It is obvious that the source of all heat is the Sun and that nuclear reactions in the earth’s interiror producing heat – if any – are negligible in comparison.
It seems equally obvious, considering the relative heat capacities of air with that of water, that the primary vehicle for the storage and distribution of the heat emanating from the sun, around the earth, is first by the oceans and only second via the atmosphere. The heat absorbed is attenuated by clouds. The heat lost from the earth is also primarily attenuated by clouds and only marginally by other constituents of the atmosphere.
But climate models have generally minimised solar insolation effects and largely ignored the oceans. Heat losses have been predicated primarily on carbon dioxide and other trace constituents of the atmosphere and have ended up treating the net effects of clouds as causing warming rather than cooling. Whither common sense!!
But the current “hiatus” in global warming – which may well become 2 or 3 decades of cooling – is beginning to bring a whiff of reality into the “science”. They don’t acknowledge the possibility of cooling, of course, and don’t give up on their carbon dioxide fantasies but they are beginning to pay some attention to the oceans and the Sun.
But now they reckon models must be judged on a timescale of 50 – 100 years!
But note the phrase “sceptics and some scientists”! I thought scientists were supposed to be sceptical. Science based on belief leaves a little to be desired.
The heat is actually non-existent but the euphemism for that is “missing heat”.
Climate change: The case of the missing heat
Nature 505, 276–278 (16 January 2014), doi:10.1038/505276a
… Average global temperatures hit a record high in 1998 — and then the warming stalled.
For several years, scientists wrote off the stall as noise in the climate system: the natural variations in the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere that drive warm or cool spells around the globe. But the pause has persisted, sparking a minor crisis of confidence in the field. Although there have been jumps and dips, average atmospheric temperatures have risen little since 1998, in seeming defiance of projections of climate models and the ever-increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. Climate sceptics have seized on the temperature trends as evidence that global warming has ground to a halt. Climate scientists, meanwhile, know that heat must still be building up somewhere in the climate system, but they have struggled to explain where it is going, if not into the atmosphere. Some have begun to wonder whether there is something amiss in their models.
Now, as the global-warming hiatus enters its sixteenth year, scientists are at last making headway in the case of the missing heat. Some have pointed to the Sun, volcanoes and even pollution from China as potential culprits, but recent studies suggest that the oceans are key to explaining the anomaly. The latest suspect is the El Niño of 1997–98, which pumped prodigious quantities of heat out of the oceans and into the atmosphere — perhaps enough to tip the equatorial Pacific into a prolonged cold state that has suppressed global temperatures ever since. ……
….. But none of the climate simulations carried out for the IPCC produced this particular hiatus at this particular time. That has led sceptics — and some scientists — to the controversial conclusion that the models might be overestimating the effect of greenhouse gases, and that future warming might not be as strong as is feared. Others say that this conclusion goes against the long-term temperature trends, as well as palaeoclimate data that are used to extend the temperature record far into the past. And many researchers caution against evaluating models on the basis of a relatively short-term blip in the climate. “If you are interested in global climate change, your main focus ought to be on timescales of 50 to 100 years,” says Susan Solomon, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. …….
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Tags: carbon dioxide, climate change, effect of oceans, global warming, Nature
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