Green | December 14, 2008 | 14 comments

The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat

source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88520025

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Katanajon
Morning Edition, March 19, 2008 · Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming."

In recent years, heat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air. This is a feature of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. So it is indeed possible the air has warmed but the ocean has not. But it's also possible that something more mysterious is going on.

That becomes clear when you consider what's happening to global sea level. Sea level rises when the oceans get warm because warmer water expands. This accounts for about half of global sea level rise. So with the oceans not warming, you would expect to see less sea level rise. Instead, sea level has risen about half an inch in the past four years. That's a lot.

Willis says some of this water is apparently coming from a recent increase in the melting rate of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.

"But in fact there's a little bit of a mystery. We can't account for all of the sea level increase we've seen over the last three or four years," he says.

One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded — and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.

But if the aquatic robots are actually telling the right story, that raises a new question: Where is the extra heat all going?
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14 comments // The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat

  • div
    • 0
      div  

    • if you seriously think it's a conspiracy, tell me who benefits from it. who benefits when people use fuels and other biological resources efficiently and sensibly.

      now, a belief that global warming does not exist benefits the top 1% of earners who own much of the wealth and sell the resources to us at a rate much higher than that at which they were purchased.

      tell me who benefits.

    • 3 years ago
  • Nancyf
  • jh64487
    • 0
      jh64487  

    • sooooooo

      it's cool to put billions of tons of carbon and toxins into the atmosphere now?

      great! good job dude! the world will be a better place.

      no indeed, I think the jury is still out. venus here we come :)

    • 3 years ago
  • GPSADE50
    • 0
      GPSADE50  

    • All I have to say is:

      It's December 15th, I live in Pennsylvania, USA, and it is 65 degrees out.

      FYI: It should be in the 20s-30s.

      Honestly, does anyone seriously believe that we can pollute and waste like this forever and nothing is going to happen? We dump chemicals and garbage into the water. We cut down countless trees every day. We pump pollution into the air. Antarctica is melting and falling apart. Animals are becoming extinct.

      Seriously. We are so screwed.

    • 3 years ago
  • Katanajon
    • 0
      Katanajon  

    • Read the article FH. God you make me sick. This out of all the scientists at the UN. 650 who once believed, now do not. I know that doesn't fit in your political agenda but to fupping bad FH. 52 still believe. If you could read or would read it might be easier for your stup d a-s!!! The Article Is by The US SENATE COMMITTEE. Duh brendan.

    • 3 years ago
  • Katanajon
    • 0
      Katanajon  
    • Katanajon:

      Brendan, the guy you refer to has been dead for two months, The guy you r talking to has a lot of work on CURRENT now and twenty homepage hero's this weekend alone. So your opinion really doesn't matter to me at all, lots of other people here like my work or my articles wouldn't shoot to number 5 in 30 minutes.

    • 3 years ago
  • Brendan_M
    • Brendan_M  
    • This comment was removed as a violation of community guidelines.
  • Katanajon
  • Katanajon
    • 0
      Katanajon  

    • Perhaps the whole Global warming thing is the Biggest Lie since the Third Reich. But no body wants to tell the King he Has no cloths on. I 'l do it SORRY MR. GORE, WRONG AGAIN!!! If 650 scientist say it doesn't exist and only 52 say it exist. Why is there even any debate still?? I will tell you why. LEFT WING politics has turned global warming into a rallying cry. But too bad, it isn't real folks, the world it self has been getting colder for four years in a row, the sky isn't falling, the oceans aren't any warmer. This is fact. GET OVER IT global warming is on the way out as GORES claim to fame. But he still has Probda West.

    • 3 years ago
  • Katanajon
  • div
    • 0
      div  

    • or, perhaps the jellyfish number went up because the water remained warmer longer, thereby increasing the time for their mating season and further thereby increasing the population of jellyfish. (btw, what do jellyfish have to do with this article?)

      i think the waters are colder because more glaciers are melting sending more cold water into the oceans. the ocean currents are colder because more of the water is runoff from melted glaciers- the arctic and antarctic water currents are more widespread now because of the increase in glacial water. this is due to global warming.

    • 3 years ago
  • arcticspirit
    • 0
      arcticspirit  

    • The jelly fish could be why the sea level went up! And the mystery of the jelly fish lies in what happened to the fish and turtles that eat them...

    • 3 years ago
  • Katanajon
  • lookatmypix
    • 0
      lookatmypix  

    • I am about to say something that could make completely no sense at all. The reason I say it is because intuition could solve big mysteries like this one sometimes.
      I THINK THE EXTRA HEAT is getting somehow absorbed by jelly fish which would explain why there are so many than ever.
      I do not why or how , again , what I said can easily make no sense at all, it's just an intuition.

    • 3 years ago
  • Katanajon
    • 0
      Katanajon  

    • POZNAN, Poland - The UN global warming conference currently underway in Poland is about to face a serious challenge from over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe who are criticizing the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. Set for release this week, a newly updated U.S. Senate Minority Report features the dissenting voices of over 650 international scientists, many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN. The report has added about 250 scientists (and growing) in 2008 to the over 400 scientists who spoke out in 2007. The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.

    • 3 years ago
  • Katanajon
    • 0
      Katanajon  

    • An incredible 31,072 Americans with university degrees in science, including 9,021 Ph.D.s, have signed a petition that flatly denies Al Gore’s claims that human-caused global warming is a settled scientific fact.

      Gore calls scientists and others who question the reality of human-caused global warming “deniers” and claims they are a tiny minority among the scientific community who he insists almost universally agree that the planet is being threatened by the alleged warming of the earth.

      Gore told CBS’ Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes" recently, "I think those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view. They're almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat."

      These 31,072 scientists do not believe the world is flat, and they say there is no convincing scientific evidence that so-called greenhouse gasses are causing catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’

    • 3 years ago
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