kewp: “What I find hilarious about you nuts is you think you are the first person in history to ask this question.”
I never claimed I was the first person to ask it. I find it strange that this anomaly *hasn’t* helped to tame the global warming hype.
Getting your information solely from realclimate.org is a terrible mistake to make. That site is as biased as slashdot is in the computer industry. I do read that site, because there are going to be *some* good material, but the site is mainly about scare-mongering and maligning the characters of global warming skeptics.
I should have been clearer. Greenland always had glaciation, but the amount of non-iced over land during 1000-1200 enabled Vikings to settle it and grow food. The cooling that occurred afterward (The Maunder Minimum) forced the Vikings to flee. The point here is that there are dramatic changes in climate that happens on a sub-century scale, and to believe that the one happening now *has* to be man-made seems to gloss over historical parallels.
Now, for the further education of Climate Science amateurs (like myself), the topic of this post is the solubility of CO2 in water. Ever noticed how cola, uncapped, tastes flat when you take it out of the refrigerator, and as it warms up, it tastes more fizzly? There’s a reason for this, and the same phenomena applies in the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and the temperature of the ocean: the colder the ocean is, the more CO2 is it is able to dissolve and hold. Read: http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/CO2.htm
The natural question that should arise as a consequence of reading this is: what warms the ocean in the first place?
Sunlight. There are two other minor factors that come to mind: geothermal energy, and energy absorbed and reemitted as infrared radiation by greenhouse gasses (yes, that’s what you guys are going to jump on). For an accessment of just how strong this latter effect is on ocean temperatures, read http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/ocean.html (skip down to How Oceans Get Warm.) If you consider the fact that 95% of greenhouse gasses is water vapor, the proportional contribution to CO2 becomes very very small.
So if sunlight is what primarily drives ocean temperature, it stands to reason that the sun is responsible for the long-term variations that we’re seeing.
