WELCOME

A recent study found that in the past century, global

Sept. 5, 2018 by James Ashley

A recent study found that in the past century, global ocean temperatures increased by nearly 1°C, or more than 9°F, for every 1.6°C increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. That means we have increased temperatures 2-3 times in the last 100,000 years, increasing the probability that global temperatures will continue to rise for quite some time.

With the global warming of the past century, that probability is more than doubled. And that's where we get to the other big question: What happens to the climate after we die?

While this is a topic that many researchers still wrestle with, there's a good chance that an important part of our answer to that question will come in the form of a new and important piece of literature.

First, we might want to look at the historical record of climate change. The global mean surface temperature is rising, and the rate at which it is changing has been increasing. The temperature difference between 1990 and the end of the 21st century is about 1.5°C per decade on average. Over the past century, global mean surface temperatures have been nearly doubling at the same rate.

What is going on here?

Climate models show that the world has warmed by about 2°C per decade, an increase of about 1% per decade on average over the last century. That means the rate of warming has slowed to a point where there are no longer any detectable signs of warming.

The data are consistent from a number of observations, all of which show changes in the mean surface temperature over time. Some of these changes are quite obvious in the atmosphere's patterns of precipitation and warming, but none of them is quite evident on the sea ice.

There are certainly changes in the ocean. In the past, the ocean was not warming at all—that is, it actually cooled, but was not changing much. It was cooling in some places. The rate of warming is much smaller. That change has been happening as we've gone from lower latitudes to higher latitudes in the past.

The most obvious example of this change is that of the Atlantic, in the last few decades the trend toward an increase in sea level has been much faster than the rate of warming. But there is also a much larger change of the ocean, especially in the Gulf of Mexico and the South Atlantic, as well as the Atlantic Coast and the Great Lakes, that is taking place. There is an interesting connection between these two changes.

One of the problems with looking at past global