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Comment by saulpw | Hacker News Reader

> In March, researchers examining the ocean off the east coast of North America found that the water's surface was 13.8°C, or 14.8°F, hotter than the average temperature between 1981 and 2011.

How does 13.8°C translate into 14.8°F, in any way? I thought at first maybe they were converting absolute temperatures, but that doesn't check out either. I'm sure ocean warming is hugely terrible but this casts doubt on the whole article.

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I checked the BBC article linked else-thread, this should read, “.. was 13.8° C, or 24.8° F, hotter than..”

13.8 C is 56.84 F tho

Yes indeed and the difference between (eg) 10°C and 23.8° C is 13.8° C, or 24.8° F.

(Rewriting the other comment in an easily digestible format)

23.8C (78.8F) - 10C (50F) = 13.8C (78.8F - 50F = 28.8F)

It's also completely meaningless even if the conversion was right. They're comparing the average ocean surface temperature off the east coast of North America to just "the average temperature between 1981 and 2011." The average temperature of what and where? The ocean? Water surface? Air? Globally? Off the coast of North America?

Then a few paragraphs later:

But that doesn't account for the average global ocean surface temperature rising by 0.9°C from preindustrial levels, with 0.6°C taking place in the last four decades.

I can't even. They went from 14 to 0.6 in the span of two sentences.

Not to mention that water being either "13.8°C, or 14.8°F" at similar times is laughable.

I suspect that they are taking some point in time and comparing it to average temperatures, which is beyond comical. What a farce.

Who they, the scientists? Come on, that is just some strange error in this commondreams article, neither in the data or in the BBC article...

The right translation would be 24.8F, so wow... this study must be false and scientists beyond comical because an article made a typo (:

here’s the actual paper https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/1675/2023/

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