The current temperature of the oceans

June 22, 2023 12:46 PM

The Daily Sea Surface Temperature - click on 'World (60S-60N)' to toggle with North Atlantic data - compiled by the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine. BBC: Sudden heat increase in seas around UK and Ireland. Science News: Why is the North Atlantic breaking heat records? New Scientist: UK and Ireland suffer one of the most severe marine heatwaves on Earth. Vox: The world’s oceans are extremely hot. We’re about to find out what happens next. The Conversation: here's what that (ocean heat) means for humans and ecosystems around the world.
posted by Wordshore (47 comments total)

I'm looking forward to people in this thread being scolded for doomsaying.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 1:00 PM on June 22, 2023 [21 favorites]

I saw that temperature spike graph a couple of weeks ago. There's a rather important warm water current that takes heat from the Caribbean to Europe that might break down if the surrounding ocean doesn't maintain enough temperature differential. That would lead to results that nobody really knows what it means.
posted by hippybear at 1:22 PM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

This seems like it is a bad thing.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:25 PM on June 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

One of the more disturbing quotes is from the Vox piece: "We have this tug of war: El Niño wants to say tropical Atlantic hurricanes should be weaker this year but these really warm ocean [temperatures] say hurricanes should be stronger,” said Amaya. “Only time will tell which process wins out.”"

If we don't have big hurricanes to churn the hot water...then where does it go? What does it do, if it doesn't get moved around?
posted by mittens at 1:40 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

If you would like to argue that there is a reasonable chance of mitigation at this point, please show your work.

If this becomes a trend, it will, then we can expect oceanic ecosystems to collapse and fisheries we deoend on to die out, algaes might start dying off in hotter waters, so more CO₂ and CH₄ in the atmosphere.

Are we at the point where we talk about how to deal with global temperature increases of 3.5C and above yet? I mean the melting glaciers might lead to increased volcanic activity, so maybe that will 'help'?
posted by Ignorantsavage at 1:41 PM on June 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

I appreciate this work, but some of the shortcuts writers take to make a point can be factually wrong *as expressed*, and undercut the credibility of the piece as a whole.

From Vox
“And along with fertilizer runoff, hotter temperatures in the Atlantic, specifically, are contributing to record blooms of sargassum, a smelly, toxic seaweed that’s now fouling beaches in Florida and in the Caribbean.”

Sargassum is not a smelly, toxic seaweed. Sargassum is a delicious, edible seaweed that due to excess nutrition is wildly overgrowing its space. The result is huge piles of sargassum rotting on beaches. The “rotting on beaches” part is what’s toxic. You don’t avoid eating dead fish you find on the shoreline bc fish are toxic. You avoid eating them bc they’re dead and rotting.
posted by toodleydoodley at 1:46 PM on June 22, 2023 [23 favorites]

Part of Eve's Discussion
by Marie Howe

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time.
posted by foxfirefey at 2:02 PM on June 22, 2023 [25 favorites]

as a sad riff on "Being 20 In The 70s Was Way More Fun Than Being 70 In The 20s", can I say 'it's looking better to be in my 50s in the 2020s than in my 20s in 2050'?

(I'll be hitting 30,000 days on this earth in late 2049, that ought to be enough.)
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 2:11 PM on June 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Two old jewish men are sitting on a park bench.

One says "So, how are you doing today?".

The other goes,"ehhhhhhhhhhh" and after that long, pained sigh says "......Not as bad as tomorrow".
posted by lalochezia at 2:33 PM on June 22, 2023 [31 favorites]

You could, but maybe shouldn’t, HM III. Neither the young nor the old did anything to earn our ages, we shouldn’t gloat if lucky.
posted by clew at 2:37 PM on June 22, 2023

The sea ice no longer gets thick enough to sink to the bottom ,that sea ice melting on the bottom runs down the big trench in the Atlantic pushing warm water in the Indian Ocean.it takes 11 years I think for the water to completely cycle ,the ocean conveyor system .AKA AlGore"s hockey stick.
Well the Merry-Go-Round broke down !!! the Merry-Go-Round broke down! and when it broke down it made a sound.
posted by hortense at 2:43 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

The sea ice no longer gets thick enough to sink to the bottom

Due to the physical properties of ice, it can never sink to the bottom. That's why icebergs exist.

If ice sank to the bottom of water when it was frozen, all water would freeze solid from the bottom up and we'd never have any melting.
posted by hippybear at 2:47 PM on June 22, 2023 [10 favorites]

Inclined to doomerism myself, but increasingly on board with tamping down expression of that, if only to marginally increase the chance of sustaining the status quo in the hope that some novel technological solution manifests in advance of societal collapse. I've yet to feel comforted by alternatives.
posted by otsebyatina at 3:03 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

It is known as Anchor Ice .
posted by hortense at 3:06 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think I can be of help here as a physical oceanographer (one who studies the movement of the ocean) and one who works with ice at that!

When sea ice forms it does not sink to the bottom of the ocean, although, when it is formed it pushes salt out in a process called "brine rejection". This means the water adjacent to the ice which was just about cold enough to freeze is also now really salty, meaning its tremendously dense so it falls to the bottom of the ocean.

In the North Atlantic the more climate relevant dense water formation happens from surface waters becoming cooled by the cold atmosphere above. This dense water sinks and drives what is called the "lower limb" of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The upper limb of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is the Gulf Stream which is a warm current of water that travels northwards from the Caribbean to the North Atlantic.

If the AMOC were to shutdown completely there would be a number of large climate ramifications, and this has been predicted in the past (it is also the plot to the day after tomorrow). However, the IPCC's latest report AR6 basically said the field is unsure whether the AMOC has been weakening recently and how much it will weaken in the future. Although they are quite certain it will weaken in the next century.

As for these anomalous temperatures, they are certainly a product of global warming but what they mean for the circulation in that part of the ocean remains to be seen. In general, changes on the timescale of a few years is not indicative large scale changes in the state of the AMOC. Large changes happen in the AMOC over small timescales (https://climate.metoffice.cloud/dashfigs/amoc_rapid.png) due to inherent variable in the earth's climate system.

But ocean warming is bad in and of itself regardless of its effects on the ocean's circulation.
posted by dreyfusfinucane at 3:43 PM on June 22, 2023 [77 favorites]

This will mean a lot more water vapor in the atmosphere, and

“Water vapor accounts for about 97 percent of the total (natural plus man-emitted) greenhouse warming of the planet. See, e.g., John Houghton's ‘The Physics of Atmospheres, 3rd edition,’ Cambridge University Press, 2002.”

This is true, water vapor is the major player in the greenhouse effect and is often omitted from reports and reporting about global warming -– mostly because it is more of a symptom than a cause in global climate change, and cannot be easily mitigated.

Carbon dioxide is the fuse; water vapor is the bomb.
posted by jamjam at 5:23 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

And here I am waiting for the bus that comes by every 45 minutes while 100 cars a minute pass by
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 7:09 PM on June 22, 2023 [21 favorites]

… and I have the bus to myself

we are doomed
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 7:23 PM on June 22, 2023 [11 favorites]

Everyone, turn your air conditioners so that they blow outdoors.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:10 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

We see more of Ocean 2.0 every day. What an exciting time to be alive.
posted by interogative mood at 11:26 PM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Had billionaire submariners been found alive I had been hoping that they would have had an Earthrise-like aha moment of a "we have realised (hu)mankind's follies and the ocean spoke to us" and we would have had a double miracle of all the other titans of industry waking up and realising we are all on this tiny fragile planet together.
posted by pipstar at 11:30 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

The bushfires this year are going to suck bigstyle.
posted by pompomtom at 11:38 PM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

(sorry, if that's doomsaying perhaps I could rephrase in the form of a wager...)
posted by pompomtom at 11:40 PM on June 22, 2023

The world’s oceans are extremely hot. We’re about to find out what happens next.

We're about to find out - not an encouraging phrase.
posted by From Bklyn at 2:45 AM on June 23, 2023

The bushfires this year are going to suck bigstyle.

Given the intensity of the regrowth I've seen the last three years of La Nina rainfall promote here in East Gippsland, I expect you're sadly right. So I wouldn't take your wager.

Canada 2023: hey, watch this drive
Australia 2024: hold my beer
posted by flabdablet at 4:09 AM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Not faving that.

Only laughing at the last bit because I am a terrible terrible person.
posted by pompomtom at 4:17 AM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

aw man but even the beer's too hot to enjoy now
posted by Pachylad at 4:21 AM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

I wonder if there's some sort of bushfire-smoke solution to climate change. Get enough particulates in the air to increase albedo (modulo dying from that, of course).
posted by pompomtom at 4:25 AM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Unfortunately, there's also the soot on snow effect, which decreases albedo and is bad for climate change.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:32 AM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Then there's the whole fucking the ozone layer and promoting potentially toxic algal blooms thing.
posted by flabdablet at 4:34 AM on June 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

So how close are we to The Day After Tomorrow's "flash-freeze helicopter pilots in flight"?

I don't mean to be glib but this does sound an awful lot like the first few minutes of the most crazy-ass absurd pro-environment movie ever
posted by AzraelBrown at 6:45 AM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Get enough particulates in the air to increase albedo

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly...
posted by LooseFilter at 6:52 AM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Back in 2016-2017 I was watching the graph reproduced in this article on a nearly daily basis. It shows the global sea ice extent going totally off the rails. I wondered if time was pretty much up for the global ecosystem.

Now, seven years later, it looks like ice back on the rails, following it's long term, steady decline. So, still pretty terrible, but not yet the point where I'm going to cash out my 401K and blow it on scotch.

So I can imagine myself looking back at this in 2030, seeing that oceans have gotten steadily worse, but didn't exactly burst into flame in 2024.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 7:06 AM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Everyone, turn your air conditioners so that they blow outdoors.

We just need a really long hose with a lot of freon to move the heat outside of the earth's atmosphere, it's simple.

(sadly vacuum doesn't conduct heat well)

The bushfires this year are going to suck bigstyle.

They already do in Canada! Just ask the people in NYC. We're at about 140x more area burned in the season this year than the average over the last 10 years. It's won't reoccur each year, we had perfect conditions for this this year, but all signs point to not gonna get better.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 7:15 AM on June 23, 2023

Add to this what is dumped illegally into the oceans on daily basis. NG
posted by DJZouke at 9:18 AM on June 23, 2023

Geoengineering is a really terrible idea. It's difficult to overstate just how bad an idea it is to start fucking around with the atmosphere on a large scale in order to try to change things deliberately.

And I think we're going to see some desperate people in the more equitorial regions start trying it because while geoengineering is a really horrible idea that can easily go wrong, it's also probably the only hope those nations have.

And it's cheap enough if you're just trying to reflect away more sunlight to cool things down a bit and don't care too dreadfully much about side effects.

It's well within the budget of some of the richer nations that are really getting hammered by climate change, and a coalition could easily pay for it.
posted by sotonohito at 11:34 AM on June 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think we're probably in for at least a limited amount of solar geoengineering (like dispersing aerosols in the atmosphere to block solar radiations before they warm us). It can't be the only mitigation plan, but it could help maintain livable conditions while we fight the emissions problem and do more capture. I think there's modeling that show a little bit seems ok, too much would just cause even more disturbance of weather patterns.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 12:01 PM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I believe that the plants of the world, which depend on sunlight for photosynthesis, might have some objections to solar geoengineering. Just a hunch.
posted by MrVisible at 1:07 PM on June 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

The 'geo' engineering I think might work is making a survey of all tthe near earth objects that cross our orbit around the Sun and choosing a selection of such objects you could, with a very gentle nudge, send into a low angle grazing collision with the Earth-facing side of the Moon.

You would carefully calculate the trajectory and site of the collision so as to inject the maximum possible amount of moondust into the space of the Earth-Moon system. Such as by arranging to have the dust ejected at a velocity greater than the escape velocity of the Moon, but less than that of the two worlds together, perhaps.

If this is actually feasible, it conceivably might have happened naturally at some point in the past, so if it were possible to date some of the Moon's major craters, it might be interesting to try to find out what was going on with Earth's climate at the time.
posted by jamjam at 3:22 AM on June 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Because, you know, knocking the moon even a tiny bit off of orbit in a collision that would elicit enough dust to cause solar darkening on Earth would not do anything to tidal calendars or anything else that might be really tragic with unforeseen results.
posted by hippybear at 3:01 PM on June 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

After all the ways we screwed with the earths atmosphere and ecology over the last 200 years it is a bit late to stop geo-engineering now. We might as well investigate if there are some short term things we can do to limit the impact of the catastrophe.
posted by interogative mood at 10:05 PM on June 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

After all the ways we screwed with the Earth's atmosphere and ecology over the last 200 years, now is a good time to admit that this is an enormously complex system and we simply aren't capable of managing it through direct intervention and instead should focus on the things we already know work--leave the fossil fuels in the ground and reduce land use changes and other practices that also release greenhouse gases. We've known all of this for the last 200 years. It's time to act like we know what we have long known.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:13 AM on June 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

Metafilter: now is a good time to admit that this is an enormously complex system and we simply aren't capable of managing it through direct intervention and instead should focus on the things we already know work
posted by glaucon at 6:03 AM on June 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

We've nice simple-ish geo-engineering tools, like painting everything the right flavor of white, which reflects might light at frequencies which escape our atmosphere. Ain't too likely "sustaining the status quo" yields large scale deployment of "technological solutions [ahead] of societal collapse" though, otsebyatina, if only for economic reasons, but..

We might retain more if societal collapse winds up less complete, due to being triggered sooner. It's really the opposite of maintaining the status quo. Also "collapse now and avoid the rush". It's nice to no longer worry too much about Ukraine, Taiwan, resource conflicts, etc either.

We really must curb meat consumption though, as collapse could go dark places fast if everyone eats mostly meat.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:38 AM on July 1, 2023

Two Bit da Vinci on how bad this El Niño is expected to be
posted by flabdablet at 12:14 PM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Because, you know, knocking the moon even a tiny bit off of orbit in a collision that would elicit enough dust to cause solar darkening on Earth would not do anything to tidal calendars or anything else that might be really tragic with unforeseen results.

Okay, right, hear me out here...

With careful calculation, we could fire a succession of billionaires at the moon - and this is the cool bit: IN BALANCED PAIRS. We could maintain the tides while attacking the whole problem from both supply and demand perspectives.
posted by pompomtom at 4:21 AM on July 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

Charge $250K a seat and assure them it's a round trip
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:25 AM on July 2, 2023 [2 favorites]