I thought so. This is HUGE climate news

I brought this up recently on Twitter, but finally found the time to mention it here on my blog.

In my piece on why scientists know that CO2 is causing the warming of the Earth -- which is undoubtedly happening -- I mention the following:

"Skeptics like to point out that the warming at the Earth's surface hasn't been uniform, there have been cooling periods and flat periods (maybe), none of which I will give a name to, ever since the effects of increasing CO2 began to kick in. So, they ask, how can that happen if there is evermore heat being trapped.

The simple answer to that is: most of the heat is going into the ocean. It's been measured, documented, and quantified. Yet still, the ocean's uptake of the heat can vary, depending on a few factors, and just a slight variation can have a big effect on the atmospheric temperature. That might be part of the explanation for what happened in the early years of the 21st century (if in fact it happened). But more heat kept going into the oceans -- until it came back out decisively, in a massive El Niño event that drove atmospheric temperatures to all time highs, and also lower tropospheric temperatures measured by satellites."

That last part is based on the observation of the warming of the 20th century, that every time there was a big El Niño there was a jump up in global temperature, and it didn't come back down all the way, leading to a steplike appearance of the temperature vs. time plot.  And several readings indicated that this was a likely mechanism by which the oceans vented the excess GHG heat that they store.

But I didn't really know for sure that this last El Niño released a lot of that stored heat. I was pretty sure it had, but that isn't my field of expertise.  So that last sentence was an informed extrapolation of previous climate behaviors.

Not any more.  It's been confirmed.

Stored heat released from ocean largely responsible for recent streak of record hot years

"By analyzing records of global temperature, sea level rise, ocean heat content and other climate data, the study authors find the 2015-2016 El Niño released excess heat from the Pacific Ocean that had accumulated over the past two decades because of global warming.

They conclude this heat transfer from the ocean is largely responsible for the sharp spike in temperatures."

It feels so good to read that.  Because it's true and it's what I thought was true.

And this part too:

“The result indicates the fundamental cause of the large record-breaking events of global temperature was greenhouse-gas forcing rather than internal climate variability alone,” Yin said.

Of course it was.  Lest I sound gleeful to be right about it, I'm not.  It means that the Earth is getting warmer, and the Earth is getting warmer faster.

And that's not good.  We need to do something about it.  And I  have an idea about what to do, and pretty soon you'll read about it right here.