Why Is the Sea So Hot?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-is-the-sea-so-hot

by mitchbob • 2 years ago

79 60 2 years ago

mitchbob• 2 years ago

graphe2• 2 years ago

I 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

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• 2 years ago

This 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.

graphe2• 2 years ago

I 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.

perihelions3• 2 years 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-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• 2 years 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_gnostic2• 2 years ago

Is water vapor some kind of greenhouse gas? How does its' infrared absorption measure up to carbon dioxides'?

atoav• 2 years ago

Afaik 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.

perihelions3• 2 years ago

Yes. But there's ten trillion tons of water vapor in the troposphere, so, normally this wouldn't be a relevant amount. It's key that the volcano eruption lifted the water vapor completely outside the weather layer, into the stratosphere. A marginal unit of water in the stratosphere is a lot more potent as a greenhouse gas, than the same unit in the troposphere. (I don't know the quantified values).

KaiserPro• 2 years ago

It absorbs a lot of the spectrum, both UV and IR.

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

However clouds reflect. So high humidity will absorb ir, but thick cloud will reflect.

So its a bit more complex.

aeroman• 2 years ago

Water vapour is a very strong infrared absorber, so much so that it is more important for the greenhouse effect than CO2. However, it is usually very difficult to change the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere as a whole (it just rains out).

The stratosphere cycles through much slower than the troposphere (there are very few clouds, for example). That means that if you put water there, it can stay there for a lot longer, increasing the total amount of water in the atmosphere and warming the climate.

I'll also say that we expect water vapour to increase as temperature increases, which is a positive feedback in the climate system,increasing the warming beyond that of CO2.this is known as the water vapour feedback.

taylodl• 2 years ago

Water vapor is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas - however, it's presence in the atmosphere is extremely variable and so it's very difficult to measure long-term trends versus just what the weather is doing today. That's why we use CO2 as our climate change marker. CO2 is nowhere near as powerful of a greenhouse gas, but it's stable in the atmosphere for centuries. That makes it easy to track trends, versus today's weather, and you're also tracking a variable that has long-term consequences. For the record, methane is another strong greenhouse gas but like CO2, it's concentration in the atmosphere is highly variable, so we don't tend to track it.

mellosouls• 2 years ago

There are quite a few discussions here on the topic over the past couple of years, eg:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36997834

Ocean Heat Record Broken, 289 comments

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1710661488&dateRange=custom&...

vinnyvichy2• 2 years ago

Sea surface temperature datasets https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/optimum-interpolation-sst

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

Most recent HN thread from yesterday

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39719391

ImHereToVote• 2 years ago

Could 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.

living_room_pc• 2 years ago

Didn'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.

a_gnostic2• 2 years ago

Exactly. It's not terrorism when government does it.

rocqua• 2 years ago

It was aimed at people's energy supply during winter. that very much was meant to instill fear. Not fear for one's life, but fear for everyone's wallet and heating.

EGreg• 2 years ago

The most important thing is that the investigation does not reveal ourselves as the perpetrators.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-shuns-formal-joi...

Sweden shuns formal joint investigation of Nord Stream leak, citing national security

But they did find explosives and sabotage:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/18/nord-stream-...

Analysis:

https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/why-the-media-dont-want-...

NemoNobody3• 2 years ago

Thank you - I thought it was common knowledge that we did that.

Can totally trust the Swedes not like their formal members of an alliance of ours or anything like that - I think we can clearly chalk this up to an "act of sabotage" and let that be the end of that

yvoschaap• 2 years ago

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/06/...

tomtomistaken• 2 years ago

Various sources report 7.5 to 14 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent from the leak, which is about the same amount emitted by a coal-fired power station in a year.

wiseowise• 2 years ago

The Nordstream leak has as much impact on sea temperature as my fart on air temperature.

isoprophlex• 2 years ago

That pipeline blowing up lead to a pretty insignificant methane release compared to whatever is happening yearly. As in, at most 5-10% of what the oil and gas industry releases anyway.

NemoNobody3• 2 years ago

I thought we, the Americans, literally did that "act of terrorism" and said it was the Ukranians.

vinnyvichy2• 2 years ago

Top line of top graph: 2024 ocean heat

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

astahlx• 2 years ago

We 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• 2 years ago

You're not helping the situation by making these hyperbolic statements that can be easily be argued against and muddy the dialog.

momdad420• 2 years ago

What'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.

akaru5• 2 years ago

How is this hyperbole? There’s a wall being touted at the southern border of America for chrissake, the country that has a statue engraved on it that it takes in refugees. Every temperate climate western country has a border “crisis” right now.

perrygeo• 2 years ago

There 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.

chx• 2 years ago

No, no, every possible question must be answered by an automated plagiarism machine running on GPUs which need multiple kilowatts to operate. It's called progress, you see.

otabdeveloper4• 2 years ago

Good thing you won't be around in 30 years to eat your hat.

dinkumthinkum3• 2 years ago

Where is one shred of evidence of any of this? Humans adapt. It’s this kind of thing why you have 20-year-olds that think we’ll be dead in 5 years. It’s ridiculous. The same people that make this argument also try to tell us that the 10 million people that have illegally crossed into the US have some because of climate change.

akaru5• 2 years ago

Go outside.

loadingcmd2• 2 years ago

Other 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?

matthewdgreen2• 2 years ago

I 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.

loadingcmd2• 2 years ago

Ok, 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.

realusername• 2 years ago

there's been plenty of catastrophic agriculture events caused by climate change already, they've just been smoothed out by global trade (for now at least, I don't know how resilient it will continue to be)

rapjr92• 2 years ago

Seems 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.

jaybrendansmith2• 2 years ago

Agree. 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• 2 years ago

Wouldn't that lead to a return of the acid rain that was killing off ocean life already?

xyzzy123• 2 years ago

It's an excellent and very practical proposal. Unfortunately I think geo-engineering is a hard ask politically.

Left-coded groups demanding action on climate change seem to primarily it as a moral issue, and will tend to reject what they percieve as "easy fixes".

Right-coded groups are more split with some groups wanting various kinds of action while others deny a problem exists at all.

Geo-engineering is perceived as a "techno optimist" position right now, which is a relatively insignificant demographic niche.

But that pales compared to the difficulty of getting international consensus. I feel we'd need a PR / influence campaign the likes of which the world has not yet seen.

Projectiboga• 2 years ago

I 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-acceler...

Why Is the Sea So Hot?

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