Earth's Civilizations Are Shaped By Oceans

I noticed the TV weather reporters once in a while mention ocean temperatures when talking about what is coming in the next winter or summer. Part of what they are talking about was in a recent article was ocean temperatures. Oceans, the link says, are the engines of climate and climate determines all kinds of changes for humans. Civilizations have always been moved around by weather. I suppose gods traveled with them. The gods and humans have always been one and the same.

Until reading the link, I had never understood something about weather. My 30 years of flying a small plane are over and the airplane has been sold. During all that flying I was a novice student of weather. It is often said one day we will mix flying and driving, i.e, the flying car. Flying is so sensitive to weather I don't see how that will ever happen. 

For years I read articles about flying by a "ferry pilot" who moon lighted as a writer. A ferry pilot is paid to fly someone else's airplane to a different location. Often, a plane located in one place is purchased by someone hundreds of miles away, sometimes on the other side of an ocean. Flying a strange small airplane over a large ocean is not for the faint of heart.  

The ferry pilot said his many flights in small planes across the Pacific Ocean were almost always in clear and quiet weather. Why was this, I wondered. The link explained that when cold water stays at the bottom and warm water stays on the top the weather above the ocean stays quiet. It is when ocean water is moving up and down that weather systems develop. 

Water is most likely to move up and down with warming and cooling near the shore. This means there will be rain for crops, fish for food and people will live there. The Bible stories are about fishermen and farmers because that is where people had to live. Religious metaphors focused on this water, "I will make you fishers of men."  One guy even walked on water.

Years pass, the oceans as engines of weather and the resulting societies goes on. Today there is dramatic news about warming oceans. The changes this will cause in the world might be huge.