NASA data shows oceans cooling since 2003?

posted at 5:30 pm on January 22, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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This comes as no great shock, since the Arctic has the most ice in its cap since 1979.  However, the data tends to support those who theorize that warming and cooling cycles are nothing more than that, and undermine the argument for global warming as a consequence of carbon dioxide.  It also explains why the last two winters have gotten longer and colder instead of shorter and warmer:

Two separate studies through NASA confirm that since 2003, the world’s oceans have been losing heat.  In the peak of the recent warming trend, 1998 actually ranked 2nd to 1934 as the warmest year on record.

John Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, published his first report about the warming oceans. The article Correcting Ocean Cooling (see below) published on NASA’s Earth Observatory page this week discussed his and other results.  willis used data from1993-2003 that showed the warm-up and followed the Global Warming Theory.  In 2006, he co-piloted a follow-up study led by John Lyman at Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle that updated the time series for 2003-2005. Surprisingly, the ocean seemed to have cooled. He was surprised, and called it a ’speed bump’ on the way to global warming.

A second, independent study was conducted. Takmeng Wong and his colleagues at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia came up with the same results.  Wong studies net flux of solar energy at the top of our atmosphere.  From the 1980s to 1990s his team noticed increased amounts net energy when comparing incoming solar energy to what Earth radiates and reflects.  Since then, the solar flux has remained the same.  Other studies have suggested that the sun’s output has decreased in the past few years.

In fairness, though, the NASA paper to which this site links comes up with a very different explanation.  Research discovered problems with specific kinds of sensors used for decades in ocean temperature surveys.  Older XBT data gave data biased towards warmer temperature readings, while newer Argo floats were biased in the opposite direction.

This leads to another problem, however.  Much of the actual ocean temperature data for the past few decades came from these probes; the rest, according to the paper, came primarily from satellite data, ships, and computer models.  The NASA paper claims to have pulled out the bad data and corrected for it so that their new data matches the computer models that support global-warming theories.

But is that real, or just an attempt to fit data points into preconceived models?  The only direct measurements would have come from ships, and is that really enough to even have a reliable record of ocean temperatures?

Bad data leads to bad conclusions, regardless of whether it matches pre-conceived notions or not.

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