My Climate Change News

Refined Estimates of Global Ocean Deep and Abyssal Decadal Warming Trends, Johnson & Purkey, Geophysical Research Letters:

Deep and abyssal layer decadal temperature trends from the mid-1980s to the mid-2010s are mapped globally using Deep Argo and historical ship-based Conductivity-Temperature-Depth (CTD) instrument data. Abyssal warming trends are widespread, with the strongest warming observed around Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) formation regions. The warming strength follows deep western boundary currents transporting abyssal waters north and decreases with distance from Antarctica. Abyssal cooling trends are found in the North Atlantic and eastern South Atlantic, regions primarily ventilated by North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW). Deep warming trends are prominent in the Southern Ocean south of about 50°S, the Greenland-Iceland-Norwegian (GIN) Seas and the western subpolar North Atlantic, with cooling in the eastern subpolar North Atlantic and the subtropical and tropical western North Atlantic. Globally integrated decadal heat content trends of 21.6 (±6.5) TW in the deep and 12.9 (±1.

[Bold ours. By way of comparison: total global electrical generation capacity is in the neighborhood of 11TW, roughly a third of the constant warming power input quantified above, which itself is but a small fraction of the excess energy now being absorbed by Earth thanks to our perturbation of radiative equilibrium.]

Ocean warming as a trigger for irreversible retreat of the Antarctic ice sheet, Hill et al., Nature Climate Change:

Warmer ocean conditions could impact future ice loss from Antarctica due to their ability to thin and reduce the buttressing of laterally confined ice shelves. Previous studies highlight the potential for a cold to warm ocean regime shift within the sub-shelf cavities of the two largest Antarctic ice shelves—the Filchner–Ronne and Ross. However, how this impacts upstream ice flow and mass loss...