Trenberth ripostes: “I do not agree with your comments. We are well aware that there are well over a dozen estimates of ocean heat content and they are all different yet based on the same data. There are clearly problems in the analysis phase and I don’t believe any are correct”.

If Trenberth, perhaps the most authoritative of the IPCC-favoured scientists (and a New Zealander to boot), is so scathing about ocean heat measures, then why does the New Zealand Royal Society rely heavily on this measurement as proof of their global warming theory?

Trenberth claims 90% of energy “trapped” by the greenhouse effect is absorbed by the oceans, but talk about the “mystery” of half the total amount of heat being unaccounted for.

Trenberth should meet with the NZ Royal Society. They say they can account for all the heat from the greenhouse effect.

But both of them cannot be right. I’d like to be a fly on the wall.

This is a direct negation of the main point of the Royal Society’s paper – which built its case on the fact that AGW theory allowed the global energy budget to be balanced. Hunter’s take on measured ocean heat content is rubbished.

The timing is impeccable.

But on the other hand: “When you put the clowns in charge, don’t be surprised if a circus breaks out.” (anon.)

Unequivocal, uncomplicated, unconditional and untrue. What would motivate the man to make a claim like this? And why didn’t the Royal Society peer-review it – or at least subject it to a sanity test – before allowing it to go out on the society’s letterhead?

Prof Gluckman, that so-independent adviser (who is utterly baffled by climate issues), has opted to hoist the whole discussion on to his own website. But only the Royal Society viewpoint of course.

It’s hard to imagine because they’re so tenaciously inaccessible!

Renownden’s argument seems to be that a Colorado group, led by somebody called Murphy, has actually had a go at measuring the energy content of the oceans, atmosphere, land surfaces, biosphere and cryosphere and adding them all together. Heroic! Ah, but no ……

Turns out that the Murphy group merely interviewed their own computers. The aggregate heat content of the world’s oceans, for example, was learned from applying “radiative transfer models”, rather than using the comprehensive system of ARGO floats which measure ACTUAL real-world heat content.

And Murphy had a cunning trick for getting it all to balance. He just ASSUMED that any imbalance must have been aerosols. As the Skeptical Scientist blog explains:

” Aerosol forcings are one of the major areas of uncertainty with climate models. So what this paper does is place empirical constraints on aerosol forcing by working out the total energy imbalance, then pruning away other forcings that we know with greater certainty. What is left is “aerosol direct + indirect + other forcings”.

It’s interesting that this 2009 paper should have come out of Boulder, Colorado. It must have been in preparation when the IPCC’s Kevin Trenberth – also of Boulder Colorado – sent his 1999 email complaining it was a “travesty” that they couldn’t find the missing energy.

Atmospheric increase = emissions from fossil fuels + net emissions from land use change – oceanic uptake – missing carbon sink.
3.2 = 6.3 + 2.2 – 2.4 – 2.9

Perhaps Keith Hunter believes the missing carbon cancels out the net emissions from land use. But he didn’t say that and I wouldn’t put words in his mouth. Besides, that still leaves 700 million tonnes unaccounted for. It also suggests that deforestation and other land use changes are not a problem.

How could the Royal Society just mislay 2.9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide?

For all that the Woods Hole people may say that annual oceanic uptake is 2.4 petagrams, this is a purely theoretical number thrown up by computer models. Nobody has measured how much carbon is in the oceans of the world at any time, or how much gets added in any given year. So there is a climate change theory backed up by an oceanic carbon theory, and no empirical support for either.