Andy May, a retired petrophysicist and data scientist has convinced me that 99.9 percent of the thermal energy coming from the sun (including the greenhouse effect) and stored by the earth’s surface as heat goes into the oceans, not into the land or air. The oceans contain more than 99.9 percent of the thermal energy on the surface of the Earth, and their average temperature is only 4° to 5°C (40°F). On a calorie basis, the land stores essentially no heat, and the atmosphere stores less than 0.1 percent of the heat coming in. Oceans store the rest.
The implication is that if you want to measure “global warming,” surface temperatures and atmospheric temperatures are not the way to do it. Sounds plausible when they say it, but for all I know this is a couple of Internet cranks who could be persuasively debunked by someone knowledgeable.
People I’ve known who are strongly convinced of the climate crisis have said that ocean temperatures are a better measure than global average temperatures.
When there was a pause in temperature rise around 2010 they would say that the ocean temperature was the more important thing to watch.
However, how you measure the ocean temperature is again subject to difficulty and well, average temperatures are going to be somewhat synthetic.
If you would like to be better informed on this subject I would strongly suggest following Judith Curry’s blog “Climate, etc.”
Global Warming had a PR makeover into Climate Change
past “controversial” theories like The Big Band and Continental Drift didn’t need that
it is also heavily pushed by all the wrong people and all the wrong orgs
I find Internet Cranks to be just as reliable as the UN
Those specific statements are correct.
Water has a larger heat capacity than soil or air: water 1 calorie/gram/degree vs .25 calorie/gram/degree for soil or air.
The oceans circulate so the full mass of the oceans can absorb heat from the sun. Soil does not circulate and does not conduct heat well, so it can store solar energy down only a depth of a few feet.
Mass of the oceans is about 1.4 x 10^21 kg. Mass of the atmosphere is about 5.3 x 10^18 kg. So between the larger mass and larger heat capacity, oceans have about a thousand-fold more heat storage than atmosphere.
The mass of the relevant land is about 150 million km^2 land surface area times less than 1 meter depth, or about 10^14 m^3, or 10^20 cm^3, or 10^20 g or 10^17 kg. So land stores about 1/50 less heat than the atmosphere.
These numbers replicate Andy May’s, 99.9% of heat capacity is in oceans and 0.1% in atmosphere and land is negligible.
Quite so. The big problem is that the mixing of heat down to the ocean depths is not terribly well known.
Yes. This is absolutely correct. One doesn’t need a PhD in climate science to do this basic arithmetic.
Apparently we’ve found ourselves looking at the atmosphere because the light’s better there.
I would think that even if the average temperature of the entire mass of the Earth doesn’t change much, the thin outermost layer we happen to live in might.
The thing is, a lot of the ocean isn’t participating in thermal exchange. Water is densest at 4 degrees C, and water below the thermocline tends to keep a stable temperature. Might be worth measuring if that depth is rising or falling, but water under about 500 meters down isn’t really interacting with surface temperatures. In short, this is an incomplete model, and we need a more sophisticated one to make any useful predictions.
Standard plea of non-expertise, but I think one problem with this explanation is that the energy transfer between the atmosphere, the land, and the ocean is very slow, for the same reason that when you go to cook up some eggs, the skillet can be a couple hundred degrees, but the handle remains at room temperature or slightly above it. The area where heat exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean occurs is basically a two dimensional plane, whereas the entire atmosphere, a three dimensional space, is absorbing solar radiation, so the result is that the atmosphere can heat up a lot faster than it can transfer that heat to the ocean or other bodies of water.
I am not totally confident in this assessment and some meteorologist might show up here and laugh at me for this.
Jeff,
Arnold missed the best post to link to, it is this one that explains ocean warming in more detail, as well as the thermal energy distribution: https://andymaypetrophysicist.com/2020/11/27/ocean-temperature-update/
The atmosphere is in daily communication with the ocean mixed layer and the delay in temperature exchange is no more than a week. The mixed layer has 22x the heat capacity of the whole atmosphere. The rest of the ocean has a bigger delay, especially the ocean below 4000 meters. But, either way the ocean protects us from heat extremes.
Being an extreme contrarian about popular opinion on climate is not the least bit extraordinary as popular opinion is so freaking bizzare. Popular opinion, or “Thunbergism” as it embodies the “truths” revealed by high climate prophetess Greta Thunberg, rests on four claims:
1. The pure global average temperature ordained for the optimal welfare of humankind is that of the year 1850, a pre-industrial time unsullied by human progress and just coincidentally the time of the Little Ice Age.
2. Any change from the pure temperature is bad, evil even, and a result of human sin which are any activities that increase the presence of a “greenhouse gas” in the atmosphere such as procuring food, shelter, warmth, or transportation.
3. The Earth shall punish humankind for these sins in the most severe ways possible to include human extinction and that punishment is imminent.
4. Humankind must repent immediately as the consequences of not doing so are so catastrophic that no avoidance cost is too great.
Prominent Thunbergites include former religious leader turned wannabe politico Pope Francis and whomever writes Joe Biden’s lines for him. As countless scientists have pointed out the most recent IPCC report clearly states that a climate apocalypse is highly unlikely but we must have faith in the direct predictions because High Prophetess Greta says so. Anyone who questions even a little of this popular opinion such as Bjorn Lomborg is harshly denounced as an apostate, heretic or worse by the likes of “economist” Tyler Cowen.
Unfortunately there is too much money flowing to the profiteers feeding off the increased retail power costs for any sanity to ever be restored and the resulting Great Immiseration is unavoidable.
Seems there was more contrarian views in the media twenty years ago. Now most media is co-opted by politics, I suppose.
Heck, in the mid seventies much opinion was that we were in a global cooling phase: man made pollution was reflecting too much solar radiation. Higher CO2 levels were dismissed, noting that all UV radiation incident on the troposphere was absorbed already; more CO2 didn’t matter. Past geologic epochs had much higher CO2 levels with only moderate temp increases.
Tony Heller has a nice piece today that illustrates not just this great forgetting but also how NASA changes the temperature records to suit the dogma of the day: https://realclimatescience.com/rewriting-the-climate-at-nasa/
So, aren’t ocean temperatures rising? I guess I am missing the point.
I’m guessing ocean temperature is not rising as fast as expected. Temps fell from 1940 to 1970.
Wiki tells me that during the Cretaceous, ocean temps were 20 degrees C higher than today.
My best estimate of ocean warming using JAMSTEC data and U of Hamburg data is 0.06 deg. C per decade. The warming is over 90% linear with no sign of acceleration. This is not dangerous. you can see the plot here: https://andymaypetrophysicist.files.wordpress.com/2021/10/ocean_temp_trend.png
The standard climate models absolutely incorporate the roles played by the oceans, including as heat sinks. But it doesn’t end up making much difference relative to the common understanding people have. The oceans are not going to warm up in isolation by themselves – they will be passing heat back and forth with the atmosphere. They can’t arbitrarily just acquire a new temperature differential between themselves and the surrounding air. Indeed, the vast majority of the extra heat that oceans do pick up will be heat that was in the air first.
(the factual claim that oceans do have a large heat carrying capacity relative to both land and air is entirely true)
I have followed climate debates for a lot of years. I don’t think this particular idea is very contrarian — one only needs to look at the heat capacity of air vs. water. Also the fact that oceans are like 75% of the surface. This is one reason there is a project that was put in place for drifting buoys that can unreal thermometers down to great depth in the ocean to track ocean temperatures at many levels around the globe.
The problem is that you get into significant figure problems — tiny tiny changes to temperature at, say, 2000 feet deep imply enormous increases in heat retention. But ocean temperature measurement has always struck me as a better way to look at the global heat balances and changes therine.
They’ve been talking about this for a while: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/12/science/earth/ocean-warming-climate-change.html
We just stuck our thermometer into the sea in addition to various test strips. Temperature was just fine, but the ph was a little high. We added a few buckets of ph-. You’re welcome! good luck!