Oceans hit highest temperature on record

lbriner

When I was younger, I remember thinking, "a few degrees, what difference does that make?" Then when I grew older I realised that in Climate science a few degrees is the difference between survival and annihilation. A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world. I am glad that I live far away from the effects but it is sad to think of people losing all kinds of things for the lack of respect of Mother Earth!

gmuslera

"highest temperature on record"... so far. There are still ~4 months till peak El Niño, and then some months to spread effects.

cdrnsf

Meanwhile governments are electing to either do nothing or actively make the problem worse (particularly in the case of the US — expanding fossil fuel extraction, pushing data center build out and attacking renewables like wind).

yboris

My favorite source of graphs about this ongoing catastrophe: https://x.com/EliotJacobson - retired professor of mathematics and computer science Example: https://x.com/EliotJacobson/status/2091911667903041543

ang_cire

As someone who works in risk management, I think I have a hard time understanding how anyone can be so blase about climate change. Like, it truly takes a level of willful ignorance to have something so dire happening, and just choosing to either ignore it, or ignore the evidence for it. Like, even if you think the science isn't that accurate, the impacts , the massive potential harms, should outweigh the choice to just ignore it. Then again, there are people buying wooden homes in wildfire, hurricane, and flood zones, so who knows; maybe doing risk management as a job has just inured me to head-in-the-sand reactions, since I've seen what happens when you don't beat the odds. This isn't a personal risk, either, like riding a motorcycle where you're the only one who's going to get hurt when your number comes up. This is literally going to kill millions.

neom

BBC did a pretty good deep dive a few days ago on what we're in for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xZCh8eDZFc DW also, similar stuff, but the guest is quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcl5Mn373Oc Anton Petrov covered it from a much more science lens a couple months back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRoU3whzX_Q

Varelion

Thank God we have a new technology that is aggressively using water, power, and making the world increasingly hotter.

johnnyApplePRNG

I can feel it. The weather this year up in Canada here has been extremely odd. Constantly. You can tell something is off.

elorant

Meanwhile, canned sardines went 20% up in the last month in Greece. And that's while we have plenty of local production. I can't imagine what it would be in countries where they import everything. Give it a few years and all fish food prices could go up substantially.

karol

OMG, that's like 200 years of 4.5bn?

zero-sharp

I remember watching a documentary which talked about feedback loops in the climate. It might have been in the context of history. If the ocean warms up enough, it causes the CO2 in the ocean itself (either in the deposits or the gas saturated in the water) to get released into the atmosphere. Maybe I'm not using the right technical words, but there is a certain amount of CO2 that sits within the ocean that is separate from the atmosphere. In any case, after a certain point it becomes a feedback loop: warmer climate -> more CO2 joins the atmosphere -> warmer climate.

willmeyers

This El Niño is going to be interesting come Christmas time. Lot's of weather and climate unpredictability coming to a region near you!

livinglist

I scuba dive in Monterey, CA every other weekend, and just came back from a liveaboard in Galapagos in May. The water is much warmer this year, and it is very noticeable because usually in Galapagos, divers are expected to wear 8mm wetsuit or dry suit to be comfortable in the water, but this year even a 5mm made me feel too warm. In Monterey, water temp used to be around 11-13°C but this year it’s easily above 16°C, divers also reported more sightings of spiny lobsters which were rare in Monterey because water was too cold for them.

cb321

The "scatter line plot" in TFA is all same shade of red on white with no year labels. This seems like a missed visualization opportunity. Using some kind of color scheme/gradient to represent the 1979-2026 years in a way that can show long-term "trend". (A 50 frame movie at, say, 5 fps with same axes or maybe "all years" as faded background as the current year pops around in bold is another possibility, but a scientific paper format doesn't let people do .mp4s.) I know I've seen multi-colored "scatter lines" in IPCC reports. Seemed worth asking rather than doing it myself.

layer8

Original source: https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-daily-global-sea-su...

jauntywundrkind

Not adding anything super major here, but to repeat the broadcast: this has such a broad danger to it, is a core driver of ocean acidification (along with the ambient CO2 the ocean sinks up), by reducing the oxygen carrying capacity of water. > Ocean acidification has been called the "evil twin of global warming" and "the other CO2 problem". Increased ocean temperatures and oxygen loss act concurrently with ocean acidification and constitute the "deadly trio" of climate change pressures on the marine environment. The impacts of this will be most severe for coral reefs and other shelled marine organisms,as well as those populations that depend on the ecosystem services they provide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

asphodele

With less ice around than there used to be, the same incident energy can do a lot more ocean heating. It takes 80 calories to convert 1 gram of ice at 0C to 1 gram of water at 0C. Once the ice is melted, a further 80 calories can raise the temperature of the gram of water at 0C to 80C

tehnoslow

Worrying news, but honestly not surprising anymore. What's interesting is that El Niño hasn't even peaked yet, if it gets as strong as they're predicting 2027 is gonna be even hotter. Also kinda depressing to realize that no matter how much one person does, it won't make a dent globally. And what really stings is that even when decisions get made they're either too late or half-assed. Guess all we can do is hope we don't live to see things get really bad...

floro

The biggest lie we're being told in the west is that we have a hand in climate change. China produces 60% of global Co2. When you look at the graph, Europe isn't even visible. If we truly cared about climate change we would stop buying from China. But we all know this won't ever happen because we don't really care enough. It's just virtue signaling. Buy an AC you're not saving the planet by sweating your ass off.

zmmmmm

The big question / risk is whether there are unknown tipping points where things run away. Many are talked about - ice melting, reducing reflectivity, more heating causes more heating etc. But some fraction of these are probably unknowable.