Willis Tries to Dismiss His Own Ocean Non-Warming Research

Roger Pielke Sr has taken issue with comments on a nationalpost.com blog by Josh Willis titled, 'Josh Willis on climate change: Global warming is real.'

Willis is an author of the recent paper on data derived from the ARGO network, which shows no warming in the upper 700m of the ocean over the past 4 years:

The national post blog comment by Willis begins:

“As a scientist, I always enjoy it when people outside my field take an interest in oceanography. But I was a bit disappointed to read Lorne Gunter’s column: Perhaps The Climate Change Models are Wrong, March 24.

It is a well-established fact that human activities are heating up the planet and that global temperatures will continue to rise for decades to come. Climate change skeptics often highlight certain scientific results as a means of confusing this issue, and that appears to be the case with Mr. Gunter’s description of our recent results based on data from Argo buoys.

Pielke Sr says:

Josh Willis is a well respected scientist and his views merit consideration. In this case, however, Climate Science concludes that he is misinterpreting the significance of his data analysis. He agrees that

“Indeed, Argo data show no warming in the upper ocean over the past four years”.

He dismisses this though by claiming that

“…but this does not contradict the climate models. In fact, many climate models simulate four to five year periods with no warming in the upper ocean from time to time. “

Where are these model results that show lack of upper ocean warming in recent years? There is an example of a model prediction of upper (3km) ocean heat content for decadal averages in Figure 1 of

Barnett, T.P., D.W. Pierce, and R. Schnur, 2001: Detection of anthropogenic climate change in the world’s oceans. Science, 292, 270-274,

but they did not present shorter time periods. Nonetheless, since Figure 1 is presumably a running 10 year average, the steady monotonic increase in the model prediction of upper ocean heat content (the grey shading) suggests that no several years (or even one year) of zero heating occurred in the model results. The layer they analyzed in the figure is also for the upper 3 km but in Figure 2 the Barnett et al study showed that most of this heating was in the uppermost levels.

Thus the lack of heating in the upper 700m over the last 4 years does conflict with at least the Barnett et al model results!

What the upper ocean data (and lack of warming) actually tells us is that if global warming occurred over the last 4 years, it was in the deeper ocean and is thus not available in the short term to the atmosphere.

Indeed, if it is in the deeper ocean, it likely more diffused and therefore could only enter the atmosphere slowly if at all. This heat could also have exited into space, although the continuation of global ocean sea level rise suggests that this is less likely unless this sea level rise can be otherwise explained.

The other heat stores in the climate system are too small (and the atmosphere has clearly not warmed over the last few years). Global sea ice cover is actually above average at present (the Antarctic sea ice is at a near record level). The continued sea level rise indicates that the heat is in the deeper ocean (which is not predicted by the models).

Finally, there is also no “unrealized” heat in the system. This is a fallacy of using temperature trends as the surrogate for heat trends as has been reported Climate Science (e.g. see, see and see).

Josh Willis too easily dismisses the significance of his research findings.