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Earth

Ocean Temperatures Are Skyrocketing (arstechnica.com) 110

Posted by EditorDavid from the in-hot-water dept.
"For nearly a year now, a bizarre heating event has been unfolding across the world's oceans," reports Wired.

"In March 2023, global sea surface temperatures started shattering record daily highs and have stayed that way since..." Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami. "It's really getting to be strange that we're just seeing the records break by this much, and for this long...." Unlike land, which rapidly heats and cools as day turns to night and back again, it takes a lot to warm up an ocean that may be thousands of feet deep. So even an anomaly of mere fractions of a degree is significant. "To get into the two or three or four degrees, like it is in a few places, it's pretty exceptional," says McNoldy.

So what's going on here? For one, the oceans have been steadily warming over the decades, absorbing something like 90 percent of the extra heat that humans have added to the atmosphere...

A major concern with such warm surface temperatures is the health of the ecosystems floating there: phytoplankton that bloom by soaking up the sun's energy and the tiny zooplankton that feed on them. If temperatures get too high, certain species might suffer, shaking the foundations of the ocean food web. But more subtly, when the surface warms, it creates a cap of hot water, blocking the nutrients in colder waters below from mixing upwards. Phytoplankton need those nutrients to properly grow and sequester carbon, thus mitigating climate change...

Making matters worse, the warmer water gets, the less oxygen it can hold. "We have seen the growth of these oxygen minimum zones," says Dennis Hansell, an oceanographer and biogeochemist at the University of Miami. "Organisms that need a lot of oxygen, they're not too happy when the concentrations go down in any way — think of a tuna that is expending a lot of energy to race through the water."
But why is this happening? The article suggests less dust blowing from the Sahara desert to shade the oceans, but also 2020 regulations that reduced sulfur aerosols in shipping fuels. (This reduced toxic air pollution — but also some cloud cover.)

There was also an El Nino in the Pacific ocean last summer — now waning — which complicates things, according to biological oceanographer Francisco Chavez of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. "One of our challenges is trying to tease out what these natural variations are doing in relation to the steady warming due to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere."

But the article points out that even the Atlantic ocean is heating up — and "sea surface temperatures started soaring last year well before El Niño formed." And last week the U.S. Climate Prediction Center predicted there's now a 55% chance of a La Nina in the Atlantic between June and August, according to the article — which could increase the likelihood of hurricanes.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mrflash818 for sharing the article.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Ocean Temperatures Are Skyrocketing More

Ocean Temperatures Are Skyrocketing

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  • But it's cold (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18, 2024 @03:43PM (#64249478)

    In Montana in wintertime. Checkmate, climate losers!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Lserevi ( 1270986 )

      You appear to not understand the difference between climate and weather.

      • Re: But it's cold (Score:5, Informative)

        by JeffOwl ( 2858633 ) on Sunday February 18, 2024 @04:02PM (#64249514)
        You appear to not understand sarcasm
        • Yeah well look at who Lserevi is replying to.
    • just throw another christian on the fire then!

    • it's funny how that gets trotted out, but every.single.fucking.time it's HOT in summer..
      >yeah this is what happens if you don't drive a prius and continue to eat meat.

  • Ever since I heard that the Black Sea is anoxic below a certain depth I've wondered if it was possible to pump air down below to help start life getting a foothold. I know an entire sea is not like a puny aquarium, but still, it is the method used in some African lakes that used to spew toxic gases from their bottom every couple of decades. So would it be possible to improve those dead zones simply by pumping compressed air ?

  • Something BIG (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Sunday February 18, 2024 @04:02PM (#64249512)
    Is gonna break eventually. And we’re not gonna do jack squat about these issues until it does.

    So, I’m not sure if I should be hoping something breaks as soon as possible, or as late as possible. If something breaks soon, we just might start mitigating the issues earlier. But that also means that the ecosystem is in bigger trouble and we’re facing problems sooner rather than later.

    I guess it’s better to happen as slow as possible. Drill baby drill, I guess.

    Yes, I’ve gotten cynical. I have zero expectation that our species is gonna do anything about this until there’s the equivalent of a gun at our temple.

    • I have zero expectation that our species is gonna do anything about this until there’s the equivalent of a gun at our temple.

      If you look at history, yeah, pretty much. We had rivers literally catching on fire before people started thinking "gee, those environmentalists may have a point."

      It's probably not that people don't care, it's that modern society is dependent on an ample supply of cheap(ish) energy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Most people are really dumb. Large groups of people are far worse though.

      until there’s the equivalent of a gun at our temple

      Possibly not even then. When the first billion is dead, chaos will reign and make things worse. If we are very lucky (unlikely) we will have a somewhat working high-tech civilization left in some places. But my personal guess is reduction to 100M or less people and a few centuries to get technology going again, this time without fossil fuels. That is, if enough people survive at all.

    • No, nothing in nature gonna "break". Because it's not designed nor has particular purpose so it's impossible to meaningfully define this "breaking". Like would you consider something like this to be a break: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ? It's for sure spectacular enough. But were it "fixed" or prevented from happening then now we wouldn't have oxygen to breathe.

      • Nature is just nature - it will adapt and continue to do its thing.

        What will break is something in the margins of the natural environment that Human civilization has adapted to over the last 5000 years. Our crops, our livestock, our dwellings, our livestyle, energy consumption and other infrastructure... the margins are shifting and some of our adaptations will eather stop working or become much less efficient.
        This will require readaptation, the question is what will be faster: climate changing or human ada

        • You cannot know this in advance. Nature changes and people adapt for many millennia. And there is nothing magical about our particular millennium. It's basically same logic as with various doomsday predictions. Mind you we still could be offed sooner or later either by our own actions or something beyond our power to influence(such as collision with stellar object/nova/vacuum stability event). But it will be something that we won't see coming in time I'm sure.

    • I guess it’s better to happen as slow as possible. Drill baby drill, I guess.

      Well, for the people who demand mitigation - they are going to find themselves bedfellows with the oil industry. As shown how temperatures soared when we stopped polluting the air, the mitigationists need to demand that all pollution controls be dropped immediately and to burn as much bunker fuel as possible, and inject as much sulfur aerosols int the atmosphere as humanly possible.

      Crazy, but write your politicians that the oil and coal industry kraken must be released. the dirtier the fuel, the better.

    • Because we'll be in a better position technologically to handle it and likely also a better position socially. Our civilization is progressing it's just doing it very slowly because each previous generation holds the next one back. You can go all the way back to Socrates to find him bitching about kids instead of trying to understand their concerns
      • I suppose you are referring to a much-cited quote attributed to Socrates about the behavior of contemporary youths. Although people back in the day of Socrates most surely were complaining about how their kids were turning up, this quote has been shown to be falsely attributed to Socrates. In fact, Socrates himself was accused of corrupting the youth, having taught the very controversial figure of Alcibiades, and famously found himself in the crosshairs of Aristophanes in his comedy "The clouds" in which th
    • I picture you wearing a sign saying "The End is Near"
    • There's hope left; that other highly intelligent species we all know about will take care of it

  • I have no idea if what I'm about to say is at all sensible; so if somebody more knowledgeable says I'm out to lunch that's cool - I'll be more than happy to be wrong in this instance.

    CO2 levels are increasing in the oceans, while O2 levels are decreasing. As a result, various kinds of life are dying and decaying. That's an exothermic process which both sequesters oxygen in and of itself, and releases heat. (I suspect decay also releases CO2, because it's a form of "slow burning"). Thus death begets more de

    • No, the ocean is mostly just water. There's not enough stuff to die off to change the temperature

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      You are looking for a positive feedback loop (in systems theory). You are in luck, just look a permafrost in the Arctic regions. As it thaws, it will release CO2 and methane, each of which will cause more global warming. If that happens, we really have no way to stop it.

  • Annotated graph ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Sunday February 18, 2024 @04:36PM (#64249572) Homepage

    This graph [bbci.co.uk] is the same as the first one in the linked article, but it is annotated.

    Really scary.

    One wonders if we have reached the stage of runaway warming, and/or a self enforcing feedback loop ...

    • This graph [bbci.co.uk] is the same as the first one in the linked article, but it is annotated.

      Really scary.

      One wonders if we have reached the stage of runaway warming, and/or a self enforcing feedback loop ...

      The likelihood of Earth becoming Venus-like is really quite low. There have been times in the past when there was more CO2 in the atmosphere. Yet here we are.

      I have firm confidence in the energy retention characteristics of an atmosphere varying based on the composition of that atmosphere. And we have de-sequestered some millions of years of CO2, and now are releasing semi-sequestered methane accidentally.

      And it is going to take a pretty long time for those to return to 1750 levels - the beginning of

    • Six, if you're wondering. That's six standard deviations off the mean.

  • ... but we won't build new nuclear power plants.

    I'll believe the world is taking global warming seriously when they run out of excuses to not build more nuclear power plants.

    Is nuclear power the only thing we can do to prevent global warming? Of course not. What we know from people that studied the issue is that without nuclear power our ability to keep the lights on while lowering CO2 emissions are effectively zero without utilizing nuclear fission for energy.

    Is nuclear power without issues? Of course n

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 )

      I'll believe the world is taking global warming seriously when they run out of excuses to not build more nuclear power plants.

      Don't worry about it. We have wind and solar in abundance, almost too cheap to meter, we will just replace all the energy humans use with that. Life is good, no reason not to go out and enjoy it to the utmost.

      If it's going to kill us then we should take some very drastic solutions to stop it.

      Obviously not an emergency. The problem of climate change is solved with just this one simple trick. Don't know why we keep hearing about it.

  • They've known for a while now, and been talking about it for well over a year.

    On Jan 1 2020 a new IMO (International Maratime Organization) regulation went into effect. The shipping industry drastically lowered the sulfur content of its fuels and the SOx content of ship exhaust plumes dropped by about 77%. (Other aspects of the fuel change also reduced some particulate pollution, too.)

    The COVID sequestration also reduced shipping (and cloud-seeding exhaust from it), along with aircraft contrails and upper

    • Here's that first sentence with them...

      They've known for a while now, and been talking about it [maritime-executive.com] for well over a year [nature.com].

      • If that's the case there's a simple fix for it: We could just have them make a minor mechanical tweak to all the large ship engines so they spray a plume of water vapor up into the air behind them (rather than just letting all the water that passes through the engines spill out with the engine wake as it normally does) and that should easily offset the solar heating of the oceans without having to re-introduce a bunch of sulfur or other nasty chemicals into the process unnecessarily.

  • Solar maximum. Followed by 5.5 years of downtrend.
  • The impact of the reduced sulfur aerosols in shipping fuels can be seen as a big geoengineering experiment where we've seen the impacts of cloud seeding by ships across the ocean. As controversial as this practice may be, we have a case here where we've been doing it for decades at an increasing rate through normal human activities and thus we can predict the impact of keeping up doing it, but with a mist of seawater instead of toxic aerosols.
  • I suspect it will be roughly 30-40 years until a massive storm flattens one of the northern continents rendering habitation and agriculture impossible in that region, leading to a crushing influx of billions of migrants (not tens millions people complain about now) and likely wars.

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