That the ocean heat content is rising while surface temperatures flatten out is consistent with an energy imbalance that is
visible in ocean heat content trends and satellite measurements.
However, for the purposes of this analysis it doesn't matter, since the
swings in ocean heat content are nowhere near large enough to balance the budget.
Linear trends (1955 — 2003) of change
in ocean heat content per unit surface area (W m — 2) for the 0 to 700 m layer, based on the work of Levitus et al. (2005a).
Any discussion of «climate sensitivity» that does not take into account the increasingly clear
gains in ocean heat content going on are fairly meaningless, given that this ocean heat will be driving atmospheric temperatures as it always has.
A total of 2.3 million salinity profiles were used in this analysis, about one - third of the amount of data
used in the ocean heat content estimates in Section 5.2.2.
With all the
latencies in ocean heat content and other parts of that «pipeline», 450 ppm or higher is guaranteed to put us back in the Last Interglacial, at 4 - 6m higher sea level within centuries to a few millennia.
But there are offsets between GHGs / aerosol combinations and solar activity (especially as derived by Hoyt and Schatten), which may have been underestimated (see Stott e.a. 2003) If one simply should compare only the influence of solar (by H&S or even LBB) with the increase in heat content of the oceans, one can get a similar conclusion: that solar is the main driving
force in ocean heat content.
It shows ocean warming in the shortwave — SW --(and longwave — LW — cooling) in the 1990's and a transient
peak in ocean heat content.
Even extending to pre-Argo periods, with a long period the
errors in ocean heat content values have to be very large to have a major effect on the mean rate of heat uptake over the period.
Phrases with «in ocean heat content»