A new comment piece in Science by Clement and DiNezio (£) reviewing support for the idea that Trenberth's famous "missing heat" is lurking in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. This is a fairly unobjectionable paper, delivered in a moderate tone, with only the inevitable profession of the faith at the paper's close - "Greenhouse gases are warming the planet, and will continue to do so" - distracting from the main thrust.
The support for the idea that the Pacific is key seems to come chiefly from climate model studies, for example the "mind-blowing" Kosaka and Xie study and a paper by Meehl. Observational evidence seems rather harder to come by:
...there is some observational support for the hypothesis that the missing anthropogenic heat is being stored below the ocean surface...
the cited paper being Trenberth and Fasullo. We then get citation of the Balmaseda "remix" and the England, oh England paper that we discussed here a week or so ago.
So there's quite a lot of computer model hypotheticals here and not a lot of empirical measurement. That's fair enough. The essence of the paper is that there are questions worthy of addressing here.
But how then to explain the tweet by Anders Levermann of the Potsdam Institute in which he highlights the new paper?
Missing #heat responsible for #warming pause found in depth of #Pacific #hiatus #GlobalWarming