Study Says 2023’s Crazy Atlantic Ocean Heat Foretells Much Hotter World

"Off the charts “crazy” heat in the North Atlantic ocean and record-smashing Antarctic sea ice lows last year are far more severe than what Earth’s supposed to get with current warming levels. They are more like what happens at twice this amount of warming, a new study said.

The study’s main author worries that it’s a “harbinger of what’s coming in the next decades” and it’s got him not just concerned, but wondering why those two climate indicators were so beyond what was expected.

A study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society charted the North Atlantic sea temperature and the Antarctic sea ice halfway across the globe against long-accepted computer simulations. Sea ice levels that low and North Atlantic temperatures that much above normal are supposed to occur regularly in a world that has warmed 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times."

Seth Borenstein reports for the Associated Press February 27, 2024.

Source: AP, 03/01/2024