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Are the Climate Commission's claims of a hot summer correct?

By Anthony Cox - posted Tuesday, 12 March 2013


The Climate Commission [CC] has been dogged by controversy since it was set up to explain the certainty of AGW. Its latest reports are no exception. The first report asserts [paragraph 2]:

the physics [of AGW] are very well understood

And then:

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The vast majority of the extra heat does not go into the atmosphere and thus raise the air temperature but rather into the ocean.

But back-radiation of infra red radiation at CO2 absorbing and emitting wavelengths, the way AGW allegedly works, cannot penetrate the oceans.

Basically for heat from the atmosphere is to be "transmitted" to the ocean the temperature gradient must be atmosphere => ocean but global average atmospheric temperature is about 3 C COOLER than the ocean.

So even if the oceans are warming they are NOT warming due to AGW, even if AGW exists, and there is very strong evidence it doesn't. What this shows is even if it is a case of "the physics being very well understood" what is not understood is how the climate system reacts to the physics.

Are the oceans warming? The CC shows ocean warming to 700 meters and to 2000 meters in Figure 1. The heat accumulation at 2000 meters is problematic. The ocean warming to 700 meters is more important because this level has a strong relationship with energy leaving the atmosphere. The CC says the ocean is warming to 700 meters.

This is wrong and the CC's information is superseded by ARGO data from the NOAA Pacific Marine environment Laboratory (PMEL).

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The second CC report is even more strident than the first and concerns itself with the records recently broken during the 2012-2013 summer. For the CC and the Bureau of Meteorology [BOM] the recent summer was the hottest on record. This is confirmed by the BOM's record of summer temperatures and the graph of summer temperature anomalies from 1910:

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About the Author

Anthony Cox is a lawyer and secretary of The Climate Sceptics.

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