2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #2

A chronological listing of news and opinion articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jan 8, 2023  thru Sat, Jan 14, 2023.

Story of the Week 

Relentless Rise of Ocean Heat Content Drives Deadly Extremes

The heat of global warming will keep penetrating deeper into the oceans for centuries after greenhouse gas emissions cease.

Sea Ice Greenland

Photo by William Bossen on Unsplash

Ocean heat content reached a new record high for the fourth year in a row, scientists said Wednesday as they released their annual measurements of ocean heat accumulating down to a depth of more than a mile.

The findings published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science show that just in the past year, the planet’s seas absorbed about 10 Zetta joules of heat—equivalent to 100 times the world’s total annual electricity production.

The scientists found that the warmth keeps working its way deeper into the ocean, as greenhouse gases have trapped so much heat that the oceans’ deeper waters will continue to warm for centuries after humans stop using fossil energy.

Oceans cover 71 percent of Earth’s surface and have absorbed more than 90 percent of the heat energy trapped by greenhouse gases since the start of the industrial age, dominating the global climate system. Measuring their temperature is one of the best ways to accurately track how Earth’s fever has kept rising since 2016, when the global average surface temperature peaked. 

Co-author John Fasullo, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said there are still open technical questions about the use of ocean heat content as a metric of climate change, “but our expectation is that ocean heat content more clearly resolves the march of climate change relative to other indices, such as surface temperature, which have more year to year variability.”

Click here to access the entire article as originally posted on the Inside Climate News website.

Relentless Rise of Ocean Heat Content Drives Deadly Extremes by Bob Berwyn, Science, Inside Climate News, Jan 11, 2023


Links posted on Facebook

Sun, Jan 8, 2023

Mon, Jan 9, 2023

Tue, Jan 10, 2023

Wed, Jan 11, 2023

Thu, Jan 12, 2023

Fri, Jan 13, 2023

Sat, Jan 14, 2023

Posted by John Hartz on Saturday, 14 January, 2023


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