We are Unbelievably Screwed

This is not a boating accident

We have the latest data on ocean temperatures, ane there is an unprecedented heating event going on.

The numbers are worrying, put putting it in context with a picture makes it f%$#ing terrifying: (See the black line)

To call what’s happening in the oceans right now an anomaly is a bit of an understatement. Since March, average sea surface temperatures have been climbing to record highs, as shown in the dark line in the graph below.

Since this record-keeping began in the early 1980s—the other squiggly lines are previous years—the global average for the world’s ocean surfaces has oscillated seasonally between 19.7° and 21° Celsius (67.5° and 69.8° Fahrenheit). Toward the end of March, the average shot above the 21° mark and stayed there for a month. (The most recent reading, for April 26, was just a hair under 21°.) This temperature spike is not just unprecedented, but extreme.

“It’s surprising to me that we’re this far off the trajectory,” says Robert Rohde, lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit that gathers climate data. “Usually when you have a particular warming event, we’re beating the previous record by a little bit. Right now we’re sitting well above the past records for this time of year, for a considerable period of time.”

Rohde points out that temperatures this week were just under two-tenths of a degree warmer than the previous record. “Two-tenths doesn’t sound like a lot—but in ocean terms two-tenths is actually a lot because it doesn’t warm as quickly as the land,” he says.

This is a F%$# tonne of energy.

………

We're gonna need a bigger boat


Enough with the Jaws quotes, we are f%$#ed

Last year, researchers reported that climate change has made extreme heat events in the ocean the new normal. Thanks to historical data collected from ships all over the world, they determined the highest surface temperatures between the years 1870 to 1919—essentially setting a baseline for extremes. They found that in the 19th century, 2 percent of the ocean was hitting these extremes, but because of climate change it’s now 57 percent. In other words, extreme heat events in the ocean are now typical. (These differ from an overall increase in heat, in that temperatures come down from extreme peaks, but the general upward trend isn’t reversing itself.)

At this point, disaster is largely inevitable.  The only question is how bad it is going to get.

I think that it is inevitable that we will see significant areas of the world rendered uninhabitable for humans for at least part of the year, and a sea level rise of at least 3 meters.

What's more, I expect to see this earlier than anyone is predicting, which is not an unreasonable supposition given that the actual progress of anthropogenic climate change has exceeded the worst case scenarios from climatologists.