IPCC in denial. “Just-so” excuses use ocean heat to hide their failure.

In answer to the excuse du jour: “The Ocean ate my Global Warming”.

Now that the plateau in air temperatures has lasted for 15 years, everyone, even IPCC lead authors, can see the “90% certain” models were 98% wrong. So the IPCC now claims the heat went into the deep abyss, which they didn’t predict, can’t measure accurately, and, even by the best estimates we have, has not been anywhere near large enough to explain the missing energy.


They predicted the surface air temperature would increase, but it didn’t. (The 1990 IPCC predictions about temperatures were so wrong the trends have come in below their lowest possible estimate.) They predicted the oceans would warm more than twice as much as they actually have (as best as we can tell). They did not predict the air temperature would level out for 15 years, and the oceans would suddenly start producing “natural cooling”.

The oceans are a bit of a mystery black box

There are 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of ocean out there — it’s so big it hid a 650 km volcano until two weeks ago. Only two people have been to the bottom ever (correction, three men), and they stayed just 20 minutes (and all they saw was silt). Despite this the IPCC wants us to believe we can measure the entire Earth’s ocean temperature in one hundreth’s of a degree, not just now, but allegedly also 50 or 60 years ago. There is no 95% certainty about ocean measurements in 1962 or even in 2002. Strangely, the best models in the world did not predict this in 2007.  The IPCC are handwaving at the ocean heat so they can still say “the world is warming” but in reality the numbers are devastating, and the data (as scratchy as it is) supports the skeptics. If the standstill in temperatures is bad news for the IPCC, so are the ocean heat figures.

The excuse that the missing heat went into the ocean is a deceptive reframing — where a failure in ocean measurements is used to save them from their  failure to predict what happened above the water. It is as simplistic as saying the warming line points up, and “up” is success.

http://joannenova.com.au/2013/09/ipcc-in-denial-just-so-excuses-use-mystery-ocea...

Ocean Heat Content does not help the IPCC

1.If the oceans affected global temperatures after 1998, what were they doing before that?


If the oceans caused natural cooling over the last 15 years, how do we know they didn’t cause natural warming over the 20 years before that?  The answer is, if La Nina’s can cool the surface, El Nino’s can warm it. If oceans can draw heat out of the sky, then in times when they are not doing that, they can also increase the trends.

Caught again, the IPCC hides this banal symmetry. Their self-serving lop-sided rule is: if it cools, it’s natural; if it warms, it’s artificial. The killer contradiction goes unspoken. If the warming from 1979 -1999 was significantly caused by natural changes in currents, clouds or wind which allowed heat to build up in the air, it means they underestimated the natural effect of the oceans and overestimated the effect of CO2 during the warming.  When CO2 levels reached their “highest” levels in human history after 1998, the oceans overrode whatever effect CO2 had. The IPCC knows so little about the ocean, that they didn’t even allow for this possibility in their past predictions.  Why should we let them get away with the banal post hoc hand-waving excuse?

This is a point so simple any science journalist ought to spot it immediately. Have any of them asked?

Read the rest here
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/09/ipcc-in-denial-just-so-excuses-use-mystery-ocea...