Now let’s consider the total power input of the sun: about 1000 W/m**2 at the surface, for a total of about 1.3 x 10**17 W. Divide that into the gross heat capacity of the oceans and you get about 4.5 x 10**7 seconds — a bit more than one year. In other words, if there were no feedback mechanisms and the sun simply blinked out, the initial cooling of the earth would be only about 1ºK per year. However, we’re not talking about anything as dramatic as that. A 1% change in total incoming radiation would take about 100 years to show a change of 1ºK. The primary forcing factors for AGW are CO2 and methane, which yield effects of only about 2 or 3 W/m**2. However, the feedback effects increase the overall forcing to perhaps 5 W/m**2, which should take about 200 years to show an increase in temperature of 1ºK. However, all this assumes rapid and complete mixing in the oceans, which is not likely. Indeed, the mixing of heat in the oceans is probably the main factor behind short-term variations in surface temperatures. It could well be that the pause we have seen in the last ten years is due to a change in ocean circulations that has dramatically increased mixing rates.

As you can see, this quickly gets very complicated. However, the key point is simple: the oceans act as a gigantic heat reservoir, and so they act to slow down the earth’s response to temperature changes. For changes of the magnitude we’re looking at, we’re talking roughly centuries in order to get a significant change in temperature. You can push it down to maybe 30 years if you want to talk about the smallest changes that we could measure with some reliability. Below that 30 year mark, the fluctuations we see cannot reflect any real change in the earth’s overall temperature.

Fair enough, but the facts I’ve seen don’t indicate stagnation. A slowdown, yes, but a warming trend of .07 degree Celsius is still a warming trend. There is a widespread meme in both mainstream and denier-media, prompted no doubt by a couple of brutal winters in several parts of the United States, that climate change has stopped or reversed or that the planet is cooling, and this is simply not true.

I’m also all for making all data known, but it’s useless unless it’s put into context.

This consideration also applies to climate models. A climate model really doesn’t concern changes over a time frame of less than 30 years. Asking a climate model to predict changes over the course of ten years is really no different from asking it to predict the temperature at the corner of 5th and Oak in Peoria on July 18th, 2034, at 10:33 AM.

A language correction. “Warming” by definition implies a change in temperature, so stagnation cannot be defined as warming.