Next up in our series on Canary in a Climate World Vol. 3 is the chapter by Mr. William Kininmonth, meteorologist and former head of the Australian Climate Centre. He’s not as well known as some of the luminaries in this series up to now, but his credentials are impeccable and, like all real experts, he makes his points with elegant simplicity. Yes yes, everyone has seen the upward-sloping graph of global average temperature. But look past the average at the details and some odd features emerge. Most of the warming is in the polar regions, and most of that is in the winter months. Neither the tropics nor the southern ocean regions are showing much warming. But CO2 doesn’t explain this pattern. Also the annual swing in average temperature is far too large to be explained by CO2. So what’s going on, since it’s clearly not what orthodoxy claims?

Kininmonth argues that contrary to the standard IPCC model, the Earth has never been in radiative equilibrium. The system didn’t go out of balance when industrial greenhouse gas emissions started because it’s never been in balance. And rising CO2 just isn’t enough of a forcing agent to explain the observed trends and variations in the data. Kininonth points instead to the tropical oceans as the world’s climate driver.

Those oceans, as Kininmonth points out, have a massive heat capacity compared to the atmosphere, and statistical analysis shows the air above the oceans warms in response to changes in water temperature, not the other way around. Heat from the tropical oceans that gets injected to the atmosphere must be transported to the polar regions to be radiated to space, and due to wind patterns this happens mostly in winter, thus explaining the warming pattern.

So why are the tropical oceans warming? Again, basic calculations show that CO2 can’t be the culprit because the change in absorption of outgoing infrared radiation due to that gas is just too small. Instead, Kininmonth argues, the tropical oceans are warming due to natural changes in ocean circulation patterns that have been underway since the 19th century. This cause, he argues, explains the detailed temperature data better than the naive CO2 model.

Next week: Professor Gernot Rabener and what was found in the Conturines cave.