2013 UN IPCC report scary looking graph about ocean heat doesn't tell politicos (the ones saying evil US taxpayers must pay billions) the difference between Joules and Centigrade meaning 'scary' increase was only hundredths of a degree C

10/10/13, "The ocean heat graph (Part 2) – signal or noise?," IPCCReport.wordpress.com

"In Part 1 I showed the ocean heat graph from the (2013) IPCC WG1 SPM, (Summary for Policy Makers) got rather distracted by the fact that I could not find the Supplementary Material that supposedly listed the datasets, showed the corresponding graphs from Chapter 3 and noted that they were described as ‘estimates’ there but not in the SPM
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The IPCC graph shows estimated total ocean heat content since 1950, in units of Joules, with the tick mark intervals on the axis showing an apparently enormous numbers such as 10^23 Joules. What the IPCC does not tell the policymakers however, is what this corresponds to in degrees C. In fact a very simple calculation shows that 10^23 Joules would correspond to a rise of only about 0.04C.

Lucia Liljegren produced a helpful version of the graph with additional axes showing the corresponding temperatures:

Her version is 0-2000m so is not directly comparable with the IPCC 0-700m one.

It’s no secret that the corresponding temperature increase is only a few hundredths of a degree. The website of the ARGO system for measuring ocean temperature mentions a temperature change of 0.06C since the 60s and the Levitus et al paper talks of  0.09C since 1955 in the abstract. But the IPCC SPM does not mention these small numbers, talking instead of a 0.11C/decade warming in the upper 75m of the ocean.

These very small temperature variations raise the question of whether there is any significant meaning in these graphs at all. How large are the error bars? How accurately can ocean temperature be measured? How accurately could it be measured in the 1950s? To within a hundredth of a degree? I think not.  As well as the temperature accuracy, there is the question of coverage. To be able to produce this graph accurately, you need to measure the temperature all over the ocean and at all depths, at all times back to the 1950s."...

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via "Even if ocean ate the warming, would only change ocean temperature by IMMEASURABLE hundredths-of-a-degree," Junk Science, Steve Milloy





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