The last decade has seen a lot of activity in the world of environmentalism and climate change science, largely thanks to the public outcry created by Al Gore's highly-acclaimed Inconvenient Truth. Of course, it's also been the result of major opposition by climate change "deniers", fueling a strange kind of anti-science/pro-science debate. Recent data suggests that the so-called deniers may be losing their convenient "lack of evidence", as the heating of our planet in the last ten years has been somewhat slowed by deep oceans and a record low amount of solar activity like sunspots. That points to a greater acceleration of heating in the next decade, as oceans reach their saturation point and the sun begins to show more activity.

Recently reported in ThinkProgress, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) showed the 12-month running average temperature broke the record in 2010. This is a record dating back to 1890 (as the graph depicts). “We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade,", the report said, and “there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970's.” Although that is primarily in surface temperatures from around the globe, there's reason to believe that the planet has actually absorbed much more heat than even that. According to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), deep oceans have been masking the global warming trend. "The planet’s deep oceans at times may absorb enough heat to flatten the rate of global warming for periods of as long as a decade even in the midst of longer-term warming." According to NCAR, layer of oceans deeper than 1,000 feet are the recipients of much of the planet's trapped heat, moved in the form of large global systems of ocean currents. All of this leads to the conclusion that in over a century of record keeping, the 2000's are the hottest decade, with 2010 being the hottest year of them all.

The implications of the trapped heat are enormous, as the energy that is trapped will not stay trapped in our fluid, ever changing oceans. Hurricanes and other erratic weather systems are thought to be partly a product of our warming oceans, and as that trapped heat energy is released in unpredictable ways, we could see sudden and violent changes in weather patterns in the near future. In addition, heat won't always be warehoused in this way, and significantly faster warming trends are more likely now that oceans have already absorbed much of the surplus heat. NCAR researchers Kevin Trenberth says, “This study suggests the missing energy has indeed been buried in the ocean. The heat has not disappeared, and so it cannot be ignored. It must have consequences."