Jeff Berardelli for WFLA Tampa:
Global oceans are so hot right now, scientists all around the world are struggling to explain the phenomenon. Sea surface temperatures in June are so far above record territory it is being deemed almost statistically impossible in a climate without global heating.
This is happening across the huge expanse of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
In the North Atlantic Ocean — which was already way above record levels — temperatures have strikingly shot directly upwards over the past two weeks.
The shocking visual is prompting many to ask whether this recent surge is evidence that human-caused heating has propelled the climate past a tipping point.
Luckily, climate scientists say the answer is likely no. Instead, it is much more probable to be a compounding coalescence of various factors – some natural and some human-caused. In other words, a coincidence of natural factors piled on top of the steady trend of human-caused global heating.
Regardless it’s a vivid illustration of the new extremes Earth can reach when conditions are ripe.
Ocean temperatures in any given region are the result of complex interactions between ocean currents, weather, climate oscillations and longer-term climate trends. In the case of this year, there are many factors, but the biggest factor is the change from La Niña to El Niño in the Tropical Pacific Ocean – a natural cycle that has global implications.
For the past three years, Earth has been in a rare prolonged La Niña event. During that time, heat piled up in the tropical Western Pacific Ocean near Indonesia. But this spring, subsurface heat started propagating eastward across the Pacific Ocean and reached the surface. This marked the beginning of the warm phase called El Niño.With warm water now sitting on the surface of the entire Tropical Pacific Ocean – a particularly wide swath of the ocean basin – Pacific ocean temperatures have been rising fast.
But the effects of El Niño are not confined to the Pacific Ocean. The ocean-air heat exchange results in changes in the atmospheric steering flow and pressure systems in the Atlantic as well. These changes in weather over the Atlantic Ocean, some related to El Niño, can have significant impacts on surface ocean temperatures.
At the same time, in the high latitudes of Canada and the far North Atlantic, a very blocked jet stream pattern has persisted for weeks. These persistent weather patterns have a significant impact on the underlying sea surface temperatures. Areas where it is sunny and calm tend to warm up and cloudy, windy areas tend to cool.
Canada has been trapped under a heat dome leading to record setting wildfires and the US eastern seaboard/ western Atlantic has been stuck under the opposite — a cool dip in the jet stream. And over on the other side of the Atlantic a ocean heat dome has been present near Europe.
The result of this stubborn configuration is a cooler than normal NW Atlantic and a much warmer than normal NE Atlantic.
To the south across the Tropical Atlantic, this odd and persistent configuration of atmospheric steering and pressure systems has resulted in record-shattering heat. Sea surface temperatures are so hot across the “main development region” (seen in deep red between Africa and the Caribbean) they have already reached levels expected during peak hurricane season in September.
While it’s still several years away, after decades too long, and the tail end of global oil use is likely to be decades more, the IEA is saying peak oil demand will happen this decade:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/14/peak-in-global-oil-demand-in-sight-before-end-of-decade
From the Guardian Article:
“Oil producers need to pay careful attention to the gathering pace of change and calibrate their investment decisions to ensure an orderly transition,” Birol said.
In the late 1980s there was a general consensus about how big the US car market would be by the year 2000, yet there was a glut of production by then because car makers had overestimated how much of that market share they each would have. I can see the various oil&gas companies making similar mistakes.
According to Kevin E. Trenberth on the PBS News Hour two nights ago, El Nino is just taking off and could bring higher ocean temperatures for next 5-7 years.
[? Did you intend to reply to that particular comment or was that a common
Replymisfire?]I feel like chasing Kevin Trenberth around hitting him with Eric Cartman’s wiffle bat until I collapse in sobs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/14/climate/enriched-uranium-nuclear-russia-ohio.html
Ocean temperatures are so anomalously high that Eliot Jacobson, a retired mathematics professor who created the graph using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had to “increase the upper bound on the y-axis,” he said.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time, but this one was like, ‘Oh my God, look at this,'” Jacobson said of the graph. “What is going on here?”
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-ocean-temperatures-el-nio-blame.html?
“Notable changes have been observed in the inflows and outflows of the Arctic Ocean over the past decade, including unprecedented high temperatures and remarkably low salinities. ”
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/992211?fbclid=IwAR1e4eXzq4q9s24njHUn3IJyV-Nvk0IUe26Tku4aYaGOOWlu9_XwVFtVK6M
“Water can only hold so much oxygen at certain temperatures, and certainly we know that seawater temperatures are rising.”
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/12/1181661320/fish-kill-texas-beaches-explained?fbclid=IwAR0YhgJ4UJE1Z40iU39_qpjGFOcExza61-ZpOw6kZ_OqtvU9AKQIkQ084FE
“We used to think that changes in the deep ocean could only occur over centuries. But these key observations from the Weddell Sea show that changes in the dark abyss can take place over just a few decades.”
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2023/06/shrinking-and-warming-of-antarctic-deep-ocean-waters.page
The ocean people, like the glacier people, have been having their predictive butts handed to them by Mother Nature.