Welcome, I'm Anastasia Glova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

Full and edited versions of our podcasts are available on our website at

W.W. Kato.org.

A recent paper in Science magazine by NASA climate modeler James Hansen asserts that in the last

decade the ocean has heated dramatically. This contradicts findings by John Liman of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,

who will soon publish his findings that between the years 2003 and 2005, the ocean lost 20% of the heat gained in the last half century.

Senior fellow in Environmental Studies Pat Michael's comments in this podcast.

We keep hearing over and over that the deep ocean is warming

and that this spells disaster for climate change.

Is there anything new to the story?

Yeah, there's a lot new when it comes to warming the deep ocean.

There was a very famous paper that came out about a year ago in Science magazine by a NASA climate guy by the name of James Hansen

who looked not just at the surface temperature of the ocean but the temperature of the top 2,500 feet because the surface fluctuates a lot.

And he could see a warming of that entire depth.

It wasn't all that much, but it was very consistent, he thought, with some computer models for human influence on the atmosphere.

Well that paper covered data through a couple of years ago, and a funny thing happened at the end of 2002.

In the years 2003, 4, and 5, the ocean lost 20% of the heat that

it had built up in the last half century. That's right. Between 2003

and 2005 the ocean lost 20% of the heat that it had built up in the last 50 years.

How did this happen? Why don't any of the models predict this?

You know, I don't think anybody has a clue how this happened.

Because the ocean is like a huge tub of water and changing the

...