Heat Around and Below

This is a good place to start with what the "Climate Change" issue really is about -- and something rarely mentioned. The source, along with the Sun, and Oxygen in the air, of all life: Water. The beautiful color blue.  Blue, that in temperature ranges, represents not the coldest end of the spectrum we often associate it with, but the hottest.

And while the water around us is by no means hot, it is getting warmer.  Consistently, getting warmer.  

Here's a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) chart of the world's ocean heat content, from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), that helps illustrate this (direct link):

One key thing to remember: Large bodies of water are extremely stable temperature wise.   Huge bodies of water, even more so. The world ocean, comprised of the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern (or Antarctic),and Arctic oceans, and many seas, is a huge body of water; covering about 71% of the earth's surface (right now), and comprising over 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water.  

Just one single cubic kilometer is about 1.3 cubic billion (1,300,000,000) yards (or over 10,000,000,000 cubic feet). And there are a little over 1.3 BILLION of these (which would be about 1,750,000,000,000,000,000 cubic yards, total), representing about 96.5% of all of the water on earth and in the air above us.    

It's a lot of water.  And this water is what both stabilizes, and ultimately drives, climate on earth. And for the past half of a century, it has not only been slowly rising in temperature, but slowly increasing, in its rate of rise, as well.  

Far more relevant to the problem that we refer to as Climate Change, often thought of as a temperature problem, notice that heat is measured in Joules, a measurement of energy. Heat is energy. And that increase in the Ocean's heat, shown in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chart posted above, represents an increase in the ocean's, and our world's, total retained net energy. This is a big part of what the Climate Change issue really is: A Radical Atmospheric Change (in our atmosphere's heat re radiation quotient) leading to an increasing energy retention, and an increasing net energy balance, here on our planet.  And one increasingly out of line with what the earth has seen over the past several hundred thousand, to several million years.   

Not "Climate." 

Ultimately, energy, and the oceans, drive climate. And we would expect to see climate, from our our perspective, to radically shift as a result. And - while many ideologically driven sites and even books and some scientifically misinformed politicians strive for all kinds of ways to argue (as if it ultimately really mattered) that the "coincidental" increases in overall ambient global climate temperatures is due to "other" factors (just Google it, there's no point in linking to examples of ideology masquerading as science, found in abundance on the Internet and even sometimes in speeches on the floors of Congress), despite a rise in precisely what would, as a matter of physics, drive such an increase in climate over time - we are in fact, gently now at first, starting to see just such a rise. 

Along with several other, far more consequential, and alarming, further "corroborative" or oddly "coincidental" signs, which we'll cover here in numerous interesting posts to come.