EDIT: As is typical for your "questions," this one is a moving target. I'm not sure if it's because you don't know what you're asking, or it's because your questions are poorly worded, but by your additional details you seem to be asking how energy is transferred IN the ocean, not INTO the ocean. Those are completely different questions, and if that's what you wanted to know, why did you quote someone talking about air molecules bumping into water molecules?
Some suggestions for future questions: stop the Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 nonsense. Stop being so long-winded in your questions--strive to be concise and to the point, rather than rambling and philosophical. Then maybe you'll actually ASK the question you want ANSWERED (presuming that you actually do want answers).
Another EDIT: Your quote from Trenberth talked about "subduction," that refers surface ocean water being carried to depth, so that is NOT about energy from the atmosphere being transferred into the ocean. If there is thermal energy being subducted that originally came from the atmosphere, it had to get into the ocean first.
"The above seems to imply that the mechanism is 'electromagnetic interaction'. I'm not sure what that is"
It was me you quoted. I told you that the primary reason for oceans to absorb different amounts of heat at different times was due to the temperature differential being different at different times. For example, if you put 70 air in contact with 40 degree water the water will absorb heat faster than if the water was at 50 degrees. (Other things can also affect the rate of heat transfer.) Sometimes cold water is sent to the surface, and at that times the ocean will absorb heat faster.
You told me you had some very fancy engineering title--so fancy that I cannot remember it (at least I can remember when jim_z says he is a "geologist")-- yet you could not understand what I was telling you.
As for my comment about the transfer technically being "electromagnetic", I said that to avoid technically being wrong. When most people think of electromagnetic tranfer of energies to oceans they think of the Sun heating the oceans via transfer of radiation, or CO2 emitted radiation sent to the oceans. But if you put air molecules in contact with water and the air molecules transfer thermal enerrgy to the water by "hitting" the water molecules thec transfer actually is occurring electromagnetically. If there were no electromagnetic interactions then the molecules would not transfer energy. There is no fundamental "hitting" force.
The reason the ocean heats is because of the increase in the downward longwave radiative forcing due to adding CO2 to the atmosphere. With the increased atmospheric CO2 concentration, there is more longwave IR coming back down from above, around 2 W/m^2. That increased longwave forcing heats the surface (both land and water), which then heats the lower atmosphere. Because water has a much higher specific heat capacity than soil, and also because the heat added to the surface can diffuse and advect downwards more rapidly in water than in a solid, the water warms up more slowly than the land. Furthermore, if you take that LW energy that was added to the surface ocean and advect it downwards, it becomes decoupled from the surface so it won't cause surface warming.
Did you know this already and were just testing, or did you really not understand how an increase in radiative forcing leads to an increase in surface temperature? I find the latter proposition, for a skeptic such as yourself, one who prides himself on delving into the science to really understand it, farfetched.
Edit: It's pretty basic physics. I didn't have a source, per se, I just kind of know it because I understand the physics (at least a little). Anyway, never let it be said I am unwilling to lead a horse to water:
http://www-ramanathan.ucsd.edu/files/pr7...
Be advised that Ramanathan is part of the whole the whole global warming conspiracy thing, so he's going to fill your head with a lot of claptrap and lies. You might be better off, at least in terms of your emotional safety, trying to find incorrect analysis and faulty description of the physics on skeptic blogs. Pierre-Humbert's book also might have this in it, Piexoto and Oort does as well, although I don't recommend that one since it is dry as dust and extracting usable information from it is like eating only saltines to get calories.
Trenberth is now looking at the Bermuda Triangle he thinks the missing heat might have been taken there by aliens.
You are lying like hell, as usual. You have not read, let alone understood, Trenberth's articles, or probably any other peer-reviewed scientific literature in your anti-science paranoid-about- environmentalists life. For umpteenth hundredth time, you are recycling, in this fake question, the recycled pro fossil fuel industry deceptions of the anti-science blog Wattsup. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/22/ke...
You are not wasting your life here out of any interest in science or in genuine answers to honest questions. You are doing so out of a twisted copy-cat desire to spread pre-fab anti-science deceit.
"They never even mentioned it until the Earth didn't obey "their" models as regards temperature.
Then all of a sudden "the missing heat" had found its way into the ocean.
And people believe this rubbish?
As I noted in Part 1, Kevin Trenberth is the prominent scientist who espouses the theory that the imbalance in the Earth's energy budget is due to heat which is "missing". This missing heat is thought to be in the deep oceans which is one of the current explanations for the recent lack of surface warming.
I've been looking at Trenberth's Earth Energy Budget papers. But I cannot find any which have a mechanism or explanation for the transfer of heat from the atmosphere to the oceans. The only energy gain by the oceans is from solar radiation. In the previous answer, this explanation was put forward:
"I am referring to thermal contact. Air molecules bumping into water molecules. ( In a technical sense it is "radiative" in that when a molecule transfers energy to another molecule the transfer proceeds via electromagnetic interactions, but not the "radiative" iteractions" people think of when they hear "radiative".)"
The above seems to imply that the mechanism is "electromagnetic interaction". I'm not sure what that is. So does anybody know of an update to Trenberth's budget which shows and explains the mechanism for the missing heat transfer? Or any other climate scientist who can describe it?
