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Why Is the Sea So Hot?
- Projectiboga 3y agoI have a few serious points to mention. One ice consumes massive amounts of heat during the last degree of melting vs the next degrees up, like 2 to 300 times as much. Two, CO2 levels have increased at a pace never seen in the geologic record. We haven't been over 420 ppm for millions of years and the last time we were our temp was almost 20 degrees warmer. Climate shifts often happen rapidly finishing with an exponential shift, the scary part is just starting. https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2024/03/co2-rise-is-accelerating.html?m=1 https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2024/03/co2-rise-is-acceler...
- mitchbob 3y agohttps://archive.ph/jUzOZ https://archive.ph/jUzOZ
- a_gnostic 3y ago[flagged]
- GeoAtreides 3y agoyes, it has never happened before: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ it's a on literally 12 month record breaking streak
- Scarblac 3y agoThat chart is so insane. To see the last year the orange line plus the black line) so apart from all other lines before.
- lostlogin 3y agoThe XKCD of global temperatures one that always comes to mind for me. https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- Scarblac 3y agoYes, but whatever starting March 2023 is much more extreme than climate change in the last decades has been, it's a very different scale than even that XKCD.
- RandomLensman 3y agoHow can you take "has never happened before" from that chart?
- boesboes 3y agoDo you have eyes?
- RandomLensman 3y agoMaybe I am using the thing wrong, but I see a little over 40years which isn't "never before" by any stretch of imagination. The reason to be concerned about exceeding some previous maximum on a small sample is that we have some understanding about the processes.
- NemoNobody 3y agoIt would be really convenient if we could somehow utilize climate change to kill off all of us that refuse to see the truth. Unfortunately, it seems extinction is pretty indiscriminate.
- razodactyl 3y agoNo no no. We don't do snark here. :P
- exe34 3y agoIf this is a genuine question, 2024 is the top line on the chart.
- bergen 3y agoYou clearly have not watched or understood the sources
- waitforit 3y agoDo you think it's winter everywhere? It's about global temperatures and it was summer on the southern hemisphere.
- perihelions 3y ago- "Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai produced relatively little sulfur dioxide but a fantastic amount of water vapor, and its warming effects, it’s believed, are still being felt." If this puzzles anyone, the missing key is that this water vapor was injected into the stratosphere. https://www.nasa.gov/earth/tonga-eruption-blasted-unprecedented-amount-of-water-into-stratosphere/ https://www.nasa.gov/earth/tonga-eruption-blasted-unpreceden... - "...estimate that the Tonga eruption sent around [146 million metric tons] of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer."
- profsummergig 3y ago"...estimate that the Tonga eruption sent around [146 million metric tons] of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer." Is this one of the reasons why winter's been so weird this year in North America? I've heard of El Nino as being the suspected cause, but this sending of water vapor into the air also must have had long-term effects.
- a_gnostic 3y agoIs water vapor some kind of greenhouse gas? How does its' infrared absorption measure up to carbon dioxides'?
- atoav 3y agoAfaik it is a strong greenhouse gas, but under normal circumstances the amount of water vapor in the global air is more or less the same so it won't matter that much. Now we don't live in normal circumstances, but in a society that hasn't given economic value to an environment that is essential to it's survival. And so it happens like in France where nuclear energy couldn't be used anymore because there wasn't enough water in the rivers for the process anymore, during a particularly hot summer. Essentially water vapor is one of the runaway feedback loops for cilmate change, more vapor means more greenhouse effect, means warmer, means more vapor, etc. This works until the air is saturated. Climate is driven by a bunch of those complex feedback loops and includes tipping points (e.g. particular big ice structures melting) so predicting how exactly it will pan out isn't trivial. A side effect of more water vapor is also that storms get stronger and rain falls worse.
- graphe 3y agoI watched Sabina Hossenfelder talk about historical predictive models being wrong and too cold on their predictions due to the way they looked at the clouds and the scattering of the light (quantifying the amount of water vapor in the clouds). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9sDyooxf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9sDyooxf4 Climate scientists are disagreeing over the hot climate models. This is not a debate on the human effects, simply the way to interpret the data.
- it_citizen 3y agoThis video is one of the most scary thing I have watched on climate change. I have been thinking about it since it was published. I have read Michael Mann’s answer to James Hansen and that didn’t make me feel any better. I am really waiting to have more people looking into it.
- graphe 3y agoI agree. I knew the climate models were wrong so I dismissed the climate scientists. I did not know how wrong they were and on what measurement. The data on human causes is perplexing, as lower car emissions warmed the planet as the co2 scattered less light causing the temperature to rise, however this would cause acid rain and other issues even though the temperature lowered. Temperature is like reading the Ghz of a computer, it could mean many things. Acidification, chemical dumping, and extreme weather patterns can occur with deadly effects with or without readable measurements in temperature. Be ready for 'it' human caused or not.
- mellosouls 3y agoThere are quite a few discussions here on the topic over the past couple of years, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36997834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36997834 Ocean Heat Record Broken, 289 comments More: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1710661488&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1647734400&page=0&prefix=true&query=Ocean%20temperature&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1710661488&dateRange=custom&...
- vinnyvichy 3y agoSea surface temperature datasets https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/optimum-interpolation-sst https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/optimum-interpolation-sst Visualizations https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ Most recent HN thread from yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39719391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39719391
- ImHereToVote 3y agoCould it have something to do with the biggest act of terrorism of industrial infrastructure in history? The Nordstream pipeline leak has resulted in the biggest single release of methane gas in history, the release also neatly coincides with a huge jump in the ocean mean temperature anomaly. The war on terror has truly failed.
- NemoNobody 3y agoI thought we, the Americans, literally did that "act of terrorism" and said it was the Ukranians.
- living_room_pc 3y agoDidn't know of that. Can you link me? > biggest act of terrorism Not to be pedantic, but that was just an attack, I wouldn't call it terrorism. Not sure anyone was scared by an explosion at the bottom of the Baltic.
- vinnyvichy 3y agoTop line of top graph: 2024 ocean heat https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/
- astahlx 3y agoWe are leaving the conditions that work for humans and other animals. 3 billion climate refugees in the next 30 years. We must slow down the climate catastrophe now.
- Dudhbbh3343 3y agoYou're not helping the situation by making these hyperbolic statements that can be easily be argued against and muddy the dialog.
- perrygeo 3y agoThere were three sentences. Which one exactly was hyperbolic? - "We are leaving the conditions that work for humans and other animals". We're outside the envelope (the historical range) of biotic and abiotic conditions that defined our species' existence on earth for the duration of our time as a species. We are seeing climate extremes never before experienced by the genus homo, let alone homo sapiens. This is a matter of climatic record, absolutely no controversy here. - "3 billion climate refugees in the next 30 years"? That's a future prediction so obviously we can't confirm or deny it. We've "only" seen 100s of millions globally displaced already from small-scale recent collapses. But those have other causal factor in addition to climate. Still, sea level keeps rising. Water extraction continues sinking coastal water tables into brackish water. Extreme storms happen more and more frequently. Most people on earth live near the ocean. Totaled property damage is more and more common. 3 billion people displaced in 30 years is plausible given the recent trends. It might be less if we're lucky. - "We must slow down the climate catastrophe now." Given the ongoing catastrophe, I fail to see any hyperbole in this statement.
- momdad420 3y agoWhat's hyperbolic? The fact is no one knows how bad it'll be and how soon. Does that mean no statement can be made about the future? We're already seeing problems around water sourcing. I don't see how any of OPs statements are a stretch. Every time I see someone make a statement about the future negative affects of climate change inevitably someone comes around to say that's not helping. It reads like a shade of denialism. How can you fix a problem without reviewing the consequences? I've yet to hear these same commenters suggest what would help.
- loadingcmd 3y agoOther than a mild winter, there has been no coverage or news on a tangible impact to either agriculture or extreme weather events, merely speculations on what could happen. It would also mean that as far as a real impact, the system is self balancing and we should not worry too much?
- matthewdgreen 3y agoI don’t understand at all what you’re saying. If we’re at the start of some unknown runaway feedback loop, the fact that we had a (relatively, it was quite warm) normal winter means nothing at all. Just because your car is moving slowly when it starts rolling down a hill, does not mean you should be casual about the situation.
- loadingcmd 3y agoOk, let me try to explain myself. I think what you’re referring to the possibility of a perturbation that can result in an uncontrolled descent down the hill until it reaches another stable equilibrium (a local equilibrium in a non linear system). I am picturing a ball rolling down from a peak until it comes to rest in a valley My question is that given the large excursion recently seen in the temperature graph, would we not expect to see large scale effects that would be visible? The implication is that until this impact is clear enough, strong action that is usually advocated, may not be taken. For instance, the reliance on greenhouse power plants continues to increase worldwide including the US. While renewables have made progress, there is no clear path to net zero over the next decade. So the question remains on the predictions from the models, vs tangible evidence.
- NemoNobody 3y agoYeah, love how you clarified the effects of gravity - the ball rolling down the hill, that totally cleared the confusion I had about a car rolling, whew - almost hurt my head there. What still hurts my head is this whole concept of like feedback loops and like how nothing about the projections show any like sort of leveling off - like maybe you can help me make sense of that. What happens if it's just like a really really big hill and there is no valley of "equilibrium" to get to?? Does the ball stop rolling before the car or will they at least stop before we all die?? Maybe I've lost the analogy
- rapjr9 3y agoSeems like there is a natural experiment here that could be easily tried. Let the ocean going ships switch back to the high sulfer fuel for a while and see what happens to the ocean temperature. Even if it proves the effect is small it would at least make it predictable and serve as input into models. The risks compared to other types of geoengineering seem small also since the ships were already putting sulfer into the atmosphere for decades and it's easily reversible. Maybe 6 months of allowing high sulfer fuel would be enough to get the data? If the ocean temperatures drop dramatically that would be scary, it would mean that eliminating other similar causes of sulfer pollution (low sulfer fuels being replaced by EV's) would probably have the same effect.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jaybrendansmith 3y agoAgree. Short of direct stratospheric injection of sulphur dioxide, just waiving the regulation for 1 year would give us quite a lot of data about the real-world impacts, and allow us to calibrate climate models correctly. It would be a first step to building consensus that we need climate engineering in the short term in order slow the rate of climate change and lower the ecosystem impacts until we can fully shift to a non-carbon based economy. It's not necessarily the warming, it's the rapid rate of change that is the danger here.
- slowmovintarget 3y agoWouldn't that lead to a return of the acid rain that was killing off ocean life already?
- rapjr9 3y agoYes, though ocean ships are not the only source of sulfer (and even low sulfer fuels have some sulfer.) But the duration would be short, we've already been doing it for decades, and the data could be invaluable. Regardless of the politics and peoples perceptions, it seems like the right thing to do scientifically. If you're against tampering with the environment then consider that by switching to low sulfer fuels we have just tampered with the environment in a huge way, without any scientific study of the results or forethought as to what the consequences would be. Halting pollution is just as big an experiment in geoengineering as any other type of geoengineering. This is an opportunity to learn something about geoengineering at low cost and low risk. Best case may be that putting the sulfer back shows little effect. Worst case is it shows a big effect and then we have to very careful about when and how we end other sources of particulate pollution that may have an effect on warming. That would be terrible since it may mean we'd have to keeping putting poisons into the atmosphere to keep from cooking the planet for a while, but at least we'd have a better idea of what we're doing and what effects air pollution is currently causing.