The well documented lack of global warming over the last 15+ years has proven to be a major problem for the latest IPCC AR5 report.
In prior reports, the IPCC has utilized short-term warming as proof that greenhouse gases were the cause, and supposedly proved climate model accuracy. But in this report, the IPCC dismisses the latest 15-year period as being too short to rely on.
Despite this dismissal, the IPCC AR5 report does make an attempt to explain why global warming went AWOL. One of the reasons they state is that global warming decided to dive into the ocean depths where it is currently hiding (and somehow also escaped original detection).
The "hiding" excuse has been picked up by mainstream science journalists without their doing any due diligence on the veracity of the IPCC statement or at least reviewing the actual empirical evidence.
"It’s clear science journalists need some help. The IPCC are saying “The ocean ate my global warming” and most environment reporters just cut-n-paste this excuse — they fall for the breathtaking joules-to-the-22nd-figures — not realizing they convert to a mere 0.07C over nearly 50 years (as if we could measure the average temperature of the global oceans to a hundredth of a degree!). Worse, the warming we do find is so small, it supports the skeptical calculations, not the IPCC’s ones."
A number of experts have analyzed the "global-warming-is-hiding" claim and found it to be, at best, laughable. To add to the bogosity, the IPCC and other serial climate-change exaggerators have attempted to hide the real impact of global warming on the oceans by using a 'gazillion-bazillion' Joules to portray the gain in ocean heat.
A common way they have expressed the effect is to state that it has increased by an approximate 2.0*1023Joules (or, 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules). But when converted to actual temperature warming, that number, with all those zeros, equates to about a total of +0.06°C to +0.07°C increase since 1955.
Laughable, no? This level of warming is barely even measurable and irrefutably indicates that CO2 emissions have barely impacted the top 2000 meters of the oceans.
The adjacent three graphs (click to enlarge) depict the warming that has occurred in degrees, as well as Joules. For more information about these charts, done by experts, go here, here and here.
And their work is confirmed by no less than NOAA:
"For the upper 700m, the increase in heat content was 16 x 1022 J since 1961. This is consistent with the comparison by Roemmich and Gilson (2009) of Argo data with the global temperature time-series of Levitus et al (2005), finding a warming of the 0 - 2000 m ocean by 0.06°C since the (pre-XBT) early 1960's."
In addition, the list of articles addressing the IPCC's gross misrepresentation of ocean warming (the "hiding" bogosity) is growing: read here, here, here, here and here.
Note: A 'gazillion-bazillion' is not recognized as a real number. FWIW, a number with 23 zeros does fall between the 'sextillion' and 'septillion' nomenclature. 'Gazillion-bazillion' sounds better though.