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Record hot sea surface The daily sea surface temperature (SST) between 60°South and 60°North was at a record high on April 2, 2023, i.e. the highest temperature in the NOAA record that started in 1981, as illustrated by the above image. The black line shows this year's SST, up to April 2, 2023. The orange line shows last year's SST, i.e. 2022. The thicker grey line shows SST in the year 2020, when annual temperatures on land and ocean reached a record high, since 2020 was an El Niño year.  This record high sea surface temperature comes as we're moving into a new El Niño, as illustrated by the image on the right, adapted from NOAA . There are further reasons why this uptick doesn't come unexpected. The emerging El Niño looks set to coincide with high sunspots, while the 2022 Tonga submarine volcano eruption did add a huge amount of water vapor to the atmosphere, as discussed in an earlier post .  Greenhouse gas concentrations keep rising Reducing emissions is the right t...

Carbon dioxide levels continue at record levels, despite COVID-19 lockdown, the WMO reports . The increase in carbon dioxide from 2018 to 2019 was larger than that observed from 2017 to 2018 and larger than the average annual growth rate over the last decade. The rise has continued in 2020. The lockdown did cut emissions of many pollutants and greenhouse gases, but any impact on carbon dioxide levels - the result of cumulative past and current emissions - is in fact no bigger than the normal year to year fluctuations.  “Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries and in the ocean for even longer. The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO₂ was 3-5 million years ago, when the temperature was 2-3°C warmer and sea level was 10-20 meters higher than now. But there weren’t 7.7 billion inhabitants,” said WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas. “The COVID-19 pandemic is not a solution for climate change. However, it does provide us with a platf...