More global warming oops?

Question

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

Answer 1

But global warming does exist, thrive and will survive as it has since that global cooling thing in the seventies.....  In global warming fanatics' minds.

Give a scientist a living and he will give you knowledge. Give a scientist wealth and he will give you anything you want.

Answer 2

Jumping to a conclusion, that this somehow proves AGW is wrong is ludicrous, at best.  Dr. Willis isn't questioning the theory of AGW.  He even hypothesizes that increased cold water from glacier melts could be the cause.  Plus, in contrast to surface or atmospheric temperature datasets, only a small fraction of the deep ocean is sampled each year, making it very difficult to detect statistically significant changes.

You are falling into the trap of assuming that just because there are some unanswered questions about a scientific theory, the theory is therefore wrong or baseless.

And let's not forget the mistake made with some early satellite temperature measurements.  The doubters made a big issue about the apparent temperature discrepancy with land-based measurements, until it was found out that orbital drift errors hadn't been properly applied.

Answer 3

It is a scam that the oil co. are using to charge U3 prices for your fuel . It is what is dragging us into a depression.

Answer 4

Global Warming in my opinion is a natural, and is just the earth heating up. We had the ice age, and no we are going to have a warm age. It's basically just Carbon Dioxide. I think it's probably just a government scam to help us improve the environment. Your last paragraph is exactly correct though, 80 to 90% of global warming does involve heating up ocean waters. Interesting, isn't it? Global Warming can work to our advantage as to our disadvantage.

Answer 5

Yes, it's a bit confusing.  I'll just wait to hear the explanations for this before making a judgment one way or the other.

It shows that the globe is a very complex system that we don't fully understand or have the ability to measure.

Answer 6

Okay seriously, everyone has moved past trying to prove global warming and is already on the "try to fix" phase. There are several people, like you and a few crack pot masters-degree "scientists" who don't know enough about the subject, and make up cute little reasons global warming doesn't exist. Please hurry up and catch up with the rest of the civilized world.

Answer 7

There is a lag time between warming and change in CO2 concentration of about 800 years.  This is because the ocean is very deep and slow to change temperature.   Even if global warming were significant, it would take a long time for it to show in the ocean and what would be reflected would be somewhat of an average over the past hundreds of years.  I do agree that the ocean is much more significant but like the climate, there is insufficient knowledge and technology to make any definitive conclusions.  As for gcn.. who posted after me, the only myth is that humans are causing any significant harm.

Answer 8

These are the ARGO drifters.  They don't go down deep enough to measure heat content of the bottom water, which is heating.

Recent bottom water warming in the Pacific Ocean

Author(s): Johnson GC (Johnson, Gregory C.), Mecking S (Mecking, Sabine), Sloyan BM (Sloyan, Bernadette M.), Wijffels SE (Wijffels, Susan E.)

Source: JOURNAL OF CLIMATE    Volume: 20    Issue: 21    Pages: 5365-5375    Published: NOV 1 2007  

Times Cited: 0     References: 25    

Abstract: Decadal changes of abyssal temperature in the Pacific Ocean are analyzed using high-quality, full-depth hydrographic sections, each occupied at least twice between 1984 and 2006. The deep warming found over this time period agrees with previous analyses. The analysis presented here suggests it may have occurred after 1991, at least in the North Pacific. Mean temperature changes for the three zonal and three meridional hydrographic sections analyzed here exhibit abyssal warming often significantly different from zero at 95% confidence limits for this time period. Warming rates are generally larger to the south, and smaller to the north. This pattern is consistent with changes being attenuated with distance from the source of bottom water for the Pacific Ocean, which enters the main deep basins of this ocean southeast of New Zealand. Rough estimates of the change in ocean heat content suggest that the abyssal warming may amount to a significant fraction of upper World Ocean heat gain over the past few decades.

The only myth I see here is the one that says anthropogenic CO2 is *not* affecting climate.

Answer 9

Isn't that just like the leftists leaning NPR to get information wrong!

JPL's 'robots'  (about 21) are just now getting started:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.ht...

They only descend to 3000 ft. - to read the deep oceans they would need to get below 20,000 ft.

It would be very interesting to monitor the western pacific ring of fire and pass over the thousands of sea mounts (active volcanic vents).  

Maybe they could explain this heat anomaly???:

http://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/satellite...

Answer 10

Keep dreaming.  The biggest myth in the world is Jesus Christ.

Answer 11

yeah, it's obviously not happening as drastically as some would have you believe.

Answer 12

That's an interesting link and a good question. It's obvious to most of us that the sun is the major input to Earth's temp, not any greenhouse gases trapping heat. The Earth itself produces very little heat and even if you stipulate that the solar radiation itself is trapped, the facts don't support the global warming models. The tropical troposphere should be heating as well, according to the models, yet the opposite is found to be true by the US Climate Change Science Program, using balloons for measurement. It didn't deter the theorists, though, they simply glossed over this and the summary to the 2006 report claimed it did agree with predictions, a clear disconnect from the content of the report.

It's not the scientists who are lying or falsifying data, it's the bureaucrats and officials involved who pay for the results they want and when that fails to materialize, they just falsify the reports themselves knowing few will actually bother to read the full report. I often hear global warming advocates claim cooling in the troposphere proves their theory, which is an interesting way to look at things to say the least.

It's not too surprising since they've tried to pretend that anything in the historical record that disagrees with their theory doesn't exist. We used to learn in school about a Medieval Warm Period and a Little Ice Age, now they're trying to claim these global events were only local and can be ignored. This lets them claim that temp today is the highest in thousands of years, a million years in the case of James Hansen of NASA's GISS, when that is clearly not true if you look at the period from about 1000 AD to 1300 AD, when it was up to 3 degrees C warmer than today.

***edit

Jason, could you try to find a valuable link that doesn't call those who debate this idea "retards" or state that outer space is a negative billion degrees and that the sun is a billion degrees? It also doesn't help to claim only crackpots debate this, since I don't think Professor Richard Lindzen from MIT or the many other scientists who question this theory to be crackpots, do you?