ocean

The ocean is turning green. Yes, it’s climate change

The ocean is turning green. Yes, it’s climate change

Not good news: More than half of the world’s oceans have changed colors in the past 20 years, becoming more green than blue. The culprit? Climate change. In a study, published Wednesday in Nature, decades worth of research showed 56 percent of the world’s oceans experienced color change between 2002 to 2022.

“The study’s authors say that natural instances, like seasonal or yearly variations to phytoplankton blooms, don’t explain the oceans’ shift in color, and don’t account for the change. Instead, researchers say the greening might better be explained by carbon dioxide absorption by plankton and algae communities and could signal an even more serious problem: Oceans absorb nearly 25 percent* of the world’s carbon emissions and may not be able to absorb more in the future.”

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The ocean is hotter than ever

The ocean is hotter than ever

Wow, not so good news… Oceans are heating up, more and more. The ocean absorbs about 90% of the extra heat in the climate system resulting from global warming. But because it takes more energy to heat water than air, the surface water temperature is rising more slowly than the surface air temperature is.

I developed a few years ago some graphics (source 1, source 2) on this, which shows the trend too:

Incredible, if we imagine that heat would have solely gone into the atmosphere – where would we be now?

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