Funny peculiar: #Climate "guru" Anthony Watts' doesn't know the oceans accumulate energy

Two days ago Anthony Watts, who runs a climate conspiracy blog WUWT, posted what he called "Friday Funny – Climate Central’s scare graph excuse: ‘The oceans ate the warming’".

It is funny, as in odd, peculiar, that Anthony Watts doesn't know that more than 90% of the extra energy we've been adding is stored in the ocean. I mean, Anthony makes himself out to be an expert on climate change, more expert than the experts who research the subject. He's been blogging about climate for about ten years now. To think that he doesn't know one of the most basic facts about global warming is very strange indeed.

Bob Tisdale's latest conspiracy theory about ocean heat

Today Bob Tisdale has found a new conspiracy theory that he's promoting (archived here). It's much the same as all the others. From his ergonomic computer chair in his basement (is he that advanced?) Bob decided that another group of scientists must be fudging the data. Problem is, Bob doesn't understand the data or how to use it, let alone how the scientists analysed it.

A warning that this article is long. I enjoyed writing and researching it. The paper this article is based on is a great example of the sort of effort and thinking required to scope out and quantify the changes we're bringing about. Which is of critical importance IMO.

Progress in determining changes in ocean heat content

The paper Bob doesn't like this time is by Dr. Lijing Cheng  from the International Center for Climate and Environment Sciences in China, and co-authors Jiang Zhu and John Abraham. They have been looking to improve the record of heat content of the top 700 m of the ocean. The paper is called: "Global upper ocean heat content estimation: recent progress and the remaining challenges". As the title suggests, the paper describes recent progress in this regard, and the challenges that remain.

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.)

A lot more heat is found in the ocean

In the last day or so there have been two new papers on ocean heat, which have had some publicity. Both have just been published in Nature Climate Change. The studies are not in conflict with one another, despite what you might read around the traps. They are complementary. In fact, one scientist, Felix W. Landerer, is an author of both papers.

One paper is about how there has been very little extra heat going into the deep ocean, below 1,995 metres, over the past decade. The other is about how the ocean in the southern hemisphere has been warming more than previously thought.

David Archibald in a momentus denial of gravity at WUWT

Anthony Watts' blog is where science deniers congregate so they don't feel so alone in the world. Usually they are simply rejecting climate science, the greenhouse effect, rising global surface temperatures and anything else that takes their fancy that's to do with climate. They don't normally get into rejecting biology or not openly at least. They will from time to time reject chemistry, usually in relation to ocean acidification.

Today I see that a guest essayist has decided to reject gravity and probably momentum. He was writing about a paper in Science from last week, which got denier blogs all a twitter. The paper is probably raising some eyebrows among scientists too. It's an interesting take on where the heat is going.

Before I get to that, though, let me show you what David "funny sunny" Archibald wrote about thermohaline circulation (archived here). He posted this image from an article in last week's Science, which Eli Kintisch wrote about the subject:

The Atlantic Ocean may be storing vast amounts of heat (red), keeping global surface temperatures from rising.
Credit: Xianyao Chen, Ka-Kit Tung, Source: Science Vol. 345 no. 6199 pp. 860-861 

David Archibald said it can't be so. He wrote:

The illustration shows heat plunging into the depths as far as 1,500 metres. The oceans don’t work like that. Most of the heat energy of sunlight is absorbed in the first few centimetres of the ocean’s surface. Waves mix the water near the surface layer such that the temperature may be relatively uniform in the top 100 metres. Below that there is almost no mixing and no vertical movement of water.

Some of what he wrote was okay, sort of. Some of it was very wrong. In particular, he he is rejecting thermohaline circulation, arguing there is no vertical movement of water in the ocean. He's wrong of course.  Thermohaline circulation is the convection in the ocean driven by pressure gradients and gravity. Saltier water is denser than fresh water. Cold water is denser than warm water. Colder saltier water sinks in the ocean. This process doesn't stop and start, or not easily and not often. There's a lot of momentum behind the conveyor belt. There's a huge amount of water going through this cycle. Just because some of it is a bit warmer at times doesn't mean the water stops moving.

WUWT argumentum ad ignorantiam or what a bunch of ignoramice

Anthony Watts and Bob Tisdale think that there is no movement of water in the world's oceans.  Anthony seems to think the ocean warms as if it is a single solid mass.  He thinks it warms from the top down gradually and no other way.  He cannot fathom that cold water might come up to the surface from the depths or that warm water might be drawn down to lower levels in the ocean. How do I deduce this?  Because Anthony asks:

How does that heat get to the deep ocean hidey hole, down to 2000 meters, without first warming the upper 700 meters in transit? That’s some neat trick.

I'd say he's built a strawman.  Here is a chart of ocean temperatures to different depths over time:

Data source: NODC/NOAA

So for starters, the oceans' top layer is warmer than deeper layers overall.  No surprises there.  Next thing to note is that the ocean is heating up at depth as well, right down to the two kilometres deep layer as has been discussed in recent published papers, like Nuccitelli et al (2012) and Balmaseda et al (2013)

Another funny thing, not so much for Anthony Watts, we know he knows nothing.  But Bob Tisdale keeps boasting about how he knows the ocean inside out and upside down.  Yet he writes this, and Anthony quotes him:

Can well-mixed human-created greenhouse gases pick and choose between the hemispheres, warming one but not the other? One might think that’s very unlikely.

Why is that unlikely?  What rule is there that says that all over the world has to warm at the same rate all at once?  Why wouldn't oceans in particular heat or cool at different rates at different times?  The land does, why not the oceans?

The weird thing is that it's only a few hours since Anthony posted an article about how the Indian Ocean didn't warm up as quickly as others until recently, most probably because of aerosols.  Makes you wonder if he ever reads anything he posts or if he just copies and pastes without reading the stuff.

Here is a chart showing the changes over time in the vertical mean temperature of the different oceans to 2000 metres:

Data source: NODC/NOAA

And here's a chart of the ocean temperature changes over time between the northern and southern hemispheres, again to 2000 metres:

Data source: NODC/NOAA

If you go to WUWT (no need really), you'll see that Anthony has focused on only the past few years, from around 2005 and is looking at changes in ocean heat content, not temperature.  So let's consider that, except we'll look at all the available data, not just the past few years.

Data source: NODC/NOAA

There is only data to depth for the last few years, but there is a lot more data for 0-700 metres.

How does the heat move around in the ocean?  I come across terms like meridonial overturning circulation - where meridonial denotes north-south and overturning denotes surface-depth.  Water in the ocean moves around all the time.  The ocean isn't all the same temperature.  Parts are warmer than others, which is obvious to all but people like Anthony Watts and Bob Tisdale apparently.  (Have they ever wondered how sea ice forms do you think?  Have they ever been swimming in the sea or a river or a lake and noticed how the temperature can change, even at depth?)

Finally, here is one more chart, from Nuccitelli et al (2012) showing where the heat is going:

Data Source: Nuccitelli et al (2012)

A sample from WUWT denialati comments

Eustace Cranch takes 27 words to ask:

July 24, 2013 at 8:17 am  Sorry for the scream, but: again and again, WHAT IS THE MECHANISM? What told the heat to hide? In 50 words or less of plain English, please.

David Becker, another fake skeptic, doesn't query what the deniers write but says:

July 24, 2013 at 8:34 am  Just out of curiosity, why did this process (energy going into the deep ocean) not occur from 1970 to 1996? Does it just occur when the solar radiance decreases (rhetorical question.) I too, wondered to many AWG supporters how the deep ocean might warm, but the surface not. This is more pathological science from very poor scientists who have a poor grasp of basic thermodynamics.

Mark isn't aware that ocean water moves up and down as well as forward and backward and says:

July 24, 2013 at 8:48 am About the only obvious mechanism for deep water to heat up is through vulcanism.

I know Jimbo doesn't keep up with the latest data and is a denier, but he's close when he says:
July 24, 2013 at 9:30 am  Bearing in mind hiding heat > thermal expansion shouldn’t we be seeing an acceleration in the rate of sea level rise?

We would see an acceleration if the oceans were heating faster (at an increasing rate, that is, accelerating) and/or ice sheets and glaciers were melting faster. Here's a chart of sea level - yep, it's rising faster:

Data Source: U Colorado

Chad Wozniak is the ultimate in denial, he says, every chance he gets:

July 24, 2013 at 9:58 am Actually, the overall cooling began in 1938 . . . it’s been going on, net, for 75+ years now . . .

This is for Chad:

Data Sources: NASA and UK Met Office Hadley Centre