What do you make of new analysis of ocean heat content?

Question

A big noise has been made about Earth's 'missing heat', or 'Trenberth's Travesty'.

Some of the heat appears to be going into the deep ocean (von Schuckmann, 2009), but not by enough to 'close' the budget.

Lyman et al have taken another look at the data and compared other group's work and looked deeply into possible sources of uncertainty:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7296/pdf/nature09043.pdf

They mention that the uncertainties caused by previous datasets and by the sudden change to ARGO floats, and the increase in southern ocean coverage cause problems. After further analysis, counting for this, they conclude that there has been a statistically significant increase in ocean heat content at a rate of 0.64+-0.11 W m^-2, about 25% higher than given in the last IPCC report.

They conclude that this is statistically significant, and whilst they do show an increased ocean heat content during 'Trenberth's Travesty', they conclude that the uncertainties are too great to say whether it is a statistically significant flattening or not.


Do you think this is a sensible way of looking at it? Does the lack of statistically significant flattening support Trenberth's idea that inadequate observations may be the source of Earth's 'missing heat'?

Banned in D.C. · Accepted Answer

I'm shaking my box of Captain Sig's frozen fish sticks in ANGER!  I hate it when the IPCC takes a WAG (wildass-guess) and and gets it wrong (again).  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sig_Hansen

Dana1981 · Answer

Well Trenberth and others have found an energy imbalance of about 0.9 Wm-2, so if the upper oceans can only account for 0.64 Wm-2, it seems to me as though there's still some 'missing heat'.  It could be going mostly into the deeper oceans, where the data is sparse, but this doesn't seem to quite resolve 'Trenberth's Travesty'.

Uncertainty is certainly an issue.  Aside from changing instrumentation, it wasn't long ago that scientists though ARGO was showing upper ocean cooling.  And of course there's the sparse deeper ocean data.  An interesting study though.

virtualguy92107 · Answer

I think that it pretty thoroughly blows away the skeptic position recently cited by Eric C in disputing climate models:

"ocean heat content- For the observations to come into agreement with the GISS model prediction by the end of 2012 there would have to be an accumulation 9.8 * 10** 22 Joules of heat over just the next three years. This requires a heating rate over the next 3 years into the upper 700 meters of the ocean of 3.27* 10**22 Joules per year, which corresponds to a radiative imbalance of ~+2.0 Watts per square meter.

This rate of heating would have to be about 3 1/3 times higher than the 0.60 Watts per meter squared that Jim Hansen reported for the period 1993 to 2003.

http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/20…"

The skeptic's logic depended on a perceived lack of heat accumulation that has now been shown to be instrumental error.

bravozulu · Answer

Typical denial and grasping at straws that we have come to expect from deniers of reality.

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What do you make of new analysis of ocean heat content?

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