What heats the oceans?

If you want to understand what the IPCC says about climate science, you spend a lot of time reading Chapter 9: Ocean, Cryosphere and Sea Level Change. Which I’m sure you do — right? I certainly do.

If you really want to understand what drives our climate, you’ll need to single out section 9.2.2. But you already knew that. Here is the summary paragraph on ocean heat content and transport. I’m going to break it into single sentences in bold with comments:

Ocean warming — that is, increasing ocean heat content (OHC) — is an important aspect of energy on Earth: SROCC (Bindoff et al., 2019) reported that there is high confidence that ocean warming during 1971–2010 dominated the increase in the Earth’s energy inventory, which is confirmed by the Box 7.2 assessment that the ocean has stored 91% of the total energy gained from 1971 to 2018.

This surprises no one. Temperatures have been going up for 200 years. It would be strange if 1971–2010 showed a decrease in temperature, since 1950–1971 DID show a decrease in temperature that they don’t mention. As I showed last week, the Atlantic Decadal Oscillation and other ocean oscillations ensure that temperatures don’t march linearly up or down.

As reported in Sections 2.3.3.1, 3.5.1.3 and 7.2.2.2, Box 7.2 and Cross-Chapter Box 9.1, confidence in the assessment of global OHC change since 1971 is strengthened compared to previous reports, and extended backward to include likely warming since 1871.

Again, this makes sense, though data quality is generally poor, and the 1871 number is laughable. Back in 1871 sailors were throwing thermometers off the sides of ships and writing down temperatures (or not) in a log book. Once in a while, they even threw it on the shady side, not the sunny side of the ship. The technical term for this is “grasping at straws.”

Before 2004, all ocean-temperature data is essentially worthless. Since 2004, we have better data from the Argo and Triton floats that show a slow, gradual warming. This chart, from Woods Hole, is based on Argo data and is very politically motivated ...

This graph has the data, but the colors are obviously designed for the news cycle. The blue on the upper left is the so-called “pause,” because there was no El Nino then, and that threw the computer models off. This gorgeous bit of Rothko-inspired science shows the surface warming about 0.2 degrees C since 2004, with a high at the 2016 El Nino and some El-Nina cooling over the last three years. It also shows how sluggish the deep ocean is in changing temperature.

At 1,800 meters, even though the graph goes from light blue to golden, the temperature hardly budges at all, it’s well within the error range of the instrument, which is at least 0.4 degrees plus/minus. So all the color in this chart above 200 meters is misleading at best, from 200–400 meters is dishonest, and below 400 meters is meaningless, bordering on fraudulent. The Woods Hole people know this. It’s designed to show a dramatic “transition” from dark blue to dark red in the mixed layer of the ocean that represents a range of 0.3 degrees, which is well within the margin of error of measurement. The data do not show anything dramatic, but the public only sees colors, and journalists don’t understand the visual display of quantitative information, so this kind of chart is money in the bank for fundraisers. Feynman called this “Cargo cult science.”

The average temperature of the oceans is unknown. Raising the ocean temperature from wherever it is now by 0.1 degree would take a huge amount of energy that only direct heating by shortwave radiation can provide. It would take many nuclear-bombs’ worth of energy. No amount of CO2 can heat the oceans significantly, as we’ll learn below.

Overall, the entire ocean has gained about 40 zettajoules of heat energy in the last 20 years (all measurements before 2005 are worthless), and there are error bars around that number that get bigger the deeper you measure.

Wait. 40 zettajoules! That sounds like a lot of zettajoules!

Is it? The oceans contain a minimum of 1.5 million zettajoules of energy, so the oceans have warmed about 40/1,500,000 = 0.0000266 percent in 20 years.

Wait. 0.0000266 percent?

That’s far less than one ten-thousandth of one percent. That’s a rounding error. At this rate, it would take more than 400,000 years to warm one percent. Keep that in mind as you read how dramatically the oceans are warming.

Journalists have no idea what a zettajoule is or how to put anything in context.

To continue following the IPCC trail, we need to look at section 3.5.1.3, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. Here is the key cookie:

Observed ocean heat content changes are discussed in Section 2.3.3.1, where it is reported that it is virtually certain that the global upper ocean (0–700 m) and very likely that the global intermediate ocean (700–2000 m) warmed substantially from 1971 to the present.

Starting in 1971 gives them an excuse to say the warming has been rising as CO2 has been rising, but the data from 1971 to 2005 are worthless — you can choose any trend you like from that period and substantiate it using “evidence.” As we have seen, the global ocean has warmed a microscopic amount since 2005. It almost certainly warmed the same amount from 1871 to 1920, but we don’t have the data to show that.

Most of this section is based on simulations, but one of their claims is:

Since AR5, the attribution of ocean heat content increases to anthropogenic forcing has been further supported by more detection and attribution studies. These studies have shown that contributions from natural forcing alone cannot explain the observed changes in ocean heat content in either the upper or intermediate ocean layers, and a response to anthropogenic forcing is clearly detectable in ocean heat content (Gleckler et al., 2016; Bilbao et al., 2019; Tokarska et al., 2019).

I want readers to understand that this is impossible. No amount of CO2 in the atmosphere can have much, if any, influence on ocean temperatures. Jim Steele explains why (I’m starting the video at the point where he explains this):

Shortwave radiation coming from the sun has far more energy than reflected longwave radiation coming back down. The shortwave radiation has enough energy to penetrate the water, which you know from snorkeling as the water in the first ten meters really warms up. On the other hand, the longwave radiation reflected back down doesn’t generally go past 2 microns, where it mostly powers evaporation, which actually cools the water below. Longwave radiation can mix a bit of heat down into the top layer, but that effect is dwarfed by both the evaporation effect and the shortwave energy penetrating the water.

This is what the IPCC has decided not to understand. Instead, they publish papers showing how the oceans have warmed and don’t explain that this has to be a solar trend, not a greenhouse-driven trend. Read chapter 9 carefully and you’ll see that it’s guilt by association rather than cause. They don’t point to any source.