"The #oceans absorb 90% of the heat trapped by the #CarbonEmissions from the burning of fossil fuels, making it the clearest indicator of global heating.
The ocean surface temperatures in 2023 were “off the charts”, the researchers said. The primary cause was another year of record carbon emissions, assisted by El Niño. Over the whole year, the average temperature was 0.1C above 2022, but in the second half of 2023 the temperature was an “astounding” 0.3C higher."
This is a reminder that while humans live on the "Earth" part, it is really a water planet.
"The extraordinary temperatures in 2023 raised the question of whether global heating was accelerating. But Abraham said: “We’re watching for this but, currently, we do not detect a statistically significant acceleration. Right now, it’s basically a linear increase from about 1995.” "
(The data shows nonlinearity but emissions have increased a lot over the past 100 years).
"In many ways, ocean heat content represents a much better measure of #ClimateChange than global average surface temperatures. It is where most of the extra heat ends up and is much less variable on a year-to-year basis than surface temperatures. It shows a distinct acceleration after 1991, matching the increased rate of greenhouse gas emissions and other radiative forcing elements over the past few decades."
The immensity of energy involved here is incomprehensible. For fun, calculate the cost of equivalent energy as electricity.
Saying “400 zetajoules” fails to communicate. Maybe saying “X thousands of trillions of dollars of electricity…
oh. right.
first they have to listen.
:blobsad: I’ll just…
There are many reasons why the exceptional heat at the surface of the oceans are a concern, from stronger hurricanes and typhoons to fewer and smaller fish.
“We don’t really know what’s going on,” Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told me. “And we haven’t really known what’s going on since about March of last year.” He called the situation “disquieting.”
I'm no authority, to say the least, but from reading and following this subject for a number of years it seems that for decades the oceans have been predictably "heroic" in absorbing atmospheric heat which has been disbursed in their waters so uniformly that it's been virtually unmeasurable. Those days are now over and the seas have reached their limit and can absorb no more without their temperatures rising. #SST#SeaSurfaceTemperature
Absolutely.
The atmosphere is just a thin rind.
One way to think about this - ONLY a gedanken experiment please! - is that if you collapsed the atmosphere into a liquid with the density of water, it would be only 10 metres deep. (One atmosphere of pressure is equivalent to a 10m water column).
Compare that to the oceans which are 3600 m deep on average.
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