Post is here. Needs a bit more work - animation (or failing that) a graphic illustrating the cool skin effect, is yet to come.

I've got quite a few more posts on ocean heat, thermal lag, sea level rise to come. I figure I'll have to cover a lot of these topics before I can tie them all together and simplify them so that they're more acessible to a general audience.

Be nice when most readers understand that La Nina is when heat goes into the ocean & deep ocean, rainfalls increases dramatically over land, which lowers global sea level, increases plant growth, which increases CO2 uptake by plants. And El Nino is when heat is lost from the ocean surface to the atmosphere, the ocean surface layers cool, rainfall increases over the oceans, decreases over land, which raises global sea level and reduces CO2 uptake by land plants (drought).

Well, that's the plan anyway.

Rob, you obviously don't have a day job. Great output man. After the title of 'The Borg'?

Glenn, I've been working long hours the past week, so it's difficult to squeeze things in. Borgette sounds like a feminine title, and unoriginal to boot, so I'm not too keen on that moniker.

Global warming (along with other degradation of the natural environment) will be the greatest catastrophe in all of human existence, and limiting harm is extremely time sensitive - that's what drives me every single day. Barely an hour goes by where I don't think about.

I think if people truly understood the scale of the problem, and how quickly it could possibly unfold, we'd have an army of volunteers researching, writing, and critiquing posts and rebuttals.

Until then, it's up to us.

Any comments on the post? 

The Borgito?

What the heck is a skerrick?

So it seems like the point of this post is to show that the oceans will continue warming for a long time due to the GHG increase.  But that seems pretty intuitive to me.  Is there another main point from this post that I'm missing?

Skerrick = tiny amount, or last little bit. It's an old english saying which is well known downunder. I'll hyper-link to an explanation.

The point of the post is threefold:

- laying out one of the many planks, to eviscerate Pielke Snr's bogus claims about the warming (or not) of the oceans. It's going to make it that much easier if I've addressed all the relevant issues on seperate posts. I can just then hyper-link to them, and provide a basic explanation in the Pielke posts.  

- provide a rebuttal to the skeptic claim "greenhouse gases can't heat the ocean". I'm sure you are familiar with that McLean guys claims over at The Conversation. This will be the intermediate version.

- illustrate to readers how the oceans warm, and why they will continue to do so for a very long time. It may be intuitive to you, but I disagree that the same holds true for the general population. In fact, given the efforts some skeptics have made to muddy-the-waters (pun intended), I don't think it is well understood at all.

Once the mechanism is understood, readers can plainly see that expectations of future deep, and polar, ocean warming isn't just based on speculative climate modeling, but upon past and present observations, plus physics-based climate modeling.

Clearly a re-write is in order to make this explicit.   

Rob
being something new to many readers I think you should spend a few more words explaining the process, maybe in the third paragraph. A simple list of the heat exchage mechanism between the ocean, the surface layer and the atmosphere will suffice. In this way, the effect of the reduction of the thermal gradient will be clearer.

Thks, Riccardo, I figured it wasn't clear enough. I'll work on that graphic/animation in a day or so too.

Gavin Schmitt posted "Global warming and ocean heat content" over at Real Climate today (Oct 3 US).

Is this ready to publish Rob?

Dana, I'll work on it tonight. Should be ready for publication tomorrow, at the normal time. 

Sorry bro, stayed up watching the Rugby World Cup, and didn't get 'er finished. If it's okay with you I'll be done in about 9-10 hrs from now and will publish then - better get some beauty sleep!

Well then, I'll finish it off later today - wife is starting to get on my case. Better get it done before the Rugby World Cup quarterfinal games on tonight!

I'll put this one on hold for now, still not happy with it.

Okay, I've got you on the schedule for Wednesday next week.  Can also bump it up to Tuesday, or bump it back if you prefer.

Dana, this post isn't finished, but has been published. Anyway to take it down? I'll finish it off tonight.

Yeah sorry, my bad.  Let me know when it's ready.

Sweet. Sent you an e-mail you can now ignore. It'll be finished tonight - so ready for your normal publication time tomorrow.

Cheers.

Dana, I'm finished with this one. Good to go whenever you're ready.