But the dynamics and capacity of ocean storage are not well understood.
The Global Post reports:
There has been a recent pause in the slow increase of global temperatures, says the United Kingdom’s meteorological office.
The new research has emboldened skeptics, but they risk speaking too soon as scientists say that the temperature trend remains upwardly mobile.
The slowdown in increasing global temperatures in the last five years is due to the warming of the deep oceans, say scientists.
Oceans absorb heat, which helps to cool the world — but as the deeper reaches of the ocean begin to warm, they will no longer be the powerful air conditioners they once were. [Emphasis added]
As Jim Hansen pointed out in his seminal 1981 global warming paper:
Lack of knowledge of ocean processes primarily introduces uncertainties about the time dependence of the global CO2 warming.
Thirty-two years later, not much has changed.
The late oceanographer, Dr Robert Stevenson said in a year 2000 article, that: “The top layer of the ocean to that depth warms up easily under sunlight. Below 100 meters, however, little radiant energy remains. The ocean becomes progressively darker and colder as the depth increases.The concept proposed in some predictive models is that any anomalous heat in the mixed layer of the ocean (the upper 100 meters) might be lost to the deep ocean.
There have been a number of studies in which this process has been addressed (Nakamura 1997; Tanimoto 1993; Trenberth 1994; Watanabi 1994; and White 1998). It is clear that solar-related variations in mixed-layer temperatures penetrate to between 80 to 160 meters, the average depth of the main pycnocline (density discontinuity) in the global ocean. Below these depths, temperature fluctuations become uncorrelated with solar signals, deeper penetration being restrained by the stratified barrier of the pycnocline.
Consequently, anomalous heat associated with changing solar irradiance is stored in the upper 100 meters. The heat balance is maintained by heat loss to the atmosphere, not to the deep ocean.”
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/ocean.html
Notice that Trenberth has been struggling with this since 1994 and he still hasn’t found his missing heat.
Wow! That heat energy is clever stuff. For years it was warming the air in the atmosphere, but when that started giving it a bad reputation it started hiding in the ocean. /sarc off
There’s a lot of ocean that can absorb a lot of heat, folks. This sounds nonsensical to me. Besides, last time I reviewed the topic here and at WUWT, there’s no evidence of deep ocean heating anyway.