Posted 3/20/2008 05:50:00 PM by Douglas

As long as we're talking about "global" warming, isn't it time someone started measuring the temperature of our globe's oceans? Someone has.

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

Robots. Always with the misleading robots. Well, water has about four times the heat capacity of air, so it's easy to see how an increase would take a lot longer to become measurable.

Who knows how this is going to play out, but I sure hope Al Gore lives long enough to see how wrong he was. Or at least long enough to have to give up his gas guzzling limo.

Labels: global warming