🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Cn5AMH.4Fq@unocal.com>, stgprao@st.unocal.COM (Richard Ottolini) writes:

|> The degree of global warming, if it is happening at all,
|> is far from being known.
|> Data from the past three years actually shows a global cooling
|> and decrease in the amount of C02.  This is thought to be a temporary
|> volcanic cause.  If not, the next ice age could be around the corner.
|> Scientists are curious to know what is really happening.

I think being lost in this absurd yet sadly typical episode of toxic
environmentalism and incompetent science journalism is that this is not a
global warming detection experiment, so much as an effort to understand the
participation of the ocean in the heat budget of the biosphere. If there is
cooling while the greenhouse gas concentration increases, either albedo
changes sufficiently to explain it, or else the mechanism is likely to be
transfers of energy into the large heat reservoir of the lower thermocline
(middle depths of the ocean), precisely the region that this experiment
measures.

See Watts & Morantine, _Climatic Change_ vol 16 p 83, and vol 18 p iii.

Not only does this have implications for the trajectory of climate. If the
middle depths are warming, upwelling is suppressed, which in turn would
suppress the supply of nutrients to surface waters, limiting the biological
productivity of the oceans globally. Watts and Morantine hypothesize that
was the mechanism that suppressed global warming in the period 1940-1970 and
show model result indicating that this suppression would agree with a 10%
reduction in upwelling. If this is indeed happening, I would think people
concerned about whales would want to know about it.

mt