The oceans have been setting heat records for more than fifteen months – now the constant peaks are likely to come to an end. Globally, the surface temperature of the American ‘Climate Reanalyzer’ platform recently no longer exceeded the daily values of the previous year. It can be assumed that the global sea temperature will remain below the extreme records of 2023 in the second half of the year, says Helge Gößling from the German Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI).
The oceans have been exceptionally warm since March of last year. Since then, the sea surface has been at its highest value every day since measurements began about 40 years ago, usually far from the previous daily record. Even now, the temperature is still well above the average of the years 1982 to 2011.
The main reason for the increase is man-made greenhouse gases. According to experts, more than 90 percent of the resulting heat effect is absorbed by the oceans. Even a change of just one tenth of a degree means the warming of incredibly large bodies of water.
The influence of El Niño is decreasing
In addition to the ongoing human-induced warming, there have been other effects recently. The climate phenomenon El Niño pumped heat from the ocean depths in the Pacific. “The influence of El Niño on the average temperature of the Earth is currently decreasing noticeably,” explains climate physicist Gößling. The change to its counterpart La Niña – also a natural, regularly occurring climate phenomenon – will probably lead to a decrease in global temperature. “However, it is still unclear how much cooling we can actually expect.”
The AWI researcher points to analyses showing that the influence of El Niño on the plates was not that great. Experts cite other factors for the unusually violent rash. The reduction in sulfur emissions from shipping and the eruption of an underwater volcano could have been partly responsible.
“Overall, however, these contributions appear to be too small to explain the recent temperature increase,” says Gößling. Wherever the rest comes from, the cause is crucial to whether temperatures will rise in the future as previously expected – or follow a different upward path.
Source: Krone
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