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It's the sun
Climate's changed before
There is no consensus
Surface temp is unreliable
Models are unreliable
It's cooling
Ice age predicted in the 70's
Al Gore got it wrong
We're heading into an ice age
CO2 lags temperature
View All Arguments...


Latest Posts

It's the ocean

The skeptic argument...

Many effects may be lagged. One reason is the vast reservoir of heat, CO2 and much else that girdles the earth: the ocean. It takes some time for a surface temperature variation to show up in the amount of heat stored in the ocean (source: Greenie Watch)

What the science says...

The notion that the ocean is causing global warming is ruled out by the observation that the ocean is warming (Levitus 2005). Internal climate changes such as El Nino and thermohaline variability stem from transfers of heat such as from the ocean to the atmosphere. If the ocean was feeding atmospheric warming, the oceans would be cooling.

Other studies

In fact, ocean observations confirm both global warming and its cause. Barnett 2007 compares observations of ocean temperatures to results from the Parallel Climate Model (PCM) and finds "model-produced signals are indistinguishable from the observations". This suggests "the observed ocean heat-content changes are consistent with those expected from anthropogenic forcing, which broadens the basis for claims that an anthropogenic signal has been detected in the global climate system."

Warming in the pipeline

The other consequence of the warming ocean is it means there is additional "warming in the pipeline". Even if CO2 emissions were to start falling now, we already face further global warming of about another half degree by the end of the 21st century (Meehl 2005).

Comments

  1. "If the ocean was feeding atmospheric warming, the oceans would be cooling."

    Thats very weird thinking. The transmission goes like this:

    1. Increased solar activity leads to oceanic warming. Leads to more water vapour, leads to atmospheric warming.

    2. Increased solar activity leads to less invasion of cosmic rays, leads to less cloud cover, leads to greater oceanic warming, leads to water vapour, leads to atmospheric warming.

    3. Increased solar activity, leads to greater momentum in oceanic currents, leads to greater imbedded energy in the oceans via the Stefan-Boltzmann's law.

    With regards to point 3. Were there some basic change to the "resistance to circulation". If some change in oceanic currents led to a better circulation or less resistance to circulation then you would expect the oceans to accrue more energy and that would eventually have the side effect of greater average global temperatures.
  2. John
    In keeping with this thread, you may be interested in a paper from Nature: AMO will stop warming until 2020. This seems to coincide with SSC24 as well. I added two links dealing with the AMO, PDO and ENSO cycles in Is Pacific Decadal Oscillation the Smoking Gun? as well as the ENSO related posts in It's volcanoes (or lack thereof)
     about the cause of El Nino/La Nina.

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© John Cook 2008