WE all know that it takes longer to heat a kettle of water than a piece of metal, and that the heated water will take much longer to cool down. It’s why it’s best to wait until late summer to swim in the sea.

We also know from our energy bills how much more energy is used by our radiators, and washing up and bath water, let alone a pot of tea. We certainly wouldn’t want the bill for making the oceans a little warmer, particularly when we consider how big they are.

Not only do they cover 71 percent of our globe, but they are deeper, averaging around 12,000 feet whereas the smaller land mass, some 29 percent, only averages around 2,500 feet in height, so we are dealing with an enormous amount of water that needs heating. Thank goodness for the sun.

However despite the length of time it takes for sea water to heat up when it does two rather important changes are strongly encouraged. The first states quite clearly that CO2 is less soluble in warmer water and therefore will have to remain as an atmospheric gas where of course its concentration determines how fast the climate will warm.

Additionally warming sea water will melt even more ice from polar regions, and this, and expansion is why the sea level is rising at an accelerating rate these days. Indeed the five warmest years have been the last five, and in 2017 the increase was 600 times greater than all the energy from China’s electricity production.

The oceans contain around 50 times the amount of CO2 in the air and a third of this will return to the atmosphere as the temperature increases so it is vital that we now stabilise the emission levels and then behave in such a way that they begin to fall.