Gaia obviously didn't get Gore's memo.
The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat : NPRWell, you've got to consider that if you have equivalent volumes of air and water that the water can hold a LOT more thermal energy than the air can. (You would, for example, have little trouble holding your hand in an oven where the temperature is 300 degrees for ten or fifteen seconds, but you sure wouldn't want to dip your hand in a pot of boiling water for that length of time.)Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.
This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.
But it sure seems like the oceans don't figure into the equation when it comes to global warming. Of course, they're not acting right.
"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming."Um, I guess you could describe slight cooling as less rapid warming... (Like a Democrat can redefine a decrease in an expected increase of program funding a 'cut' - despite the actual increase...)In recent years, heat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air. This is a feature of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. So it is indeed possible the air has warmed but the ocean has not. But it's also possible that something more mysterious is going on.
But if the aquatic robots are actually telling the right story, that raises a new question: Where is the extra heat all going?Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it's probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.
Well, judging by the cold blasts in Chicago, the massive storms in the Midwest, solar output dropping, I think we're in for a cold spell. But the guys who's funding depends on warming disagree.
Trenberth and Willis agree that a few mild years have no effect on the long-term trend of global warming. But they say there are still things to learn about how our planet copes with the heat.Um, yeah. Especially when it doesn't seem to be warming.
J.
Comments (1)
From what I remember of the long-term graphs on temperature and carbon dioxide, the latter is a lagging and dependent variable: carbon dioxide is driven by temperature and lags behind temperature. The offset is small, on the geological scale, but measureable, and confined to inter-glacial periods by and large.
As I have gone on about numerous times, the reason that global temperatures stabilize at 14 degrees centigrade higher than they are now is that plate tectonics, when slower, allows water to cover more land surface. Thus you get relatively shallow, but widespread seas. Imagine the Caribbean covering all but the Rockies and high plateau, and the Appalachians an island chain. Do that for the rest of the continents and you get the best thermal heat sink available: warm, shallow seas.
And ditch that heat sink in the Antarctic, get that stupid continent out of there... it acts like the heatsink and fan on your PC's CPU: keeps it cooler by radiating heat away more efficiently.
Of course that is just basic physics at work, nothing fancy. It is a tough go for atmosphere to do much of anything unless it is really dense, like Venus.
Posted by ajacksonian | March 25, 2008 8:17 PM
Posted on March 25, 2008 20:17