Monday, December 01, 2008

Oceans cooling. Not.

A common misconception about measuring global warming, one that deniers prey upon, is that the average global temperature is the whole story. Ergo, if the last ten years of lower atmosphere temperatures plateau, the warming must have stopped, so the meme goes... on and on.

No so, according to Josh Willis, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who specialises in estimating how much heat the ocean stores annually:

"The oceans are absorbing more than 80 percent of the heat from global warming,” he says. "If you aren’t measuring heat content in the upper ocean, you aren’t measuring global warming."

And so goes a fascinating NASA Earth Observatory feature story of how a conundrum facing scientists, that climate models predicting rising ocean temperatures mismatched observations, was solved.

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3 comments:

  1. Matthew Tripp1:34 pm AEDT

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  2. Anonymous6:46 pm AEDT

    Righty oh, then.

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  3. VangelV1:52 am AEDT

    The problem for the AGW folks is that the oceans are not warming. The data shows that they have actually been cooling for the past three years. A bigger problem is the fact that we have not seen temperatures rise in more than a decade even though CO2 levels have gone up. How many more years of this will you guys have to see before you consider the effects of the sun on our climate?

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