Earth Equity News

New Study: Oceans Warming More Quickly Than Suspected. By Marlowe Hood, AFP, June 18, 2008. "The world's oceans have warmed 50% faster over the last 40 years than previously thought due to climate change, Australian and U.S. climate researchers reported Wednesday... Rising sea levels are driven by... the thermal expansion of sea water, and additional water from melting sources of ice. Both... are caused by global warming. The ice sheet that sits atop Greenland, for example, contains enough water to raise world ocean levels by... 23 feet, which would bury sea-level cities from Dhaka to Shanghai. Trying to figure out how much each of these factors contributes to rising sea levels is critically important to understanding climate change, and forecasting future temperature rises... But up to now, there has been a perplexing gap between the projections of computer-based climate models, and the observations of scientists... The new study [PDF, 1 pp]... [in the journal Nature by Catia M. Domingues with] the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, is the first to reconcile the models with observed data. Using new techniques to assess ocean temperatures to a depth of... 2,300 feet from 1961 to 2003, it shows that thermal warming contributed to a 0.53 millimetre-per-year rise in sea levels rather than the 0.32 mm rise reported by the IPCC... The IPCC report was criticised for including only the impact of thermal expansion in its projections... over the next century, despite recent studies showing that melting ice is a significant -- and growing -- factor. The planet's oceans store more than 90 percent of the heat in the Earth's climate system and act as a temporary buffer against the effects of climate change."