[HN Gopher] Ocean Temperature
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Ocean Temperature
Author : luu
Score : 78 points
Date : 2023-05-13 09:15 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| skymast wrote:
| What is the temperature of the oceans supposed to be?
| haizhung wrote:
| Not sure if my math is correct, but seems like compared to before
| global warming started, the oceans now hold an excess of energy
| that is equivalent to running a nuclear power plant for 3 million
| years. This is now excess energy in our system.
|
| I just wanted to share that since I couldn't really relate to the
| 10^22 joules number in the article.
| rsaesha wrote:
| Venus any% glitchless speedrun.
| gary_0 wrote:
| Short of launching all the nukes, it's actually really hard
| to imagine a faster way to make Earth uninhabitable than
| humanity's GHG emissions project. (3.68x10^13 kg of CO2 in
| 2022 alone! Impressive!)
|
| If we could terraform planets as quickly as we're de-
| terraforming Earth, Mars would be prime real estate in no
| time. Alas.
| wcoenen wrote:
| > _hard to imagine a faster way to make Earth
| uninhabitable_
|
| Manufacturing lots of SF6 (sulphur hexafluoride) might do
| the trick. 22800x more greenhouse potential than CO2 per
| unit mass.
| gary_0 wrote:
| It's way more dense[0] than air, though, so not a lot of
| it reaches the upper atmosphere. I don't think it's
| 22800x more effective when produced at ground level.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u19QfJWI1oQ
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's why we're aiming for in-orbit manufacturing, isn't
| it?
| [deleted]
| thret wrote:
| Which article are you referring to? I didn't see it in the
| parent.
| dndn1 wrote:
| Chart for Ocean Heat Content under trends.
|
| Source is @ https://www.climate.gov/news-
| features/understanding-climate/...
| dndn1 wrote:
| The number appears to me as ~20 x 10^22 J
|
| I tried to replicate your maths using 1Bn W for a power plant
| and I get ~6.3M years. Did you use a different W?
|
| I chose 1Bn from reading
| https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-how-much-powe...
|
| I'm glad your comment triggered me to do this exercise!
|
| Boggling numbers all the same, and this is only the top half-
| mile of ocean
| ttul wrote:
| Great. We just need to find a way to vent that extra heat off
| into outer space. Problem solved. /s
| milesvp wrote:
| I hear the sarcasm in your voice, but truly this is a thing.
| There are bands of radiation that are very transparent to our
| atmosphere and there is work being done with meta materials
| to try to shift waste energy into these bands to bleed it
| into space. I do conceed that the scale is impossibly large
| for the numbers we're talking about, but I do find the
| science fascinating.
| comprambler wrote:
| This is exactly what hurricanes do, and a lesser extent
| cumulonimbus clouds, starting from an atmospheric imbalance
| to eventually venting tropospheric heat to the upper
| atmosphere.
| throw_away1525 wrote:
| Given that the excess energy did come from nuclear power plant
| (the sun) over millions of years I think that is a really apt
| way to look at things.
|
| Interesting coincidence that you ended up with 3 million years,
| given life appeared on earth about 3.7 million years ago.
| IanCal wrote:
| The increase in temperature is since 1990 though.
| kzrdude wrote:
| As a useful milestone, dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million
| years ago. Long time. First hominids, 2 Mya?
| akiselev wrote:
| First evidence of hominids goes back almost six millions
| years [1] and first tools over three millions years ago [2]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardipithecus
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan
| tomrod wrote:
| > given life appeared on earth about 3.7 million years ago.
|
| Add 1000X -- 3.7 _billion_ years ago!
| throw_away1525 wrote:
| oops
| f6v wrote:
| What concerns me is sloppy writing of this article. For example:
|
| > In other words: the climb in ocean temperatures is the
| inevitable outcome of Earth's energy imbalance, primarily
| associated with increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases.[8]
|
| The reference leads to
| https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs00376-023-2385-2 which is an article
| that doesn't establish the causal relationship between human
| emissions and rising temperatures. Rather, the authors use this
| as an opening and reference other works on the topic.
|
| If you put a reference to back up your claim, the reference
| should be to a primary study and not some study that references
| other study that might be relevant.
| brianush1 wrote:
| Primary sources are not allowed on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a
| tertiary source
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
| jackhab wrote:
| Can someone explain me why people post links to Wikipedia
| articles without any context?
| stefncb wrote:
| They maybe stumbled upon it and found it interesting. There's
| often no need for context, it can simply be an interesting
| article to read.
| melenaboija wrote:
| Because it is compliant with HN rules.
|
| If you see it in the front page and it bothers you enough to
| ask the question maybe you should try to find another
| community.
| tjr225 wrote:
| [dead]
| prawn wrote:
| I've submitted them before and often enjoy when they're posted.
| Sometimes the zeitgeist-link is obvious or sometimes it's a bit
| random. I'd guess that people who enjoy when they're posted
| also take to submitting interesting pages they've read (or re-
| encountered).
| moehm wrote:
| You may enjoy this little list I built, which collects all
| Wikipedia articles posted on HN and rank and tag them.
|
| https://www.mostdiscussed.com/
| kzrdude wrote:
| Ocean temperatures have been in the news (for me), so I for one
| can see the context.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| It's a delightful HN quirk. You can post a direct link to
| anything you find interesting, apropos of nothing.
| hyperpape wrote:
| Ocean temperatures have been the subject of a half dozen HN
| articles (driven by articles in the news) in the past few
| weeks, so I assume that's the reason.
|
| Speaking for myself, not Dan, but for non-technical topics that
| appear on HN, the discussion would be a lot better if the
| average commentator read the obvious Wikipedia article before
| commenting. That's true even though Wikipedia has a lot of
| problems.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| " but for non-technical topics that appear on HN, the
| discussion would be a lot better if the average commentator
| read the obvious Wikipedia article before commenting. That's
| true even though Wikipedia has a lot of problems"
|
| I have vague ideas of a forum, where any new poster has to
| answer some basic questions about the topic first correctly.
|
| Most online discussions would probably benefit from that.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| That's a great!!! idea. I get very frustrated reading HN
| comments that have obviously never read the article beyond
| the title.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| ControlProblem subreddit implements this and I was quite
| impressed.
| arc-in-space wrote:
| For the exact same reason people post links to other things,
| it's interesting. It's always been more "hacker" than "news"
| here.
|
| Incidentally, check out this wacky alien-looking worm that
| exhibits bioluminescence even though it lives its entire life
| inside of a tube, so there is no one to perceive it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaetopterus
| stevenwoo wrote:
| That was neat, though it does mention there are some other
| creatures that can choose to share the tube and the research
| about it may be lacking in smaller companion life (bacteria
| or other lifeforms).
| ezconnect wrote:
| Is this worm all over the world or there's a certain climate
| it can live on. Wikipedia doesn't expand on it.
| dmbche wrote:
| Oh shit - cool worm!! Edit: Keep being weirded out that
| comments like this get downvoted. What's the point?
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| HN is not Reddit. We like comments that add information and
| dislike comments that only express brief reactions, jokes,
| etc. Keeps the signal to noise ratio high.
| dmbche wrote:
| Thanks!
| brabel wrote:
| > These predictions suggest ocean temperatures of 55-85 degC
| during the period of 2,000 to 3,500 million years ago, followed
| by cooling to more mild temperatures of between 10 and 40 degC by
| 1,000 million years ago.
|
| Imagine going to the beach and finding the water temperature is
| 85C, near boiling :D. What a different world that would be.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| What's the reason it started to skyrocket after 1980 and not
| before? What made it stagnant or even slightly drop between 1940
| and 1980?
| sixbrx wrote:
| That mirrors global average temperature in general for that
| time period. Apparently it was because we were pumping sulfates
| into the atmosphere at an amazing rate from the 1940's until
| the EPA was born. Sulfates block sunlight and so mask the
| overall warming, at the cost of polluting the atmosphere.
|
| See for example: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/50-years-
| ago-scientists-...
| gary_0 wrote:
| It has been proposed to intentionally resume injecting
| sulfates into the upper atmosphere in order to mitigate
| global warming[0]. (This is a horrible idea, but the jury's
| still out on whether it's better than the alternative.)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering#Strato
| sph...
| ezconnect wrote:
| We probably are getting better at measuring things and
| crunching the numbers as years pass by.
| notamy wrote:
| > What made it stagnant or even slightly drop between 1940 and
| 1980?
|
| Well, there was that one really big war in the 1940s...
| jonhohle wrote:
| Doesn't that suggest sea transportation may be a bigger
| contributor than greenhouse gasses? Industrial production was
| at its limits during that period, but I would imagine cross
| ocean cargo was down significantly.
|
| It would be interesting to see what pandemic years looked
| like with thousands of ships sitting for months off shore.
|
| Edit: there might be something to that idea -
| https://arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card/Report-
| Card-2022/ArtMID/.... maybe globalism is the issue.
|
| One more edit: container ships are effectively giant heat
| sinks with a ton (literally tons) of surface area (corrugated
| containers), sucking heat from the air and dumping it into
| the ocean. If that hypothesis has merit, I would expect the
| LA ports to have an increase in temperature during that same
| period.
| f6v wrote:
| Or there's a complex interaction between Earth's natural
| climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.
| jonhohle wrote:
| That's definitely possible, but complexity makes errors
| more likely.
|
| According to Google^TM, it takes 20-200 years for CO2 in
| the air to dissolve in the oceans and yet there are
| immediate effects during WW2 and COVID.
| philjohn wrote:
| Aerosols from pollution could be a culprit?
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(page generated 2023-05-13 23:01 UTC)