NPR: The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat

According to a story this morning on NPR, scientists are having trouble figuring out why the Earth isn't as warm as their predictions say it should be.

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.

Hmm. Weird. All that warming of the Earth and, in the place where it's most relevent and most influential and we can't find any evidence of it whatsoever.

Whodathunkit, right?

Oh, but wait. It gets better.

"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming."

So, not only is there no evidence that the world is warming, but the oceans are actually cooling slightly.

I won't say I told you so, but I did.

The explanation though -- hey, it does come from NPR after all -- isn't that Global Warming is a sham (but it is) or a hoax, but rather that we simply don't understand what our instruments are telling us and that maybe Global Warming has been on hiatus.

And, on top of all of that, NPR reveals that scientists don't even know how to track or account for this little built-in thermostatic system that the Earth has called 'clouds'.

But if the aquatic robots are actually telling the right story, that raises a new question: Where is the extra heat all going?

Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it's probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.

That can't be directly measured at the moment, however.

"Unfortunately, we don't have adequate tracking of clouds to determine exactly what role they've been playing during this period," Trenberth says.

Uh-huh. Well, it's a good thing these scientists are factoring in everything when making their calculations about how much the Earth is (or isn't) warming and how much effect we have on it.

"I suspect that we'll able to put this together with a little bit more perspective and further analysis," Trenberth says. "But what this does is highlight some of the issues and send people back to the drawing board."

Whoa. Hang on there, Trenberth and Willis. Al Gore told me this debate was settled. I don't think you can just be going 'back to the drawing board' all willy-nilly now ...

Trenberth and Willis agree that a few mild years have no effect on the long-term trend of global warming. But they say there are still things to learn about how our planet copes with the heat.

Oh, well, that's good.

I mean, I thought that for a minute there that these guys might use the scientific method and, when through experimentation, they get data that directly conflicts with what they expected, revise their hypothesis.

Clearly, though, they're doing 'the right thing' and not letting these new facts get in the way of whether or not they toe the Global Warming line ...