Mention is often made how the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean, pushes tropical waters north & even affects Arctic climates. Well……yeah! Was looking at recent Atlantic ocean temperatures at latitudes that are north of New York City, north of the southern half of Lake Michigan, & about the latitude of Eugene, Oregon. What is this Atlantic Ocean temperature? Ugh……80Fdeg………just incredible.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/03/21/ocean-temperatures-record-warm-climate/ Average ocean waters are at very high temperatures. Decades of rising average ocean temperatures never reached 21degC AND were considerably lower. Within the first months of 2023, average ocean temperatures porpoised high, popping to & over 21degC. Few waters north of the equator are even average, but vast waters are above average. The ocean west of Peru & Chile are way over average! The coolest below normal temperature waters are west of the west coast of the US. In the southern hemisphere, the largest average temperature waters surround Antarctica. Yet even there, a warm stream of waters flowing south along southeastern S.America, cross the Drake Passage waters to the West Antarctic peninsula. The “hot” waters submarine & melt the greatest amounts of deep ices of Antarctica & are raising havoc with Thwaites Glacier, which is the loosening plug holding back the largest glacier flow to the oceans of anywhere on Earth. Already Thwaites accounts for the largest ice melts in the southern hemisphere & potentially could increase numbers of times, for decades to millennia into the future.
Hi Litesong: It is going to get worse. https://www.accuweather.com/en/clim...manual&country_code=US&default_language=en-US Wayne
Yes, Wayne. You are totally correct. Some people may not know how severe sub-surface Antarctic ice melting is. As ice sheets grew in Antarctica, the weights of the ices started driving Antarctic lands downward. Some ices are near 3 miles thick. There are some Antarctic mountains that are 15,000+ feet tall, & yet, Antarctic ice sheets have or nearly covered these tall mountains. Closer to Antarctic coastlines, such deep ice sheets have piled on lands that initially were above sea level & driven those lands BELOW sea level. In the worst cases, lands have been driven 8000+ feet BELOW sea level. These strong, warm, sub-marine waters, have 8000 feet of ices to warm & melt. Much of western Antarctica is NOT land based, but presently are islands & sub-marine lands with ice sheets piled on top. Already in places, ices have melted such that the ices have lifted off the sub-marine land (grounding points). As on fjords of Greenland, Norway, western Canada, & South America, the waters become DEEPER than the initial grounding points near oceans AND as directions move into the interiors of land. These deep waters, away from the oceans, provide even more opportunities for intruding warm waters to melt ices. Antarctic ice melting is just getting started & I’ve only talked about articles as temperatures are now. However, even warmer waters are in the future, just as your mentioned article articulates.
Excerpts from Scott Dance reporting in the Washington Post: ////// Earth is at its hottest in thousands of years. Here’s how we know. Observations from both satellites and the Earth’s surface are indisputable — the planet has warmed rapidly over the past 44 years. In recent days, as the Earth has reached its highest average temperatures in recorded history, scientists have made a bolder claim: It may well be warmer than any time in the last 125,000 years.,,,,,, Measuring up a warm spell 6,000 years ago If any a single day in the past 100,000 or 125,000 years could have been as hot as the Earth this week, scientists said it could only have occurred about 6,000 years ago. At that time, the planet had warmed with the end of the last ice age, and a period of global cooling began that would continue until the Industrial Revolution……..Scientists are confident that, apart from the global warming of recent decades, it was Earth’s warmest period in the past 100,000 years. They estimate that temperatures averaged somewhere between 0.2 degrees Celsius and 1 degree Celsius (0.36 to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than they were from 1850-1900…… In comparison, during a record-warm June last month, global temperatures averaged 1.36 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than 1850-1900, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service…… During the stretch 6,000 years ago, the warmth was largely the result of fluctuations in Earth’s orbit, which is elliptical rather than circular…... That conclusion is “certainly plausible,” said Michael Mann, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania known as a pioneer in studying historical climate data. But technically, without 120,000 years of daily temperature data, it becomes “a plausibility argument, rather than a definitive statement,” Mann wrote in an email. Unlike any previous warm period, this one was caused by people…… That assessment states with “medium confidence” that temperatures from 2011-2020 exceed those of any multi-century period of warmth over the past 125,000 years….. Further, there is no evidence anywhere in scientists’ understanding of Earth’s history of warming that occurred nearly as rapidly as the ongoing spike in temperatures, caused by the burning of fossil fuels and emissions of greenhouse gases…… “The current rise is not natural, but caused by us,” he said. Scott Dance is a reporter for The Washington Post covering extreme weather news and the intersections between weather, climate, society and the environment. He joined The Post in 2022 after more than a decade at the Baltimore Sun, where he most recently focused on climate change and the environment. ///////// Democracy Dies in Darkness
The following is about Climate Change effects on South Asia. In recent years, citizens are fleeing their long term places of residences due to increasing climate changes at a 10% greater rate than longer term averages. It appears these rates of abandonment will increase in short years ahead. Needless to say, death rates are also rising: https://apple.news/AkfXZych2S2arQGs62TH2qA Excerpts from the article: Researchers said the Himalayas, which cover countries such as Pakistan, Nepal and India, had lost 40 percent of their ice over several hundred years. “Over a billion and a half people are living in an area…….has major river systems from the Hindu Kush and the Himalayan mountain regions flowing through,”………Some 750 million people in South Asia have been affected by at least one natural disaster, according to data compiled by the Washington-based World Bank…… “Climate change … is exacerbating the ‘push factor’ – the motivation to migrate away from place of residence – for people who are living in places where they can no longer continue to have livelihoods that they used to have, whether it’s farming or fishing,”
