Ocean Heating by the Industrial Activities of Humans



The accumulation of atmospheric CO2 is the direct manifestation of our strongly non-equilibrium consumption of planetary resources. However, there is another measure that is even more fundamental and scientific to the root cause of climate change. Ever since the industrial revolution human activities have produced thermodynamic waste heat. Burning fossil fuels is just one form of producing industrial waste heat.

Virtually all waste heat ends up in the oceans. For instance, if you were to light a candle that excess heat that you added to the air in the room you were in, would eventually get carried to the oceans as precipitation takes that heat out of the air, deposits it in the soil, where it eventually runs off to the oceans. The timescale for this process can be very long (decades) because heat can be stored in various buffers (e.g continents) in the Earth system but eventually that all ends up in the world's oceans.

Since 1957 we have had an ocean buoy network to measure sea surface temperatures. Scientists have now been able to transform that temperature date into ocean heat content. This is a difficult calibration to make and different groups use different procedures but they all end up showing that ocean heat content is now systematically increasing:













We are now systematically dumping more heat into the oceans that it can dissipate via its natural channels. This excess heat couples directly to the world's climate system and adds significant energy to it resulting in not only climate change but increasing weather volatility. It is the heat content of the oceans and the movement of that heat content which is the principal driver of the earth's climate system. If you perturb that system then you will perturb (perhaps strongly) the overall climate system of the Earth

• ever since about 1990 industrial activities have added more waste heat to the oceans than the system can handle. As a result, the signature of climate change driven by excess ocean heat would start to emerge around 1990.
  
  
• The response of the oceans to this excess heat are to
  • a) transport some of it vertically down thus changing the vertical temperature profile of the oceans,
  • b) change its surface heat redistribution via ocean current amplification,
  • c) directly transport it to atmospheric heating.
  
  
  
• The oceans are 850 times denser than the atmosphere and thus can hold an enormous amount of heat. Indeed, it is this high heat capacity of the oceans that has served as a buffer against increasing warming on the land --that buffer is now saturated. If the entire excess heat content of the oceans could be transferred directly to the atmosphere, the global temperature of the atmosphere would increase by 36 C!
  
  
• Increased ocean heat content will ultimately be carried to the poles and accelerate the loss of sea ice as well as lowering the permafrost thickness of most soils (especially in Siberia).

And the data clearly show that since about 2000, temperatures in the Arctic are beginning to rapidly rise to that will accelerate (there is that word again) the rate of melting of Arctic Sea Ice.





Which leads to the inevitable message we are sending to children: