The entire heat capacity of the atmosphere is equal to the top 3.5 meters of the oceans. The remaining 3,700m of the abyss is Earth’s true thermal vault — Peter Clack

The entire heat capacity of the atmosphere is equal to the top 3.5 meters of the oceans. The remaining 3,700m of the abyss is Earth’s true thermal vault.

The truth is, the Earth is a water planet and oceans cover 71% of the surface to an average depth of 2.3 miles. Ocean currents carry warm water from the mid tropics to the northern hemisphere, then the currents return after a round trip of 1,000 years. Without these currents northern Europe would look like Greenland.

Warm waters from the Roman warm period (240BC to 400AD) are still just returning to the mid latitudes. The atmosphere by comparison is a gaseous envelope that retains almost no thermal energy, hardly any CO2 and is largely controlled by ocean dynamics.

The deep Pacific itself is so massive that it is only now receiving the cold waters from the Little Ice Age. We aren’t starting from scratch, we are mid-cycle in a 4.6-billion-year-old machine.

We’ve also reinvented the climate. Once, it was a word for the local weather of robins and sparrows. Now it’s a global ideological abstraction. We’ve lost our admiration for the natural world. We count CO2 in ppm while ignoring the satellite-proven greening of the Sahara.

It’s time to move past the light breezes and offshore winds and look into the deep. Ask yourself, is the 1.4°C warming since 1850 really an unprecedented crisis?

The physics says the ocean runs the game.

link