James,
I hope you are right, but we can't base decisions on your belief.

We need to accept the other side presented by the consensus of scientific opinion. Consequences of doing nothing and probabilities playing out will be dire. Spending money on response to the data is not unlike what we do routinely on insurance for vehicles.

Making appropriate moves toward GCC, will mean we can respond effectively if the Arctic ice melts and the global sea currents literally turn curent climate patterns around.

What has been discussed here is really the heart of dramatic climate change, and really rarely mentioned in the wider media.

Probabilities of a reversal of the earth's thermohaline circulation are high and will have dramatic consequences. There is no question about that.

Can we risk not responding?

"The other factor in the sea ice melt is ocean heat content (OHC). This has levelled off since 2005 and if we see more frequent La-Nina events over the next 20 to 30 years I'd expect OHC to start to reduce and further arctic ice recovery to take place."

That's a ridiculous assertion. The only significant climatic trend in the figure you link to is the long term increasing heat content of the oceans over the last half-century. It's perfectly feasible to have periods of order a decade or so where the globally averaged surface temperature shows no trend or even slight cooling in the presence of longer‐term warming.

The figure you link to only includes the top 700 m of the ocean. There is ample evidence that the temperature of this top layer is very noisy (you should take a look at this paper recently published in GRL: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011GL047835.shtml). A quote from their conclusions:

"In terms of monitoring anthropogenic climate change, we would expect to see a more monotonic signal in total [ocean heat content] than [sea surface temperatures], which is highly subject to oceanic heat re‐distribution on multi‐annual to decadal time scales."

Thus six years is not even close to being a long enough period to be statistically significant. You can't say that global ocean heat content has 'levelled off' in the space of six years with the implication that it will reverse the long term (increasing) trend.

Kevin Trenberth plotted a curved trend based on the last 18 years or so of NASA sea surface data. His trend showed a maximum around 2006 and a subsequent cooling which I have confirmed from NASA figures has continued right through to now (Oct 2011) beyond the end of his plot. That plot features at the top of the home page at http://climate-change-theory.com

Trenberth never found his "missing energy" and Knox and Douglass rubbished the concept. The plain obvious facts are that ocean heat content in the long term has to correlate pretty well with sea surface temperatures because there is no sound reason for heat being permanently trapped in warmer waters at great depths. The fact that NASA sea surface data shows 2011 as shaping up to be cooler than 2003 is also in agreement with Trenberth's trend, given that his maximum in 2006 was closer to 2003 than 2011. The trend is also in keeping with a sinusoidal trend for a (natural) 60 year cycle superimposed on a 900 to 1000 year long term trend also roughly sinusoidal and likely to hit a maximum this century.

So indeed we do have global warming still continuing along these natural trend lines which predict slight cooling for another 18 years or so, followed by warming for 30 years but then long-term cooling for over 450 years.

Why isn't carbon dioxide having any effect? For a start, the emission from a carbon dioxide molecule is less than 0.5% that from a water vapour molecule. Then, even though more downward radiation occurs, there is also consequent additional upward heat transfer by both radiation and diffusion followed by convection. The models do not prove that warming must occur because they are not accurate enough to prove what would be less than 0.5% net downwelling radiative flux. (The errors in the models are 1% to 2% of total incoming radiation.) Finally, there is no empirical evidence that carbon dioxide causes warming. Wood's 1909 experiment was confirmed this year by Nahle and Pratt's was shown to be invalid. Proof that the world warmed towards the end of last century does not prove that carbon dioxide rather than natural causes were forcing such warming. There has been a sharp change in gradient since 2002 which cannot be correlated with carbon dioxide and aerosol levels or explained by models used by IPCC.

"His trend showed a maximum around 2006 and a subsequent cooling..."

Once again, I'll point out that decadal changes in heat content in the upper layer of the ocean is probably nothing more than noise. Most models predict these sorts of variations in SSTs within the context of an overall increase in ocean heat content.

"...ocean heat content in the long term has to correlate pretty well with sea surface temperatures because there is no sound reason for heat being permanently trapped in warmer waters at great depths"

The lower portions of the ocean don't have to be warmer than the top 700m to store more heat. You just need a larger volume of water to store the heat in. There's a lot of very sound physical reasons for why you can trap a lot of heat in the deep oceans, and I'd recommend that you look up any introductory oceanography textbook to find out why.

In terms of the correlation between SSTs and the heat content of the entire ocean, it's important to note that the oceans as a whole take a very long time to equilibrate to changed climatic conditions because of their large thermal mass. So you're right that in the long term the heat content in the thermocline and total heat content throughout the entire ocean should match, but the 'long term' in your statement is a very very long period of time (more like thousands of years for the deep ocean).

I'm going to leave the rest of your post alone, except to say that there's no physical reason why the climate should follow ad hoc 'sinusoidal cycles'. Any correlation without physical grounding is just mathturbation: http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/mathturbation/.

James,
this is a place for discussing Ideas, and a conduit for academia and the wider population to interact so if and "if" and "might" are appropriate. One of the reasons that site has been so successful. I sugest you get used to it.

As for the earth's thermohaline circulation the area the USA monitors, models run show there is a high probability of current reversal with as little as .3〫 - .2 〫change sea temperature in the Northern Atlantic.

This is science learned by K11- K12 if you need and depth it's mainstream science and readily available from reputable sources.

Mr Cotton, if you had troubled yourself to read beyond the headline, you would have found the answer in your first link. You are cherry-picking single data points.

Not an acceptable explanation I'm afraid when looked at in any detail. Multi-year Arctic ice has actually increased nearly 50% in the last three years. http://theconversation.homestead.com/arctic.gif and, in case you don't realise, that is a sharp reversal of the previous trend.

You have just done precisely the same thing again. Three years is not a trend (notice how many other such "trends" could be constructed from the graph you linked to?) and by looking only at proportions, you hide the fact that the overall decline of Arctic sea ice is making the whole pie (of which those proportions are part) smaller. There is no recovery. Notice the PIOMASS graph of Arctic sea ice volume shows an even more depressing picture than the data for extent or area.

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/