The empirical data has spoken. Cancel the global cooling party. Global warming is still happening.

The planet is heating up, thanks to human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases.  But as a new NOAA-led study, “An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950” (subs. req’d, release here) concluded:

[S]ince 1950, the planet released about 20 percent of the warming influence of heat-trapping greenhouse gases to outer space as infrared energy. Volcanic emissions lingering in the stratosphere offset about 20 percent of the heating by bouncing solar radiation back to space before it reached the surface. Cooling from the lower-atmosphere aerosols produced by humans balanced 50 percent of the heating. Only the remaining 10 percent of greenhouse-gas warming actually went into heating the Earth, and almost all of it went into the ocean.

Note that this Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres study was done “without using global climate models.”

Figure 1: “Total Earth Heat Content [anomaly] from 1950 (Murphy et al. 2009). Ocean data taken from Domingues et al 2008.”

That figure comes from the first of two posts by the terrific website Skeptical Science, which I repost below.  Skeptical Science is an excellent, well-organized site to send convincible people for a shredding of the standard, long-debunked denier talking points.

Now I’m sure the deniers and delayers out there are shrieking, “There are peer reviewed analyses that document that upper ocean warming has halted since 2003!” — a claim I dealt with in my July post, “Like father, like son: Roger Pielke Sr. also doesn’t understand the science of global warming “” or just chooses to willfully misrepresent it.”

Subsequently, however, another JGR article, “Global hydrographic variability patterns during 2003-2008” (subs. req’d, draft here) details an analysis of “monthly gridded global temperature and salinity fields from the near-surface layer down to 2000 m depth based on Argo measurements.”  Background on Argo here.   Their findings are summed up in this figure:

Figure [2]: Time series of global mean heat storage (0-2000 m), measured in 10⁸ Jm^-2.

Still warming, after all these years!  And just where you’d expect it.  The study makes clear that upper ocean heat content, perhaps not surprisingly, is simply far more variable than deeper ocean heat content, and thus an imperfect indicator of the long-term warming trend.

UPDATE:  Yes, I am aware of the recent upper-ocean heat content data on the web.  Please note that plots of very recent, highly variable upper-ocean content heat data down to 700 meters from unpeer-reviewed sources do not trump peer-reviewed analysis of much longer-term data down to 2000 m.  Is it too much to ask people to actually read this entire post before posting comments?

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When we last left GM, they were pursuing buyers for Hummer and Saturn (see “GM in talks to seel Hummer to China “” the second mistake by those clueless new owners?“).  So of course, the smaller-car brand dies, but the 7,000-pound gas guzzlers live.  WashPost reports:

General Motors has reached an agreement to sell its Hummer brand to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery….

It recently announced that it would wind down the Saturn brand.

The price for Hummer was not disclosed, but according to sources familiar with the negotiations, it was $150 million, far less than the $500 million price once envisioned.

Seriously, $150 million?  As I wrote back in June:

Less than $500 million?  That’s a rounding error in the cash giveaways to the auto industry these days.  Why couldn’t we just swallow that cost to forever remove from the planet this unsustainable blight?  Who are these clueless new owners of GM anyway?  Oh.  Never mind!

But WashPost buried the lede:

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Part 1 was an intro to the Solar Decathalon, a contest for innovative, high-tech, high-efficiency, solar-powered homes, which is open to the public in DC from October 9-13 and 15-18.  In this reposting, guest blogger A. Siegel focuses on one finalist.  For in-depth discussion of all the others, go to his website Get Energy Smart!  NOW!!!

No, we’re not speaking about Cold Fusion, but Penn State’s entry into the DOE Solar Decathlon, which opens Friday on the Mall in Washington, DC. Let’s take a look at some of Natural Fusion’s features from its website, which is dynamic, enabling rapid connection of concepts and approaches with the home’s physical layout.

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