October 18, 2010 | 12:41 PM | By

Not climate change, ocean change!

FILED UNDER: Ocean Change, ocean acidification, sea surface temperature

Climate Shifts

Graph of ocean heat absorption from a Climate Shifts post by John Bruno, redrawn by John Cook with data from Murphy, D. M., S. Solomon, R. W. Portmann, K. H. Rosenlof, P. M. Forster, and T. Wong. 2009. An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950. J. Geophys. Res. 114:D17107. doi:10.1029/2009JD012105

This picture really is worth a thousand words … or at least the 714 words in the Climate Shifts post I found it in. John Bruno – an Associate Professor of Marine Ecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a contributing author at Climate Shifts – argues that “ocean change” would be a better name than climate change (or climate disruption) because the ocean is absorbing the brunt of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet.

Nearly all of the debate – or at least what is depicted in the media as a debate – about global warming has focused on land surface temperatures. However, over 85 percent of the extra energy trapped by soaring greenhouse gases has gone into the ocean.

We all call this man-made catastrophe “global warming” or “climate change,” but “ocean warming” and “ocean change” are really more descriptive of what is happening.

Kinda says it all.

  • Peter Sadlon

    ::facepalm::

    The ocean is part of the global ecosystem and the effects while greater in the oceans are not limited to them.