It's official: the world's July ocean temperatures are the warmest ever. They've hit 62.6 degrees average, which doesn't sound like much...but they're up to 88 degrees in Ocean City, Maryland! Warmer water is a more ominous sign of global warming than warmer air temperature, as any former resident of New Orleans, Louisiana knows.
Despite the cheap diary title, this is not truly BREAKING news -- it was reported last Friday. However, it's only now being picked up by the AP and going national.
The basic facts: officially, global water temperature was 62.6 degrees, says the National Climatic Data Center, the world's largest archive of climate data. This broke the prior record of 1998, which was also the warmest year on land on record. (So far, this year looks like it'll only be the fifth-warmest on record.) The average doesn't sound like much, but the details are astounding.
88 degree water temperature in Ocean City, Maryland: that's borderline between swimming and hot tubbing.
72 degrees in Maine: come on in, the water's fine!
Three degree rise in the Mediterranean Sea.
In the Gulf of Mexico, water temperatures are up to 90 degrees.
And in the Arctic, water temperatures are up 10 degrees.
NOAA's July global statistics -- summary can be found here.
The implications for us are huge.
Breaking heat records in water is more ominous as a sign of global warming than breaking temperature marks on land. That's because water takes longer to heat up and doesn't cool off as easily, said climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
Warmer surface water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico can cause bigger and stronger hurricanes. Hurricane Bill is spinning off the coast of Bermuda and heading north along the Atlantic seaboard:
"It's moving over waters of 84, 85 degrees Fahrenheit, which could provide some fuel to it. We still think it could restrengthen back into a Category 4. The environmental conditions appear to be right," said Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center.
And, as FishOutofWater diaried yesterday, warmer Arctic oceans are causing spikes in methane gas to be released, creating a vicious spiral ("positive feedback" sounds too benign) in which warming oceans cause release of methane, which causes more global warming, which causes more warming oceans, which cause more release of methane...the same condition found at the Paleocene thermal maximum (an extinction level event).
While I do not pretend that passing ACES (American Clean Energy Security Act, aka cap & trade, aka Waxman-Markey) will act as a magic wand to cool down the world's oceans, we need to start somewhere. We need to hope.
GreenRoots is a new environmental series created by Meteor Blades and Patriot Daily for Daily Kos. This series provides a forum for discussing -- and acting upon -- environmental issues.
UPDATE: As long as this is on the rec list, I will plug a new project, Adopt A Senator for ACES. It's a variation on a whip tool -- find an interesting Senator (the diary has a list), write diaries about the Senator's position, help track the Senator as the bill moves through committees and on to the floor.