How fast are the oceans warming?
Abstract
Climate change from human activities mainly results from the energy imbalance in Earth's climate system caused by rising concentrations of heat-trapping gases. About 93% of the energy imbalance accumulates in the ocean as increased ocean heat content (OHC). The ocean record of this imbalance is much less affected by internal variability and is thus better suited for detecting and attributing human influences (1) than more commonly used surface temperature records. Recent observation-based estimates show rapid warming of Earth's oceans over the past few decades (see the figure) (1, 2). This warming has contributed to increases in rainfall intensity, rising sea levels, the destruction of coral reefs, declining ocean oxygen levels, and declines in ice sheets; glaciers; and ice caps in the polar regions (3, 4). Recent estimates of observed warming resemble those seen in models, indicating that models reliably project changes in OHC.
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Supplementary Material
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References and Notes
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Science
Volume 363 | Issue 6423
11 January 2019
11 January 2019
Copyright
Copyright © 2019, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
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Published in print: 11 January 2019
Acknowledgments
This study is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFA0603202). The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. We thank the climate modeling groups (listed in table S1) for producing and making available their model output, and we acknowledge J. Fasullo for calculating OHC in CMIP5 models and making the data available to the authors. Institute of Atmospheric Physics data and the CMIP5 time series are available at http://159.226.119.60/cheng/.
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