Without the support of OH's outrage about global pollution, the Watchdog that this thread purports to be has been sleeping on the job lately, but even I have been jerked alert by this headline from today's CNN webpage; it's about the possibility of the disruption of the Gulf Stream:-
A Potentially Dire Development For Life On Earth: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/06/w...ntl/index.html
If you have any tendency to worry about the environment, then the state of the world's oceans are of particular concern. To mind my there are three reasons for this:-
i) as others have said, we are more familiar with the surface of the moon than we are with the bottoms of the oceans; the ocean is "mysterious and dark", according to Mr. R. Zimmerman, and news of what happens down there is slow to reach us.
ii) the oceans hold a massive, ungovernable momentum. It's one thing to build a sea wall to stop a local tide at the surface. No one can change what water in unimaginable volumes chooses to do below the surface.
iii) how water holds heat. Anyone who has boiled an egg may have noticed that water takes quite a time to boil. Without going into science that I don't understand, it's because:-
Quote:
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Water is able to absorb a high amount of heat before increasing in temperature. Water has the highest heat capacity of all liquids.
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Put the other way, just a small rise in water temp implies a lot of stored heat energy, and that is what we have in our oceans today:-
Quote:
Rising amounts of greenhouse gases are preventing heat radiated from Earth’s surface from escaping into space as freely as it used to. Most of the excess atmospheric heat is passed back to the ocean. As a result, upper ocean heat content has increased significantly over the past few decades.
More than 90 percent of the warming that happened on Earth between 1971-2010 occurred in the ocean.
Heat already stored in the ocean will eventually be released, committing Earth to additional surface warming in the future.
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The quotes above are from NOAA:
https://www.climate.gov/news-feature...n-heat-content
This graph is from the EPA:-
Average global sea surface temperature 1880-2020
The graph is for
surface temp so things should be less extreme in the currents down below, but that is still a huge quantity of heat that the oceans have already absorbed. Read more here if you feel inclined, and be aware that news reports of forest fires and record land temps are taking, ahem, a very superficial look at climate change.
The EPA graph explained:
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicato...ce-temperature