Article Why future warming isn't as "locked in" as you might think

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Stop emissions, stop warming: A climate reality check
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/climat...op-when-we

EXCERPT (Andrew Dessler): . . . In case you want a slightly nerdier description of why temperatures stop rising, you’re in luck. When we stop emitting greenhouse gases, the future behavior of Earth’s temperature depends on the relative speed of two critical processes:

1. The rate at which CO₂ is removed from the atmosphere (through absorption by oceans and land).

2. The rate at which heat is transferred from the surface ocean (a layer with small heat capacity) into the deep ocean (which has very large heat capacity).

To illustrate this, consider two extreme scenarios:

Scenario 1: CO2 removal is very slow, ocean heat transfer is very fast. Under this scenario, the Earth’s temperature would continue to rise long after emissions stop. This happens because the persistent CO2 in the atmosphere would keep trapping heat, while rapid heat mixing into the deep ocean would increase the effective heat capacity of the surface ocean. A higher surface heat capacity means it would take longer for the surface ocean to reach equilibrium for any given CO2 level. Thus, when emissions cease, the surface layer is much cooler than equilibrium with atmospheric CO2 and it must warm over the following centuries to reach equilibrium.

Scenario 2: CO2 removal is very fast, ocean heat transfer is very slow. Under this scenario, CO2 levels drop quickly after emissions stopped. The slow mixing limits the heat capacity of the surface ocean, causing the temperature of the surface layer to remain very close to equilibrium with atmospheric CO2 levels. As CO2 concentrations decrease, the surface ocean will therefore cool to stay near equilibrium.

In our actual climate system, these two processes happen at roughly comparable rates. The cooling effect of declining CO2 levels tends to offset the warming caused by heat transfer into the deep ocean. This balance means that, after emissions stop, global temperatures are expected to remain relatively stable instead of significantly rising or falling... (MORE - missing details)

Other stuff. Twitter/X is dead for climate science. If you were someone who went to Twitter to read about climate, head over to Bluesky — most of the climate community I engage with are and, as an added bonus, it’s not a Nazi bar. Read more about Bluesky on Andrew Rumbach’s recent substack post. I’m almost exclusively on Bluesky; you can find me here,

If you can’t get enough of my perspectives on climate and energy, I gave a “fireside chat” at the Texas A&M Innovation Forward conference a few weeks ago. You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/E0M75Fao96M

[confused2]

Dressler is addressing the question "Are we going to cook our great-grandchildren?".

We know sea level has risen by about 20cm over the last hundred years, of which about 10cm is ice melt so 10cm is due to thermal expansion.

Using this information your friendly AI can tell you the temperature of the ocean has (on average) risen by about 0.1 degrees centigrade over the last hundred years.

With more prompting your AI can tell you this 0.1 C increase corresponds to about 0.4 Watts per square meter. The average incident energy from the Sun is about 340 Watts per square meter so it looks like CO2 is giving (very very roughly) a 0.1% tweak to the energy balance over the sea.

At the surface the average sea temperature is increasing by about 0.2C/decade .. so the top is warming while the bottom stays pretty much the same - there's no massive hot thing lurking at the bottom of the sea - so if you heat the sea surface for 100 years it seems reasonable it will cool down again in about the same amount of time. I've snuck in '100 years' .. it could be more (or less) .. the actual number isn't important at this stage.

Feeding an AI with bits of information it didn't think were important .. it can tell you (OK me) CO2 doesn't seem to hang about as long as some folks think. I got a half-life (of CO2 in the atmosphere) of about 70 years.

On the basis of facts (not faith) I agree with Dressler..
We probably won't cook our darling great-grandchildren. The temperature will overshoot the point when we decide 'enough is enough' or run out of things to burn but it looks (to me) like it will start to go down after maybe fifty or a hundred years.