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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.
Yesterday it was about the top layer, today about the deeper layers. Oceans are big and varied, you know.
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.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"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.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
They're obviously getting a rebate on rocket fuel from big oil. Deniers the whole bunch of them!
It's hard to admit that you could've been wrong isn't it?
Especially after you've been gloating over your high horse position and have insulted everyone that disagreed.
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.
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.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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
Climate: (noun) - anything in the sky or seas that can be twisted to support the claims that the world will end if we do not all pay higher taxes and give governments more power over individuals.
Weather: (noun) - anything in the sky or seas that might be twisted into an argument that governments do not need more money and power in order to "save the planet"
Examples of proper usage:
1. Hurricanes: when large and devastating, like Katrina, they are climate and proof of global warming, but when absent for a record-setting period of time they become weather and anybody who cites them as evidence of non-warming is an IDIOT
2. Temperatures: when high in a place like California, they are climate and proof of global warming, but when very low in a place like the midwest and explained as a "polar vortex" they are just weather and anybody claiming temperatures matter is an IDIOT who doesn not "get" the difference between "climate" and "weather"
3. Droughts: When hitting California worse than younger citizens remember in their short lives they are climate and proof of global warming, but when people are reminded that they have happened many times before and when evidence shows that the current one too is tied to El Nino/La Nina weather patterns they are....... um...... still climate and proof the world will end if we do not abandon the free market, personal liberty, etc (when something is a disaster that can be used no matter what, it remains climate)
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.
Bingo. Anti-AGW people go "ah hah! It's not warming see! Nothing to worry about!"
Which should actually be about as comforting as discovering that your septic tank has gone from full to empty without any actually needing to pump it out.
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)
Yeah, it's not a constructive attitude to take. But, if I'm convinced that global warming is going to wipe out the human race, then anyone who is arguing on the other side is directly contributing to the extermination of humanity, and that's not going to endear me to them. And in a broader sense regarding "liberals", tolerant people can't be expected to be tolerant of intolerance. Same with religion - if I'm convinced that anyone not worshipping God is helping the devil to destroy the world, then I'm not really going to be sympathetic to atheists or other religions. Of course to someone who disagrees with me on any of these positions, I'm just some nutjob. But if I'm right, well, what otherwise outrageous actions are acceptable in order to save the world?