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The ocean surface is warming four times faster than in the 1980s

By teleSUR Desk (Posted Jan 29, 2025)

Originally published: teleSUR English on January 28, 2025 (more by teleSUR English)  |
Capitalism, Climate Change, Environment, StrategyGlobalNewswire

On Tuesday, the journal Environmental Research Letters published a study by the University of Reading showing that ocean surface warming has quadrupled over the past four decades.

At the end of the 1980s, ocean temperatures were rising at a rate of 0.06 degrees Celsius per decade, whereas now they are increasing by 0.27 degrees every ten years. This would explain the unprecedented high ocean temperatures recorded in 2023 and early 2024.

“If the oceans were a bathtub of water, we could say that in the 1980s, the hot water faucet was opening slowly, warming the water by only a fraction of a degree each decade. Now the faucet is opening much faster, and the warming is accelerating,” explained one of the study’s authors, Chris Merchant, an ocean and climate change researcher at the University of Reading.

Merchant noted that there is only one way to “slow ocean warming: start closing the hot water faucet by reducing global carbon dioxide emissions and moving toward net-zero emissions,” meaning emitting no more than the planet can absorb through its natural mechanisms.

Energy Imbalance

The accelerated warming of the oceans is due to the Earth’s growing energy imbalance, where the Earth system absorbs more energy from the Sun than it releases into space.

This imbalance has doubled since 2010, partly due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and the fact that the Earth now reflects less sunlight back into space than before. Global ocean temperatures reached historic highs for 450 consecutive days in 2023 and early 2024.

While this warming may be linked to El Niño, scientists compared it to another El Niño period in 2015-2016 and found that the rest of the record heat from the 2023-2024 period can only be explained by the faster warming of the ocean surface over the past 10 years compared to previous decades.

Forty-four percent of the high ocean surface temperatures in 2023 and early 2024 are attributed to oceans absorbing heat at an accelerated pace.

More Warming Ahead

The results indicate that the global rate of ocean warming observed in recent decades is not “an accurate guide to what will happen in the future” and warn of the possibility that the increase in sea surface temperature recorded over the past 40 years could be surpassed in just 20 years.

Since the ocean surface sets the pace for global warming, its temperature is highly significant for the climate as a whole.

“This accelerated warming of the seas highlights the urgency of reducing fossil fuel consumption to prevent even faster temperature increases in the future and to stabilize the climate,” concluded Merchant in a statement from the University of Reading.

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