Argo has been the gold-standard observational system since the early 2000s for tracking ocean heat. Before full deployment, pre-Argo OHC estimates relied on ship-based data with huge gaps.

Post- Argo, multiple groups (NOAA, NASA, UK Met Office, etc.) produce consistent upward trends in OHC, supporting the idea that the oceans are the planet’s main heat sink.

This helps close the energy budget alongside satellite radiative flux measurements (e.g., CERES).

Sea-level rise (thermal expansion) and other indicators align with this picture.

Skeptics have long flagged legitimate issues: coverage biases (polar regions, coasts, under ice), instrument drift/calibration, deep ocean (>2,000 m) under sampling, and how raw profiles are interpolated into global grids.

The new paper amplifies those concerns by arguing the processing steps fundamentally violate the scientific method, producing numbers that don’t correspond to verifiable physical quantities.

This is a sharp methodological critique from Willie Soon, David Legates, etc.). If the paper’s analysis holds up under scrutiny—showing that Argo-derived EEI/OHC values are essentially statistical artifacts with uncertainties swamping the reported trend- it would undermine a key pillar of recent IPCC assessments.

That’s worth serious examination, especially since the paper is recent (March 2026) and the journal Science of Climate Change is not part of the mainstream IPCC-cited literature.

The authors argue that the standard processing of Argo float temperature profiles into global ocean heat content (OHC), used by the IPCC to support an Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) of ~0.7 W/m² with oceans absorbing ~90% of excess heat — involves a fundamental methodological flaw.

Specifically, they contend that averaging temperatures across spatially and temporally distant water masses in a fixed grid produces computational artifacts that do not represent genuine physical changes in thermal energy.

This renders the derived OHC trends and EEI estimates physically invalid (a “category error”), with uncertainties large enough that the reported imbalance is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Lead author Jonathan Cohler has promoted the work strongly, stating it “tears apart” central IPCC claims on ocean warming and energy imbalance.

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18936064

Full Title: IPCC’s Earth Energy Imbalance Assessment is Based on Physically Invalid Argo-Float-Based Estimates of Global Ocean Heat Content

Authors: Jonathan Cohler (lead/contact, listed with MIT affiliation in some records), David R. Legates (University of Delaware, retired), Kesten C. Green (University of South Australia), Ole Humlum (University of Oslo), Franklin Soon (Marblehead High School, MA), Willie Soon (Institute of Earth Physics and Space Science, Sopron, Hungary)

Published: March 10, 2026

Journal: Science of Climate Change, Volume 6(1), pages 43–76
Version: v1 (open access journal article)

Direct PDF Download (739.7 kB):
https://zenodo.org/records/18936064/files/SCC-Vol.6.1-04_-Cohler_et_al.pdf

Additional Zenodo records exist for the press release (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18943232) and a plain-language summary (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18944694).

The paper also carries a separate journal DOI: 10.53234/scc202603/06.