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.)

Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale knows zilch about ocean heat...

Today Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale is puzzled about ocean heat.  Going by what he's written today (archived here), he knows less about ocean heat transport than I do.  And I know very little about the subject.

This article isn't anything more than a bit of a hodge podge of material relating to ocean heat transport. It's prompted by Perennially Puzzled Bob's article. I'm aware that a lot of HotWhopper readers know a lot more about the subject than me, so feel free to point out errors or add to the discussion.

Bob Tisdale asks a (very long) question:

If Manmade Greenhouse Gases Are Responsible for the Warming of the Global Oceans……then why do the vertical mean temperature anomalies (NODC 0-2000 meter data) of the Pacific Ocean as a whole and of the North Atlantic fail to show any warming over the past decade, a period when ARGO floats have measured subsurface temperatures, providing reasonably complete coverage of the global oceans?

Let's have a look.  Here is the ocean heat content with data from NODC/NOAA. First the change in ocean heat content in the different oceans and globally.

Data source: NODC/NOAA

As shown above, the biggest increase in heat content in recent years in the top 2000m is in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.  Here is a chart showing the north and south Atlantic and global total.

Data source: NODC/NOAA

So you can see how the heat shifts around.  The heat in the North Atlantic shot up around the turn of the century, then it kept going up, more so in the South Atlantic than the North.

Let's move up and just look at the top 700 metres.  Here is a chart tracking the heat content of the different oceans.

Data source: NODC/NOAA

Here it appears that the top 700 m of the Indian Ocean got a lot warmer since 2000 while the heat content in this upper level of the Atlantic and Pacific didn't change much.  In fact in the Pacific as a whole, the heat content of the top 700 metres dropped a bit. Here is a chart of the North and South Pacific.

Data source: NODC/NOAA

Most of the increased heat globally in the top 700 metres is down to the Indian Ocean heating up.

Back to Bob Tisdale's question:

...why do the vertical mean temperature anomalies (NODC 0-2000 meter data) of the Pacific Ocean as a whole and of the North Atlantic fail to show any warming over the past decade...

Bob expands on his question:

Or, in other words, why is the warming of the global oceans (0-2000 meters) over the past 10 years limited to the Indian and South Atlantic Oceans, when carbon dioxide is said to be a well-mixed greenhouse gas, meaning all ocean basins should be warming?

He seems to think that CO2 being a well-mixed greenhouse gas (which it is) means that everywhere on Earth will warm at the same rate.  He's wrong.  Air moves, oceans move, heat is transported around the world in different ways at different times.

The real question is "how does heat move around?"  And more specifically in relation to the world's oceans: "how does heat move around in the oceans?".  Bob seems to think that oceans heat up like this:

However the oceans have a life of their own.  Think how deep 700 metres is, then think just how deep 2000 metres is.  That's two kilometres or, for the metrically challenged, 1.24 miles.  And it's all sea water.  Water isn't static.  The oceans aren't static.  Water moves in the oceans.

I found this chart in a paper by Lynne Talley from Scripps, which is a simplified view of the global overturning circulation.

Figure 1. Schematic of the global overturning circulation (“GOC”). Purple (upper ocean and thermocline), red (denser thermocline and intermediate water), orange (IDW and PDW), green (NADW), blue (AABW), gray (Bering Strait components; Mediterranean and Red Sea inflows). Updated from Talley et al. (2011), based on Schmitz (1995), Rahmstorf (2002), and Lumpkin and Speer (2007). Source: Talley 13.

That's not the whole story by a long shot.  But it gives some idea of how water moves within and between the different oceans, coming up for air (so to speak) and moving to depths.  The Talley paper in Oceanography gives a lot of detail and is quite technical.  If you're up for that level of discussion I can recommend it.

If you are new to the subject (like me) and want a simpler overview, I found a PowerPoint presentation that has some neat diagrams.  It's a start. From that as I understand it, most of the heat transport between the oceans and the surface is wind-driven.  At depth within the oceans it's a different story of course.

Here is some more information, which looks to be from a Columbia lecture.  It describes directions of flows as well as the mechanisms of heat exchange:

Meridional heat and freshwater transfer: The ocean and atmosphere work together to move heat and freshwater across latitudes, as required to maintain a quasi-stationary climate pattern. The wind-driven and thermohaline ocean circulation accomplish this task for the ocean, by moving warm waters poleward, colder water toward the Equator. On average the ocean meridional heat flux is higher or at least equivalent to that of the atmosphere between the equator and 30° latitude, with the atmosphere becoming dominate at higher latitudes. Ocean currents of differing salinity also move freshwater from place to place to close the global hydrological budget. For example, salty water flows away from the evaporative subtropics to be replaced with lower salinity water from the tropics.

Fluxes across the sea-atmosphere interface: Heat exchange between ocean and atmosphere is a product of a number of processes: solar radiation heats the ocean; net long wave back radiation cools the ocean; heat transfer by conduction and convection between the air and water generally cools the ocean as does evaporation of water from the ocean surface

Any imbalance of the heat or freshwater budgets due to sea-atmosphere fluxes is compensated by transfer of heat and freshwater by ocean currents. Generally heat transport across latitudes is from the tropics to the polar regions, but in the South Atlantic Ocean the oceanic heat transport is directed towards the equator. This is due to the thermohaline circulation - as warm upper kilometer water is carried northward, across the equator, offsetting the southward flow of cooler North Atlantic Deep Water near 3000 m. Much of the heat lost to the atmosphere in the North Atlantic is derived from this cross equatorial heat transfer. The flux of freshwater in the North and South Atlantic is southward, as freshwater excess of the Arctic is brought into off set the net evaporation and influx of salty water from the Indian Ocean

If this is more than you bargained for, you can blame Bob Tisdale for prompting me to look into the topic with his dumb question at WUWT.  I'd have thought he would know better given he's often going on about water moving around when he pontificates about ENSO.  The odd thing is that Bob refers to some recent papers that go a fair way to explaining the accumulation of heat within the deeper ocean.  Bob says the data shows differently, but he's wrong.  Maybe he didn't understand the papers or maybe he did and he's counting on the fact that a lot of his readers won't bother reading them.

These are the papers Bob referenced:

• Meehl et al (2013)
• Balmaseda et al. (2013)
• Trenberth and Fasullo (2013)

In that third paper, the one by Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo, they attribute the so-called hiatus in surface warming to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which is a natural variation:

The picture emerging is one where the positive phase of the PDO from 1976 to 1998 enhanced the surface warming somewhat by reducing the amount of heat sequestered by the deep ocean, while the negative phase of the PDO is one where more heat gets deposited at greater depths, contributing to the overall warming of the oceans but cooling the surface somewhat. The Pacific Ocean appears to account for the majority of the decadal variability [Chen et al., 2008]. Nevertheless, the events in the Pacific undoubtedly also affect the Atlantic, Indian, and Southern Oceans as the system acts collectively to equilibrate to these changes in the flow of energy.

I note that Bob only looks at the top 2,000 metres.  (The deepest part of the Pacific is the Mariana Trench which goes down almost 11 kilometres at its deepest.) I don't know how far down in the Pacific Ocean the heat referred to by Trenberth and Fasullo gets to.  But there sure is a lot of water in which heat can accumulate.

If you were expecting easy answers, I'm sorry.  When it comes to quantifying every bit of heat and exactly how and where and when it moves through the Earth system it gets a bit tricky, especially when dealing with the deep ocean, which isn't easy to monitor directly.  The scientists are doing a stellar job.  Bob Tisdale and the denialati at WUWT not so much.  (By the way, Bob Tisdale is a greenhouse effect denier too.)

From the WUWT comments

Just a few of the comments from the illiterati at WUWT (archived here).

Phil's Dad thinks it might be underwater volcanoes and says:

December 19, 2013 at 3:35 am
Any idea why the Indian and South Atlantic are warming and the rest not? Volcanic chains?

Ronald says there are no such thing as ocean currents transporting water and heat and there is no such thing as thermohaline circulation:

December 19, 2013 at 4:56 am
Anomalies are nice but not the point. Heat is sitting in the ocean and heat is temperature just like cold and every thing in between. So warm water is heat and that cant go under cold water because of it being lighter than cold water. By giving it a fancy name it masks the problem of the case. And by doing so they cane take it a way from reality.

Dan points out that Bob's charts don't conflict with the papers from actual scientists (unlike Bob's questions and conclusions) and says:

December 19, 2013 at 5:23 am
Bob,
You say that “Kevin Trenberth and associates say the recent series of La Niña events are causing the Pacific Ocean to warm at depths below 700 meters”.

Looking at your derived analysis of the 700-2000m depth temperatures, it would appear you are proving Trenberth to be correct, with a cooling surface and warming ocean underlayer. Is my understanding correct?

Correct me if I am wrong,from my understanding of Trenberth’s analysis, I think that the warming down to 2000m is insufficient to account for the anticipated energy imbalance, and hence it is hypothesised that the warming is also taking place at depths below 2000m?

Old'un goes off topic and all alarmist, saying that the shift to clean energy will be a killer:

December 19, 2013 at 7:07 am
...Sadly, blind belief in CAGW is already driving the UK down a calamitous path of high energy costs, deaths from fuel poverty and probable black-outs. To paraphrase John Maynard Keyne’s comment on stock markets, our leaders seem intent on remaining irrational for longer than the Nation will be able remain solvent.

Talley, L.D. 2013. Closure of the global overturning circulation through the Indian, Pacific, and Southern Oceans: Schematics and transports. Oceanography 26(1):80–97, http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2013.07

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.

How Anthony Watts gets a bit confused about ocean heat content

Willis Eschenbach has posted an article on Anthony Watts' WUWT blog.  He's wondering this time about ocean heat and forcing.  He's done something similar to what Bob Tisdale did a little while ago and wrote about here.

Here is Willis' chart.  Willis has done some sums on ocean temperature and plotted this chart in units of watts/sq metre.  Willis calculated from scratch and may not have got the conversion ratios quite right.  I didn't check.  I do know that it's not that easy to work out the specific heat of sea water going all the way down to two kilometres deep into the ocean.

This next chart is also from Willis' spreadsheet.  He doesn't plot it or show it in his article, but it shows up in his calculations.  This time it's what he calculated as the heat accumulated in the ocean.  He did this calculation before working out the year to year differences and converting to Watts/sq metre.  In other words, it's part of the very same data he used to generate the chart above.  This one shows the cumulative effect on the ocean of the year to year changes shown in the top chart.  

This next chart is based on a chart from SkepticalScience.  What I did was take the Skeptical Science ocean heat content and added in the heat content from the latest few years from NODC/NOAA (with an estimate from ocean temperature to fill the missing year 2004) and worked out the difference in heat being added to the ocean each year.  This is the same as Willis chart shown above but using data from a different and more trusted source.  It looks like more accumulated heat than Willis' chart in part because the base is different and in part because of Willis' different calculation, but both show a large accumulation.

Lots of people fall for Willis' line and go on about how the ocean isn't really heating up etc.  What is a surprise (but probably shouldn't be) is a comment from Anthony Watts.

How Anthony Watts is tricked...

In the comments to Willis' article, Anthony Watts put up the SkS version of the above chart (which looks pretty much the same except it includes land and atmosphere as well), writing (my bold):

June 19, 2013 at 4:13 am

Hmmm, this rather puts the kibosh on this graph from the SkS zealots:
Makes me wonder how Murphy finds such a large trend in OHC, but Levitus does not find any trend in forcing.

 No, Anthony, it's Willis who says he found the "average forcing is small" and that the overall mean is "not significantly different from zero" and that only a few of the individual years are significantly different from zero.  Willis finally gets around to pointing out Anthony's error, though he argues again that "it's not statistically significant" writing:

[REPLY: Thanks, Anthony. There is a large trend in OHC, as you show in your graph, but it is not statistically significant. This is because of the high autocorrelation of the data (lag-1 autocorrelation of 0.92). As usual, SkS forgot to mention that ... w.].

I'm not about to check that out but will just observe that the standard errors quoted by NOAA are much lower than the heat content reported.  SkepticalScience has links to relevant papers, but they are behind a paywall.  It's certain that the ocean is heating up (sea levels are rising etc) just as it's certain the oceans are getting more acidic.

Small mercies.  I suppose Willis could have denied it was warming altogether or put it down to one of Bob Tisdale's magical ENSO leaps.

Addendum:

20 June 2013 3:50 pm AEST

Thanks to Dana, here is the up-to-date SkepticalScience.com chart showing how heat is accumulating on Earth:

Source: SkepticalScience.com

Read the comments below for some good insights and further information, including other references to scientific publications and data.

More Tisdale Tricks....Don't Worry...

Bob Tisdale has a post on WUWT castigating David Appell for writing on his blog about the latest ocean heat content figures.  This is what David reports:

Ocean heat content numbers are in for the first three months of 2013, and they show the 0-2000 meter layer increasing more than in any previous observed period:

David shows these charts from NODC/NOAA (click to enlarge):

It seems a minor quibble to me, but Bob Tisdale takes issue because there was one quarter - back eight years ago - when the quarterly increase was a bit higher than the amount the heat rose this past quarter.  Bob is really incensed, writing as part of the title: "...Alarmist Writes Science Fiction" and in the text::

Some might think he’s an author of science fiction after reading the opening to his post...

It could be argued that David was merely a bit lax in his expression. By "increased more" did David mean the ocean heat content is higher than ever observed before or did he mean the difference from one quarter to the next has never been greater?

Even if David did make a mistake and mean the latter, it's hardly 'science fiction' to miss a slightly higher change in a single quarter going back eight years earlier.

The oceans are heating up ... quickly

Lets look at the record. The latest quarter is the highest ever heat content in the record. The quarterly record down to 2000 meters only goes back eight years to March 2005 and the heat content has risen by about 30% of the total heat gained since the 1960s in that time. We've already got an idea of the heat content of the top two kilometres of ocean going back to the 1950s in the top chart above. The heat is accumulating at a very fast pace. (Click to enlarge.)

:

Don't Worry...

Bob Tisdale is well aware that WUWT-ers don't like scary stuff, so what he does is plot the difference from one quarter to the next. He then he seems to argue that because the change from this quarter to the previous one was once exceeded by the change in a previous quarter (back in December quarter 2005), there is "nothing to worry about". You can see the amount of change each quarter in this chart (click to enlarge):

Okay, the above chart doesn't look scary until you see what it is.  Once you realise it's the change in heat content from quarter to the next (non-cumulative), and that there are many more quarters in which heat content is rising than falling, it becomes more of a concern.

Let's look at this ocean heat accumulation more closely. Heat content rose by 10.4x10²² joules in only eight years. In the last quarter it rose by 2.7x10²² joules or 26% of the total amount of heat added over that period. Since the 1960s the heat content has risen by nearly 30x10²² joules.  That's a lot of Hiroshima bombs.

Certainly there are ups and downs over time - but overall the heat content of the ocean is going up, up, up.

Bob's next trick

So Bob tricks his readers by making it look like there's not much change.  What does he do next?  Well, his next trick is to show his readers some ocean areas where there hasn't been a huge change in warming - since 2005 only - the North Atlantic and the North Pacific.  (I haven't checked these but let's assume he is correct).

Then he shows the tropical Pacific and the extra-tropical North Pacific for the period since the 1950s, where there has been quite a bit of warming.  What does he write about that?  Well, true to form Bob blames it on the magical ENSO:

It’s plainly obvious that the ocean heat content of the tropical Pacific would cool over the long-term without the 1973-76 and 1995/96 La Niña events.

But Bob - why didn't it cool again with all the El Niños over that period - huh?  Thousands of WUWT readers are clamouring for the answer....well, no, not really.  They are too busy ad hom-ing David Appell to take much notice of what Bob wrote about ocean heat content and his fixation on the magical leaping and cavorting of ENSO :(

Bob's perpetual warming machine

To sum up, Bob seems to be telling his readers that a perpetual warming of the world's oceans is 'normal'. That it's of no consequence that the heat content of the top two kilometres of ocean has risen by 10.4x10²² joules in only eight years. I wonder how long he will think like that? Can you see him saying down the track: "Oceans are boiling*? Nothing to worry about, folks. The quarterly change has been higher in the past!"

B..b..but It's Natural!

What's weird is all the congratulations Bob gets for outing the scaremonger. Must be that conservative brain at work again, relieved that the numbers can't be all that scary because Bob told them "it's natural".

...be happy

* No, I don't believe the oceans are about to literally boil!