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Climate Change Has Doubled the Frequency of Ocean Heatwaves (nature.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Nature: Scientists analyzed satellite-based measurements of sea surface temperature from 1982 to 2016 and found that the frequency of marine heatwaves had doubled. These extreme heat events in the ocean's surface waters can last from days to months and can occur across thousands of kilometers. If average global temperatures increase to 3.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, as researchers currently project, the frequency of ocean heatwaves could increase by a factor of 41. In other words, a one-in-one-hundred-day event at pre-industrial levels of warming could become a one-in-three-day event. The study has been published in the journal Nature.

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  1. Marine Heat Wave by Layzej · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm not sure why he has a problem with the coining of a term. Does he prefer they use another phrase, or rather that they not study the phenomenon at all? See no evil hear no evil I suppose? Regardless of what we call it, (and "marine heat wave" seems like a practical enough name) the evidence for the phenomenon is clear in the satellite data as well as in the economic impacts.