evidence: Rising amounts of greenhouse gases are preventing heat radiated from Earth’s surface from escaping into space as freely as it used to. Most of the excess atmospheric heat is passed back to the ocean. As a result, upper ocean heat content has increased significantly over the past few decades. Upper layers are accumulating heat faster than deeper layers, but averaged over the full depth of the ocean, the 1993–2022 heat-gain rates are approximately 0.64 to 0.83 Watts per square meter averaged over the surface of the Earth. [...] Less than a watt per square meter might seem like a small change, but multiplied by the surface area of the ocean (more than 360 million square kilometers), that translates into an enormous global energy imbalance. It means that while the atmosphere has been spared from the full extent of global warming for now, heat already stored in the ocean will eventually be released. That release of ocean heat would commit Earth to at least some additional warming in the future once greenhouse gas emissions stop. (The latest Earth system model simulations, however, find that at present levels of warming, this release of heat may be mostly balanced by the natural carbon cycle, which will begin incrementally reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels right away. If these models are correct, the amount of warming that can be expected once greenhouse gas emissions reach zero is at most a few tenths of a degree Celsius over a decade, and may be closer to zero.)