Ocean temperatures hit record high as rate of heating accelerates | Hacker News Reader

Ocean temperatures hit record high as rate of heating accelerates

theguardian.com

22 pointsForHackernews10 comments

I usually try to be an optimist however, I have zero expectation we're able to mitigate severe climate change and it's repercussions.

The only mechanism I can think of is we'll develop mechanisms at scale that can remove CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans and sell it to the world as if we're able to continue BAU and just raise taxes on carbon or income to pay for it.

Ultimately, we never know what will unfold, but it would be wise to do what one can to not accellerate warming.

Realistically, I can't help but feel that many attempts at solutions will only make things worse...

Dramatically cutting back waste and encouraging reuse over recycling should be the first concerns. Cutting down e-waste and expanding user rights to devices is probably a good place to start. The fact that you can't update/maintain a phone or router a few years is pretty significant.

Fooling people into thinking a new car is a better option than keeping their existing cars running is another big issue... what's good for the economy isn't always what's best for the ecology. Tax breaks for companies where more than 75% of their workforce is on a 4-day full time work week over a 5+ day would do more than carbon taxes.

Forcing companies to pay for domestic recycling of goods they sell would also be a big improvement... dumping waste in China and Africa is not a viable long term solution.

Taxing air shipping to discourage it, would also help a lot... do you REALLY need that thingy from Amazon tomorrow?

There are many ways to bring about change, and imho expanding bureaucracy or increasing income taxes are the last places you should start.

I wish that popular press accounts of science could be a bit more precise. What exactly does "rate of heating accelerates" mean. The graphs seem to indicate a relatively steady rate of temperature increase (not an accelerating rate) in the oceans over the last 40 years. This corresponds to the the relatively steady rate of increase in the global temperature over the same time period [1].

More precisely, it looks to me like the second derivative of the ocean temperature is approximately zero, whereas the headline suggests that the second derivative of temperature is much greater than zero.

Obviously, the reported heating is great a concern, but the original article, not surprisingly, [2] appears to be behind a paywall.

[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

[2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6423/128.full

The verbiage also indicates a fair amount of bias...

> because they absorb more than 90% of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases emitted by fossil fuel burning, forest destruction and other human activities

Up to 90% of greenhouse gas volume is water vapor... human activities definitely have an effect, but the statement above inflates the involvement and creates an alarmist feel.

I'm all for making better choices and policy change. Throwing away money on things that won't help or disguising political interests behind the environment won't help the planet as a whole.

My high school physics is rusty, but is the relationship between heat and temperature a linear one? The article seems to be talking about heat energy, rather than temperature in degrees:

> The results show heat increasing at an accelerating rate as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. The rate from 1987 to 2019 is four and a half times faster than that from 1955 to 1986.

And the axis on the chart says:

> Change in heat content relative to 1981-2010 average in zettajoules

Anybody know what the global climate change skeptic/denier position is on ocean warming is? Is it that the ocean is not getting warmer, or it is but it has some other cause than human activity, or it is but it's a good thing, not bad? Or do they just ignore it?

There’s no single denier poison.

In my neighborhood the most popular position is: that’s great that temperature rises, winters won’t be so cold.

On co2 raise they usually respond with: high co2 is good for plants, and: high co2 promotes growth of algae, it will be reverted soon without us having to do anything about it.

While the science is correct, the media coverage is like a contest of who can come up with the scariest spin possible. Case in point: this article mentions a heating of more than 200 zettajoules. Just to be extra helpful they put an asterisk and explain that "One zettajoule = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules". Very clarifying, won't you say? I personally don't know anyone who is familiar with zettajoules, but I do people familiar with degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius. That number is absent. With a little bit of google, you can find it though. It's 0.135F or 0.075C [1].

[1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/climate-...

So is it your position that ocean warming will be bad in its consequences, but not nearly as bad as the media coverage says it will be?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com