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                     Oceans Are Buffers for Climate Change

   by Rosanne Skirble

   A major [1]United Nations report released in September noted that while
   global temperatures have risen each decade since the 1950s, the rate of
   global warming has slowed. Climate skeptics say this boosts their claim
   that emissions from power plants, motor vehicles and buildings are not
   the source of the problem. Climate scientists attribute the cooling to
   volcanic eruptions, changes in solar intensity and the movement of heat
   through the ocean. While the ocean is the largest reservoir for
   heat-trapping gases, it is a service that is unsustainable over time.


   While most people think of global warming as largely an atmospheric
   process, a new study looks at the ocean and its role as the largest
   reservoir for climate-changing gases.
   "The atmosphere has been quickly responding to what human activities
   are doing, and the ocean is slowly catching up, but this 'slowly'
   takes a long time, and we are not in equilibrium," said lead author and
   [2]Rutgers University professor Yair Rosenthal, who studies changes in
   climate over time. He worked with colleagues to reconstruct a
   10,000-year climate history of the Pacific Ocean, using sediment cores
   from Indonesia.
   "The surface temperature is the warmest temperature on the planet and
   as such, it's a  major engine for climate change. Now, at depths,
   Indonesia is essentially an archipelago of different seaways. So it's a
   nice conduit where you can essentially monitor changes in at least the
   Western Pacific without going everywhere in the Pacific."
   ''The study finds that subsurface temperatures near the equator vary in
   step with natural warming cycles in northern and southern regions of
   the world. Rosenthal said the sediment cores show a relatively stable
   ocean that cooled by about 2 degrees Celsius until 300 years ago, when
   temperatures slowly started to rise.

   "And when you compare the rate with the modern rate of ocean warming,
   the modern rates are about 15 times higher than any time in the past
   10,000 years," he said.
   The recent warming is blamed on emissions pumped into the atmosphere
   from power plants, buildings and cars. Rosenthal said that while the
   oceans may buy us some time to adapt to the impact of climate change,
   they are not a solution to our climate woes.
   "I think now we basically are way beyond this buffering. Eventually,
   given enough time, the ocean will equilibrate, if we hold the
   temperature one way [the same] with the atmosphere, because that is the
   main storage that we have of heat that we have on the planet. Right
   now, the way we are forcing climate is really fast - too fast for the
   ocean to essentially catch up with this warming," said Rosenthal.
   The study is published in the [3]journal Science.
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   [4]http://www.voanews.com/content/oceans-are-buffers-for-climate-change
   /1781090.html

References

   1. http://www.ipcc.ch/
   2. http://www.rutgers.edu/
   3. http://www.sciencemag.org/journals
   4. http://www.voanews.com/content/oceans-are-buffers-for-climate-change/1781090.html