GW Cops Issue an APB for Missing Heat

I hate to do another piece on Global Warming but this is significant. It seems the "heat" is missing. Scientists are at a loss to explain it.

In a revealing story on www.npr.org called "The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat" Richard Harris explains the dilemma facing the true believers.

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.

So, they mean to tell us that the oceans, which make up over 70% of the Earth's surface, have not warmed at all? In fact the oceans have actually cooled. How can this be?

Maybe the "deniers" are on to something when they point out that land based monitoring stations near growing urban heat islands could be providing scientists with skewed data. This coupled with decades of satellite data that has also showed no significant "global" warming is feeding the mystery of the missing heat.

I have also read that global temperatures fell by 0.6 degrees celsius in 2007 which is remarkably the exact number they had placed on the increase during the entire 20th century. One year does not a trend make, but isn't it interesting that we are all shivering in the face of this all this dire and significant global warming.

From the article:
"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? Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it's probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet. That can't be directly measured at the moment, however. "Unfortunately, we don't have adequate tracking of clouds to determine exactly what role they've been playing during this period," Trenberth says.

Well, I think this sums up what the CAGW skeptics have said all along: "We don't know what we don't know." We shouldn't be automatically dismissive, but we also should not allow politicians and policy makers create laws and regulations that will limit our economy and deny the developing world a chance to develop based on something we don't really understand.




CW