Why Is the Sea So Hot? | Hacker News Reader

Why Is the Sea So Hot?

newyorker.com

79 pointsmitchbob76 comments

Seems like there is a natural experiment here that could be easily tried. Let the ocean going ships switch back to the high sulfer fuel for a while and see what happens to the ocean temperature. Even if it proves the effect is small it would at least make it predictable and serve as input into models. The risks compared to other types of geoengineering seem small also since the ships were already putting sulfer into the atmosphere for decades and it's easily reversible. Maybe 6 months of allowing high sulfer fuel would be enough to get the data? If the ocean temperatures drop dramatically that would be scary, it would mean that eliminating other similar causes of sulfer pollution (low sulfer fuels being replaced by EV's) would probably have the same effect.

Agree. Short of direct stratospheric injection of sulphur dioxide, just waiving the regulation for 1 year would give us quite a lot of data about the real-world impacts, and allow us to calibrate climate models correctly. It would be a first step to building consensus that we need climate engineering in the short term in order slow the rate of climate change and lower the ecosystem impacts until we can fully shift to a non-carbon based economy. It's not necessarily the warming, it's the rapid rate of change that is the danger here.

It's an excellent and very practical proposal. Unfortunately I think geo-engineering is a hard ask politically.

Left-coded groups demanding action on climate change seem to primarily it as a moral issue, and will tend to reject what they percieve as "easy fixes".

Right-coded groups are more split with some groups wanting various kinds of action while others deny a problem exists at all.

Geo-engineering is perceived as a "techno optimist" position right now, which is a relatively insignificant demographic niche.

But that pales compared to the difficulty of getting international consensus. I feel we'd need a PR / influence campaign the likes of which the world has not yet seen.

Regarding rightists: It would seem easier to go from "there is no problem" to "the problem can be cheaply contained", particularly without a strict requirement for mass lifestyle, infrastructure, or industrial changes.

Similarly, it's hard to imagine opportunists not using any leftist refusal to take concrete action as ammunition. This will motivate them to at least give token support.

If the problem gets worse, geoengineering will naturally be turned to, not because it's some best solution that would make everyone maximally happy, but because it's the easiest solution and requires the least coordination.

Lastly, note that you mention international consensus, but it's easy to imagine mere regional/factional consensus being enough. Nations already often engage in pollution or depletion of natural resources that crosses borders. Other players not cooperating only means scaling up independent operations to compensate.

The future belongs to techno-optimists. This is a critical coalition to build, because pragmatically, I do not see carbon capture or carbon reduction happening quickly. I think we need the climate scientific community to model an approach and put forward a recommendation.

Wouldn't that lead to a return of the acid rain that was killing off ocean life already?

Yes, though ocean ships are not the only source of sulfer (and even low sulfer fuels have some sulfer.) But the duration would be short, we've already been doing it for decades, and the data could be invaluable. Regardless of the politics and peoples perceptions, it seems like the right thing to do scientifically. If you're against tampering with the environment then consider that by switching to low sulfer fuels we have just tampered with the environment in a huge way, without any scientific study of the results or forethought as to what the consequences would be. Halting pollution is just as big an experiment in geoengineering as any other type of geoengineering. This is an opportunity to learn something about geoengineering at low cost and low risk. Best case may be that putting the sulfer back shows little effect. Worst case is it shows a big effect and then we have to very careful about when and how we end other sources of particulate pollution that may have an effect on warming. That would be terrible since it may mean we'd have to keeping putting poisons into the atmosphere to keep from cooking the planet for a while, but at least we'd have a better idea of what we're doing and what effects air pollution is currently causing.

I watched Sabina Hossenfelder talk about historical predictive models being wrong and too cold on their predictions due to the way they looked at the clouds and the scattering of the light (quantifying the amount of water vapor in the clouds). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9sDyooxf4

Climate scientists are disagreeing over the hot climate models. This is not a debate on the human effects, simply the way to interpret the data.

This video is one of the most scary thing I have watched on climate change. I have been thinking about it since it was published. I have read Michael Mann’s answer to James Hansen and that didn’t make me feel any better.

I am really waiting to have more people looking into it.

I agree. I knew the climate models were wrong so I dismissed the climate scientists. I did not know how wrong they were and on what measurement. The data on human causes is perplexing, as lower car emissions warmed the planet as the co2 scattered less light causing the temperature to rise, however this would cause acid rain and other issues even though the temperature lowered.

Temperature is like reading the Ghz of a computer, it could mean many things. Acidification, chemical dumping, and extreme weather patterns can occur with deadly effects with or without readable measurements in temperature.

Be ready for 'it' human caused or not.

We are leaving the conditions that work for humans and other animals. 3 billion climate refugees in the next 30 years. We must slow down the climate catastrophe now.

You're not helping the situation by making these hyperbolic statements that can be easily be argued against and muddy the dialog.

There were three sentences. Which one exactly was hyperbolic?

- "We are leaving the conditions that work for humans and other animals". We're outside the envelope (the historical range) of biotic and abiotic conditions that defined our species' existence on earth for the duration of our time as a species. We are seeing climate extremes never before experienced by the genus homo, let alone homo sapiens. This is a matter of climatic record, absolutely no controversy here.

- "3 billion climate refugees in the next 30 years"? That's a future prediction so obviously we can't confirm or deny it. We've "only" seen 100s of millions globally displaced already from small-scale recent collapses. But those have other causal factor in addition to climate. Still, sea level keeps rising. Water extraction continues sinking coastal water tables into brackish water. Extreme storms happen more and more frequently. Most people on earth live near the ocean. Totaled property damage is more and more common. 3 billion people displaced in 30 years is plausible given the recent trends. It might be less if we're lucky.

- "We must slow down the climate catastrophe now." Given the ongoing catastrophe, I fail to see any hyperbole in this statement.

How is this hyperbole? There’s a wall being touted at the southern border of America for chrissake, the country that has a statue engraved on it that it takes in refugees. Every temperate climate western country has a border “crisis” right now.

This statement seems very naive and hyperbolic, like “chicken little”. The people crossing the southern border of the US are economic migrants that are not fleeing “climate change” that is preposterous. There are more military aged males relocating due to criminals situations per day than the amount people coming to the US because of a “hole in the ozone layer” in one year. People that think this way, I think are consuming way too much leftist media and are not thinking critically.

What the living fuck are you going on about? You can’t even write a complete sentence.

Well, you’re just throwing insults like a child but the fact is that what you said is completely hyperbolic and irrational. What I wrote is clear enough. The people crossing the border are not doing so because they are scared of climate, you sound ridiculous for asserting that.

That has nothing to do with climate change. They aren't abandoning their homeland because its hot. They're doing it because they can get more money elsewhere.

No one said it was because “it’s hot”. It’s not like they go to cool off. But climate change changes everything. It may kill off a tourist economy they relied on. It may reduce crop yield, making food too expensive, etc. It may increase disease. Absolutely climate has a huge impact.

We should really give the statue back. It's an embarrassment how we explicitly reject its ideals.

What's hyperbolic? The fact is no one knows how bad it'll be and how soon. Does that mean no statement can be made about the future? We're already seeing problems around water sourcing. I don't see how any of OPs statements are a stretch.

Every time I see someone make a statement about the future negative affects of climate change inevitably someone comes around to say that's not helping. It reads like a shade of denialism. How can you fix a problem without reviewing the consequences? I've yet to hear these same commenters suggest what would help.

What you will see is the fingerprint of trolling conservative bots, talking about “leftist” this, “woke” that. Same as Twitter. With nothing to back anything up because they’re just shills.

Where is one shred of evidence of any of this? Humans adapt. It’s this kind of thing why you have 20-year-olds that think we’ll be dead in 5 years. It’s ridiculous. The same people that make this argument also try to tell us that the 10 million people that have illegally crossed into the US have some because of climate change.

Go outside.

No, no, every possible question must be answered by an automated plagiarism machine running on GPUs which need multiple kilowatts to operate. It's called progress, you see.

Good thing you won't be around in 30 years to eat your hat.

Top line of top graph: 2024 ocean heat

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/

There are quite a few discussions here on the topic over the past couple of years, eg:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36997834

Ocean Heat Record Broken, 289 comments

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1710661488&dateRange=custom&...

Sea surface temperature datasets https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/optimum-interpolation-sst

Visualizations https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/

Most recent HN thread from yesterday

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39719391

I have a few serious points to mention. One ice consumes massive amounts of heat during the last degree of melting vs the next degrees up, like 2 to 300 times as much. Two, CO2 levels have increased at a pace never seen in the geologic record. We haven't been over 420 ppm for millions of years and the last time we were our temp was almost 20 degrees warmer. Climate shifts often happen rapidly finishing with an exponential shift, the scary part is just starting. https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2024/03/co2-rise-is-acceler...

- "Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai produced relatively little sulfur dioxide but a fantastic amount of water vapor, and its warming effects, it’s believed, are still being felt."

If this puzzles anyone, the missing key is that this water vapor was injected into the stratosphere.

https://www.nasa.gov/earth/tonga-eruption-blasted-unpreceden...

- "...estimate that the Tonga eruption sent around [146 million metric tons] of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer."

"...estimate that the Tonga eruption sent around [146 million metric tons] of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer."

Is this one of the reasons why winter's been so weird this year in North America? I've heard of El Nino as being the suspected cause, but this sending of water vapor into the air also must have had long-term effects.

Is water vapor some kind of greenhouse gas? How does its' infrared absorption measure up to carbon dioxides'?

Afaik it is a strong greenhouse gas, but under normal circumstances the amount of water vapor in the global air is more or less the same so it won't matter that much.

Now we don't live in normal circumstances, but in a society that hasn't given economic value to an environment that is essential to it's survival. And so it happens like in France where nuclear energy couldn't be used anymore because there wasn't enough water in the rivers for the process anymore, during a particularly hot summer.

Essentially water vapor is one of the runaway feedback loops for cilmate change, more vapor means more greenhouse effect, means warmer, means more vapor, etc. This works until the air is saturated. Climate is driven by a bunch of those complex feedback loops and includes tipping points (e.g. particular big ice structures melting) so predicting how exactly it will pan out isn't trivial.

A side effect of more water vapor is also that storms get stronger and rain falls worse.

> nuclear energy couldn't be used anymore because there wasn't enough water in the rivers for the process anymore

That's a deformation; production had to be reduced (not stopped), not because there was not any water anymore, but because the exhaust water temperature would have been over the threshold for ecosystem stability. The plants could have been run at full power if we were OK with toasting the shellfishes.

Water vapor is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas - however, it's presence in the atmosphere is extremely variable and so it's very difficult to measure long-term trends versus just what the weather is doing today. That's why we use CO2 as our climate change marker. CO2 is nowhere near as powerful of a greenhouse gas, but it's stable in the atmosphere for centuries. That makes it easy to track trends, versus today's weather, and you're also tracking a variable that has long-term consequences. For the record, methane is another strong greenhouse gas but like CO2, it's concentration in the atmosphere is highly variable, so we don't tend to track it.

Water vapour is a very strong infrared absorber, so much so that it is more important for the greenhouse effect than CO2. However, it is usually very difficult to change the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere as a whole (it just rains out).

The stratosphere cycles through much slower than the troposphere (there are very few clouds, for example). That means that if you put water there, it can stay there for a lot longer, increasing the total amount of water in the atmosphere and warming the climate.

I'll also say that we expect water vapour to increase as temperature increases, which is a positive feedback in the climate system,increasing the warming beyond that of CO2.this is known as the water vapour feedback.

- "That means that if you put water there, it can stay there for a lot longer"

There's more to it than that. Large parts of the water bands in the troposphere are already saturated: adding more and more of the same absorbing material doesn't have a linear effect, but diminishing returns. But the stratosphere is completely dry. The marginal effect of a water unit is a lot greater.

Yes. But there's ten trillion tons of water vapor in the troposphere, so, normally this wouldn't be a relevant amount. It's key that the volcano eruption lifted the water vapor completely outside the weather layer, into the stratosphere. A marginal unit of water in the stratosphere is a lot more potent as a greenhouse gas, than the same unit in the troposphere. (I don't know the quantified values).

It absorbs a lot of the spectrum, both UV and IR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_absorption_by_...

However clouds reflect. So high humidity will absorb ir, but thick cloud will reflect.

So its a bit more complex.

Other than a mild winter, there has been no coverage or news on a tangible impact to either agriculture or extreme weather events, merely speculations on what could happen. It would also mean that as far as a real impact, the system is self balancing and we should not worry too much?

I don’t understand at all what you’re saying. If we’re at the start of some unknown runaway feedback loop, the fact that we had a (relatively, it was quite warm) normal winter means nothing at all. Just because your car is moving slowly when it starts rolling down a hill, does not mean you should be casual about the situation.

Ok, let me try to explain myself.

I think what you’re referring to the possibility of a perturbation that can result in an uncontrolled descent down the hill until it reaches another stable equilibrium (a local equilibrium in a non linear system). I am picturing a ball rolling down from a peak until it comes to rest in a valley

My question is that given the large excursion recently seen in the temperature graph, would we not expect to see large scale effects that would be visible?

The implication is that until this impact is clear enough, strong action that is usually advocated, may not be taken. For instance, the reliance on greenhouse power plants continues to increase worldwide including the US. While renewables have made progress, there is no clear path to net zero over the next decade. So the question remains on the predictions from the models, vs tangible evidence.

This is a really sudden event. It’s only about a year old. We are seeing effects that are visible — on sea surface temperatures. But it’s likely too soon to know what the implications of this sudden temperature excursion will be on things like land temperatures, storms etc. Similarly, there’s no reason to believe there’s a “valley” or safe equilibrium we’ll wind up in. The world doesn’t fundamentally care about our well-being, that’s up to us.

Yeah, love how you clarified the effects of gravity - the ball rolling down the hill, that totally cleared the confusion I had about a car rolling, whew - almost hurt my head there.

What still hurts my head is this whole concept of like feedback loops and like how nothing about the projections show any like sort of leveling off - like maybe you can help me make sense of that.

What happens if it's just like a really really big hill and there is no valley of "equilibrium" to get to??

Does the ball stop rolling before the car or will they at least stop before we all die??

Maybe I've lost the analogy

there's been plenty of catastrophic agriculture events caused by climate change already, they've just been smoothed out by global trade (for now at least, I don't know how resilient it will continue to be)

Could it have something to do with the biggest act of terrorism of industrial infrastructure in history?

The Nordstream pipeline leak has resulted in the biggest single release of methane gas in history, the release also neatly coincides with a huge jump in the ocean mean temperature anomaly.

The war on terror has truly failed.

Various sources report 7.5 to 14 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent from the leak, which is about the same amount emitted by a coal-fired power station in a year.

Didn't know of that. Can you link me?

> biggest act of terrorism

Not to be pedantic, but that was just an attack, I wouldn't call it terrorism. Not sure anyone was scared by an explosion at the bottom of the Baltic.

It was aimed at people's energy supply during winter. that very much was meant to instill fear. Not fear for one's life, but fear for everyone's wallet and heating.

Was the attack aimed at european energy supply or was it aimed at Russia’s wallet?

The whole episode is fascinating.

¿Por que no los dos?

Exactly. It's not terrorism when government does it.

That pipeline blowing up lead to a pretty insignificant methane release compared to whatever is happening yearly. As in, at most 5-10% of what the oil and gas industry releases anyway.

The Nordstream leak has as much impact on sea temperature as my fart on air temperature.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/06/...

The most important thing is that the investigation does not reveal ourselves as the perpetrators.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-shuns-formal-joi...

Sweden shuns formal joint investigation of Nord Stream leak, citing national security

But they did find explosives and sabotage:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/18/nord-stream-...

Analysis:

https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/why-the-media-dont-want-...

Thank you - I thought it was common knowledge that we did that.

Can totally trust the Swedes not like their formal members of an alliance of ours or anything like that - I think we can clearly chalk this up to an "act of sabotage" and let that be the end of that

I thought we, the Americans, literally did that "act of terrorism" and said it was the Ukranians.

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