Willis Eschenbach over at WUWT has a good summary of the latest scare story about ocean warming:
How much is a “Whole Little”? Well, it’s like a whole lot, only much, much smaller.
There’s a new paper out. As usual, it has a whole bunch of authors, fourteen to be precise.
My rule of thumb is that “The quality of research varies inversely with the square of the number of authors” … but I digress.
In this case, they’re mostly Chinese, plus some familiar western hemisphere names like Kevin Trenberth and Michael Mann. Not sure why they’re along for the ride, but it’s all good. The paper is “Record-Setting Ocean Warmth Continued in 2019“.
Here’s their money graph:
Now, that would be fairly informative … except that it’s in zettajoules. I renew my protest against the use of zettajoules for displaying or communicating this kind of ocean analysis.
It’s not that they are not accurate, they are. It’s that nobody has any idea what that actually means.
Read the full post here.
Willis makes a number of points:
Firstly, when it is expressed in terms of temperature, we find that the oceans down to 2,000m have warmed by little more than 0.1C in half a century, hardly Armageddon:
The idea that we can measure the temperature of the world’s deep oceans to such fine margins is, of course, twaddle.
As Willis points out, even ARGO buoys, only operational since 2005, only cover less than one-third of the oceans. Prior to that, we were doing little more than guesswork.
Although zettajoules sound impressive, the claimed increase is microscopic compared to the total amount of energy entering and leaving the ocean.
How can we be sure that this tiny increase, even if it was real, is due to AGW, and not a myriad of natural causes, such as clouds, thunderstorms, ENSO, and other ocean cycles?
I would add one further thought.
As the map below shows, there is a huge variation in sea surface temperature anomalies across the world, with a range of about 6C.
OK, these are just surface temperatures, and temperature anomalies at depth will be much less pronounced. Nevertheless, the natural factors causing these variations clearly dwarf the supposed impact of man-made warming.
How then can we be sure that we are actually measuring the latter?
Read more at Not A Lot Of People Know That
See also Dr. Roy’s piece on Deep Ocean temperatures and this flawed report.
He is a fantastic track couch. He increased the speed of a runner by 264 feet an hour. Units can be selected to tell lies. In this case, 264 feet an hour translates to the difference between 10 mph and 9.95 mph. A zettajoule is a very large number, but the heat capacity of the ocean is beyond huge so we are deal with the fact that the unit makes difference appear larger. Again we have another example where the researchers are conducting their efforts in order to support the climate change movement.
Micheal Mann,Al Gore,Bill Nye,Leonardo DiCaprio,David Suzuki,Laurie David,John Travolta,Etc and other Global Warming/Climate Change scam artists
It is unfortunate that we can talk all day about the truthful science behind climate dynamics that will completely bury the global warming alarmists, but they just come back at us and yell: “But we have to do something to stop the crisis!” The global warming scare campaign is not about science; it is about using science to distort reality with the objective of gaining political leverage. It is even more unfortunate that it’s working. Just like the terrorists who supposedly make us more steadfast and enact ever more security measures, the end result is that we are becoming a fortress society where seemingly everyone is distrustful of everybody else.
Just because its my thing, the Zeta Joule at 1×10^21 Joules should be compared to the heat required to raise the World’s Ocean’s 1 degree, which is roughly what 1 degree SST all over will equalise to, as oceans control atmosphere and hold 99.9% of surface heat.
That is 6×10^24 Joules. So the Earth’s surface must gain 6,000 Zeta Joules for 1 degree rise in temperature.
A Zettajoule is Less than 0.02% of the heat required to raise temps by 1 degree.
Or 0.06W/m^2, less than Earths internal heat reaching the surface by conduction.
Now I want to know where the energy to do this is coming from?
More simple absolute if slightly rounded numbers like this in the three tables in my paper at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3259379
Feel free to snarf and check them. Quote with attribution please.
Winston picked up and unrolled the slips of paper written by the Ministry of Climate Crisis.
“Previous rep of 0.01 C rise doubleplusungood rewrite use fright esoteric units fullwise with Mann et. al. upsub antefiling.”
Translation: [Previous report of only 0.01 C rise in ocean temperatures is extremely unsatisfactory and requires complete rewrite using previously unknown energy units intended to create panic in the readers. Cite Michael Mann and other usual names. Submit to superior prior to filing.]