Slashdot Mirror
New Study Confirms the Oceans Are Warming Rapidly (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from The Guardian, written by John Abraham, who discusses the rising ocean temperatures and the important factors that affect ocean-temperature accuracy: The most important measurement of global warming is in the oceans. In fact, "global warming" is really "ocean warming." If you are going to measure the changing climate of the oceans, you need to have many sensors spread out across the globe that take measurements from the ocean surface to the very depths of the waters. Importantly, you need to have measurements that span decades so a long-term trend can be established. These difficulties are tackled by oceanographers, and a significant advancement was presented in a paper just published in the journal Climate Dynamics. That paper, which I was fortunate to be involved with, looked at three different ocean temperature measurements made by three different groups. We found that regardless of whose data was used or where the data was gathered, the oceans are warming. In the paper, we describe perhaps the three most important factors that affect ocean-temperature accuracy. First, sensors can have biases (they can be "hot" or "cold"), and these biases can change over time. Another source of uncertainty is related to the fact that we just don't have sensors at all ocean locations and at all times. Some sensors, which are dropped from cargo ships, are densely located along major shipping routes. Other sensors, dropped from research vessels, are also confined to specific locations across the globe. Finally, temperatures are usually referenced to a baseline "climatology." So, when we say temperatures have increased by 1 degree, it is important to say what the baseline climatology is. Have temperatures increased by 1 degree since the year 1990? Since the year 1970? Since 1900? The choice of baseline climatology really matters.
The temperature effects are not distributed equally across the entire water column. Most of the warming is in the upper ocean, which is most relevant for us, because it's the layer where the energy is quickly transported back to the atmosphere.
The relatively small increase in temperature should make you excited, because it's means that the ocean isn't anywhere near equilibrium, so it will keep absorbing energy from the atmosphere at increasing rates, causing sea level rise through thermal expansion, and come back to us in bursts during the El-Nino season.
As an _actual_ oceanographer, there is nothing to see here.. it's honestly kinda busch league and I'm a little surprised it got published given the glaring error in the conclusions, but whatever. I've given up trying to talk sense into people.
Interesting read but I have to admit I'm skeptical. I work in the field and its common knowledge that sensors are few and far between outside of normal travel lanes/coast lines. http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/ is the site I most often use and its quite lacking all things considered. From TFA (I know, I know) "Since one can never re-observe the ocean in the past, some synthetic data should be used, for instance high-resolution model outputs, sea level data, etc." While these models are decent, they won't perform the best in extremely data sparse areas which can easily skew data when working with over a large area. Not claiming its wrong, just that the lack of live data makes it difficult to honestly assess the situation.
Umm... what am I? I think social services, taxes and government spending are a good idea. but I also like guns and think that using them isn't outright wrong as long as the reason is right.
Care to point me to my pigeon-hole?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For you and your reading comprehension skills. My children can read and understand a graph better than you.
Maybe your children are immensely smart because I looked at the graph and found it confusing and misleading.
lucm, indeed.