“There has been a change in direction by the climate alarmists. They now emphasize ocean temperatures and ocean heat content, and pay scant attention to air temperature. Their new argument is that most of the heat in the climate system (water, air, ice, and snow) is stored in the oceans, so the ocean temperature is “a better indicator of change in the climate” than the air temperature.

This argument is correct (as supported by and originally suggested by Pielke Sr. in 2003 and again in 2007 on his blog, A Litmus Test for Global Warming). The problem is that ocean temperatures have only been measured adequately since mid 2003.

Measuring ocean temperature globally is harder than it sounds. The Argo network finally overcomes many of the prior problems, but only became operational in mid-2003. Before Argo, starting in the early 1960s, ocean temperatures were measured with bathythermographs (XBTs). They are expendable probes fired into the water by a gun, that transmit data back along a thin wire.

The ocean data that the alarmists are relying on to establish their warming trends is all pre-Argo; it all comes from the old, less accurate XBTs. Now that we are measuring ocean temperatures properly, the warming trend has disappeared. And by coincidence, it disappeared just when we started measuring it properly!”

This trick was pulled on Senator Fielding of Australia, when he met with Climate Change Minister Wong to discuss the absence of warming. After the meeting, the Minister’s advisers produced written answers which said, in effect “who cares about air temperatures anyway, when 85% of the effect occurs in the ocean”. The Senator’s advisers responded promptly in a “Due Diligence” report of 10 August 2009 – see it at
http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/the-wong-fielding-meeting-on-global-warming-documents

A sample extract follows:

” 7. Ocean temperatures have only been measured adequately since the beginning of 2004, using the Argo network of buoys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_(oceanography),http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/Marine_Atlas.html. Earlier measurements, made during the 20th century on ships of opportunity, were not collected under controlled conditions and are therefore of dubious quality (cf. Thompson et al., 2008).
The Argo data currently show slight cooling since the beginning of 2004 (Loehle, 2009;http://www-argo.ucsd.edu/rey_line_atlas.gif , http://www-argo.ucsd.edu/nino34_atlas.gif ).

8. This cooling trend is also reflected in upper ocean heat content, as estimated by Loehle (2009) and DiPuccio, W. (2009), and summarised in the figure below (next page).

9. As discussed in more detail by DiPuccio (2009), ocean temperatures need to be rising above a certain rate to be consistent with the IPCC greenhouse warming hypothesis. They aren’t. Ocean heat content is falling, and there is nowhere for the heat alleged to be accumulating to be hiding.

10. Finally, enthusiasm for the use of ocean heat content as an arbiter of climate change should be tempered by the IPCC’s considered view that “Limitations in ocean sampling imply that decadal variability in global heat content, salinity and sea level changes can only be evaluated with moderate confidence” (IPCC Technical Summary, p. 84).

Now the Royal Society is treading the same path. But all this is new and there are many pitfalls – as appears from the “Oceans Eleven” paper at http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC1004/S00028.htm

This would require an immense quantity of heat. Picture the effort to heat a bath full of cold water, by turning on bar heaters around the walls of the bathroom.

This rather strained hypothesis could be supported only if oceanic heat content has been building up. The ARGO floats show that the opposite is the case.

But they go further and invoke “detailed measurements of the changes in oceanic heat content, and the temperature rise that accompanies this”. So it is not just a generalisation but a mathematical exactitude. But where is it? What’s the citation? Who’s the author? Where’s the data?