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NASA Study: Ocean Abyss Has Not Warmed 295

Posted by Soulskill from the blame-the-aliens-and-ed-harris dept.
submitter bigwheel sends this excerpt from a NASA news release: The cold waters of Earth's deep ocean have not warmed measurably since 2005, according to a new NASA study, leaving unsolved the mystery of why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, analyzed satellite and direct ocean temperature data from 2005 to 2013 and found the ocean abyss below 1.24 miles (1,995 meters) has not warmed measurably. Study coauthor Josh Willis of JPL said these findings do not throw suspicion on climate change itself. "The sea level is still rising," Willis noted. "We're just trying to understand the nitty-gritty details."
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NASA Study: Ocean Abyss Has Not Warmed More

NASA Study: Ocean Abyss Has Not Warmed

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  • phase change (Score:3, Interesting)

    by aquabat ( 724032 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @01:11AM (#48089095) Journal
    Lots of Ice melting. Could be that all the energy is going into phase change right now.

    • Re:phase change (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @01:28AM (#48089143)

      Lots of Ice melting. Could be that all the energy is going into phase change right now.

      No. Your statement is false. It could only be true if you stated that ice melting is severely underestimated. This stuff is not ignored, you know. It's hell of a lot of energy to change ice to water at 0C. That's why polar ice caps are called air conditioning of the world.

      For comparison, it's almost easier to boil water than to melt it from 0C ice to 0C water.

        * 334kJ/kg for water to melt it
        * 418kJ/kg for water to raise from 0C to 100C

      Basically the energy required to melt ice is the same as to raise the temperature of water from 0 to 80C.

      • ... it's almost easier to boil water than to melt it from 0C ice to 0C water.

        Your statement would be true if you'd left out the word boil and simply said "raise it's temperature from 0C to 100C". The heat of vaporization of water [wikipedia.org] is a whopping 2260 kJ/Kg - that's the heat required to turn 100C water into 100C steam.

      • It's very simple. The bottom of the ocean is COLD. There's not going to be much circulation going on between the upper warmer layers and the bottom.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Layzej ( 1976930 )

        "Coauthor Felix Landerer of JPL noted that during the same period warming in the top half of the ocean continued unabated, an unequivocal sign that our planet is heating up. Some recent studies reporting deep-ocean warming were, in fact, referring to the warming in the upper half of the ocean but below the topmost layer, which ends about 0.4 mile (700 meters) down"

        What this study found was that melting ice and warming of the first 2000 meters accounted for virtually all of the sea level rise. Nice bit of editorializing on the part of bigwheel to suggest that this new data has any impact on "why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years." This does not suggest that the ocean has warmed less than we had previously thought. Only that the warming is occurring primarily in the first 2 kilometers of depth.

    • Re:phase change (Score:5, Insightful)

      by durrr ( 1316311 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @02:02AM (#48089253)

      It's hard to admit that you could've been wrong isn't it?
      Especially after you've been gloating over your high horse position and have insulted everyone that disagreed.

      • It's hard to admit that you could've been wrong isn't it?
        Especially after you've been gloating over your high horse position and have insulted everyone that disagreed.

        Hah! You think this one is bad? I have stories.

        But it does seem to be true: the term "denier" is increasingly pointing in the other direction now.

        • ... don't try to tell me you're calculating the TOTAL electrical power needed to both heat the source and cool the walls, because that would be a different experiment. Spencer stipulated "electrical power" to the heat source. He left power to the walls unstated, except to say that they are maintained at 0 degrees F. He did not say the power to the heat source AND to the walls was constant. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-07] [slashdot.org]

          Again, I've repeatedly explained [slashdot.org] that the power needed to cool the walls is irrele

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 )

      That was my first instinct, but it's also possible that humanity just doesn't have THAT much of an impact. Remember that we're actually living in an unusually stable period of Earth's climate history to begin with, and as recent as the Cretaceous period we had atmospheric CO2 some 20 times what it is now (which BTW happened to be the most "green" period of Earth's history in addition to supporting the largest land animals to ever live.)

      Who is to say when this period we're so familiar with ends, our fault or

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by itzly ( 3699663 )
        When comparing CO2 levels between Cretaceous of years ago and current, you should also keep in mind that the Sun has been gradually getting hotter.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by haruchai ( 17472 )

          The continents were also in different positions, much closer together, which would have an affect on ocean circulation.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dave420 ( 699308 )

        This is going to sound really, really bizarre, but you could familiarise yourself with some of the most basic research, which would answer all of your questions. Believe it or not, but the climate scientists have taken historical events & trends into account when working on this. You also might want to be aware that in the Cretaceous period CO2 was at about 2000ppm, not the 8000ppm required to be 20x the current level.

        So to answer your question - the research findings show that it is most definitely h

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PhilHibbs ( 4537 )

        Who is to say when this period we're so familiar with ends, our fault or not?

        If and when it ends, it will end for reasons. There will be some set of physical processes that drive the cycle or rhythm or rollercoaster or whatever you want to call it. We're trying to figure out what those processes are, and we've discovered that CO2 in the atmosphere seems to be having a bad effect as far as our comfort is concerned. So, I guess, scientists will be those who say when it ends, if we let them figure it out, and right now most scientists are saying that too much CO2 is a bad thing. Sure,

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dywolf ( 2673597 )

        No, no we are not in an unsually unstable period of climate. Or more accurately stated, that instability is BECAUSE OF US.
        And no, no you cannot dump ever increasing amounts of energy into a system without effect. We ARE having an effect.

        To be clear: The human race dumps in excess of 40 BILLION tons of CO2 into the atmospehere, every year. To put that in perspective, that's the weight of 400,000 aircraft carriers. If formed into a cube, it's a cube 95,000 feet tall.

        You say "but the dinosaurs were fine"...to

    • 'Frightening' projection for Arctic melt The Arctic Ocean could be free of ice in the summer as soon as 2010 or 2015 - something that hasn't happened for more than a million years, according to a leading polar researcher.

      Yes, it's true! A top expert says the Arctic could be ice free by 2010! [canada.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PhilHibbs ( 4537 )

        Could be free as soon as 2010 or 2015, as against the 2050 that the IPCC had forecast. Sure, it's not as bad as the very very worst possibility that one expert has warned. We're not out of the woods yet.

        This is how science happens. You study, you theorise, you predict, you measure, you GOTO 10. If you don't publish your predicitons, then nobody learns and science cannot progress, especially in a long term field like climatology. We may well not know what the truth is behind CO2 and AGW until well past my li

  • Well, apparently NASA is not part of the global science conspiracy to lie about the climate so they can rake in the subsidies.

  • Everyone should just say "interesting" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Karmashock ( 2415832 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @01:28AM (#48089145)

    Because that is what every new report is field of science that we don't actually understand.

    And we don't. As regards global climate we have models and data but we don't really understand what is going on here. We never have. And that isn't to say that AGW isn't happening or is or anything one way or the other. But rather that it is extremely complicated and extremely confusing.

    This article is going to make the anti AGW people feel vindicated just like the walrus thing made the pro AGW people feel vindicated. It is going to go back and forth. I'm sure tomorrow or the next day we'll get another report of something that backs up the AGW side and this article will just be forgotten.

    That is just the politics. For those of us that don't care about the politics... this should just be interesting.

    So what we get here is that the heat predicted by the models is still missing.

    That is interesting. So we should keep looking for it. And until it is found those supporting the climate models that require that heat to be somewhere really should be some what humble about their position until the heat is found. Which is reasonable. But assuming they don't want to do that for whatever reason... Whatever. We're going to respond to this issue however makes best sense to each of us.

    For me... I'm going to take with a grain of salt anything someone says when they don't show what I feel to be a reasonable amount of humility on an issue they cannot claim to fully understand. By all means... form your own opinions.

    For me... this is just another interesting data point. I await more.

    • Re:Everyone should just say "interesting" (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @01:43AM (#48089201)

      "This article is going to make the anti AGW people feel vindicated"

      They shouldn't. The alternative explainations as to where that energy is going are far more concerning. If the energy is not being disipated into the deeper oceans, then its being concentrated elsewhere. Candidates include: Siberian traps. Arctic/Antarctic pole melt. Upper ocean (And thats an "oh shit" possibility), and so on.

      • No extra heat needs to be found because the earth is not warming any more than usual during the latter stages of an inter-glacial. Seems to fit the observed phenomenon.

        Alternate explanation is that not all feedbacks are positive and the plant food that has been modeled to cause AGW is just a bit player. That also seems to fit the observed behavior as CO2 continues to rise but global temps have plateaued.

        We can leave the door open to the 'oh shit' possibilities, but really, that's starting to feel shril

        • Re:Null hypothesis (Score:5, Informative)

          by able1234au ( 995975 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @02:52AM (#48089391)

          Except global temperatures have not plateaued and continue to rise. The rate of the rise changes but it is continuing to rise. The "plateau" is only spin using a very crude line from a peak in 1998. http://www.skepticalscience.co... [skepticalscience.com]

          The warming cannot be explained by an inter-glacial. Dumping millions of years of stored carbon into the upper atmosphere is not surprisingly having an effect on the climate. Land use changes, clear felling, road and city concreting do not help either.

          This study is going to help refine the calculations of where heat is stored and how it changes over time but don't delude yourself that this is not related to human activity. Even most deniers have stopped denying that.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gewalker ( 57809 )

          I believe that climate modelers have identified over a thousand feedbacks, many positive, many negative. The problem is that this really and truly the great unknown of climate models -- The early models (and probably later ones, since the results are somewhat consistent in overall sensitivity) pretty much all seem to be have estimated sensitivity to the CO2 as much larger than unity. From radiation emissivity calculation alone, a doubling of CO2 should raise average temp. by 1.1 def C, the earlier climate m

        • No extra heat needs to be found because the earth is not warming any more than usual during the latter stages of an inter-glacial.

          Not only is this a lie (covered in a sibling comment) but you are just completely ignoring known physics. Carbon release has predictable consequences, and there are no carbon releases of this magnitude in Earth's history since the last great extinction.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dywolf ( 2673597 )

          You completely missed the point of hte article.
          The oceans ARE absorbing heat. More of it than we expected. That is not in debate, and not being challenged by the article.

          All this article is saying is that the heat/energy isnt also making it into the deepest depths. Which is not exactly shocking.
          The fact that the ocean has different layers that do not (relatively) mix is not new. These differening layers are well known.
          Which means its being concentrated in the upper portions of the ocean, namely the layers t

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by rioki ( 1328185 )

        So far we can conclude that it is not in the upper atmosphere, it is not in the lower atmosphere, it is not on land surfaces and not on the ocean surface. Now we have an additional data point, it is not in the lower oceans and the ice caps are low but a slow positive trend. These last two decades have seen runaway CO2 emissions but no noticeable warming. Few people claim that high CO2 levels are a good thing, but as GP stated, we are far from understanding climate.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by itzly ( 3699663 )
          I don't know where you get your data, but both ice caps are still on a negative trend.

      • They shouldn't. The alternative explainations as to where that energy is going are far more concerning. If the energy is not being disipated into the deeper oceans, then its being concentrated elsewhere. Candidates include: Siberian traps. Arctic/Antarctic pole melt. Upper ocean (And thats an "oh shit" possibility), and so on.

        No, because we aren't actually observing any of those things. Antarctic ice recently set a historic record. And not just sea ice, either. Satellite data has been showing the land volume to be growing too. Arctic is is pretty darned normal. (Not quite at the 1981-2010 average, but pretty damned close.)

        If the "missing" energy were in the upper ocean we would have known about it long ago, because we've been keeping upper ocean temperature records for decades.

        Deep ocean was pretty much the last gasp for t

        • Re:Everyone should just say "interesting" (Score:4, Informative)

          by jcupitt65 ( 68879 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @04:29AM (#48089647)

          Antarctic ice recently set a historic record. And not just sea ice, either. Satellite data has been showing the land volume to be growing too.

          Are you sure about that? People usually say the sea ice is increasing in extent, but that the land ice (the bit that might raise sea levels) is shrinking rapidly. For example:

          http://climate.nasa.gov/news/242/ [nasa.gov]

          Gravity data collected from space using NASA's Grace satellite show that Antarctica has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002. The latest data reveals that Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate, too.

          /. had a recent story on this too, based on data from the same satellite:

          http://news-beta.slashdot.org/story/14/09/30/2351213/antarctic-ice-loss-big-enough-to-cause-measurable-shift-in-earths-gravity [slashdot.org]

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I dislike replying to trolls. But for the record and anyone who might actually buy your bullshit, your statements should not be allowed to stand unchallenged.

          The Antarctic ice maximum is SEA ice, just a thin sheet a meter or two thick, consistent with higher winds (guess why- increased thermal gradients) leaving source water exposed to the atmosphere.
          At the same time GIGATONS of LAND ice (the kind which raises sea level) is being lost in the Antarctic and even faster in Greenland.

          Land volume growing? I know

          • I appreciate the effort, but it is pointless I'm afraid. I'm assuming that these folks actually mean well, in the sense that they genuinely believe that 97% of climate scientists are involved in some harebrained conspiracy ("green is the new red"). My point is that once that idea is firmly lodged into someone's mind, no amount of links to actual science is going to change their opinion. If anything, it'll just reaffirm it.

        • No, because we aren't actually observing any of those things. Antarctic ice recently set a historic record.

          I refer to you my earlier comment [slashdot.org], which you personify. HTH, HAND.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dywolf ( 2673597 )

          Oh my god...the antarctic sea ice saw a maximum...during winter...after being inundated with record amounts of freshwater, which freezes easier and at a warmer temperature, from the melting antarctic land ice (a volume of melted ice the size of Manhattan, and 3 miles thick)....shocking.

          Just stop posting. You are wrong every single time.
          You repeat the same debunked myths, every single time.

          You completely missed the point of hte article.
          The oceans ARE absorbing heat. More of it than we expected. That is not i

      • That assumes it is being trapped in the earth at all. Until you find out where it went, you can't say it is on earth at all. It could have been bounced back into space for all you know.

        I am NOT saying it was bounced back into space. I am saying you need to find it before you can say it is still in the planet. You cannot merely assume with scientific authority that it is here. You would need empirical evidence of that point to hold that position. Absent knowing where the heat went you don't have that. Which

    • Re:Everyone should just say "interesting" (Score:5, Interesting)

      by RogueyWon ( 735973 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @02:27AM (#48089331) Journal

      From an intellectual standpoint, I agree with you.

      From a real-world standpoint, the problem of the political response in terms of adaptations and mitigations isn't going anywhere and means that almost nobody will do what you suggest. You may not care about the politics, but in practical terms, they are probably the most important thing. With a range of responses in the public debate from "do nothing" at one extreme to "throw away Western civilisation, start living in organic yurts spending our evenings knitting underwear out of hemp" at the other, there's a lot of emotion and political capital invested in this debate. It's only made worse by the number of people who have latched onto the issue as a means to push almost-entirely-unrelated political agendas, mostly far-left, but a few far-right as well.

      So in practical terms, this report provides a touch of ammunition to the "do nothing" camp and has the potential to slide opinion slightly in their direction. But, as you say, this time tomorrow, the position may well be reversed and the "organic yurtists" may hold the advantage.

      And the last thing either side is going to display is a touch of humility. Useful though that might be.

      • Yes, I'm still trying to figure out if it would be better to cover my roof with solar cells, or to just paint it white.

      • Re:Everyone should just say "interesting" (Score:4, Informative)

        by erikkemperman ( 252014 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @05:25AM (#48089747)

        Except that the "throw away Western civilization" is only ever thrown out there by the "do nothing" crowd as a caricature of progressive proposals. That said, there is ample precedence for the concept of you break it you pay for it, so some wealth redistribution is going to be a factor in most reasonable strategies.

        • Really? [slashdot.org]

          Because personal freedoms, including the freedom to pursue "wants" as well as "needs" are kind of a cornerstone of Western civilisation.

          • Having missed that story, it seems to center around a calculation of needed energy if the whole planet displayed circa-2010 American consumption within two decades. That is, as far as I can tell at a glance, without accounting for improved efficiency of power generation, storage, distribution, and use.

            Setting aside the question of whether the rest of the planet actually aspires to US consumption patterns (which I think are widely perceived as unnecessarily wasteful) the submission you linked to says

            Economists and energy experts shy away from issues of equity and morality, but climate change and environmental justice are inseparable: It's impossible to talk intelligently about climate without discussing how to distribute limited energy resources.

            Which se

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by gtall ( 79522 )

            I heard yesterday on CSPAN a debate between the two senatorial contenders in Colorado. It wasn't an uplifting experience. However, when the debate came to climate change. The Democrat said the usual things you'd expect a Democrat to say. The Republican started by expressing his concern for the environment but that when it came down to economics, he'd be choosing economics over the environment. So the boy clearly sees no link between the state of the environment and the state of the economy, a point the Demo

      • And the last thing either side is going to display is a touch of humility. Useful though that might be.

        Well...just how often do scientists need to say "the scientific method compels us to observe, collect and analyze data, and revise our theories when those observations and data require us to do so"? Revising theories, refining our understanding, and being intellectually, is not humility. It's part of the scientific process. The deniers have other motivations.

  • Shouldn't the oceans fall under the NOAA's domain? Or are we "cross pollinating" science now. Maybe the next US manned space shot will be aboard the NOASS Nautilus launched from Woods Hole.

    • Shouldn't the oceans fall under the NOAA's domain?

      NASA has a mandate to figure out what's with a variety of planets throughout the universe. They only have a few samples nearby, and this is the only one they can measure REALLY thoroughly, to test and refine their models and theories.

      They also have the technology to do measurements from space. AND they work closely with NOAA (including launching and operating observation satellites for them).

      • Not that I'm bothered by NASA, but I hate when the science is turned political instead of being....you know...science. And James Hansen tends to do that.

  • It's like troposphere/stratosphere but upside down (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @03:04AM (#48089423) Journal

    In the atmosphere there's a situation: The weather all happens down near the surface, in a region called the troposphere. Here the density/temperature gradients can result in instabilities, where a parcel of air that is, say, lighter than its sourroundings can become MORE ligher-than-its surroundings as it moves up (and vice-versa). Above that is another (set of) layer(s) called the "stratosphere", where everything is most stable right where it is. Nothing very exciting happens there except when something coming up REALLY fast from below coasts up a bit before it stabilizes and moves back down.

    The oceans do something similar, but upside down:

    Water has an interesting property: Like most materials it gets more dense as it gtss colder - but only up to a point. As it approaches freezing the molecules start hanging out in larger groups, working their way toward being ice crystals. The hydrogens on one molecule attract the oxygens on another, and because of the angle between the hydrogens bondended to the oxygen in each molecule, the complexes are somewhat LESS dense than liquid. As a result, with progressively lower temperatures the density reaches a maximum, then the water begins to expand again. When it actually freezes it is so much less dense than near-freezing liquid that the ice floats. With fresh water the maximum density happens about 4 degrees C. Salt disrupts the crystalization somewhat so the maximum density is a tad cooler (and varies a bit with salt concentration - and thus depth), but the behavior is similar.

    The result is that, when you have a mix of cooler and hotter blobs of fresh water, the water closer to 4 degrees sinks and that farther from it rises. The result is that, absent a heat or impurity source below, the bottom (and much of the volume) of a deep lake tends to be stable, stratified, water at about 4 degrees year around, while all the deviations from it and "weather" activity is in no more than about the top 300 feet: Wave action, ice, hot and cold currents, etc. are all above the reasonably abrupt "thermocline" boundary. Below that things are very slow, driven mostly by things like volcanic heat. (Diffusion is REALLY slow in calm water. It takes decades for, say, dissolved impurities to move a couple inches.)

    The ocean is much like that, too, but a little cooler and with some temperature ramps spreading out the thermocline due to variations in salt concentration.

    So global warming/cooling/weather, whatever would NOT be expected to affect deep water temperatures. This would all be happening in the top few hundred feet. If, say, the ocean were heating up without the surface water temperature changing, this would take the form of the thermocline gradually lowering near the equator and/or rising near the poles, rather than the deep water becoming warmer.

  • This only means that we still can't explain the "pause" in global warming. It does not mean that the model is based on "bad science".

    The Quest for an explanation must continue.

  • No doubt the climate change hippies will spin this as exactly what one expects in climate change. Just like they spun recent cold winters as an indication of global warming. Billion dollar universities and researchers have a huge monetary motivation for keeping the climate change specter alive, it's their funding. So expect a big spin on this evidence.

  • "leaving unsolved the mystery of why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years"

    ROTFL

  • Seems strange to me that temperatures taken earlier were ignored. Of course that pesky Artic Ice Cap is going away anyway, so who cares?

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