🧪 Climate Change

Raising atmospheric CO2 does not warm the surface instantly — most of the extra energy trapped by the greenhouse effect first has to work its way through the ocean's enormous thermal mass. This simulation runs a real two-layer energy balance model: a fast-responding surface/upper-ocean layer and a slow deep ocean beneath it, coupled by a heat-exchange term. Push CO2 up and the IPCC's logarithmic forcing law (F = 5.35·ln(CO2/280)) immediately raises the radiative forcing, but the surface temperature and the deep-ocean temperature climb at very different rates — watch the live chart to see the gap between them, and the top-of-atmosphere imbalance readout to see how much "committed" warming is still banked in the ocean even after CO2 stops rising. Climate feedback strength and ocean heat uptake efficiency are both tunable, so you can see directly how a more sensitive climate or a slower-mixing ocean changes both the pace and the eventual size of the warming.