An Interesting Take on Ocean Temperatures

I'm a little confused by this new story on the three-year cooling trend of oceanic temperatures. I wrote earlier that global warmalists would try to paint the trend as a dip in the overall warming trend, which is a valid enough hypothesis. But to call a 20 to 25 percent loss of all the heat gained in the last 30 years in only three years "a small fraction" or "a little dip" is a gross mischaracterization. The graph of this trend would look like the 2000 stock market crash, except the market hasn't stopped crashing yet.

To confuse matters, instead of talking about their own research, the scientists talked about others' reports on sea levels still rising, when a temperature decrease would have a negative thermal expansion. But water has different expansive properties at different temperatures. In fact, between 0 and 4 degrees Celsius, water actually decreases in volume as its temperature increases. So, tying sea levels' rise or fall to an average temperature is too simplistic.

The next thing the story does is associate the sea level rise to glacial and ice melt since thermal expansion certainly couldn't account for it. Really. To support this wobbly stick, they cite this story on the Antarctic ice sheets losing mass. Those data were taken using gravimetric measurements only and did not take into account any volumetric or other pressure-variable measurements. You can read the evisceration of this study here. In fact, sea ice coverage around Antarctic has been increasing.

The rest of the LiveScience story is the usual twaddle about needing more research, which is so obviously true. There was so much spin attached to this story to minimize the data's impact on climate change theories. This much cooling of the ocean has a WTF? effect on all currently popular climate models, and nothing should minimize that.