Oceans can hide global warming for a decade

Computer simulations of global climate have shown that the planet’s oceans can mask the presence of global warming for as much as ten years.

Ocean layers deeper than 300 metres absorb enough heat to flatten the apparent rate of global warming for long periods, despite the level of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere increasing in such periods.

Satellite measurements showed that the discrepancy between incoming sunshine and radiation leaving the earth increased, showing that while global temperature appeared to stay constant, it was still, in fact, on the rise.

Read more at Bureau of Meteorology (Aus.) & National Centre for Atmospheric Research (US)

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  1. John McLean

    logged in via email @connexus.net.au

    From the article "The study, based on computer simulations of global climate..." but do we have any evidence whatsoever that this model is accurate and that all climate forces are accurately incorporated?

    Also, aren't ARGO bouys showing that the deeper ocean isn't warming? Or was that paper superseded by a "defensive" paper that claimed that it was? Is there any reason why we should believe the second paper over the first - or for that matter the first over the second? (Please don't insult my intelligence by claiming that peer review - which both papers surely went through - is somehow totally impartial.)

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  2. Dennis Alexander

    logged in via LinkedIn

    Around 2000 or so, I asked a friend (then a climate sceptic) from the BoM for some deep ocean temperature records from the Antarctic. I ran them through some basic stats and they convinced me that the ocean temperatures, in the Antarctic at least, were rising. Wish I'd kept the floppies and the spreadsheets.

    But the physics is pretty simple. Water has a large specific heat capacity and a volume of water like the oceans, with interconnected currents to distribute heat among layers and around…

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  3. Duncan Rex Tippins

    Meteorologist

    Argo floats (to my knowledge) only sample the top 2000m or so of the ocean, and so the bottom 2000m or so of the ocean is not sampled (http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/How_Argo_floats.html). I suspect this is where a reasonable amount of the "missing" heat is and that this heat distribution into the deep waters is one the myriad processes the model would be attempting to simulate.

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