It stands to reason that as the atmosphere warms from the buildup of greenhouse gases, so does the ocean. Scientists have long suspected this was true, but they did not have enough solid evidence. Now they do. Data compiled by Marinexplore in Sunnyvale, Calif., not only confirm previous studies that the world's oceans are simmering, but they also bring surprising news: the heating extends beyond the first few meters of surface waters, down to 700 meters. Because most organisms live in the top 400 meters, the data suggest that warming could affect most marine life, altering food chains and migrations. It could change the distribution of life—from tiny phytoplankton to big whales—across the seven seas. “The more the atmosphere warms up, the more heat it transfers to the ocean,” says Roberto De Almeida, an ocean data engineer at Marinexplore. “That heat propagates downward.” Indeed, the extra energy could affect massive ocean currents and the weather patterns they influence.
Credit: Jen Christiansen
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE
See a map of ocean temperature change at ScientificAmerican.com/apr2013/graphic-science
See what we're tweeting about
70 Comments
Add CommentIn case anyone is interested in reproducing the plot, I have published the notebook with my analysis. It can be found here: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/robertodealmeida/notebooks/master/scientific_american/Scientific%2520American%2520graph.ipynb
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA shorter link for the notebook: http://ocn.mx/14BGmyq
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, by what mechanism is warmer surface water transported through cooler denser water, against the normal convection forces that normally transport warmer less dense water upward. I would love to understand this mechanism. It could be utilised for example to transport hot water from roof based solar hot water collectors down to ground level. then the anti convection forces could be switched off so that the hot water after giving up its heat, could rise again to be reheated. In other words, it is nonsence. if there is extra heat at depth, it must have been transported there by some mechanical means, perhaps over centuries. So present global warming would be the result of warming that took place long ago.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMay I suggest a little experiment. Make a tank out of a length of 6 inch PVC pipe. Stand it up, fill with water & install an electric heater in the top. You will find that you can boil the water on top without registering any temperature increase at the bottom. That is for about twenty feet. Now drop a piece of near molten metal in. As it sinks it will briefly heat the water at the bottom. In a very short time the heat will be transported up to the top again & the bottom water will return to ambient.
So what mechanism is keeping this warm ocean water below the cool water above?
Gee, I dunno, what keeps the warm air close to the Earth while the upper atmosphere is so cold? Why is the surface of the ocean salty when salt is denser than water and should sink to the bottom.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt doesn't seem difficult to a) picture the ocean as dynamic rather than static, b) picture it as complex as the atmosphere in terms of air/water currents and temperature gradients, and c) trust that scientists are not all idiots and therefore if there is a conflict between your thought experiment and the science, it's most likely your thought experiment that has it wrong.
I was a sonar tech on a Lafayette class FBM submarine. One of my tasks was shooting the bathythermographs from the aft signal ejector. I've read the charts, the ocean can have an amazing variety of high and low temperature layers just in one spot. Sometimes the water at the bottom is heated by volcanic activity, sometimes strange currents are caused by freshwater flowing from rivers into the saltwater sea. There are "storms" underwater, big roiling fronts that would put an atmospheric thunderstorm to shame.
The only thing that could surprise me about the ocean thermocline is if they ever found a spot where it remained static for long periods of time.
Carlyle,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHave you ever heard of conduction and ocean currents? Have you ever heard of "the arrogance of ignorance"? Or maybe it's the arrogance of a mind that knows the truth.
Air becomes less dense with altitude. Water is virtually incompressible. Conduction will not do it either. There are circumstances where it occurs but they are not ocean wide.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome of the forces & time scales:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThermohaline Circulation: As surface water is made denser through the removal of heat or freshwater, the surface layer descends to deeper depths. If the stratification is weak and the buoyancy removal sufficient, the descent would reach the deep sea floor. Such deep reaching convention occurs in the northern North Atlantic (North Atlantic Deep Water) and around Antarctica (Antarctic Bottom Water). The thermohaline circulation engages the full volume of the ocean into the climate system, by allowing all of the ocean water to 'meet' and interact directly the atmosphere (on a time scale of 100-1000 years).
http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/ees/climate/lectures/o_circ.html
You used to be a teacher yet you consider conduction is an appreciable force in ocean heat transport to the depths. Get a full length of metal pipe. Fill it with sand so there is no air flow, place it horizontally. Now place a thermometer in one end & apply a blow torch to the other. The thermometer will not register any difference in temperature though the other end is burning white hot at near 1000 degrees. How is conduction going to carry a heat differential of only a few degrees into the ocean depths?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is your point? Are you trying to argue that the oceans cannot store heat energy transferred to them from the atmosphere, and that somehow this proves global warming is not happening, or is not caused by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOcean currents push cold bottom waters up against a continent, and those cold waters rise to the surface even though they are heavier than the waters they are rising above. Warmer waters will replace those bottom waters as they rise. There is an entire ocean current system that transfers heat energy from warmer regions to colder regions. That system includes movement of waters up and down as well as horizontally.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe ocean is not a length of pipe, and there is little about a length of pipe filled with water (or sand) that resembles the ocean. The ocean has currents and lots of vertical "relief" that shapes and modifies those currents. You know this, why do you ignore it?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHeated water discharged by nuclear power plants also contributes to ocean warming. In California both San Onofre and Diablo Canyon nuclear plants have managed to gain exemptions from meeting state and federal once through cooling prohibitions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAccording to the UC Santa Barbara San Onofre Mitigation Monitoring Project, during regular operation the plant draws in 830,000 gallons of sea water per minute to cool the reactors. It discharges the heated water back into the Pacific Ocean after mixing it with cooler, ocean water surrounding the discharge pipes. When it is finally discharged the heated water coming from the plant is 19 degree warmer than surrounding ocean water.
I'd love to learn more about the extent of ocean warming caused by nuclear power plant heated water discharge world wide.
All Carlyle is doing is just trying to spread doubt about climate science. I have pointed them to mountains of scientific papers disproving all these silly climate denier myths, yet they have budged not one inch in admitting their validity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe fossil fuel companies are fighting an insurgent campaign on climate change because the science is already settled. They don't have to win a debate; they merely have to make the average person mistrust the conclusions of sound science just a little bit so they aren't concerned about it. They know the average person doesn't understand how science makes progress, so they cherry-pick data, misuse terms and personally attack climate scientists with bogus accusations instead of engaging on the facts.
So yeah, you'll break your keyboard before you ever get through to Carlyle.
While local thermal pollution is a problem, the 200GW or so of waste heat coming out of the USA's nuclear plants is insignificant as far as the climate is concerned. For a comparison, 1GW of solar energy falls on just 1 square kilometer of the Earth's surface and Rhode Island is 3,140 square kilometers in area. All those Rhode Island-sized chunks of ice that are breaking off more and more often nowadays each have and order of magnitude more impact on the heat going into the oceans compared to the waste heat from nuclear reactors.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou get some things right. Others you get close to right. Let’s just say in this case you are out of your depth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour science project examples don’t prove what you think they prove. In your examples you aren’t taking into account that heat transfer goes where it wants to go whether you are aware of it or not. I’m not going to bother to try to educate you. You can’t intuit everything, Dude.
Yes that is mechanical forces as I stated. Not conduction. Other factors then can keep the warmer water submerged but these factors are far from universal. The main point though is the time scales. 100 to a thousand years for this water to interact with the atmosphere. Any influence being exerted now will necessarily have to have been stored 100 to 1 thousand years ago.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCarlyle,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe point of the article is that the oceans are warming as well as the atmosphere, and that ocean warming could impact marine life beneath the surface. Since measurements show warming of ocean waters, it follows that marine life could be affected. Your hypothetical thought experiments don't reflect the reality of the ocean's complexity, and do not support your claim that any warming affecting marine life had to occur over 100 years ago. If you were not so intent on finding some reason to challenge climate change, maybe you're comments would not be so convoluted, stretched, and off-base.
Sometimes I just like to provoke conversation. The buried heat is supplanting the missing atmospheric heat predicted by the CO2 adherents. The fact is that just like the fact that CO2 release in the past followed warming & did not precede it, so any present day warming from the deep oceans has to have been stored a minimum of 100 years ago. Also in all the reports I have read on the matter, the greatest volume of data available, from the Argos system of buoys, does not support the claims that on average, the deep ocean is increasing in temperature. You might call the stored heat that is there, fossil heat.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy example re the pipe was to demonstrate that only mechanical forces can transport heat down. Conduction will not. Also, I wished to show that convection only carries colder water down. Not hot or even warm water.
Argos Buoy data from an Oceanographer, "http://scrippsnews.ucsd.edu/Releases/?releaseID=1258
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"New Comparison of Ocean Temperatures Reveals Rise over the Last Century
Ocean robots used in Scripps-led study that traces ocean warming to late 19th century
Scripps Institution of Oceanography / University of California, San Diego
A new study contrasting ocean temperature readings of the 1870s with temperatures of the modern seas reveals an upward trend of global ocean warming spanning at least 100 years.
The research led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego physical oceanographer Dean Roemmich shows a .33-degree Celsius (.59-degree Fahrenheit) average increase in the upper portions of the ocean to 700 meters (2,300 feet) depth. The increase was largest at the ocean surface, .59-degree Celsius (1.1-degree Fahrenheit), decreasing to .12-degree Celsius (.22-degree Fahrenheit) at 900 meters (2,950 feet) depth.
Argo floats transmit ocean data via satellite.
The report is the first global comparison of temperature between the historic voyage of HMS Challenger (1872-1876) and modern data obtained by ocean-probing robots now continuously reporting temperatures via the global Argo program. Scientists have previously determined that nearly 90 percent of the excess heat added to Earth's climate system since the 1960s has been stored in the oceans. The new study, published in the April 1 advance online edition of Nature Climate Change and coauthored by John Gould of the United Kingdom-based National Oceanography Centre and John Gilson of Scripps Oceanography, pushes the ocean warming trend back much earlier.
"The significance of the study is not only that we see a temperature difference that indicates warming on a global scale, but that the magnitude of the temperature change since the 1870s is twice that observed over the past 50 years," said Roemmich, co-chairman of the International Argo Steering Team. "This implies that the time scale for the warming of the ocean is not just the last 50 years but at least the last 100 years."
Published six days ago. Why would anybody listen to a pipe-fitter when it comes to physics and oceanography? Probably breathed in too much lead while at work...
Water becomes LESS DENSE below 2 Celcius. Which is why ice floats.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are kind of correct. Ice is less dense than sea water mostly because a lot of the salt in sea water is expelled when the ice forms and the regular, crystalline structure of ice packs in water molecules much less densely than liquid water, where they just jumble around in a random arrangement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour assuming a static ocean with no currents or surface winds?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCarlyle,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisProvoking conversation is one thing, and generally a good thing. However, when the provocation is based on a seemingly single-minded drive to find reasons to challenge climate change science (or evolution or whatever!), I personally find it infuriating. So you got a rise out of me, and if that was your goal, congratulations. But at the same time, your obfuscation is misleading and just wrong, and you know better. So I also find it disappointing. And that it is a strategy first used so successfully by the tobacco industry to delay action based on the best available evidence, and used successfully by many others since, I also find it abhorrent.
Carlyle, you said...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"any present day warming from the deep oceans has to have been stored a minimum of 100 years ago"
...but the article did not say any warming came from the deep oceans, that was your (deliberate?) misstatement of what the article was about. So you manufactured a misleading interpretation of the article to push a mistaken challenge to climate change science. Instead of promoting discussion of the science, you simply provoked debate about something that never existed in the first place! Way to go.
Variations in heat absorbed from the Earths core can create additional convective forces. The planets rotation and wobble add tidal energy varying with topography and depth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou guys are all chasing red herrings. Look at the error bar indicated on the graph. It equals or exceeds the measured signal. Otherwise speaking... the signal could be anything, and no valid conclusions can be obtained. Noise.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this“The more the atmosphere warms up, the more heat it transfers to the ocean,” says Roberto De Almeida.
Fail- The ocean warms the atmosphere NOT the other way around. It is incoming solar energy (isolation) which heats the ocean, which then heats the atmosphere. Ever tried to heat a tub full of water, with a hair drier. Applied to the metal tub one can heat the tub. Applied to the water surface and your whistling dixie. GK
So I had not come across a report published six days ago. I will study it. My immediate reaction is that the historic temperatures taken of the oceans could not have been comprehensive. Also that in contrast to land based temperature readings, anything recorded prior to the twentieth century is considered unreliable when compiling temperature records, especially the warmer ones. I will be looking to see what 'corrections' have been made. The last point, what is the explanation they give for ocean warming 100 years ago?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am not refuting the report but I have questions.
If the ocean is warming, and by all accounts it is not since the earth as a whole is still cooling according to scientist that have not been swayed by the popularity of Bandwagon MMGW fans.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the earth were to warm dramatically it would only be returning to temperatures that it has previously experienced before.
There was a time when the average temp was 28 degrees warmer than the present. For the last couple of million years, billion of species have gone extinct from the changing environment.
I will need at least 1000 more years of recorded weather data to compare with the last 4 billion years of changing weather before I make any speculation about MMGW, if I did otherwise I would an activist and not a scientist.
The tobacco industry?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy initial post, I admit without too much thought, was prompted by the article statement: “That heat propagates downward.” No explanation. I was, I admit, well aware of different temperature gradients in the ocean. Back in the 1970s I was involved in studies of Solar Ponds, where solar heated salt water was stored in ponds having heavy saline water overlain by light fresh water. Untill disturbed by wind, the two layers remained remarkably stable, the fresh water acting as if it was a glass shield over the saline water. The major difference was that the ponds were quite shallow, allowing sunlight to penetrate to the bottom of the pond thus heating the saline water. There was practically no convection interaction between the zones. Wind plus ground water & soil moisture in intimate contact with the bottom of the ponds + black body radiation were the causes of heat losses. Heat losses due to conduction were only measurable for a few inches beneath the ponds. Once wind broke down the boundaries, losses from phase change, evaporation, quickly reduced the stored heat.
So you see, I know a little more than you give me credit for. The facility at Alice Springs was the one I was associated with.
Missed including a link: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~cliff.hignett/solar/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLook at how Karst doesn't even know how to read a graph. And fails at Statistics too. But I guess cherry-picking the small number of least-likely values from a huge pile of data is par for the course for climate deniers. Claiming to know more than ACTUAL experts in the field is just an added bonus.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTONS of circular reasoning, logical fallacies and unscientific nonsense on display here. You deniers must be getting this garbage from SOMEWHERE yet we NEVER see one shred of evidence backing up your claims.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMeanwhile, the world's ENTIRE scientific community (think the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, The American Physical Society, along with hundreds of others) agrees that human greenhouse gas emissions are disrupting the climate and that we need to reduce emissions quickly. And 99.98% of scientific papers published in the last 20 years agree on these same conclusions...oh, and with 95% of glaciers worldwide in retreat, rising temperatures, sea levels and many other indicators showing that the climate is getting wacky, REALITY agrees with the scientific consensus as well.
Since climate deniers continually dredge up the same long-debunked talking points, this page ought to take care of all that baloney with the help of peer-reviewed scientific papers so you don't even have to take their word for it if you don't want to:
http://skepticalscience.com/argument.php
Interesting but only relevant for a few degrees above zero. From 3 degrees on up it becomes less dense. See chart. http://www2.volstate.edu/CHEM/Density_of_Water.htm
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe report you linked to looks quite honest to me. It only covered 300 of the thousands of possible soundings, but their aim is to set a base line to compare future measurements. Nothing wrong with that & it does not look as if there has been any fiddling with the data. Watch this space. If previous experience is anything to go by, others will come in to try & discredit the earlier warming trend. By the way, I have never disputed global warming. I have never even discounted some human influence. It is the alarmist AGW view that I dispute. And the concentration on CO2 as the primary culprit. The fact this study conclude the warming was apparent 100 years ago , in fact twice the rate of the past fifty years if I read it correctly, vindicates my position.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt doesn't vindicate anything you've said. You're confusing MAGNITUDE with RATE and twisting ANYTHING you read to fit your agenda. The data in this study just confirms the history of climate change going back to 1870 and the quote from the scientists who wrote it was merely illustrating that if you only use temperature records from the last 50 years, you are ignoring half the MAGNITUDE of climate change over that time. Global temperatures are still increasing at an alarming rate and guess what, over the last 140 years, HALF of that warming has occurred in the last 50, so it is accelerating.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAgain...Reading Comprehension. It's a thing.
Get a life sault. Relying on anything from sceptical science is like boiling water to create holy water. Are you trying to drive traffic to that rubbish site? Perhaps you are even a moderator or worse? As for your favourite site, this is only the latest of many very unscientific episodes at SkS.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://joannenova.com.au/2013/03/lewandowsky-cook-claim-78000-skeptics-could-see-conspiracy-survey-at-cooks-site-where-he-didnt-even-put-up-a-link/
Lewandowsky, Cook claim 78,000 skeptics could see conspiracy survey at Cooks site where there is no link.
Might have been too cryptic. Boiling hell out of the water to create holy water would fit legitimate science at SkS if they thought it would further their argument.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou criticise G.Karst for cherry picking yet you are happy about only 300 reading sites to characterise all the worlds oceans? Well, I'm beginning to wonder about that after the way terrestrial readings have been cherry picked. The findings have not been peer reviewed either have they?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this21. sault in reply to eomuahaha09:19 PM 4/6/13
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother garbage comment. He was talking about liquid water at just above freezing point. When water freezes, it expands by 9%. That is why icebergs stick up out of the water. Marvellous how ignorant you can be for someone who professes to be so smart. When water freezes it loses .0831 g/cm3 in density compared to its density at the same temperature prior to freezing & the resultant phase change.
So we are supposed to believe that in 1910 there was enough data collected worldwide at 400 to 700 meter depths to make a valid comparison with todays temps. Additionally the arguments supporting the mechanism by which warmer water could be carried to great depths make
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisany measurements at that depth irrelevent because of the
infinite amount of variables which might effect a few
degrees increase or decrease in temps at any given depth.
Do you really expect people to believe the validity of
these figures. This is weird science at its worst.
If we concede the fact that cold water is upwelling
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisas it reaches coastlines and thus warm water must be sinking somewhere. Where then do we make our measurement of water temperature to be sure that any
difference we measure from year to year is not just
a factor of a relocation of the currents by a few feet.
Your argument calls any assumptions made from water
temperature differences into question.Or worse yet it makes cherry picking of data so easy that it is impossible to check the data.
For the data to be valid there would have to be stratification. If there is stratification then there
is no way for the temperature to increase at a depth of
400 meters with a 1 degree change of air temperature.
This argument is self defeating.
Jo Nova believed a commentator when he told her water _vapor_ had a surface. And you hold her in higher esteem than the authors at SkS, many of whom have actually published scientific articles. What does that say about your ability to discern wheat from chaff?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDidn't anyone ever tell you what happens when you feed stray animals?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSorry, but you're link is busted. You're probably trying to funnel traffic towards a polluter-funded denier site anyway. Too bad Skeptical Science has MULTIPLE peer-reviewed papers backing up EVERY ONE of their articles. All you peddle are arguments from ignorance, cherry-picking and whatever fossil fuel talking point is making the rounds of the right-wing echo chamber that day.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.globalresearch.ca/global-cooling-is-here/10783
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOnce again, reading comprehension. It's a thing. We're stating the same thing in different ways. eomuahaha was trying to state that the decrease in density of LIQUID water at 2C is why ice floats. I said that most of the salt gets expelled from the ice and that the water molecules line up in a regular pattern (a crystal...don't want to take any chances of you not understanding given how bad you are at reading comprehension) that is less dense than the random jumble of water molecules in a liquid. This drives the 0.0831g / cm^3 density change you're talking about. CHILL. OUT.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this2 things wrong with your post. You don't seem to understand the difference between TEMPERATURE and TEMPERATURE ANOMALY. Look them up and your questions will be answered.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the 2nd half of your post, you are making an argument from ignorance, which is a logical fallacy. Just because YOU can't understand (or don't want to understand) how they can come up with this data doesn't mean that THEY are wrong. People A LOT smarter than you or I have looked through the data and arrived at the conclusions in the article. Now unless you want to join in on the peer-review process and critique this article the RIGHT way, please stop assuming that an armchair "scientist" such as yourself commenting on SciAm boards knows more about oceanography than an oceanographer!
Thanks for the link to the wacko Centre for "Research" on Globalization. THEIR OWN WEBSITE does all the work for me in showing how crazy they are:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The Global Research website was established on the 9th of September 2001, two days before the tragic events of September 11. Barely a few days later, Global Research had become a major news source on the New World Order and Washington’s “war on terrorism”."
Yeah, that "New World Order" and their silent helicopters are coming to get us and only the Centre for "Research" on Globalization can swoop in to save the day! Gimme a break!
Carlyle parades his/her ignorance as evidence once again. Correction, that's twice, thrice and more times again. Deliberate falsehoods, red herrings, straw men, carefully picked cherries, all half-baked while at full Gish gallop.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRe SkS. Get back to the facts. They have been caught propagating a scientific fraud to support the AGW cause. Not just a mistake, a fraud.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy not condemning it, various commenters here are supporting fraud in a GOOD cause. Hypocrites.
Tell us sault. Has the report this article is based on been peer reviewed? If not, given your past record of decrying anything not having been peer reviewed as being unreliable, how come you are making an exception? Even if it was peer reviewed, how were the 300 report sites chosen from literally millions of Argos readings?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSalt has nothing to do with the water densities under discussion. In fact the figures all relate to fresh water. Water actually expands a few degrees above freezing point, then becomes denser again until above 3C becoming less dense again for all higher temperatures. This is a peculiar property of water. I supplied you with a link to a chart. Comprehension problem?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www2.volstate.edu/CHEM/Density_of_Water.htm
"They have been caught propagating a scientific fraud to support the AGW cause."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAccording to whom? Your reference was to someone who doesn't know enough physical science to know that gases do not have surfaces.
PROVE IT!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell if you do not like JoNova try this source & FOLLOW THE LINKS. Do not try shooting the messenger.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://climateaudit.org/2013/03/28/lewandowsky-doubles-down/
Despite you absurd persecution complex, no one intends to shoot you.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou have, however, been figuratively roasted alive for linking to fossil fuel industry shills and people who have been shown to know absolutely nothing about fields they profess to be experts in.
Hey, YOU'RE the one who said "The report you linked to looks quite honest to me." Here it is again for anybody that's interested:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://scrippsnews.ucsd.edu/Releases/?releaseID=1258
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography stands behind the report. Again, are you claiming to know more about oceanography than an oceanographer (or a world-renowned institution dedicated to the field)?
And you FAIL at reading comprehension AGAIN on 2 levels. For starters, this article in SciAm is based on NASA and NOAA data. The report you keep blabbering on about for only using "300 sites" was released by the Scripps Institute. So you're conflating the reports in your rabid attempt to spread unwarranted doubt concerning climate science.
On top of that, and this REALLY takes the cake here, you didn't even bother to read the Scripps article all that well. You see, those 300 "report[sic] sites" are actually from the HMS Challenger voyage from 1872 - 1876! Just so you can't weasel out of this one, here's the key paragraph your denier eyeballs apparently FAILED to read:
"Although the Challenger data set covers only some 300 temperature soundings (measurements from the sea surface down to the deep ocean) around the world, the information sets a baseline for temperature change in the world's oceans, which are now sampled continuously through Argo's unprecedented global coverage. Nearly 3,500 free-drifting profiling Argo floats each collect a temperature profile every 10 days."
Yeah, you're suffering from a bad case of Confirmation Bias. You see only what you WANT to see. I say you should lay off the fossil fuel propaganda for a while and read some REAL scientific papers for a change! When you're failing to grasp even just the basic facts in an article, you're definitely doing something wrong!
How many times do I have to show you that Steve McIntyre has a vested financial interest in keeping the atmosphere open as a dumping ground for fossil carbon and is a laughingstock among REAL scientists?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Stephen McIntyre is the primary author of the blog Climate Audit, noted for its many articles skeptical of climate change. He is a prominent critic of scientific studies of temperature records of the past 1000 years that show increasing global temperatures. Stephen McIntyre has worked in mineral exploration for 30 years, much of that time as an officer or director of several public mineral exploration companies.
He does not have an advanced degree and has published two articles in the journal Energy and Environment, which has become a venue for skeptics and is not carried in the ISI listing of peer-reviewed journals.[3]
McIntyre was also exposed for having unreported ties to CGX Energy, Inc., an oil and gas exploration company, which listed McIntyre as a "strategic advisor." [4] He is the former President of Dumont Nickel Inc., and was President of Northwest Exploration Company Limited, the predecessor company to CGX Energy Inc. As of 2003, he was the strategic advisor of CGX Energy Inc."
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Climate_Audit
And guess what, McIntyre's attempt to smear REAL scientists at skeptical science was a bunch of conspiracy theory nonsense! The article with all the links McIntyre is blabbing on about how they were never released are all right here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-cook/conspiracy-theorists-respond_b_2676621.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications
Sorry, but all the conspiracy mongering that climate deniers do starts to all make sense once I look at the article. Thanks for pointing it out!
And here's the abstract of the actual survey quoted at length for your reading pleasure:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Although nearly all domain experts agree that human CO2 emissions are altering the
world's climate, segments of the public remain unconvinced by the scienti c evidence.
Internet blogs have become a vocal platform for climate denial, and bloggers have taken a
prominent and in
uential role in questioning climate science. We report a survey (N
> 1100) of climate blog users to identify the variables underlying acceptance and rejection
of climate science. Paralleling previous work, we nd that endorsement of a laissez-faire
conception of free-market economics predicts rejection of climate science (r ' :80 between
latent constructs). Endorsement of the free market also predicted the rejection of other
established scienti c ndings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking
causes lung cancer. We additionally show that endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy
theories (e.g., that the CIA killed Martin-Luther King or that NASA faked the moon
landing) predicts rejection of climate science as well as the rejection of other scienti c
ndings, above and beyond endorsement of laissez-faire free markets. This provides
empirical con rmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to
the rejection of science. Acceptance of science, by contrast, was strongly associated with
the perception of a consensus among scientists."
http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/documents/LskyetalPsychScienceinPressClimateConspiracy.pdf
WOW! You helped me uncover a veritable GOLD MINE, Carlyle!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Researchers in history and sociology frequently cite the "manufacture of doubt" by vested interests and political groups as a factor (Jacques, Dunlap, & Freeman, 2008; McCright & Dunlap, 2003, 2010; Mooney, 2007; Oreskes & Conway, 2010; Stocking & Holstein, 2009). For example, over 90% of environmentally sceptical books published since 1972 have been demonstrably sponsored by conservative think tanks (Jacques et al., 2008). Oreskes and Conway (2010) analyzed the shared ideological underpinnings of organized attempts to question well-established scientifi c findings over the last few decades, from the link between smoking and lung cancer to the causal role of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's) in eroding the ozone layer to, most recently, the fi ndings from climate science. Oreskes and Conway documented that a small number of organizations and individuals have been instrumental in those contrarian activities, arguably motivated by a laissez-faire free-market ideology that views as threatening any scienti fic fi nding with potential regulatory impact, such as Motivated rejection of science 4 interference with the marketing of tobacco products, bans on CFC's, or a price on carbon (cf. Dunlap & McCright, 2011)."
http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/documents/LskyetalPsychScienceinPressClimateConspiracy.pdf
Is the report this article is based on PEER REVIEWED? You demand nothing less. Is SkS a blog? Most would judge it so & we know your opinions on blogs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, I did say my initial reading was favourable. Then I started re considering that the report is based on 300 sites. As a matter of fact you are right about the 300 sites they claim to have studied from the Challenger. I looked it up. They must have manufactured 37 of those readings. The Challenger only tested 263 sites for temperature during its four year journey. That is all very interesting, but the authors also say: Among other interesting and possibly useful things this evaluation has found is the Gulf Stream is farther north today than it was during the Challenger Expedition. Kind of stuffs up comparisons.
Though interesting, this study has been sexed up to fit the AGW meme. The conclusions are drawn from too few sites with reliance on the accuracy of thermometers available in 1872 to a fraction of a degree. I have been unable to retrieve the original data but I suspect the temperatures were not recorded to an accuracy of a tenth of a degree or anything like it.
By the way for all your ranting, you have not actually refuted what I posted re SkS or the dishonesty of the report they support. A very flexible moral gauge you carry. More heat than light. Your water temperature density comments are rubbish too.
Just as I thought.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere is the information on how the temperatures were collected. The thermometers were calibrated to read to an accuracy of 1F. I admire their ingenuity, but to compare what they did with their methods & the instruments they had, to modern temperature readings & instruments, particularly to fractions of a degree, is absolutely ludicrous.
I think the authors of this SIAM article have sullied the work of those pioneers.
Have a read of this though. It is quite remarkable.
http://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/1885/publication-4751.pdf
So how in the WORLD do you get off thinking you know more about oceanography than the ENTIRE staff at the Scripps Institiute? If you're such an expert, why don't you publish a paper with these AMAZING findings you supposedly have? You'll have a hard time because your reading comprehension skills aren't the best and you tend to cherry-pick evidence and twist it to your agenda. However, I wish you luck and look forward to the peer-review your paper will go through.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo you think that when they exaggerate about the number of sites tested by the Challenger that they are not likely to have made other 15 percent or greater adjustments? The AGW climate industry is corrupt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow!! Too bad we don't live in a tube. Even in (relatively small) Monterey Bay the atmospherically warmed water is blown towards the north (Santa Cruz) in the summer and we experience an "upwelling" from the 12K" canyon that is nutrient rich for the sea life. But as temperatures increase, we are seeing sea life that ten years ago existed only south of us, coming north to avoid the warming oceans, while are native species have done the same and are become more rare here. Even wine growers world wide are moving their vines north because it has become too hot where they are now (and have been for hundreds of years). Do you think they did this just to support GW science? consider moving into your tube if you really want to avoid the facts.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell that settles it then. Who knew just a short pipe, some water and a heater could so accurately simulate ocean dynamics. Most amazing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is an abundance of information online that informs about ocean dynamics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe the 'pipe model' is short of expressing the more nuanced aspects.
I was demonstrating that neither conduction nor convection could "Propogate" temperatures down to the ocean depths. Currents against land masses is a mechanical action. The article stated that warm water propagated down. Where exactly was I wrong?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn pre-digital days, science students were taught to read calibrated instruments to the nearest 0.1 of the calibration and expected to do so with an error of no more than +/- 0.1. This means that the measurements would have been made to nearest 0.1 F. Presumably the measurements were done by an expert, rather than a student, so the reading error should have been no more thane +/- 0.05.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't have any information on the accuracy of the thermometers being used at the time, but I think that the technology had been mature for some time (think gas laws, heat and work, etc.). Does anybody have any actual information on this?
There is a very interesting paper that discusses the thermometers used by the Challenger. They had all sorts of problems with the calibration including parallax errors caused by the calibrations not being directly marked on the thermometers but being quite a distance away from it. It would be well worth your while to go back & read the pdf I linked to regardless of your point of view. I am full of admiration for what they achieved. deep sea temperatures could even have been higher than they thought. they discovered that errors occurred with these thermometers simply due to compression at great depth compressing the bulb.
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