[asa] Re: Secular Albedo changes.

On Jun 24, 2008, at 7:45 PM, Glenn Morton wrote:

>
> Now, I will answer your question. You say the ocean cooling is pure
> bs. Maybe. But you foisted off a chart that showed oceanic cooling
> and now when called upon it you go article shopping to find one that
> supports your view. This is from the very latest Nature, and I was
> reading that issue but hadn’t yet gotten to that article. Your
> procedure is what I did when I was a YEC. I try not to do it
> anymore. You thought that picture of land and oceanic
> temperatures, put out by NASA, was good enough to show that I was
> wrong, but what it shows is that you didn’t even look closely at the
> data you were resting your argument upon.
>
> Let’s look at your data. It seems you are confusing heat content
> with temperature. The two are not the same thing at all. And this is
> another case of grabbing anything at had, even if it is irrelevant
> to my claim that the oceanic temperatures are cooling. The first
> picture is NOT of oceanic surface temperature, but of heat content.
> Since the ocean bottom waters have a temperature of 4 deg C or so,
> warming them even a tiny bit would increase the heat content of the
> oceans significantly. So, answer the question, why do the NASA
> TEMPERATURES show that the oceans are cooling? Remember heat content
> of the oceans isn’t the same as surface temperature.
>
>

I am throwing this one back on the ASA list because the point above
betrays a very common misunderstanding about climate and allows for
important pedagogical points that would be of general benefit to the
list. First some context for the list. For a wide variety of reasons
Glenn distrusts the land temperature measurements so we were
discussing sea surface temperatures instead. During the Winter of 2007
and Spring of 2008 we had a La Niña. We are now ENSO neutral. ENSO
fluctuations produce short-term fluctuations on both the average
global temperatures but even more so sea surface temperature because
ENSO is defined by temperature anomalies in the Pacific near South
America. Because of this Glenn saw a slight dip in the NASA SST
during that period. It didn't matter that over the decadal time frame
we had a solid rising trend in temperatures. We had cooling oceans
because of a 6 month dip.

Which brings us to the Nature article in which I was allegedly playing
a YEC. Randy, the graph I pointed you to from Hansen's presentation
used data from this paper.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7198/abs/nature07080.html

> Changes in the climate system's energy budget are predominantly
> revealed in ocean temperatures1, 2 and the associated thermal
> expansion contribution to sea-level rise2. Climate models, however,
> do not reproduce the large decadal variability in globally averaged
> ocean heat content inferred from the sparse observational database3,
> 4, even when volcanic and other variable climate forcings are
> included. The sum of the observed contributions has also not
> adequately explained the overall multi-decadal rise2. Here we report
> improved estimates of near-global ocean heat content and thermal
> expansion for the upper 300 m and 700 m of the ocean for 1950–2003,
> using statistical techniques that allow for sparse data coverage5,
> 6, 7 and applying recent corrections8 to reduce systematic biases in
> the most common ocean temperature observations9. Our ocean warming
> and thermal expansion trends for 1961–2003 are about 50 per cent
> larger than earlier estimates but about 40 per cent smaller for 1993–
> 2003, which is consistent with the recognition that previously
> estimated rates for the 1990s had a positive bias as a result of
> instrumental errors8, 9,10. On average, the decadal variability of
> the climate models with volcanic forcing now agrees approximately
> with the observations, but the modelled multi-decadal trends are
> smaller than observed. We add our observational estimate of upper-
> ocean thermal expansion to other contributions to sea-level rise and
> find that the sum of contributions from 1961 to 2003 is about 1.5
> 0.4 mm yr-1, in good agreement with our updated estimate of near-
> global mean sea-level rise (using techniques established in earlier
> studies6,7) of 1.6 0.2 mm yr-1.

Glenn got it exactly right that this paper dealt with heat content
rather than temperature. What Glenn gets wrong -- like many if not
most climate skeptics -- with respect to climate is presuming that
temperature is more important than heat, local is more important than
global, and short term fluctuations are more important than long term
trends. This error had him refer to the wrong data (the SST
temperatures of the last few months rather than the heat of the last
few decades) when asking the question are the oceans warming or cooling.

A common refrain is we cannot trust the climate models because we
cannot predict the weather accurately. Climate models solve a
different problem and have different challenges. The challenge of
weather modeling is getting the initial condition right while for
climate modeling it's getting the energy balance (or budget) correct.
In fact, what's done is to have an ensemble of Monte Carlo initial
conditions and compare the results. The spread of the predicted
temperatures also gives us a gauge on how accurate our results are.
Climate models actually get more accurate with time and is why decadal
rather than monthly time scales are important. What is the most
important factors to get right is the so-called forcings measured in W/
m^2. CO2 is largest of the positive forcings while solar irradiance
has a small positive forcing and aerosols has a small (and decreasing)
negative forcing. The best analogy to a forcing is heat and why the
authors of the Nature paper associated heat, not temperature, with
ocean warming trends. When a furnace warms a house it is measured in
the heat and not the temperature. When you say the earth or the oceans
are warming or cooling it is the same question, what is the heat
balance. Otherwise, you are measuring weather instead of climate.

Glenn hypothesizes a heat source from below in the ocean. If he wants
to show this he needs to show that this models the heat in the ocean
down to 700 m, three year mean, is better than GISS E-R (Hansen et
al, Science, 2005). But I don't see any of that coming from any of
the climate skeptics. They throw up one hypothesis after another but
they don't build a better computer model and show how it is superior
to the existing ones. They will say things about sun spots but they
don't use the directly-measured solar irradiation or the magnetic
field of the Sun but don't look at the directly-measured cosmic rays
nor measured cloud cover. This is for good reason. Solar irradiation
and GCR and cloud cover are either flat or cyclical and do not show a
secular trend on the time scales of the current warming. On the other
hand, CO2 has been up and to the right for as long as we have been
measuring it.

One of the weaknesses of the current modeling was the decadal
variation of heat levels in ocean along with the sea level rise. Until
now, the computer models simply didn't cut it. This was an opportunity
for the skeptics to come in and improve the science. Like YEC and ID
they just said it's wrong without providing better predictions. As
usual, the poor old, maligned, mainstream climate scientists plugged
away and improved -- in this case -- the observations and showed that
the models were actually sound. They also showed that ocean warming
and sea level rise were being severely underestimated. Early in the
21st Century similar bad satellite and radiosonde measurements were
also improved by eliminating the "leakage" from the lower stratosphere
into the mid troposphere. This showed the climate models were good at
a wide variety of altitudes and provided an important piece of the
forensic evidence that AGW was indeed real. To this day, Spencer and
Christy still won't fix their bad data presumably because it disproves
their now faulty thesis that the satellite data does not support the
models.

I hope this is helpful to people on the ASA list and why Randy I
pointed out slide 15 of Hansen's presentation. It may not be the
sexiest one of the bunch but from a scientific standpoint it is the
most relevant as to how the science is continuing to improve. It is
also further evidence on how mature climate science has become.

Rich Blinne
Member ASA

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Received on Wed Jun 25 09:13:18 2008