Dr. Karina von Schuckmann, a renowned oceanographer and IPCC expert, points to Earth’s energy imbalance as the key driver behind our rapidly warming oceans.
The ocean can be seen as the sentinel for planetary warming. So when we measure the ocean by taking all the measurements of temperature from the surface down to deeper layers, we can calculate, the so-called ocean heat content.
And we see globally that the ocean is warming. It tells us that the Earth's is out of energy balance.
That means, we receive energy from the sun and, normally, this amount of energy after a certain time — there are a lot of interactions, evaporation, precipitation, reflection, absorption — but then this heat is leaving the system, and normally we come to quasi-equilibrium of energy.
But because we have the greenhouse gases in the system, there is less energy leaving the system. And so we have an imbalance at the top of the atmosphere. So more is coming in, and less is going out. And this leads to an accumulation of heat in the climate system.
So this heat is taken up by the climate components. And the ocean is a big part. It's about 90% of this surplus heat from global emissions is stored in the ocean, and that leads us to a warming ocean.
But it tells us also that the Earth is out of energy balance.
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