Date: Wed Jun 25 2008 - 09:28:58 EDT
This is great -- both the climate alarmists and the climate skeptics are
acting like YECs! Everyone who disagrees with me is a YEC! You don't like
my views on local property taxes -- you're a YEC! You don't like what I
ordered for breakfast -- you're a YEC! My tie is ugly -- you're a YEC!
On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 9:12 AM, Rich Blinne <rich.blinne@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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 [image: plusminus] 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 [image:
> plusminus] 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
>
-- David W. Opderbeck Associate Professor of Law Seton Hall University Law School Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology
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