The Saturation Chronicles - 13

How Much Is Too Much

Ocean saturation includes carbon dioxide (CO₂), that is, as CO₂ increases in the atmosphere, a percentage of that increase flows into the oceans:

"Levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) measured at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory by NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory surged to a seasonal peak of just under 427 parts per million (426.90 ppm) in May, when CO₂ reaches its highest level in the Northern Hemisphere. That’s an increase of 2.9 ppm over May 2023 and the 5th-largest annual growth in NOAA’s 50-year record. When combined with 2023’s increase of 3.0 ppm, the period from 2022 to 2024 has seen the largest two-year jump in the May peak in the NOAA record."

(Carbon dioxide levels surge faster than ever, emphasis added; cf. A Grim Signal: Atmospheric CO2 Soared in 2024). Infrared photons and CO₂ have something in common.

Saturation applies to both "heat" and CO₂:

"The idea seemed simple enough: the more carbon dioxide that people pumped into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, the more the oceans would absorb. The ocean would continue to soak up more and more carbon dioxide until global warming heated the ocean enough to slow down ocean circulation. Water trapped at the surface would become saturated, at which point, the ocean would slow its carbon uptake. To oceanographers of 30 years ago, the question was less, how will human emissions change the ocean carbon cycle, and more, is the ocean carbon cycle changing yet?

The question matters because if the ocean starts to take up less carbon because of global warming, more is left in the atmosphere where it can contribute to additional warming."

(The Ocean's Carbon Balance, emphasis added; contra: Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?). Sounds like a "feedback loop", eh?

Today's Appendices

Today's appendices, among other things, contrast ocean temperatures with saturation percentages (% From 1900, % From 1950, Conservative Temperature).

The individual depths in the graphs are represented by colors as explained in the Conservative Temperature appendix.

WOD layers

"Heat content" is not temperature: "It is incorrect to speak of the heat in a body, because heat is restricted to energy being transferred. Energy stored in a body is not heat (nor is it work, as work is also energy in transit)";  Encyclopedia Britannica, emphasis added).

In other words heat is a photon flow (The Photon Current).

Which when absorbed by seawater molecules and/or atoms, can be determined by the potential enthalpy value as calculated using TEOS-10 library functions (In Search Of Ocean Heat - 20).

The graphs in today's appendices present WOD layer values so as to contrast saturation with temperatures at several latitude layers.

Closing Comments

Arguing about  the effect while ignoring the cause is a waste of time because we know that the cause is fossil fuel usage, so leave it in the ground. 

The nest post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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