Modern surface temperatures are an echo from the past. The Earth is an ocean planet, driven by a pulsating 1,000-year conveyor belt known as Thermohaline Circulation. We are witnessing a planetary memory in the oceans operating on a scale humans struggle to imagine — where deep currents are only now responding to thermal signals set in motion during the Roman Warm Period (250 BC–400 AD).
Indeed, a landmark study by Jake Gebbie (Woods Hole) and Peter Huybers (Harvard) found that the deep Pacific lags so far behind the atmosphere that it is still actively cooling from the later Medieval Warm Period, and only just beginning to digest the climate shift of the Little Ice Age.
The top 3.5 meters of the oceans hold the same heat capacity as the entire global atmosphere. The 3,700 meters below, is the Earth’s thermal vault of all retained heat energy. Oceanic inertia – or momentum – smooths out atmospheric hot and cold spikes.
The oceans absorb and retain 90% of the system’s excess heat while the atmosphere is simply a gaseous envelope, thin and reactive, largely a passenger on the back of the massive oceanic flywheel.
American Buddhist Net 