Anyone who understands physics, which excludes many prognosticators on climate change (yes, I’m thinking of you @beneltham*), understands that the oceans drive the climate.

So it was always a bit of a stretch to think that the plateau in global temperatures of over the last 18 or so years was because the heat was hiding in the ocean.

For that to be the case they had to answer the question as to why the ocean had suddenly stopped heating the atmosphere and was now retaining the additional heat and effectively becoming hotter than the atmosphere.

Recent research by Liang, Wunch, Heimbach and Forget suggests that not only is the heat not hiding in the ocean, but the ocean is very gradually becoming cooler.

This opens the possibility that recent temperature increases reflect energy balances at some stage in the past, not the present. Another of the interminable list of confounding factors that can’t be, or aren’t, factored in to climate models.

Current emissions of CO2 may well just be balancing out a gradual cooling of the globe, which is evident in the record of the last 10,000 years.

*If you’re wondering about the Ben Eltham jibe click here to follow his haranguing of me for daring to have an opinion on global warming that differs from his. When he claims to be a scientist and tries to pull rank I ask him a simple question about water, air and thermal mass which he confuses with oceanography. You can read the whole unedifying discussion here. But I’ve also copied the tweets below.

I challenged Eltham, who works for rival think tank the Centre for Policy Development to a debate on the subject of global warming, but he refused. Seems it’s OK to have a view, but not necessary to be able to defend it.