HOW TRANSPORT OF TROPICAL OCEAN HEAT CAUSES AN OVER-ESTIMATION OF THE GLOBAL AVERAGE TEMPERATURE

Watch my youtube video HOW TRANSPORT OF TROPICAL OCEAN HEAT CAUSES AN OVER-ESTIMATION OF THE GLOBAL AVERAGE TEMPERATURE  PART 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNT7oB53pRY

 

Below is a transcript of THEE video 

 Welcome back everybody, 

 Today I'll examine how the transport of tropical ocean heat raises both the Arctic's air temperature and biases the global average temperature. Now the Arctic has warmed dramatically, but why? A few researchers simplistically suggest it's polar amplification of greenhouse warming, but that explanation fails to explain why at the Southern pole, most of Antarctica has never warmed. This video explains how extensive transport of tropical ocean heat uniquely warms the Arctic. It also demonstrates why it's an abuse of statistics to average extreme warming temperatures in the Arctic with temperatures elsewhere, such as the cooling in north America. 

Averaging two temperatures caused by vastly different dynamics is meaningless and useless for understanding climate change. It’s as useless as averaging apples and oranges just because they're both fruits. So here in part one, I'll examine how transported tropical ocean water affects the Arctic sea ice.   Part 2 examines how the natural Arctic oscillation affects the presence or absence of thick sea ice and how sea ice controls the release of stored heat and affects Arctic temperatures. And in part 3, we'll examine the climate dynamics that control the changes in the ocean heat transport.

First, we need an overview of how the world's ocean temperatures vary. The oceans are warmest in the tropics (seen in red) Due to the sun's most intense heating of the surface, temperatures are averaging 20 degrees centigrade or 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Ocean temperatures decrease towards the higher latitudes as the Earth's curve and the axis tilt decrease solar heating. Between 50 and 60 degrees south latitude, we see temperatures are much lower, averaging between five and zero degrees centigrade. And due to the Antarctic circumpolar current, the warmer subtropical waters, averaging about 10 plus degrees centigrade seen in green, can't intrude further south preventing any warming of Antarctica. As discussed in a previous video “The Antarctic Refrigeration Effect”,  in contrast between 50 and 60 degrees north, warm subtropical waters intrude deep into the Arctic. 

Now talking with fellow scientists and lay people about Arctic warming, I am constantly amazed that typically, they're totally unaware of how ocean circulation affects the Arctic. 

Here I'll focus on the Northern hemisphere’s circular pattern of ocean circulation, creating what's called subtropical gyres. A similar pattern also occurs in the Southern hemisphere. 

Now due to intense solar heating, the tropical waters are warmest and that heating also generates the trade winds blowing water from the east to the west. When reaching the ocean’s western boundary, those heated waters are guided towards the poles, via the Gulf stream in the Atlantic, and the Kuroshio current in the Pacific. 

 Upon reaching the mid-latitudes, the westerly winds then guide the warm waters back towards the east. Upon reaching the continents’ west coast, the now cooler waters are pumped back towards the equator to complete the subtropical gyre’s circulation. 

Of importance to humanity, the currents moving back towards the equator also create the four upwelling regions that support humanity's richest fisheries. 

 We also observe again in the Southern hemisphere, that the gyre’s warm tropical waters don't penetrate past the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, keeping Antartica cooler than average. 

In contrast, there's a slight leakage of warm water from the Pacific through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic. And more importantly, it's the large volume of warm water transported via the Gulf stream into the north Atlantic that enters the Arctic, melting sea ice and warming the region. 

To understand how the transport of ocean heat biases temperature statistics, there's a simple experiment you can do at home and it is easily understood by children. 

All you need is an infrared temperature gun (they cost less than 20 bucks) and a pot of heated water. I used the temperature gun to show students in environmental studies classes, how surface temperatures dramatically changed between open sunlit areas and shaded areas, or between different vegetation types, or moist versus dry ground. 

So first heat up a pot of water, then turn off the heat, so no further energy is being added. Now measure the surface of the heated water and nine random spots on your kitchen floor. Add up those temperatures and divide by 10 to get the kitchen's average surface temperature. 

Next, scoop out half of the water and throw it on the kitchen floor, and again, take the same 10 measurements. The pot of water lost the heat due to water removal, but the remaining water still keeps the same temperature. Now, however, the average temperature will be much higher, not because there was any energy added to the kitchen, but simply because the redistribution of heat raised the average statistic. 

So to understand climate change, we must accurately separate temperature changes due solely to the redistribution of heat from changes due to added energy. And to date, I know of no researchers making this distinction when they are generating the global average temperature. 

Now this illustration shows the general pathways of intruding warm Atlantic waters being re-distributed from the subtropics into the Arctic. The water changes color from the initial red to the lighter pink as it loses heat to the air and the surrounding waters as it circulates. 

The small squiggly pink arrows represented here, show where most of the intruding warm water heat escapes to the air, primarily where there is no insulating ice. 

Also because the warm inflows make the ocean warmer than the land, the Arctic winter winds blow towards the ocean and push ice away from the coast. This creates open-water winter polynyas. 

Those open waters have allowed a subspecies of walrus that normally would migrate south each winter in search of open waters to feed, to instead remain all winter in the Laptev Sea 

To estimate changes in temperature and volume of inflowing Atlantic water, scientists have placed moorings along the major pathways, such as the Fram straight and elsewhere (represented here by the yellow lines) to monitor the inflows. 

But it is extremely difficult to measure exactly the amount of redistributed heat, partly because inflowing waters follow very complex pathways while ventilating heat and mixing with cooler Arctic ocean waters. 

Furthermore, an increase in the volume of inflows will raise temperatures even without any change in the inflows temperature. 

Conversely, less inflow volume can still warm the Arctic, if the source waters of the inflows are warmer. 

Estimating temperature changes in the source of the inflowing waters is also difficult because temperatures of the north Atlantic waters vary due to dynamics such as the natural Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation. So according to Ruiz-Barradas in his 2018 peer-reviewed study, between the 1980s and the 1990s, the north Atlantic warmed, but it has been cooling since then. 

Now some researchers use the recent changes in sea ice to estimate changes in inflowing water. In Antarctica, there has been no long-term declining trend in sea ice, and that's because the Antarctic Circumpolar Current blocks warm inflows. In the photo on the right, the white circle here represents the Antarctic Circle. And because sea ice growth is unimpeded by continents, sea ice expands past the circle symmetrically, each winter until it reaches the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. 

In contrast as seen in photo on the left, Arctic sea ice is confined by surrounding continents and stays inside the Arctic circle, (in black here). Yet as in Antarctica, winter temperatures are cold enough to form sea ice outside the circles, as seen in the Hudson Bay that freezes over completely each winter. More importantly, unlike Antarctica, due to the inflows of warm Atlantic water, sea ice is melted deep inside the Arctic circle, keeping ocean water ice free during the winter over most of the Barents Sea. 

On a larger timescale, Moffit-Sanchez’s 2017 paper examines the relationship between changing inflows and sea ice cover over the past 3000 years. Unfortunately, there are two illustrations shown here, with reversed the timelines.

The panel on the left shows that  during the Roman Warm Period around 2000 years ago, there were strong Atlantic inflows and accordingly sea ice extent was very small. Then sea ice began to grow with the reduced inflows during the following Dark Ages Cold Period. 

During the Medieval Warm Period about 1000 years ago, warm inflows increased again and sea ice again declined, but not to the same extent as in the Roman Warm Period. Then during the following Little Ice Age starting around 700 years ago, inflows became persistently low and Arctic sea ice reached its greatest extent in over 5,000 years. 

When the Little Ice Age ended around the 1850s, inflows increased up through the present times and sea ice declined, but not to the low extent of the Roman or Medieval Warm Periods. 

Researchers also compared the warmer Atlantic inflows during three recent warm periods to the intervening cold periods. Their results also found a strong relationship between increasing warm inflows and decreasing sea ice. During the cold periods inflows decreased and sea ice increased. 

Similar studies found the warmth of the Holocene Optimum about 9,000 years ago, coincided with strong Atlantic water inflows that raised sub-polar ocean temperatures to four degrees Celsius above the temperatures observed today. 

Similarly, during the most recent 5,000 years, known as the Neo-glacial, the gradual decrease in Atlantic inflows have coincided with increasing sea ice, culminating in the Little Ice Age’s greatest sea ice extent. 

Clearly, both short-term and long-term studies find the extent of Arctic sea ice is regulated by changes in the warm Atlantic inflows. 

Up next, part-two examines how shifting winds due to the natural Arctic Oscillation controls where sea ice is present or absent and how much thick multi-year ice survives and thus, how sea ice contributes to the control of Arctic temperatures. 

And until then embrace the renowned scientist, Thomas Huxley's advice that 

“skepticism is a highest of duties and blind faith, the one unpardonable sin.” 

 And if you appreciate the science clearly presented here, science rarely presented by the mainstream media, then please give it a like, give it a share or copy the video's URL and share it with friends through the email, subscribe to my video channel or read my book: Landscapes and Cycles an Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism. 

 Thank you.

How Antarctica Caused Global Cooling or Why Earth Remains in Ice Age Mode for Next 200 Million Years

 Watch my new video 

"How Antarctica Caused Global Cooling or Why Earth Remains in Ice Age Mode for Next 200 Million Years"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxVL_lGaJc0&t=50s

Oceans are a tremendous reservoir of heat. The upper 10 feet of ocean water holds more heat than the earth's entire atmosphere. Due to the formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, enabled by plate tectonics, Antarctica became thermally isolated from the rest of the earth initiating 1) a permanent ice cap, 2) extensive sea ice that extruded cold brine that filled the ocean's bottom water, and 3) Intensified upwelling that increased productivity that drew down atmospheric CO2 to current levels. As a result of increasing cold Antarctic Bottom Water, oceans ventilated its its displaced ancient bottom water heat. As a result of a 50 million year cooling trend, the earth is now locked into a fluctuating balance between cold ice ages and warm interglacials

Transcript of Presentation below:

Welcome back, everybody. Thanks for all the kind comments today. I want to discuss what I call the Antarctic refrigeration effect. And if you understand that, you understand why the earth will remain in ice age mode for probably the next 200 million years. Now, climate change is a huge in complex problem, and it's akin to the, the Indian, east Indian parable of the blind men characterizing an elephant. Unfortunately, there's one cadre of scientists who are trying to force a singular viewpoint: Carbon dioxide is the climate control knob. But once you understand how important ocean circulation is, you just might be convinced that the greenhouse gas effect is really the tail wagging the elephant.

If you look at ancient climates, we'll see that 90 million years ago during the Cretaceous that the earth's continents were warm from the polar region to the equator, and Antarctica was a tropical rainforest. It had its own dinosaurs, Glacialisaurus sp. Well, the dinosaurs had a major extinction event about 66 million years ago when an asteroid collided with the earth and caused the extinction about seventy-five percent of all global species. So I'm going to skip ahead to the Eocene and the cooling trend that happened about 50 million years ago. Now temperatures back in the during the Eocene, the Arctic's Ellesmere island summer temperatures, even though it was, it was a polar place was about 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

The coldest month only dropped down to just above freezing. Yet today we look at Ellesmere Island, which is adjacent to Greenland, and the average temperature there is about 2.3 degrees C. So we've had a tremendous cooling trend since then. And along with that cooling trend was the development of polar glacial ice caps.

Now we look at around 34 million years ago, Antarctica started to have its permanent ice cap, but it then took until about two and a half million years ago for a permanent ice cap to form on Greenland. So the question becomes if CO2 is the control number of temperature and ice formation, why is this this 15 to 30 million lag between Antarctic in Arctic ice cap formations now to understand the earth climate before the great global cooling trend began, we have to go back to the age of dinosaurs back then the continents were all connected in one continuous continent, known as Pangea with the lack of glaciers.

50 million year cooling trend from the Eocene to the present

During the age of dinosaurs, there were higher sea levels which created shallow coastal seas. And there was the creation of the Tennessee, another shallow sea shallow seas heat up more quickly and evaporate water more quickly. And that causes more warm salty water to sink to the ocean floor.

Pangea with shallow seas (purple)

So at the beginning of the Eocene, the oceans of the world were dominated by warm, salty, deep water (WSDW), the oceans bottom waters (WSDW) were about 10 to 13C warmer than they are today. And that warm water would also upwell around the Antarctic and be carried back to the equator by a current known as the Antarctic Intermediate Water (AAIW). But that dynamic was about to change as Pangea broke up throughout the age of dinosaurs.

And pretty soon Antarctica became isolated as it is today. When Antartica separated from south America, Australia, and Tasmania, it allowed for one continuous current to loop around Antarctica known as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). And it had had some major impacts on the world's climate. That current blocks, the warm sub-tropical waters from entering Antartica waters and that initiated extensive sea ice growth and glaciation.

It also increased upwelling and diatom productivity, which is associated with the evolution of baleen whales that now we're able to just filter feed through the ocean. That tremendous productivity caused more CO2 sequestration, which caused the amount of atmospheric CO2 to drop.

Antarctic Circumpolar Current

And now the Antarctic Circumpolar Current through the Antarctic intermediate waters would feed all the rest of the world's oceans in the Aaliyah scene lasting from 34 to 23 million years ago, the Antarctic circumpolar current deepened and strengthened the formation of sea ice now cause cold brine rejected from that sea ice to sink to the bottom and replace the warm salty water. And that began to change the temperature profile of our oceans.

Changing Oligocene ocean bottom waters from warm salty WSDW
to cold Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW)

And that began to change the temperature profile of our oceans.

Now due to the shape of the earth and its tilt of this axis, the sun more intensely heats the earth around the equator relative to the polar regions, which receive more diffuse sunlight. So the polar regions don't heat up much. And then due to the polar nights where there's no sun at all, it radiates all that heat back to space. The current temperatures in the polar regions are maintained by a flow of heat from the tropics into the polar regions, through ocean currents and atmospheric currents, uh, such as the Gulf stream or the Kuroshio current.

And we can see this illustrated here in this diagram where there's an excess amount of heat and the equator relative to his temperature and that excess heat is transported to the polar regions, which warm those regions.

Heat transport from warm tropics to warm polar regions

So based on those dynamics, I like to refer to the cooling that's been happening for the last 50 million years as the Antarctic refrigeration effect. Now every refrigerator has this compressor & fan apparatus, which removes heat from the refrigerator and blows it out the back. Now it's not quite analogous, but the polar regions remove heat away through radiation especially during the the polar nights.

Now, if a refrigerator door is left open, then the heat is blown out the back of the refrigerator just re-introduced through the front. So there is no cooling, but if you shut the door, the refrigerator cools and the Antarctic circumpolar current shuts the door on the Earth's temperature circulation Now is heat is blocked from entering the Antarctic southern waters increasing sea ice.

More extensive sea ice creates more brine ejection, which sinks to the bottom and cold salty brine replaces the warm salty waters. Now the formation of cold Antarctic bottom water sets the stage to create the profile of temperatures we see throughout the modern day oceans. We see that the bottom waters are dominated by Antarctic bottom waters and that cold water helps feed, uh, the Antarctic intermediate waters, which transports the cooler temperatures to the equator in, into the Northern hemisphere.

Ancient warm salty deep water replaced by AABW & North American Deep Water (NADW)

And here's another way of looking at that profile. You have Antarctic bottom water on the bottom. You have North Atlantic deep water above that's been formed in the Arctic under the cooler conditions of today. We see the Antarctic, intermediate Water is flowing up past the equator and we still see some sinking warm salty water due to evaporation happening in the Mediterranean.

And here's a profile of the Atlantic at about a thousand meters depth. We see this warm salty water coming out of the Mediterranean Ocean.

Now the sinking Antarctic bottom water, which is the coldest water in the oceans mixes and lowers the temperature of the North Atlantic Deep Water. And together that feeds the cool Antarctic intermediate waters that moves towards the equator and affects most of the upwelling regions around the world.

Now, by looking at the Pacific Ocean todeay, we can appreciate the power of upwelled cold water that changes the global temperature during the La Ninas. Warm waters are pushed over to the eastern side of the Pacific and cold waters rise from below to replace that warm water with cold water.

If we look at satellite temperature data, we see the major drops in global temperature happened during Linea events as represented by the red arrows.

The problem is the Pacific cold water upwelling didn't begin until 4 million years ago, Before the Arctic region began to form its glaciers and ice caps. And the reason for that is this Antarctic refrigeration effect had to build up the Antarctic bottom waters to a large enough volume to feed cold Antarctic Intermediate Waters, raising it close enough to the surface to allow it to be upwell and then affect the Earth's climate.

Now around 2.5 million years ago, Greenland's permanent ice cap took hold. And that correlates with the closing of the central American Seaway by the rise of the Panama isthmus connecting North America to South America. Now, some researchers say that this blockage of the central American Seaway, enabled the glaciations to begin, but others say that it delayed the glaciation. There's not enough time to talk about whether that's true or not, but the changes in ocean circulation around 2.5 million years ago, we're not just relegated to the isthmus of Panama, but happened around the Bering Strait, and around Indonesia.

So we see there was a tremendous change in circulation. Now, one result of the creation of the Panama isthmus that might be of interest, is it allowed the animal fauna between North and South America to move upwards or southwards. If you look at the brownish green silhouettes, those are all South American animals that moved into North America and the silhouettes in blue are North American animals then moved into south America. That causes one to question if temperature has anything to do with similar kinds of migrations

To summarize 50 million years of global cooling, we start with the ESC a time period 50 million years ago when carbon dioxide was a a thousand parts per million or greater in the atmosphere in global atmospheric temperatures, as well as warm salty, deep water was at least 23 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer or 13 degrees centigrade warmer than today by 34 million years ago.

The Antarctica Circumpolar Current was now blocking any kinds of flow of subtropical, warm water from reaching Antartica. And this caused three critical things. 1) it allowed the initiation of Antarctica's permanent ice cap that persists today, 2) it caused extensive sea ice to increase, which caused brine rejection, which added to the volume of the cold Antarctic bottom waters.

And 3) the current also increase upwelling. It caused high productivity from diatoms, the evolution of the baleen whales and that productivity sequestered more and more CO2 dropping CO2 down to levels of 300 parts per million to 700, depending on your models, which is lower than today in many cases. And surprisingly, as the Oligocene proceeded, the late Oligocene was warming despite the continued drawdown of carbon dioxide. By the Miocene, the CO2 was down around 400 parts per million, and, but global temperatures were seven degrees to eight degrees centigrade, 14 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today.

And so some models said that that CO2 had to be higher in order to justify those temperatures. But we could also say that the reason we saw this warming in the late Oligocene, or we saw it in the Miocene as, as Antarctic bottom waters, increasingly, uh, replace replacing warm salty waters in the bottom, the ocean, it raised those ancient, warm waters to near the surface where that warm water could ventilate as heat back to the atmosphere by the Pliocene, which ended around 2.5 million years ago, we saw the initiation of the Greenland's permanent ice cap that was partly associated with the Panama isthmus as well as other changes in plate tectonics, which caused changes in ocean circulation. At that point, CO2 was again around 400 parts per million and upwelling of warm water. Up until that point had kept temperatures around three degrees or 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today.

Temperature changes between cold ice ages and warm interglacials

Now the growing amount of cool upwelling waters caused the Pleistocene 2.5 million years ago to reach a point where it's very sensitive to any changes in energy imbalances on earth, that caused the Earth's climate to fluctuate wildly between glacial cold periods in interglacial warm periods.

We had the warm interglacial the previous one hundred thousand years ago that was warmer than today by about four to five degrees centigrade. And then the last glacial maximum temperature was down to about a minus 11 cooler than today

No Meat For You!

Healthy Grazing and Grasslands

published in the Pacifica Tribune  January 2020

What’s Natural?

No Meat for You!

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced NYC’s New Green Deal and his plan “to save our earth”. He stated NYC will reduce beef purchases by 50% and phase out ALL purchases of processed meat by 2030. It’s not clear how he defines processed meats, but the World Health Organization defines it as "meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavor or improve preservation."

Processed meats evolved before the era of modern refrigeration for good reason. Salting, curing, fermenting, and smoking meat increased the shelf-life of a limited food supply and thus increased human survival. But now processed meats are demonized. Certainly, some chemical additives are unhealthy, but demonizing all processed meats is just wrong. With good labeling people can freely choose what foods they trust.

But de Blasio’s edict would mean any institution run by NYC will no longer serve chicken nuggets, hotdogs, sausages, bacon, pastrami, ham, baloney, salami, pepperoni, corned beef and jerky. Fresh beef meals will be cut by 50% to “save the planet’s climate” from cow farts.  How far will these government actions go? Dairy cows fart too. Will milk, whip cream, cheese, yogurt and ice cream be next on the hit list? Will they later extend their ban to all of NYC? What if Mayor de Blasio ever became America’s president? Fortunately, de Blasio’s authoritarian actions are why so many Americans rightfully argue we need limited government!

There is no place for authoritarian diet control. We all experiment with our best personal diets. I went vegetarian for a few years. I liked learning to make tastier vegetables. But eventually I reverted to carnivorous ways. Most studies suggest our bodies evolved to eat both plants and meat, so I resent those who try to shame me for naturally eating meat. However, one PETA article did argue if you see dead animals on the side of the road, but are not tempted to stop and snack on them, you are naturally a herbivore. Really?

Nonetheless, vegetarians make a very valid point.  Over-grazing has been bad for the environment. Studies of temperatures in Arizona and Mexico determined lost vegetation from overgrazing caused soils to dry, raising regional temperatures by as much as 7°F compared to un-grazed adjacent lands. Over-grazing converts biologically diverse grasslands into barren deserts. But counter-intuitively, without grazing animals, grasslands still convert to deserts. Grasslands benefit from natural grazing and “holistic grazing” has been shown to prevent “desertification”. Unfortunately, overzealous radical vegetarians don’t understand - holistic grazing is a win-win for the environment and meat eaters.

Grasses do not decompose immediately. Nutrients get locked up for years while the accumulating “thatch” blocks the sun and inhibits the growth of new grasses. Accumulating thatch also enhances wildfires. Grazing animals not only remove thatch, their manure freely fertilizes the soil and promotes next year’s growth. Holistic grazing has demonstrated if we mimic the natural migrations of huge herds, as in Africa’s Serengeti, we can prevent desertification. Overgrazing typically happens when herds are confined to small pastures, too small to support the cattle’s needs.

I encourage everyone to google Allan Savory’s hope-filled TED talk titled “How to Fight Desertification and Reverse Climate Change”. Savory is originally from South Africa. There, cattle were removed from lands destined to become National Parks and Savory was charged with studying the results.  His studies revealed the park’s grasslands continued to degrade into desert despite removal of all cattle grazing. The “only” remaining explanation pointed to elephants. Regretfully he recommended culling elephants to sustainable levels. Such a recommendation was blasphemous, so government experts initiated another study. Unfortunately, government experts agreed. Too many elephants were ripping up vegetation. So, thousands of elephants were slaughtered.  The result - the land continued to degrade from grassland to desert.

Savory eventually understood holistic grazing was the only solution. If cattle were managed to imitate natural grazing, the land could be restored because cattle grazing would remove thatch, freely fertilize the ground, and supply a protective layer of moisture-holding mulch. Holistic grazing reversed desertification and stopped excessive warming of surface temperatures caused by overgrazing. And holistic grazing increased the storage of carbon in the soil.

The anti-meat-eating crowd often argues eating meat is a shameful, immoral and inefficient use of calories. They argue meat provides only a small fraction of the calories we would otherwise obtain by directly eating the grains fed to cattle. But that is a narrow perspective. By raising cattle holistically on grasslands, we efficiently obtain calories and protein that we could never acquire otherwise from inedible grasses. Globally there are huge swaths of land unsuitable for growing edible plant food, and where human populations must totally rely on grazing animals for survival.

So, feel no shame! Meat eating is not the ticket to climate hell! Holistic grazing is a win-win for meat eaters and the environment.

Jim Steele is director emeritus of the Sierra Nevada Field Campus, SFSU and authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism.

Contact: naturalclimatechange@earthlink.net