Mummy, The Ocean’s Eaten My Heat!!

I’ve been meaning to post on this for a while. We often hear the claim that all of the missing heat has been gobbled up by the oceans.

Now, let’s leave aside some of the obvious problems with this theory, such as:

How all of this heat has selectively and mysteriously managed to avoid land areas.

How warm water has managed to sink instead of rise.

How the water at, or near, the surface seems to have escaped this warming.

And get straight to the nub of the matter.

Water has a much higher heat capacity than air. According to NOAA,

The oceans store more heat in the uppermost 3 meters (10 feet) than the entire atmosphere (above it).

So let’s run some very simple calculations.

In the last decade, most models were predicting something of the order of 0.2C global warming. If, instead of warming the atmospheric , this extra heat has gone into the sea, its effects will be much diluted, with the result that increases in sea temperatures will be much, much less than 0.2C.

(Remember, it takes much more energy to warm a bucket of water by 1C than a bucket of air.)

The suggestion is that, as there has been no noticeable warming in the upper 100 meters, this “hidden heat” is as far as 2000 meters down.

So, ocean temperature should have increased by:

2000 Meters Divided By 3 Meters = 666.6

0.2C Divided By 666.6 = 0.0003C

The idea that we can:

measure sea temperatures throughout all the oceans of the world

measure it throughout the whole depth down to 2000 meters and more.

take into account seasonal changes

take into account shifting ocean cycles and currents.

and still be able to measure the overall temperature to better than three ten thousandths of a degree is patent nonsense.

So step forward Professor Ted Shepherd, a leading atmospheric scientist and recently installed as Grantham Chair in Climate Science at Reading University.

He had this to say to the Guardian.

“The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,”

Or to put it another way, we have no idea whether it is or not, but in the meantime we’ll still cling to our theory.