The process is a little more messy than the AGW propagandists have claimed.

First, we don’t know the exact total irradiance. It varies quite markedly over the year because the Earth’s orbit is elliptical, and over the years and decades because the sun is also bobbing about in its dance with the heavier planets. The several different satellites come up with slightly different answers – they’re all within a few Watts of one another, but it’s a tricky measurement to calibrate. Because the radiation emitted and reflected from the Earth is not uniform in all directions. Because when you sum the time series, the errors add too. (If you’re lucky you just get a random walk – if not, a systematic error will accumulate.) And because the actual difference between input and output would be tiny even if AGW claims are correct. For any body in equilibrium the input and output balance, so it is only the rate of change you might detect. This is a number measured in fractions of a degree per decade.

It’s a measurement far beyond current capabilities. But yes, in theory it would settle the argument.

Of course there are a few miniscule effects: the energy of cosmic rays and meteorites passing through the atmosphere, heat coming up from the earth’s core via lava or plain ground heat, evaporative cooling as from loss of hydrogen and helium–the lighter atoms–from the top of the atmosphere, but wouldn’t these be almost zero?

Now, maybe people don’t talk about this direct approach because it is too difficult, I don’t know, It seems that it would take at least four satellites arranged in a tetrahedron to fully look down upon the earth and catch both day and night sides. Maybe the instrumentation is too difficult and they don’t really know how to measure all frequencies. And, of course, it could not be a one time measurement as the sun is irregular and varies about .1% as I recall. And, probably the weather and clouds would, likewise, cause variance in the total emissivity. So the answers would be time series integrals.

But, wouldn’t it theoretically put an end to all the speculation?

I’ve seen too many “scientists” making such bogus claims, eternal motion machines and plain wrong science to recognize a rat when I see one.

But perhaps you just like the kool-aid. Drink it at your intellectual peril. I’ve once read a study that says that drinking kool aid produces brain cancer. IT must be right, it’s SCIENCE, haven’t you heard?

Doesn’t this add up to less heat in the ocean and less heat in the atmosphere?

As a laymen after looking at the data for three weeks i am fairly appalled that the White House Climate Report and Union of Concerned Scientists are declaring crisis and declaring it absolutely. This absolute ‘concensus’ looks more like corrupted absolute power.

I appreciate the challenging looks here.

Are we seeing the unraveling of the scientific story of the century?

To say anything meaningful here, somebody would have to take a look at his methodologies, which are much more important than having error bands when it comes to getting a right answer. (Although they’re both quite important; if you don’t have error bands, a 99% match still isn’t good enough, because you’ve claimed to be precisely correct.) Where the measurements were taken, what time of day, with what equipment, at what depths – what “corrections” took place once he was done.

I thought it was open-hi-low-close.

How about a temp chart with Bollinger bands?

(4 years may not a trend make, but neither does bogus proxy measurement over 650,000* years…..)

*Please, enough with the proxy crap. It’s (mostly) crap.

Perhaps the commenters above are confusing ocean heat content with atmospheric temperature readings. Water has much higher heat content than air, and is much more resistant to change. Four years of reliable data on ocean heat is significant in terms of global heat content trends. And what you see is no trend except perhaps slight cooling. That is sehr significant.