Climate crisisThe Heat Human Activity Has Added to World’s Oceans in the Past 25 Years Is Equivalent to 3.6 Billion Hiroshima-Size Bombs
The Hiroshima atom-bomb exploded with an energy of about 63,000,000,000,000 Joules. The amount of heat mankind has put in the world’s oceans in the past 25 years equals to 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bomb explosions. A new analysis shows the world’s oceans were the warmest in 2019 than any other time in recorded human history, especially between the surface and a depth of 2,000 meters. The new studyalso concludes that the past ten years have been the warmest on record for global ocean temperatures, with the past five years holding the highest record.
A new analysis shows the world’s oceans were the warmest in 2019 than any other time in recorded human history, especially between the surface and a depth of 2,000 meters. The study, conducted by an international team of fourteen scientists from eleven institutes across the world, also concludes that the past ten years have been the warmest on record for global ocean temperatures, with the past five years holding the highest record.
The authors published their results on 13 January in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, with a call to action for humans to reverse climate change. In the face of such disastrous effects as the 17.9 million acres Australian bushfire, which has resulted in 24 deaths and thousands of homes destroyed so far, the researchers report that global ocean temperature is not only increasing, but it’s speeding up.
According to the study, the 2019 ocean temperature is about 0.075 degrees Celsius above the 1981-2010 average. To reach this temperature, the ocean would have taken in 228,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (228 Sextillion) Joules of heat.
“That’s a lot of zeros indeed. To make it easier to understand, I did a calculation. The Hiroshima atom-bomb exploded with an energy of about 63,000,000,000,000 Joules. The amount of heat we have put in the world’s oceans in the past 25 years equals to 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bomb explosions,” said Cheng Lijing, lead paper author and associate professor with the International Center for Climate and Environmental Sciences at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Cheng is also affiliated with CAS’s Center for Ocean Mega-Science. “This measured ocean warming is irrefutable and is further proof of global warming. There are no reasonable alternatives aside from the human emissions of heat trapping gases to explain this heating.”
CAS says that the researchers used a relatively new method of analysis from IAP to account for potentially sparse data and time discrepancies in instruments that were previously used to measure ocean warmth specially from the ocean surface to 2,000 meters deep. The newly available data allowed the researchers to examine warmth trends dating back to the 1950s. This study also includes ocean temperature changes recorded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States. The two independent data sets indicate that the past five years have been the warmest on record for global ocean temperatures.
The researchers also compared the 1987 to
