New paper shows climate models have exaggerated ocean warming by 66,590 Hiroshima bombs per day

An erratum published today in Climate Dynamics shows that climate models have exaggerated heat accumulation of the oceans by about 66,590 Hiroshima bombs per day vs. observations over the past ~50 years. That's indeed a travesty of a lot of "missing heat."

According to the corrected 700 meter heat content data below, observations show about 54% less heat accumulated than predicted by climate model simulations. Observations show the global oceans have warmed only 0.09C over the past 55 years, which demonstrates the IPCC has exaggerated the effect of CO2 on the climate by a factor of at least 5 times.

According to the authors, "the historical [model] simulations still overestimates the heat content trend over this last time period [1970-2005], which could be related to the too large climate sensitivity" to CO2.

Math:

• Observations [red line in graph below] show a heat content increase of ~13e+22 J from 1956-2004
• Models [black line in graph below] historical simulation predicted a heat content increase of ~20e+22 J from 1956-2004
• Models therefore exaggerated heat increase by ~7e+22J [54%]
• One Hiroshima bomb = 6e+13 J
• 7e+22/6e+13 = 1,166,666,666 extra Hiroshima bombs exaggeration by models over past 48 years, or 66,590 excess Hiroshima bombs per day
• It is left to the reader to work out the number of kitten sneezes this exaggeration equates to

In Fig. 3 of the published version, the heat content was integrated down the 200 m only in the model simulations, thereby biasing the comparison with the data, which are themselves integrated down to 700 m. The new figure shows the heat content integrated down to 700 m both in the simulations and in the data. This correction generally improves the comparison of the model simulations with the observations of heat content for the most recent period, especially in the Atlantic basin.

Corrected Fig. 3: Heat content from Levitus et al. (2009) with slight recent improvements in red (cf.http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT), from the nudged simulations in blue and from historical simulations in black expressed in 1022 J. a for the global ocean, b over 30–70°N in the Atlantic. The reference period is 1961–1990, and a 3-year running mean has been applied to all the data. The error bar for historical and nudged simulations corresponds to two standard deviations computed for each five-member ensemble. The red vertical lines represent the years with a large eruption, i.e. the Mount Agung in 1963, El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991

The corrected numbers in section 3.1, concerning the computed trends for global heat content from Fig. 3 for the period 1955–2005, are 113.1 TW (r2 = 0.98) in the nudged simulations and of 129.5 TW (r2 = 0.84) in the historical simulations as compared to the trend of 69.5 TW (unchanged, r2 = 0.70) in the data. The agreement is therefore lower over this time period than suggested in the published version, but it increases if computed over the more recent time frame 1970–2005 with 115.5 TW (r2 = 0.96) in the nudged [fudged] simulations, 189.0 TW (r2 = 0.96) in the historical simulations and 108.6 TW (r2 = 0.83) in the data. While the historical simulations still overestimates the heat content trend over this last time period, which could be related to the too large climate sensitivity in IPSL-CM5A-LR (Dufresne et al., this issue), the nudging [fudged model] leads the heat content to be closer to the observations.
We believe that this error may not modify the main messages of the paper, which are more related to the impact of volcanoes on the AMOC.

Related:

Kitten sneezes or Hiroshima bombs, the fact is the 0.09C ocean warming over the past 55 years [Levitus et al 2012] proves that:

1.  The IPCC exaggerates effect of man on climate by more than 5 times

2. The warming is not from longwave infrared from increased greenhouse gases

3. Due the 1st and 2nd laws, an ocean that is 0.09C warmer can only warm the atmosphere by an additional 0.09C. 

4. Douglass & Knox disproved the assumptions behind the Kitten/Hiroshima analogy used by Cook/Nuccitelli

http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/DK_reply_PLA_2012.pdf

and here

5. Why the 'one Hiroshima bomb every four seconds' claim is another AGW lie