Is Global Heating Hiding Out in the Oceans?

A new study in the leading journal Science adds support to the idea that the oceans are taking up some of the excess heat, at least for the moment.  In a reconstruction of Pacific Ocean temperatures in the last 10,000 years, researchers have found that its middle depths have warmed 15 times faster in the last 60 years than they did during apparent natural warming cycles in the previous 10,000.

“We’re experimenting by putting all this heat in the ocean without quite knowing how it’s going to come back out and affect climate,” said study coauthor Braddock Linsley, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.  “It’s not so much the magnitude of the change, but the rate of change.”

Is Global Heating Hiding Out in the Oceans?