Straws!

If we warm up enough, the mantle will become a heat sink.

Fully agree with you that more urgent problems are waiting for us which in the case of the oceans can only be resolved when mankind can take on ownership of the open sea without raging a war about it.

And lets not forget that wonderful plume of highly radioactive water traveling across the floor of the pacific ocean from that, oh barely damaged and so wonderfully controlled Fukushima fiasco set to decimate our Westcoast fishing in the next three years.

Although the giant plastic slurry eddy in the Pacific is probably going to bite us eventually.

I have often though that we were actually killing large sections of the planet. Africa for one, is a dying continent. Every year it looses more and more arable land and it already can't support the relatively few people who still live there and that is one large chunk of real estate.

Now we are seeing the oceans dying off, and that people is phenomenal when you consider the sheer size of them.

Sooner or later we will learn the lessons of a finite planet and the facts of a closed system. Sadly it looks as though we will learn those lessons the hard way, by destroying our home for profit. now we have to try and live on money.

The alcolytes are puzzled why Zeus hath not smote his fury on mankind for his carbon wickness. Zounds! - perhaps Zephyrus has colluded with Poseidon to conceal man's wickedness within the depths of the great oceans!

'Global warming' is no longer a science, it's a religion whose believers have lost the ability to question their initial presumptions.

Ok, I honestly try to be a bit scientific about this.

I am not sure the oceans are that great a heat sink. I'd rather think that the space around Earth is our heat sink. If so radiation would be the only available heat transfer.

Am I close?

Any A/C man knows the heat is in the moisture in the air....it only follows that as it condenses and falls into the ocean that heat is gained,,,,but then of course in evaporation the heat is lost again, but not all of the ocean evaporates, so some heat is transferred to deeper water, which then rises to the top, and evaporates, unless the humidity is too high, then it just sits there,,,,,,,er,,a, what was the question again...??

The tide cometh in and goeth out again.....this is all I know........Yer a wise man Barney....

Certain parts of the Pacific are warming, other parts are cooling. This is measured daily through ATOC. Trends over the last twenty years show mixed results.

There are so many possible cause-and-effect scenarios it boggles the mind. All we really know is what we can observe and measure. The tricky part is the analysis.

They based this on some critters that lived in the sediment on the sea bed. After 10,000 years the seabed could have risen. Or the sediment flowed from some other higher elevation.

All this stuff is worked on the basis that mankind is inteded to survive. That assumption may not be valid.