Oliver Morton
speaker
147 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 5 Aug
Oliver Morton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The surface temperature of the oceans between sixty north and sixty south.
Has been at a record for the time of year all through July and almost all through June.
And so the seas of the world are very hot at the moment.
The heat in the oceans is the biggest store of heat on the planet, and it's driven by how much heat the planet absorbs from the sun and how much it gives off as infrared radiation, and the Earth is absorbing considerably more heat than it used to be absorbing.
Part of this is an effect of global warming.
There were fewer clouds, scarcer ice caps, and that means that the Earth absorbs more energy.
And then there's a second issue, which is that also the earth is being made less reflective because we're putting less of particular sorts of pollutant into the atmosphere.
that's right.
If you were standing outside the earth and looking at it would just at the edges of human capacity to see, it would be getting just a little bit dimmer over the decades.
And this leads to more sunlight being absorbed, and that means that there's more energy coming into the system.
The amount of energy leaving the system is also going up, but not as quickly.
And so you get basically a build up of energy in the system.
There are two things going on here.
One is you say we know about global warming and we know about it in general, but I think a thing that's not very thoroughly appreciated is that though the warming takes place in the atmosphere of the greenhouse gases to begin with, it then spreads throughout the system in various complicated ways.
And one of the ways that it spreads through the system is diminishing the amount of cloud cover, and that adds to the warming further, because light that's not reflected from
From the clouds gets absorbed and adds to the warming.
So this is what we call a climate feedback.
And it's sort of like climate change feeding on itself.
And so the change just due to the greenhouse gases becomes a change due to greenhouse gases and this new effect of the Earth being less reflective.
But there's also a second effect which is distinct, which is that humans put
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