I know we don't really need any more bad climate news, but the current record-setting ocean temperatures can't be ignored. The effects are so large that they are almost literally off the charts ("completely unprecedented in the satellite record" according to one scientist):
It seems that there are a whole host of reasons for the hugely increased temperatures in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans this year, a perfect storm, so to speak.
Perhaps the main one is the change from the La Niña conditions that have held for an unusually long time over the last few years to El Niño this year. With this change, sub-surface heat has begun propagating eastward across the Pacific, and reached the surface, and a warm phase of unknown duration is in prospect. This bodes poorly for drought and heat dome conditions in North America, the beginnings of which we are already experiencing, and the prospect of a record-setting hurricane season to come.
But other factors play into it as well, including: weaker than usual trade winds, resulting in less cooling of ocean waters; the cleaner air due to America's Clean Air Act (in particular, the huge reductions in sulphur dioxide emissions from cargo ships), allowing more solar radiation to reach the earth; fewer Saharan dust storms having a similar effect on the eastern side of the Atlantic; even the eruption of the huge underwater Hunga Tonga volcano in the South Pacific Ocean back in January 2022 may factor into the increased ocean temperatures.
And, of course, underlying it all, is climate change and global heating. After all, the oceans have been absorbing most of the heat from human-generated greenhouse gases for decades now. Conservative news outlets that don't like to admit that humans are heating up the planet and causing global devastation, for whatever reasons of their own, will almost certainly try to argue that all these myriad other factors are the real culprits and that oil and gas remain blameless, just as they have done with the Canadian wildfires. And it's true that teasing out how much of the blame can be directly attributed to climate change is a mug's game. But its direct and indirect effects are clearly huge.
Before this year, the warmest ocean temperatures on record were from 2022, followed by 2021, then 2020. You see the trend? 2023, though, looks set to blow all of those successive ecosystems out of the water (so to speak). 2024 is predicted to be even worse, as El Niño intensifies. Along with the general temperature increases and the consequences for aquatic life, this kind of heating creates inceasingly intense and frequent "hot spots" in the oceans, hot spots that attract equally intense weather activity above them - storms, cyclones and hurricanes.
Exactly how this massive temperature anomaly will translate into extreme weather events later this year, we will have to wait and see. But it doesn't look good. Have we just blithely sashayed past a global tipping point?
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