‘The human impact is clear’: Ocean heat continues to rise

The planet’s air temperature has been rising for decades but it wobbles up and down, write Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis. The ocean doesn’t do the same dance, it changes more slowly – and more deeply

A school of fish swim over a coral along the Great Barrier Reef (Washington Post by Michael Robinson Chavez)

The amount of excess heat buried in the planet’s oceans, a strong marker of the climate emergency, reached a record high in 2022, reflecting more stored heat energy than in any year since reliable measurements were available in the late 1950s, a group of scientists reported last Wednesday.

That eclipses the ocean heat record set in 2021 – which eclipsed the record set in 2020, which eclipsed the one set in 2019. And it helps to explain a seemingly ever-escalating pattern of extreme weather events of late, many of which are drawing extra fuel from the energy they pull from the oceans.

“If we keep breaking records, it’s kind of like a broken record,” says John Abraham, a climate researcher at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota and one of the authors of the new research published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.