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Past Measurements May Have Missed Massive Ocean Warming
An anonymous reader writes "Previous estimates of global ocean warming have been significantly underestimated due to historically sparse temperature data from the Southern Ocean, new research has found. From the article: "Earth's oceans have absorbed more than 90% of the warming caused by greenhouse gases, researchers estimate, with the stored heat showing up as warmer seawater. But a new analysis suggests scientists may have underestimated the size of the heat sink in the upper ocean—which could have implications for researchers trying to understand the pace and scale of past warming."
I wonder what happens to all the heat that's being taken up by the oceans. Is any of it released - and if so, how? Evaporation and heat needed to melt polar ice come to mind as possibilities. Or is it going to stay there, forever warming the oceans, and the oceans increasing in temperature forever.
The next thing is of course the question of how it affects the deeper oceans. Are those layers also warmed up - for example thanks to ocean currents mixing the water of the world's oceans?
> nonono, the science is settled.
Science, by definition, is never settled. What's far more difficult is to bring a scientific attitude to the table if there is a political dog (or two) in the fight.
The basic science has been settled for a long time now, the Earth is warming. Models of the extra heat distribution may undergo changes though, as data accumulate and better models are developled.
So given that conventional atmosphere models have ignored this to date, if the oceans are storing 90% of the excess heat, why aren't the conventional models showing temperature rises 10 times as great as what is observed, say 5-10 deg C?
Either the summary or the article are slack in the extreme.
But the temperature on Mars is rising too! We are sooooooooooooooo screwed!
Relax. Temperature may be rising but sea levels are remarkably stable.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
You outed yourself with your last sentence. The only place global cooling was discussed was in the media, not in the scientific literature. It also wasn't the 1980s or 1990s, but the 1970s, which also means you either have a terrible memory, or are regurgitating something you heard someone else say. So, to sum up, you just demonstrated that you:
1. Get your scientific information from the mass media
2. Have a terrible memory of this topic, or simply regurgitate what others say without checking.
Just one of those is enough to make people not listen to you, but you got both. Brilliant.
im so sick of the lying. both poles have jncreased 40% or more accordibg to daily mail
You win todays internet prize for most ironic forum post.
start using your brain people.
If you used your brain rather than blathering mindlessly about popular media reporting of a science topic, you wouldn't have made this post.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Enough already. The Earth is warmer, probably. We don't know for how much longer. We don't know how much warmer. We don't know how it's happening, mostly. We don't know why it's happening.
That's climate in a nutshell. Do you want a _government_ ringing in new policies based on that? A government can't even get well understood problems under control ... like say, traffic, or urban development. And if you dare say, "Hey, traffic is hard to model!", well guess what, climate is harder.
We know car accidents happen, probably.
We don't know when you will be in one
We don't know what type of accident you will be in.
We don't know the severity of the accident you will be in.
This is car travel in a nutshell. Aren't you glad that the government mandates safety belts, airbags and car seats for children?
Just because something is not 100% does not mean we should not protect against it. I feel like using some ad hominem against you but I will refrain today.
Silence is a state of mime.
im so sick of the lying
So why are you doing it? We just covered how wrong you are.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Models will NEVER be accurate enough for any real predictions, causes or illustrations.
I heard that modern weather models have accuracy above 80%.
Good enough, IMO.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Ah yes.
"The Little Ice Age" myth.
Here you go, since you dont seen to know what youre talking about:
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Myth: The models arent accurate
Fact: The models are accurate.
"Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean."
"While there are uncertainties with climate models, they successfully reproduce the past and have made predictions that have been subsequently confirmed by observations."
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Really? The same models that predict that result in the weather man telling you its going to be a beautiful sunny day while it pours down rain?
Weather models are an absolute joke.
What?
Your weather forecasts are wrong every day? And in every conceivable way (Temperature, Cloud cover, Humidity, Rainfall, Windspeed, etc.)?
Honestly, that would be an achievement in itself!
Or, maybe, they get it right most of the time, but it's only the times they're wrong that stand out?
However, while I'm sure that both 'sides' in this debate are equally guilty of seeing what they want to see, that which confirms their observer bias, I'm not sure that ridiculing weather forecasts is a valid argument against the accuracy and predictive power (or lack thereof) of climate models.
And here goes the lying liar linking to another lying liar, again.
The only reason they're inexplicable, is because he's not a scientist.
The blog post refers only to land based sensors in the US, and the difference it causes is less than 0.02%, and it onyl affects a single data set for the US.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/G...
"Denialists jumped on the bandwagon in regards to this shift making many grandiose claims that it invalidates all of the data that proves this has been the hottest decade in recorded history. This is not the case; it only makes a tiny difference that does not change the decade averages or the global averages."
So.. once again: nothing you have stated is valid.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Uh...no. You do know that's not how it works right?
Apparently not, or you wouldnt have said somehting so stupid.
So let me educate you: THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS.
What, you think scientists are out of work and have to go learn a new trade if they can't find anything to research, so they make stuff up?
JFC...how dumb are you?
http://arstechnica.com/science...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Cognitive filter. Example: you.
You do know that your local man on Tv usually isnt an actual meteorologist? And what's on the teleprompter may or may not have been based on NOAA's official forecast. Weather modeling and forecasts are very good, boasting >95% accuracy over the first 3-4 days, with accuracy decreasing the further ahead you go.
"This claim is based more on an appeal to emotion than fact. The inference is that climate predictions, decades into the future, cannot be possibly right when the weather forecast for the next day has some uncertainty.
In spite of the claim in this myth, short term weather forecasts are highly accurate and have improved dramatically over the last three decades."
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The "threats to our political and military stability" come mainly from our needing to buy fossil fuels and thereby fund our enemies. Funny how people who don't believe in global warming do believe in the global jihad, and yet the two have many of the same remedies.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
The "models aren't 100% accurate therefore we shouldn't trust them until they are" argument is essentially the same as the ones the anti-vaxxers use: Vaccines aren't 100% safe and therefore we shouldn't use them until they are 100% safe.
The fact is that the groups plan on never trusting climate models or vaccines because they realize that neither will never reach 100%. Even if we were able to improve climate models by leaps and bounds above the current ones (which themselves are pretty accurate), there would still be *some* uncertainty. We might get it to 99.999%, but there would still be that 0.001% that deniers would point to. Same with the anti-vax groups. If one person gets sick due to a vaccine (e.g compromised immune system & shouldn't have gotten the vaccine or allergy that wasn't known at the time) then this will be proof that vaccines aren't 100% safe and therefore shouldn't be used. Never mind that a 99% safe vaccine is orders of magnitude more preferable than any of the vaccine preventable diseases.
Both arguments use the Perfect Solution Fallacy.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Just because your model predicted the outcome of something does not mean your model is accurate.
Cartoon to educate you: http://static.skepticalscience...
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-other-planets-solar-system-intermediate.htm
Viking wines were made from berries, not grapes. So significantly less warm than "vineyards" might imply.
Fact: The models are accurate.
I think what annoys me the most about climate alarmism is the false certainty such as conflating opinion with fact. The second most annoying thing is the lack of scientific grounds for the arguments made.
For example, the above two links in the parent post show considerable divergence between the models and reality (sea level and polar ice extent while substantially and suspiciously downplaying the temperature difference between model and reality). The "myth" is confirmed but the writer portrays it as affirmation of their desired conclusion.
Meanwhile the assertion that models fit past events is near irrelevant since that is data which is already known and it is expected that the models would have been adjusted in the first place to fit that data). For example, I can construct an interpolation of any temperature (or other numerical) data to perfect precision using an even degree polynomial of sufficiently high degree, yet it'll be completely irrelevant once I attempt any sort of extrapolation into the future (odds are good, about 50% I'd say, that it'll predict temperatures far below absolute zero by 2100).
We see this attitude in action in the current story. First, the story noted that these models don't actually predict past events when they're run backwards from a current state. Then someone rationalizes that it's because the observations are wrong, not the models. This not only runs counter to your empty assertion that the models predict the known past, but also is profoundly anti-scientific.
Here are two examples where the most FUD-inducing interpretations are used. The climate models are "too conservative" because they allegedly underplay sea level rise, but the corresponding inability of the models to predict temperature increase is not (though that means the models are exaggerating sensitivity of carbon dioxide temperature forcing, the most important of the unknowns in climate research.
Similarly, when models are shown to be out of whack with past observations (as they were with future observations), the interpretation is that the observations are wrong, not the models even though it is more likely to be the other way around.
This profound inability to admit error is why I don't trust current climate models or the doomsday predictions they spawn in the least. That's why I'm going to wait a few decades and see what happens. If it genuinely is as bad as claimed, then we'll see something by then.
Maybe you'll send them to re-education camps. If not that, work camps where the Work will set the free.
I hear North Korea has that down to a science now.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
No, 99% safe vaccine is not ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE better that disease. It is not even better than disease itself. Will you get yourself vaccinated against AIDS if it has 1% of chance giving you AIDS in first place?
Vaccines are safe to 99.9999% or more. And you always have to put it into context. If Ebola will spread to billions, 99% safe vaccine might be acceptable. If AIDS is perfectly preventable in normal case, even 1:million safety might be not enough. But please be careful with 99% and 'orders of magnitude' in same sentence - there are not that many orders of magnitude in 1:100.
A paper published today in Nature Climate Change finds climate models have greatly exaggerated global warming over the past 20 years, noting the observed warming is "less than half" of the modeled warming.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot....
A new paper by prominent German climatologists Dr. Hans von Storch and Dr. Eduardo Zorita, et al, finds "that the continued [global] warming stagnation over fifteen years, from 1998 -2012, is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot....
I'm pretty sure it's pause explanation #1. The global temp hit a little pause. We wondered where all the extra heat was going. It turns out it was going into the oceans. Done in one.... This isn't new. We've known this for a while... This is simply that more of that has been occuring than we previously thought. Keep your snark.
I go hiking a lot. I check the weather forecast. it's usually right. I wouldn't trust it 10 days out, except as a vague guidline, but I'd trust it three days out. I do, regularly. I live in Oregon. It's important to have your raincoat here....
So no, weather models are NOT a joke. They're incredibly accurate for just about every use case I've ever used them for. The absolute joke must be you...
and there is no conclusive proof that cigarette smoking causes lung disease. No, really, there has never been an observation of a cell mutating after exposure to a puff of smoke. The evidence is only statistical. And yet... reasonable people can accept that the odds are that smoking is unhealthy, in spite of the lack of "hard" scientific proof. Proof of the kind that Climate Change Deniers seem to be demanding. Arctic ice that is 60% thinner than it was when our first nuclear sub crossed under it in the 60s, Old photos of curling (that obscure shuffle board type sport) on fjords that haven't frozen over in decades, the no longer needed fleet of ice breakers on our Great Lakes, fauna found further and further north every year, tree rings, ice cores, historical records...all prove...nothing...but still, reasonable people can conclude that there is a link between our draining of the carbon sinks, and greenhouse warming. It's really not a stretch is it?
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
im so sick of the lying. both poles have jncreased 40% or more accordibg to daily mail
Clearly it's absolutely true because you read it in the Daily Mail.
I stole this Sig
I'm pretty sure it was you that diverged from reality... The earth is getting warmer dude... The data is easy to see. It's really easy to see. You can look up satellite pics of ice coverage. A simple Wolfram Alpha search will tell you global mean temperatures, and show you the data sources so you can investigate them better.
How do you people keep insisting nothing is going on? The excuses keep changing. "It's not warming. Ok, it is, but it's solar! Ok, it's not solar, but it's not man made.... It's natural cycles! Ok, it's it's moving too fast for natural cycles, but it paused for the last few years! It's warmer, but it stopped, so it's not warming! Ok, so yeah, Arctic sea ice is dwindling, but antarctic is growing! Ok, sure, arctic is sea ice and antarctic is land ice, but.... It's scientists, just making a grab for lucrative grab for government money! Ok, so that money is shit and it's pretty obvious all the real money is in private industry, but..."
On and on you people go, changing your story. Diverging from reality, if you will.....
furthermore, it's quite obvious that several industries just don't want a drop in profits that would come with regulation. It's quite obvious they've spent a TON of money to muddy the conversation. My question is, in 30 years when we can look back on this, will you !@#$holes fess up that you were wrong the whole time? Will you admit that you all were duped and spent decades ignoring your betters? Will you finally shut up?
Don't worry, I know the answer....
So it wasnt going into the oceans before and all of a sudden started going into the oceans all at once? Thus creating a "pause"? Why wasnt the heat going into the oceans before the "pause"?
You know, if people who arent climate scientists are not qualified to question the science, then people who arent climate scientists are also not qualified to defend the science.
argh.... Just... what do you think HAPPENS when you release a few million years of stored up carbon in a measly few hundred years as CO2. Just... think about it. It's not that hard... Fossil fuels are quite literally millions of years of stored CO2 from dead plants.... And you release it in this HUGE surge in just 200 years... We KNOW CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We know it prevents us from radiating heat back out into space. This is not disputed..
I need to stop arguing about this. I know the people that argue against global warming are morons or have an agenda... Why do I do this to myself?
Crop yields down. Yes, seriously.
All you've shown is that we're growing more corn - which should be no surprise to anyone given how it's used in all our first-world processed junk food, and now we're even using it to fuel our cars. And the US has been subsidizing the hell out of it.
Suggesting that global warming could be a net positive for global crop yields flies in the face of all research to date:
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...
http://www.theguardian.com/env...
This is one of the biggest problems global warming is bringing with it, I don't know how you'd missed it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If you'd like to actually look at science papers instead of a crappy website, here's one in Nature that shows the models are inaccurate
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
One knows this because one studies nonlinear chaotic systems (in systems with far simpler coupled DEs), learns about things like the Kolmogorov scale, turbulence, Lyupanov exponents, one monkeys about with solving nonlinear coupled ODEs with both adequate and inadequate integration stepsize. From this one learns that the climate models are arguably some 30 orders of magnitude shy of a spatiotemporal step that one might reasonably expect to be able to integrate over some significant time to get an actual solution.
This gap is bridged two ways. One of the two ways is to make pure assertions about the physics in between the Kolmogorov scale and the scale we can afford to integrate. For example, forget local dynamics of thunderstorms -- thunderstorms are phenomena that are basically invisible on a 100x100x1 km grid. Assume that one can use some sort of probability distribution of thunder-storminess in the dynamics and that this is adequate to describe all of the violent and rapid heat transport vertically and laterally in thunderstorms with sizes distributed on length scales of 2 to 10 km and with time scales of significant variation of a minute or longer (the time required to get out of your car and reach the house, of course). Do this repeatedly, with everything -- tornadoes (and other small scale velocity fields with nonzero curl) -- gone, replaced with and assertion regarding averages. Don't worry about the fact that none of these assertions can be formally derived and that we know perfectly well that we won't get the right answer for any other chaotic system studied by mankind (for example, try this for a simple damped driven rigid oscillator, replace the driving force with an average of almost any sort and see what happens) thus far if we do this, but don't forget to shout that the models are based on physics if anybody dares to point this out.
The other is even better. When the models are run, they are still nonlinear iterated maps, even if they are integrated with approximated dynamics and an enormous spatiotemporal step, so they still exhibit chaos and make lots of nifty patterns that "look like" weather (and even are a theoreticaly and empirically defensible approximation to weather, for integration periods of a week or so from reasonable well-known initial conditions before the chaotic trajectories diverge to fill phase space and render them worthless for weather prediction any more). One gets, from even tiny perturbations of the initial conditions and/or physical parameters, butterfly-effect divergences that create an entire bundle of "possible microtrajectories" for the model system being solved which is, note well, not even arguably the actual equation of motion for the coupled Earth-Sun-Atmosphere-Ocean system, it is a pure toy model that nobody sane would expect to actually work. And of course it empirically does not work, not even close. The microtrajectories produced, which generally only work across a reference period (trial data) by carefully choosing large, cancelling forcing terms in the approximated dynamics, end up having far too much variance (compare to the actual climate), the wrong autocorrelation spectrum (direct evidence of the wrong physics but who is counting), and range from (for CMIP5 models) a handful that actually cool over very long time scales to some that go sky high.
The actual Earth, of course, only has one trajectory and it doesn't look anything like any of these model trajectories. So now comes the best part. The "ensemble" of microtrajectories is actually averaged and used as a prediction for the trajectory.
Words fail me. Again to fall back on a trivial example, imagine taking a damped driven rigid rod oscillator operating in the chaotic regime, starting it from an "ensemble" of slightly perturbed different initial conditions, integrating it on so coarse a timestep that one gets chaos but perhaps chaos that is not even qualitatively similar to the chaos observed with an adequate timestep, and then
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
You know, if people who arent climate scientists are not qualified to question the science, then people who arent climate scientists are also not qualified to defend the science.
Then why are you asking questions on /.?
I don't think the people here at /. are doing such a bad job explaining climate science, but you can always ask your money back and go find answers from real climate scientists.
So it wasnt going into the oceans before and all of a sudden started going into the oceans all at once? Thus creating a "pause"? Why wasnt the heat going into the oceans before the "pause"?
There are some really simple explanations for this: one, the ocean currents changed (due to changes in the atmospheric climate) forcing more of the warmer water deeper into the ocean than before, two, no one said it was an "all-at-once" thing, and even if they did their perspective on "all-at-once" may be decades where you may be thinking more immediately, three, no one said that the rise in air temperatures WASN'T heating the oceans all along. As a matter of fact the continuing rise in ocean temperature has always been a priority concern to climatologists because of the impact on the entire food chain.
Keep your snark.
If you're going to oppose overwhelming scientific consensus for political reasons, snark is a very important weapon.
Just because your model predicted the outcome of something does not mean your model is accurate.
Correct, but if the model predicts the outcome more than half the time, or up to ninety percent of the time, then it's pretty accurate. It may not be precise, but it is accurate.
Not sure what you mean by few references...All these were on that page.
http://www.grida.no/publicatio...
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncli...
http://www.weatherzone.com.au/...
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs...
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/...
http://www.copenhagendiagnosis...
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/people/...
http://www.aip.org/history/cli...
http://www.aip.org/history/cli...
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea...
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
As for Dyson...two imporat words you dont find in his biography are "climate scientist".
In fact, he rather quite well falls into the science trope of the phsycist who insits on talking about things outside his realm of expertise.
(There's even an XKCD for that, though I am missing the link atm)
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
So it wasnt going into the oceans before and all of a sudden started going into the oceans all at once? Thus creating a "pause"? Why wasnt the heat going into the oceans before the "pause"?
You know, if people who arent climate scientists are not qualified to question the science, then people who arent climate scientists are also not qualified to defend the science.
You know, if you could engage your brain for 5 seconds instead of going to your default ideology routine, you may be able to figure this one out for yourself. The oceans are not static objects. Ocean currents can and do have periods that can span a couple decades. These currents can bring warmer or cooler waters to the surface.
Form there, it's basic physics. If the air is warmer than the water, the water heats up. If the air is colder than the water, the air heats up. If the net energy balance of the system is positive, then the water (having much greater heat storage capacity) will gradually warm up over time. As the currents cycle there will be periods where air temperatures will be cooler and periods where air temperatures will be warmer. And again, if the net energy balance is positive then temperatures will stair-step higher and higher (which is what we've been seeing).
~X~
I think what annoys me the most about climate alarmism is the false certainty such as conflating opinion with fact. The second most annoying thing is the lack of scientific grounds for the arguments made.
"Alarmism" as you call it, is social. I've yet to read any scientific papers claiming we're all going to die.
As for your "lack of scientific grounds", that's just bullshit. The basic chemistry and thermodynamics were worked out well over a century ago. The first prediction of AGW was made by Arrhenius in 1899 (he also created the first climate model and is considered the father of modern chemistry). If you want to go further back you could talk a look at the preliminary work on greenhouse gas theory from Fourier (1825).
For example, the above two links in the parent post show considerable divergence between the models and reality (sea level and polar ice extent while substantially and suspiciously downplaying the temperature difference between model and reality). The "myth" is confirmed but the writer portrays it as affirmation of their desired conclusion.
Irrelevant. Those aren't scientific papers. They're not peer-reviewed. Any idiot on the web can say whatever they want. That doesn't make them a legitimate source of information.
Meanwhile the assertion that models fit past events is near irrelevant since that is data which is already known and it is expected that the models would have been adjusted in the first place to fit that data). For example, I can construct an interpolation of any temperature (or other numerical) data to perfect precision using an even degree polynomial of sufficiently high degree, yet it'll be completely irrelevant once I attempt any sort of extrapolation into the future (odds are good, about 50% I'd say, that it'll predict temperatures far below absolute zero by 2100).
Ignorance only hurts your argument. Climate models are physical simulations. They work based on physics, not some statistical curve fitting which is what you seem to be implying. Climate models are initialized with some historical set of conditions, and then run forward to see how well they model climate responses.
That's why physical models in general (fluid dynamic models, gravitational models, weather models, climate models, etc.) can be used for helping make useful decisions and research.
We see this attitude in action in the current story. First, the story noted that these models don't actually predict past events when they're run backwards from a current state. Then someone rationalizes that it's because the observations are wrong, not the models. This not only runs counter to your empty assertion that the models predict the known past, but also is profoundly anti-scientific.
You have terrible reading comprehension. The article (which isn't the paper) says the scientists used climate models to look into the past, not "run the models backwards". Running them backwards doesn't even make any sense. You can read the paper to see their methodology.
The issue the paper is addressing, which you fail to grasp, is that the the data from recent higher accuracy observations (namely the ARGO network) are reporting a lot more warmth than was previously estimated from earlier, lower quality observations. They then analyzed the discrepancies and discovered that global ocean heat in the upper 700m may have been off by as much as 25%, which would have potential impacts on things like CO2 sensitivity studies.
Here are two examples where the most FUD-inducing interpretations are used. The climate models are "too conservative" because they allegedly underplay sea level rise, but the corresponding inability of the models to predict temperature increase is not (though that means the models are exaggerating sensitivity of carbon dioxide temperature forcing, the most important of the unknowns in climate research.
You are viewing a c
~X~
Turns out "may have"... and "suggests" turns out to be "is not" ... "there"...
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/n...
JPL just compared deep ocean temps with what they were in 2005 and found there is no warming. So the deep oceans are not warming.
This means the "missing heat" issue remains a problem for the people working on these climate models. And this "may have" ... "suggests" that maybe the reason the heat is missing is because there isn't actually any warming. Think I'm wrong? Where it is the heat?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.