The Inertia for Good Editor
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Lost at Sea and Shaking In My Surf Booties: A Baptism by Fire

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The Inertia

Our oceans have warmed at an accelerated rate over the past four decades, according to new climate change research published by Environmental Research Letters this week. The rate is astonishing – warming of the ocean has more than quadrupled since the ’80s and that rate is at risk of being exceeded over the next 20 years. Unsurprisingly, the researchers point to greenhouse gas emissions as the main culprit, which drives the ocean to absorb heat at the accelerated rate witnessed in the study period.

The study is supported by data from NASA’s CERES project, which collects and measures the amount of solar radiation sent from Earth back to satellites. The dataset comes from multiple satellites with the purpose of monitoring climate change. This particular study found that the ocean warmed in the 1980s at a rate of 0.06 degrees Celsius per decade. That same measure for ocean warming today has been raised to 0.27 degrees Celsius — more than four times greater in four and a half decades.

One of the most shocking things researchers pointed out was that the oceans saw a staggering 450 consecutive days of record sea surface temperatures between April 2023 and July 2024. That span, they acknowledged, coincided with an El Niñ0, which is fueled by higher-than-average sea surface temps around the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Accounting for that, the researchers referenced warming trends during the previous El Niños of 1997-1998 and 2015-2016. The record rates of the most recent El Niño still hold up with the current accelerated warming rate, they say.

The lead author of the study compared this trend to filling up a bathtub with hot water.

“In the 1980s, the hot tap was running slowly, warming up the water by just a fraction of a degree each decade. But now the hot tap is running much faster, and the warming has picked up speed,” said Professor Chris Merchant, lead author of the study and a researcher at the University of Reading.

Failing to curb emissions, they say, will allow that “hot tap” to run faster and faster until warming becomes irreversible.

“(The temperature) increase seen over the past 40 years will likely be exceeded in the next 20 years, and by a significant margin in the absence of successful climate mitigation,” the researchers wrote. “Wider society and policy makers should be aware that the rate of global warming over the last four decades is not a guide for the coming decades, otherwise there is a danger of underestimating the urgency of deep reductions in fossil fuel burning.”

 
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