Ocean Temperature | Hacker News Reader

Ocean Temperature

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87 pointsluu53 comments

Not sure if my math is correct, but seems like compared to before global warming started, the oceans now hold an excess of energy that is equivalent to running a nuclear power plant for 3 million years. This is now excess energy in our system.

I just wanted to share that since I couldn’t really relate to the 10^22 joules number in the article.

Which article are you referring to? I didn't see it in the parent.

Chart for Ocean Heat Content under trends.

Source is @ https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

Venus any% glitchless speedrun.

Short of launching all the nukes, it's actually really hard to imagine a faster way to make Earth uninhabitable than humanity's GHG emissions project. (3.68×10^13 kg of CO2 in 2022 alone! Impressive!)

If we could terraform planets as quickly as we're de-terraforming Earth, Mars would be prime real estate in no time. Alas.

> hard to imagine a faster way to make Earth uninhabitable

Manufacturing lots of SF6 (sulphur hexafluoride) might do the trick. 22800x more greenhouse potential than CO2 per unit mass.

It's way more dense[0] than air, though, so not a lot of it reaches the upper atmosphere. I don't think it's 22800x more effective when produced at ground level.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u19QfJWI1oQ

That's why we're aiming for in-orbit manufacturing, isn't it?

The number appears to me as ~20 x 10^22 J

I tried to replicate your maths using 1Bn W for a power plant and I get ~6.3M years. Did you use a different W?

I chose 1Bn from reading https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-how-much-powe...

I'm glad your comment triggered me to do this exercise!

Boggling numbers all the same, and this is only the top half-mile of ocean

Given that the excess energy did come from nuclear power plant (the sun) over millions of years I think that is a really apt way to look at things.

Interesting coincidence that you ended up with 3 million years, given life appeared on earth about 3.7 million years ago.

> given life appeared on earth about 3.7 million years ago.

Add 1000X -- 3.7 billion years ago!

oops

The increase in temperature is since 1990 though.

As a useful milestone, dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago. Long time. First hominids, 2 Mya?

First evidence of hominids goes back almost six millions years [1] and first tools over three millions years ago [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardipithecus

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan

Great. We just need to find a way to vent that extra heat off into outer space. Problem solved. /s

I hear the sarcasm in your voice, but truly this is a thing. There are bands of radiation that are very transparent to our atmosphere and there is work being done with meta materials to try to shift waste energy into these bands to bleed it into space. I do conceed that the scale is impossibly large for the numbers we’re talking about, but I do find the science fascinating.

This is exactly what hurricanes do, and a lesser extent cumulonimbus clouds, starting from an atmospheric imbalance to eventually venting tropospheric heat to the upper atmosphere.

Can someone explain me why people post links to Wikipedia articles without any context?

They maybe stumbled upon it and found it interesting. There's often no need for context, it can simply be an interesting article to read.

I've submitted them before and often enjoy when they're posted. Sometimes the zeitgeist-link is obvious or sometimes it's a bit random. I'd guess that people who enjoy when they're posted also take to submitting interesting pages they've read (or re-encountered).

You may enjoy this little list I built, which collects all Wikipedia articles posted on HN and rank and tag them.

https://www.mostdiscussed.com/

Ocean temperatures have been the subject of a half dozen HN articles (driven by articles in the news) in the past few weeks, so I assume that’s the reason.

Speaking for myself, not Dan, but for non-technical topics that appear on HN, the discussion would be a lot better if the average commentator read the obvious Wikipedia article before commenting. That’s true even though Wikipedia has a lot of problems.

" but for non-technical topics that appear on HN, the discussion would be a lot better if the average commentator read the obvious Wikipedia article before commenting. That’s true even though Wikipedia has a lot of problems"

I have vague ideas of a forum, where any new poster has to answer some basic questions about the topic first correctly.

Most online discussions would probably benefit from that.

ControlProblem subreddit implements this and I was quite impressed.

That's a great!!! idea. I get very frustrated reading HN comments that have obviously never read the article beyond the title.

For the exact same reason people post links to other things, it's interesting. It's always been more "hacker" than "news" here.

Incidentally, check out this wacky alien-looking worm that exhibits bioluminescence even though it lives its entire life inside of a tube, so there is no one to perceive it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaetopterus

Oh shit - cool worm!! Edit: Keep being weirded out that comments like this get downvoted. What's the point?

HN is not Reddit. We like comments that add information and dislike comments that only express brief reactions, jokes, etc. Keeps the signal to noise ratio high.

Thanks!

That was neat, though it does mention there are some other creatures that can choose to share the tube and the research about it may be lacking in smaller companion life (bacteria or other lifeforms).

Is this worm all over the world or there's a certain climate it can live on. Wikipedia doesn't expand on it.

It’s a delightful HN quirk. You can post a direct link to anything you find interesting, apropos of nothing.

Ocean temperatures have been in the news (for me), so I for one can see the context.

Because it is compliant with HN rules.

If you see it in the front page and it bothers you enough to ask the question maybe you should try to find another community.

What's the reason it started to skyrocket after 1980 and not before? What made it stagnant or even slightly drop between 1940 and 1980?

> What made it stagnant or even slightly drop between 1940 and 1980?

Well, there was that one really big war in the 1940s...

Doesn’t that suggest sea transportation may be a bigger contributor than greenhouse gasses? Industrial production was at its limits during that period, but I would imagine cross ocean cargo was down significantly.

It would be interesting to see what pandemic years looked like with thousands of ships sitting for months off shore.

Edit: there might be something to that idea - https://arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card/Report-Card-2022/ArtMID/.... maybe globalism is the issue.

One more edit: container ships are effectively giant heat sinks with a ton (literally tons) of surface area (corrugated containers), sucking heat from the air and dumping it into the ocean. If that hypothesis has merit, I would expect the LA ports to have an increase in temperature during that same period.

Or there’s a complex interaction between Earth’s natural climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s definitely possible, but complexity makes errors more likely.

According to Google^TM, it takes 20-200 years for CO2 in the air to dissolve in the oceans and yet there are immediate effects during WW2 and COVID.

That mirrors global average temperature in general for that time period. Apparently it was because we were pumping sulfates into the atmosphere at an amazing rate from the 1940's until the EPA was born. Sulfates block sunlight and so mask the overall warming, at the cost of polluting the atmosphere.

See for example: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/50-years-ago-scientists-...

It has been proposed to intentionally resume injecting sulfates into the upper atmosphere in order to mitigate global warming[0]. (This is a horrible idea, but the jury's still out on whether it's better than the alternative.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering#Stratosph...

We probably are getting better at measuring things and crunching the numbers as years pass by.

Aerosols from pollution could be a culprit?

CO2-Emissions have been growing at an accelerating speed. Cumulative emissions double every 20-30 years. Half of CO2-emissions since 1750 have happened just since 1993.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?c...

> between the 1950s and the 1980s, the temperature of the Antarctic Southern Ocean rose by 0.17 °C (0.31 °F), nearly twice the rate of the global ocean.

>The warming rate varies with depth: at a depth of a thousand metres the warming occurs at a rate of nearly 0.4 °C per century (data from 1981 to 2019), whereas warming occurs at only half that depth [sic]

So from 20% of two centruries we have developed a long term average?

The chart of excess ocean energy also relates the current ocean energy relative to an average which ends in 2006. If you're unaware this biases the end values upwards.

Calculating out their 2020 value to each kg of ocean water on earth for a depth of 700m gives 0.189Cal. In other words, less than 20% of one degree above an arbitrary average calculated on a century basis with 80% of the century data absent.

If this could just pretend to appear as science i would start to care.

> These predictions suggest ocean temperatures of 55–85 °C during the period of 2,000 to 3,500 million years ago, followed by cooling to more mild temperatures of between 10 and 40 °C by 1,000 million years ago.

Imagine going to the beach and finding the water temperature is 85C, near boiling :D. What a different world that would be.

What concerns me is sloppy writing of this article. For example:

> In other words: the climb in ocean temperatures is the inevitable outcome of Earth's energy imbalance, primarily associated with increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases.[8]

The reference leads to https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs00376-023-2385-2 which is an article that doesn’t establish the causal relationship between human emissions and rising temperatures. Rather, the authors use this as an opening and reference other works on the topic.

If you put a reference to back up your claim, the reference should be to a primary study and not some study that references other study that might be relevant.

Primary sources are not allowed on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a tertiary source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...

I forgot Wikipedia has nothing to do with science.

Oh, you may be looking for this. It dates back before the doi system, so I don't think it has a link there.

https://www.geographyrealm.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/18...

“Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun’s rays”, pp 382-83 in: The American Journal of Science and Arts, Second Series, Vol. XXII — November, 1856 (Whole Volume). New York: G.P. Putnam & Co., 1856

If someone did present evidence that they oceans were not warming, they would be shouted down. Therefore, the claim the oceans are warming is not falsifiable. Therefore there can be no scientific position taken on whether the oceans are warming or not.

I regret that both sides in the warming debate have proven they will fake data. Their actions make it impossible for me to know if our planet is warming.

What is the temperature of the oceans supposed to be?

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