Ocean Warming Study So Distressing, Some Scientists Didn't Want to Talk About It

https://www.commondreams.org/news/ocean-warming-study

by Paul-Craft • 3 years ago

77 71 3 years ago

saulpw• 3 years ago

In March, researchers examining the ocean off the east coast of North America found that the water's surface was 13.8°C, or 14.8°F, hotter than the average temperature between 1981 and 2011.

How does 13.8°C translate into 14.8°F, in any way? I thought at first maybe they were converting absolute temperatures, but that doesn't check out either. I'm sure ocean warming is hugely terrible but this casts doubt on the whole article.

GreedClarifies• 3 years ago

Not to mention that water being either "13.8°C, or 14.8°F" at similar times is laughable.

I suspect that they are taking some point in time and comparing it to average temperatures, which is beyond comical. What a farce.

throwbadubadu• 3 years ago

Who they, the scientists? Come on, that is just some strange error in this commondreams article, neither in the data or in the BBC article...

The right translation would be 24.8F, so wow... this study must be false and scientists beyond comical because an article made a typo (:

eep_social3• 3 years ago

here’s the actual paper https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/1675/2023/

eep_social3• 3 years ago

I checked the BBC article linked else-thread, this should read, “.. was 13.8° C, or 24.8° F, hotter than..”

coolspot• 3 years ago

13.8 C is 56.84 F tho

akiselev• 3 years ago

It's also completely meaningless even if the conversion was right. They're comparing the average ocean surface temperature off the east coast of North America to just "the average temperature between 1981 and 2011." The average temperature of what and where? The ocean? Water surface? Air? Globally? Off the coast of North America?

Then a few paragraphs later:

But that doesn't account for the average global ocean surface temperature rising by 0.9°C from preindustrial levels, with 0.6°C taking place in the last four decades.

I can't even. They went from 14 to 0.6 in the span of two sentences.

cloudripper• 3 years ago

Data only runs back to the early 80s, but its pretty stark:

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/

gary_0• 3 years ago

The original BBC article is less editorialized, but just as alarming: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65339934

matthewdgreen2• 3 years ago

One thing mentioned in this article is that some of the warming may be due to regulations in 2020 that mandated cleaner (less sulfur) shipping fuel. The particulates from this fuel apparently reflected a significant amount of light both directly and through cloud formation, the loss of which may have caused a kind of termination shock and jump in ocean temperatures. If this is true, we should figure this out and do something about it ASAP.

ETA: To be clear, if true this is just the cherry on the thermonuclear bomb we've set off under our feet. But it's still significant and something we might be able to address.

mturmon• 3 years ago

One thing mentioned in this article...

I think you mean not mentioned?

(The linked article, and the scientific publication that it references, don't mention sulfur.)

The increases they show span decades (see Fig. 2 in the publication), and indeed end at 2020, so this would not seem relevant to their result.

It would be surprising if this kind of point change could have a significant impact on overall ocean heat content, but I'd be interested in your source. The effect of various gases and aerosols to climate forcing can be hard to determine, not just in magnitude, but also in sign (e.g., https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit/science/objectives/).

matthewdgreen2• 3 years ago

It's mentioned in the original BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65339934

A couple of other articles: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9307247/

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/Documents/Simons.2021.RiskOfAT...

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/esnt/2022/nasa-study-finds-evid...

ccleve• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening

junon2• 3 years ago

I really don't get what is supposed to happen. The folks that can do something about this have no incentive to do so - instead, they're often incentivized to do something against it.

So what's the solution? Me recycling cans and using public transportation and going vegan and ... isn't going to solve this problem. The people who aren't already convinced aren't going to change their habits.

Pardon my french, but are we just completely and collectively fucked? What does a solution, long or short term, look like - realistically, not as per Musk et al?

bee_rider• 3 years ago

Maybe the Great Filter was inside us the whole time!

Teknoman117• 3 years ago

That is one of the Great Filter thought examples already, right?

A civilization whose technology advances faster than its understanding of the impacts of said technology may blot themselves out early on.

gmuslera• 3 years ago

Sometimes substractive approaches work better than additive ones. It may not be about what else you can do, but what things that you are doing you may stop to do so to push a change. Less consumption, travel, driving and so on, done on scale, may eventually hit the ones that do the biggest damages.

2020 was the biggest setback to some of the most nasty trends in recent years because we collectively did a lot less on those and other categories.

llsf3• 3 years ago

2020 was a setback. 2020 was forced on us, and there is no way that any country would willing decide to apply such a setback on itself, voluntarily for the sake of saving the planet. The tricky part is to find a path that does not impede the economy and yet reduces the CO2 (to zero or even start capturing it).

Most of the CO2 emissions are linked to fossil fuel, and so the economy in general. We are addict to fossil fuel. Fossil fuel is the life blood of all the economies.

There is a say that there are 2 ways to limit your consumption:

1. You are willing to reduce your consumption => Sobriety 2. The consumption reduction because you cannot afford => Poverty

Sobriety is hard, but as time passes, the climate consequences are getting more expensive. If we ignore sobriety, we will eventually fell in poverty as fossil fuel is a limited resource and we will not be able to afford it for ever.

The sooner we get rid of it, the better. To govern is to foresee. Our government should plan accordingly.

Robotbeat• 3 years ago

“Not as per musk” I mean, when you get rid of techno-fixes, you’re left with 100% unrealistic political solutions (Degrowth) and, like, maybe mass genocide? Why are people so conditioned nowadays to be anti-technology in fixing this? There are no solutions that are neither technological nor terrible.

Decarbonization via electrification while simultaneously transitioning all electricity to renewables (& maybe some nuclear) is the most straightforward method. Besides solar radiation management, like sulfur aerosols in the stratosphere, which is scary-cheap. Or accelerated weathering.

halfjoking2• 3 years ago

Most straightforward carbon removal is accelerated rock weathering IMO

https://www.projectvesta.org/

The ocean is the carbon sink that’s reaching a tipping point. If it keeps becoming more acidic and heating up, the plankton will die, oxygen levels drop and we all die.

Limestone rock weathering is how carbon is lowered naturally - usually it happens from an earthquake that exposes these types of rocks. Then over millions of years they suck carbon out of ocean as they weather. Accelerating that process by transporting the rocks to coastal areas with a lot of waves will dramatically reduce carbon. We’re talking carbon removal at less than $20/ton. Nothing else comes close, is as natural, or attacks the problem at the source by going after ocean carbon and acidification.

We need $1 trillion spent yearly on rock weathering and we could avert mass death this decade. We got about 3 years to do it. 2026 is the last chance since El Niño and the sun cycle is at peak that year, after that human civilization is done for.

llsf3• 3 years ago

Technology might not have a solution to all the problems. Especially when extracting free and limited resources (like free fossil fuel, free lithium, etc.) is part of the tech solution.

Technology is part of the solution, but maybe sobriety e.g. do we really need to produce so much almonds in California, which requires a lot of water, to end up squeezing those almonds to make some "milk". Maybe not the best usage of water ? Do we need so many private vehicles ? (278M personal and commercial vehicles were registered to drivers in the U.S. in 2021... for a population of 330M), etc.

I get that "regrowth" is scary, but maybe some more responsible consumption could help to not make things even worse. Technology has definitely a role, since it put us in that position. I agree that electrification would streamline our energy production and consumption. We would need a strong baseline (e.g. nuclear) and renewable too.

I do feel that we will look at the 1950-2030 as the years of "insouciance" and abundance, thanks to fossil fuel (energy, plastic, electronic waste, etc.). I suspect that we will have to change how we get/consume energy, and reduce our consumption, maybe with less and more sustainable "stuff"...

hotpotamus• 3 years ago

I think people start to get weirded out when you start talking about changing the composition of the atmosphere that they breathe and also they don't realize how ironic that is. Aren't we already about 100ppm above pre-industrial CO2 levels already? At this point, why not throw some other gasses in there to try and cool it down a bit? Honestly, given that it's the cheap, half-assed solution, I assume it's the way things will eventually go.

HyperSane2• 3 years ago

Long term heat waves might kill enough people to reduce CO2 emissions significantly.

CatWChainsaw• 3 years ago

There are no solutions, as such, because "solution" implies "problem to be solved", not "predicament we blundered into with no way out".

staunton2• 3 years ago

It looks very simple. Public awareness and pressure will gradually change those incentives and emissions will be reduced significantly. At the same time people are going to adapt to the new environment as best they can and live on. If everything goes well, living standards around the world in a hundred years will be a lot higher than now.

Of course, this is not a given. A lot of people have to work very hard to get there. A lot of people have to change their minds or die, their opinions losing relevance. Alot of people will get unlucky or won't have the means to adapt to the new conditions, resulting in some of the worst humanitarian crises the world has ever seen. Conflict and war is a possibility that might work against this solution. There might be some big issues noone can think of now.

However unsexy this might sound, this is the solution and it will happen. The question is when and how much suffering it will take to get there.

2102922286• 3 years ago

Here's a video made 53 years ago about how we need to tackle pollution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA45iKHjoGg

A lot of it still rings true today. The sad thing is that we _knew_ that _something_ had to be done, but our political and economic structures provide no incentive for long-term thinking, and so we didn't change anything.

vbxi• 3 years ago

Pardon my french, but are we just completely and collectively fucked? What does a solution, long or short term, look like - realistically, not as per Musk et al?

We are, but not in our lifetimes. Our children's children's children are going to start getting the worst of it, and there's very little we can do about it now. The scales have already been tipped towards destruction, and we're just awaiting the inevitable.

motohagiography• 3 years ago

I could go on at length and quite reasonably, but how do you reconcile with people who don't recognize your apprehension of "the planet," and "us."

Rury• 3 years ago

Well, given enough time, our current understanding of physics implies that we are screwed no matter what we do (and there is no possible solution).

As for more relevant practical matters, no not necessarily. Mostly a matter of carbon going into the atmosphere must be < carbon leaving the atmosphere. Many solutions that can help with that, but fossil fuels are by far the biggest culprit and the root of the current problem. Cutting out their use completely would be more than half the battle, but it would obviously come at a huge cost. It's politics, that's the real problem.

junon2• 3 years ago

I'm not talking about heat death or the sun exploding. I'm talking about within the next century.

bryanlarsen4• 3 years ago

If we would have done nothing, we'd have ended up with something like 6 degrees of warming. Instead we have a good hope of limiting it to 3 degrees. Still way too much, but way better than i expected 20 years ago. At this point 1.5 is hopeless, but 2 isn't, so let's make it our goal.

revelio4• 3 years ago

CO2 levels have continued on their long term trend since it started to be measured so no, there's really nothing that's been done and actual warming since the mid 70s is way way less than 6 degrees. All projections of such levels of warning were way off base.

HyperSane2• 3 years ago

What is really frustrating is that the people most likely to believe climate change is real are also the people most opposed to nuclear power, the only real option to mitigate it long term.

ChatGTP• 3 years ago

Apparently we should light up as many GPUs as possible and LLMs what to do. People are actually counting on this.

Gigachad3• 3 years ago

People will start to get more radical if things don’t change. They are starting now to deflate the tires of oversized SUVs. Later I can imagine the destruction of property which is damaging the environment and the disruption of industries like coal power plants.

Our_Benefactors2• 3 years ago

Environmental terrorism won’t catch on since it is after all, you know, terrorism. A crunchy granola crackpot letting air out of a few car tires won’t become a trend, it’s a clickbait for ecofacists.

gedy2• 3 years ago

And that doesn't matter as China is what's driving CO2 increase. But folks "gotta do something", especially if it targets their outgroup.

hothead334• 3 years ago

The Hacker News consensus is that no one is doing anything. I used to believe this and despair. But that is _just not true_. I've subscribed to the Harvard C Change newsletter and it's really changed my perspective - past issues here: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/climateoptimist/

Just one highlight: the current has administration canceled three fossil fuel lease sales in 2022 due to a lack of industry interest In contrast, there are currently 18 active offshore wind leases with 14 new site assessment plans approved, including the scoping of the first wind energy areas in the Gulf of Mexico and Gulf of Maine.[0]

I also look at this daily, although it's more focussed on Europe: https://www.positive.news/

It's not all sunshine and roses. But the narrative should be: 'some humans, albeit perhaps the minority, are fighting save this planet, and are winning at least of their battles'. Maybe it will be too little too late. But the narrative is decidedly not 'existential threat to our species and others, and no one gives a shit'.

[0]https://www.americanprogress.org/article/offshore-wind-can-l...

luckydata• 3 years ago

It's very much an Horizon Zero Dawn kind of situation. We are collectively fucked and there's nothing realistic that can be done.

j_crick• 3 years ago

it's not yet well established, why such a rapid change, and such a huge change is happening

Humans thought they might be apex predators, but what if the actual apex predator for humans is the planet itself? philosoraptor.jpg

scientists are just people with lives and families who've learnt to understand the implications of data better.

If only they could do something meaningful about it. Oh, wait...

PM_me_your_math2• 3 years ago

Common dreams is a progressive activist organization. Anything you read there should not be considered unbiased, accurate, or objective.

PM_me_your_math2• 3 years ago

We will be ok. Tax increases or destruction of our economy is unreasonable and unnecessary.

llsf3• 3 years ago

The scientists are just telling what they see.

If they scream "Iceberg ahead!", of course someone like you and me, in our cabin, can say "Is making noise is reasonable and necessary?" right ? there is nothing we can really do from our cabin to meaningfully improve the situation.

But the captain (government) should take a cue, and maybe consider changing course.

badrabbit2• 3 years ago

Put some ice in the ocean then.

But seriously, how impractical is it for sub-arctic nuclear power plants to convert ocean water into icebergs and shove it off so it can go melt and cool other parts of the polar ocean water and keep caps from melting. The goal not being cooling the ocean but at least slowing down the rate of warming. I know the oceans are insanely huge but nuclear power is also very powerful, build a dozen or more nuclear powerplants that each are powrerful enough to power NYC year round and use that energy to boil and the water for energy and then use that energy to freeze water.

ELI5 on why this is impractical technically?

Because politically getting money and support is difficult but at least it not impossible. Telling the world to take it easy in capitalism on the other hand is delusional. Not gonna happen.

Scientists are always like "take is seriously" but most of the time it isn't that decision makers don't take them seriously but that they present problems not a bunch of solutions that decision makers can evaluate and you know... decide.

generativenoise• 3 years ago

Your understanding of the physics is so bad I don't know where to start. Though for a first step where do you think that energy you extract from the water to turn it into ice goes?

If you want to use ice cubes they have to either be made in space, or you have to get extremely good radiative cooling to space.

There have been plenty of solutions proposed but the most favourable "solution" that has mostly been chosen is to make it the futures problem to figure out how to adapt.

badrabbit2• 3 years ago

ELI5 means assume I have zero understanding of anything!

is so bad I don't know where to start. Though for a first step where do you think that energy you extract from the water to turn it into ice goes

You are not extracting energy from water, the energy comes from nuclear fission in nuclear powerplants.

If you want to use ice cubes they have to either be made in space

Why? You have a giant power plant getting energy from nuclear radiation and it's entire purpose is to generate 1-2 square km of ice sheets each 1M thick along with 10-20 other plants you have 300-600 sq km of ice per year that is intended to keep polar surface ocean water cool (not the whole world).

The goal is not to cool the air but to essentially use nuclear energy to transfer heat from the ocean into steam into the atmosphere.

staunton2• 3 years ago

seriously, how impractical is it for sub-arctic nuclear power plants to convert ocean water into icebergs and...

Very impractical, to the point where I wonder if I'm missing some sarcasm in your comment. The amounts of water/ice involved are absolutely huge and due to basic thermodynamics you have to heat up some stuff to cool other stuff (and heat everything overall due to inefficiency). Even if it was doable, other approaches would be a lot easier and more effective.

What might be practical is spraying chemicals into the atmosphere (e.g. above the caps) or throwing tiny glass marbles on the ice to reflect more light and keep it from being ice-free in the summer.

jfengel• 3 years ago

The extra heating due to climate change is about 1.6 W/m^2. That's about 800 Terawatts.

The average nuclear power plant is .001 Terawatts.

So you'd need close to a million power plants to combat global warming. A lot more than a dozen.

bullen• 3 years ago

Nuclear is heating the oceans, we are litteraly boiling ourselves like frogs in a kettle.

We are terraforming a perfectly functional planet with matter into energy, like the sun.

Ocean Warming Study So Distressing, Some Scientists Didn't Want to Talk About It

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