Do You Believe in Magic?

Real Climate has a post on Bill Gray's meetings paper for the 27th Conference on Hurricans and Tropical Meteorology. The post argues that Gray, who attributes Hurricane frequency and some aspects of global warming to changes in the Thermohaline Circulation (THC), is pretty much making shit up. The case they make sounds convincing to me - not that I needed a lot of convincing to be skeptical of a paper that starts with Senator Inhoffe and ends with science fiction writer Michael Crichton.

The THC is undoubtedly important to climate, because it transports heat from one place to another. However it cannot do magical things. It cannot created energy out of thin air (or thick water), nor can it make energy mysteriously disappear. Thus, Gray's statement that "The average THC circulation cools the ocean by about 3 W/m2" is a scientific absurdity.
My italics.

I wrote a comment on this several days ago and submitted it to RC. I quoted the passage above and said, more or less:
Bill's number might be wrong, but is it a "scientific absurdity" dependent on magic? My radiator cools my auto engine without any magic, and we think CO2 warms the Earth by equally unmagical means. It is certainly true that ocean currents transport heat polewards. This transported heat may warm continents, be radiated into space or otherwise have the effect of changing the average ocean temperature, and certainly the temperature of the tropical ocean. Am I wrong?


The reason I mention it here is that I know some climate smart types occasionally visit, and for some reason, RC has apparently found my comment problematic or unsuitable - perhaps it's less germane than the other comments covering epicycles, the Catholic Church, petroleum geology, and the moose populations of Maine and Minnesota - and I would like to know the answer.

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