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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The oceans are the largest global heat reservoir. As a result of man-made global warming, the temperature in the global climate system increases; around 90% of the extra heat is absorbed by the oceans. This means that the average sea temperature can tell us a lot about the state of our climate, both today and in the past. However, it is difficult to determine an accurate average value across all sea depths and regions of the world.
The results of previous measurement methods heavily depend on location, season or sea depth, which can lead to distorted results. As part of the WAIS Divide Ice Core Project, an international research team led by Bernhard Bereiter from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography - now working at Empa and the University of Bern - has developed a method of measuring ocean temperatures over the last 24'000 years with high accuracy.
These measurements have now been published in Nature. "Our study clearly shows that the basic idea - the connection between the concentration of noble gases in the atmosphere and the average ocean temperature - is correct and that the method works," said Bereiter.
(Score: 2) by slinches on Monday January 08 2018, @05:59PM (4 children)
I wish it were that simple. Even if there weren't influences on the time scale between 1 & 100 years (there's the solar sun spot cycle, for one), there can still be oscillations in natural feedback loops within that period set off by random perturbations. Natural systems tend to be chaotic, but fairly well bounded, which means that variations in the system can naturally occur on shorter time scales than the forcing function changes themselves. Only the bounds of the system are limited to following the rate of change of the forcings.
Of course, that makes it much harder to interpret climate data on something close to human time scales.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday January 08 2018, @08:17PM (3 children)
They're talking about mean ocean temperature. I really doubt the solar sun spot cycle would have even a measurable effect. Mean ocean temperature changes extremely slowly.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by slinches on Monday January 08 2018, @11:16PM (2 children)
And how do they measure mean ocean temperature?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @01:30AM
I'm more interested in how they determine which oceans are the mean ones.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday January 09 2018, @05:56AM
That's partially what the article is about.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.