I thought I’d catch up on the latest science on how climate change is impacting oceans. What you say? Climate change is impacting oceans? You thought it was just raising air temperature because sunlight can’t escape the atmosphere with all those greenhouse gases clogging up the works? It’s true, climate change is impacting oceans but you don’t hear much about ocean impacts, mostly because people get their news about climate change from the newspapers. It is rare to see a newspaper article on the subject, but it was a newspaper account which prompted my interest in the current science. It was a ham-handed article on the transfer of heat energy to the oceans. The article compared the transfer of heat energy in the atmosphere to the oceans, using the equivalent of how many atomic bombs would need to be detonated in order to produce the same amount of energy.

Every time I see energy measured in nuclear bombs I groan. It’s like every time you hear a politician call another politician Hitler. People are scared of another Hitler, but they are even more scared of nuclear bombs; and with good reason. Nuclear bombs release energy in a single area where they are detonated, which then spreads out to envelope the surrounding area in what we have all seen on television and in movies as a gigantic mushroom cloud of heat and radiation decimating everything within sight. Heat energy being transferred to ocean water is spread out over the oceans, which by the way constitute 70% of the surface of this planet. It goes on everyday of our life. It has gone on every day that the earth has existed with an atmosphere and an ocean. Energy transfer from the atmosphere to the oceans is not the same as a nuclear bomb blast. But people like to use these comparisons I think in order to frighten people.

Anyway the newspaper article covered a recent paper in the journal Nature Climate Change, which was written by scientists from a Department of Energy Laboratory, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Pennsylvania State University – an impressive lineup. It’s an interesting article, where these scientists have looked at the heat uptake at various depths in the ocean using measurements taken since 1865. Now most of these measurements are not continuous measurements. Many of them are from what climate scientists like to call transects, where a ship takes various measurements during its voyage. For the journal article, these scientists even used data from the Challenger expedition, an English scientific mission in the 1870s. The Challenger sailed around the world for about six years measuring the depth of the ocean. The folks on the Challenger also measured water temperature. Pretty amazing for those times. These days, there are whole systems of floating buoys in the oceans, measuring all sorts of things. The big system out there, measuring temperature and salinity, is ARGO. I know you thought ARGO was a movie with Ben Affleck. But before it became a movie, it was actually the name of the ship on which Jason sailed in search of the Golden Fleece. (Greek Myth, look it up). So researchers named the current system of scientific instrumentation floats bobbing around out there in all the oceans of the world after a ship used in a futile journey by an ancient mariner; strange choice. The measurement system is huge though and is really cool. The system was set up in 2000 and has about 3000 floating stations. ARGO was devised to complement sea level rise measurements being taken by a satellite, which is named (get this) Jason – those scientists what a funny bunch.

Anyway, the journal article is an analysis of all these various measurements taken over approximately the last 150 years and the results show over half of the steady increase in ocean heat uptake from the atmosphere during this time has occurred since 1997. Well that made me think, wow, I’ve really lost touch with what is going on in climate change research. I’m not a climatologist or an oceanographer, and I tend to keep to issues effecting water on terra firma, but frankly I get a lot of questions on climate change and other than saying to people, it is getting warmer and what don’t you understand about temperature measurements, I do not have a good handle on current research findings. So I am setting out to inform myself and you about the research scientists are conducting on ocean impacts of climate change and what they have been discovering.

There are six big topic areas for how climate change and greenhouse gases are affecting oceans. Of course there is heat uptake as I’ve just been discussing, but there are also temperature increases in the ocean as a result of the heat uptake, there’s sea level rise, there are the changes in salinity, there are the changes to global ocean circulation, and there is ocean acidification. I’m going to check in first with the International Panel on Climate Change. Never heard of them? Well they are the United Nations funded science group who examines current research on climate change. The panel consists of an impressive group of scientists. Their job is to examine current research data for evidence of the extent the earth’s environment is being altered by climate change.

Every few years they produce a report which catalogues research findings to date. Their fifth report came out in 2014. I’m embarrassed to admit, I have only read their first report. It was published in 1990. So I’m only 25 years behind. I look forward to reading the report and providing this blogs readers with an insightful review.