Thousands of scientific ocean robots suggest that ocean temperature has not warmed up at all over the past four or five years
Everybody from Al Gore to Arnold Schwarzenegger have preached about the effects of global warming but is the planet actually warming? We know that the global average air temperature near the Earth’s surface rose about 1-2 degrees during the last hundred years but what does that equate to in the grand scheme of the planet? A hundred years is a small fraction in the billions of years the earth has been around. Instead of just measuring the air temperature, scientist have been monitoring the oceans for changes, but what they have found is to the contrary.
This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.
In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.
So if these ocean robots are actually giving accurate data, then where is all the heat going?
Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it’s probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.
In actuality, the scientist really can’t explain this missing heat at all. Is it too soon to tell if global warming is real? There is no disputing that what people do effects the environment. China and India build coal-burning plants like they are going out of style. We are too dependent on foreign oil. The list could go on and on, but are you really sold on global warming? Is it possible that we humans have done so much damage in the past 50 years? Or is the current rise in temperatures just a natural blip that has occurred many other times in the history of the Earth, we just weren’t around to notice.
[via NPR]
