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."

Comments

phase change

[aquabat]

Lots of Ice melting. Could be that all the energy is going into phase change right now.

Everyone should just say "interesting"

[Karmashock]

Because that is what every new report is field of science that we don't actually understand.

And we don't. As regards global climate we have models and data but we don't really understand what is going on here. We never have. And that isn't to say that AGW isn't happening or is or anything one way or the other. But rather that it is extremely complicated and extremely confusing.

This article is going to make the anti AGW people feel vindicated just like the walrus thing made the pro AGW people feel vindicated. It is going to go back and forth. I'm sure tomorrow or the next day we'll get another report of something that backs up the AGW side and this article will just be forgotten.

That is just the politics. For those of us that don't care about the politics... this should just be interesting.

So what we get here is that the heat predicted by the models is still missing.

That is interesting. So we should keep looking for it. And until it is found those supporting the climate models that require that heat to be somewhere really should be some what humble about their position until the heat is found. Which is reasonable. But assuming they don't want to do that for whatever reason... Whatever. We're going to respond to this issue however makes best sense to each of us.

For me... I'm going to take with a grain of salt anything someone says when they don't show what I feel to be a reasonable amount of humility on an issue they cannot claim to fully understand. By all means... form your own opinions.

For me... this is just another interesting data point. I await more.

Re:Everyone should just say "interesting"

[sg_oneill]

"This article is going to make the anti AGW people feel vindicated"

They shouldn't. The alternative explainations as to where that energy is going are far more concerning. If the energy is not being disipated into the deeper oceans, then its being concentrated elsewhere. Candidates include: Siberian traps. Arctic/Antarctic pole melt. Upper ocean (And thats an "oh shit" possibility), and so on.

Re:Everyone should just say "interesting"

[rioki]

So far we can conclude that it is not in the upper atmosphere, it is not in the lower atmosphere, it is not on land surfaces and not on the ocean surface. Now we have an additional data point, it is not in the lower oceans and the ice caps are low but a slow positive trend. These last two decades have seen runaway CO2 emissions but no noticeable warming. Few people claim that high CO2 levels are a good thing, but as GP stated, we are far from understanding climate.

Re:Everyone should just say "interesting"

[RogueyWon]

From an intellectual standpoint, I agree with you.

From a real-world standpoint, the problem of the political response in terms of adaptations and mitigations isn't going anywhere and means that almost nobody will do what you suggest. You may not care about the politics, but in practical terms, they are probably the most important thing. With a range of responses in the public debate from "do nothing" at one extreme to "throw away Western civilisation, start living in organic yurts spending our evenings knitting underwear out of hemp" at the other, there's a lot of emotion and political capital invested in this debate. It's only made worse by the number of people who have latched onto the issue as a means to push almost-entirely-unrelated political agendas, mostly far-left, but a few far-right as well.

So in practical terms, this report provides a touch of ammunition to the "do nothing" camp and has the potential to slide opinion slightly in their direction. But, as you say, this time tomorrow, the position may well be reversed and the "organic yurtists" may hold the advantage.

And the last thing either side is going to display is a touch of humility. Useful though that might be.

Re:Thermal capacity of rock?

[Karmashock]

My understanding is that the transmission of heat would not be perfect and so if there were heat being sinked in the rock there should be residual heat in the water. The oceans are not after all super conductors. They must have a high resistance and that resistance would mean they would warm if they were subjected to a net increase in heat.

I am no expert either of course... so many that is all crap. :-)

It is very difficult to discuss this issue because about 30 percent of people only care about answers that prove AGW and end the discussion and another 30 percent of people only care about answers that disprove AGW and end the discussion. That means about 60 percent want AGW to not be talked about but rather concluded one way or the other. That leaves less then 40 percent that are actually curious about it and want to know more.

This makes posing questions and looking into the issue problematic because the 60 percent will attempt to shut down any discussion one way or the other. Those 30 percent figure are of course completely pulled out of my butt and they will shift around radically from one moment to the next. In some cases, I've been pretty sure it was over 90 percent of people in a discussion that simply didn't want anyone to talk about the issue at all. Just hordes of people shouting and browbeating everyone to try and silence everything.

Re:Thermal capacity of rock?

[radtea]

Allow my naivete to shine: What's the temperature of all of the rock that water is in contact with, and what's its thermal capacity relative to the water? Could it be that it's slow to warm as you need to warm all the rock it's in contact with?

You are correct to label your question naive :-)

The average ocean depth is about 4000 m, so the depth being looked at here (just under 2000 m) isn't typically in contact with rock at all. That is, if you demarcated the 2000 m depth line it would intersect very little ocean floor, and that just off the edges of continental shelves. These are pretty much the "mid-depths" we are talking about.

Furthermore, rock is both a) insulating (compared to water) and b) of relatively low heat capacity (compared to water).

Water has a heat capacity of about 4 kJ/kg*K, which is to day it takes 4 kJ to raise 1 kg of water 1 K in temperature. A typical rock (granite, say, although most others are similar) has a heat capacity of 0.8 kJ/kg*K, so rock is both less able to transport heat and less able to absorb heat than water.

Oceans are far more important to the heat balance of the Earth than the air is. Consider the scales. Earth has 5E18 kg of air, and 1.4E21 kg water, and water has 4 times the heat capacity of air, so the thermal mass of the oceans is about 1000 times greater than that of the air (I'm actually surprised it's not more than that, but I've confirmed the numbers from a couple of different sources.)

Given that AGW is adding about 1.6 W/m**2 to the Earth's heat budget, consider a typical square metre of ocean surface, below which is a water column 4000 m deep with a mass of 4E6 kg. That 1.6E-3 kJ/s*m**2 has the capacity to raise the temperature of that water column by 1.6E-3/4*4E6 = 1E-9 K/s. Which doesn't sound like much until you realize there are 3.14E7 s/year, so ocean warming, all else being equal, could be as much as 0.03 K/year, or 0.3 K/decade, or 3 K/century.

These are pretty appreciable numbers, and give a sense of the utility of precise ocean measurements as a way of getting at AGW, because we should be able to see a characteristic depth profile of temperature developing over time that would allow us to infer the additional radiative forcing very directly.