Rolf Schuttenhelm reports that in Part 16 of his temperature trend analysis series, he discusses one of the main reasons almost everyone still underestimates climate urgency: Thermal inertia of the climate system, a delay between the moment of emissions of CO2, and the moment the (majority of) inevitably resulting atmospheric warming manifests itself, a time lag of decades, with very large implications. Before the onset of new subsequent atmospheric warming records (2014, 2015, 2016), atmospheric warming showed what some referred to as a plateau. This graph shows the opposite of that cycle ... it shows the warming trend not of the atmosphere, but of the world oceans, one that has been very steep over the last two decades.
It means the oceans have stored a relatively large amount of heat that was generated in the atmosphere. Because the oceans weigh 1.3-1.4 million teratonnes and the atmosphere only about 5.5 thousand teratonnes (0.004 times as much) it takes a very long time before a higher atmospheric temperature is in balance with a higher temperature of the oceans, and since the initial driver of change is still active (the atmospheric CO2 concentration is still rising) there is a constant time lag between atmospheric and oceanic warming, which in turn delays atmospheric warming. The currently observed warming is (mostly) the result of cumulative CO2 emissions up to the late seventies. The implications of this understanding are large ...
See Home page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rolfschuttenhelm/?originalSubdomain=nl
Original working URL apparently withdrawn: http://www.bitsofscience.org/real-global-temperature-trend-climate-system-thermal-inertia-7086/
Even if we stopped further rise of the atmospheric CO2 concentration completely tomorrow, warming would still continue for several decades. In other words, the actual global temperature trend is significantly higher than the observed temperature trend ... possibly 0.6 degrees higher, judging by the one leading study in this area, performed by James Hansen and no less than 14 other climate scientists and published in Science in 2005.
Original URL apparently withdrawn: http://www.bitsofscience.org/real-global-temperature-trend-climate-system-thermal-inertia-7086/
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