The point being Canuck, as you well know, is that the ocean temperatures that will have any significance during the next hundred years are not in the sub-thermocline, they are in the top hundred metres. Knowing this, one wonders why you never bothered to raise the issue of 'whole ocean' versus the upper 'subset' as you call it.
Sorry red - the question was raised about the ocean's response time - that is why I never "bothered to raise the issue of 'whole ocean' versus the upper 'subset'". In systems analysis, response time is the length of time for the system to come to equilibrium after an input. Are you saying that the oceans temperature has reached equilibrium from an atmospheric temp increase after 100 years? (rhetorical, I know you're not). The question is, if you know equilibrium is not reached in 100 years, then why would you say the response time of the oceans is 100 years?
Sure you 'could go finer' than me, but 'finer' is irrelevant in this case.
So looking at the shallow ocean temperature is irrelevant when looking at GW? Geez, you better get on the horn with NOAA/NASA/Hadley/IPCC, since they are using ocean surface temps, from the top 3-4 meters (likely even shallower), to determine the oceanic response to GW. I'd love to have a look at global ocean temperatures for the top 100 meters as well - after all, if it's so relevant, I'm sure there's a dataset out there. Could you pass it along please?
This site continues to astound me, people seemingly want to argue about fairly trival things - like whether the response time for the top 100 meters, or the entire ocean should be used to determine the "oceans response time", or argue about whether anecdotal evidence contributes to scientific evidence. But they never want to discuss the lack of peer review on how global average temperature is determined, never want to discuss the impacts when those average temperatures were shown to be wrong, never want to discuss how UHI may be impacting the surface record, never want to discuss how improved detection methodologies/looser criteria is likely responsible for the increasing trend in hurricanes, never want to discuss how CO2 measurements on top of an active volcano can actually be representative of background CO2, never want to discuss how observed trends don't match GW theory (there should be more warming higher in the atmosphere, we're seeing more warming at ground surface), never want to discuss why this global phenomenon of GW is not affecting Antarctica (or, after the Hanson mistake was found, neither the US – McIntyre is going through other continents attempting to find this warming, so far, no dice), or never want to discuss how the absorption band of CO2 is supposed to expand with higher concentrations.
I could go on, but I think I made my point - lets start having some meaningful discussion on here, and stop arguing about trivial definitions, in some pathetic attempt to "score" points.
