Scientists Don’t Know Why Oceans Have Warmed

By Paul Homewood

 

The fact that scientists do not know is very telling:

 

 

 

Every day for the last 12 months, the world’s sea surface temperatures have broken records.

Ocean scientists are growing increasingly concerned.

“It’s not just an entire year of record-breaking ocean temperatures, but it’s the margin it’s breaking them by — it’s not even close to what the previous record was,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. “That’s what’s raising the eyebrows of a lot of people.” 

Average sea surface temperatures today are roughly 1.25 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they were from 1982-2011, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer. It’s a huge anomaly that could have significant effects on weather and ecosystems.

Human-caused climate change is likely playing a role, researchers said, but is probably not the only factor. Climate models predict a steady rise in sea surface temperatures, but not this quickly, and ocean surface temperatures also fluctuate and can be affected by natural climate variability, including patterns such as El Niño and La Niña. 

So scientists don’t yet know precisely why sea surface temperatures have climbed so high.

“I pray we’re having a once-in-a-lifetime year of hot sea surface temperatures, but I do fear there may be something else going on that is causing a long-term change in sea surface temperatures we hadn’t predicted,” said John Abraham, a professor at the University of St. Thomas who studies ocean temperatures. “All bets are off now, this is something that is so unusual, it’s challenging our past expectations.”

If ocean temperatures continue to break records, that could bleach corals, generate more intense and fast-developing hurricanes, drive coastal temperatures up and make extreme precipitation more likely — events scientists already observed in 2023.

Temperatures first soared to record levels in mid-March last year, according to the Climate Reanalyzer, which tracks average measures of sea surface temperature data from across the globe. The data used to measure these trends dates back more than 40 years and comes from networks of monitoring buoys and robotic devices designed to help meteorologists make weather forecasts.

Abraham suspects the main cause of the trend is climate change, with some natural ocean processes that aren’t well understood playing a role, as well.

“It takes a lot of heat to raise water’s temperature,” Abraham said.

McNoldy listed other dynamics that may play a small role, including the weakening of trade winds in the North Atlantic, which has reduced the amount of dust blowing from Africa’s Sahara Desert  toward North America. Dust absorbs the sun’s energy over the Atlantic Ocean, so it’s possible that more radiation is being absorbed into the ocean.

“That could be a factor, but I don’t have a good sense of being able to quantify it,” McNoldy said.

Some researchers have also suggested that changes to maritime shipping regulations may have reduced sulfur pollution in ship exhaust, ultimately reducing cloud cover and allowing the oceans to absorb more energy.

“All these little ingredients by themselves don’t explain what we’re seeing, but maybe in a combined sense, they do,” McNoldy said, though he added that he’s skeptical of the theory but can’t rule it out.

Among ocean scientists, he added: “We’re kind of all just observing something strange happening. At some point, someone will come up with an answer, but I haven’t seen that answer yet.” 

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/oceans-record-hot-rcna143179

Remember this when the alarmist community tell us we must quickly stop using fossil fuels.

Although they say underlying global warming may have raised sea temperatures, the actual amount can only be tiny, given the ocean’s enormous capacity to store heat. Put simply, a warmer atmosphere cannot raise sea temperatures to any significant degree. Indeed, it is the other way round; it is ocean temperatures which affect atmospheric ones. We see this every time there is an El Nino event.

Although McNoldy dismisses the impact of sulphur pollution, scientists widely blamed this for global cooling between the 1940s and 70s. And there is considerable evidence that the much cleaner atmosphere we have nowadays has been in part responsible for rising global temperatures since.

There is also no mention of the Hunga Tonga eruption, and the resultant injection of incredible amounts of water vapour into the stratosphere, which many scientists say has contributed to warming in the last year.

But taking these two factors out of the equation, it is clear that natural factors have played the major role in the increasing sea temperatures. The fact that no climate scientists seem to have the slightest clue what these factors might be and how they might work rather makes a nonsense of their models and pretensions about what might happen in future.

And if oceans have warmed recently, they are just as likely to cool back down sooner or later.

So instead of lecturing us about fossil fuels, maybe they should try to understand what is going on under the waves!