An angry discussion has erupted over recent research which appears to suggest that the build-up of heat in the oceans that is predicted to be associated with global warming is not happening.
The research based on an analysis of ocean buoy temperature measurements suggests that the oceans cooled between 2003 and 2008, that this cooling does not support the idea that the oceans are stockpiling heat and that it does not support the idea that the Earth is in positive radiative balance – that is, acting as a net absorber of heat and therefore warming.
Physicists Robert Knox and David Douglass of the University of Rochester, New York, bluntly state in their paper that their research “does not support the existence of either a large positive radiative imbalance or a “missing energy.””
Rubbish
Climate scientist Kevin Trenberth of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) , who made famous the phrase “missing energy”, has reportedly dismissed the paper as “rubbish”, according to the websites of climate scientists Roger Pielke Sr of the University of Colorado and Judy Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Pielke Sr described the research as “a solid scientific study” on his website.
The Knox and Douglass paper, “Recent energy balance of Earth”, was published in November by the International Journal of Geosciences.