March 20, 2008

The Heat is Gone

An array of 3,000 temperature sensors in the earth's oceans have discovered zero evidence of the seas warming - exactly the opposite of what global warming theory says they'd find.

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

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.

Perhaps the Earth has the ability to adjust with and dissapate excess heat. One scientist in the NPR story speculates that cloud cover is acting as a thermostat, allowing more heat to escape into space, though to know for sure we'd need data on cloud cover.

What this story tells us is that our scientists don't know everything there is to know about how climate works. Imagine that. They were wrong about ocean warming. They might even be wrong about global warming. For global warming profiteers like Al Gore, that would certainly be an inconvenient truth.