As repeatedly emphasized on Climate Science, the use of surface air temperature is not a measure of climate system heat since it has almost no mass associated with it. Heat of the climate system requires that temperature change (and heat associated with the phase of water) ocurr over mass.  The relation of a change in global climate system heat change is dominated by ocean heat changes, as succincty summarized in Table 1 of Levitus, S., J.I. Antonov, J. Wang, T.L. Delworth, K.W. Dixon, and A.J. Broccoli, 2001: Anthropogenic warming of Earth’s climate system. Science, 292, 267-269, where they write:

“Our analysis of components of Earth’s heat balance quantitatively demonstrates that during the latter half of the 20th century, changes in ocean heat content dominate the changes in Earth’s heat balance.”

This heat change can be expressed as:

ΔH = CΔT * Mass of the ocean where C is the specific heat capacity of sea water in units of Joules per degree per kilogram, T is temperature and M is the mass of the ocean in kilograms.

 Thus if  ΔH > 0, there is global warming.

No where is there a need to use a global average surface temperature trend to diagnose global warming, and, in fact, its use is misleading since there is an inconsequential amount of mass of the climate system involved.  Over the oceans, the sea surface temperatures are correlated with the upper ocean heat content, but over land there are a variety of serious problems with its use as reported in the paper:

Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, D. Niyogi, S. Fall, J. Steinweg-Woods, K. Hubbard, X. Lin, M. Cai, Y.-K. Lim, H. Li, J. Nielsen-Gammon, K. Gallo, R. Hale, R. Mahmood, S. Foster, R.T. McNider, and P. Blanken, 2007: Unresolved issues with the assessment of multi-decadal global land surface temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24S08, doi:10.1029/2006JD008229.

Climate Science (and others; e.g. see) have been reporting on the shortcomings of the use of the global average surface average temperature trend to diagnose global warming, but this poor metric continues to be used by those advocating for particular policy actions on climate (e.g. see its inadequate and incomplete explanation in Wikipedia).

However, using the actual robust metric of global warming, ΔH, there has been none since 2004 (e.g. see), at least in the upper 700m of the ocean.  Source

Write comment
Name:
Email:
Subject:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."