(ORDO NEWS) — Climate researchers warn that extreme heat in Earth‘s oceans passed the “point of no return” as early as 2014, reports The Guardian.
This is new evidence that highlights our path to climate catastrophe – or rather, that we are already living in that catastrophe.
“Using this measure of extremeness, we showed that climate change is not something uncertain that could happen in the distant future – it’s a historical fact that has already happened,” Kyle Van Houtan, a researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, told The Guardian. and co-author of a new study published in the journal PLOS Climate.
“Extreme climate change is already here, it’s in the ocean, and the ocean underlies all life on Earth,” he warned.
Wang Houtan and his colleagues studied temperature data recorded from 1920 to 2019. By 2015, temperatures had surpassed their 50-year-old record high, which researchers are calling “the point of no return.”
“For the global ocean, 2014 was the first year to exceed the 50 percent threshold for extreme heat to become ‘normal’, with the South Atlantic (1998) and Indian (2007) basins breaking that barrier earlier,” the researchers wrote in their paper. .
And 1998 “was 24 years ago – it’s amazing,” Van Houtan told The Guardian.
The first wild animals to really feel the pressure were species such as lobsters and scallops in areas off the northeast coast of the US and Canada. In fact, in Alaska alone, 14 fish farms have already been declared federal disasters.
The study paints a disastrous picture and should serve as a warning of what lies ahead.
“The oceans are critical to understanding climate change,” St. Thomas University professor John Abraham told the newspaper. “They cover about 70 percent of the planet’s surface and absorb more than 90 percent of the heat from global warming.”
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