Wiserfool

The heat capacity of the entire atmosphere is equal to just the top 3.5 meters of the world's oceans. Below this surface lies Earth’s true thermal vault. Earth is a water planet, and the oceans cover 71% of the surface to an average depth of 2.3 miles. Global ocean currents carry warm waters from the deep tropics to the northern hemisphere, before returning after a round trip of 1,000 years. Without these currents, northern Europe would be a glacial wilderness, just like Greenland. The scale is colossal. Warm waters from the Roman warm period (240 BC to 400 AD) are still returning to the mid-latitudes. The atmosphere, by comparison, is a gaseous envelope that retains almost no thermal energy, holds a tiny fraction of the planet's carbon, and is largely controlled by ocean dynamics. The deep Pacific itself is so massive that only now it is 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 time machine. We’ve also reinvented '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 parts per million while ignoring the satellite-proven greening of the Sahel. It’s time to move past the light breezes and offshore winds and look into the ocean depths for answers. Ask yourself, is the 1.4°C warming since 1850 really an unprecedented crisis? – at Bega, New South Wales