[MCN] Why Montanans need to keep an eye on ocean heat

[Lance Olsen]

"Ignorance of remote causes disposeth men to attribute all events to the causes immediate and instrumental: for these are all the causes they perceive.”

Attributed  to Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) 
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Excerpts:  Two recently published peer-reviewed studies make clear that the planet’s oceans are continuing to set hottest-yet temperature records nearly every year and, secondly, that the rate of ocean warming is in virtual lockstep with what modern climate models have projected.

One study <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00376-019-8276-x>, led by Cheng and colleagues and published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, concludes that 2018 was the hottest year ever recorded in the oceans. In fact, since the turn of the century, all but three years – 2007, 2010, and 2016 – have set a new ocean heat record.

Those three exceptions shared a key trait: Each was characterized by significant El Niño events, which transfer heat from the ocean to the air. As a result, for heat at Earth’s surface (in the air above both the land and oceans), 2007 was the second-hottest year up to that time, and 2010 and 2016 both subsequently broke the surface temperature record. 

About 93 percent of global warming goes into heating the oceans <https://skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=12>, compared to about 2 percent warming the atmosphere. As the hottest year in the oceans, 2018 therefore was the hottest year ever recorded for the planet as a whole.

What’s it all mean? Because humans live on Earth’s surface, it’s only natural that we focus primarily on the air temperatures that we experience most directly. But most of the heat trapped by the tens of billions of tons of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere each year is absorbed by the oceans; it’s there that El Niño and La Niña events exert significant influence over the amount of heat transferred each year to the air. As a result, surface temperatures are quite variable, and the public at large can mistakenly focus on short-term surface warming changes <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/nov/24/study-drives-a-sixth-nail-in-the-global-warming-pause-myth> and lose sight of the big picture.

https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/02/earths-oceans-are-routinely-breaking-heat-records/

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