Humans are still too weak to have a serious effect on the Earth’s climate. The ocean is far stronger.

Alexander Demidov (Moscow State University),  Sergei Dobroliubov (Moscow State University), Tigran Oganesian, Anastasia Falina (The Shirshov Institute of Marine Science)

The world media regularly report violent storms and weather-related disasters in terrible detail (the most recent example being Hurricane Ivan). The headlines in the papers and online are overflowing with all sorts of scenarios for the coming climate cataclysm and catastrophe. In general the image of general weather mayhem seems so convincing that any attempts to even somewhat discredit it would be futile.
The most popular topic in this alarmist stream of information is without a doubt the so-called anthrogenic factor, the negative influence of Homo sapiens on the Earth’s climate. In these reports, the answers to the sacred questions of “who is to blame?” and “what is to be done?” are obvious.
The majority of civilization’s discontents, often referred to in the past as “representatives of progressive humanity,” demand the immediate implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. This preliminary legal document, approved in December 1997 by the world community, stipulates the responsibility of industrialized countries and countries with transitional economies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from 2008 to 2012, or in other words the very “anthrogenic” substances that according to “green” climatologists are the main culprits behind global warming.
With stunning ease, the numerous harbingers of climactic doom use a limited set of facts to paint a picture of global warming, holes in the ozone layer, and other crimes of civilization, marshalling massive forces to popularize their conspiracy theory of human influence. However, though this may be hard for those adepts of the “new ecological thought” to hear, according to fresh facts from the forefront of scientific research, information regarding the impending manmade climactic catastrophe is absolutely divorced from reality.
As Alexander Lisitsyn, one of Russia’s foremost scholars of marine science, noted in an interview with Expert, “Humanity is still too weak to have a serious effect on our planet’s climate.” The key to understanding long-term climactic processes lies in the depths of the World Ocean, which covers two thirds of the Earth’s surface.

Ask the ocean
Thanks to a technological revolution in ways to collect data about the ocean which began in the 1970s, marine scientists are for the first time able to capture uninterrupted time-space series and analyze marine processes on an unprecedented scale. Sounding devices recording the vertical profile of ocean, robots diving into hard-to-reach corners of the ocean, instruments that drift for years on the surface or at great depths…this is a far from complete list of innovations that are actively being used in research today.
The other important component that has provided a flood of new, high quality information about the ocean is the widespread use of satellite observation. Now, water levels, temperatures, wave patterns, and streams of heat and humidity can be measured across the entire ocean, which allows scientists to get a realistic picture of interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere, to see how currents work, and to watch various types of storms for the first time.
Let’s focus now on the big climatic issue, the process of so-called global warming. Today, we can only say with a fair amount of certainty that over the last hundred years an extremely insignificant increase in the temperature of the Earth’s surface has occurred, all in all of 0.6 +\-0.2°C. These tenths of a degree are based on temperatures taken on land when no reliable data regarding the historical change of the temperature of the World Ocean exists for this same period. Even if we propose that the change in the ocean’s temperature in the 20th century more or less correlated with the change on dry land, there are still no serious grounds for extrapolating long-term warming. On the contrary, a significant portion of today’s scientists believe that our planet is experiencing a typical, short period between ice ages.
According to this idea, in the very near historical future, or more exactly over the next hundred or maximum two hundred years, the Earth will not see continued warming, but “global cooling,” including the revenge of permafrost. A significant amount of experimental data support this hypothesis, data generated by studying marine sediments and ice cores taken from the Arctic and Antarctica.
A second important moment, one heavily emphasized by proponents of humanity’s influence on the environment, is the gradual increase over the last century of the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in the Earth’s atmosphere, which they believe are an important catalyst in global warming. Alas, it was discovered fairly recently that the main source and largest absorber of greenhouse gasses is the World Ocean. Fifty times more carbon dioxide can be found in the ocean than in the atmosphere. Excess carbon dioxide regularly precipitates to the ocean floor, while some is expelled from the ocean. Moreover, many specialists believe that the ocean absorbs almost all of the carbon dioxide gas emitted by industry. In other words, it is constantly drawing it out of the atmosphere, thanks to the phytoplankton drifting in its currents.
The final blow to the greenhouse effect theory and to its ideologues came when scientists succeeded in interpreting the historical chronicles of carbon dioxide contained in the natural annals of the ocean floor and artic ice. Reconstructing the history of the Earth’s climate 400,000-700,000 years ago via these annals, scientists concluded that folks in Kyoto had the chain of cause and effect completely turned around. The increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was not the cause but the direct result of climatic warming, and first and foremost of the World Ocean’s higher temperatures.
The famous Russian geophysicist Oleg Sorokhtin interprets this interconnection extremely simply. The amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean is strictly dependent on water temperature. The lower the temperature, the more carbon dioxide is dissolved. For this reason, higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will always correspond to a warmer climate (and higher ocean temperatures) and lower levels to cooling. In accepting that the paragon of animals does not play that great role in climatic processes, we need to then make the next logical step and try to find the real culprits.

The global conveyor belt
The most important source of the annual patterns of all process on Earth is the energy of the Sun, which strikes the Earth’s surface unevenly. If this energy were not redistributed among latitudes, the contrast in temperatures between the equator and the poles would be far greater. The two main transporters of this energy that create stable temperatures on the planet are, of course, the ocean and the atmosphere. As late at the 1950s, scientists believed that the atmosphere played the largest role in this process. However, in recent decades, a revolution came as scientists discovered that the ocean plays just as great a part.
The ocean acts as an inert medium in this ocean-atmosphere system, slowly accumulating changes in the atmosphere. Thanks to the ocean’s great capacity for absorbing heat, the ocean warms up and cools down relatively slowly, while the atmosphere is volatile. Thus, the ocean defines long-term changes to the climate and serves as a stabilizer in climatic processes. Its deepest waters, comprising three fourths of its total volume, play a significant role in this.
In the nineteenth century, observers mistakenly thought that the ocean’s waters moved exclusively due to wind and that all its dynamically significant processes were concentrated in the comparatively thin upper layer. Research over the last several decades has determined that though wind does have a certain effect on the circulation of the ocean’s surface, a far more serious factor is the movement of layers of water due to their different densities. On the surface, water moves at greater speeds than in the depths, but this layer makes up only the first several hundred meters. For this reason, the volume of water moving at greater depths is more significant in many regions of the ocean than that closer to the surface.
The lack of uniformity in the physical and chemical characteristics of various layers of the World Ocean causes the global redistribution of warm surface and cold deep water between various regions of the globe. This process, now called the “global marine conveyor belt,” is one of the main forces behind long-term climatic patterns.
Due to differences in temperatures of the two links in the global conveyor belt—the deep water moving south and the compensating warm currents flowing from the equator—the North Atlantic gains additional heat. Though making up only 11% of the surface of the World Ocean, it gives off 19% of the total heat from the sun that reaches Earth. This excess heat, carried north by surface currents of the Atlantic such as the Gulf Stream, makes Europe’s climate milder, especially in winter.

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