Chethana Janith, Jadetimes Staff
C. Janith is a Jadetimes news reporter covering science and geopolitics.
And they’re not slowing down anytime soon.
Ah, the 1980s – a time of New Coke, teased hair, and an ocean that warmed at a steady pace. Fast forward forty years, and classic Coke is back, teased hair is mostly a “bedhead” side effect, and, unfortunately, the ocean is warming at an alarming rate. This finding comes from a new study by scientists at the University of Reading.
While it’s no shock that the ocean is getting warmer, the speed at which it’s happening – roughly 400 percent faster than in the 1980s – is deeply concerning. Using satellite observations from 1985 to the present, combined with statistical models factoring in climate variability, scientists discovered that the ocean warmed at a rate of about 0.06 degrees Celsius per decade in the late '80s. Now, that rate has surged to 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. The study’s results were published in 'Environmental Research Letters'.
“If the oceans were a bathtub, in the 1980s, the hot tap was running slowly, warming the water by just a fraction of a degree each decade,” said Chris Merchant, lead author of the study and a researcher at the University of Reading. “Now, the hot tap is running much faster, and the warming is accelerating. The way to slow this down is by turning off the hot tap – that means cutting global carbon emissions and striving for net-zero.”
Of course, the overall warming of the ocean - a figure known as the global mean sea surface temperature (GMSST) - is a result of the growth of “Earth’s energy imbalance,” or EEI, in the words of the authors. As concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases rise, more energy from the Sun is being absorbed than is escaping back into space, and that means warmer oceans.
By extrapolating future scenarios based on this data, the researchers also note that this growth isn’t linear, and that the increase gained over the last 40 years will likely be surpassed in less than 20 years if climate emissions are not mitigated. For evidence of this, look no further than recent history - in 2023 to 2024, the ocean hit record high temperatures for 450 days straight.
Although this heat flux was caused in part by the El Niño - a climate pattern that typically brings warmer conditions to the Pacific - scientists compared this recent El Niño to the one that occurred back in 2015-2016 and discerned that 44 percent of the record warmth came from steadily increasing ocean water temperatures.
Because of this steadily increasing rate of warmth, looking to past decades as a predictor for future climate behavior likely isn’t reliable, and this new data suggests that limiting emissions is more important than ever.
“Policy makers and wider society should be aware that the rate of global warming over recent decades is a poor guide to the faster change that is likely over the decades to come, underscoring the urgency of deep reductions in fossil-fuel burning,” the authors wrote.
There’s no going back to the ’80s - no one liked New Coke anyway - but there still are solutions for safeguarding a healthy planet for future generations.
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