocean readings

[Papa Bear]

[Papa Bear]

Chris Horner, Planet Gore

Gotta love this NPR headline, “The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat.” This is the most recent in a refreshing series of sober assessments that of course brief periods are not climatically meaningful, be they a month, a year, three years, even a decade. The folks in the NASA PR shop who put together all those “annual temperature trend” press releases sure must be embarrassed.

Things are wonderfully captured in this euphemistic kicker from the article: “it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming.” Like, maybe, this?






What’s global warming without the warming called? Come on, you can say it . . .

[Papa Bear]

The "Mystery" Is That We Still Listen To Them
Admin, Thursday 20 March 2008 - 18:19:48

There is so much wrong with this story from National Public Radio that its hard to know where to start. Here is a teaser from their story: "it's possible that scientists need to correct for some other feature of the planet they don't know about". Just one of several that indicate much of what scientists thought they knew about the climate, and climate models, is being reconsidered. All based on new information from 3,000 diving robots.

First let me thank one of our regular readers, D. K. Wells, for pointing out this NPR story. Our readers obviously study all sides of this issue because many of them quote articles appearing in some very liberal publications.

So lets dissect this story "The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat".

The story starts off discussing the 3,000 diving robots loaded with scientific instruments that began taking measurements of the world's oceans in 1995.

"These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them."


Argo Robotic Buoys
When in doubt blame the robots!


Obviously these robots didn't get the Al Gore memo that all science must conclude that the earth has a fever. If science's theory of CO2 warming was correct the earth would have seen overall "global" warming over this period as CO2 levels continued to climb. This assumes that outside influences such as solar activity had a minimum effect, which is what they've been telling us. There would have been local variations in temperature but the global average should have increased as more solar energy was "trapped" by the "greenhouse gas blanket".

"This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record."

Again, they don't know why this is happening as their computer models didn't predict anything like this. Could it be that the oceans had trapped solar heat and as the solar cycle cooled the oceans cooled as well? When the oceans cool they release this energy which causes surface warming.

"But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming."

Remember this quote.

"In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans."

So when we finally get some decent instruments in place they tell us there is no global warming. You would think that would pretty much put an end to the argument that disaster is looming.

'"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming." '

Say what? You measure global cooling and then call it "less rapid warming". If the CO2 theory of warming was correct every year would be warmer "globally" unless there were outside influences that changed the amount of energy the earth was receiving. But we've been told time after time that the solar cycles are having a minimum effect on climate. “Our results imply that, over the past century, climate change due to human influences must far outweigh the effects of changes in the Sun's brightness” - Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. So if CO2 levels are increasing and variations in the Sun's energy isn't effecting the climate exactly what caused the ocean cooling over the past 5 years? Increasing CO2 levels should have trapped more of the Sun's (steady state) energy and according to the greenhouse theory the earth should have warmed, not cooled.

If the oceans hold 80-90% of warming and they're actually cooling where does that heat go? We're not seeing it over land as we've seen no warming for 10 years now. If its going in to space, as the article indicates as a possibility, why didn't it get released in to space at this rate 10 years ago? That makes no sense.

"with the oceans not warming, you would expect to see less sea level rise. Instead, sea level has risen about half an inch in the past four years. That's a lot."

Again, they have no idea why this is happening.

"But in fact there's a little bit of a mystery. We can't account for all of the sea level increase we've seen over the last three or four years"

Yet another mystery that their models can not solve. Now its going to be a lot harder to blame future sea level increases on global warming.

"One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded — and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys."

That's right, blame the poor defenseless robots. When the evidence doesn't fit the theory blame the evidence, not the theory. They're basically admitting again that they have no idea what is going on. They had expected the buoys to nicely confirm what their computer models were telling them. Instead the buoys are putting them on the hot seat.

"The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet. That can't be directly measured at the moment, however. "Unfortunately, we don't have adequate tracking of clouds to determine exactly what role they've been playing during this period," said KevinTrenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research

When you consider that water vapor makes up 95% of atmospheric greenhouse gases (CO2 represents only 3.6%) you begin to understand the importance of the statement above. Clouds and water vapor are extremely important to understanding climate yet they readily admit to having a poor understanding of this important component and have no way to directly measure and track it.

"it's possible that scientists need to correct for some other feature of the planet they don't know about"

At least one major component in the climate equation is missing from the models. Yet we're still suppose to trust their computer models and spend trillions of dollars on mitigation, carbon taxes, and regulations.

"what this does is highlight some of the issues and send people back to the drawing board" - Kevin Trenberth

Lets just hope they approach the "drawing board" with an open mind and not try to make the data fit their existing theory.

"Trenberth and Willis agree that a few mild years have no effect on the long-term trend of global warming. But they say there are still things to learn about how our planet copes with the heat."

As stated above, for the anthropogenic greenhouse gas theory of global warming to hold up when we're experiencing global cooling you have to show what external factor is causing the temperature balance to change. Are we receiving less external energy?, is something causing less energy to be received through the atmosphere?, or is something causing more energy to escape back in to space? Being able to account for the missing heat only allows the Greenhouse Theory to survive, it doesn't prove that it is valid. Right now its teetering on the edge of being invalidated. Certainly the existing computer models are missing some very important information.

How can we trust their computer models regarding future climate when they have no idea of how the climate works today?

Additional Resources:

* "The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat" - National Public Radio (NPR). Audio of their Morning Edition piece is also available here.
* Wikipedia - Argo (oceanography)
* Argo Project Page, UCSD - Argo is a global array of 3,000 free-drifting profiling floats that measures the temperature and salinity of the upper 2000 m of the ocean. This allows, for the first time, continuous monitoring of the temperature, salinity, and velocity of the upper ocean, with all data being relayed and made publicly available within hours after collection.

[thalassamania]

Chris Horner, Planet Gore

Gotta love this NPR headline, “The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat.” This is the most recent in a refreshing series of sober assessments that of course brief periods are not climatically meaningful, be they a month, a year, three years, even a decade. The folks in the NASA PR shop who put together all those “annual temperature trend” press releases sure must be embarrassed.

Things are wonderfully captured in this euphemistic kicker from the article: “it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming.” Like, maybe, this?






What’s global warming without the warming called? Come on, you can say it . . .

You're chasing your own tail, that comes from the bad data from the ARGOS system that we discussed, and dismissed and that you refused to admit your error on. How many times and how many different ways are you going to try and use that discredited data?

NPR Article

[Papa Bear]

By Steven Milloy
March 20, 2008

You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist in the 1990s to figure that speculative investment in dot-coms with no revenues would be disastrous. The same goes for lenders giving mortgages to borrowers with no job, no income and no assets. So after surviving the tech bubble and while trying to extricate the economy from the housing bubble, why are we bent on heading into the global warming bubble?

Just this week, the Environmental Protection Agency issued its economic analysis of the Lieberman-Warner global warming bill that is now being considered by the Senate. The EPA projects that, if the bill is enacted, the size of our economy as measured by its gross domestic product (GDP) would shrink by as much as $2.9 trillion by the year 2050. That’s a 6.9 percent smaller economy than we might otherwise have if no action was taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

For an idea of what that might mean, consider our current economic crisis. During the fourth quarter of 2007, GDP actually increased by 0.6 percent, yet trepidation still spread among businesses, consumers and the financial markets. Though the EPA says that Lieberman-Warner would send our economy in the opposite direction by more than a factor of 10, few in Congress seem concerned. For more perspective, consider that during 1929 and 1930, the first two years of the Great Depression, GDP declined by 8.6 percent and 6.4 percent, respectively.

And what would we get for such a massive self-inflicted wound? It ought to be something that is climatically spectacular, right? You be the judge.

The EPA says that by the year 2095 -- 45 years after GDP has been slashed by 6.9 percent -- atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels would be 25 parts per million (ppm) lower than if no greenhouse gas regulation was implemented.

Keeping in mind that the current atmospheric CO2 level is 380 ppm and the projected 2095 CO2 level is about 500 ppm, according to the EPA, what are the potential global temperature implications for such a slight change in atmospheric CO2 concentration? Not much, as average global temperature would only be reduced by a maximum of about 0.10 to 0.20 degrees Celsius, according to existing research.

Sacrificing many trillions of dollars of GDP for a trivial, 45-year-delayed and merely hypothetical reduction in average global temperature must be considered as exponentially more asinine than the dot-bombs of the late-1990s and the NINJA subprime loans that we now look upon scornfully.

So who in their right mind would push for this?

I met many of them up-close-and-personal last week at a major Wall Street Journal conference at which I was an invited speaker.

My fellow speakers included many CEOs (from General Electric, Wal-Mart, Duke Energy, and Dow Chemical, to name just a few), California’s Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the heads of several environmental activist groups.

The audience -- a sold-out crowd of hundreds who had to apply to be admitted and pay a $3,500 fee -- consisted of representatives of the myriad businesses that seek to make a financial killing from climate alarmism. There were representatives of the solar, wind, and biofuel industries that profit from taxpayer mandates and subsidies, representatives from financial services companies that want to trade permits to emit CO2, and public relations and strategic consultants to all of the above.

We libertarians would call such an event a rent-seekers ball -- the vast majority of the audience was there to plot how they could lock-in profits from government mandates on taxpayers and consumers.

It was an amazing collection of pseudo-entrepreneurs who were absolutely impervious to the scientific and economic facts that ought to deflate the global warming bubble.

In the interlude between presentations by the CEOs of Dow Chemical and Duke Energy, for example, the audience was shown a slide -- similar to this one -- of the diverging relationship between atmospheric CO2 levels and average global temperature since 1998. That slide should have caused jaws to drop and audience members to ponder why anyone is considering regulating CO2 emissions in hopes of taming global climate.

Instead, it was as if the audience did a collective blink and missed the slide entirely. When I tried to draw attention to the slide during my presentation, it was as if I was speaking in a foreign dialect.

The only conclusion I could come to was that the audience is so steeped in anticipation of climate profiteering that there is no fact that will cause them to reconsider whether or not manmade global warming is a reality.

The callousness of their blind greed was also on display at the conference.

In an instantaneous poll, the Wall Street Journal asked the audience to select the most pressing societal problem from a list of five that included infectious disease (malaria, AIDs, etc.), terrorism, and global warming.

Global warming was the most popular response, receiving 31 percent of the vote, while infectious disease was far behind in last place with only 3 percent of the vote. It’s an amazing result given that billions are sickened, and millions die every year from infectious disease. The consequences of future global warming, on the other hand, are entirely speculative.

Finally, I was astounded by the double-speak practiced by the global warmers.

Virtually every speaker at the conference professed that they were either in favor of free markets or that they supported a free-market solution to global warming. But invariably in their next breath, they would plead for government regulation of greenhouse gases and government subsidies for alternative energy.

It’s hard to conceive of any good coming from a public policy in which facts play no substantial role in its development and words have no meaning in its public debate.

[Papa Bear]

Only fools and lefties will challenge all this data! Our attack the messenger! Either way they have no answers other than "Get off my planet" "Kill your children" or "Give up your evil ways"! All BS in the first degree! These are the same people who won't let us build new Nuclear plants or refineries? They just want you to sit home waiting to die while they fly around the country telling everyone to turn over your tax money so we can save you and the reefs! So don't take up SCUBA it takes too much carbon to get you there! It is all dying anyway so there must not be much to see or study!

It must be miserable being them!

[thalassamania]

Only fools and lefties will challenge all this data! Our attack the messenger! Either way they have no answers other than "Get off my planet" "Kill your children" or "Give up your evil ways"! All BS in the first degree! These are the same people who won't let us build new Nuclear plants or refineries? They just want you to sit home waiting to die while they fly around the country telling everyone to turn over your tax money so we can save you and the reefs! So don't take up SCUBA it takes too much carbon to get you there! It is all dying anyway so there must not be much to see or study!

It must be miserable being them!

What data? The only data you've presented is data that was revised because the instruments were miscalibrated. You alternate between posting and reposting that erroneous data and cuting and pasting self serving lies provided for that purpose by boot-licking tools like Steven Milloy (serious wacko, best know for his claim following the terrorist attacks of September 11 that the collapse of the World Trade Towers could have been delayed if only the builders had used more asbestos. ), Chris Horner (who works as legal Counsel for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Even ExxonMobil doesn't take the CEI serious any more.), Phil Brennan (who makes up numbers when the facts doen't suit him debunk), John Coleman (who's a TV weatherman and music show host with no climate change credentials bio) and Dennis Avery (whom we've already covered).

Frankly, there's nothing I'd welcome more than creditable data discrediting anthropogenic climate change. But I've yet to see any, I hear the really weird wailing and whining that comes from the right, but they have no creditable data, in fact they don't seem to care about creditable data or the truth, they just want a piece of Al Gore's hide. Well I hate to tell them, I don't like Al Gore either, and I sure don't like Tipper and her attempts to censor music, but that's not the issue, on the basis of the data, on the basis of creditable analysis by creditable scientists there is little room for doubt.

[Papa Bear]

While it takes only one scientific paper to disprove a theory, I fear that no amount of evidence will be able to counter what everyone now considers true. If tomorrow the theory of man-made global warming were proved to be a false alarm, one might reasonably expect a collective sigh of relief from everyone. But instead there would be cries of anguish from vested interests.

So let the crying begin!

[thalassamania]

While it takes only one scientific paper to disprove a theory, I fear that no amount of evidence will be able to counter what everyone now considers true. If tomorrow the theory of man-made global warming were proved to be a false alarm, one might reasonably expect a collective sigh of relief from everyone. But instead there would be cries of anguish from vested interests.

So let the crying begin!

You obviously know nothing about science or how it works. It is not like industry and has very little concern with "vested interests." In point of fact that very critique points to the way industry and business thinks, not science.

If I (or for that matter any competent scientist) had one shred of definitive evidence that could poke a hole in anthropogenic climate change believe me it'd be out in pubic with trumpets blowing ... that's the sort of thing that careers are made on.

Anyone who could do that would win all the major prizes and have their pick of a tenured chair at all the best institutions. It would be far more rewarding than, ho-hum another piece of data that supports climate change.

[Papa Bear]

With the recent evidence of significant disagreement between the IPCC model projections and reality, as diagnosed by surface air and tropospheric temperatures (e.g. see, see and see) and upper ocean heat content (i.e. see), Climate Science is reposting a weblog from 2006 titled “Big Time Gambling With Multi-Decadal Global Climate Model Predictions by Roger A. Pielke Sr. and Roger A. Pielke Jr.”

The weblog reads,

”Many advocates for action on climate change, including the IPCC assessments and recent documentaries have promoted a view that global warming will continue through the 21st century, with global warming defined as a steady increase in global average temperatures. This prediction of warming is based on the output of multi-decadal general circulation models and is primarily due to the radiative forcing effect of anthropogenic emissions of CO2. In such models only relatively minor year-to-year variations in global average temperatures are forecast in the upward trend, except when major volcanic eruptions cause short-term (up to a few years) of global cooling. For example, see these projections of the most recent IPCC — none of the models has an obvious multi-year (i.e., >2) decrease in global average temperatures over the next century.

Such predictions represent a huge gamble with public and policymaker opinion. If more-or-less steady global warming does not occur as forecast by these models, not only will professional reputations be at risk, but the need to reduce threats to the wide spectrum of serious and legitimate environmental concerns (including the human release of greenhouse gases) will be questioned by some as having been oversold. For better or worse, a failure to accurately predict the changes in the global average surface temperature, global average tropospheric temperature, ocean average heat content change, or Arctic sea ice coverage would raise questions on the reliance of global climate models for accurate prediction on multi-decadal time scales. Surprises or experience that evolve outside the bounds of model output would likely raise questions even among some of those who have so far accepted the IPCC reports as a balanced presentation of climate science. (For a perspective different than the IPCC on applications of climate models see this.)

The National Research Council published a report in 2002 entitled “Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises” (of which RP2 was a committee member). The report raised the issues of surprises in the climate system. One of the surprises (to many) may be that the global climate models are simply unable to accurately predict the variability and trends in the climate metrics that have been adopted to communicate human-caused climate change to policymakers. Among the climate metrics with the most public visibility are the long term trends in global average surface temperature, global average tropospheric temperature, summer arctic sea ice areal coverage, and ocean heat content.

There is some emerging empirical evidence to suggest, however, that the concerns expressed here are worth consideration. The recent dramatic cooling of the average heat content of the upper oceans, and thus a significant negative radiative imbalance of the climate system for at least a two year period, that was mentioned in the Climate Science weblog posting of July 27, 2006, should be a wake-up call to the climate community that the focus on predictive modeling as the framework to communicate to policymakers on climate policy has serious issues as to its ability to accurately predict the behavior of the climate system. No climate model that we are aware of has anticipated such a significant cooling, nor is able to reproduce such a significant negative radiative imbalance. Meaningless distinctions between “projections” and “predictions” will be unlikely to convince consumers of climate models to overlook experience that does not jibe with modeled output.

[Note added for the March 21 2008 weblog - while the cooling reported above was shown to be an error in the analysis of the upper ocean data by the authors of the Lyman et al at study, their corrected data still shows no warming in the upper oceans for the last 4 years; thus the comment about the failure of the models still applies. There has been no global warming, at least above the 700m level in the ocean, since at least 2004].

There is no greater danger to support for action on important issues of human impacts on the environment than an overselling of what climate science can provide. If the climate behaves in ways that are unexpected or surprising it will be more than just credibility that is lost. Advocates for action should think carefully when gambling with the unknown predictive abilities of climate models. The human influence on the climate system is real, but the climate may not always cooperate.”
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