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Earth

Ocean Temperatures Are Off the Charts (phys.org) 216

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: In a world of worsening climate extremes, a single red line has caught many people's attention. The line, which charts sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean, went viral over the weekend for its startling display of unprecedented warming -- nearly 2 degrees (1.09 Celsius) above the mean dating back to 1982, the earliest year with comparable data. Ocean temperatures are so anomalously high that Eliot Jacobson, a retired mathematics professor who created the graph using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had to "increase the upper bound on the y-axis," he said. "I've been doing this for a long time, but this one was like, 'Oh my God, look at this,'" Jacobson said of the graph. "What is going on here?" He and other researchers said there are several factors that may be contributing to the off-the-charts warming, which is occurring alongside other climate woes including record-shattering wildfires in Canada, rapidly declining sea ice in Antarctica and unusually warm temperatures in many parts of the world, not including Southern California.

Underlying everything is human-caused climate change, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. But atop that are a handful of other potential factors, including the early arrival of El Nino; the recent eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano; new regulations around sulfur aerosol emissions or even a dearth of Saharan dust. "The North Atlantic is record-shatteringly warm right now," Swain said during a briefing Monday. "There has never been any day in observed history where the entire North Atlantic has been nearly as warm as it is right now, at any time of year." Nearly all of the Atlantic basin is experiencing anomalous warmth, including the Irminger Sea southeast of Greenland, the western Mediterranean Sea, and the tropics "all the way from Africa to at least the Caribbean," said Gregory Johnson, an oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. "We are definitely in record territory," Johnson said. And it's not just the Atlantic, as global sea surface temperatures are also climbing to new highs, NOAA data show.
"The primary cause of the warming we are seeing right now is an El Nino event on top of overall human-caused warming," Mann said.

Though concerning, the conditions aren't "completely out of left field" based on global warming trends, Swain said. "The long-term trend is not going to stop, and we are stair-stepping up our way to much warmer oceans and a much warmer climate, and there still hasn't been a great deal of momentum away from that," he said. "We're still moving in a pretty alarming direction, overall, when it comes to to warming."
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Ocean Temperatures Are Off the Charts

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  • by afaiktoit ( 831835 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2023 @10:44PM (#63600814)
    problem solved.
    • by ElizabethGreene ( 1185405 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @05:41AM (#63601344)
      I'd like to see how this compares to pre-1982 data. I know that dataset is less complete, but we still have some information on it. If it's like the Berkeley Earth project's data, the results will be similar. Still, it's worth checking.
  • Chart (Score:5, Informative)

    by RandomReed ( 6705518 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2023 @10:46PM (#63600824)
    I believe this is the chart referenced in the article... https://twitter.com/EliotJacob... [twitter.com]
    • Re:Chart (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2023 @10:58PM (#63600858)

      Thanks. It boggles the mind that a person writing about a chart does not include it in their article...

    • Re:Chart (Score:5, Informative)

      by rot16 ( 4603585 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2023 @11:01PM (#63600868)

      Here is the updated version: https://twitter.com/LeonSimons... [twitter.com]

    • Non-geoblocked article:
      https://archive.vn/f2J9J [archive.vn]

  • Hurricane risk? (Score:2, Informative)

    IIRC the risk of hurricanes goes up with increasing sea surface temperatures. The next hurricane season might be a big one.

    • by haruchai ( 17472 )

      IIRC the risk of hurricanes goes up with increasing sea surface temperatures. The next hurricane season might be a big one.

      If the excess heat causes greater wind shear, that would mean fewer or shorter-lived hurricanes even if global warming causes many more storms

    • by Xyrus ( 755017 )

      Higher SSTs do increase the risk that any hurricane that forms will become a strong hurricane. But an overall increase in hurricane occurrence depends on more than just SSTs.

      For example, if those SSTs occur in conjunction with non-conducive atmospheric conditions (higher wind shears, stronger SALs) then hurricanes could have a harder time forming resulting in lower overall occurrence. But any storms that did form would have a higher chance of becoming monsters.

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      Yes, but significance if you live, say, on Florida or the Gulf Coast is not entirely clear.

      As you can see from this map [noaa.gov] of the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, hurricanes often start off the coast of Africa, and make their way west across the Atlantic, more often than not turning aside before making landfall in the US. 2020 was a record year for Atlantic cyclones, with 30 named storms, 14 full-fledged hurricanes, and 7 *major* hurricanes, and none of them happened to hit Florida with hurricane force winds.

      T

  • "There has never been any day in observed history where the entire North Atlantic has been nearly as warm as it is right now, at any time of year."

    I wonder if the world will end gradually or all at once. I think i might just live long enough to see it.

    • by skam240 ( 789197 )

      Only if you live for billions of years. You might live long enough for the earth to become noticeably more uncomfortable for humans and all the bad things that will stem from that though!

  • Now my climate taxes are going to up. JFC!

  • or...not. (Score:2, Informative)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 )

    Basically, all climate reporting is now tainted by implied or actual bias.

    For example, accuweather insists: https://www.accuweather.com/en... [accuweather.com]
    (even included a picture of a poor weeping evacuee from a hurricane! - bonus ESG points)

    Yet, the reality seems to be completely different: https://climatlas.com/tropical... [climatlas.com]
    Frequency: https://climatlas.com/tropical... [climatlas.com]
    Energy: https://climatlas.com/tropical... [climatlas.com]
    Accumulated energy: https://climatlas.com/tropical... [climatlas.com] ....none of these show anything like what Accuweather is i

  • The hockey stick graph, emails talking about manipulating data, faulty sensors not collecting data or erroneous data for years, computer models that compensate to produce the desired results... Climate change is the new means by which snake oil is sold. The idea isn't new. Create fear based on a false narrative so everyone will open their wallets to avoid certain doom. The only difference now is we've got politicians and scientists in on the act.
  • There have been so many cries of wolf for the past 40 years, even over the past century or more, that I stopped listening a long time ago. Since I see no change in the actual CO_2 increase rate, it's irrelevant to me, because que sera, sera. I don't see anyone being able to change it.

Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists? -- Kelvin Throop III

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