Surface warming scare was all a misunderstanding: ‘When we talk about global warming, we really mean ocean warming’

So forget the past 25 years of fearmongering about surface temperature?

Science Alert reports:

Understanding how and why the ocean is changing is critical for studies of climate change, [Dr Steve Rintoul, of CSIRO’s Wealth from the Oceans Flagship and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre] says. ‘The oceans influence the rate of climate change by soaking up vast amounts of heat and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

‘When we talk about global warming, we really mean ocean warming – about 93 per cent of the extra heat stored by the Earth over the last 50 years is found in the ocean.

‘To track the evolution of climate change, we need to continue to measure the oceans. In particular, we need to know if the ability of the ocean to absorb heat and carbon dioxide will change in the future.’

10 thoughts on “Surface warming scare was all a misunderstanding: ‘When we talk about global warming, we really mean ocean warming’”

  1. Hm. Oceans cover 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, but absorb 93% of the “extra heat”. Used to be, the CO2 acted as a ‘heat pump’ to preferentially send heat in the direction of gravity. Now we have something — perhaps CO2 again — sending the heat preferentially toward liquid water. Sure would like that mechanism explained.

    Trouble is, how can you explain a mechanism where your best explanation for heat movement is that you ‘can’t find it anywhere else’? This is Trenberth’s famous ‘missing heat’ which, he says, is a ‘travesty’ because the ‘instruments must be faulty’.

    They just can’t bring themselves to the point of considering that the “extra heat” is maybe just plain radiated into space.

  2. looking at this as a scientist one cannot help getting a creepy feeling that someone is panicking here! Sounds a bit like fixing the TV by banging it on the top.

  3. Sounds like deep sea diving time to me – warmists in those old style suits with the round brass helmets, large thermometer in one hand, flashlight in the other.

  4. The global warming crowd reminds me of when I was a kid playing a game and making the rules up as we played.

  5. What “extra” heat? Sounds more like a gap in closing energy balances resulting in the miss in global temperatures.

  6. can someone explain if this is true, short wave radiation from the Sun heats the seas to a depth of 100 metres? ( natural warming) . long wave radiation can only heat the top few Millimetres of the sea which in essence is the area that evaporates causing cooling.

  7. If this mechanism is correct, and it has some plausibility, it just proves what skeptics have always said: that the earth’s climate system is robust and dominated by negative feedback.
    It also makes some sense that oceans would absorb more heat than land since I’ve always understood water to be a very effective heat sink.
    Heat absorbed by the ocean is not necessarily or even likely to have been “driven” by human activity. Warmists who use this theory are really making the skeptics’ case for us.

  8. It’s incredible the lengths these people will go to to avoid having to say,”we were wrong”.

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