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NASA Study: Ocean Abyss Has Not Warmed
submitter bigwheel sends this excerpt from a NASA news release:
The cold waters of Earth's deep ocean have not warmed measurably since 2005, according to a new NASA study, leaving unsolved the mystery of why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, analyzed satellite and direct ocean temperature data from 2005 to 2013 and found the ocean abyss below 1.24 miles (1,995 meters) has not warmed measurably. Study coauthor Josh Willis of JPL said these findings do not throw suspicion on climate change itself. "The sea level is still rising," Willis noted. "We're just trying to understand the nitty-gritty details."
Lots of Ice melting. Could be that all the energy is going into phase change right now.
No. Your statement is false. It could only be true if you stated that ice melting is severely underestimated. This stuff is not ignored, you know. It's hell of a lot of energy to change ice to water at 0C. That's why polar ice caps are called air conditioning of the world.
For comparison, it's almost easier to boil water than to melt it from 0C ice to 0C water.
* 334kJ/kg for water to melt it
* 418kJ/kg for water to raise from 0C to 100C
Basically the energy required to melt ice is the same as to raise the temperature of water from 0 to 80C.
Except global temperatures have not plateaued and continue to rise. The rate of the rise changes but it is continuing to rise. The "plateau" is only spin using a very crude line from a peak in 1998. http://www.skepticalscience.co...
The warming cannot be explained by an inter-glacial. Dumping millions of years of stored carbon into the upper atmosphere is not surprisingly having an effect on the climate. Land use changes, clear felling, road and city concreting do not help either.
This study is going to help refine the calculations of where heat is stored and how it changes over time but don't delude yourself that this is not related to human activity. Even most deniers have stopped denying that.
In the atmosphere there's a situation: The weather all happens down near the surface, in a region called the troposphere. Here the density/temperature gradients can result in instabilities, where a parcel of air that is, say, lighter than its sourroundings can become MORE ligher-than-its surroundings as it moves up (and vice-versa). Above that is another (set of) layer(s) called the "stratosphere", where everything is most stable right where it is. Nothing very exciting happens there except when something coming up REALLY fast from below coasts up a bit before it stabilizes and moves back down.
The oceans do something similar, but upside down:
Water has an interesting property: Like most materials it gets more dense as it gtss colder - but only up to a point. As it approaches freezing the molecules start hanging out in larger groups, working their way toward being ice crystals. The hydrogens on one molecule attract the oxygens on another, and because of the angle between the hydrogens bondended to the oxygen in each molecule, the complexes are somewhat LESS dense than liquid. As a result, with progressively lower temperatures the density reaches a maximum, then the water begins to expand again. When it actually freezes it is so much less dense than near-freezing liquid that the ice floats. With fresh water the maximum density happens about 4 degrees C. Salt disrupts the crystalization somewhat so the maximum density is a tad cooler (and varies a bit with salt concentration - and thus depth), but the behavior is similar.
The result is that, when you have a mix of cooler and hotter blobs of fresh water, the water closer to 4 degrees sinks and that farther from it rises. The result is that, absent a heat or impurity source below, the bottom (and much of the volume) of a deep lake tends to be stable, stratified, water at about 4 degrees year around, while all the deviations from it and "weather" activity is in no more than about the top 300 feet: Wave action, ice, hot and cold currents, etc. are all above the reasonably abrupt "thermocline" boundary. Below that things are very slow, driven mostly by things like volcanic heat. (Diffusion is REALLY slow in calm water. It takes decades for, say, dissolved impurities to move a couple inches.)
The ocean is much like that, too, but a little cooler and with some temperature ramps spreading out the thermocline due to variations in salt concentration.
So global warming/cooling/weather, whatever would NOT be expected to affect deep water temperatures. This would all be happening in the top few hundred feet. If, say, the ocean were heating up without the surface water temperature changing, this would take the form of the thermocline gradually lowering near the equator and/or rising near the poles, rather than the deep water becoming warmer.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That was my first instinct, but it's also possible that humanity just doesn't have THAT much of an impact. Remember that we're actually living in an unusually stable period of Earth's climate history to begin with, and as recent as the Cretaceous period we had atmospheric CO2 some 20 times what it is now (which BTW happened to be the most "green" period of Earth's history in addition to supporting the largest land animals to ever live.)
Who is to say when this period we're so familiar with ends, our fault or not?
Are you sure about that? People usually say the sea ice is increasing in extent, but that the land ice (the bit that might raise sea levels) is shrinking rapidly. For example:
http://climate.nasa.gov/news/242/
Gravity data collected from space using NASA's Grace satellite show that Antarctica has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002. The latest data reveals that Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate, too.
/. had a recent story on this too, based on data from the same satellite:
http://news-beta.slashdot.org/story/14/09/30/2351213/antarctic-ice-loss-big-enough-to-cause-measurable-shift-in-earths-gravity
I dislike replying to trolls. But for the record and anyone who might actually buy your bullshit, your statements should not be allowed to stand unchallenged.
The Antarctic ice maximum is SEA ice, just a thin sheet a meter or two thick, consistent with higher winds (guess why- increased thermal gradients) leaving source water exposed to the atmosphere.
At the same time GIGATONS of LAND ice (the kind which raises sea level) is being lost in the Antarctic and even faster in Greenland.
Land volume growing? I know you know better, as every fucking article about this stuff people correct you on it, but no, that's an outright lie. Laser altimiters and gravity meters on satellites clearly show massive losses in ice volume.
Arctic is pretty darned normal? Look at the fucking ice volume death spiral graph! Does that look perfectly normal to you?!
http://iwantsomeproof.com/exti...
http://iwantsomeproof.com/exti...
Try this one on for size: look in the geologic record for what the Earth looked like last time we had this much CO2 in the atm. You have to go back to the fucking Pliocene to see that.
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/progr...
Guess what. The ice melted. 40 meters of sea level rise. It happened. That is exactly what we are headed for. Actually more, because in the next few years we will breeze past the CO2 ppm peak that happened those millions of years ago.
Except that the "throw away Western civilization" is only ever thrown out there by the "do nothing" crowd as a caricature of progressive proposals. That said, there is ample precedence for the concept of you break it you pay for it, so some wealth redistribution is going to be a factor in most reasonable strategies.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
You do realize that carbon dioxide is quite literally PLANT FOOD, don't you?
Yeah, but there's not much we can do about that. "People breathe, therefore it's ok to dump another half trillion tons of carbon out of the ground into the atmosphere" isn't really a convinving argument.
You do realize that carbon dioxide is quite literally PLANT FOOD, don't you?
Yes. Sure. Maybe some of that trillion tons (the half trillion we already liberated, and the other half trillion that's following on rapildy) will be absorbed by plant life. After all, it was plant life that it came from. Maybe if we take the carbon that had been captured by plants and stored over hundreds of millions of years as fossil fuels, and release it into the atmosphere in a few decades, maybe plant life will be able to keep up with that. Or maybe not.
ignorant AC mdoded insightful by ignorant mods.
Again, I'll break it down Barney style for you:
-Weather is what's outside your window. Local, and immediate observation.
-Climate is a whole bunch of those local observations, from a whole bunch of locations. IE, an average or trend.
Keep your eye on the man, not the dog (Cosmos clip):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
1) The part of hurricanes most clearly linked to climate change is the season: it's been starting earlier, and lasting longer. No one really understands why this year was mild year for hurricanes, but agian: one year doesnt invalidate previous decades of observation. Next year could be the worst year ever. Or it could be mild too. Either way it will provide another data point, more observations, that can be applied and explored. And keep in mind that hurricanes, due their ginormous size and the amount of energy they contain, themselves cause changes in weather and climate over a tremendously large region.
2) Question: what caused the polar vortex to break its normal bounds and allow an unusal blast of arctic air to move southward into New England, while also allowing warm tropical air to come raging northward and cause a winter heat wave in Alaska? Could it have been the increased instabilty of the climate caused by dumping ever increasing amounts of energy into the system?
3) No, this level of drought has not occured in Calfornia before in recent history. Its not just young people who never experienced something like it before...neither have the old folks. No one who is currently alive was also alive during that last time California had such a severe drought. There is no evidence that its tied to El Nino considering that neither an El Nino nor La Nina event has occured during this drought. Fact of the matter that evidence is mounting that previous wetness of California is the anomaly, not the current dryness.
While this is not science that can be easily replicated in a lab in a short time frame so we can say "AHA! We have all the answers!", and will require millions of observations from around the globe over a tremendous time frame, the idea that you continually dump more and more energy into a system without affecting it is idiocy.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.