http://www.bloomberg.com/...
At about the same time the IPCC report on Climate Change [summary here] was issued last month several reputable media sources reported that a slower rate of temperature increase as measured on the Earth's surface signalled a "pause" or "hiatus" to global warming. Predictably, this nugget of information was triumphantly seized upon by the fossil fuel industry and its paid propaganda organs to trumpet the news as marking a turning point in what they like to call the "climate change debate."
What has raised a few eyebrows recently is that temperatures on the surface of Earth have increased at a slower rate since 1998 than in previous decades. Scientists have largely chalked this up to the short-term variability of climate. However, climate skeptics have taken the surface-temp slowdown acknowledged by the IPCC to mean that global warming itself has stopped -- that somehow the physics has changed.
It hasn’t.
Research published too late for the inclusion in this year's IPCC report indicates that there is no "pause," nor was there any "turning point." To the contrary, if anything we are continuing our heedless
march towards the
point of no return.
The amount of heat stored in the oceans is a key metric of global warming. One of the authors of the 2013 paper linked above is Kenneth Trenberth. His paper corroborates earlier research conducted least year and actually resolves questions Trenberth himself had posited in 2009 regarding the impact of deep water warming on fluctuations in surface temperature.
“The planet is warming,” said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a reviewer for the IPCC report. “The warmth just isn’t being manifested at the surface.”
Trenberth's research confirms that the warming is evident from residual heat being "stored" by the planet in the deepest part of the ocean:
In fact, there is mounting evidence that deeper regions of the ocean, down to 2000 meters, are absorbing heat faster than ever, Trenberth said in a phone call. His research shows the oceans began taking on significantly more heat at around the same time the surface warming began to slow in 1998. His widely cited work was published just after the cutoff to be included in the IPCC report.
The irony, says Trenberth, is that when the surface of the planet is unusually sweltering, the Earth actually radiates more heat into the atmosphere, in effect slowing the long-term warming of the planet. And in “hiatus” years, when the surface is cooler, the Earth absorbs more of the sun’s heat deep the oceans, slowly cooking the planet. What you see isn't always what you get.
So the next time someone suggests that global warming has stopped, point them directly to the nearest ocean.
If the greenhouse effect (that checks the exit of longwave radiation from Earth into space) or the amount of absorbed sunlight diminished, one would see a slowing in the heat uptake of the oceans. The measurements show that this is not the case.
The increase in the amount of heat in the oceans amounts to [17E22] joules over the last 30 years. That is so much energy it is equivalent to exploding a Hiroshima bomb every second in the ocean for thirty years.