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Ocean Warming is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds (nytimes.com)
Scientists say the warming of the world's oceans is accelerating more quickly than previously thought, a finding with dire implications for climate change given that almost all of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases ends up stored there. From a report: A new analysis, published Thursday in the journal Science, found that the oceans are heating up 40 percent faster on average than a United Nations panel estimated five years ago. The researchers also concluded that ocean temperatures have broken records for several straight years. "2018 is going to be the warmest year on record for the Earth's oceans," said Zeke Hausfather, an energy systems analyst at the independent climate research group Berkeley Earth and an author of the study. "As 2017 was the warmest year, and 2016 was the warmest year."
As the planet has warmed, the oceans have provided a critical buffer, slowing the effects of climate change by absorbing 93 percent of the heat trapped by human greenhouse gas emissions. But the escalating water temperatures are already killing off marine ecosystems, raising sea levels and making hurricanes more destructive.
A specific part of the oceans.
Only the water that was old enough to remember the European Little Ice Age.
Specifically that article said that the water that between 1.8 and 2.6 km below the pacific ocean surface was cooling at rate of around 0.02 degrees per century. If we assume all of the measurements are accurate, then the volume of water above 1.8 km and below 2.6 km would still be warming (at rates of about 0.4 degrees and 0.1 degrees per century, respectively), so the other parts of the pacific represent a larger volume of water and they are warming faster than this smaller band is cooling, and that means that there is more than enough warming water to offset the smaller band of cooling water. So overall the ocean is warming, even though there is band of water that hasn't seen the surface in 200-1000 years that is still cooling.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
It's a perfectly valid question to ask, which has a complex answer that I can't summarise very well here.
But the gist is: you are thinking about weather (local, seasonal change). They are talking about climate (the sum of all whether for a large region/the planet, over a longer period. Years, decades)
What you say and what you experience IS TRUE. But you can't hold in your mind the variations that happen over decades all over the world, human brains just don't normally do it. We can focus only on more immediate things, like the weather in the area where you live. That's why people record these things.
Over time, the average has been raising. But keep in mind that an average is the sum of many parts, which means that there will be places where it's a lot more or a lot less. Also keep in mind that you won't be able to tell the difference reliably from memory vs 50 years ago if the average change is one or two degrees.
Next, some species are more fine tuned to specific conditions. Their body chemistry and metabolism and reproduction cycles developed over millennia in more or less stable conditions, and for them, these changes you don't notice are a big deal.
Finally, climate change isn't the only problem. Pollution and acidification also change their environment, making it difficult to maintain their usual way of living. Then there is overfishing. And these are just direct factors. Things like rain, wind and ocean currents are affected by fluid dynamics that can change by a lot at global scale.
So, yes, your questions are reasonable, but there isn't a yes/no answer.
I can't help but think back to November. It may not have been the 5th, but this story seems an awful lot like the error-riddled study back in November. Heck, I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that this article cites the very study: L. Resplandy et al., Nature 563, 105 (2018). Maybe November was too close to the print deadline, and they hopped it would go unseen. Judging by the comments it seems like most believers truly have blind faith.
Pretty much everything you said is wrong.
It isn't new information. The newest citations are in 2016
Nope. There are 15 citations. Three are from 2018. Two are from 2017. Did you think nobody would check?
and they're citing studies that were done entirely with models... that is not data.The data being cited is often about ten or more years older.
Wrong again. I did a quick skim of the Google Search links provided in the bibliography. My rough guess is that about half of them discuss data, and the other half discuss models that include comparisons to data. A couple of titles had the word 'prediction'.
Models are not data, but they are built and tested with data.
article title says "Ocean Warming is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds "
Yes, the NYT article. But the article in Science has the title "How fast are the oceans warming?"
The research is not "new"... it is old stuff in a new box.
False. See above.
How many people that actually cite this stuff actually read any of it? I feel they're headline readers. Do better.
Oh the irony. I'll just let that stand.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The paper notes that there are four new ocean heat content estimates and all have a larger OHC trend than the observations published in IPCC AR5.
But none of that says anything about acceleration. The paper does note that "All four recent studies show that the rate of ocean warming for the upper 2000 m has accelerated in the decades after 1991 to 0.55 to 0.68 W m^2", but far from "Accelerating Faster Than Thought", instead it notes "The recent OHC warming estimates are quite similar to the average of CMIP5 models, both for the late 1950s until present and during the 1971–2010 period highlighted in AR5"
The fault seems to be in the original NYT article. The line "The results converged at an estimate of ocean warming that was higher than the I.P.C.C. predicted and more in line with the climate models." seems especially confused since the paper referenced the same CMIP5 models that are referenced in IPCC AR5.
Sigh. I can't tell if you're trolling, willfully ignorant, or just plain ignorant. This is a SUPER OLD question that's been answered thousands of times. I'm gonna make exactly one effort to explain it to you. Suspecting you're gonna reject it and come back at me with something inane, but here goes....
I'm gonna assume you're US and run on english units. So, your body temperature averages 98.6 on a good day, but sometimes it varies down a bit, and when you're really sick it shoots up to around 105 F. There's variance in your body temp. So, what happens if your average temp goes up by three degrees? For the sake of conversation, assume that you just add 3 to your temp all the time. That can't have a big effect, right? I mean, 3 degrees is absolutely nothing!
Well, actually, it has a huge effect effect. As in "you die fairly quickly" type of effect. If you're running at 98.6+3=101.3 degrees on average, you FEEL LIKE ABSOLUTE CRAP. Most of the time. It's like you have a constant minor flu. You have a hard time working, thinking, procreating, or doing anything else. Your body wears down really fast. You evolved to have a 98.6 body temp and 101.3 is not a good thing at all.
Furthermore, the first time you actually get sick, instead of hitting 105 (which you can recover from) you hit 108 (which kills you dead).
The bottom line: for most life, it's the increase at the extremes that makes the huge difference.
Same thing happens to ecosystems except they've been shown to be even more sensitive. In a green farmland area, the temp varies from some low to some high. During the hot summer, everything gets a bit brown but doesn't die out completely. However, there is a threshold temp at which a bunch of things will just flat-out die. A few degrees of increase in average temperature means that during some hot summer week, the temp goes above the threshold and kills a bunch of things instead of just making them go brown. The ecosystem then alters in terms of what grows back. Just a few die-offs like this will result in an alteration to desert, or some other ecosystem. In any case, it doesn't return to what it was before. Result: farmland becomes not-farmland.
I'm pretty sure you don't care about the environment for it's own sake, so let me put it this way. The human population depends on a fairly small number of "breadbasket" regions for a lot of its food. If a bunch of these become unproductive in a very short period of time, our civilization could get badly disrupted. Could we adapt? Yes. Might it be painful and worth avoiding? Probably.