Re: Climate Apocalypse
Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 5:46 pm
World ocean heat content
Graph Credit: Adapted from S. Levitus et al., Geophys. Res. Letts.; © AGU 2012
For those who imagined that the stability of global air temperature at record high levels over the last decade means we can keep cooking the planet, think again - the heat is going into the oceans.
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Equivalent to twice a day. How come? This massive heat increase is due to humans adding CO2 to the atmosphere, which lets light enter from the sun but does not let heat escape. CO2 is like a transparent blanket. "NOTHING ELSE FITS THE EVIDENCE... When the first analyses of Ocean Heat Content calculated from old temperature data from the oceans were first published in the early 2000's, they were described as the 'Smoking Gun'. Because they were. They are the primary observational evidence for Global Warming and the human nature of it."
Graph Credit: Adapted from S. Levitus et al., Geophys. Res. Letts.; © AGU 2012
For those who imagined that the stability of global air temperature at record high levels over the last decade means we can keep cooking the planet, think again - the heat is going into the oceans.
Main Artlcle ($25)Science wrote: Global warming contrarians remind the public that the world has not warmed all that much, if at all, during the past decade or so. But that's the atmosphere. Oceanographers with their thermometers in Earth's biggest reservoir of heat—the world's ocean—report in a paper to be published in Geophysical Research Letters that greenhouse warming has in fact been proceeding apace the past decade, not to mention the past half century. Ninety-three percent of the heat trapped by increasing greenhouse gases goes into warming the ocean, not the atmosphere. So taking the ocean's temperature is the most comprehensive way to monitor global warming. A group of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists has revised and updated their decade-old compilation of temperature measurements from the upper 2000 meters of the world's ocean. Its store of heat (red line with error bars in graph above) steadily increased over the past 20 years. And the upper ocean has warmed so much in the past 50 years that its added heat would be enough to warm the lower atmosphere by about 36°C (thankfully a physically impossible feat).
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2 ... orlds.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Breakin ... A_LOT.html notes that the ocean is very big, so the tiny temperature increase found by such studies has been enough to boil Sydney Harbour dry twice a daySummarised from http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2 ... 1106.shtml
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 39, L10603, 5 PP., 2012
World ocean heat content and thermosteric sea level change (0–2000 m), 1955–2010
Key Point: The rise in world ocean heat content since 1955 is due to the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gasses
S. Levitus National Oceanographic Data Center, NOAA, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
et al
- updated estimates of the change of ocean heat content and the thermosteric [heat induced] component of sea level change of the 0–700 and 0–2000 m layers of the World Ocean for 1955–2010.
- estimates are based on historical data not previously available, additional modern data, and bathythermograph data corrected for instrumental biases.
- heat content of the World Ocean for the 0–2000 m layer increased by ... 0.09°C.
- Ocean accounts for approximately 93% of the warming of the earth system since 1955.
From
To
Equivalent to twice a day. How come? This massive heat increase is due to humans adding CO2 to the atmosphere, which lets light enter from the sun but does not let heat escape. CO2 is like a transparent blanket. "NOTHING ELSE FITS THE EVIDENCE... When the first analyses of Ocean Heat Content calculated from old temperature data from the oceans were first published in the early 2000's, they were described as the 'Smoking Gun'. Because they were. They are the primary observational evidence for Global Warming and the human nature of it."