David Friedman is an economist, so of course he doesn’t claim to be a climate scientist. He can, however, do math and examine numerical evidence … which doesn’t seem to support the most recent explanation for the pause in global warming:
One claim I have repeatedly seen in online arguments about global warming is that it has not really paused, because the “missing heat” has gone into the ocean. Before asking whether that claim is true, it is worth first asking how anyone could know it is true. A simple calculation suggests that the answer is one couldn’t. As follows …
Part of the claim, which I assume is true, is that from 90% to 95% of global heat goes into the ocean, which implies that the heat capacity of the ocean is 10 to 20 times that of the rest of the system. If so, and if the pause in surface and atmosphere temperatures was due to heat for some reason going into the ocean instead, that should have warmed the ocean by 1/10 to 1/20th of the amount by which the rest of the system didn’t warm.
The global temperature trend in the IPCC projections is about .03°C/year. If surface and atmospheric temperature has been flat for 17 years, that would put it about .5° below trend. If the explanation is the heat going into the ocean, the average temperature of the ocean should have risen as a result above its trend by between .025° and .05°.
Would anyone like to claim that we have data on ocean temperature accurate enough to show a change that small? If not, then the claim is at this point not an observed fact, which is how it is routinely reported, but a conjecture, a way of explaining away the failure of past models to correctly predict current data.
