Oceans heating up faster now than in the past 10,000 years, says new study
Posted on 5 November 2013 by John Abraham
If the latest research is correct,
our oceans are heating up much faster now than they have in the past 10,000 years. This is one of the conclusions that is drawn from a recently published paper in Science. The researchers (Yair Rosenthal, Braddock Linsley, and Delia Oppo) cleverly traveled back in time to explore how ocean temperatures have changed. Comparison of those temperatures to today's helped them quantify the impact that human greenhouse gas emissions are having on the planet.
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Here is what the author himself had to say:
"
It is clear that much of the heat that humans have put into the atmosphere through greenhouse gas emissions will be absorbed by the ocean. But the absorption time takes hundreds of years, much longer than the current rate of warming and the planet will keep warming. Our study puts the modern observations into a long-term context. Our reconstruction of Pacific Ocean temperatures suggests that in the last 10,000 years, the Pacific mid-depths have generally been cooling by about 2 degrees centigrade until a minimum about 300 years during the period known as the Little Ice Age.
After that, mid-depth temperatures started warming but at a very slow rate. Then,
since about 1950, temperatures from just below the sea surface to ~1000 meter, increased by 0.18 degrees C. This seemingly small increase occurred an order of magnitude faster than suggested by the gradual change during the last 10,000 years thereby providing another indication for global warming. But our results also show the temperature of the ocean interior is still much colder than at any time in the past 10,000 years thus, lagging the changes we see at the ocean surface."