By Jim Steele

A team of top expert oceanographers from Harvard and MIT, published the attached graph in the paper Liang (2015) Vertical Redistribution of Oceanic Heat Content, illustrating how oceans absorb heat in the tropics, and due to ocean circulation, release that heat as ocean currents move that heat towards the poles. Ninety nine percent of all climate scientists have always acknowledged this dynamic.

Clearly greenhouse gases are not adding heat to every region of the oceans, despite claims oceans are absorbing 90% of greenhouse warming. The regions in white represent where any absorption of heat, whether via solar or greenhouse radiation, is quickly radiated back to space with no net warming.

The blue regions (negative heat flux) represent regions where the oceans absorb more heat than is locally released. Those blue regions represent La Nina-like conditions where upwelling of cool subsurface waters reduce cloud cover and intensify deeper solar heating of the oceans.

The red (positive heat flux) represents regions where the oceans release more heat than has been locally absorbed, whether solar or greenhouse energy. Ocean circulation has simply transported excess absorbed heat out of the tropical blue regions, into the red regions where it is released, such as along the Gulf Stream and in Arctic Ocean!

During the Little Ice Age, the oceans were in a El Nino-like state, during which the oceans absorbed less solar heat in the tropics, and thus, absorbed and transported less heat towards the poles. This resulted in the cooling of the northern hemisphere and glacier advances.

Since 1850, La Nina-like conditions have dominated, which promoted the increased absorption of solar heat in tropical oceans. Unlike solar energy, greenhouse infrared does not penetrate deeper than a few microns into the ocean surface, so that any infrared greenhouse heat that is absorbed by the oceans is also quickly released back to space.

This is why only the eastern tropical oceans absorb and store solar heat, while the remaining ocean regions (represented in white) do not!