Sea Surface Temperature Rising | Energy Central

Economist: “Earth is warming faster. Scientists are closing in on why.” Gavin Schmidt is a leading climate modeler + chief of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science in New York City. He + many colleagues have been working overtime to explain the discrepancies between modeling + the warmer reality of 2023-2024 [red lines on the graph]. “In 2021 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put the rate of warming at 0.2°C a decade.” An El Niño revved up in the second half of 2023 + ended in mid-2024, events that increase sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific. The subsurface eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in the South Pacific Jan2022 lofted a huge amount of water vapor into the stratosphere. And the ‘Sun was reaching the peak of its typical 11-year sun-spot cycle; during such “solar maxima”, it provides around 0.05% more light than it does on average and its spectrum skews into the ultraviolet.’ In 2020, new rules imposed by the International Maritime Organisation slashed the allowable amount of sulfur in fuel used on the high seas, not just near ports as previously established. “But [sulfate] particles also encourage the formation of clouds, brighten clouds already there and reflect away sunlight even if the air is too dry for any clouds at all: all these effects cool the sea’s surface.” Modeling suggests ‘something like 1.2 more watts per square metre of sunshine [at top of the atmosphere] is warming the ocean. “Helge Goessling + his colleagues at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven used satellite data + weather records to show that over the course of this century Earth has gradually been reflecting less sunlight back into space than it used to.” 2023 was the dimmest [looking from space] to date, apparently due to paucity of cloud cover, ‘particularly in northern mid-latitudes.’ Finally, “since 2014 China has been making progress in reducing sulphur emissions by closing particularly noxious power plants and scrubbing sulphur out of the flue gases at others.” Complicated, eh? Simplify this by looking at the trendlines of the graph. Going up like a weather balloon.