From the INSTITUTE OF ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICS, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES and the “worse than we thought” mind of climate activist John Abraham comes this study, that frankly, isn’t very believable, especially when you invoke the word “consensus” as part of your proof.

Oceans are warming rapidly, study says

More than 90% of the earth’s energy imbalance (EEI) in the climate system is sequestered in the ocean and consequently the ocean heat content (OHC) is increasing. Therefore, OHC is one of the most important indicators of global warming. During the past 30 years, many independent groups worked to estimate historical OHC changes. However, large uncertainty has been found among the published global OHC time series. For example, during the current surge of research on the so-called “hiatus” or “slowdown”, different scientific studies draw quite different conclusions on the key scientific question such as “Where is the heat redistributed in the ocean?” This motivates us to give a detailed analysis about global and basin OHC changes based on multiple ocean datasets.

A just released study, led by Ph. D student WANG Gong-jie from National University of Defence Technology, cooperating with Professor LI Chong-yin and Dr. CHENG Li-jing from Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP)/ Chinese Academy of Sciences, Professor John P. ABRAHAM from University of St. Thomas (USA), comprehensively examined the OHC change on decadal and multi-decadal scales and at different ocean basins. Through three different objectively analyzed ocean datasets (Ishii from Japan, EN4 from Met. Office and IAP), they found that the oceans are robustly warming, regardless of which data was used. In addition, the heat among global oceans experienced a significant redistribution in the past several decades.

During 1998-2012, which was famous for global warming slowdown period, all of these basins had been accumulating heat, and there was no clear indication of which ocean basin dominates the global OHC change. In other words, below 100-m depth in the Atlantic and Southern Ocean, and between 100-300m depth in the Pacific and Indian Ocean, there was statistically significant warming and they all contributed to global ocean warming. The discrepancy results from previous studies are due to the difference of depth ranges used in calculating OHC as well as the uncertainty in subsurface temperature datasets.

Why are there substantial differences among different datasets? This study shows that Ishii analysis underestimates the heating rate in the southern hemisphere in the past century. And EN4 analysis cannot correctly reconstruct the sea surface temperature (SST) during the past 30 years and underestimates the warming rate by ~90% compared with an independent SST datasets such as ERSST and OISST. This indicates the Ishii and EN4 analyses may underestimate the ocean warming rate.

“In plain English, it will be important that we keep high-quality temperature sensors positioned throughout the oceans so in the future we will be able to predict where our climate is headed,” explains co-author ABRAHAM. “We say in science that a measurement not made is a measurement lost forever. And there are no more important measurements than of heating of the oceans.”

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The press release: http://english.iap.cas.cn/RE/201706/t20170629_179178.html

The paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-017-3751-5

Consensuses and discrepancies of basin-scale ocean heat content changes in different ocean analyses

Inconsistent global/basin ocean heat content (OHC) changes were found in different ocean subsurface temperature analyses, especially in recent studies related to the slowdown in global surface temperature rise. This finding challenges the reliability of the ocean subsurface temperature analyses and motivates a more comprehensive inter-comparison between the analyses. Here we compare the OHC changes in three ocean analyses (Ishii, EN4 and IAP) to investigate the uncertainty in OHC in four major ocean basins from decadal to multi-decadal scales. First, all products show an increase of OHC since 1970 in each ocean basin revealing a robust warming, although the warming rates are not identical. The geographical patterns, the key modes and the vertical structure of OHC changes are consistent among the three datasets, implying that the main OHC variabilities can be robustly represented. However, large discrepancies are found in the percentage of basinal ocean heating related to the global ocean, with the largest differences in the Pacific and Southern Ocean. Meanwhile, we find a large discrepancy of ocean heat storage in different layers, especially within 300–700 m in the Pacific and Southern Oceans. Furthermore, the near surface analysis of Ishii and IAP are consistent with sea surface temperature (SST) products, but EN4 is found to underestimate the long-term trend. Compared with ocean heat storage derived from the atmospheric budget equation, all products show consistent seasonal cycles of OHC in the upper 1500 m especially during 2008 to 2012. Overall, our analyses further the understanding of the observed OHC variations, and we recommend a careful quantification of errors in the ocean analyses.

The study was co-authored by John P. Abraham, this guy:

For those of you that don’t know, he’s part of the wrongheadedly named “skeptical science” crew of 97% consensus baiters. He’s also an activist, writing political commentary for The Guardian.

For example:

Climate change will have very long lasting consequences that we will be dealing with long after he is gone. Long after other issues like immigration, the economy, debt, jobs, terrorism, or new words like “covfefe” have passed from our minds, the implications of our climate effect will linger. Frankly, no challenge we are facing (except perhaps a potential nuclear war) presents the consequences that climate change does. And this, sadly, will be the legacy of conservatives in my country. As we wake up to more severe weather, more droughts, heat waves, rising seas, severe storms, the world will remember that these issues could have been solved long ago but for an ideology and tribalism. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/jun/02/reflections-on-the-politics-of-climate-change

Talk about misguided, even the IPCC doesn’t think we are getting more severe weather..

He’s also not a climate scientist, nor even a meteorologist, but rather a mechanical engineer.

Just like the antics of of his buddies John Cook and Stephan Lewandowski, I don’t trust this guy to come up with accurate and unbiased science. The key red flag is the sentence in the abstract:

“Inconsistent global/basin ocean heat content (OHC) changes were found in different ocean subsurface temperature analyses…”

Abraham is playing the “order out of chaos” game, setting himself up as the unifier of all these “inconsistent” pieces of data to fit a theory. Just reading the paper makes me think it’s another one of those “conclusions first, justifications second” type paper.

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