AustralianClimateMadness reports:
Here’s the alarmists’ thought process: Where’s the missing heat? Our models must be right (no doubt there), so it must be hiding somewhere. Somewhere we can’t measure it. Deep in the oceans!
And because of the much larger heat capacity of water compared to air, the differences in temperature would be of the order of hundredths of a degree. Which is conveniently impossible to measure accurately.
Which is why ocean heat content is the buzzword du jour…
[h/t ClimateDepot]
There are a number of ways water is heated/cooled. One is convective transfer from air. The effectiveness depends on the difference in temperture at the transfer surface, the area of the transfer surface and the relative specific heats. The specific heat of water is ~4 times that of air, so a 1°C transfer from air to water is going to require 4x the mass of air than water. If water cools the air above it, then the heat is transferred from the air to the water and air heats the water. Although I heat my living room with hot air and can boil water with enough, hot-enough air, given the mass of water, the surface to volume ratio’s of the oceans and the other heat capture/release mechanisms of water (crystallization, evaporation, boiling) it would seem logical that the oceans would make better temperature regulators of the air than the reverse.
I’m sure the warming of the pools is due to body heat and peeing in the pool. Bodies and pee are 98 degrees and that is what warmed your pool from 75 degrees. Heat travels from warmer to cooler bodies, that’s proven fact right? So that must be why your pools are warmer. I don’t need to know anything else.
Just like the whole global warming argument. We have a factor that no one disagrees with, that CO2 does contribute to the warming process. But they can’t tell you definitively whether it’s the major contributor, a significant contributor, a minor contributor ,or just a trivial component of climate change. But they’ll ignore all other factors because that’s enough to put the entire warming process at the doorstep of CO2 and it’s something they’ve decided they can tax and regulate.
The whole theory is based on the assumption that CO2 outweighs all other factors significantly. But the annoying part is that when observation doesn’t match modeling, this premise is never questioned by climatologists, even though it has never been quantified in comparison to other factors. I believe that the initial IPCC report devoted about one paragraph to the solar contribution, basically brushing it off and declaring that the panel looked at other factors including solar and decided they weren’t significant..
My understanding is that while research into CO2 based warming is getting bikkions in grants. Solar research is being unfunded right and left. Coincidence?
The oceans cover over 70% of the world’s surface.
Just another “minor” variable they forgot to include when they created their models to prove global warming.
Heat going into the oceans is ridiculous. It’s going into mountains.
I have been thinking about this for quite a while now and am still wonder under what mechanism is the heat transferred from the atmosphere to the ocean? Other than direct heating by the sun (I live in Arizona and know all too well about this phenomenon), what would account for this? I would think that if was heat transfer, then the ocean air would have to be extremely hot. And if the ocean air got this hot, then other effects would be observed.
Let’s take a swimming pool as an example. Again, living in Arizona, every summer the pools become almost unbearably hot. Even the large municipal pools become very warm. The cause of the heat is warming by the sun and retention of the heat is due to the warm air that again was warmed by the sun. However, swimming pools are not oceans. While swimming pools have circulation to keep them clean, there just is not enough water to dissipate the heat. The oceans don’t have this issue. We do see localized effects such as the heating of the Gulf of Mexico in the summer, but during the winter it cools back down.
Just ‘running the numbers’ and claiming that water has X heat retention properties, therefore the heat must be there is an over simplification and leaves out how the heat got there in the first place.