What ocean heating reveals about global warming

Filed under: Climate modelling Climate Science El Nino Instrumental Record Oceans
skeptics stefan @ 25 September 2013

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SUMOME
The heat content of the oceans is growing and growing. That means that the
greenhouse effect has not taken a pause and the cold sun is not noticeably slowing
global warming.

NOAA posts regularly updated measurements of the amount of heat stored in the
bulk of the oceans. For the upper 2000 m (deeper than that not much happens) it
looks like this:

heat_content2000m

Change in the heat content in the upper 2000 m of the worlds oceans. Source:
NOAA

The amount of heat stored in the oceans is one of the most important diagnostics
for global warming, because about 90% of the additional heat is stored there (you
can read more about this in the last IPCC report from 2007). The atmosphere stores
only about 2% because of its small heat capacity. The surface (including the
continental ice masses) can only absorb heat slowly because it is a poor heat
conductor. Thus, heat absorbed by the oceans accounts for almost all of the
planets radiative imbalance.

If the oceans are warming up, this implies that the Earth must absorb more solar
energy than it emits longwave radiation into space. This is the only possible heat
source. Thats simply the first law of thermodynamics, conservation of energy. This
conservation law is why physicists are so interested in looking at the energy balance
of anything. Because we understand the energy balance of our Earth, we also know
that global warming is caused by greenhouse gases which have caused the largest
imbalance in the radiative energy budget over the last century.

If the greenhouse effect (that checks the exit of longwave radiation from Earth into
space) or the amount of absorbed sunlight diminished, one would see a slowing in
the heat uptake of the oceans. The measurements show that this is not the case.

The increase in the amount of heat in the oceans amounts to 17 x 1022 Joules over
the last 30 years. That is so much energy it is equivalent to exploding a Hiroshima
bomb every second in the ocean for thirty years.

The data in the graphs comes from the World Ocean Database. Wikipedia has a fine
overview of this database. The data set includes nine million measured
temperature profiles from all of the worlds oceans. One of my personal heroes, the
oceanographer Syd Levitus, has dedicated much of his life to making these
oceanographic data freely available to everyone. During the Cold war that even
landed him in a Russian jail for espionage for a while, as he was visiting Russia on
his quest for oceanographic data (he once told me of that adventure over breakfast
in a Beijing hotel).

How to deny data

Ideologically motivated climate skeptics know that these data contradict their
claims, and respond by rejecting the measurements. Millions of stations are
dismissed as negligible the work of generations of oceanographers vanish with a
journalists stroke of a pen because what should not exist, cannot be. Climate
skeptics web sites even claim that the measurement uncertainty in the average of
3000 Argo probes is the same as that from each individual one. Thus not only are
the results of climate research called into question, but even the elementary rules
of uncertainty calculus that every science student learns in their first semester.
Anything goes when you have to deny global warming. Even more bizarre is the
Star Trek argument but let me save that for later.

Slowdown in the upper ocean

Let us look at the upper ocean (for historic reasons defined as the upper 700 m):

Change in the heat content of the upper 700 m of the oceans. Source: NOAA

And here is the direct comparison since 1980:

Changes in the heat content of the oceans. Source: Abraham et al., 2013. The 2sigma uncertainty for 1980 is 2 x 1022 J and for recent years 0.5 x 1022 J

We see two very interesting things.

First: Roughly two thirds of the warming since 1980 occurred in the upper ocean.
The heat content of the upper layer has gone up twice as much as in the lower layer
(700 2000 m). The average temperature of the upper layer has increased more
than three times as much as the lower (because the upper layer is only 700 m thick,
and the lower one 1300 m). That is not surprising, as after all the ocean is heated
from above and it takes time for the heat to penetrate deeper.

Second: In the last ten years the upper layer has warmed more slowly than before.
In spite of this the temperature still is changing as rapidly there as in the lower
layer. This recent slower warming in the upper ocean is closely related to the slower
warming of the global surface temperature, because the temperature of the
overlaying atmosphere is strongly coupled to the temperature of the ocean surface.

That the heat absorption of the ocean as a whole (at least to 2000 m) has not
significantly slowed makes it clear that the reduced warming of the upper layer is
not (at least not much) due to decreasing heating from above, but rather mostly
due to greater heat loss to lower down: through the 700 m level, from the upper to
the lower layer. (The transition from solar maximum to solar minimum probably
also contributed a small part as planetary heat absorption decreased by about 15%,
Abraham, et al., 2013). It is difficult to establish the exact mechanism for this
stronger heat flux to deeper water, given the diverse internal variability in the
oceans.

Association with El Nio

Completely independently of this oceanographic data, a simple correlation analysis

(Foster and Rahmstorf ERL 2011) showed that the flatter warming trend of the last
10 years was mostly a result of natural variability, namely the recently more
frequent appearance of cold La Nia events in the tropical Pacific and a small
contribution from decreasing solar activity. The effect of La Nia can be seen
directly in the following figure, without any statistical analysis. It shows the annual
values of the global temperature with El Nio periods highlighted in red and La Nia
periods in blue. (Weekly updates on the current El Nio situation can be found
here.)

Global surface temperature (average of the three series from NOAA, NASA and
HadCRU). Years influenced by El Nio are shown in red, La Nia influenced years in
blue. Source: Climate Central, updated figure from the World Meteorological
Organization (WMO) p. 15.

One finds that both the red El Nio years and the blue La Nia years are getting
warmer, but given that we have lately experienced a cluster of La Nia years the
overall warming trend over the last ten years is slower. This can be thought of as
the noise associated with natural variability, not a change in the signal of global
warming (as discussed many times before here at RealClimate).

This is consistent with the finding that reduced warming is not mainly a result of a
change in radiation balance but due to oceanic heat storage. During La Nia events
(with cold ocean surface) the ocean absorbs additional heat that it releases during
El Nio events (when the ocean surface is warm). The next El Nio event (whenever
it comes that is a stochastic process) is likely to produce a new global mean
temperature record (as happened in 2010).

Kevin Trenberth, who has recently published a paper on this topic, explains the
increased heat uptake in the deep ocean:

The reason for the change is a specific change in the winds, especially in the
subtropical Pacific, where the trade winds have become noticeably stronger. That
altered ocean currents, strengthening the subtropical sea water circulation thus
providing a mechanism to transport heat into the deeper ocean. This is related to
the decadal weather pattern in the Pacific associated with the La Nia phase of the
El Nio phenomenon.

New results from climate modelling

A study by Kosaka and Xie recently published in Nature confirms that the slowing
rise in global temperatures during recent years has been a result of prevalent La
Nia periods in the tropical Pacific. The authors write in the abstract:

Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability tied
specifically to a La Nia like decadal cooling.

They show this with an elegant experiment, in which they force their global
climate model to follow the observed history of sea surface temperatures in the
eastern tropical Pacific. With this trick the model is made to replay the actual
sequence of El Nio and La Nia events found in the real world, rather than
producing its own events by chance. The result is that the model then also
reproduces the observed global average temperature history with great accuracy.

There are then at least three independent lines of evidence that confirm we are not
dealing with a slowdown in the global warming trend, but rather with progressive
global warming with superimposed natural variability:

1. Our correlation analysis between global temperature and the El Nio Index.

2. The measurements of oceanic heat uptake.

3. The new model calculation of Kosaka and Xie.

Beam me up Scotty!

Now to the most amusing attempt of climate skeptics to wish these scientific
results away. Their argument goes like this: It is not possible that warming of the
deep ocean accelerates at the same time as warming of the upper ocean slows
down, because the heat must pass through the upper layer to reach the depths. A
German journalist put it this way:

Winds can do a lot, but can they beam warm surface waters heated by carbon
dioxide 700 meters further down?

This argument reveals once again the shocking lack of understanding of basic
physics in climate skeptic circles. First the alleged problem is lacking any factual
basis after all, in the last decades the upper layer of the oceans has warmed faster
than the deeper (even if recently not quite as fast as before). What is the problem

with the heat first warming the upper layer before it penetrates deeper? That is
entirely as expected.

Second, physically there is absolutely no problem for wind changes to cool the
upper ocean at the same time as they warm the deeper layers. The following figure
shows a simple example of how this can happen (there are also other possible
mechanisms).

The ocean is known to be thermally stratified, with a warm layer, some hundreds of
meters thick, lying on top of a cold deep ocean (a). In the real world the transition
is more gradual, not a sharp boundary as in the simplified diagram. Panel (b) shows
what happens if the wind is turned on. The surface layer (above the dashed depth
level) becomes on average colder (less red), the deep layer warmer. The average
temperature changes are not the same (because of the different thickness of the
layers), but the changes in heat content are what the upper layer loses in heat,
the lower gains. The First Law of Thermodynamics sends greetings.

Incidentally, that is the well-known mechanism of El Nio: (a) corresponds roughly

to El Nio (with a warm eastern tropical Pacific) while (b) is like La Nia (cold eastern
tropical Pacific). The winds are the trade winds. The figure greatly exaggerates the
slope of the layer interface, because in reality the ocean is paper thin. Even a
difference of 1000 m across the width of the Pacific (lets say 10,000 km) leads to a
slope of only 1:10,000 which no one could distinguish from a perfectly horizontal
line without massive vertical exaggeration.

Now if during the transition from (a) to (b) the upper layer is heated by the
greenhouse effect, its temperature could remain constant while that of the lower
one warmed. Simple classical physics without beaming.

Beam me up Scotty! There is no intelligent life on this planet.

Links

Tamino provides his usual detailed analysis of the new study by Kosaka and Xie.

Dana Nuccitelli in the Guardian on the same paper with some further interesting
aspects that I have not talked about here.

Another important point that is often forgotten in the discussion: The data hole in
the Arctic that explains part of the reduced warming trend (maybe even more than
previously thought).

And a reminder: The warming trend of the 15-year period up to 2006 was almost
twice as fast as expected (0.3C per decade, see Fig. 4 here), and (rightly) nobody
cared. We published a paper in Science in 2007 where we noted this large trend,
and as the first explanation for it we named intrinsic variability within the climate
system. Which it turned out to be.

Recent Literature:

Levitus et al. (Geophysical Research Letters 2012). Documentation of the heat

increase in the worlds oceans since 1955. Included are uncertainty analyses, maps
of the measurement coverage and many illustrations of the regional and vertical
distribution of the warming.

Balmaseda et al. (Geophysical Research Letters 2013) shows among other things
that El Nio events are associated with a strong loss of heat from the oceans. As
discussed above, during an El Nio the ocean loses heat to the surface because the
surface of the ocean (see Fig. (a) above) is unusually warm. Further, during volcanic
eruptions the ocean cools but for another reason: because volcanic aerosols shade
the sun and thus the oceans are heated less than normal.

Guemas et al. (Nature Climate Change 2013) shows that the slower warming of the
last ten years cannot be explained by a change in the radiative balance of our
Earth, but rather by a change in the heat storage of the oceans, and that this can be

at least partially reproduced by climate models, if one accounts for the natural
fluctuations associated with El Nio in the initialization of the models.

Abraham et al. (Reviews of Geophysics 2013). Very recent, wide ranging review of
temperature measurements in the oceans with a detailed discussion of the accuracy
of the data, planetary energy balance and the effect of the warming on sea levels.

Comments (pop-up) (158)

158 Responses to What ocean heating reveals about global warming

1 2 3 4 Next
1
prokaryotes says:
25 Sep 2013 at 4:07 AM
The solar energy will increase in the next 10 years, progressing to solar maximum.
The chance to get an El Nino is also considerable high. This means that there will be
very likely a new temperature record we can expect. At the same time the
cryosphere response progresses to a more ice free state. Which further accelerates
feedbacks.

The problem is that we cannot just stop these processes, because of the big inertia
of the climate system. That is why we need to fix the CO2 problem today, not when
extremes disrupt society to a degree which makes actions harder and the chance to
pass other tipping points. Hansen further explained how a +2C target is analog to
the early Pliocene, which comes with 15-25 higher sea levels. We are now roughly at
+1C.

The media has to report this properly, with input from scientist to accurately
message the science to the public! We threaten the habitability of what we call
home if we continue with inaction, if we continue with burning of fossil fuels!

2
Byron Smith says:
25 Sep 2013 at 5:15 AM
Thanks for this very helpful post. I have a question about one of your calculations.

The increase in the amount of heat in the oceans amounts to 17 x 10^22 Joules
over the last 30 years. That is so much energy it is equivalent to exploding a
Hiroshima bomb every second in the ocean for thirty years.

Am I right in thinking that a Hiroshima bomb is approx 67TJ of energy (or 67 x

10^12J)? That seems to be an often-quoted figure. If so, then 67TJ per second for 30
years is 67 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365.24 x 30 = 63,429,039,360 TJ = ~6.3 x 10^22J.

This is only roughly a third of the 17 x 10^22J figure quoted in the text. So am I
wrong in thinking that it would be more accurate to speak of approximately *three*
Hiroshima bombs per second of extra energy being added to the oceans over the
last thirty years? (Or ~2.68 bombs per second to be more accurate)

3
wili says:
25 Sep 2013 at 5:43 AM
Thanks for another great article. Near the end, you note:

The data hole in the Arctic that explains part of the reduced warming trend (maybe
even more than previously thought).

This links to an article in German. I think I could make out the gist of it, but perhaps
you could give your synopsis. Is there a lot more warming of the Arctic Ocean than
was previously thought? How large of a role has ocean warming been playing in the
rapid loss of sea ice volume there?

Thanks again for the article, and thank ahead of time for any further light you can
through on the (now quickly darkening) Arctic.

4
Barry Woods says:
25 Sep 2013 at 6:00 AM
As we have typically expressed energy in the atmosphere on a degrees C scale, I
thought this might be useful from the UK Met Office, for context.

Met Office: What do observations of the climate system tell us? July 13

Careful processing of the available deep ocean records shows that the heat
content:of the upper 2,000m increased by 24 x 1022J over the 19552010 period
(Levitus, 2012),equivalent to 0.09C warming of this layer. To put this into context, if
the same energy had warmed the lower 10km of the atmosphere, it would have
warmed by 36C! While this will not happen, it does illustrate the importance of the
ocean as a heat store.

finding a rate <2oooths of a degree C per decade.

(ref increase in 0.09C in 55 years) is that really measurable?
ie one ARGO buoy per how many thousand cubic kilometres of ocean. (and we've
only had ARGO, for a decade, or less at depth)

[Response: Changing a unit to have a small sounding number doesnt actually

change anything; neither the significance nor the accuracy. But if you want to play
rhetorical games, go right ahead though perhaps not here. gavin]

5
Kelly H says:
25 Sep 2013 at 8:41 AM
Whoops, missing the huge 1982/83 El Nio Shows up in the original versions of
the figure.

[Response: Odd. I have updated the figure to the current version taken directly from
the Climate Central website which does include 82/83. Sorry about that. gavin]

[Response: Thanks Gavin. Climate Central made me a Celsius version at short

notice (for German readers), thanks to them for doing that, but a slip-up must have
occurred. So back to Fahrenheit. 82/83 is a case in point of course. stefan]

6
Blair Dowden says:
25 Sep 2013 at 8:42 AM
Thanks you for this. My executive summary is that the ocean as a whole is
continuing to heat up at a constant rate, which suggests that heat being retained by
the greenhouse effect has also been increasing at the same rate for the past 30
years. Some heat is being transferred to the deeper ocean by wind changes,
reducing the rate of increase in the upper layer, which reduces the warming rate on
land. As for changes in the solar cycle, is the following sentence correct? The
transition from solar maximum to solar minimum probably also contributed a small
part as planetary heat absorption decreased by about 15%. I assume you mean
the change in the annual increase, rather than total planetary heat absorption.

7
tokodave says:

25 Sep 2013 at 8:43 AM

Thanks for this post Stefan. It is very timely given the pause the denialosphere is
so intent on focusing on.

8
James Cross says:
25 Sep 2013 at 8:58 AM
re: prokaryotes @ 25 Sep 2013 at 4:07 AM

Pro

We are at solar max now and we have been a while without an El Nino.

9
Barry Woods says:
25 Sep 2013 at 9:08 AM
Here is the link to the Met Office report that I quoted, for context

here:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/e/f/Paper1_Observing_changes_in_the_climat
e_system.PDF

10
Bob Reiland says:
25 Sep 2013 at 9:16 AM
This is a very timely article, given all the recent nonsense about no temperature
increases in the last decade. The first graph shows how meaningless this claim is.

However, I have a question about the use of the word heat. Im sure that just
about all climate scientists know the definition of the word, but, as in this article, I
often see it used incorrectly. Talking about heat as contained somewhere makes it
seem as if the discredited caloric theory is still the basis of thermodynamics.
Since heat is now defined as the transfer of energy between two systems as a
result of a temperature difference, heat itself is not a substance that can be stored.
Energy is stored, the transfer of energy is not.

Isnt it time to use the interest in climate science to educate the public on the
correct meaning of heat?

[Response: I think you are pushing uphill on this. Heat has so many common
meanings and connotations, that changing its use in popular writing is probably
impossible. That, plus the observation that there is no actually ambiguity or
confusion in what is being communicated, makes the point somewhat technical and
even arcane. So good luck with that. gavin]

11
Downpuppy says:
25 Sep 2013 at 9:18 AM
Could someone translate 10^23 joules into degrees, for those of us afraid to slip a
digit figuring the volume of the ocean?

Thanks!

[Response: 10^23 J in the ocean = 2.8 x 10^8 J/m2 = 1.4 x 10^5 J/m2 over 2000 m
depth ~= 1.4 x 10^2 J/kg ~= 0.04C (averaged over the whole depth). Much bigger
changes are near the top though. gavin]

12
prokaryotes says:
25 Sep 2013 at 9:42 AM

Thanks James for pointing that out, took me a moment to find the current data on
this.

13
Krishna AchutaRao says:
25 Sep 2013 at 9:42 AM
I think it is inaccurate to say deeper than that(2000m) not much happens. If you
mean not much observing happens you are right. If you mean changes in ocean
temperature, Purkey & Johnson 2010 have looked at that.

14
Chris Colose says:
25 Sep 2013 at 10:12 AM
Bob (#10)

It is still popular nomenclature in physical oceanography and atmospheric dynamics

to refer to the bodily transport of energy by a fluid as heat transport. Technically,
heat is a quantity of exchange, not a property of the fluid, and the transport we
speak of differs from heat fluxes (e.g., radiation)see Warren, 1999 (JGR) for a more
thorough examination of the terminology. Generally enthalpy is what is actually
meant. But I agree with Gavin that this is not very important in the public discourse,
and probably not even in the scientific literature. I dont know of much confusion on
what is being talked about that has stemmed from this.

15
prokaryotes says:
25 Sep 2013 at 10:36 AM
Re solar cycle

Because of the variations of sunspots and faculae on the suns surface, the total
solar irradiance (TSI), also called the solar constant, varies on a roughly 11-year

cycle by about 0.07%, which has been measured by orbiting satellites since 1978
[Lean, 1987, 1991; Wilson et al., 1981]. The change in the solar constant amounts
to about 0.90 Wm2 for the last three cycles. 2007 study

16
Jay Dee Are says:
25 Sep 2013 at 10:44 AM
Wili @3: Load Stefans German-language post into Google Chrome. Chrome will ask
if you want a translation. The translation isnt perfect, but the main messages are
there. In deutscher oder englischer Sprache, ist Stefan ein erstklassiges Klima
Kommunikator.

17
WebHubTelescope says:
25 Sep 2013 at 11:19 AM
With the Kosaka and Xie paper gaining some prominence, I am seeing a few of the
simple 2-box models apply the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) as a noise
compensation to get a better fit to the global temperature records. Some terrific
looking model fits include the following:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/two_box_enso.png
and
http://images.sodahead.com/profiles/0/0/2/0/7/6/2/8/5/2bmvsgissrsquared117883512421.png

These are taken from this recent discussion at SkS:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/pacific-ocean-global-warming-puzzle-KosakaXie.html

My question is: Is it getting close to when the SOI can be used to automatically
remove the pseudo-oscillatory ocean noise? The SOI signal is stationary over
decades as it shows very little trend.
Another way to put it: how much residual noise would the GISS, HadCRUT, etc data
sets have after compensating via the SOI record?

18
Colin Johnstone says:
25 Sep 2013 at 11:26 AM
@ stefan

Nice article. I am very interested in this subject and I am also learning German at
the moment (since I am now working in Vienna). Are there any good websites like
Real Climate that are only in German? I think one learns best when they read stuff
that is interesting.

19
Hank Roberts says:
25 Sep 2013 at 11:27 AM
> prokaryotes The solar energy will increase
> in the next 10 years, progressing to solar maximum

Check before repeating that belief. You appear to predict Cycle 25 will peak in 2023,
higher than Cycle 24 peaking this year. Its possible. Its interesting. But is this your
own prediction? something you read somewhere? Why think so?

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/

The sensitivity of the energy budget and hydrological cycle to CO2 and solar forcing

Earth Syst. Dynam. Discuss., 4, 393-428, 2013

http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/393/2013/
doi:10.5194/esdd-4-393-2013

20
robert says:
25 Sep 2013 at 12:15 PM
Im with Bob [10] in spirit, anyway on heat. Better term for this use would be
thermal energy, but understand the need not to be too pedantic.

However proper use of the term could help, in the present discussion. We have
energy being transferred into the system via the greenhouse effect (moving from
electromagnetic to thermal), and then we have energy transferred from atmosphere
to ocean via First Law i.e., heat.

21
robert says:
25 Sep 2013 at 12:18 PM
Regarding the pause in surface warming. Im not hearing much about aerosol
screening as a result of massive buildup of coal-fired power plants in China and
India. Given the significant role such aerosols played in the 40s, 50s, 60s from
U.S. and European emissions (prior to serious scrubbers), and that the scale in
China / India right now is significantly larger, why wouldnt this aerosol screening
(global dimming) be an issue?

[Response: Indeed. I think this should very much be part of the discussion. There is
a lot of evidence that Chinese aerosols are underestimated in the CMIP5 models and
in the emission data sets. We dont yet have a good estimate of what this
underestimate implies though people are working on it. gavin]

22

prokaryotes says:
25 Sep 2013 at 12:21 PM
Hank Roberts
Why think so?
If you google solar cycle all the images you get show solar minimum. If you go to
wikipedia same, though i just fixed that.

23
Arne Melsom says:
25 Sep 2013 at 1:35 PM
Nice and informative article, thanks!

I have one question. In the section on links with ENSO, you write that the recent
reduced warming rate of the upper 700m is related to natural variability, given the
clustering of La Nias in the last fifteen years. A valid point indeed, but are you
confident that this is natural variability? Might it be speculated that a change in
ENSO (more frequent La Nias) is an aspect of global warming, rather than natural
variability? I realize of course that this is conjecture, and other explanations such as
e.g. stochastic behavior or modulation by other modes of variability are perhaps
more likely to be correct.

[Response: Good question, but one thats hard to answer. Its possible, but it may
also be that it would take a really long time to demonstrate it clearly because of the
variability. In the absence of that demonstration, its probably best to assume only a
small or negligible effect. gavin]

24
Hank Roberts says:
25 Sep 2013 at 1:37 PM
Stefan, I linked above to one comparison of CO2 vs. solar forcings (Schaller et al.,
doi:10.5194/esdd-4-393-2013).

Their abstract says energy budget calculations show that poleward atmospheric
energy transport increases more in solar forcing compared to equivalent CO2
forcing simulations, which is in line with the identified strong increase in large-scale
precipitation in solar forcing scenarios.

That sounds like the effect may come not from direct heating, but from rearranging
wind patterns and precipitation (and perhaps changing ocean temperature
structure?)

You point out in the main article that the cold sun is not noticeably slowing global
warming pointing to the Guardians article and the graphic from Feulner &
Rahmstorf (2010).

Here (Krivova and Solanki) say their models of solar irradiance variation
progress over the last half decade . For the period after 1974, there is no
evidence for any non-magnetic change in the solar irradiance on time scales longer
than about a day.

Solankis earlier work was popular with the Its the Sun crowd, but if I read that
right, theyre saying variation of the Suns direct forcing is trivial, and those older
studies were making too much of tiny changes.

(I realize solar over time averages out to no trend, while CO2 forcing is steadily
trending upward I wonder if varying insolation changes wind patterns and
intensities, to change ocean temperature/depth arrangement (and plankton blooms
and clouds and albedo change as that happens).

25
Frank says:
25 Sep 2013 at 1:43 PM
How do you explain the regional investigations: The UOHC ( 0700m) of the
northern extratropics: http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/inodc_heat700_0-360E_19-

90N_n.png where we can see a decline after about 2005 and the southern
extratropics: http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/inodc_heat700_0-360E_-9019N_n.png
where we find a strong increase of the UOHC? Is the heat on the road to the abyss
only in the NH? What kind of downward elevator is working only in NH?

26
Fred Moolten says:
25 Sep 2013 at 2:20 PM
Gavin or Stefan The cited data suggest that the rate at which the Earth has been
storing energy recently does not greatly exceed 0.30 W/m^2. Other OHC estimates
have suggested a larger quantity. How are these data reconciled with estimates of
the planetary energy imbalance from a variety of model sources that are closer to
1.0 w/m^2? This is of particular interest in relation to effective climate sensitivity
estimates that rely heavily on OHC uptake data.

27
Doug Bostrom says:
25 Sep 2013 at 2:49 PM
Seconding Krishna AchutaRao at 25 Sep 2013 9:42 AM. Observations are sparse but
still enough to yield statistically significant insights, pretty much all of which are
disturbingly consistent with whats going on up here in the daylight. To paraphrase
the late Senator Dirksen, a few Sverdrups here and a Sverdrups there and pretty
soon youre talking more than small change. Follow Johnson et al into the depths!

28
Thomas Huld says:
25 Sep 2013 at 3:04 PM
Does this result allow you to get a meaningful estimate of the radiative imbalance
of the earth? Doing a simple calculation from the first figure:

From 1985 to 2012 (28 years) the heat content increased by 210^23J. That time is
28*365*86400s=8.8310^8s. This gives a power of 2.210^14W~=0.45W/m2

If this is 90% of the heating of the earth we would get around 0.5W/m2.

Is this at the lower end of estimates? A fairly recent paper by Trenberth&Fasullo

(Surv Geophys (2012) 33:413426) quotes an estimate of 0.9W/m2 (+-0.4W/m2 if I
remember correctly).

29
Hank Roberts says:
25 Sep 2013 at 3:52 PM
Krishna AchutaRao above suggested Purkey & Johnson 2010
Thank you!

Looking their work up in Scholar finds among much else worth reading

A review of global ocean temperature observations: Implications for ocean heat

content estimates and climate change

J. P. Abraham1,*, M. Baringer2, N. L. Bindoff3,4,5, T. Boyer6, L. J. Cheng7, J. A.

Church4, J. L. Conroy8, C. M. Domingues5, J. T. Fasullo9, J. Gilson10, G. Goni2, S. A.
Good11, J. M. Gorman1, V. Gouretski12, M. Ishii13, G. C. Johnson14, S. Kizu15, J. M.
Lyman14,16, A. M. Macdonald17, W. J. Minkowycz18, S. E. Moffitt19,20, M. D.
Palmer11, A. R. Piola21, F. Reseghetti22, K. Schuckmann23, K. E. Trenberth9, I.
Velicogna24,25, J. K. Willis25
online: 23 SEP 2013

DOI: 10.1002/rog.20022

30

Ed Barbar says:
25 Sep 2013 at 4:24 PM
Where are the paleo reconstructions for deep ocean temperatures? Seems thats
missing at the Wikipedia link.

31
Rob Nicholls says:
25 Sep 2013 at 4:33 PM
This is the most helpful article that Ive read on the topic, demonstrating multiple
lines of evidence. I think the part about differential warming of different layers of
the ocean to be particularly clear and useful.

32
Jon Kirwan says:
25 Sep 2013 at 5:30 PM
Im still sitting here stunned by the 1710 Joules in 30 years figure. Coupled with
the atmosphere stores only about 2%, I figure this works out to 163,200 quads of
energy in 30 years. Or about 5440 quads per year. In 2010, all humans production
and use of energy amounted to 524 quads. (Some 85% of which is a number I
remember being associated with fossil fuel sources.)

Which implies that the mere average watts from global warming going back over
the last 30 years is perhaps more than 10 times higher than the average watts from
human productive use in the latest year of 2012.

Global warming effects are accumulating, which gives great power to their results
over time. While human production and use is year by year. But what a huge
leverage factor that implies.

33
jen says:

25 Sep 2013 at 5:53 PM

hello, thank you for your article. i got the gist of it, even though im not a scientist
and dont understand all the detail. i have been interested to find out lately how the
gulf stream is going? With this increase in ocean temperatures,has it almost
stopped yet? the weather seems to be becoming more extreme, and im wondering
if/when the weather pendulum will swing so far that this inevitable (mini) ice age i
heard about will occur. do you have any comment about this? (in laymans terms,
please!)
thanks

34
Hank Roberts says:
25 Sep 2013 at 5:59 PM
ps above Prokaryotes discovered the 2007 Tung paper.

RC has discussed that one several times since it came out:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arealclimate.org+tung

35
Meow says:
25 Sep 2013 at 6:08 PM
The beam me up explanation could be clearer. Heres my stab at it:

The rate of shallow ocean warming can decrease at the same time the rate of deep
ocean warming increases. This can happen if something increases the amount of
mixing between the (warm) shallow ocean and the (cold) deep ocean. The mixing
transports heat from the shallow ocean to the deep ocean, thus cooling the shallow
ocean while warming the deep ocean.

36

john byatt says:

25 Sep 2013 at 7:14 PM
Cannot relate to Hiroshima bombs but as an Australian, relating to boiling Sydney
harbour dry is more understandable, perhaps use one of the great lakes as an
analogy

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Breaking_News_The_Earth_is_Warming_Still_A_LOT.
html

37
Daniel Bailey says:
25 Sep 2013 at 7:40 PM
@ Colin Johnstone

Skeptical Science offers many posts translated into German, among other
languages.

38
Geoff Sherrington says:
25 Sep 2013 at 10:22 PM
Is this presentation wrong or right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM7IUkvT_Zg&feature=player_embedded
It is of interest to know if Ocean heat Content is different in different oceans or parts
thereof.

39
Bryson Brown says:
25 Sep 2013 at 10:53 PM

@10: I think youre confusing the verb to heat with the noun heat. To heat
something does require a transfer of heat energy from some source to whatever is
heated. But heat itself is a form of energy the energy of random molecular motion.

40
Surfer Dave says:
25 Sep 2013 at 11:41 PM
Just curious, but you say This is the only possible heat source. Does not volcanism
provide a source? The interior of the earth is a heat source, and there is poor
understanding of the heat flux, its magnitude and how it varies over time. We
continue to discover vast, active volcanoes in the deep oceans, could they not
have an impact on ocean heat content and via that the atmospheric heat content?
Some parts of the continental USA have a heat flux of the order of 10Wm-2, perhaps
there are similar areas of high flux in the deep oceans?

[Response: Not an absurd question, but in practice net geothermal heating

(including volcanoes, mid ocean ridges etc) is about 0.075 W/m2 some 20 times
less important than human CO2 increases. gavin]

41
Johnno says:
26 Sep 2013 at 12:13 AM
How bad can the next El Nino be? This year for example we had 45.8C in Sydney on
January 18 in a neutral year. If cities with pampered citizenry nudge 50C for
several days in a row the same time as electricity and water problems there will be
major grief. Sure Baghdad does this but I doubt they have the nearby fire prone
bushland or the high percentage of senior citizens as Sydney.

42
prokaryotes says:
26 Sep 2013 at 12:55 AM
RC has discussed that one several times since it came out

There seems to be a 2007 article which mentioned the study and a few comments
on that here

Is there a recent discussion on solar cycle, a paper someone can recommend?

43
WebHubTelescope says:
26 Sep 2013 at 1:11 AM
I kind of answered my own question in #17 after working with the data myself. It is
amazing how well the Southern Oscillation Index (from NCAR) fits to a temperature
record such as GISS, and only shows deviations in recent years during the big
volcanic disturbances.
http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/3476/ejab.gif

From this one index and the sporadic volcano data which temporarily suppresses
the temperature, all recent natural variability seems to be accounted for and all that
is left is an upward warming trend.

Now I understand why Stefan and Taminos work is so straightforwardly practical.

44
Rob Painting says:
26 Sep 2013 at 3:08 AM
@25 Is the heat on the road to the abyss only in the NH?

No. You are looking at only the top 700 metres of ocean. The North Pacific and North
Atlantic subtropical ocean gyres are surface intensified, i.e. they dont reach down
as deep into the ocean as the southern hemisphere gyres. Contrary to your claim,
most of the deep ocean warming is actually taking place in the southern

hemisphere. See Roemmich & Gilson (2009) and an earlier paper by Josh Willis (I
dont have the details to hand).

@38 It is of interest to know if Ocean heat Content is different in different oceans

or parts thereof.

Well it certainly should be. As shown in Levitus (2012) most of the warming is
beneath the subtropical ocean gyres. This is to be expected because the spin-up of
the wind-driven ocean circulation speeds up the currents (Ekman transport) which
carry heat out of the tropics in the near-surface layers toward the subtropical ocean
gyres. Where the poleward & equatorward currents of this intensified circulation
converge the centre of the gyres surface water is pumped downwards into the
ocean interior in a process known as Ekman pumping. The downward flow is
(partly)balanced by upward flow near the equator (Ekman suction). Thats largely
why the central and eastern Pacific Ocean are cooler-than-average during La Nina
cold water is drawn up from deeper layers below, warm water is pushed down below
surface in the western tropical Pacific, and the poleward (meridional)heat transport
in the surface layers intensifies.

@41 How bad can the next El Nino be?

There are no hard and fast rules, but often when the wind-driven circulation spins
up, as it is now, El Nino tends to be weaker. Its complicated, but it may be easier to
think of this phase of the circulation as La Nina-like. A far more interesting question
is how strong El Nino will be in the future when this circulation becomes sluggish
again, i.e. when we get an El Nino and the circulation is El Nino-like. The 1980s and
1990s El Nino were certainly much stronger when the circulation was weak, but
there is the added complication of global brightening during that period.

45
prokaryotes says:
26 Sep 2013 at 5:30 AM
Without access to Abraham et al. 2013, i must ask if there is a discussion of it
somewhere?

46
Adrian says:
26 Sep 2013 at 5:50 AM
Regarding those having troubles with the calculations:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/ is an excellent resource.

47
KK Aw says:
26 Sep 2013 at 7:05 AM
According to this article, The amount of heat stored in the oceans is one of the
most important diagnostics for global warming, because about 90% of the
additional heat is stored there (you can read more about this in the last IPCC report
from 2007). The atmosphere stores only about 2% because of its small heat
capacity

If the atmosphere accounts for only 2% of the energy, why are we so preoccupied
with the global average temperature?

[Response: Because thats where we live. gavin]

48
Pete Wright says:
26 Sep 2013 at 7:43 AM
A question: the article leaves one with the impression that when (not if) there is a
return to some strong El Nio events that surface temperature averages will resume
their rise.

Is it not the case that if the relative lack of El Nios and predominance of La Ninas
is in fact due to global warming, rather than natural variability, then the current

increase in the rate of warming of the ocean below 700m may continue. If this is the
case then this may result in a long term reduction in the rate of warming of land and
surface ocean temperatures. So, although the science isnt wrong regarding the
continued heating of the earth (net energy imbalance), the rate of rise of surface
temperatures may prove to be much less than predicted by the models. Not much
help though with sea level rise due to thermal expansion!

49
John McCormick says:
26 Sep 2013 at 8:48 AM
The winds of change.

The world awaits the shift of prevailing wind patterns across the equatorial Pacific to
deliver a mean El Nino punch.

50
Alan Millar says:
26 Sep 2013 at 9:13 AM
If the increased increasing energy is being distributed in the deep ocean, how does
it get out into the troposphere?

Alan

[Response: This is an odd question. The increase in OHC is an indication that the
planet is in radiative imbalance (more energy is coming in than is leaving). This will
only be balanced (in a quasi-equilibrium way) when the surface temperature rises
sufficiently to increase the outgoing long wave radiation. Thus the OHC trend says
that surface temperature trend has further to go. It has nothing to do with heat
going into the ocean and coming back out. At equilibrium the ocean heat content
will be much larger than it was (and the surface temperature warmer too). gavin]

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