Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale doesn't know water moves in the oceans

I find it odd that Bob Tisdale doesn't know that there are currents and upwelling and all sorts of movement of water in the world's oceans. He's written before about how he rejects the fact that oceans have currents that run deep and long.

Today in a repeat of at least one previous article, Bob Tisdale writes about how he is puzzled that the oceans don't heat up at exactly the same rate and amount at exactly the same time. (Archived here.)


The reason it is strange is that Bob regards himself as WUWT's resident expert on oceans. Yet he doesn't understand what is surely fundamental to an understanding of oceans - and how they influence climate. He wrote an article with a wrong headline: "Ocean ‘Global Warming’ is not actually ‘global’ at all". Well, I don't know quite what he means by Ocean 'Global Warming' - the term global warming is normally applied to the globe - the land and the oceans and the atmosphere. Still, if he thinks that the oceans aren't warming he's very wrong. He even puts up charts that show they are warming.

Bob has a tendency to label anyone who understands global warming as an "alarmist". Bob is a climate science denier and that's one of the ways deniers identify each other. A bit like a not-so-secret handshake. Or calling anthropogenic global warming CAGW. Bob's not just a climate science denier, he is a greenhouse effect denier. He doesn't usually make a song and dance about that because he knows that his patron, Anthony Watts doesn't totally reject the greenhouse effect and he needs Anthony for free advertising of his tedious pdf files. For example he wrote:

Alarmists are having a grand time trying to scare their readers with their chicken-little end-is-near proclamations. Example: see the post titled “The oceans are warming so fast, they keep breaking scientists’ charts” at SkepticalScience here and The Guardian here.  Also see Joe Romm’s post ‘Hottest Year’ Story Obscures Bigger News: Ocean Warming Now Off The Charts at ClimateProgress.

What John Abraham and Joe Romm were remarking on was just how much the oceans have been heating up of late. Here are two charts I've put together using NOAA/NODC data:

Data source: NOAA/NODC

Data source: NOAA/NODC

Down to 2000 m the oceans have broken the 20 x 10²² Joules barrier.

Bob caters to the dumb deniers at WUWT

Bob acknowledges that the oceans have a large heat capacity and that they are taking full advantage of it. He wrote:

Of course, the alarmists present the ocean heat content data, not the vertically averaged temperature data.  Why?  The oceans have an extremely large heat capacity, so a very slight increase in the temperature of the oceans to depths of 2000 meters represents a very large uptake of heat when placed in terms of 10^22 Joules…the units used by the NODC.  

I don't know if he fully understands what he wrote. But what he does understand is that if he uses a different measure, the deniers will mistakenly think that the oceans are only storing a little bit of heat. He wrote:

So to counter the alarmists, we present the NODC data in terms of deg C (data here), because people are more familiar with temperature.  We also break the data down into basins and subsets to show that the warming rates are not uniform, which is tough to explain with greenhouse gas-driven human-induced global warming.   So here’s a general introductory discussion of that NODC temperature data to depths of 2000 meters.

Bob pretends that he's only using temperature because deniers are too dumb to understand joules. Some of them probably are, but quite a few deniers, you may be surprised to know, did study a bit of science at school and have heard of joules before.

You'll also have seen what I meant when I wrote that Bob rejects the fact that the oceans are not static pools of water. Nor does he seem to be aware that the air above them has a tendency to blow about a bit too. He thinks that greenhouse warming means that the oceans should all warm evenly and to depth. He's probably never heard of terms like thermohaline circulation. He might not be aware that the water in the ocean can move sideways and up and down. Nor that an awful lot of energy is being stored when you see the oceans are warming way down to two kilometers deep.

More on how much the oceans have warmed

Bob's article is very short by Bob's standards. That could be because he's written almost identical articles before. He only put up one chart of vertical mean temperature to 2000m and a great big pie chart. I did some charts too, if you're interested.

Data source: NOAA/NODC

Data source: NOAA/NODC

You can see how the Atlantic and Indian oceans have become an awfully lot hotter lately. The Pacific not so much, although there's been an uptick in the last couple of years. Compare that with Bob's chart:

Source: WUWT

I don't know what he did with his anomalies. They aren't those reported by NODC. He screwed it up somehow. He seems to have aligned them all at zero for 2003, almost. If you look at the chart I did for 0-2000m you'll see he got that wrong.

Nor can I fathom why Bob Tisdale would be so sanguine about this. The oceans really are getting a lot hotter and this has to have an impact on the land, where most of us live. Just what that impact will be I don't know, but I expect that it will continue to get hotter. Precipitation will change - maybe more intense downpours and maybe shifts in rainfall patterns.

Another Tisdale Trick

Another thing I noticed is that Bob Tisdale restricted his charts to the period since 2003 and said how the North Atlantic and Pacific haven't warmed much in the last 12 years. It's true. They haven't. But look at the Atlantic overall. And see the chart below for what happened in the North Atlantic in the period just beforehand.

Data source: NOAA/NODC

If you look at the 2000 m chart above, it's the Pacific Ocean that's hasn't heated up quite as quickly lately, not the Atlantic so much. However the South Pacific has got warmer recently catching up to the North Pacific.

All the oceans are warming

So despite what Bob Tisdale will have his readers believe, all the oceans are warming. And taking them altogether the oceans are warming up a helluva lot.

From the WUWT comments

The "thoughts" started off in the normal style of WUWT. First mpainter indicated his personal incredulity about accuracy:

January 22, 2015 at 4:48 pm
Measured in thousandths of °C per decade.
#####
Is not it marvelous that these wonderful Argo devices can measure to such great accuracy?
>>>what.will.they.think.of.next.?<<<

The Argo temperature profiles are accurate to +/-0.002°C, according to the FAQ.


nickreality65  doesn't believe that oceans can warm, writing:

January 22, 2015 at 4:49 pm
And how does that hot atmospheric air warm the oceans in the first place? 105 F air in Phoenix doesn’t warm that swimming pool especially enough to counter the massive latent heat of evaporation. It’s the water vapor cycle, clouds, precipitation and ocean floor geothermal heat flux that heat/cool the oceans and power the climate. CO2/GHGs are nothing but bee farts in a hurricane.

Nick Stokes explains why heat content is the more commonly used measure.

January 22, 2015 at 5:00 pm
“Of course, the alarmists present the ocean heat content data, not the vertically averaged temperature data. Why?”

The reason is that the heat content change is real. The vertically averaged temperature change would be meaningful if the heat were uniformly mixed. But it isn’t. Nothing like it. It would take centuries to reach that state.
If it made sense to take such an average, why stop at 2000m?

Malcolm wrote an obligatory dumb denier comment, which was echoed by several other dumb deniers:

January 22, 2015 at 5:40 pm
The idea that man-made emissions of CO2 have measurably warmed the oceans is supported by nothing other than the imaginations of people desperately wishing for the AGW hypothesis to be true. 

There was a long debate about whether or not infrared radiation can heat water, with mpainter arguing it couldn't. There was no discussion of what is causing the the oceans are heating up if not for the increased IR, except for one rather silly person - emsnews who seems to think the deep cold ocean is hotter than the surface. Weird.

January 22, 2015 at 6:03 pm
Just below the surface, Water is heated by volcanic activity in the various tectonic plate divisions.
So it has zero to do with CO2..

Pippen Kool commented on Bob Tisdale's ignorance about oceans:

January 22, 2015 at 8:50 pm
“It’s difficult at best, therefore, to imagine how manmade greenhouse gases could be warming one-third of the oceans to depths of more than a mile but not the other two-thirds.”

Why is it difficult to imagine? Each ocean has different rates of down welling and upwelling, as well as turbulence. The differences down deep have more to do with circulation than warming from greenhouse gases, with the provo that greenhouse gases effect the warming at the surface and that eventually gets deep.

mpainter is like a terrier with a bone and writes in reply:

January 22, 2015 at 9:16 pm
Pippen, see my comments above. CO2 has no effect on ocean heat.

Which was a gift for Pippen Kool, who responded rather nicely with:

January 22, 2015 at 9:38 pm
Yeah I saw that. It’s just your arguments are not very logical so I didn’t really pay much attention to them. But hey you’re doing the best with what you have so I have to give you credit for that.

Bob Tisdale pipes up with a comment that confirms he knows nothing about the oceans - and doesn't undertand what Pippen Kool wrote:

January 23, 2015 at 4:33 am
Pippen Kool says: “Why is it difficult to imagine? Each ocean has different rates of down welling and upwelling, as well as turbulence.”

Your reply does not account for the absence of warming to depths of 2000m in the ocean basins that cover 66% of ocean surfaces. Nice try, though.

First, there is no absence of warming to 2000 m. There's already been a lot of warming to depth. Secondly, the fact that the oceans aren't still and static is exactly why you'll see different warming in different parts of the ocean. Bob isn't just ignorant, he's dense.

Which is a good note to end on.