The First Evidence

Scripps says they just found new and dramatic evidence of global warming by looking at ocean temperature records.  If the evidence was really clear and dramatic you think they'd have noticed it before now.

Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and their colleagues have produced the first clear evidence of human-produced warming in the world's oceans, a finding they say removes much of the uncertainty associated with debates about global warming.

What's funny about this is that they said they have "the first clear evidence", thus directly saying that the evidence was not clear up till this point, despite the breathless weekly global warming updates on the BBC and CNN..

At a news briefing (Feb. 17 at 2 p.m. EST) and symposium presentation (Feb. 18 at 1:45-4:45 p.m. EST) during the 2005 American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington, D.C., Barnett will discuss the details of the study and explain why the results hold implications for millions of people in the near future.

Yep. Just one day after Kyoto goes into effect scientists step forward with their clear and dramatic evidence, based again on computer models that always show global warming.

In the new study, Barnett and his colleagues used computer models of climate to calculate human-produced warming over the last 40 years in the world's oceans. In all of the ocean basins, the warming signal found in the upper 700 meters predicted by the models corresponded to the measurements obtained at sea with confidence exceeding 95 percent. The correspondence was especially strong in the upper 500 meters of the water column.

Both global warming and natural temperature variations say there will be a bit of extra heat, which is going to act like heat does, so the fact that extra heat looks like extra heat is now claimed to be proof of the cause and mechanism of global warming. Hrmm.... There thermometer must be way smarter than the average thermometer, because the average thermometer isn't calibrated in units of blame.

It is this high degree of visual agreement and statistical significance that leads Barnett to conclude that the warming is the product of human influence. Efforts to explain the ocean changes through naturally occurring variations in the climate or external forces- such as solar or volcanic factors--did not come close to reproducing the observed warming.

So let me get this straight. If you punch in a tiny value of heating you get a small effect, but if you punch in a big value of heating you get a big effect. And if you punch up those volcanic factors you'd get cooling. And for this they hold a press conference, just one day after Kyoto. What are the odds... Apparently climatologists are far more predictable than the climate.