does have an upward trend, with some more complex behavior that gives rise to these occasional residuals. Funny how one can argue that there's no warming based on a shoulder in the upward trend, all the while ignoring the upward trend itself. On the other hand I have used the OHC reconstruction published online at the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) NODC (National Oceanographic Data Center) OCL (Ocean Climate Laboratory) site, based on Levitus 2009 and updated regularly. Fortunately the NOAA NODC OCL OHC site also has annual data in tabular format with proper error bars. If it is copied to your figure, it looks like this: Now. As you know science is never about pictures. It is about propositions, preferably with a truth-value attached to them or at least a not-known tag. Figures like the one above is only meant to be concise representations of complex propositions. For example OHC history reconstruction according to Levitus can be translated to a proposition like "There is a constant c that if ohc k is the sum of c and the true value of OHC measured in 10 22 J units for year k , then 0.246 &lt; ohc 1993 &lt; 1.122 and 0.764 &lt; ohc 1994 &lt; 2.256 and 1.615 &lt; ohc 1995 &lt; 2.913 , etc., etc." A similar proposition can be constructed for the curve in your figure which is Trenberth's representation of Lyman's finding. If you put the two propositions together like I did above by making