This headline/subhead in The Guardian (UK) reminds me of the plot of a really bad 1950s monster movie:

Global warming monitoring needs to find ‘missing heat’, say scientists

Sea surface temperature from March this year. Illustration: MODIS/Aqua/NASA

Further study on oceans needed before hidden heat ‘comes back to haunt us’, say researchers in Colorado

So, Global Warming Is Going to Kill Us All!!!

And what makes it really scary: we don’t even know where all that Global Warming is!!!!

Aaaarrrrgggghhhhh! We’re all going to die!!!!!!

Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo, climate scientists at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, say that only about half of the heat believed to have built up in the Earth in recent years can be accounted for. New instruments are needed to locate and monitor this missing heat, they say, which could be storing up trouble for the future.

“The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later,” Trenberth said. “The reprieve we’ve had from warming temperatures in the last few years will not continue. It is critical to track the build-up of energy in our climate system so we can understand what is happening and predict our future climate.”

What they’re telling us is that all the heat that their whiz-bang thermodynamic climate models say must be getting trapped has gone AWOL.

The scientists say: “How can we understand whether the strong cold outbreaks of December 2009 are simply a natural weather phenomenon, as they seem to be, or are part of some change in clouds or pollution, if we do not have adequate measurements?”

[Emphasis added.]

Fellas, um, I’m not a climate scientist, but have you considered the possibility that your climate models are wrong? That maybe, just maybe, there are significant earth/atmospheric/oceanic processes that aren’t understood well enough to make a half-decent computer model of them?

Nah, that couldn’t be, because those climate models are what hold the whole field of Climate Science together. And if those models are suspect… nah, we’re not even going there, my friend!

Cross-posted at VladEnBlog.