Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
The National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) recently updated their ocean heat content and vertically averaged temperature data for the oceans to depths of 2000 meters. See the NODC data webpage here. 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 Guardianhere. Also see Joe Romm’s post ‘Hottest Year’ Story Obscures Bigger News: Ocean Warming Now Off The Charts at ClimateProgress.
Of course, the alarmists present the ocean heat content data, not the vertically averaged temperature data.
As shown in Figure 1, the ARGO-era temperature data for those depths show the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans have warmed, while the North Atlantic and the largest ocean on our planet, the Pacific, show very little warming over the past 12 years.
For the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the warming rates measured in one-hundredths of a deg C/decade, while for the North Atlantic and Pacific, the trends are in one-thousandths of a deg C/decade.
Figure 2
Something else to consider: the raw ARGO-based temperature data don’t show that much warming. The data have to be adjusted to show those warming rates.
The other problem: manmade greenhouse gases are said to be well-mixed, meaning they’re spread pretty evenly above the Earth’s surface. 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.
I await the ad hominen attacks on Bob Tisdale
