Someone cast Wolven Winter on New Orleans!

[Edi]

Originally Posted by Tifone

Ahah, Edi's totally a: - http://www.flamewarriors.com/warrior...ngfumaster.htm

Hardly. Big cat mostly, perhaps big dog sometimes. In my usual haunts the regulars are just as likely as not to wipe the floor with me unless I stick to topics I really know about. And sometimes even then.

Energy balance is indeed the correct way to look at it.

The claim that the increase in temperature and overall energy is nowhere to be seen is incorrect. The average temperature of oceans has been rising. Coral die-offs are the primary evidence for this but not the only things. The northern ice caps melting is more. That we are seeing such apparently small increases in the ocean temperatures may seem no cause for concern, but this is a deceptive and dangerous notion.

The mass of the planet's oceans is several hundred orders of magnitude more than the mass of the atmosphere. The atmosphere has been warming up by a few degrees. The first ten feet of water in the oceans weighs the same as the atmosphere. There are roughly 300 times 10 feet in one kilometer, and most oceans are several kilometers deep. The fact that we are seeing measurable increase in their temperature should be a pretty damned scary statistic. There's a lot of mass, so it can absorb a lot of energy, but it also means that restoring the energy balance to the previous norms will also be slower and far more difficult.

I'd love to continue this further, but I have to go get some sleep. Night...