Study fingers humans for ocean heat rise
A study published last weekend on Nature Climate Change claims to give the lie to the notion that if the world is warming, it’s not our fault. With the kind of certainty that will send the Heartland Institute reaching for Plan C (“the world should focus on mitigation”), the study, The study, Human-induced global ocean warming on …
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“Although we performed a series of tests to account for the impact of various uncertainties, we found no evidence that simultaneous warming of the upper layers of all seven seas can be explained by natural climate variability alone. Humans have played a dominant role,”
But what about unknown unknowns? Surely there is a billion of those, due to human ignorance and arrogance. E.g. Sun radiation, moon cycles (i.e. 19 solar years), astoriods etc etc and they are just solar, what about earth tectonic plate movement etc?
Does this guy think he has studied everything (in the universe) and he has enough evidence over billions of years (to get a fair stat)? I don't think so IMO!
“a dozen different models used to project climate change”, making it “the most comprehensive study of changes in ocean heat content to date.”
But what if they are all wrong? :-)
What proof do we have that they are accurate for so a period of a million years?
Sorry, I don't like all of these conflicting reports coming out - they are just conflicting global warming pandering and propaganda. Believe what YOU want to believe,,,
[facepalm]
[massive deep-sighing catastrophe-level facepalm]
Unknown unknowns = faith (not science)
"But what about unknown unknowns? Surely there is a billion of those, due to human ignorance and arrogance. E.g. Sun radiation, moon cycles (i.e. 19 solar years), astoriods etc etc and they are just solar, what about earth tectonic plate movement etc?"
Until the cause is a known- or at least hypothesised with some good data and analysis to back it up- it is faith not science. All of the other factors which you mention have *already* been used by climate scientists, working with paleo-geologists, astronomers, oceanologists etc in order to understand and remove the natural cycles in the climate from the observed temperature rises. What is left is the change caused by CO2. Or alternatively by "magic pixies" or "the hand of god" or "natural variability" if you want a faith based answer that has no connection to facts or observations or science. I'd advise listening to the Richard Alley A23A lecture which will in 1 hour give you a great grounding in how the earth's cycles and climate interact, mediated by CO2 and other factors.
An example of a short term natural cycle is the El Nino/La Nina phenomenon, can mask the underlying trend in surface temperatures for more than a decade (see "going down the up escalator" in your favourite search engine).
Re: Unknown unknowns = faith (not science)
If you don't have a deterministic mechanism which matches the data without the use of extraneous epi-cycles, the CO2 claim is just as much faith and not science as the accusation you make.
Particularly when some of your subsequent "facts" are wrong. The Warmists specifically and explicitly exclude possible solar affects from their models, assuming solar output is constant.
Oh look a God of Gaps argument.
"found that natural variability in ocean temperatures could only account for ten percent of the observed rise – at most"
So it must be Man huh? Not omitted variable fraud at all then? Another conculsion I'll take with a pinch of salt (water) .
Re: Oh look a God of Gaps argument.
Yay! I've got "omitted variable fraud" on my Denialist Bingo Card and nobody has used it for ages.
Thanks.
Re: Oh look a God of Gaps argument.
So no comment on the fact it is a God of Gaps argument then? Just iterating a "denialist" meme? Thanks for your time, don't let door catch you on your way out (so many comments to make so liitle time huh)?
Re: Oh look a God of Gaps argument.
It isn't a God of the Gaps argument. Few scientific models include every known parameter, and none include unknown parameters. Derp derp.
Your post was a facile attempt to undermine a perfectly good piece of research by referring to a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory. The only contribution it made to the internet was crossing off a box on my bingo card of trite denialist clichés.
Hydrothermal vents
Hydrothermal vents are being discovered all over the ocean beds. Since we don't know what their level of activity was in the past, how do we know that they are not becoming more active for some reason, and putting lots of energy into the water?
There are other explanations than "nasty humans done it".
Re: Hydrothermal vents
And what about the inherent inefficiency of anguilliform locomotion? Or the resonance of Inuit throat singing? Or mermaid farts? Have you smelled a mermaid fart? They're like cows cubed.
Human activity is by far and away the most likely cause. Scratching around for alternatives is nothing more than obfuscation.
Re: Hydrothermal vents AND POOR PEOPLE.
Everyone knows that poor people drive wasteful cars, burn scrap paper and wood for heat, and also smell bad (which harms the ozone layer).
If we could ban the POOR the world would be a far more pleasant place to live.
PS. not MY poor people though, I need them to make all my food and things. It's YOUR poor people that are causing all the problems.
Ok...Lets see...
I'm 100% absolutely sure the sun has nothing to do with the rise in climate and ocean temps rising... Especially with the Sun in it's most Volatile 12 Year Cycle... Anyone attribute solar flares to Climate change? At all?...... You guys can trust the people that tell you we are over populated and we are causing global temperatures to rise, we need to pay for breathing and limit our child birth to one per person. That is a crock pot full of Bull Sh!t....
Re: Ok...Lets see...
The Sun is in the coldest period it's been in for over 100 years.
We have burned fossil fuel in addition to regular fuel for the past 100 years in massive quantities, plus the destructive energy of the wars and atomic testing. Energy just transforms from one type to another but does not vanish. It is stored in the atmosphere and oceans, some escapes to the outer space. We see progressive heat waves and warming, leading to/bordering destruction of many species/plants and ecosystems. Yet we still have people who deny human cause of global warming because change would reduce their cash flow. For cash flow, the oilmen/coal-men would rather destroy the planet than to use most of the cash to develop alternative energy, engines, and storage systems. Money can be incentive to change but can also be the root of all evil.
@Norman123: The problem with your flavor of denialists
is that you are still in denial about the most fundamentally basic fact of carbon emission: when they erupt volcanoes erupt they emit vastly greater amounts of CO2 in a single day than mankind has in his accumulated history by a factor of about 100. IF the changes you claim are driven by CO2 were in fact driven by CO2 to the extent you claim, we should see huge temperature spikes in the weather patterns. We don't. Full Stop.
Re: @Norman123: The problem with your flavor of denialists
"when they erupt volcanoes erupt they emit vastly greater amounts of CO2 in a single day than mankind has in his accumulated history by a factor of about 100"
No. This is WRONG. For some real numbers read: http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/2007/07_02_15.html
Over treasonable time periods human activity produces >two orders of magnitude more CO2 than volcanoes.
Or: http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming-basic.htm
(If you want pretty graphs. click on 'What the science says... Select a level... Intermediate'
"The Mount Pinatubo eruption emitted 42 million tonnes of CO2 (Gerlach et al 1996). Compare this to human emissions in 1991: 23 billion tonnes of CO2 (CDIAC). The strongest eruption over the last half-century amounted to 0.2% of human CO2 emissions in that year. "
Care with reporting
The challenge for reports like the one reviewed in this article is being extremely clear about terminology, transparent about limitations and precise about the measurements involved. Scrupulous care with facts and claim is a general requirement for all scientists but to often not ones that are allowed to get in the way of a good story.
This article appears to describes a situation across all the oceans. Since most of the billions of humans live in the northern hemisphere presumably this is where most of the errant heat is generated. So for me it raises a question about how this heat can be spread over the oceans so widely. Especially into the southern oceans because there seems to few ocean or atmospheric flows that cross the equator.
The ‘all oceans’ aspect raises another question, one that is likely to illuminate my misunderstanding and other errors. According to stats on Wikipedia the world’s oceans cover an area of approximately 3.6x10^8 Km2. Because the number is from Wikipedia it may be questionable but presumably not by many, if any, orders of magnitude. 3.6x10^8 Km2 is also 3.6x10^14 m2. The article refers to the heating of the top of the ocean so let’s be generous and assume that’s just the top 1 metre so it’s about the change in temp of 3.6x10^14 m3 or 3.6x10^23 cm3 (you’ll see why cm3 in a moment).
The volume heat capacity of water at 25dC is 4.1796 = J/cm3.K while at -10dC is 1.9 = J/cm3.K. (now you see why the ocean volume is in cm3). The oceans are not 25dC nor are they -10dC so I’ll pick a number in the middle: 3 J/cm3.K. You can pick another number in this range. The small difference doesn’t matter.
The article suggests that over the last 50 years the temp has increased by 0.1dC so now I’m in a position to compute the energy required to effect this change:
4.1796 x 3.6x10^23 x 0.10 = 1.5x10^23 Joules.
From Wikipedia (your source may vary) in 2008, total worldwide energy consumption was 474 exajoules. That’s 4.74×10^20 J or 132,000 TWh. This is approximately *300 times smaller* than the energy needed to effect the warming claimed. Or, another way, if the entire world energy output could be dumped directly into the top 1 m of the oceans for all 50 years (which didn’t happen because most was radiated into space) it would not come close. If the ‘top of the ocean’ is not 1m but 10m or more then the effect is even smaller in proportion. So it’s clear the report cannot have made a claim with the sort of generality that I inferred from the article, an inference other readers may also have made, which illustrates why reporting accuracy is required. Of course my little back of an envelope calculation may be crap and, if so, please point out the flaws.
I don’t subscribe to Nature. If you do, may be you can help with some of the detail behind this article.
Re: Care with reporting
I haven't checked the detail of your calcs, but I think they are based on an incorrect premise. The human action they are referring to is increasing the co2 and othe green house gases in the atmosphere, which presumably traps more of the heat from the sun, which in turn causes ocean warming.
To redo your calc you'd need to compare the heat required with the energy received from the sun by the earth, and work out whether the extra energy retained is plausible. I think.
Re: Care with reporting
The increase in greenhouse gases reduces the flow of infrared heat leaving the Earth into space. This results in an imbalance and energy builds up within the Earth system. The built up energy primarily goes into heating the oceans, although some goes into warming the land surface, atmosphere and melting ice. As the atmosphere and surface warm the Earth emits more infrared into space, reducing the imbalance. This feedback (and others) makes it difficult to calculate the expected heat build-up in the oceans without a computer, ie climate model.
Re: Care with reporting
Agreeing with IHateWearingATie here... direct anthropogenic (man-made) heating of the system from anthropogenic sources is not a significant factor - there is an effect there, no doubt, but it is orders of magnitude too small to drive ocean heat content. Anthropogenic heating isn't even big enough to be a major factor (maybe 1-3% IIRC) for changes in atmospheric heat content either - which, heat capacity wise, is a much lower bar than warming the ocean.
Also, in case it needs to be mentioned, CO2 is relatively well mixed in the atmosphere so - according to the theory - the heat content increase should be expected to be global and not regional.
That's not to say that these guy's are right - this appears to be a purely statistical exercise. The abstract appears to make no mention of the mechanisms or feedbacks by which a ~90PPM increase in atmospheric CO2 can drive this magnitude of change in the ocean heat content. Even perfect correlation can be spurious : /
So a 1% significance of human causation implies a 99% significance of NOT being the cause!
more data = better beliefs?
who ever has the most recent study wins, until there's another study.
arguing about global ocean temperature changes proves one thing only - you've got too much time on your hands.
Get Back to Work!
(and quit reading the newsertainment, it's bad for your mental health)
Plan C?
"Mitigation" is Plan E or F except insofar as the kleptocrats can use it as an excuse to steal more wealth (see "Carbon Tax").
Plan A - "It isn't happening"
Plan B - "It isn't anthropogenic"
Plan C - "It isn't enough to matter"
Plan D - "There's nothing we can do about it anyways"
Re: Plan C?
My bad. Apparently Plan C is "Warmer is Better". (http://inthesetimes.com/article/13362/trouble_in_the_heartland)
Plan E
The problem isn't just carbon dioxide, its methane.
From what I understand, most of the world's methane is from farm animals and a small amount from permafrost gas release and rice paddies, organic waste decomposition etc.
This isn't rocket science people, taxing petrol and diesel to the hilt simply punishes small businesses and encourages outsourcing which costs jobs.
Whereas targeting the main cause of the problem rather than silly things like using CFLs instead of bulbs will achieve the needed reductions in carbon emissions.
So the Government should offer a 75% tax break to vegetarians.
Also, the Government should offer financial incentives to people growing food at home, and abolish the unnecessary waste carried out by Big Food such as throwing away items because they are *about* to expire yet are safe to eat for another few days.
Re: Plan E
No... The problem is both, Methane degrades into CO2 pretty quickly. Although I am of the opinion that a "less meat" diet is generally a good thing. It's only really since the late 70s that we have had people in the UK who thought it was required to have meat at every meal.
Wow!
The oceans warmed up a teeny touch in the last fifty years. That must mean we did it.
No data for the previous 12 million or so years?
I don't see anything in this article that means it is actually human caused. Humans put 5% of the CO2 into the atmosphere, Earth the remaining 95%. When the same government is paying for this study that introduced the ill-conceived carbon tax, I would be surprised if it came up with any other result.
The sun's output is always excluded by climate alarmists, who conveniently ignore the fact that Mars experienced global warming at the same time as Earth did.
yawn
http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions.htm
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-on-mars.htm
Martian alert! Please don tinfoil hats immediately!
"The sun's output is always excluded by climate alarmists, who conveniently ignore the fact that Mars experienced global warming at the same time as Earth did."
So you would prefer to trust the Martian Weather Service rather than lots data of earth-based and satellite observation stations that all show the Earth receiving LESS solar radiation at the same time as global temperatures are rising? You'd prefer to infer that there are definitely NO other causes which could be leading to a warming on Mars than solar radiation, and therefore deduce that the myriad of solar observations on/around the Earth are wrong? From that one fact?
Actually the sun's output is always INCLUDED by climate realists, as it shows an increasing gap between reality (suns incident radiation on the earth is decreasing while global temperatures rise) and deluded denier fiction (** insert pretty much any AGW denier bunkum here, including the Mars myth ***).
Humans responsible for global warming?
Who woulda thunk that?
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