One feature of global warming is the *energy imbalance* of the Earth: we are absorbing more energy from the sun than we send back to space in form of thermal radiation. If Earth’s climate were in equilibrium, these two numbers would exactly balance. The main reason they don’t is the thermal inertia of the ocean. Because the ocean takes a long time to warm up, the warming of the surface ocean lags behind the warming of the land areas. So the ocean remains cooler and therefore emits less thermal radiation. 93% of the energy imbalance is due to that relatively cool ocean. If the ocean surface warming didn’t lag behind the land areas, the imbalance would thus largely disappear. I’ve seen some crazy claims, like: if the ocean did not absorb most of the energy imbalance, then that amount of heat would end up in the atmosphere, heating the Earth by 36 degrees Celsius. That’s not how this works. The ocean with its large heat capacity and therefore large heat uptake causes most of the energy imbalance of our planet at a time of rapid global warming. If the ocean didn’t do that, the Earth would only take up a fraction of the heat it does now. It would be a little bit warmer (a few tenths of a degree C) but nothing like 36 C!

That misunderstanding of ocean thermal inertia, is linked to another one: That the Earth will keep warming for decades after we reach zero CO2 emissions, as the oceans catch up with warming. That’s also incorrect. That idea is not fundamentally wrong, but there is a balancing

A third misunderstanding (that one promoted by climate skeptics) is that we do not need to reduce our CO2 emissions to zero in order to stabilize the concentration, because the ocean takes up 25% of our emissions. However, that is primarily just due to a temporary imbalance and