Ocean carbon uptake widely underestimated, say researchers

The ocean carbon cycle [credit: IAEA]

Shockingly – for some – nature’s ocean carbon cycle is functioning quite well, despite constant attempts by feckless humans to undermine it [/sarc]. Time to revisit those troublesome computer models yet again.
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The world’s oceans soak up more carbon than most scientific models suggest, according to new research, reports Phys.org.

Previous estimates of the movement of carbon (known as “flux”) between the atmosphere and oceans have not accounted for temperature differences at the water’s surface and a few metres below.

The new study, led by the University of Exeter, includes this—and finds significantly higher net flux of carbon into the oceans.

It calculates CO2 fluxes from 1992 to 2018, finding up to twice as much net flux in certain times and locations, compared to uncorrected models.

Florida current is weaker now than at any point in the past century

Image credit: NASA

And by coincidence (?) so is the sun.
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A key component of the Gulf Stream has markedly slowed over the past century—that’s the conclusion of a new research paper in Nature Communications published on August 7, says Phys.org.

The study develops a method of tracking the strength of near-shore ocean currents using measurements made at the coast, offering the potential to reduce one of the biggest uncertainties related to observations of climate change over the past century.

“In the ocean, almost everything is connected,” said Christopher Piecuch, an assistant scientist in the Physical Oceanography Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and author of the study. “We can use those connections to look at things in the past or far from shore, giving us a more complete view of the ocean and how it changes across space and time.”

Piecuch, who specializes in coastal and regional sea level change, used a connection between coastal sea level and the strength of near-shore currents to trace the evolution of the Florida Current, which forms the beginning of the Gulf Stream.

The Gulf Stream flows north along the Southeast Atlantic Coast of the United States and eventually east into the North Atlantic Ocean, carrying heat, salt, momentum, and other properties that influence Earth’s climate.

Because nearly continuous records of sea level stretch back more than a century along Florida’s Atlantic Coast and in some parts of the Caribbean, he was able to use mathematical models and simple physics to extend the reach of direct measurements of the Gulf Stream to conclude that it has weakened steadily and is weaker now than at any other point in the past 110 years.

One of the biggest uncertainties in climate models is the behavior of ocean currents either leading to or responding to changes in Earth’s climate. Of these, one of the most important is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, which is a large system or “conveyor belt” of ocean currents in the Atlantic that includes the Gulf Stream and that helps regulate global climate.

Piecuch’s analysis agrees with relationships seen in models between the deeper branches of the AMOC and the Gulf Stream, and it corroborates studies suggesting that the deeper branches of AMOC have slowed in recent years.

Full article here.

Solar cycle 14 – was the fourteenth solar cycle since 1755, when extensive recording of solar sunspot activity began. The solar cycle lasted 11.5 years, beginning in January 1902 and ending in July 1913. The maximum smoothed sunspot number (SIDC formula) observed during the solar cycle was 107.1, in February 1906 (the lowest since the Dalton Minimum) – Wikipedia

Still waiting for greenhouse: No response to my last email to Roy Spencer

Before the last time I had to dive deeply into politics to defend the EU referendum result, I had an email conversation with Roy Spencer in an attempt to resolve the conflict between physicists like himself, who believe the radiative greenhouse theory is correct, but it’s effect small, and physicists like Ned Nikolov, who contend that the theory is fundamentally incorrect.

After a couple of to and fro emails I sent this response in Feb 2019, to which I never received a reply. It’s time we got this discussion back out in the open, because Boris’ green reset #netzero plan for the UK post Brexit and post pandemic is set to ruin our economy and cause untold suffering, deprivation, and death.

the lukewarmers have utterly failed to convince the fanatics that although they think their theory is correct (it isn’t, but that’s their misguided opinion), they’ve overestimated the magnitude of the effect.

It’s time they stopped supporting the fanatics by deploying false arguments against better theory which will exonerate CO2 and move the debate away from ridiculous and expensive ‘mitigation’, and forward to adaption to the effects of natural climatic change.

Island ‘drowning’ is not inevitable as sea levels rise

Another bunch of climate alarmist predictions get exposed as over-the-top doom-mongering — literally, in this case.

Coral reef islands across the world could naturally adapt to survive the impact of rising sea levels, according to new research reported at Phys.org.

Coral reef islands across the world could naturally adapt to survive the impact of rising sea levels, according to new research.

The increased flooding caused by the changing global climate has been predicted to render such communities—where sandy or gravel islands sit on top of coral reef platforms—uninhabitable within decades.

However, an international study led by the University of Plymouth (UK) suggests that perceived fate is far from a foregone conclusion.

Climate scientists praise global warming ‘hiatus’ science boost

So when global temperatures failed to behave as models expected due to inevitable but hard to predict natural variation, they were forced to re-think – or just think? The GWPF concludes, at the risk of stating the obvious: ‘The lesson of the hiatus is that we do not understand internal climatic variability as much as many think we do, and our predictive power is less than many believe.’
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Researchers from the Universities of Princeton, California, Tokyo, Kyushu and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, say the recent hiatus in global temperature increase has led to a surge in climate science.

The global effort to understand the global warming hiatus they say has led to increased understanding of some of the key metrics of global climate change such as global temperature and ice-cover.

Searching for an answer to the hiatus, they say, meant that the scientific community grappled with difficulties with these climate metrics, in particular the fact that they do not unequivocally portray the same story about global warming.

Hundreds of towering hydrothermal chimneys discovered on seafloor off Washington

Base of “black smoker” chimney, Pacific Ocean [image credit: USGS]

How many more such discoveries could be waiting to be made? The report says ‘Geologic evidence…suggests that hydrothermal activity is part of a cycle that reshapes the seafloor over many thousands of years’.

An autonomous diving robot captured the vents in unprecedented detail, reports Live Science.

In the dark ocean depths off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, a magical fairyland of towering spires and hydrothermal chimneys sprout from the seafloor, a stunning new underwater map reveals.

These towers belch superheated liquid warmed by magma deep inside Earth.

The field of hydrothermal chimneys stretches along the ocean bottom on the Juan de Fuca Ridge to the northwest of coastal Washington state, in an area known as the Endeavor Segment.

Scientists try ‘cloud brightening’ to protect Great Barrier Reef

Great Barrier Reef, Australia [image credit: BBC]

Research continues, but what other ‘futuristic’ climate-related plans might they want to conjure up if this trial is deemed a success?
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An ambitious “cloud brightening” experiment has been carried out over Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in an early-stage trial that scientists hope could become a futuristic way to protect coral from global warming, says Phys.org.

In an attempt to cool waters around the reef by making clouds reflect more sunlight, researchers said they used a boat-mounted fan similar to a snow cannon to shoot salt crystals into the air.

Results from the trial were “really, really encouraging”, the project’s lead scientist Daniel Harrison from Southern Cross University said on Friday.

Causes of the Rapid Warming of the North Atlantic Ocean in the Mid-1990s

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Pointing to any natural factors is frowned on by climate alarmists. But these factors have always been in play and always will be, and some researchers at least will find and discuss them.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover_30y.uk.php

Most of us are probably familiar with the pattern of Arctic sea ice decline between 1979 and 2007, followed by a period of relative stability. Most of the decline took place after the mid 1990s.

The decline is nearly always explained away as the result of global warming, but a couple of old studies show this not to be the case.

In 2011, Robson & Sutton found that the sub polar gyre underwent remarkable and rapid warming in the mid 1990s, and that this was linked to changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation:

https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00443.1

View original post 853 more words

NASA study adds a pinch of salt to El Niño models

Credit: concernusa.org

Accurate ENSO forecasts without salinity data only extend out 4 months, while those with it cover 7 months, researchers believe.
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When modeling the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) ocean-climate cycle, adding satellite sea surface salinity—or saltiness—data significantly improves model accuracy, according to a new NASA study.

ENSO is an irregular cycle of warm and cold climate events called El Niño and La Niña, says Phys.org.

In normal years, strong easterly trade winds blow from the Americas toward southeast Asia, but in an El Niño year, those winds are reduced and sometimes even reversed.

Warm water that was “piled up” in the western Pacific flows back toward the Americas, changing atmospheric pressure and moisture to produce droughts in Asia and more frequent storms and floods in the Americas.

The reverse pattern is called a La Niña, in which the ocean in the eastern Pacific is cooler than normal.

The ocean’s ‘biological pump’ captures twice as much carbon as expected

The ocean carbon cycle [credit: IAEA]

The Woods Hole researchers find ‘the efficiency of the ocean’s “biological carbon pump” has been drastically underestimated’, with inevitable implications for climate modelling and assessments. Given that the oceans hold 50 times more CO2 than the atmosphere, this must matter.
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Every spring in the Northern Hemisphere, the ocean surface erupts in a massive bloom of phytoplankton, says Phys.org.

Like plants, these single-celled floating organisms use photosynthesis to turn light into energy, consuming carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen in the process.

When phytoplankton die or are eaten by zooplankton, the carbon-rich fragments sinks deeper into the ocean, where it is, in turn, eaten by other creatures or buried in sediments.

This process is key to the “biological carbon pump,” an important part of the global carbon cycle.

Like Polar Bears, Coral Reefs Are Doing Fine

Posted on PAPundits
By Dr. Jay Lehr ~

Corals are animals, actually closely related to jelly fish but of course differing in that they have a limestone skeleton made up of calcium carbonate. Their growth rates can be studied to give us knowledge of the ocean and its sea level over thousands of years.

They have lived throughout the oceans of our planet for many thousand years. Over those many years they have experienced both much warmer and much colder periods of geologic time. The bleaching that they have experienced in the view of many climate alarmists is not a sign of their destruction or in fact ill health. It is not a sign that the end of the world as we know it is in sight.

Geologic heat linked to East Coast ocean warming trend

Hydrothermal vent [image credit: USGS]

The author argues: “In summary, evidence substantiates that a well-defined, persistent and non-moving ocean warm trend originating off the East Coast of the United States is the result of super-heated and methane enriched fluids emitted from numerous seafloor hydrothermal vents/hot springs. This has far-reaching implications concerning the root cause of current worldwide ocean warming.”
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A well-defined ocean warming trend originating off the United States East Coast is likely from super-heated and methane-enriched fluids emitted from numerous seafloor hydrothermal vents/hot springs, says James Kamis at Climate Change Dispatch.

Supporting evidence:

This trend has shown up on shallow Sea Surface (SST) maps since their advent in 1997 and has likely been present for thousands of years.

Study shows acceleration of global mean ocean circulation since 1990s

Map of prevailing trade winds over Earth [credit: Wikipedia]

A change to about 0.01% of the atmosphere is now claimed to be speeding up the oceans by making winds stronger. Really? They used to claim global warming was weakening the Pacific trade winds:
“The researchers predict another 10 percent decrease by the end of the 21st century. The effect, attributed at least in part to human-induced climate change, could disrupt food chains and reduce the biological productivity of the Pacific Ocean, scientists said.” (2006 report)

A study published today in the journal Science Advances, suggests global ocean circulation has accelerated during the past two decades, reports Phys.org.

The research team found that oceanic kinetic energy shows a statistically significant increase since early 1990s, calculating a 36-percent acceleration of global mean ocean circulation.

The trend is particularly prominent in the global tropical oceans, reaching depths of thousands of meters.

The deep-reaching acceleration of the ocean circulation is mainly induced by a planetary intensification of surface winds, authors said.

How did life survive in the Snowball Earth? Scientists might have cracked the mystery

The researchers do admit that ‘Snowball Earth is just a hypothesis’, but that period seems to have been an era of the most extreme long-term cold spell(s) ever detected on Earth.

There is very little life in Arctic tundras and glaciers. However that was the situation in a big portion of the world during Ice Ages, says Technology.org.

How did life survive these difficult periods? How didn’t everything just die, being cut off from any kind of sources of nutrition and oxygen?

Scientists examined the chemistry of the iron formations in Australia, Namibia, and California to get a window into the environmental conditions during the ice age. They selected rocks left there by the ice age, because they are representative of the conditions during that difficult period for life.

By analysing these rocks scientists from the McGill University were able to estimate the amount of oxygen in the oceans around 700 million years ago.

Atlantic and Pacific oscillations lost in the noise, say Mann & co.

Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) [credit: NASA-JPL]

AMO & PDO – RIP. That’s the claim here anyway. Might be news to NASA and others.

Recently, meteorologists report that the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) do not appear to exist, says Tech Explorist.

The discovery could have implications for both the validity of previous studies attributing past trends to these hypothetical natural oscillations and for the prospects of decade-scale climate predictability.

The discovery is based on observational data and climate model simulations, that shows there was no reliable proof for decadal or longer-term internal oscillatory signals that could be separated from climatic noise— arbitrary year to year variation.

The apparent main swaying is the well-known El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

Indo-Pacific Ocean warming is changing global rainfall patterns, say researchers

It’s ‘according to a new study’ time again, as the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) goes under the microscope. Another causes and effects puzzle.

New research by NOAA and a visiting scientist from India shows that warming of the Indo-Pacific Ocean is altering rainfall patterns from the tropics to the United States, contributing to declines in rainfall on the United States west and east coasts, reports Phys.org.

In a study published this week in the journal Nature, researchers report a doubling in the size of a warm pool of water spanning the western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean in recent years.

This Indo-Pacific warm pool in what is already the warmest part of the global ocean is expanding each year by an area the size of California.

El Niños stronger in the industrial age, say researchers

More than a hint of assuming what they would like to prove here, by implying El Niños are now influenced by ‘the industrial age’. But at the end of the report a researcher says: “Maybe El Niño can just enter a mode and get stuck in it for a millennium.” Who gets to define what is or isn’t ‘natural variation’?

El Niños have become more intense in the industrial age, which stands to worsen storms, drought, and coral bleaching in El Niño years, reports Phys.org.

A new study has found compelling evidence in the Pacific Ocean that the stronger El Niños are part of a climate pattern that is new and strange.

It is the first known time that enough physical evidence spanning millennia has come together to allow researchers to say definitively that: El Niños, La Niñas, and the climate phenomenon that drives them have become more extreme in the times of human-induced climate change.

“What we’re seeing in the last 50 years is outside any natural variability. It leaps off the baseline. Actually, we even see this for the entire period of the industrial age,” said Kim Cobb, the study’s principal investigator and professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

“There were three extremely strong El Niño-La Niña events in the 50-year period, but it wasn’t just these events. The entire pattern stuck out.”

COLD WATER? The Oceans and Climate Change – Dr David Whitehouse

The full GWPF paper is here. Needless to say, it offers little comfort to ‘man-made warming’ climate dogmatists. The author concludes that what is happening to the oceans today is not unusual, in historical terms.

Executive summary

• The study of ocean heat content (OHC) is a subject struggling with inadequate data, but exposed in a public forum.

• Only since the introduction of data from the Argo array have there been convincing estimates of errors. The inhomogeneity of different data sets is a major problem.

• There is no real understanding of the difference between random and systematic errors in OHC data.

• Changes in OHC are at the limits of our ability to measure, and made with much uncertainty and many unknowns.

Changes in high-altitude winds over the South Pacific produce long-term effects

‘Long-term’ here means really long-term. The 21k year precession period quoted looks like that of the perihelion.

In the past million years, the high-altitude winds of the southern westerly wind belt, which spans nearly half the globe, didn’t behave as uniformly over the Southern Pacific as previously assumed.

Instead, they varied cyclically over periods of ca. 21,000 years, reports ScienceDaily.

A new study has now confirmed close ties between the climate of the mid and high latitudes and that of the tropics in the South Pacific, which has consequences for the carbon budget of the Pacific Southern Ocean and the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Explosion in Antarctic sea ice levels may cause another ice age

Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica

Is there an element of circular reasoning here? Carbon dioxide levels have historically followed temperature changes, bringing any supposed causation into question.

Upside-down “rivers” of warm ocean water may be one of the causes of Antarctica’s ice shelves breaking up, leading to a rise in sea levels.

But a new study suggests an increase in sea ice may lead to a much more devastating change in the Earth’s climate — another ice age, reports Fox News.

Using computer simulations, the research suggests that an increase in sea ice could significantly alter the circulation of the ocean, ultimately leading to a reverse greenhouse effect as carbon dioxide levels in the ocean increase and levels in the air decrease.

“One key question in the field is still what caused the Earth to periodically cycle in and out of ice ages,” University of Chicago professor and the study’s co-author, Malte Jansen, said in a statement. “We are pretty confident that the carbon balance between the atmosphere and ocean must have changed, but we don’t quite know how or why.”