Climate change: the oceans are warming faster and faster
The temperature of the oceans is rising faster and faster, as a recent study shows. The authors call for the burning of fossil fuels to be stopped.
Wave: Warming will continue to accelerate.
(Image: Brett Allen / Shutterstock.com)
In 2023 and early 2024, the seas were warmer than ever before – temperatures reached record highs for 450 days in a row. One reason was the El Niño phenomenon. But that's not all: according to a study by the University of Reading in England, the oceans are warming faster and faster.
Ocean temperatures are currently rising by 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. In the late 1980s, the figure was 0.04 degrees Celsius. The warming of the oceans has therefore more than quadrupled in the past four decades, as Christopher Merchant, Richard Allan and Owen Embury write in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
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“If the oceans were a bathtub of water, then in the 1980s the tap was running slowly, warming the water by only a fraction of a degree per decade. But now the tap is running much faster and the warming has accelerated,” says Merchant. “To slow the warming, we need to turn off the hot tap by reducing global carbon emissions and moving towards net-zero.”
The Earth is absorbing more and more energy
For the study, the team calculated the rate of temperature increase using a statistical model based on satellite data since 1985. One reason for the ever faster rising temperatures is the growing energy imbalance on Earth: more and more energy is being absorbed by the Earth, less and less is escaping into space.
This imbalance is because the concentration of greenhouse gases is increasing, and the Earth is reflecting less sunlight into space than before. The imbalance has roughly doubled since 2010.
According to the researchers, warming will continue to accelerate: Although the global warming of the oceans from the last few decades gives no indication of what will happen in the future. However, it is plausible that the temperature rise of the past 40 years will be exceeded in the next 20 years.
This is important for the overall climate development: the surface temperature of the oceans sets the pace of global warming. This accelerating warming therefore underlines the urgency of reducing the burning of fossil fuels to prevent an even faster rise in temperature and stabilize the climate.
With the warming of the oceans, severe weather events such as extreme storms are becoming more likely.
(wpl)
