Climate Letter #1338

There is an important new story in the news today, based on a short article written for the journal Science by four scientists who have pulled together all of the best available information about how the oceans have been warming over the years in association with the rise in greenhouse gases.  They draw a number of conclusions that in turn have an assortment of  implications, all of which are of serious interest.  I am going to give you four different stories about the article, each of which has a bit of difference in emphasis on how to put this information into perspective, plus the article itself.  It should all be read, and then I’ll mop up with some personal commentary.

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From Inside Climate News, we first learn that the study “strengthens the consensus that the warming of the world’s oceans is accelerating.  It’s a trend that climate models have long predicted, but it had been difficult to confirm until recently.  The findings are vindication of the scientific community’s work so far and lend greater weight to the projections for warming through the end of this century.”  This has been underestimated by IPCC reports.  Then, “Ocean temperatures are also much less variable than surface temperatures, which can swing greatly from year to year, and therefore give a clearer signal of global warming.”  From Kevin Trenberth, “With 2018 the warmest year yet in the oceans, there’s no doubt about what is happening.  It emphasizes the unequivocal fact that the ocean is warming, the planet is warming, and it has consequences.”
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Joe Romm, writing for ThinkProgress, puts extra emphasis on the idea that, since ocean warming is a better indicator of what is happening to Earth in comparison with air temperature warming, that makes 2018 the hottest year on record.  Modern measurements of ocean heat content have become so accurate that the whole idea of a “hiatus” in the warming trend in recent years is practically eliminated.  The oceans, at depth, are not bothered by all sorts of temporary disruptions on the surface the way air temperatures are.
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From Carbon Brief we get more insight into the background of how the story developed.  One of the four authors, Zeke Hausfather, is a frequent contributor to this website.  For scientists, an important conclusion is that the models they are using to make future predictions have now been shown to be trustworthy when tested against proven results that happened in the past.  Those results have not previously been clear with respect to ocean heat content (OHC) because it is so difficult to measure.
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Here is the standard news release from U of Cal Berkeley, as published by Phys.org, emphasizing the fact that previous data reluctantly accepted for making historical physical measurements of ocean heat content were too low.
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I like the idea of having a completely separate definition for global warming and climate change.  The “globe” in this case is almost completely represented by ocean water, which is about two miles deep on average, accumulates heat in a slow and steady way and then firmly holds onto it for many thousands of years.  The ocean surfaces, which can be thought of as only a few inches deep at any one time, have a totally different pattern of gaining, losing and holding heat, with the same kind of shorter-term rhythms experienced by surfaces on land and the lowest portions of the atmosphere.  Surface heat of all three types grows slowly, but not nearly as steadily as the full heat of the deep oceans.  Air temperatures over the oceans, 70% of climate air, will keep warming as long as ocean surfaces are warming, and ocean surfaces will keep warming until they can no longer pass part of their daily collection of heat into the depths below them, which will continue for at least another one or two hundred years even if the greenhouse gas above stops growing.  Conditions governing the interaction of climate air and land surfaces don’t work that way because there are practically no depths below the land surfaces capable of stealing collected heat.  One more point, I am not convinced by looking at the charts that ocean heat content has “accelerated” during the past couple of decades.  That part of the uptrend has a more linear type of look than it did before.
Carl

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