Southern Ocean back in business as a carbon sink (models were wrong)

The Southern Ocean absorbs 40% of the global oceanic uptake in CO2. For most of the last ten years researchers thought it was weaker, or at “saturation” point and not able to absorb more CO2. Instead, it looks like it has been absorbing more again and by the year 2010 was back up to full power. This means there was a lot more natural variation than scientists (and their models) thought.The GCM’s are meant to be coupled ocean and atmosphere models, but they don’t understand the ocean part.

Back in 2007, New Scientist declared the slowdown has “far reaching implications”, things were worse than the IPCC’s projections. Things were 20 years ahead of the IPCC’s schedule and it was “scary”:…

Settled Climate Science? Research Finding Ocean Currents More Powerful Than CO2

Settled Climate Science…Really? Research Finding Ocean Currents More Powerful Than CO2

http://www.c3headlines.com/2015/06/settled-climate-sciencereally-research-finding-ocean-currents-more-powerful-than-co2.html

Article: Current knowledge about ocean circulations (AMOC and others) and their variability are so unsettled that the most sophisticated and powerful climate models are completely unable to accurately forecast these gargantuan climate forces. Ocean circulation is responsible for the immense…

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Global warming ‘pause’ expands to ‘new record length’: No warming for 18 years 5 months

Special to Climate Depot

El Niño has not yet paused the Pause

Global temperature update: no warming for 18 years 5 months

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Since December 1996 there has been no global warming at all (Fig. 1). This month’s RSS temperature – still unaffected by the most persistent el Niño conditions of the current weak cycle – shows a new record length for the Pause: 18 years 5 months.

The result, as always, comes with a warning that the temperature increase that usually accompanies an el Niño may come through after a lag of four or five months. If, on the other hand, la Niña conditions begin to cool the oceans in time, there could be a lengthening of the Pause just in time for the Paris world-government summit in December 2015.

Figure 1. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the RSS satellite monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset shows no global warming for 18 years 5 months since December 1996.

The hiatus period of 18 years 5 months, or 221 months, is the farthest back one can go in the RSS satellite temperature record and still show a sub-zero trend.

The divergence between the models’ predictions in 1990 (Fig. 2) and 2005 (Fig. 3), on the one hand, and the observed outturn, on the other, also continues to widen.

Figure 2. Near-term projections of warming at a rate equivalent to 2.8 [1.9, 4.2] K/century, made with “substantial confidence” in IPCC (1990), for the 303 months January 1990 to March 2015 (orange region and red trend line), vs. observed anomalies (dark blue) and trend (bright blue) at less than 1.4 K/century equivalent, taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH v. 5.6 satellite monthly mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.

Figure 3. Predicted temperature change, January 2005 to March 2015, at a rate equivalent to 1.7 [1.0, 2.3] Cº/century (orange zone with thick red best-estimate trend line), compared with the near-zero observed anomalies (dark blue) and real-world trend (bright blue), taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH v. 5.6 satellite lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.

The Technical Note explains the sources of the IPCC’s predictions in 1990 and in 2005, and also demonstrates that that according to the ARGO bathythermograph data the oceans are warming at a rate equivalent to less than a quarter of a Celsius degree per century. There are also details of the long-awaited beta-test …

Analysis: ‘The Truth Behind Record Sea Temperature Claims’

The Truth Behind Record Sea Temperature Claims

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/the-truth-behind-record-sea-temperature-claims/

By Paul Homewood h/t John Kelly http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/record-seasurface-temperatures-in-pacific-point-to-record-warmth-in-2015-and-2016-20150414-1mjooh.html The Age are banging their global warming drum again, this time over what they describe as record sea temperatures around Australia. And, of, course, its YOUR FAULT! As usual, however, when you delve into the facts, things aren’t quite as straightforward as they pretend. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology, BOM, offer a full set of data/graphs for sea temperatures in that part of the world, right back to 1900. Now let me first of all say that I have grave doubts about the accuracy and comparability of sea temperatures from so far back, and even into more recent decades. Methods of measurement have changed over the years, and huge question marks should be put against the coverage. Nevertheless, this is the only data we have got, and it is from this that “record” claims are being made. So, given that proviso, what does the data tell us? http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=sst&area=aus&season=0112&ave_yr=10 1) The first thing to notice is that the long term trend has been rising at a pretty steady rate since 1900. Clearly the rise in temperatures up to the mid 20thC can have had little to do with CO2. In other words, we are back to the recovery from the Little Ice Age scenario. Is there any reason that warming in recent decades has not been caused by the same natural factors, which caused the earlier warming? 2) The rate of increase looks to have much slowed down, if not totally slowed, since the turn of the century. The record years were set in 1998 and 2010, (and yes, you’d be right to think of El Ninos). 3) There is clearly a big step up in 1998, raising the question of how much of the residual heat from that year’s El Nino has remained in the system. 4) There is a noticeable downturn in the 1950’s and 60’s, which follows the cold phase of the PDO. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/gcos_wgsp/tsanalysis.pl?tstype1=20&tstype2=0&year1=&year2=2015&itypea=0&axistype=0&anom=0&plotstyle=0&climo1=&climo2=&y1=&y2=&y21=&y22=&length=&lag=&iall=0&iseas=1&mon1=0&mon2=11&Submit=Calculate+Results The PDO has been back up in positive territory in the last year, but would be expected to drop back down in due course. When it does, SST’s are likely to fall with it. The bottom line is that CO2 and other GHG simply cannot make any measurable difference to sea temperatures, given the massive heat capacity of the oceans. And there is certainly no known mechanics, whereby CO2 …