The experts at the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had a particularly pressing challenge as they prepared the newest assessment on global warming science, the first chapter of which was released in September. The problem was that the climate wasn’t acting the way they’d expected. In recent years, global greenhouse gas emissions had kept rising—hitting an all-time record in 2012. Yet even though the carbon concentration in the atmosphere gradually increased, passing the 400 parts per million threshold earlier this year, the planet’s average surface temperatures have remained pretty much the same over the past 15 years. The Earth hasn’t cooled—this past decade has still been the hottest on record—but  temperatures haven’t risen as climate models predicted. Call it a “pause,” call it a “hiatus,” but the question is clear: where’s the heat? Try the ocean. That’s one takeaway from a new paper published in Science today, one of a number of studies suggesting that the oceans depths seem to be soaking up the excess heat energy created by the accumulation of greenhouse gases. Researchers led by Yair Rosenthal at Rutgers University reconstructed temperatures in one part of the Pacific Ocean and found that its middle depths have been warming some 15 times faster over the past 60 years than at any other time over the past 10,000 years. It’s as if the oceans have been acting as a battery, absorbing the excess charge created by the greenhouse effect, which leaves less to warm the surface of the planet, where we’d notice it. (MORE: Slowdown Seen in Rising CO2 Emissions) That means global warming is still happening, even if hasn’t necessarily been reflected in recent surface temperature changes. But there’s no guarantee that won’t change in the future. “We may have underestimated the efficiency of the oceans as a storehouse for heat and energy,” said Rosenthal in a statement. “It may buy us some time—how much time, I really don’t know. But it’s not going to stop climate change.” The Science study isn’t the first to peg the oceans as a possible reservoir … Continue reading Oceans Warming Faster Than They Have Over Past 10,000 Years