Since life began, the Earth’s oceans have been helping us out in innumerable ways. Now, it’s again lending an invisible hand by capturing some portion of the heat that may otherwise have increased the planet’s temperature more than it did.
The temperatures did increased – the decade between 2000 and 2010 was Earth’s warmest in more than a century – but the single-year mark for warmest global temperature was stuck at 1998, until 2010 matched it. The study of temperatures and its forecasting is an important one because it has a large bearing on current weather and anything related to it.
Climate scientists have solved the puzzle of the ‘missing heat’. For long, they have wondered why the Earth’s surface temperatures did not increase as per the estimates. Especially over the last decade, greenhouse gas emissions rose by a large percentage but temperatures did not rise correspondingly. Where was all the extra heat going as the greenhouse effect was effectively trapping all heat inside the atmosphere?
The deep oceans of the Earth has effectively masked the extra heat and stumped the rise in global temperatures. Computer simulations hint that most of it was trapped in layers of oceans deeper than 1,000 feet during periods like the last decade when air temperatures failed to warm as much as they might have. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research say that this event could happen continuously or sporadically even as the Earth continues to warm up.
But it’s not good news as warming continues unabated with serious present and future consequences. “This study suggests the missing energy has indeed been buried in the ocean,” NCAR’s Kevin Trenberth, a co-author of the study, said in a statement. “The heat has not disappeared and so it cannot be ignored. It must have consequences.”
Repeated computer simulations show that global temperature would rise several degrees this century. But all of them also showed periods when temperatures would stabilize before rising. The deep oceans are lending a hand as the extra heat moves into deep ocean water due to changes in ocean circulation
