Problem for study claiming ‘ocean-surface warming four times faster now than late-1980s’

Their problem is the reliance on a metric called Earth’s Energy Imbalance (EEI). Nikolov and Zeller’s recent peer-reviewed paper, which we featured here, showed any such reliance (as per this study) must be questioned. N&Z say: ‘the paper provides a new explanation of the Earth’s Energy Imbalance (EEI) showing that it does not represent “heat gain” by the Earth system as presently assumed. The mainstream climate scientists and IPCC currently misinterpret EEI as “the most fundamental indicator for climate change”’. That puts the premise in the Reading paper’s title: Quantifying the acceleration of multidecadal global sea surface warming driven by Earth’s energy imbalance, in that category. N&Z go on to say: ‘In other words, the adiabatic dissipation of thermal kinetic energy in ascending air parcels gives rise to an apparent EEI, which does not represent “heat trapping” by increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases as currently assumed. We provide numerical evidence that the observed EEI has been misinterpreted as a source of energy gain by the Earth system on multidecadal time scales.‘
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Ocean temperatures were rising at about 0.06 degrees Celsius per decade in the late 1980s, but are now increasing at 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade, says Reading University.

Published today (Tuesday, 28 January 2025) in Environmental Research Letters, the study helps explain why 2023 and early 2024 saw unprecedented ocean temperatures.

Professor Chris Merchant, lead author at the University of Reading and National Centre for Earth Observation, said: “If the oceans were a bathtub of water, then in the 1980s, the hot tap was running slowly, warming up the water by just a fraction of a degree each decade. But now the hot tap is running much faster, and the warming has picked up speed. The way to slow down that warming is to start closing off the hot tap, by cutting global carbon emissions and moving towards net-zero.”

Energy imbalance

This accelerating ocean warming is driven by the Earth’s growing energy imbalance – whereby more energy from the Sun is being absorbed in the Earth system than is escaping back to space.

This imbalance has roughly doubled since 2010, in part due to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, and because the Earth is now reflecting less sunlight to space than before.

Global ocean temperatures hit record highs for 450 days straight in 2023 and early 2024. Some of this warmth came from El Niño, a natural warming event in the Pacific.

When scientists compared it to a similar El Niño in 2015-16, they found that the rest of the record warmth is explained by the sea surface warming up faster in the past 10 years than in earlier decades. 44% of the record warmth was attributable to the oceans absorbing heat at an accelerating rate.

Full article here.