Bob Tisdale rejects the greenhouse effect (again)

Perennially puzzled Bob Tisdale is a bit of a nutter.  He doesn't accept that carbon dioxide, water vapour and other gases like methane absorb long wave radiation and prevent earth from turning into a block of ice.  Anthony Watts has banned from WUWT a number of people who don't accept the greenhouse effect but he gives a platform to greenhouse effect deniers Bob Tisdale and the appalling Tim Ball (who co-authored the silly slayers book) and other people who indulge in pseudo-science and quackery.

Bob Tisdale has a "thing" for Dana Nuccitelli, who is a scientist who writes for SkepticalScience.com and the UK Guardian.  Bob's article is a dismal attempt to refute a recent blog article Dana wrote for the Guardian newspaper.  Dana irritates Bob because Dana writes sensible articles explaining different aspects of climate science.  Bob doesn't understand climate science.  He doesn't understand, for example, that the world's oceans hold a lot of water.  To heat them up by even a few tenths of a degree needs an awful lot of energy.

Bob denies global warming outright in his article (archived here).  The title of his post is:

Dana Nuccitelli Can’t Come to Terms with the Death of the AGW Hypothesis

And in a comment Bob writes this:

For the past few years in numerous blog posts, I’ve illustrated and discussed how the ocean heat content data and satellite-era sea surface temperature data both indicate they’ve warmed, but they’ve warmed due to naturally occurring, naturally fueled ocean-atmosphere processes—not manmade greenhouse gases. (October 18, 2013 at 7:27 am)

"Naturally fueled" is Bob's code word for "magic".  Bob is one of the utter nutters. He thinks that the physics of the greenhouse effect is a hypothesis and he thinks it doesn't hold up.  These days he's in the minority of deniers.  Most fake sceptics these days accept that there are such things as greenhouse gases and that the world is warming.  They'll argue various things like how much the world is warming and what the future climates will be like, but they realise they'd look pretty stupid if they denied any warming at all.  Bob Tisdale looks pretty stupid.

In order to fool his readers at WUWT, Bob has to fudge quite a lot.  For example, he writes about the ocean:

The warming of the top 700 meters has also slowed to a crawl, and is nonexistent in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, but more on that later.

What Bob doesn't mention at all is the Indian Ocean.  Nor does he mention the change in global ocean heat content for the top 2000 m of ocean.  He tries to persuade his readers that as long as they ignore the global data and only look at the parts of the earth system he wants them to look at, they can pretend that the world isn't warming.

It's like saying that if you measure the temperature of the inside of your refrigerator you can pretend that it's not 42° Celsius in the shade outside.

Here is a chart showing the ocean heat content down only as far as 700 metres, including the Indian Ocean that Bob Tisdale doesn't want his readers to know about:

Data Source: NOAA/NODC

The heat accumulating in the different oceans is added together to get the total heat accumulating in all the oceans.  The chart above shows just how much the system is heating up.

The chart below shows the top two kilometres of ocean.  It's accumulating more and more heat.  The heat from the top 700 metres is heating the layers below.  Bob doesn't want his readers to know that.

Bob's final contribution is a chart with surface temperature anomaly plotted on the same chart as temperature changes in the oceans!  I don't know how many of his readers fall for that trick.  Bob is ever hopeful that there are enough dumb readers who don't consider how much energy the ocean has to absorb to raise it by a degree Celsius, compared to the land surface.  (If any readers are grappling with that concept, think of the last time you spent at the beach on a hot day.  The temperature of the sea doesn't rise nearly as much as the sand does, despite getting the same amount of energy from the sun.)

On energy being accumulated on earth, from the AR5 WG1 IPCC report page TS-7 (my bold italics and paras):

It is virtually certain that Earth has gained substantial energy from 1971–2010 — the estimated increase in energy inventory between 1971 and 2010 is 274 [196 to 351] ZJ (1 ZJ = 1021 J), with a rate of 213 TW from a linear fit to the annual values over that time period (Box 3.1, Figure 1).

Ocean warming dominates the total energy change inventory, accounting for roughly 93% on average from 1971–2010. Melting ice (including Arctic sea ice, ice sheets, and glaciers) accounts for 3% of the total, and warming of the continents 3%. Warming of the atmosphere makes up the remaining 1%.

The 1971–2010 estimated rate of oceanic energy gain is 199 TW from a linear fit to data over that time period, implying a mean heat flux of 0.55 W m–2 across the global ocean surface area. Earth's net estimated energy increase from 1993–2010 is 163 [127 to 201] ZJ with a trend estimate of 275 TW. The ocean portion of the trend for 1993–2010 is 257 TW, equivalent to a mean heat flux into the ocean of 0.71 W m–2.