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ocean temperatures
'Omen of the Future': Off-The-Charts Hot Oceans Scare Scientists
After 2023 was the hottest year in human history, experts warn that 2024 "has strong potential to be another record-breaking year."
Feb 27, 2024
While global policymakers continue to drag their feet on phasing out planet-heating fossil fuels, scientists around the world "are freaking out" about high ocean temperatures, as they toldThe New York Times in reporting published Tuesday.
A "super El Niño" has expectedly heated up the Pacific, but Times reporter David Gelles spoke with ocean experts from Miami to Cambridge to Sydney about record heat in the North Atlantic as well as conditions around the poles.
"The sea ice around the Antarctic is just not growing," said Matthew England, a University of New South Wales professor who studies ocean currents. "The temperature's just going off the charts. It's like an omen of the future."
Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey who watches polar ice levels, told the paper that "we're used to having a fairly good handle on things. But the impression at the moment is that things have gone further and faster than we expected. That's an uncomfortable place as a scientist to be."
\u2026for almost a year now,\u201d McNoldy said. \u201cIt\u2019s just astonishing. Like, it doesn\u2019t seem real.\u201d Across the unusually warm Atlantic, in Cambridge, England, @rdlarter , a marine scientist who tracks polar ice levels, is equally perplexed. \u201cIt\u2019s quite scary, partly because\u2026— (@)
Last week, Jeff Berardelli, WFLA's chief meteorologist and climate specialist, also highlighted the warm North Atlantic and that "all signs are pointing to a busy hurricane season" later this year.
Noting that in the middle of this month, sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic were around 2°F higher than the 1990-2020 normal and nearly 3°F above the 1980s, Berardelli explained:
That may not sound like a lot, but consider this is averaged over the majority of the basin shown in the red outline in the image above. A deviation like that is unheard of... until now.
To put it into more relatable terms, considering what's been normal for the most recent 30 years, the statistical chance that any February day would be as warm as it is right now is 1-in-280,000. That's not a typo. This is according to University of Miami researcher Brian McNoldy...
And that 1-in-280,000 is compared against a recent climate, which had already been warmed substantially by climate change. If you tried to compare it against a climate considered normal around the year 1900, the math would become nonsensical. Meaning an occurrence like this simply would not be possible.
McNoldy also stressed the shocking nature of current conditions to the Times, telling Gelles that "the North Atlantic has been record-breakingly warm for almost a year now... It's just astonishing. Like, it doesn't seem real."
The new comments from McNoldy and other scientists come on the heels of various institutions and experts worldwide recently confirming that 2023 was the hottest year in human history. Research also showed that it was the warmest year on record for the oceans, which capture about 91% of excess heat from greenhouse gases.
As Common Dreamsreported last month, Adam Scaife, a principal fellow at the United Kingdom's Met Office, said that "it is striking that the temperature record for 2023 has broken the previous record set in 2016 by so much because the main effect of the current El Niño will come in 2024."
That's the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, a climate phenomenon that also has a cool phase called La Niña expected later this year. Still, Scaife warned that "the Met Office's 2024 temperature forecast shows this year has strong potential to be another record-breaking year."
Throughout the record-shattering 2023, experts also expressed alarm. After an April study showed that the ocean is heating up faster than previously thought, the BBCrevealed that some scientists declined to speak about it on the record, reporting that "one spoke of being 'extremely worried and completely stressed.'"
In July, when a buoy roughly 40 miles south of Miami recorded a sea surface temperature of 101.1°F just after a "100% coral mortality" event at a restoration site, Florida State University associate professor Mariana Fuentes toldNPR that "if you have several species that are being impacted at the same time by an increase in temperature, there's going to be a general collapse of the whole ecosystem."
The following month, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that the average daily global ocean surface temperature hit 69.7°F, and deputy director Samantha Burgess said, "The fact that we've seen the record now makes me nervous about how much warmer the ocean may get between now and next March."
"The more we burn fossil fuels, the more excess heat will be taken out by the oceans, which means the longer it will take to stabilize them and get them back to where they were," Burgess emphasized at the time.
Last year ended with a United Nations climate summit that scientists called "a tragedy for the planet," because the final deal out of the conference—led by an Emirati oil CEO—did not demand a global phaseout of fossil fuels.
Azerbaijan, which is set to host this year's U.N. conference in November, has similarly selected a former fossil fuel executive to lead the event. The country also plans to increase its gas production by a third during the next decade.
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Coral Bleaching Across Caribbean Raises Fears of 'Catastrophic Mortality' of Reefs Worldwide
“This will only get worse until there is a global reduction in greenhouse gas emissions," said one expert.
Aug 11, 2023
A coral reef forecast released by scientists in the United States this week projects high levels of heat stress for reefs across the Caribbean and off the coasts of several Central and South American countries in the coming months, prompting alarm among experts regarding a potential threat to reefs throughout the planet's oceans.
The Coral Reef Watch project at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that reefs throughout the Caribbean and the southern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans have a 90% chance of heat stress over the next four months, necessitating an alert level of 2.
Under Alert Level 2, scientists say severe bleaching as well as coral reef mortality are likely.
Derek Manzello, coordinator of Coral Reef Watch, toldThe Guardian Friday that by continuing to extract fossil fuels for energy and adding to planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions, humans are conducting "essentially a big field experiment."
"I don't think any of these places have seen heat stress like this before," Manzello told The Guardian.
University of California, Davis atmospheric sciences student Colin McCarthy called the projection for the next four months "shocking."
"Virtually all North American coral reefs could face bleaching in the next four months," he said on social media.
Warmer water causes the algae in a coral reef's tissues to be expelled, leaving the reef with a bleached appearance. The algae is coral's primary food source and its loss makes the reef more susceptible to disease and mortality—harming the marine species that depend on the reef.
Coral reefs provide a habitat for more than a quarter of all marine species.
NOAA's forecast comes days after the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the climate agency of the European Union, released a report on unprecedented high temperatures in the world's oceans.
The average daily global ocean surface temperature reached 20.96°C (69.7°F) last week, breaking 2016's previous record of 20.95°C.
Late last month, researchers found that the ocean 40 miles south of the Miami coast in Florida reached 101.1°F, near a site where scientists detected "100% coral mortality."
"We are marching towards a Caribbean-wide coral bleaching event in the next month if things don't change," Manzello told The Guardian.
The loss of coral reefs would have catastrophic consequences for fishing industries across the world, coastlines that depend on reefs to act as a buffer against powerful storms—which are becoming more common as a result of the climate crisis—and advances in medical science, as experts have used reefs to research new medications and treatments for diseases including cancer and Alzheimer's.
In NOAA's 7-day outlook for the world's coral reefs on Friday, the vast majority of the oceans were at least under a "watch" for bleaching. Large swaths of the South Pacific were under Alert Level 1 or 2.
“This will only get worse until there is a global reduction in greenhouse gas emissions," Manzello told The Guardian. "The big fear is there will be catastrophic mortality."
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'Terrifying': Scientists Raise Alarm Over Unprecedented Global Ocean Heat
The global average ocean surface temperature is expected to rise even further in the coming months as El Niño strengthens.
Aug 04, 2023
Climate scientists on Friday said the rapidly rising temperature of the planet's oceans is cause for major concern, particularly as policymakers in the top fossil fuel emissions-producing countries show no sign of ending planet-heating oil and gas extraction.
The European Union's climate agency, Copernicus Climate Change Service, reported this week that the average daily global ocean surface temperature across the planet reached 20.96°C (69.7°F), breaking the record of 20.95°C that was previously set in 2016.
The record set in 2016 was reported during an El Niño event, a naturally occurring phenomenon which causes warm water to rise to the surface off the western coast of South America. The weather pattern was at its strongest when the high ocean temperature was recorded that year.
El Niño is forming this year as well, but has not yet reached its strongest point—suggesting new records for ocean heat will be set in the coming months and potentially wreak havoc in the world's marine ecosystems.
Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, told the BBC that March is typically when the oceans are at their hottest.
"The fact that we've seen the record now makes me nervous about how much warmer the ocean may get between now and next March," she told the outlet.
The warming oceans are part of a feedback loop that's developed as fossil fuel emissions have increasingly trapped heat in the atmosphere.
Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are warming the oceans, leaving them less able to absorb the emissions and contributing to intensifying weather patterns.
"Warmer sea surface temperatures lead to a warmer atmosphere and more evaporation, and both of these lead to more moisture in the atmosphere which can also lead to more intense rainfall events," Burgess told "Today" on BBC Radio 4. "And warmer sea surface temperatures may also lead to more energy being available for hurricanes."
The warming ocean could have cascading effects on the world's ecosystems and economies, reducing fish stocks as marine species migrate to find cooler waters.
"We are seeing changes already in terms of species distributions, prevalence of harmful algae blooms popping up maybe where we would not necessarily expect them, and the species shifting from warmer southern locations up into the colder regions as well which is quite worrying," Helen Findlay, a biological oceanographer at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the United Kingdom, told The Evening Standard.
"We are also seeing more species coming up from the south, things like European anchovy or recently examples of Mediterranean octopus coming up into our waters and that is having a knock-on impact for the fish that we catch, and consequences of economics," she added.
Certain parts of the world's oceans provoked particular alarm among scientists in recent days, with water off the coast of Florida hitting 38.44°C—over 101°F—last week.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told the BBC that ocean temperatures in that area typically hover between 23°C and 31°C at this time of year.
Since scientists first began measuring ocean temperatures using satellites and research buoys about four decades ago, the global average sea surface temperature has gone up by roughly 0.6°C.
On social media, climate scientists urged news outlets to explicitly connect the rising ocean temperatures to fossil fuel companies and the policymakers who are enabling them to continue fueling the climate emergency—such as British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who announced more than 100 new oil and gas licenses in the North Sea this week.
The New York Times this week reported "terrifying Earth breakdown but barely [mentioned] the cause is the fossil fuel industry," said National Aeronautics and Space Administration climate scientist Peter Kalmus.
"The more we burn fossil fuels, the more excess heat will be taken out by the oceans, which means the longer it will take to stabilize them and get them back to where they were," Burgess told the BBC.
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