Slashdot Mirror
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.
According to the paleo records we had been in a period of global cooling and are now moving above the median temperature by a little but not as much as it had been previously. It's a cycle. It swings back and forth. There are many things that cause the swing. This time there is good evidence that some of that cause is human-centric. So, let's clean up our act a bit. Things are naturally improving as devices become more energy efficient. Unfortunately this whole focus on global warming / climate change totally ignores and masks the much more important issue of global pollution. That's the toxic killer and much more of a long term problem.