Humor4u

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...

Most important metric Kevin Trenberth et al. suggest in a recent  article  that Earth's energy imbalance, defined as the absorbed solar radiation minus the net outgoing longwave radiation, is arguably the most important metric related to climate change. Of the extra heat from Earth's energy imbalance, about 93% ends up in the ocean as increasing ocean heat content (see image below), 3% goes into melting ice, 4% goes into raising temperatures of land and melting permafrost, and less than 1% remains in the atmosphere.  One could also argue that the most important metric related to climate change is the monthly mean surface temperatures on land, as illustrated by the image below that was created with a July 16, 2022 screenshot from  NASA customized analysis plots  and shows that the February 2016 (land only) anomaly from 1886-1915 was 2.94°C or 5.292°F.  Land only anomalies are important. After all, most people live on land and humans will likel...