World oceans heating up

[IronGhost]

WASHINGTON – Steve Kramer spent an hour and a half swimming in the ocean Sunday — in Maine. The water temperature was 72 degrees — more like Ocean City, Md., this time of year. And Ocean City's water temp hit 88 degrees this week, toasty even by Miami Beach standards.

Kramer, 26, who lives in the seaside town of Scarborough, said it was the first time he's ever swam so long in Maine's coastal waters. "Usually, you're in five minutes and you're out," he said.

It's not just the ocean off the Northeast coast that is super-warm this summer. July was the hottest the world's oceans have been in almost 130 years of record-keeping.

The average water temperature worldwide was 62.6 degrees, according to the National Climatic Data Center, the branch of the U.S. government that keeps world weather records. That was 1.1 degree higher than the 20th century average, and beat the previous high set in 1998 by a couple hundredths of a degree. The coolest recorded ocean temperature was 59.3 degrees in December 1909.

Meteorologists said there's a combination of forces at work this year: A natural El Nino system just getting started on top of worsening man-made global warming, and a dash of random weather variations. The resulting ocean heat is already harming threatened coral reefs. It could also hasten the melting of Arctic sea ice and help hurricanes strengthen.

The Gulf of Mexico, where warm water fuels hurricanes, has temperatures dancing around 90. Most of the water in the Northern Hemisphere has been considerably warmer than normal. The Mediterranean is about three degrees warmer than normal. Higher temperatures rule in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

The heat is most noticeable near the Arctic, where water temperatures are as much as 10 degrees above average. The tongues of warm water could help melt sea ice from below and even cause thawing of ice sheets on Greenland, said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Earth Science and Observation Center at the University of Colorado.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090820/ap_on_sc/us_sci_warm_oceans

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H-e-e-e-r-e we go kids! Our world gets hotter and hotter, while world leaders to their best imitation of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

[Mr Honeybadger]

I hear ya brother. I went swimming in my parents' pond last weekend. And the water was sooo warm. And it felt just like heaven. I might go swimming more often now if the water is going to stay that warm.

[Lord Umbarger]

I might be slightly off base here but, I do remember the early 1980's being a lot colder in the winters than it seems to be now. (And by "now", I mean recent winters). I also remember my uncle telling me about how the Mt. Saint Helens eruption threw dust and smoke into the atmosphere causing it to be cooler and that a full on nuclear war would have a similar effect. Yeah, even as a kid, I was sort of a military hardware nut. Anyway, I wonder if the clearing of the atmostphere could be a big part of why folks are noticing warmer tempertures now a days as opposed to the ones that we all remember from the old days?

All that aside, I also remember that it seems like it used to rain a lot more back then too. I recall that there would be rain for like two and three days straight and now, it seems like that is an extreme rarity. Still happens and all now but, I remember as a child that it would rain for two or three days almost every time it rained. Now, that only happens in relatin to really big storms.

Of course, I'm not referring to YOUR part of the country/world. Just what I noticed living here in SoWeGa for 35 years, five months and 18 days.

Anyway, I just killed a slew of elctrons to basically say that I wonder if the cooler tempertures were simply due to a "valcanic induced cool spell" set off by Mt.Saint Helens.

[acidhead]

Just curious...

How is the ocean temperature PROOF that anthropogenic increase of CO2 is causing the ocean temperature to warm?

Try without attacking me to explain that...

[Lord Umbarger]

Another interesting point is that we know that the planet was hotter in the time of the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were around for far longer than we have been. Maybe a hotter Earth is the natural state?

Just because it isn't good for us doesn't mean that it's wrong or abnormal. It just means that we'll have to pull of the hat trick that the dinos couldn't do....adapt in time to cope with it.

[Moon Monkey]

Just curious...

How is the ocean temperature PROOF that anthropogenic increase of CO2 is causing the ocean temperature to warm?

Try without attacking me to explain that...

I would like to know that too, specifically man-made CO2....and please do it without using the ridiculous words 'climate model'