John Abraham, professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas School of Engineering, reported in The Guardian “Last year (2021) the oceans absorbed heat equivalent to seven Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating each second, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Europe's climate monitor, reported yesterday, “2023 Likely Hottest Year Recorded, At 1.43C Above Preindustrial Era.” So, presumably this year the oceans will have absorbed slightly more than seven Hiroshima atomic bombs worth of heat.
In the paper Global warming in the pipeline, researchers lead by James Hansen of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, show “the concept that a large amount of additional human-made warming is already “in the pipeline” was introduced by E.E. David, Jr., President of Exxon Research and Engineering, in 1984. And that this warming in the pipeline, exceed the IPCC’s best estimates.”
“The fast-feedback response time of Earth’s temperature and energy imbalance to an imposed forcing, concluding that cloud feedbacks buffer heat uptake by the ocean, thus increasing warming in the pipeline and making Earth’s energy imbalance an underestimate of the forcing reduction required to stabilize climate,” the paper notes.
The paper showed that the Earth’s albedo (reflectivity) measured by the Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System ( CERES) satellite over the 22-years March 2000 to March 2022 revealed a decrease of albedo and thus an increase of absorbed solar energy of 500% coinciding with the 2015 change of International Maritime Organization (IMO) emission regulations with respect to sulphur in content of the bunker fuel used in marine shipping. Per the following graphic from the Hansen paper, the absorbed solar energy of + 1.05 W/m2 over the period January 2015 through December 2022 relative to the mean for the first 10 years of data was 5 times the standard deviation of 0.21 W/m2 in the first 10 years of data and 4.5 times greater than the standard deviation through December 2014.
The upshot has been ocean heat content, the true measure of global warming in the pipeline, has doubled the past 10 years. And has jumped again over the course of the last 2.5 years.
In an Intimate Conversation with Leading Climate Scientists to discuss new research, principally the Hansen paper, on Global Warming, moderated by Jeffrey Sachs, former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, Hansen said “the annual cost of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) efforts is currently between 3.5 and 7 trillion/years. And the cost of the albedo implications of the IMO’s sulphur regulations alone will be between $115 to $230 trillion. All of which makes the economics of CDR impossible.
Nevertheless, the global warming in the pipeline is coming at us like a freight chain. And since the cycle time of circulation of the thermohaline is 1500 years that is all, we have. After which the Hiroshima bombs worth of heat in the ocean will start bursting in air, which will spell the end of civilization. Unless of course we can diffuse those bombs by converting their energy to the useful energy humanity requires. Which will cost less than $3 trillion /year, while providing 4.3 gigatonnes of CDR annually at no additional cost.