This is a reply to “Stephens” comment below.
I think I may have figured out where the misunderstanding happened Stephen. You assumed I was discussing the so-called and misnamed greenhouse effect (GHE) as defined by the IPCC and only looked at the quote through that lens. This may all have been largely a point-of-view problem.
A greenhouse warms by restricting circulation and convection, somewhat like your pot with a lid. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere can warm the Earth’s surface by some unknown amount by slowing the cooling of the surface of the Earth, since it absorbs IR emitted by the surface and before it re-emits the absorbed energy it is excited and collides with neighboring molecules “warming” them. The magnitude of this effect is unknown, and it has not been measured, only modeled.
What I tried to do in the quote, was step back from the GHE, and look at the larger picture of recent warming. GHE is not climate and climate is not GHE, it is much more complicated than that regardless of what the warmists want us to believe. In the quote, I don’t care if the GHE contributed to current warming or not or even by how much. I just wanted to show that any effect of CO2 is small in the context of the oceans. The Earth is warming; thus, it is retaining some thermal energy, and as the IPCC says in AR5 (The Physical Science Basis, page 265) the oceans have retained 64% of the energy. All the retained thermal energy for the past 50 or 60 years, at most, has increased the Southern Ocean temperature less than 0.2 degrees (see Wunsch, 2018, Dynamic Meteorology and Oceanography, vol. 70, issue 1)! And this is the ocean where all oceans meet, the deep oceans have cooled since 1990 (Wunsch and Heimbach, 2014, American Meteorological Society Journal, August 2014).
Some of recent warming is natural and some is probably due to the CO2 GHE, the warming is obviously due to additional thermal energy being retained. I’m just saying it doesn’t matter. Were it all due to CO2 GHE and the effect lasted another 200 years, the Southern Ocean would warm a whopping 0.6 degrees, at most, since the effect of CO2 diminishes as more is added. This is an extreme estimate from the highest estimates of ocean warming over the last 60 years. The more likely amount of ocean warming from 1994-2013 is 0.02 degrees. The warming, regardless of the cause is not important or a problem due to the high heat capacity of the oceans. That is the point of the quote.
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