Global warming pushes ocean temperatures off the charts
FILE PHOTO: An undated file photo shows Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago and site of a major United States military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean leased from Britain in 1966. REUTERS/Stringer/File Photo.
PARIS—In 2023, the world’s oceans took up an enormous amount of excess heat, enough to “boil away billions of Olympic-sized swimming pools,” according to an annual report published Thursday.
Oceans cover 70 percent of the planet and have kept the Earth’s surface livable by absorbing 90 percent of the excess heat produced by the carbon pollution from human activity since the dawn of the industrial age.
In 2023, the oceans soaked up around 9 to 15 zettajoules more than in 2022, according to the respective estimates from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Chinese Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP).
One zettajoule of energy is roughly equivalent to 10 times the electricity generated worldwide in a year.
“Annually the entire globe consumes around half a zettajoule of energy to fuel our economies”, according to statement.
“Another way to think about this is 15 zettajoules is enough energy to boil away 2.3 billion Olympic-sized swimming pools.”
In 2023, sea surface temperature and the energy stored in the upper 2,000 meters of the ocean both reached record highs, according to the study published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
The amount of energy stored in the oceans is a key indicator of global warming because it is less affected by natural climate variability than sea surface temperature.
Some of the colossal amounts of energy stored in the ocean helped make 2023, a year rife with heat waves, droughts and wildfires, the hottest on record.
That’s because the warmer the oceans gets, the more heat and moisture enters the atmosphere. This leads to increasingly erratic weather, like fierce winds and powerful rain.
Warmer sea surface temperatures are driven mostly by global warming, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels.
Experts are concerned about the long-term capacity of the oceans to absorb excess heat from human activity. —AFP
