G'day Daniel and any other interested forum member,
Actually using your search criteria will get you a vast amount of opinion from such super reliable sources as Greenpeace and little else. It will not get you access to data, which has always been my point. You asked me to provide peer reviewed research to back my points. I am actually compiling this and will provide it. I ask you to do the same.
I'd be interested to know why your opinion is that water temperature and salinity is the key issues to determining global warming. What makes you think this is a reliable indicator that the EARTH is undergoing global warming.
Satellite data is next to useless because it has such a small window (only in the context of arguing global warming mind you - it is extremely important for a great deal of other studies). It can tell you with great accuracy what is happening this year or for the last short number of years but all that tells you is that right now what the temperatures are and where the ice and snow coverage is. Unless you have something to compare it with, you have no way of knowing what is "normal" or "average". And I'm not using normal here in the sense that the earth has some intrinsic normal state. It does seem that within glaciations and interglacial periods the earth fluctuates around a mean that over time it tends to return to but the fluctuations have patterns that can be in the thousands of years but since interglacial periods and even ice ages are transitory things themselves, there does not appear to be a "normal" state for the earth.
Historic ice coverage is a misnomer, if the desire is to study the extent of ice sheets over time rather than where ice has remained for relatively long periods. A great deal of ice covers the earth and leaves no record. 30cm of ice over Florida for only a few months will destroy all civilisation but even if it remained for say ten years, if you looked a thousand years later, you'd find no evidence of it unless you looked at the human records and most of the time when studying ice cores there is no such luxury. What ice that is studied is only in areas where the ice has remained for substantial times. Ice coverage in the mini ice age, whilst substantial, left almost no record at all. Before that there was a very warm period for a while and once again the massive retreat left no record and there were not even humans who recorded such things to observe them. Such things can be infered from ice cores and the polutants they trap but such inference provides clues only, no hard data.
IMHO, change in water temperature and salinity is a very good warning mechanism to study for potentially catastrophic events of short onset or you are studying short term events such as changes in fish populations in particular regions, but to prove or disprove global warming, it is next to useless, again IMHO. The Atlantic ocean "turns over" at the rate of around 10,000 cycles. That means that, depending on the depth and proximity to fresh water runnof, the measurements that are made have an echo in them of what happened 10,000 years ago.
The Pacific is particularly notorious for fluctuations in temperature and salinity, not due to what's going on above the water surface but what is going on within the ocean itself. The Pacific actually creates climate to some extent. Temperature and salinity shift around its vast basin in cycles that include ones with an average length of three to eight years, fifty or so years, and several thousand years.
Regards
Richard
