New Gold Standard for measuring global warming

Russ Steele

I have been following a discussion of between climate scientist at Roger Pielke’s Climate Science blog following the NCAR press release on the "Missing Heat" in the ocean.

This morning Roger recaps the discussion in this post: The Significance of the E-Mail Interchange with Kevin Trenberth and Josh Willis

Follow the above link to read the email exchanges. Roger summarizes here.

I want to summarize today what are the main conclusions from this exchange of perspectives:

    ■    First, when colleagues who differ can interact in a constructive manner, we all benefit by an improved understanding of the science issues and the way forward to resolve remaining uncertainties.
    ■    In terms of climate science, a very substantive conclusion from this interchange of perspectives is that we do not need to continue to use the global average surface temperature trend (with its unresolved biases and uncertainties) to diagnose global warming. The trends in the upper ocean heat content, which has been accurately measured since at least 2005, and will for the foreseeable future, should be adopted as the primary metric to monitor global warming.
     
This second finding does not mean continued analyses of surface temperatures and their anomalies are not needed [they certainly are for length of growing season, heating degree days, etc], but for the specific metric of global warming (and cooling), it is an inadequate metric compared with ocean heat content changes.

We need near-real time plots of the ocean heat content changes over time, such as given in the figure in

Pielke Sr., R.A., 2008: A broader view of the role of humans in the climate system. Physics Today, 61, Vol. 11, 54-55.

Four-year rate of the global upper 700 m of ocean heat changes in Joules at monthly time intervals. One standard error value is also shown. (Figure courtesy of Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory).

It will be illuminating and informative to see how NCDC (Tom Karl), GISS (Jim Hansen), and CRU (Phil Jones)  respond to this recognition that it is time to move past the surface temperature trend as the “gold standard” of global warming.

It will indeed be interesting to see how these rent seeking scientist respond to this new gold standard of ocean heat, it could result in the de-funding of their surface temperature charade.  We already have 3000 Argo floats providing regular temperature soundings of the temperature in the upper 2000 m of the ocean. All we have to do is read the oceans thermometer to measure the earths temperature. It has been showing a cooling trend if you place a straight edge on the peak and troughs in the above graphic.