That deep heat almost seems to coincide with Atlantic and Southern Ocean volcanoes?
All roads lead to the ocean. This time, though, we’re talking about the mysterious deep abyss, below 2,000m and even below 3,600m. Wunsch et al, claim the data shows the deep ocean cooled by one hundredth of a degree in the last 19 years. But they admit that really… this could just be noise. (Well, shock me.) But they have some new and glorious heat maps, and I use those to do some wild speculation about volcanoes.
When all is said and done, there are three inescapable oceanic truths:
- Around 90% of all the energy in the Earth’s climate system is in the oceans.
- Thou shalt not create nor destroy energy.
- If there was an energy imbalance running day after day, gazillions of Joules of energy must be somewhere. They cannot “pause”, take holidays, nor appear in future without being present in the now.
Despite the 95% certainty among 97% of certified “climate scientists”, no one can find that energy. Thus the social-science-fact meets the physical-science-fact. Which “fact” should we spend billions on? The stone-age approach is to go with the “doctors” not the data, and western civilization seems pretty comfortable with that.
In the end, the uncertain data and lower-than-expected warming are the foundations under the “95%” certainty, and those statements should be accorded all the scientific respect that any political slogan deserves.
Some glorious heat-maps.
The first map shows how patchy the ocean is, which makes it all the more difficult to measure accurately.
Figure 14: Di fference in heat content of the annual average of 2011 minus that of 1993, H (0;-h; 2011) – H (0;-h; 1993) : The strong spatial structure represents a major observational challenge to determining an accurate mean change.
Secondly, Wunsch slice through the depths, so we can see that the top 700m is warming near Greenland, and in the Western Pacific. But the potential hot spots below 2000m areon the other side of the planet. How curious?
Figure 15: Same as Fig. 14 except for the top 700 m alone, H (0; -700; 2011) – H (0; -700; 1993). Annual cycle and harmonics removed. Regions of loss as well as gain depict some of the sampling difficulty.
The warming in the bottom half of the ocean is mostly near the southern Atlantic and West Antarctic Peninsula.
Figure 16: Same as Fig. 14 except for 2000 m to the bottom.
Likewise the deepest ocean is warming in the Southern Atlantic and near the Antarctic.
Figure 17: Same as Fig. 14 except for 3600 m to the bottom. Note the cooling in the deepest parts
of the western North Atlantic, the entire eastern basin, Paci c and Indian Oceans. Warming of the
Antarctic Bottom Water has been discussed recently by Purkey and Johnson (2013) among others. In
the present context, it is a comparatively small water mass. Warming in the Atlantic sector Southern
Ocean is particularly conspicuous.
What about those volcanoes?
Wunsch et al don’t mention volcanoes. Nor could I find a good map of submarine volcanic activity, especially not with depth topography. But I’m going to toss the idea out there anyway. We know submarine volcanoes lie under the warming parts of West Antarctica in the far south-east Pacific (near Chile). We also know water currents (both deep and shallow) flow from west to east around the Antarctic. So if those volcanoes were warming the water, presumably the warmer water would get carried to the Southern Atlantic.
The mid Atlantic has a ridge of undersea volcanoes running up and down it, notably under the deep hot spot in the Southern Atlantic. What we don’t know would fill the deep abyss though. And if volcanoes are warming the deep, you would think we might see more warming around the Western Pacific which is warming in the top 700m, but not apparently down the bottom. I’m left with more questions than answers. Are those Western Pacific volcanoes shallow, is the heat map remotely accurate, or is the hypothesis of volcanic deep water heating just junk? Who knows.
Earth Observatory, NASA
This poor substitute shows Earthquakes — not volcanoes — and what we really need is a map of submarine active volcanoes, can anyone find one?
…There was also a chain of explosive undersea volcanoes near Norway at 3000m down. They aren’t showing on the heat maps, unless they are generating heat south of greenland in the top 700m. Maybe the just isn’t the temperature data at 300m below the Arctic? Maybe the hypothesis is wrong?
Graham Lloyd does the “right thing” and asks the pro-man-made-warming experts:
The Australian: A recent paper by Matthew England, executive director of the climate change research centre at the University of NSW, said the global surface temperature “hiatus” could be explained by increased winds in the Pacific Ocean. The paper claims the strong trade winds, which pushed heat deeper into the ocean, explained why climate models had not matched physical observations on global temperatures, a key area of dispute between climate scientists and sceptics.
But if he’d asked skeptical scientists as well as unskeptical ones, it would have been even better. I could, for example, have said that paper by Matthew England finally picked up the message that skeptics have been saying for years. The fans of alarming models don’t seem to have the intellectual honesty to admit they were wrong. They post hoc adjusted predictions to fit, they found the models that worked the best were the ones that predicted only 2C of warming, implying the other models exaggerated the warming (as skeptics have been pointing out).
As I said in February about the England paper, they conscripted a new variable, and it wasn’t even a forcing:
The Australian: Here’s how it works — Monkey modelers make a guess, get it wrong, but instead of tossing the model or reassessing all their forcings they fish for new factors to conscript to get the least-worst outcome. The new factors are not necessarily forcings (which gives the monkeys lots of scope) but could be any half-credible variable that happens to show the right slope on the graph at the right time. There are a thousand leading indicators in our planetary climate, not to mention a million ways to measure them. By cherry picking the magic factor, the “predictions” change post hoc to fall “within the error bars” and can again be called “consistent” – at least until the next time they fail. Et Voila: a new paper, a conference keynote, a two week junket and a three year grant. Blessed are the ABC for they have another pointless press release to be vacuumed and shared. Thanks go to the ARC for funding the monkeys*.
From: Global Wind excuse — monkey-modeling shows global warming theory is Still Not Wrong.
The Bottom Line
Judith Curry concludes: “All in all, I don’t see a very convincing case for deep ocean sequestration of heat.” Ditto for me.
The nub of the problem is that, inasmuch as we can measure it, the warming is not enough and the uncertainties are too large. The oceans average a bit less than 4km deep around the world, so half the water on our planet’s surface is there, but there are almost no measurements.
My past posts:
- IPCC in denial. “Just-so” excuses use ocean heat to hide their failure.
- Ocean temperatures – Is that warming statistically significant?
REFERENCE
Carl Wunsch and Patrick Heimbach (2014) Bidecadal changes in the abyssal ocean [Full paper here]
The warming is because Antarctic sea ice is increasing. This means less cold water entering the thermohaline circulation.
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England has 2 papers on wind; they are critiqued here and here.
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Yup, Matthew England is all wind and no trousers.
The problem with these youngsters is that they were taught incorrect physics and haven’t the ability to go back to first principles, so they’re stuck in an endless loop desperately trying not to admit that the IPCC ‘consensus’ gets ALL the IR and radiative physics wrong.
51
PS here is an analysis of the Antarctic cooling and its connection to sea ice area. With that increase of sea ice we have reduced melt water. Less melt water means the ocean are slightly warmer due to Global Cooling!
http://notrickszone.com/2014/07/26/so-whats-the-real-reason-south-polar-sea-ice-is-expanding-its-the-cooling-stupid/
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The post is useful the paper just a complete waste of time. When doing this sort of analysis they must surely reslise that it is going no-where. “in the noise ” to an engineer is unmeasureable, not detectable and therefore of no value.
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Perhaps Jo, the definition of “certified climate scientists” might need some clarification here.
I would tend towards the mental health definition of “certified” for the alarmist advocate end of climate science rather than the academic definition.
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The mental health definition works for me.
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Yes. Which institutions certified them?
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The institution name is: (drum roll please) The FairfABC a watermelon institution dedicated to the propagation of furpys…
00
In a mental health sense “certified climate scientist” is tautology.
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You mean scientivist don’t you?
30
The desperation to explain why the CO2 warming model is an abject failure has become a frantic search. Damn the fact that it means the prediction of global warming is wrong. Does anyone point out that the reason it is wrong is far less important than the fact that it is wrong? There is no crisis. Is it even possible that the theory is just wrong? Apparently not. It is, after all, science accepted by 97% of all people who agree with it. The other 3% will be found.
Now these true believers have concluded that the seas which receives 66% of all sunlight and are 400x as massive as the atmosphere might have an effect on climate. What happens to that light and heat is critical, because CO2 only has an effect on the way out as infra red, not the way in as visible and UV. So now we are told that the top bits are getting warm and the big bottom bit, 4km deep, has not changed in temperature or is very, very slightly cooler. It sounds like Ann Elk’s description of a dinosaur, bigger at one end than the other. How much did that revelation cost?
At what point does anyone accept that increasing CO2 is not warming the planet? Do we actually have to have an ice age?
So it now time, under the Newton’s Precautionary Principle, to start donating to the UN for Lord Monckton’s giant mechanical cricket bat to ward off asteroids. We will call it the Cricket Tax.
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There is no enhanced GHE because there is no net surface CO2 IR emission.
Even if there were, there could be no gas phase thermalisation of GHG-absorbed IR energy from a higher temperature source.
The 1.2 K warming that would be expected from OLR reduction is offset by atmospheric processes to near zero. the same applies to any other well-mixed GHG.
The IPCC has got ALL the IR and radiative physics wrong, a record for international research.
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Could it not be that there is no enhanced GHE because there is no GHE to start with?
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Nope: the ‘forcing argument in a cloud free atmosphere is valid. The reduced net surface IR emission means temperature would have to rise so extra convection and evapo-transpiration make up for the loss, unless another process intervenes. There are other processes, some quite subtle, which negate all well-mixed GHG-AGW.
The intellectuals in ‘the team’ know this because Pierrehumbert is no slouch.
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Could you go deeper into that given that arid deserts cool rapidly at night? I take objection to is valid. It doesn’t seem so to me.
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Extra CO2 widens the 15 micron band. This means net IR from the surface in the adjacent ‘atmospheric window’ and H2O bands falls. In turn surface temperature has to rise to make convection + evapo-transpiration + net IR = net SW thermalisation. Clouds offset this; extreme negative feedback.
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Well I think arid deserts contradict your point. They don’t stay too warm at night.
Perhaps you have some data that shows the extra CO2 has changed this by a measurable amount. Are arid desert nights warmer in the “high” CO2 era?
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Not just arid deserts, I ventured into a desert garden last week, that got very cold, very fast, too. The Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia is a botanist’s dream at the moment. The first time in years I wore a jacket all day in the sunny northwest of Australia.
00
Desperate is right. Their presentation has been grasping at imaginary straws for some time.
However, how many reasons are there for the lies? The next statistic I would like to see is how many of the alarmists know about the lies? For sure and certain a great many people who believe the lies lack the competence to know they are lies.
I cannot disassociate the creation of the lies from the politicisation of the CSIRO in 1986. However, for a long time now there have been a great many people whose livelihoods depend on the maintenance of the lies.
And I fear yet that the weight of the hysteria which has been applied to the warmist promotion since last year’s election will carry the lies through.
As for the 97%. What was the question?
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When your very existence as a scientist depends on a lie you will fight tooth and nail to perpetuate and preserve the lie.
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According this it does not have to be scientific correct as long as there is a policy based consensus? http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/3/3/299/pdf
“a new irrepressible world order would emerge. And it would be one that would now fully exploit the predictive power of fruitful globalised science.”
?
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The average depth may be close to 4km, but half the water is in the top 2km (approx) not the top 4km. It’s a matter of bathymetry.
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Agreed. I thought fresh water was only about 4%, of which 50% is in Antarctica. Most of the rest is in the Great Lakes 21% and Lake Baikal 21%.
So almost all the water is in the oceans.
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“I thought fresh water was only about 4%, of which 50% is in Antarctica.”
not quite the ‘fresh water’ is only very-much less of a brine. All water in the oceans are part of a vast chemical soup. Depending where you are in the ocean determines what salts are about and in what concentration.
Given that the oceans are this chemical soup, is it not reasonable that a change in temperature would alter the balance of the chemical mix by initiating chemical endothermic or exothermic reactions that store or release energy? (the balance of carbonates/hydrocarbonates, etc. ) And these may start a cascade of events that can lock-up or release even great amounts of energy dispersed over the oceans. Of course the oceans are not chemically homogeneous so some regions would be more active at a particular time than others.
Now add in some volcanic outflows and underwater smokers and a very complicated picture unfolds.
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Good point Tom0. The salinity of large lakes ( eg Vostok) under ice cover in Antarctica is always much higher than open seawater from deep oceans. Also, the bottom water temperatures of many can be quite warm due to exothermic chemical reactions, often via microbes. I suspect deep ocean waters will have some similarities.
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She’d be a cold planet without that chemical soup.
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That is all “free” water; what about water underground, in aquifers, etc.?
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Radical Rodent
July 26, 2014 at 7:48 am
Just thought I would pass this on RR as the water in underground aquifers is very small beer compared to the ;
Huge ‘Ocean’ Discovered Inside Earth
[ Also now known as the “Beijing anomaly” ]
Scientists scanning the deep interior of Earth have found evidence of a vast water reservoir beneath eastern Asia that is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.
The discovery marks the first time such a large body of water has found in the planet’s deep mantle. [The World’s Biggest Oceans and Seas]
The finding, made by Michael Wysession, a seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis, and his former graduate student Jesse Lawrence, now at the University of California, San Diego, will be detailed in a forthcoming monograph to be published by the American Geophysical Union.
&
Previous predictions calculated that if a cold slab of the ocean floor were to sink thousands of miles into the Earth’s mantle, the hot temperatures would cause water stored inside the rock to evaporate out.
“That is exactly what we show here,” Wysession said. “Water inside the rock goes down with the sinking slab and it’s quite cold, but it heats up the deeper it goes, and the rock eventually becomes unstable and loses its water.”
The water then rises up into the overlying region, which becomes saturated with water [image]. “It would still look like solid rock to you,” Wysession told LiveScience. “You would have to put it in the lab to find the water in it.”
Although they appear solid, the composition of some ocean floor rocks is up to 15 percent water. “The water molecules are actually stuck in the mineral structure of the rock,” Wysession explained. “As you heat this up, it eventually dehydrates. It’s like taking clay and firing it to get all the water out.”
The researchers estimate that up to 0.1 percent of the rock sinking down into the Earth’s mantle in that part of the world is water, which works out to about an Arctic Ocean’s worth of water.
“That’s a real back of the envelope type calculation,” Wysession said. “That’s the best that we can do at this point.”
[ more ]
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Leo, fair point. The average depth of the oceans is 3,790 meters (I think that has recently changed from something deeper.) I searched, but would you believe, the most useful page that showed up on a quick search was wiki:
“Nearly half of the world’s marine waters are over 3,000 meters (9,800 ft) deep.”
The reference is so-so: “”Distribution of land and water on the planet”. UN Atlas of the Oceans.
Can anyone find a better estimate of the depth that half the oceanic waters are below? Technically I’m happy to ignore freshwater and water on land, since the post is about oceans.
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Sorry MOD off topic.
Message to Jo.
I just love Jo’s Blog apart from a good laugh, at times, I also learn a “hell” of lot from all you guys.
Keep up the good work Jo.
Enough buttering up. I may need a favour in few months time Jo. The Amateur (Ham) Radio club I belong to had a talk from someone who works for the CSIRO(h!). The video is on Utube but hasn’t been given clearance for general exhibition by the said CSIROh yet. I am hoping to present a ‘reply’ early in the new year, say Feb 2015. May I contact you, Jo, for some help?
Cheers
Ron Cook
R-COO- K+
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Happy to help. Radio is a great way to reach people. :- )
I’ll email you.
Jo
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It is not a mystery to some …
Below we’ve highlighted Eighteen men and women who will likely determine if and how the planet will avoid dangerous levels of global warming.
http://www.rtcc.org/2014/07/25/whos-who-the-men-and-women-tasked-with-stopping-climate-change/
. . .
They will know where it is.
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Mostly middle aged white men.
Where are the protesters?
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Good luck to them. And I mean that
sincerelysarcastically. Good luck. 🙁50
To think that the “magnificent 18” will do more than fight the position of their masters and actually reach a comprehensible decision is bizarre in the extreme. Follow the link under number 19 to their recent “non-paper” referred to as a “list of options”.
China has offered a “emissions cap” for 2025, that is, for 11 years its emissions increase unrestricted and THEN it will talk about reductions. India slipstreams behind that.
After a visit to China our SOS for climate change, the execrable Ed Davey is headlined ” China warned – without an agreement for reductions there is no deal”. Reading the small print you see that he has already acquiesced to the Chinese position!
How US congress will view that considering that Obama will be a “lame duck” by then (if not impeached).
Definitely a “buy signal” for popcorn futures.
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I think the larger lesson from all of this is that Earth’s climate is incredibly complex. There are a lot more causal factors than their models account for, clearly. Given that, and including the fact that there must be myriad confounding variables (correlations mistaken for causation), I would find it refreshing if the pro-CAGW side would find some humility and address what has become so obvious to unbiased observers.
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Wellll…. if your hypothesis (AGW) can explain everything that happens, then it explains nothing.
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Hmm. I’m not sure about Google at the moment. A month or so ago, I did a lot of searching about this subject about the same time as our hostess posted about the Antarctic Hot spot. None of the information I found then wants to resurface despite my using the same search terms. Darn.
However, the Wikipedia Tectonic Plates map is a good place to start as it shows the plates and their relative movements. Subduction zones usually have most volcanoes on the edge of the top plate. Hence Nicoragua and Guatamala in Central America have a lot of aerial (atmospheric venting)volcanoes, with some activity there this year. That part of Central America is of volcanic origin. On the other side of the Pacific, Sarawak and Java and many of the Indonesian Islands are of volcanic origin. The Sunda Trench wraps around there.
The Cocos and Nazca Plate boundary is an extension of the Eastern Pacific Ridge (Pacific and Nazca Plate boundary) which is spreading sea floor, or a divergent ridge, which is very active. The triple junction (Pacific, Cocos, Nazca plates) is about where the Galapagos hot spot is. The heat there brings the cold deep water from the South American Trench to the surface as a cold upwelling. That’s also the area in which the surface hot water gathers for an El Nino … Coincidence?
That’s also the area the Equatorial Counter Current (from West to East) feeds water into. That water comes from Indonesia, home to many submarine volcanoes. If that water comes pre-warmed …
The Pacific Ring of fire has been pretty active over the last few years. Rafts of pumice brought attention to the Havre deep water eruption which was pretty big. The Rumbles I to V off the East coast of the North Island of New Zealand have also been active (draw a straight line from Whakatane, a bit south of Tauranga to Tonga, and you have the Kermadec – Tonga trench.) NIWA artlessly predicted a mild winter this year because
Wot a surprise.
The South Atlantic region, if the tectonic plate map is consulted, shows the small Scotia plate sandwiched between the South American and Antarctic plates has a chain of “huge” submarine volcanoes haeading off to the east towards Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands of the Falklands group. Could some of these be active?
Indonesia has about 148 aerial (in atmosphere) volcanoes of which 47 or so have been or are active this year. Two huge submarine volconoes have been recently discovered in Indonesia. This one in the Sunda Trench (2009)and this
mere pimple called Kawio Barat in 2010. Even the US Navy was in the act in 2005, when its nuclear submarine USS San Francisco also discovered an, until then, uncharted submarine volcano on a trip from its base at Guam to Brisbane. It ran into it.
We know hardly anything about what is down there in the Pacific. Almost all the Pacific islands are of volcanic origin. The very recent Havre eruption shows that even the massive pressure on these mountains does not necessarity contain the eruption. We have no idea how much heat they put into the water. It has been mooted that the ENSO phenomenon may be the end result of submarine activity but that is far from certain.
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Sophocles #10
There’s geophysics papers that lay out the case that it’s not coincidence, see comment #12 downthread, specifically the 2 papers:
‘Seismic Predictors of El Nino Revisited’
Walker (1999)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/99EO00202/pdf
And,
‘El Nino Tectonic Modulation in the Pacific Basin’
Leabourne and Adams (date unknown)
http://www.geostreamconsulting.com/papers/Leybourne_Oceans_Fin.pdf
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I don’t know about undersea volcanoes in the south Atlantic, but there are plenty of active volcanic islands, such as the South Sandwich Islands and Bouvet. The South Sandwich island arc marks an active plate boundary between the Atlantic and Scotia plates. There are also active volcanoes on or near the Antarctic peninsula, such as Deception Island.
40
Correction, The Scotia Plate lies between the Antarctic and South American Plates.
20
What you really need is a map of hydrothermal vents. There’s one here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hydrothermal_vents_map.svg
From Wiki:
A hydrothermal vent is a fissure in a planet’s surface from which geothermally heated water issues. Hydrothermal vents are commonly found near volcanically active places, areas where tectonic plates are moving apart, ocean basins, and hotspots.
And,
In contrast to the approximately 2 °C ambient water temperature at these depths, water emerges from these vents at temperatures ranging from 60 to as high as 464 °C.[2][3] Due to the high hydrostatic pressure at these depths, water may exist in either its liquid form or as a supercritical fluid at such temperatures. The critical point of (pure) water is 375 °C at a pressure of 218 atmospheres. At a depth of 3,000 meters, the hydrostatic pressure of sea water is more than 300 atmospheres (as salt water is denser than fresh water). At this depth and pressure, seawater becomes supercritical at a temperature of 407 °C (see image). However, the increase in salinity at this depth pushes the water closer to its critical point. Thus, water emerging from the hottest parts of some hydrothermal vents can be a supercritical fluid, possessing physical properties between those of a gas and those of a liquid.
Besides being superheated, the water is also extremely acidic, often having a pH value as low as 2.8 – approximately that of vinegar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent
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Re hydrovents, submarine active volcanoes, and climate (#10)
There’s literature e.g.
‘Magmatic heat and the El Niño cycle’
Shaw and Moore (2011) [paywalled]
Abstract
Large submarine lava flows with apparent volumes exceeding 10 km3 have recently been imaged on the deep ocean floor in various parts of the Pacific by means of GLORIA and SeaMarc side-looking sonar surveys. Such flows may produce thermal anomalies large enough to perturb the cyclic processes of the ocean and could be a factor in the genesis of El Niño phenomena. We find that known volume rates of mid-ocean magma production could generate repetitive thermal anomalies as large as 10% of the average El Niño sea surface anomaly at intervals of about 5 years (the mean interval of El Niño events between 1935 and 1984). Likewise, estimated rates of eruption, cooling of lava on the seafloor, and transfer of heat to the near-surface environment could reasonably produce a thermal anomaly comparable to that associated with El Niño. Larger magmatic events, associated with fluctuations in the total magmatic power and seismicity along the East Pacific Rise, are possible at longer intervals and may explain the extreme size of some El Niño events, such as that of 1982–1983.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/88EO01176/abstract
Daniel Walker has a wad of literature e.g.
‘Seismicity of the East Pacific Rise: correlations with the southern oscillation index?’
Walker (2011) [paywalled]
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/88EO01113/abstract
‘Seismic Predictors of El Nino Revisited’
Walker (1999)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/99EO00202/pdf
‘More evidence indicates link between El Niños and seismicity’
Walker (2012) [paywalled]
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/EO076i004p00033-01/abstract
Walker (2011) was a 1988 paper originally (hence the “revisited” paper in 1999), see references:
Case Study: ‘El Niño: A Link among Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Crustal Circulation?’
Republished From: Environmental Science
Published: July 2, 2014,
Author: Cutler J. Cleveland
Topics: Chapter 4, The Physical Systems of Planet Earth
Excerpt:
A geophysicist, Daniel A. Walker, hypothesizes that a different sequence of events produces an El Niño event. Walker says that the thermal input to the oceans comes from Earth’s interior. This hypothesis is based on an intriguing correlation of seismic activity under the eastern portion of the Pacific Ocean near Easter Island and the onset of El Niño events. This correlation can be used to illustrate possible linkages among the physical systems of planet Earth and the difference between statistical correlation and physical causation.
The East Pacific Rise is located west of Easter Island. Along this rise, tectonic plates move 160–170 mm (6.3–6.7 inches) per year. This rate is one of the most rapid in the world. As a result, seismic activity along the East Pacific Rise has been studied extensively for more than thirty years. During this period scientists have tracked the number of earthquakes and the amount of energy they release.
While plotting these data, Walker noticed an interesting pattern: Months with the greatest number of earthquakes or months with earthquakes that release the greatest amount of energy precede the onset of El Niño events. This hints at a relationship between seismic activity and El Niño events.
http://www.trunity.net/sam2/view/article/51cbf4007896bb431f6aeb04/
Also Bruce Leybourne and Michael Adams, Stennis Space Centre:
‘El Nino Tectonic Modulation in the Pacific Basin’
Leabourne and Adams (date unknown)
http://www.geostreamconsulting.com/papers/Leybourne_Oceans_Fin.pdf
‘Surge theory weighs In On the balance of evidence in the debate on global warming’
B.A.Leybourne [Follow-up to Walker (1999)]
http://www.geostreamconsulting.com/papers/Global_Warm_Submit2.pdf
All this has been around for years obviously and is a lot more than wild speculation.
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>”Re hydrovents, submarine active volcanoes, and climate (#10)”
Should be #12.
40
“… While plotting these data, Walker noticed an interesting pattern: Months with the greatest number of earthquakes or months with earthquakes that release the greatest amount of energy precede the onset of El Niño events. This hints at a relationship between seismic activity and El Niño events. …”
That wouldn’t surprise me much given the strong correlation between earthquakes, volcanism and geothermal flux. As for the hydrothermal plot, at best it depicts a strong correlation with extensional tectonics. It’s a very limited sample, ~99.999% of the deep ocean floor has not been surveyed at the scale necessary to actually map them representatively. What we have are effectively ridge scans and selective recon of the sites of interest. It’s only been about 15 years since initial recon and surveys reported counting very large numbers of volcanoes which abounded all over the ocean floor away from the ridges. I’d say our understanding of the extent of the global hydrothermal network is cursory at best.
Other than that we should legislate the greens some new magical powers so they can change the temperature of the oceans and make their political-power dreams come true. Maybe then they can bring the orbit of Saturn and Jupiter closer, as it’ll make the night sky a bit more interesting, given the green-energy economy will eliminate all forms of dark-sky light pollution. Brings new meaning to Dancing with the Stars!
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“Shaw and Moore (2011) […]
Walker (2011)”
Both are from 1988 (…but apparently they were “first published online” 23 years later).
–
Richard, Thanks
for reliably & regularly reminding us of interesting works that easily get drowned & forgotten in voluminous climate discussion (…that is constantly aggressively threatening to stubbornly & rudely go absolutely nowhere).
00
Re hydrovents #12
‘Hydrothermal “Megaplume” Found in Indian Ocean’
Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News, December 12, 2005
An enormous hydrothermal “megaplume” found in the Indian Ocean serves as a dramatic reminder that underwater volcanoes likely play an important role in shaping Earth’s ocean systems, scientists report.
The plume, which stretches some 43.5 miles (70 kilometers) long, appears to be active on a previously unseen scale.
“In a nutshell, this thing is at least 10 times—or possibly 20 times—bigger than anything of its kind that’s been seen before,” said Bramley Murton of the British National Oceanography Centre.
[…]
Megaplumes like the one found in the Indian Ocean are probably caused by undersea volcanic eruptions, though scientists aren’t yet certain.
“Once formed they can possibly hang around for years,” Murton said. The heat from such events could have a dramatic effect on ocean circulation, which plays a role in determining Earth’s climate.
“The energy content is an order of magnitude greater [than ordinary plumes], and the thermal power may be many orders of magnitude greater,” Murton said.
“A normal hydrothermal vent might produce something like 500 megawatts, while this is producing 100,000 megawatts. It’s like an atom bomb down there.”
Recent studies have attempted to factor the heat from the world’s known hydrothermal ridges into ocean circulation models.
“Some studies estimate that for the Pacific, background thermal heating might increase ocean circulation by up to 50 percent,” Murton said.
Regular hydrothermal fields stir the water for only a few hundred meters (about a thousand feet) above the ocean floor. “But these megaplumes can reach a column of 1,000 to 1,500 meters [3,280 to 4,920 feet], so it reaches right up into the midwater,” he said.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1212_051212_megaplume.html
Book:
‘Diversity of Hydrothermal Systems on Slow Spreading Ocean Ridges’
Editors Peter A. Rona, Colin W. Devey, Jérôme Dyment, and Bramley J. Murton and participating authors take readers to the exciting exploration frontier of seafloor hydrothermal research on the slow spreading half of the 55,000-kilometer-long ocean ridge that spans the Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic oceans. In this interview, Eos talks with Peter Rona.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011EO080018/pdf
100
Richard C,
I like your line of thought, simply because it reinforces my own perspective.
It makes more sense to take a huge heat source, the mantle, and define a mechanism for influencing climate, than a small heat source and magnify it. But both probably have a causal effect.
I have not been able to digest all of your references so far, but on the basis of the ones I have read, I think research grants are far more justified in this area than anything related to CO2.
Pounders point at #14 is well made. A few megatons of liquid rocks direct from the mantle could have a dramatic influence on climate. Would be especially interesting if it occurred in phase with sunspot numbers.
90
Richard C (NZ)
Without much research and by just looking at images of these vents, the vented mixture rises through the water column. This behavior would carry the heat upward and I see no reason why it would not emerge at the surface. Even accounting for currents and thermoclines, the super hot rising column would nearly always be in contact with cooler more dense water. Yes the heat would be “diluted” but even as that happens the now larger column would rise, never being in contact with warmer water that would stall out the rising.
If that is correct, how could these vents contribute to warming at depth? Besides this, we know that cold water descends (and surprisingly quickly if the surrounding water is substantially warmer) With the recent open waters of the arctic due to lower ice and winter air temperatures still well below freezing, wouldn’t we expect additional cooling of said water?
I don’t see a mechanism that would ever permit the deep oceans from getting warmer except perhaps deep snow on each of the poles slowing the cooling and decent of water columns.
Everything mentioned above transfers energy in very large numbers every moment of every day. How does one even begin to measure it?
71
Models of course.
50
Yes sir! but they’d be better off if they went to Modeling School first. 😉
10
You mean to put lipstick on the pig then? 😉
10
Mark D. You could imagine a simple experiment.
Fill your bath with cold water and leave it standing with overhead heat. Does the heat source warm the bottom water?
Try it again with an insulated heat source placed under the bathtub or in the bottom of the tub.
I think you will find that the water within the tub is heated only at the surface in the first but throughout in the second.
Then try the same experiments with salty water and using a stirrer.
Your ‘without much research’ comments are a tad simple and you may benefit from reading the references which were helpfully provided by RichardC.
Ocean floor volcanoes and heated vents are a huge source of energy and have been almost ignored in the climate debate. Much of the sea floor has not been mapped but as we find out more about the deep oceans the huge extent of these active volcanic systems is starting to become obvious.
20
Well Lank, I’m not sure that your bathtub experiment is less “simple” than my comment. For example, float several large ice blocks at each end of the tub and apply heat to the center bottom. Do you think the entire bottom gets warm before the ice is depleted?
The ocean deep has an almost unlimited supply of cold to replace the warmer rising columns.
20
Mark D #12.3.2.1
>”The ocean deep has an almost unlimited supply of cold to replace the warmer rising columns.”
Thr cold water is the supply that enters the sea floor to be heated and pumped out i.e. the cold water replaces the hot water below the sea floor, not above it.
A column pumps continually until the vent stops. It is impossible for cold water to replace or displace the hot intrusion while a vent is pumping.
To clarify, my point in posting screeds of material was for those perhaps unaware of the amount of energy being transferred to the ocean from the sea floor and where it occurs spacially. Obviously there are vast areas of ocean floor where there’s no seismicity to produce venting.
This transfer is in addition (but neglected until recently – see below) to the geo flux estimated to be about 0.09 W/m2 all over the earth’s surface (and in addition to 400 yrs of solar oceanic forcing which could be up to 6 W/m2 according to Shapiro et al). Just one m2 vent can pump 500,000,000 Watts and a megaplume 100,000,000,000 Watts (10×10^10 Joules per second). Rather more than the 0.09 Joules per second/m2 geo flux in localized areas (think ENSO and East Pacific as per Shaw, Moore, Walker, Leybourne, and Adams upthread)
According to Levitus et al. (2012) Figure 2 (and text), the upper 2000m of ocean accumulated approx 24×10^22 Joules 1955-2006:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Levitus2012OHC.jpg
Just one megaplume pumping for one year can inject into the ocean 10×10^10 Joules x 31,556,926 seconds = 3×10^18 Joules or 0.001% of the entire 50 yr oceanic heat accumulation 1955-2006.
Arithmetic is probably dodgy but I think this is a reasonable perspective. GHGs in the atmosphere redirecting longwave radiation downwards (DLR) cannot compete with the energy being pumped in from the sea floor or SW solar forcing at the surface, especially when DLR only has an effective water penetration of around 10 microns,
Neither can there be an atm => ocean sensible heat (Hs) transfer when the ocean is on average 3 degrees warmer than the air above it.
The notion that anthropogenic atmospheric warming somehow does the ocean heating (and accumulation) down past 2 kilometres depth instead of long-term solar forcing and geo fluxes is plainly bonkers when the quantity of energy required to be introduced at that depth to account for estimates of accumulation is considered. Hydrovents are a heat source already there at that depth but ignored until now, Nat Geo:
“Recent studies have attempted to factor the heat from the world’s known hydrothermal ridges into ocean circulation models.”
Good idea but I think only about 20% are known. And that’s an assumption in itself.
50
Thank you Richard C (NZ), I don’t have a quarrel with what you have posted here and I hope what I have typed isn’t somehow mistaken to be in support of warmist claims. Just the opposite is my thinking (especially Levitus etal.).
When considering a vent plume as it is rising (both by the force of ejection and by being less dense), it would certainly warm adjacent waters through mixing and those waters too would begin to rise. The cold water I was describing would necessarily replace that added volume without having gone through the intrusion “pump”. My point being that little of the heat would remain at depth as it would naturally rise. To be clear I have no doubt that the marine life found near vents feels the benefit of some warmth but I also imagine that the sea floor at those locations is warmed from underneath not so much from the vent plume which is already on the way up. The added heating of water by the proximity of a magma chamber under the sea floor (without intrusion) should not be discounted either. This being possible at potentially vast surface areas without the benefit of a visible plume to make us aware.
10
Mark D #12.3.2.1.1
>”I also imagine that the sea floor at those locations is warmed from underneath not so much from the vent plume”
Yes, the proximity of the magma heat source, thickness of the crust, rock composition, etc, would all determine sea floor heating around vent fields rather than the actual vents (and more than the 0.09 W/m2 ave flux value).
But the heat transfer to overbearing seawater by forced hot water injection is far greater power (Joules per second, or Watts) in these localities.
I live at Mt Maunganui which is an extinct cone (hopefully). There are hot pools at the base, on the harbour side hot water seeps up through the sand at the boat ramp. On the ocean side there’s Mayor Is (extinct) and White Is (semi active) steaming away. To the south on land there’s Mt Edgecumbe (extinct cone) and the geothermal fields right down past Rotorua to Taupo.
The geo heat is not evident as a flux but it certainly is in the transfer mediums, water and steam. I took a wrong turn at Tokaanu once while kayaking up a stream flowing into Taupo. Ended up in hot water – literally. Backpaddled furiously when I noticed the kayak getting hot and wisps of steam on the surface.
The hydrovents at the seafloor would be steam, not water, just as at a geothermal field on land if it wasn’t for the immense pressure.
Mech engineers at process plants know how much energy is required to raise steam for industrial use (a lot). Coal combustion does it, electricity doesn’t. But steam to electricity is a doddle, hence:
‘Submarine Geothermics;
Hydrothermal Vents and Electricity Generation’
Hiriart et al (2010)
http://www.geothermal-energy.org/pdf/IGAstandard/WGC/2010/3704.pdf
10
Adding a post script, I understand that these plumes may not rise to the surface. I imagine the water columns rising from a vent are turbulent and mixing with adjacent cold water as they rise. The column would stop rising when the combined mixture encountered water of the same temperature or was sheared off by strong current (visually much like a thunderstorm and anvil cloud) I imagine too, these masses of water are moved by currents to yet colder (or warmer) areas and then begin to rise (or sink) again. Ultimately, if they reach the surface affecting weather AND supplying nutrient material to sea life. I also imagine that vents occurring in areas with little ocean current, build an ever growing mass of warmer water that eventually does well up to the surface.
Again, how could anyone including Levitus etal. claim to have measured and quantified what is happening? How could they attribute, with certainty, anything to CO2?
10
Mark D #12.3
>”If that is correct, how could these vents contribute to warming at depth?”
In the case of megaplumes, not much because the plume “can reach a column of 1,000 to 1,500 meters [3,280 to 4,920 feet], so it reaches right up into the midwater” (Murton). The heating by megaplumes is “midwater”, which I assume he means, without checking, at about 2000 – 2500m depth.
But megaplumes are exceptional. Above that Murton quote he distinguishes between megaplumes and “regular” hydrovents:
“Regular hydrothermal fields stir the water for only a few hundred meters (about a thousand feet) above the ocean floor”
So a regular hydrovent doesn’t have the force of a megaplume. However, as I understand, most known hydrothermal fields have been found at around 2000 – 2500m depth on average so those are already at midwater rather than at depth.
The reason most known fields have been found at midwater is, as Nat Geo states:
The new data on hydrothermal fields and megaplumes underscores the fact that volcanic activity on the ocean floor remains a largely mysterious phenomenon. “Ninety percent of the Earth’s volcanic activity takes place underwater,” Murton said. “Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
And,
“The cost of working in the deep ocean is so extreme,” explained Reves-Sohn of Woods Hole. “We have the same problem in the scientific community. We don’t get to go to look at these places as much as we’d like.”
As I see, there’s still many fields at say 3000 – 4000+m yet to be discovered, if ever. Some that have (from Wiki):
Sister Peak (Comfortless Cove Hydrothermal Field, 4°48′S 12°22′W, elevation -2996 m), Shrimp Farm and Mephisto (Red Lion Hydrothermal Field, 4°48′S 12°23′W, elevation -3047 m), are three hydrothermal vents of the black smoker category, located on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge near Ascension Island
The world’s deepest known black smokers are located in the Cayman Trough, 5,000 m (3.1 miles) below the ocean’s surface.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent
Black smokers that deep are not megaplumes so they MUST warm the ocean at depth in the vicinity including Cayman Trough above at 5000m.
40
It’s been estimated there are about 4,000 submarine volcanoes per million square kilometers of just the Pacific Ocean’s sea floor [volcano.oregonstate.edu/submarine].
If the estimate is anywhere near to being realistic, then extrapolating this across all the oceans leads to an estimated million or more under-sea mounts, with over 75,000 rising more than a kilometer above the sea floor. The sea floor covers over 70% of the globe’s surface area and may be responsible for over 75% of the annual output of magma.
If their climate contribution is real, and correlation is not necessarily causation, then it is an area crying out for globally coordinated and thorough research. (Sigh! All that good grant money wasted on atmospheric models which could have been put to much better use!)
More interesting material here suggests this has been the case. Unfortunately, this is an expensive area to reasearch.
20
@Richard C
We will probably never be able to put an accurate number on the energy being supplied by all forms of underwater geothermal activity.
A simple way to see the effect of ALL underwater seismic energy activity combined is to look at long term deep ocean temperatures.
The last 84 million years the DEEP oceans have been cooling down, losing ~ 18K in that period. The 100 mW/m^2 geothermal flux alone added the total OHC content ~ 60 times over during that period, yet the oceans cooled down.
My conclusion is that all the warming from any geothermal source is almost exactly countered by cooling at very high latitudes.
The sun warms the upper 200 meters or so of our oceans, so bottom heated water can’t reach the surface in over 90% of the oceans. This means that in the remaining 10% ~1 W/m^2 has to be lost to the atmosphere to compensate for the geothermal flux alone.
Bottom line is that the temperature of the deep oceans has been caused by geothermal ONLY.
The sun is warming the upper 200 meters of ocean water from ~ 275K to ~290K.
Surface temperature explained => NO greenhouse effect.
see my article on Tallblokes.
30
Ben #12.3.3.2
>”The sun warms the upper 200 meters or so of our oceans”
>”The sun is warming the upper 200 meters of ocean water from ~ 275K to ~290K”
I realize you’re making an on-average generalization but I’m a bit adverse to that in this case. I think it is important to confine solar oceanic heating to where it actually occurs – the tropics.
Refer chart:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/pacific-temperature-transect-150w.jpg
Figure 3 (Figure 10 from cited source.) North/South Pacific transect at 150°W. ORIGINAL CAPTION: Vertical section of potential temperature (°C) along 150°W from data collected in 1991-1993 [abbrev.but check the rest at link below]
From,
‘Where in the World is Argo?’
by Willis Eschenbach
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/06/where-in-the-world-is-argo/
Yes, 15 – 30 C at the equator to 200m but either side of the equator (20N & 20S) the heating is a little deeper.
5 – 15 C water extends from 50N to 55S and 1000m deep in the SH. Beyond that very little warm water.
Until just recently, in the SH winter, sfc water temperature off Mt Maunganui NZ (Lat -37.6) was 15 C (probably go down to 11 C before the winter is over) but that water was heated initially in the tropics – not off NZ.
Hansen thinks “The oceans will begin to boil….” when GHG forcing really kicks in. That’s about as daft as AGW gets I think.
10
>”Until just recently, in the SH winter, sfc water temperature off Mt Maunganui NZ (Lat -37.6) was 15 C”
The Bay of Plenty wave buoy data is offline at present (buoy servicing) but here’s August 2012 to June 2013 sea surface temperature I captured back then:
http://monitoring.boprc.govt.nz/MonitoredSites/cgi-bin/hydwebserver.cgi/points/plot?point=834&aggregate=0&Sdt=23/06/2012%2013%3A30&Fdt=23/06/2013%2013%3A30&trType=2&trParam=0&UUID=15879.06333039352
14.5 deg. C Aug 2012 (winter ending).
21 – 21.5 Feb/Mar 2013 (summer ending).
So perhaps we wont see 11 C this winter if 2012 is anything to go by. The ocean does keep the air temp up in winter along the coast in this neck of the woods unless there’s wind.
The really warm water comes down from the tropics when the sun comes into the SH. Local solar heating is the lessor heating agent for that.
00
Fine. But do you agree that most of the oceans surface water has a temperature (~density) that is high enough to prevent water warmed at the oceans bottom to reach the surface?
00
>”But do you agree that most of the oceans surface water has a temperature (~density) that is high enough to prevent water warmed at the oceans bottom to reach the surface?”
Most? No, you are being overly generalist Ben. Prevent? No – you cannot “trap” heat (contrary to AGW rhetoric). If there was no dissipation route for geothermally heated water. the heat would just accumulate – it doesn’t.
See the thread below for solar ocean heating, ocean heat transport, and water temperatures (°C) which I repeat for convenience:
Anchorage
January -1
July 14
Kiribati (equator)
March 28 – 30
September 26 – 29
Obviously there’s no temperature gradient bottom (1 or 2°C) to surface (26 to 30°C) at the tropics. There is sfc to bottom but the sfc heat moves horizontally towards the poles because that’s the greater gradient than to the bottom. Heat at depth will move in whatever direction there’s a gradient. Towards the surface at the tropics is out of the question so the heat remains in storage (hence term – “heat sink”) until such time (years, decades, centuries even) as diffusion and whatever transport (yes, transport dependent on pressure/density gradients – see below, but heat transfer/transport is not necessarily constrained) enables heat to dissipate to the surface, not in the tropical zone but towards the poles.
Given the January water temperature at Anchorage of -1°C, water at 1 or 2°C at depth under the tropics has a gradient to Anchorage (or wherever else there’s a similar gradient.
And there is a mechanism for deep water to rise to the surface at Anchorage (Lat 61.2167° N) – ocean gyres (from Wiki, my emphasis):
Subpolar gyres form at high latitudes (around 60°). Circulation of surface wind and ocean water is counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, around a low-pressure area, such as the persistent Aleutian Low and the Icelandic Low. Surface currents generally move outward from the center of the system. This drives the Ekman transport, which creates an upwelling of nutrient-rich water from the lower depths.[4]
Subpolar circulation in the southern hemisphere is dominated by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, due to the lack of large landmasses breaking up the Southern Ocean. There are minor gyres in the Weddell Sea and the Ross Sea, the Weddell Gyre and Ross Gyre, which circulate in a clockwise direction.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_gyre
Heat in upwelling cold water from depth, once at the surface at -1°C off Anchorage in January say, then has a gradient to the atmosphere where January high/low is -5/-12°C.
Not so in July because the Anchorage water is 14°C (atm high/low, 19/11°C).
00
“Most? No, you are being overly generalist Ben. Prevent? No – you cannot “trap” heat (contrary to AGW rhetoric). If there was no dissipation route for geothermally heated water. the heat would just accumulate – it doesn’t.”
That is why I mentioned the 10% (or less) surface area where cooling IS possible. The places where deep ocean and bottom water is formed.
All heat that enters the deep oceans from earths interior warms up the deep oceans. Warming rate for the 100 mW/m^2 geothermal flux alone is ~1K every 5000 years for the entire ocean. This heating is countered by cooling at high latitudes. For the last ~84 million years the cooling has been very slightly more than the warming, since the deep oceans cooled ~18K.
00
Imo it’s more complex than this. see eg. this site
In the summer months Anchorage receives on average more solar energy than eg. Benin or Singapore.
But whatever the mechanism, fact remains that a very large part of the oceans is covered with a warm(er) surface layer (or sea ice), effectively preventing bottom heated water to reach the surface (unless it’s density is lower than the density of the surface water).
My point is that the deep oceans can only lose energy in a small part of their total surface area (less than 10% in a rough estimate), mostly around Antarctica. see eg this image
All solar energy is absorbed in the upper 200 meters or so, and released again at the surface, warming the atmosphere.
00
Look at the North/South Pacific transect at #12.3.3.2.2 Ben.
It’s very clear that ocean heating is predominately in the tropics i.e. this zone:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_indicating_tropics_and_subtropics.png
It’s the angle of incidence that is important for radiative penetration (tracklength). From Wiki:
“The tropics include all the areas on the Earth where the Sun reaches a subsolar point, a point directly overhead at least once during the solar year.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropics
You don’t get that in Anchorage, Alaska.
00
Should be:
“Look at the North/South Pacific transect at #12.3.3.2.[1] Ben.”
00
>”It’s the angle of incidence that is important for radiative penetration (tracklength).”
Sun elevation and solar absorption
90°, 98% absorbed, 2% reflected
15°, 80% absorbed, 20% reflected
Anchorage July declination is 18.8° (Jan 18°) so depth of penetration is only 21% of what it would be at 90° and absorption a little more than 81% of what it would be i.e. the heating effect is inefficient. This is evident in the respective water temperatures (°C):
Anchorage
January -1
July 14
Kiribati
March 28 – 30
September 26 – 29
Solar ocean heating occurs predominantly in the tropics Ben.
00
>”Solar ocean heating occurs predominantly in the tropics”
After that, horizontal poleward heat transport:
‘The ocean heat transport’
https://pangea.stanford.edu/courses/EESS146Bweb/Lecture%2016.pdf
Refer page 14: Basin to basin distribution of ocean heat transport
At 20N and 20S the Pacific ocean is moving 1 PW north and south horizontally estimated to be confined to the upper 500m in SH (page 19):
•Nearly all of the heat transport in the southern hemisphere is confined to upper 500 m.
00
I wonder how long it will be before the Planet Saver propaganda sites take down their atomic bomb widgets, which tell us how many gazillion explosions worth of heat there have been since whenever, during which the global temperature has not changed.
80
They blamed it on cold fusion.
70
Jo posts: “Around 90% of all the energy in the Earth’s climate system is in the oceans.”
Wellll, yeeeeah, but.
We’re talking about thermal buffers here. What has to change, in order for the climate to change.
Water holds more heat than air. Clearly. There is more water than air in the climate system. Clearly. So long-term changes in the heat content (and eventually, temperature) of the ocean must be expected to manifest before changes in the long term “typical” air/weather heat and temperature measures.
BUT, or possibly AND:
There is what engineers would call a s*it pot load of thermal mass in the icecaps. The ice, like the oceans, has a state that changes very gradually. And from the perspective of climate politics (distinct from science) the ice is not “changing” because it is not and can not be seen to be “melting”. A rise in air/climate/weather temperatures at the poles from minus multiple dozens of degrees (F or C, doesn’t matter for this) to a changed new typical value of minus multiples plus even 6 additional degrees (assume C, just to be generous) doesn’t reach the necessary temperature to change the phase of the H2O from solid to liquid. The heat and the temperature necessary to significantly change the typical state of the polar icecap is, by my estimation, well, HUGE, okay? When we’re talking about changes in seasonal WEATHER that are vastly (a dozen times) bigger than the changes is average CLIMATE the ice buffers those changes in the same way the ocean does.
But the ice caps are every bit as poorly measured a part of the system as the deep oceans.
We have the arrogance to look at the AIR temperatures of the habitable parts of the globe for a few dozen decades, the SURFACE temperature of the oceans for a decade or so less, neglect the rest of the ocean and both of the icecaps, and assume we can do “physics” on the (white and blue and green and yellow) globe using the black-body equations of radiation. C’mon! Who’s doing the “chemistry” (calorimetry) on the phase shifts of the system? Anybody? Bueller? Bueller?
This of course completely leaves out the liquid-phase ROCKS deeper in. Hey physicists! Run the math for us! What happens to the AIR when a few megatons of liquid rock emerges thru the insulating surface and changes to a solid phase, releasing the heat into that air?
100
What do you say about the continuous fall of ocean “snow” that rains down unendingly since the dawn of time.
This “snow” is the detritus from dead plankton and algae, fish scales and shit, mamals dead skin and excreta, dead plants and so much more. All of this matter that builds up at about 1-2 inches per century on the ocean floor, and stays there. Has this ocean floor slime no energy impact?
Well I’m sure that the CAGW will write it off without inspection as their hypothosis is complete – or so they say.
50
Ooops:
Not builds up at about 1-2 inches
Should be builds up at about 1-2 cm
40
Far more relevant is what happens when at least 136 million km^3 of liquid rock is released into the deep oceans. Last time this has happened the deep oceans were ~18K warmer than today.
See here for more details
00
Could “missing heat” possibly mean that the theory that there’s more heat hiding somewhere is wrong?
I just thought I’d ask?
Sorry for the sarcastic attitude if it offends any of you believers out there. But it’s time for you to face this question squarely
80
If a volcano above a hot spot does not erupt forever, how can we possibly measure these changing effects accurately?
Eventually the movement of the tectonic plate carries the volcano off of its magma supply. The volcano becomes extinct and cools. The plate beneath the volcano (and above the hot spot) also cools. The rocks that make the volcano and plate become denser. The volcano and the plate gradually subside as they move away from the hot spot. Even giant volcanoes, like Mauna Loa on Hawaii, will eventually disappear into the ocean. As the volcano subsides below sea-level the top is eroded flat by waves.
http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/book/export/html/138
20
Yep, simple concept.
Works out at about 2mm over 10 years.
But more dramatic to say sea level is rising.
40
They can become an coral island?
20
…and eventually the volcano disappears completely as it is subducted into the mantle on the other side of its tectonic plate to be recycled.
10
Let’s look at reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K34DVorBTZs
20
If the energy left the system (that is not destroying it), you are not going to find it in the system.
That is a simple truism, but watch how every alarmist argues with it.
70
I have more than once wondered how Jo and other such bloggers can so tirelessly keep it up. But thinking about it, a more interesting question is how the warmists on these blogs have for so long kept going despite receiving continual batterings from the facts. But browsing through the comments, the evidence is that they are starting to fade. Has anyone else noticed that?
Thank you Jo.
80
Instruction Manual reality.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPXABS5oKhw&src_vid=P5kVuA6OOQM&feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_2762711393
20
Off topic, so my apologies to everyone – but this is so bonkers I have to post it.
I switched on my computer, and found this message from my internet provider:
“Service Delays due to Extreme Weather.
Due to the recent bad weather some customers may experience delays to their engineer appointments and some disruption to their services.”
‘Extreme weather’? Here we are in the middle of a typical English summer, some hot days, some heavy rain showers at other times, and varying cloud cover with a pleasant breeze!
Has anyone else in the UK experienced this ‘extreme weather’, I wonder?
50
I thought the UK was the definition of extreme w….
60
We were laughing at the fact that 27C is described as a heatwave in the UK, with advice on how to cope with it ladelled out by the nanny state! Matt, the cartoonist in the Daily Telegraph, had a very good mick-take of it; sorry…no link but Google Matt cartoons.
50
Current southern polar vortex at an altitude of 17 km.
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/70hPa/orthographic=23.26,-86.31,318
50
Somewhat off-topic question:
Is it true that tornadoes in Australia rotate counter-clockwise?
20
Yes…. and water goes down the drain hole likewise.
20
I’ve heard the water also goes down the drain backwards.
20
Oops! I meant to say clockwise in Australia.
Its counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere, around a low pressure system.
20
Well…. I knew it was one way or the other 😛
40
We had a very long discussion with our eldest grandson about the Coriolis effect.
20
James McCown
July 26, 2014 at 3:52 am · Reply
James
Generally dust devils / willie willies which are small concentrated rotating thermals or columns of a rising and rotating air mass but not a very intense and concentrated high energy tornado type system,rotate in a clockwise direction down here in the Southern Hemisphere / Australia.
When flying those small intense willie willies in a glider it can get damn rough when trying to circle in the lift area and climb in a larger version as the turbulence within the willie willie can be a teeth jarring extreme with a number of secondary willie willies often spinning away and rotating around in the main rotating column all of which as you fly through bounce the hell out of everything.
They can also pitch you right out of the willie willie often in an attitude where the horizion is not where it should at all be but is somewhere else entirely until you get sorted out and get right way up again when you get a real roughie
But get a good one and we can get rates of climb with the glider of well over a thousand feet a minute inside of a good one .
Probably 80% or 90% but not entirely all of the willie willies down here in the Southern Hemisphere / Australia rotate in a clockwise direction so glider pilots generally turn to the left, ie; anti-clockwise so as to go against the direction of rotation of not only willie willies but also the standard average thermal which usually has some rotation at height as well.
Not that there ever is a such a thing as your standard average thermal in existence. They are all different.
Going against the direction of rotation of a willie, willie / dust devil / thermal, all the same thing as is a tornado, only the energy concentration in the rising column of air is different, for a glider pilot means you are running into and through the turbulence pockets which makes for much easier and a little smother flying and your airspeed at the high angles of bank needed for a tight turning within the thermal / willie willie is quite high so we try to maintain as small a diameter turning circle as possible to stay in the centre of the lift area, then turning left/ anti clockwise against the clockwise air flow direction of a willie willie / thermal means that without going into all sorts of explanations, our turning circle inside of the thermal is a little smaller so we can stay within the strongest lift areas more easily.
We do have tornados in Australia although they are not as strong as the USA ones but can do a hell of a lot of damage when they strike a settled area.
There is a small tornado alley to the north of one of the local Wimmera towns, Dimboola, where real tornadoes seem to go through every few years leaving a quite obvious path of quite severe destruction behind them.
One such tornado touched down for about a hundred metres in heavy gum tree timber on my brother’s property a few years ago and twisted off big solid heavy timber Gum trees up to 400 mms through. It missed his house and buildings by about a hundred metres. He got enough fire wood out of that one to keep him going for a few years.
If you watch those puffy cumulous clouds above you for a few minutes you will often see a part of the cloud somewhere on it’s outer fringes, quite visibly rotating.
Thats where an rising column of warmer air , the thermal that has both created that cloud and is feeding it, is actually continuing to feed warm air into the base of that cloud.
Warm and moister air that like your breath ona cold frosty morning, that warm moist air from the lower levels from which the moisture condenses out of the rising air column when it reaches altitudes that are cool enough to do so and so you get a cloud at the top of that thermal and created by that thermal.
And of course ALL clouds of every type except the near space noctilucent clouds [ & Cloud Appreciation Society ] of the polar regions are formed in some way by warmer moister rising air ie thermals
“Warmer air ” is a relative term as the Scandinavian glider pilots get thermals off frozen lakes in mid winter at below freezing temperature.
It is the contrasts in temperatures, the contrasts in energy concentration right across every facet of the world’s immensely varying climates and environments that drive all those weather phenomena as well as those ocean currents and ocean temperature gradients under discussion in this blog post of Jo’s
50
In WA we have things called Cock Eyed Bobs which may be the same as tornadoes.
00
Hi James,
My understanding is that large cyclones follow the predictions of the Coriolis Effect at some minimum distance from the Equator (no effect close to the Equator, hence no hurricanes), but that in smaller masses of fluids (water or air) internal vectors or basin irregularities may swamp the Coriolis Effect.
So, a ‘hurricane’ should rotate counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. Smaller cyclones such as tornados may not necessarily follow this rule – I would guess size and topography might be major influences.
Sinks and toilets will tend to drain consistently in one direction, but this will be independent of hemisphere. I remember how disappointed I was when I learned this was a myth. Almost as disappointing as learning CO2 didn’t control climate.
20
If you want to look at a lot of diagrams of OHC, here’s your link from a very good source:
http://www.clivar.org/sites/default/files/documents/gsop/DISCUSSION_II_LOEB.pdf
Someone over at Climate Etc raised the question of sea level rise which is sort of a check on OHC. So the Wunsch et al paper should roughly reconcile with the sea level rise, taking into account ice sheet loss.
At the above link on page 13 there’s a CERES TOA Net Radiation graph. One could argue a flat TOA net, and a flat GAT implies a flat OHC.
20
Arctic Snorkelers will find the missing heat …
Women plan 3,000km Northwest Passage snorkel relay
‘It will be very black, so we are not gonna see much,’ says expedition leader Susan R. Eaton
Last summer, Eaton was among a group of adventure tourists plucked from remote north Baffin Island by helicopter after the ice pan she was camping on unexpectedly broke away from land and began to drift away.
The rescue cost the Canadian Military $2.7 million, the National Post later reported.
That hasn’t deterred Eaton.
Susan R. Eaton says she’s passionate about adventure, empowering Inuit women and girls, and educating the world about the global melt now underway.
. . .
Further evidence the idiots are in charge.
51
Regarding your reference to Matthew England’s trade wind paper he wrote back in February, it seems now, six months later he has changed his mind and now blames the IPO (Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation) for the ‘pause’;
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL060527/abstract
This is England’s second excuse for the ‘pause’ and the AGW ‘experts’ excuse #14 (or there abouts).
h/t The Hockey Schtick;
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2014/07/new-excuse-for-pause-negative-phase-of.html
30
For two years now I’ve been preaching that it is anti.science to rabbit on about ocean properties when the deeper half of the vollume is so sparsely sampled and explored.
If you have worked with systems that you wish to sample and characterise and if you know the significance of Nyquist and similar, you too would be embarrassed by claims like those of Wunsch that meaningful maps of temperature changes in the deep oceans can be made.
It is noise, Carl, with so many data gaps that you could fit in many unknown undersea, hot volcanos.
Remember, Carl, that you have a redibility problem after your contribution to the Great Global Warming Swindle. We are almost exactly the same ages, Carl. You should have learned by now that data trumps guesses.
20
“2. Thou shalt not create nor destroy energy.”
Unless you convert mass to energy.
There is significant radioactivity in the core. Probably no reason why the hot spots would coincide with Earthquake map though.
The deeper maps are 99.8% confabulaiton. How many readings were there in 1993 ?!
I would not believe anything below 700m , take 2000m with a large pinch of sea salt.
Contour maps look really sexy but if they did the same maps with data points marked you’d probably fall on the floor laughing.
30
Climate “experts” presumably know that a brief ten thousand years ago you could have walked from Vic to Tassie, but they seem appalled by any manifestation of climate change. They constantly allege that the climate has been shot and we must round up the usual suspects.
Here’s a thought to save the world from educated pottiness. Let’s have a new IGY, and International Geophysical Year like 1958, but with a few unusual rules. No participants are allowed indoors except for basic functions, all are to examine and record the physical world without drawing conclusions or uttering theories…and anybody tempted to publish will perish. Those who come through will be declared “not potty” or “less potty now” or “potential to be less potty”.
21
For a laugh-out-loud moment, a letter in today’s (26/7) “The Australian”, in full for those without subscription-
“YOU have muddled the science of ocean heat uptake, lumping upper ocean heat uptake with deep ocean trends (“Puzzle of deep ocean cooling”, 25/7). The former is much better constrained by decades of measurements and shows unequivocal warming and accelerated heat uptake, explaining the recent slowdown in atmospheric warming.
The latter suffers from sparse data, although the available estimates suggest overall warming prevails. The ocean is a vast volume of seawater that has sucked up over 90 per cent of anthropogenic heat in the past half century. A few isolated regions of deep ocean cooling doesn’t change this fact.
Matthew England, University of NSW”
This is so clearly only aimed at someone who has no idea of the debate (or probably anything else in the real world), that it is hard to imagine it not coming back at him academically. I can see him now, furiously chewing his pencil trying to come up with a word that isn’t “data”, to refute the data, and finally settling on “estimates”.
He must think anyone who believes his story is stupid.
30
Lomborg and Tol at last are having an impact on the delusional extremism of the EU.
http://notrickszone.com/2014/07/25/tollomborg-becoming-powerful-voices-of-reason-on-climate-policy-in-german-media-1-euro-costs-3-cents-benefit/
The cost/waste by 2100 would be 185 trillion Euros for a reduction in temp of 0.05c or ZIP.
Absolutely barking mad the lot of them.
71
I’m sorry that should read a cost of 15 trillion euros by 2100 not 185 trillion. The annual cost would be 185 billion euros.
And the reduction in temp would be 0.05c by 2100.
20
On the cooling / warming of the deeo oceans.
There are only a few ways in which an even very rough idea of the temperature variations and therefore the heat content of the deeo oceans can be measured / estimated /ascertained.
First and most obvious were the very few and sparse scientific deeo ocean oceanography surveys before and after WW2.
Even these surveys and the drive to explore the deeps of the world’s ocean tapered off after 1960.
The American Navy owned, Auguste Piccard designed two man Bathyscape, the “Trieste” reached the bottom of the Mariana’s Trench, the 10,000 metres [ 36,000 feet ] Challenger Deep off Guam on 23rd January 1960.
It was to be over half a century before mankind descended again to the bottom of the Challenger Deep with the one man, Sydney built submersible DeepSea Challenger
The temperatures of the ocean deeps are generally only known down to about 2000 metres from the pre ARGO Float XBT data [ Expendable Bathythermographs ] which is highly suspect and the subject of some very harsh estimated [ ? ] “adjustments” when it was discovered towards the end of the XBT program the rate of sinking / free fall of the wire link reporting XBT floats had been mis-estimated leading to supposedly warmer temperatures being measured at depths that were considerably different to what were calculated and assumed.
Then in 2004 the ARGO Float array of some 3000 deep diving ARGO floats initially to 700 metres and now down to 2000 metres deep was deployed in the world’s oceans.
Shortly thereafter it was decided by the head of the ARGO Float system organisation, a warmist, that some floats were reading too low deep ocean temperatures [ which destroyed a lot of the claims about the warming of the oceans from CAGW ] so those low temperature reading floats were eliminated from the ARGO data base.
Any deep ocean temperature reading ARGO floats that read too high were apparently non existent. [ /sarc ]
The ARGO float array now numbering some 4000 floats in the World’s oceans is a truly marvelous technological development but it is being used by alarmist climate science to claim fantasy deep ocean temperature data for which it hasn’t measured below 2000 metres and accuracies in deep ocean temperatures and therefore deep ocean heat content far beyond the real actual accuracy of it’s sensor systems abilities to accurately measure temperatures, salinity and possibly accurate depths plus another set of data from some specialised ARGO Floats now being deployed.
Some reading on the deep ocean temperature / heat content scenario;
From Roy Spencer who gives a number of possible scenarios that tie in with Jo’s headline piece
More on Trenberth’s Missing Heat
The ARGO Float data has been the subject of numerous and varied adjustments as seems to be endemic in data that has any relationship at all with climate science.
And it all to do with the assumed rates of drift in and calibration of the ARGO sensors.
The mish mash of adjustments to the ARGO Float data can be seen in the abstract of this paper which deals with the Pressure Sensor drift, the measurement of how deep the ARGO float dives to and the depth it measures the deep ocean systems.
Pressure Sensor Drifts in Argo and Their Impacts
Then from the official ARGO sources we have these items on the adjustments to the data
Sensor Response Correction Example
Salinity Drift Adjustment Example
And for a primer on the ARGO system for those who are not familiar with it’s design or purpose or the way in which the whole system works [ slow loading ]
ARGO FLOATS
And 4000 floats in the world’s oceans sounds a very impressive coverage of the World’s oceans but have a read of Willis E’s post on WUWT on this ARGO float coverage to get some idea on just how sparse that coverage actually is.
Krige the Argo Probe Data, Mr. Spock!
I expect that few will read many of these links but the short version is that an accuracy for the supposed changes in the deep ocean temperatures [ in hundreths of a degree ] and therefore for ocean heat content is being claimed for which there is no supporting technical evidence of any sort.
Claims on those changes in deep ocean temperatures which are entirely subject to the types and amounts and ranges of the in many cases , “estimated” adjustments that are being applied to the various deep ocean sensor data for which there is very little evidence availablle to justify.
11
TRENBERTH LOSES HIS STRAWBERRIES
(see the court room scene from The Caine Mutiny)
As greenhouse gases still accrete
This captain of the climate wars
Is searching for the missing heat
That he believes the ocean stores
He’ll prove to all humanity
That danger in the deep resides
The Kraken that he knows to be
That Davy Jones’s Locker hides
The soul’s more heavy than we thing
A truth that everyone must face
And to what depths a soul may sink
Oh! To what dark and dismal place
Does Captain Trenberth understand
That data offers no appeal?
He tumbles in his restless hand
Three clacking balls of stainless steel
MY GEOMETRIC LOGIC PROVES
HEAT TELEPORTS FROM PLACE TO PLACE
FROM SKIES INTO THE DEPTHS IT MOVES
AND IN BETWEEN IT LEAVES NO TRACE!
When silent faces stare at you
Its always best to shut your jaw
But Trenberth is without a clue
As he believes they stare in awe
Eugene WR Gallun
40
I think it might be worth developing a signature headline to designate the steadily rising number of similar content renewable energy headlines ;
It couldn’t happen to a
nicermore despicable bunch of greed driven big time scammers than thisOff topic;
UK; TheTelegraph
Offshore wind farms in doubt as subsidy pot can fund just one project
[quoted ]
Finite budget for green energy subsidies is now on the verge of exhaustion, leaving nearly a dozen proposed offshore wind farms facing uncertain fate
Plans for a series of new offshore wind farms have been thrown into doubt after the Government disclosed it would only award enough subsidies this autumn to fund one such project.
Wind farm developers who fail to secure a subsidy contract this year will be forced to wait and attempt to secure funding in future years, with no guarantee of how much money – if any – will be available.
The disclosure underlines a growing realisation in the industry that the finite budget for green subsidies is now on the verge of exhaustion and there is simply not enough cash left for many projects now in the pipeline to be built this decade.
The Treasury has said the cost to consumers of green subsidies must rise to no more than £7.6bn in the 2020-21 financial year. The vast majority of that will be used up by subsidies for projects that have either already been built, are under construction, or have already been awarded a subsidy contract.
Ministers said on Thursday that they would allocate new contracts this autumn for projects requiring up to £205m in annual subsidies, of which £155m is earmarked for technologies such as offshore wind.
&
Until now, offshore wind farms have been subsidised through a scheme called the Renewables Obligation (RO), but this will be closed to projects built after April 2017.
&
The budget post-2020 is yet to be set but at a minimum will have to expand to accommodate new nuclear plants, the first of which could start generating power – and therefore using up susbidies – from around 2024.
[end]
30
And again
This time from the USA
U.S. FEDERAL AGENCY FACES BACKLASH AFTER WIND FARMS GET EXEMPTION FOR KILLING EAGLES
A recent Wildlife Society survey estimated 1.4 million bats and birds are killed annually by wind turbines. In the past five years, wind farms have destroyed at least 67 eagles, mostly golden eagles.
Wind industry insiders call it a “turbine collision,” though the feds prefer “non-purposeful take.”
But critics such as Sharon Klemm get real on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife website: “Why don’t you call it what it is? Shooting eagles. Killing Eagles. Murdering Eagles.”
The backlash over a controversial 2013 government rule exempting wind farms from prosecution for the unintentional deaths of bald and golden eagles—for up to three decades—continues to play out in emotional online comments.
“Eagles along with other birds are being chopped out of the air and suffer horrible injuries and death by the blades of high-speed wind turbines,” wrote Patricia Lewko. “This practice has been given a green light by this administration in the name the name of Clean or Green Energy. … What is so clean about chopping up birds to either lie in agony or be mutilated?”
Bald eagles were removed from the endangered species list in 2007, yet killing bald and golden eagles remains a felony punishable by a $250,000 fine and prison time.
[ more ]
30
And again ;
The worm is turning and becoming a very big dangerous to climate alarmist critter indeed !
The German NoTricksZone blog;
Tol/Lomborg Becoming Powerful Voices Of Reason On Climate Policy In German Media: “1 Euro Costs…3 Cents Benefit” –
[quoted ]
It seems that it is beginning to dawn on some of Europe’s mainstream media: The transition to green energies is turning out to be ten or even 100 times more expensive than what they were led to believe just a few years ago.
Increasingly we have been seeing reports featuring renowned climate economists such as Bjørn Lomborg or Richard Tol in the German-language mainstream media.
The message: Hey, this green energy policy really isn’t working well at all.
&
[ my bold ]
The Austrian nachrichten.at then writes about the astronomical costs and the utter ineffectivity of climate policy so far:
Already the EU 2020 strategy costs 185 billion euros annually. By the end of the century the costs will run to 15 trillion euros. With this, according to the UN IPCC, the global temperature increase will be lowered 0.05°C. For every euro that the EU pays into climate protection, it prevents 3 cents worth of damage from climate change. Lomborg writes: ‘That is not rational policy!’”
[ cont]
–
40
How can we trust someone who draws a map without Tasmania and New Zealand in it to get other details right.
40
This just showed up:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/26/solar-cycle-driven-ocean-temperature-variations/
10
From the end of the piece:
00
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/26/solar-cycle-driven-ocean-temperature-variations/#comment-1694859
So we can go a stretch further and combine what we know. When solar activity falls, energy comes out of the ocean, not just over the period of the decline of a single 11 year solar cycle, but if the Sun stays low in activity terms, for many years. An integration of the sunspot number shows us that the ocean heat content rose all the way from 1934 to 2003. This is the real cause of ‘global warming’. A lot of excess energy is still retained in the upper ocean. We can expect the effect of a couple of low solar cycles to be softened by a proportion of that excess heat returning to space via the atmosphere warming it on the way.
00
The oblique ‘shear line’ of volcanic activity from Antarcta through the Pacific Rim to Iceland (and beyond,) may be explained by the following extract from Alex S. Gaddes’ (‘Tomorrow’s Weather’ 1990. Model of a Convection Still. (pp 114)
“Raising of climatic temperature to a mean, specific, critical point, somehow dissociates moisture from lower atmosphere.
The more moisture used up, the drier and hotter the climate, the more dry air available to the convection ‘still’. So, the more super-cooled air delivered at the Poles.
Areas with drought conditions would be prevalent and widespread. Unexplainable ‘spot droughts’ would be conspicuous.
The deserts would tend to migrate away from the poles, ahead of cooler and wetter conditions. The vortex would centre over the point of greatest surface value of terrestrial G, in this case the Poles,
Thus, it seems, that there would always be extreme cold at the Poles (no matter where situated) so long as there were deserts and/or areas of dry air supply, in conjunction with required mean, specific, critical temperature.
The nightmarish hurricanes etc. which blast down from the Poles, would enter the lower atmosphere via the roaring circular cataracts over the Poles, the velocity of which would be easy to calculate from Density – Volume – Height.
It would be analogous to a kind of ‘invisible super Niagara’, but none the less real.
How else can the observed phenomena be explained? As far as I’m aware, the ratio of the lower atmospheric winds blowing to the Poles, to those blowing from the Poles is relatively low – where, density considered, there ought to be hurricane force winds, of greater mean volume and velocity blowing to the Poles, simultaneous with those blowing away there-from.
Even granting the above to be the case, would the enormous volume of warm air moving towards the Poles, spend sufficient time there to bring about the observed reduction in temperature? I doubt it. The role played by the Polar night, would be, I believe, only a supplementary one.
No one has yet explained to my satisfaction, just how this ‘snap freeze’ is brought about. It is beyond my comprehension to grasp, if the Pole itself is endowed with such physical powers! The model (Fig. 18) shows that the latter would not be necessary.
The above hypothesis has the advantage of being readily accessible to scientific test.
Mawson states that the average wind velocity for one year (continuous) at their base at Adelie Land, was 50 mph.*
As this record was taken about 1000 miles from the Pole, it would be reasonable to suppose that closer proximity to the Poles would make for higher average velocities.
Now if (as has been vaguely shown, in most authoritative works that I have been able to find) the devious wind currents moving from the equator to the Poles, finally reach the Poles (after continually changing direction and, presumably, gaining in density) and duly swing round to thereby commence the journey back to the equator, from whither comes the energy to accelerate the velocity of the (now) high density air?
*I learned from Mr. Robert Smith, who was a passenger in the recent Dick Smith tourist plane to Antarctica, that they enjoyed perfect weather, without a sign of turbulence on the Antarctic continent during the flight. Does this mean the tropospheric energy is also being piped away along with our momentum? For instance, how to explain the riddle of the missing Westerlies? Not all that long since, These ‘Roaring Forties’ could be guaranteed to set in (at this latitude, about 35 degrees south) around August, and continue to blow for about two months.
Would the low density in-going winds have the right order of velocity and whatever to make this geophysical U-turn and retain the observed characteristics?
Whereas; the mechanics of the hypothetic convection ‘still’ require only that the volume of warm dry air rises to a height whereby it gains a position of potential energy, from where it becomes gradually denser.
It would already be rotating, with Earth. As it gained density, so would it gain momentum. This, in turn, would be governed by the laws of the vortex? (see appendix. 6.) Also Kepler’s Second Law would govern the gradual decrease in velocity, as it reached the Pole.
The problem is, how did the Jet Stream gain such a high peripheral velocity?
Fig. 18: Convection Still
To me it seems that this would be a kind of equilibrium of spin. The above would be the velocity of rotation of Earth at the surface (approx.) 1000 mph.
Still following Kepler’s Second Law, we produce the hypothetic sweeping line from the axis of the Earth to a position in space, indicated by the peripheral velocity of the jet stream, over and above the mean velocity at Earth’s surface.
Another factor would be centrifugal force, caused by high velocity of periphery, would accommodate the fresh, warm, dry air, whilst space would be provided, as air cooled and became denser; so ‘sinking’ and spiraling toward the greatest point of value of terrestrial G – at the Poles. Thus we have two basic features of spin, as components of the basic cause, as well as warm, dry air rising and terrestrial G.
From the above considerations the requirement necessary to start the ‘still’ is the raising of the mean, specific, critical temperature of an area large enough to create enough dry air to inaugurate the jet stream.
From there on, the system would be more or less self regulating – the mechanism relying on a constant supply of warm, dry air. The basic energy would ultimately be derived directly from the Sun and Earth rotation.
Basic causal factors behind the Ice Ages then, are:
1. The Sun, the basic heat energy;
2. Warm, dry air rising (potential);
3. Rotation of Earth (velocity) with gradual cooling to give momentum;
4. Centrifugal force (differentiation);
5. Terrestrial gravitation (centre of spin) finally brings about cataract of super-cooled air delivered to Earth’s surface, at or about the Poles, plus all the kinetic energy derived from the forgoing potentials, which, I believe, is quite considerable.
Points taken from the Model;
The fact that, as the air becomes more dense, so its degree of inertia must rise in direct proportion, must have a significant effect. According to Newton, the higher the degree of inertia, the greater the tendency to move in a straight line at constant speed.
It seems to me that a high degree of inertia would (in conjunction with a progressively shorter distance of revolution) tend to have a compensating effect for gravitation.
This bearing in mind the tendency to maintain the initial peripheral speed, plus the fact that the whole spinning mass would have a tendency to move toward the point of least resistance, owing to reduction of pressure at periphery, plus the added tendency to freeze up, according to the principle of the spinning cone.
Subsequent Notes;
On completion of my ‘model’ I forwarded to Dr H. J. Harrington of the University of New England. He referred me to Arthur N. Strahler’s ‘The Earth Sciences’, (Harper.)
On thoroughly sifting the relevant data I decided to leave my ‘model’ in its original form because of the limits of my technical qualifications.
My initial intention was to air my theory about basic casual relationships, in this case the analogy of the spinning cone, causing reduction of pressure and a tendency to freeze up.
The fact that there has been (evidently) more than one Ice Age seems to argue that the Ice Ages (present anyhow) show evidence of a rhythmic or pulsating movement in time, suggests the specific presence of those very same basic factors, even at this specific point in time.
It would simplify matters to know what, in fact, constitutes normal global climatic conditions, in the absence of an Ice Age.
As far as I can ascertain, man has never known any other existence, nor may he ever live outside an ice Age environment.
The distribution of the major deserts of the Earth in the Northern Hemisphere, seems to me not at all coincidental in the scheme of the present Ice Age and its progenitors.
Geologists might do well to study the documents of the rocks, with an eye for the hemispherical distribution of ancient desert landscapes with relation to Ice Ages, in time.
On being advised by Dr Harrington of the correlation by scientists of the Chandler Wobble etc. with the occurrence of major earth-quakes, I was moved to seek a cause for the phenomena (see pages 166-7 of Ref. No.17,)
Considering this information in conjunction with the Law on Conservation of Angular Momentum, it seems that, if the intensity of the Jet Stream is greater in the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern, it should follow that there ought to be a greater transfer of angular momentum in the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern.
Assuming the above to be the case, it should follow that the rotation of the Northern Hemisphere would tend to slow down to a greater degree than that of the Southern, with a consequent resultant stress (torsion) which must ultimately find release, after elastic limit is reached, by dislocating the Earth’s crust.
This ‘brake’ being applied, unevenly, to the one Hemisphere, would tend to instigate the Chandler Wobble as well as other local irregularities of rotation, plus the enigmatic pear shape of the Earth.
From the above considerations it is tempting to conclude that major Earth dislocations and volcanicity be likely attendants with glaciation.
Geologists might do well to study the rate of incidence of major earthquakes. Should their occurrence coincide with the progressive intensity of the Jet Stream, it might give food for thought.
This idea might also be extended to explain the origin of the Tethys’ Shear, along with certain types of mountain building and rift valleys.
It might well turn out that the energy for driving at least some of the mechanism of the mobile crust of our Earth, is derived ultimately from the Sun, via the deserts, via the Jet Stream, via the conservation of angular momentum……”
The complete work ‘Tomorrow’s Weather’ Alex S. Gaddes 1990 (including fig. 18) is available as a free pdf from [email protected]
00
Colour me stupid, but I notice that the units used are Joules – lots of them, too. While this might be the scientific way of expressing it, how is it measured? Are there joule-o-meters extant in this world? If not, why do we consider it scientific to measure in one unit then convert to another? If the j per g per K of sea water is dependent upon salinity, could this not be introducing potentially massive errors into the figures?
00
Temperature is a measure of energy. True. But it says nothing about quantity. For that we use joules (or more familiarly – watt seconds and for billing purposes kilowatt hours). So yes. We do have – fore electricity – joule meters.
Everything introduces errors. You try to find the sources and do the best you can to compensate. Better instruments, more instruents, more widely dispersed instruments, and correction factors.
00
>”I notice that the units used are Joules – lots of them, too. While this might be the scientific way of expressing it, how is it measured?”
By temperature. The unit of heat in the SI-system is the Joule, which is:
a) unit of energy equal to the work done when a force of one newton acts through a distance of one meter
b) 4.184 joule of heat energy (or one calorie) is required to raise the temperature of a unit weight (1 g) of water from 0oC to 1oC, or from 32oF to 33.8oF
Heat quantity Q = m•C•ΔT
where
Q is the quantity of heat transferred to or from the object,
m is the mass of the object,
C is the specific heat capacity of the material the object is composed of, and ΔT is the resulting temperature change of the object.
Temperature (and temperature change) is required to determine heat quantity and transfer.
00
How do you measure temp to one hundredth of a degree.
00
With great difficulty.
00
FT and wavelet analysis:
http://notrickszone.com/2013/12/03/german-scientists-show-climate-driven-by-natural-cycles-global-temperature-to-drop-to-1870-levels-by-2100/
00
Having read through the material and comments I think two assumptions are not being met. I have written about CC since 1993, some of my material is on the Web.
Sudden climatic events brought on by volcanic explosions are regular 200 year events. These bring darkness, floods, subsequently plague and political and social changes …look up The Dark Ages and 534 Krakatoa explosion.
The CO2 cycle is not understood. The small inputs from human activity are only part of inputs …season variations in tree growth, volcanos, rain forest clearing fires and who knows what else add inputs. And as to outputs you guess where they all are and how significant they may be. I suspect that the two locational ‘average measurements of CO2’ that were used for many years were massaged to get he steady increases of CO2 that the Green House theory required to keep the funding wheel turning – and I note that we no longer talk of measurements but the additions brought by human direct activity… perhaps massaging the figures became too difficult
Co-incidentally, I feel the CO2 concept is so favoured by people because it has become a symbol for the terrible environmental devastation that is rampant on the planet. So to deny CO2 is taken as a red rag by Greenies.
00
Hi Jo,
not having your email address this seems the only way to reach you.
Denier? when did it start? good question. sorry can’t help
some interesting turns were made at the beginning. when I did my 1993 school book the field was just starting to get pegged out.
I was paid good money to do the greenhouse book and on investigation I lost faith in the idea. But still needed to produce so I went off and interviewed people asking the basic question, “what does greenhouse CC mean to you?” The interviewees ranged from the Indian high commissioner to kids and farmers – it was rural centred book.
I interviewed Jill Landsberg CSIRO a ecological researcher and put in a box of her comment about the need for new mathematical tools to study green house variability. She made the very real point that you can’t understand an ecological system’s variability by using resorting to averages.
She(and I) got a bullet about that, “the CSIRO has a climate section they have the right to talk about climate, no one else.” ..or words to that affect.
the only other bullets were for a soil conservation officer who was taken smoking a cigarette as he showed me his empty garbage bins … because of CO2 or health I’m not sure.
and the Indian HC who objected to the sketch of a cow (sacred no doubt) farting out methane. :)..well, atleast he read it.
But the CSIRO was angry and deadly serious.
The book was poorly received by most teachers, I asked questions that required student (and worse still) teachers to think. What the teachers wanted is, “is 2.3% the amount of CO2 in the air …true or false”. Didactics wins over thought every time. And when stated by an authority figure its power is reassured …that hasn’t changed, it’s repeating for sure.
if you send me an email address I can send you bits of the book. You should enjoy.
Steven
Emailed :- ) – Jo
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