For some reason the MSN algorithm has become obsessed with sending us Astrum Earth items on unsettled and unsettling science, including one they headlined “A new megalodon study blew up everything scientists believed for 190 years”. And while we recognize that there is a certain amount of clickbait sensationalism out there and quite possibly it did not cause quite that kind of explosion, we also mention again that the story does underline the mountains of scientific dogmatism frequently erected on molehills of hard evidence. And if it can happen on an apex ocean monster (“Scientists now believe the prehistoric predator may have reached nearly 80 feet in length”… unless it didn’t), surely it can happen on other aspects of the ocean as well, including the way in which oceans warm and cool in response to CO2 and other changes in climate or, very possibly, drive these changes by warming and cooling.
For instance, it really is pretty simple physics that warmer water dissolves less CO2, so if the oceans were to warm on a centuries-long scale you’d see atmospheric CO2 rising not as the cause of warming but as a consequence of it. (As indeed those famous ice cores appear to show roughly an 800-year lag between warming and increases in CO2, in which case what we’re seeing today would be in part at least a response to the Medieval Warm Period.)
In this context it’s vital to grasp that oceans hold something like 50 to 60 times more carbon than the atmosphere does. Something like. Another big uncertainty.
In discussing this situation NOAA blabs about how:
“The ocean acts as a ‘carbon sink’ and absorbs about 31% of the CO2 emissions released into the atmosphere according to a study published by NOAA and international partners in Science. As atmospheric CO2 levels increase, so do the CO2 levels in the ocean. When CO2 is absorbed by seawater, a series of chemical reactions occur causing the seawater to become more acidic. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as ocean acidification.”
As it would, although drawing on Canary in a Climate World, this time Tom Harris’s Chapter 20 titled “Climate Activists Complain About Trivia… The Best Answer: ‘So What?’”:
“There are regions in the ocean where pH varies more in a day than the most extreme forecast so-called average changes for the 21st century, yet ocean life adapts.”
Plus the ocean isn’t acidic, it’s alkaline. But the big point here, which NOAA deftly overlooks, is that given the vast quantities of carbon stored in the oceans, a small change in their behaviour will have a huge impact on the atmosphere whereas their take is entirely about how a change in the atmosphere will massively impact the oceans. (Including Patrick Moore’s concern that for tens of millions of years hard-shelled ocean critters have been sequestering carbon and turning it into rock including limestone and marble then sucking more out of the air, creating a massive carbon famine that actually does threaten all life on Earth in the medium term.) And of course that figure of how much carbon in the ocean is just a wild guess because (all together now) we know so little about them.
There’s also the question of the extent to which oceans warm, or cool, because of the efficiency of heat transport to the poles from which it is radiated efficiently into space during hemispheric winter, the Javier Vinós argument with the paradoxical implication that the Arctic warming is actually a sign of global cooling.
How and why these currents change is complex and involves everything from transient impacts to continental drift, for instance the growing isolation of Antarctica over tens of millions of years. (As Matthew Wielicki has pointed out on the short-run side, lower-atmosphere temperature readings correlate remarkably strongly to phases of the “ENSO”, the “El Niño-Southern Oscillation” current and ahem not to CO2.) It creates a complex picture not simple physics, and one that is poorly understood not rigorously modeled.
As meteorologist William Kininmonth’s “Misrepresentations of Climate Science”, Chapter 13 in Canary in a Climate World Vol. 3, says:
“The likely explanation for a recent warming of the tropical oceans is a reduction in poleward transport of heat by the oceans. Indeed, there is evidence that the Gulf Stream of the North Atlantic Ocean, a primary component of ocean heat transport, is slowing and has been slowing since the early 19th century. Winds and temperature contrasts drive the ocean currents, and it is expected that ocean currents will naturally fluctuate over a range of time scales to vary the climate.”
Of course this passage does add a bit of fuel to the AMOC recurring scare story. But surely it also underlines that if the Gulf Stream is slowing, and has been for nearly 200 years, it can’t be humans that caused it. And that climate processes take place over centuries or more, so much that we see around us, whether we like it or not, is the culmination, unfolding or even early stage of something or more likely things that have been going on for very long periods of time. As in since long before the Industrial Revolution.
That the oceans are poorly understood is conceded by most climate alarmists. But they simultaneously insist that they are well understood. For instance, earlier this year Inside Climate News emailed about “An enormous climate blind spot” linking to an invitation to a video and story that itself said:
“Oceans cover 70% of the Earth’s surface, absorb 90% of excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases, and help prevent dramatic temperature spikes on land. Yet they’re often overlooked in conversations about climate change. The consequences are significant. Ignoring ocean damage nearly doubles the cost of climate change and has left a multi-trillion-dollar blind spot in climate finance, according to a new study released last week. Global ocean heat content also increased for the ninth consecutive year in 2025. Every second of last year, the Earth’s oceans absorbed the equivalent in energy to 12 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.”
So obviously they’re important. But the notion that they “absorb 90% of excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases” assumes that we understand the dynamics (and know what “excess heat” is), so the only blind spot is not handing out trillions of dollars we don’t have to do we don’t know what.
Something to do with the social cost of carbon, apparently. Which they confidently assert rises from $51 per ton to $97.20 per ton, another of those deeply suspicious double-decimal-place calculations about a region we do not begin to understand. We haven’t even mapped it. But the science is settled.
