History
Early GCMs used "swamp" or "slab" ocean models for reasons of computational simplicity. Such models cannot simulate the heat take up that occurs in the real ocean and were thus unable to run transient simulations: instead, the response to equilibrium change was investigated. There are problems with this approach, which were well appreciated at the time: the deep ocean has a very long time constant and in some areas (most notably the southern ocean) the transient and equilibrium responses are very different.
Read more about this topic: Transient Climate Simulation
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