The bottom line with respect to oceans is this: They are warming at a rate that leading studies suggest is about 15x faster than any point in the last 10,000 years.
Take a grain of salt with the estimates, and point is they are warming, and the rate is geologically significant. Very. Not only faster than in 10,000 years, but much faster.
That is not a fluky coincidence, since there is a precise reason for it. Obviously.
Over time if they are warming, it means net energy is leaving the atmosphere, rather than the earth itself to warm the atmosphere. That means most of the heat energy that is being re captured, is not going into heating our atmosphere, but into heating our oceans.
The World Meteorological Organization even notes in their 2013 report (perhaps too precisely?) that 93% of the increase in captured energy has been going into heating our oceans.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwdvoC9AeWjUeEV1cnZ6QURVaEE/edit
And a study published last month in Nature, essentially mirrors this point
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n11/full/nclimate2389.html and provides further detail.
This has profound consequences for future climate. Those oceans raise the net energy level balance between atmosphere and ocean, while the atmospheric energy capture is going to remain higher because it is not due to some short term fluke, but a long term change in the long term concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases.
This aside from the intensely complicating fact that those atmospheric levels are also continuing to rise (and in a way that is starting to compound itself ice starts to melt http://climatesolutionsandanalysis.wordpress.com/2014/10/30/major-methane-spikes-from-warming-sea-beds-are-compounding-an-underestimated-climate-change-challenge/) and doing so in a way that in a geologic sense is all but instantaneous.
So as we move forward in time, the atmosphere will continue to warm as it both continues to capture more heat, and the increase in ocean temperatures balances out (or won’t for a while as atmospheric concentrations continue to rise, air temperatures continue to rise, while most of the energy continues to heat the oceans.) this will only continue to amplify melt, and as the oceans warm, continue to amplify atmospheric change over time in conjunction with ongoing high (and increasing, even) absorption and re radiation of thermal radiation.
There is a tendency to get too precise with numbers that we really can’t pinpoint, and lose sight of the big picture concepts at play here that are very fundamental science, even if the issue is somewhat complex. And that, in many quarters, are being butchered through a self perpetuating tendency to interpret everything and anything in a way that somehow dismisses, lessens or refutes climate change, and simply dismiss, ignore, or misconstrue everything else. http://climatesolutionsandanalysis.wordpress.com/2014/11/11/why-climate-change-refutation-is-illogical-and-driven-by-something-else-not-science/
It’s really easy, particularly when following this extremely distinct and powerful pattern, to get caught up in any kind of particular that we don’t know about the ocean, to miss sight of the far more important big picture, which keeps getting wrangled around:
That is, the atmosphere is capturing more energy via long term greenhouse gases (and so far all studies show even through short term, as water vapor has increased whereas if it didn’t, that would be bad because it would only intensify regional drought changes in a warming world) than it has in MILLIONS of years. This is an ongoing addition of extra energy.
It doesn’t just disappear. It has raised the ambient global temperature a little, but mainly (aside from the atmospheric levels themselves, which by remaining high – let alone increasing much more – will only exacerbate this) gone into heating the earth. In many permafrost regions the actual ground has warmed more than the air above. In melting land ice sheets, which of course has not been occurring in total at both ends of the poles, and accelerating, in Greenland almost doubling it’s rate of melt in just five years. (Which is remarkable). And warming the ocean. At a geologically relevant, if not near extraordinary, rate.
(A classic example among many is the tendency to take all aspects of the ongoing adjustment and correction process of science, as repudiation of climate change itself. If something is more than expected, the clamor is “this wasn’t even expected, so climate scientists don’t know anything, ,wen can’t listen to them!” And whenever it’s less than expected, to go “see, it’s not a problem, it’s not even what they said. (Even if the “it” is a peripheral issue, as is almost always the case. And based the idea of climate change upon the mistaken idea that to know a change will occur, we need to be able to “write the exact script in advance as if seeing it after the fact.)
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