If there is one topic that trumps all others in climate science, it’s ocean heat.

If there is a planetary imbalance in energy, and Earth is acquiring more heat than it’s losing, we ought to be able to find that heat. Energy can not be created nor destroyed. It has to be somewhere.

On this Water-Planet, virtually every scientist agrees that the vast bulk of the extra energy ought be stored in the water. The oceans cover 70% of the surface, and are 4km deep; water has a high heat capacity (meaning it can store a lot of energy), and, because water flows quickly (unlike rock), turbulence and mixing can take that heat energy away from the surface.

Every skeptic (and taxpayer) ought to know that since 2003 (when we started measuring oceans properly) the oceans have been cooling: Douglass and Knox 2010.

Five years of planetary heating amounts to a massive amount of energy. That’s 2,000 days of the sun bearing down on an atmosphere with growing levels of CO2. According to the IPCC favored models, the extra heat stored should be 0.7 x [...]

Sea levels are one of the top five most critical measurements to tell us about the planet’s “heat”. Remember, they say “it’s worse than we thought” and that sea level rise is accelerating. Yet the measurements by the best equipment available — satellites — tell of a steady linear rise of just 3mm year after year, except for lately, when it’s been lower. (What kind of scientist can’t predict where a straight line is headed?)

Sea level is hard to measure — the sea is not flat — the ground also moves, but satellites measure the world’s oceans every ten days to an accuracy of several millimeters, and what’s more, they measure it compared to the center of the Earth (see below). NASA says so. So it is hard to explain why, after delaying the latest (shrinking) results for a couple of months past the usual posting date, they now announce that they’ve added “a correction of 0.3 [...]

The public might not understand the science, but they do understand cheating

Dr. David Evans

6 October 2010

[A series of articles reviewing the western climate establishment and the media. The first and second articles discussed thermometer tricks with air temperatures.]

Click to download a pdf file containing the whole series

Measuring ocean temperature globally is harder than it sounds. But it is crucial to understanding climate, because most of the heat in the climate system [...]

Michael Hammer previously calculated that if the IPCC were right, the oceans should have absorbed a lot more heat, but just how much? He has revised his previous calculation after discovering an error. Now instead of oceans missing as much as 90% of the heat capacity, they are missing less, but it’s still around two-thirds. Its a lot of energy that somehow, somewhere, is not being absorbed. Where is the energy that greenhouse gases are supposedly ‘trapping’? Not in the air, and not in the water. What sort of radiative imbalance is this? Not one to get scared of.

Naturally, as always, Michael is keen for people to check his numbers and give us feedback.

Here is another example of a skilled expert doing pro bono work because he is concerned at the state of the science and the unnecessary damage to our society that it will bring. Michael Hammer has around 20 patents in the field of spectroscopy, that means he’s produced work that’s so useful and original that his employers have shelled out hundreds of thousands of [...]

The big scary number of the week is 15 × 1022 (or 150 million quadrillion). It’s the number of Joules the ocean has apparently heated by since 1961. But convert it to degrees per year and suddenly the big scary 15 × 1022 becomes three thousands of one degree per year. Unmeasurably small. So realists everywhere, lets check the math, and get ready to spread the word. Everywhere you see the ocean heat capacity argument or graph, let people know the numbers just don’t add up.

THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED SEE HERE FOR THE LATEST FIGURES.

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15 × 1022 Joules since 1961 = 3 thousandths of a degree warmer per year. Who cares?

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Below Michael Hammer goes through the calculations he started on the comments thread for “Ocean temperatures: The new bluff in alarmism.” Essentially he confirms Kininmonths numbers and calculates:

The alarmists have abandoned air temperatures as a measure of global temperature, because the air temperature graphs are just too hard to argue with (like the second figure below, from the Skeptics Handbook). Instead they’ve switched to ocean temperatures, which they often disguise as ocean heat content (a huge number like 15×10²² Joules sounds much more scary than the warming it implies of 0.003° C/year).

All three pages of the Synthesis Report that deal with ‘evidence’ are about factors or trends that tell us nothing about whether or not the warming is due to carbon emissions. If God put the galaxy in a toaster, sea levels would rise, ocean heat content would increase, and ice would melt.

Notice how the graph above from the Synthesis Report that came out this month doesn’t include the last six years of data? Carrier pigeons from the remote worldwide network of Argo buoys make it back to base eventually, but the world’s leading team of climate researchers seem to have trouble googling “argo”. Not coincidentally, measurements [...]

Professor Matthew England’s research teams have received nearly $2.5 million in funding from the Australian government, much of it for studying oceans and climate change. So when we need good answers on the topic, he would be the man. If a school student asked for help, we might expect only a two line reply passing on a link. But when the question comes from one of the most informed climate scientists in the country, with 12 years as head of Australia’s National Climate Centre, and it’s about a graph at the centre of legislative negotiations, it’s inexcusable that the reply was vague, poorly reasoned and didn’t answer the question. All this, in a conversation that England himself started.

If indeed “a Nobel Prize is there for many of the ideas the skeptics champion if only they were true” as England claims, then opportunity is knocking, and England is [...]

Any investigative journalist who was doing their job only had to Google for the other side of the story. I’m not saying those journalists have to agree with us, just that, at the moment most environmental writers think ‘balanced’ means saying, “The world will cook: the question is, lightly toasted OR totally pan-fried’.

Here’s the counter summary of the headlines we didn’t see, accompanied by an analysis you probably won’t see anywhere else.

Planet Unmoved by IPCC Forecast

Despite the power of the authority vested in the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), The Planet appears to be unswayed by the large well funded international bureaucracy, and is similarly immune to following the collected wisdom of the software engineers who compress it’s 1100 billion cubic kilometers of complexity into a PC.

Although the warming of the last 30 years has been the ‘steepest in living memory of the baby boomers’, the trend (with the most favorable cherry-picking permitted*) [...]