NASA: Oceans’ Depths Don’t Explain Why Global Warming Has Stopped

The deep waters in the world’s oceans have not warmed in nearly a decade, according to a report by NASA, countering one theory for the hiatus in global warming. Some climate scientists have tried to explain away the lack of global warming in the last 18 years by blaming oceans. The idea is that excess heat from burning fossil fuels has been trapped deep in the ocean depths, causing them to warm instead of the atmosphere. But this theory seems to fall apart in the face of a new report by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which analyzes satellite and direct temperature data to conclude that the ocean’s depths — below 1.24 miles — have not warmed since 2005.  “The deep parts of the ocean are harder to measure,” said JPL’s William Llovel, the study’s lead author. “The combination of satellite and direct temperature data gives us a glimpse of how much sea level rise is due to deep warming. The answer is — not much.” Ocean warming has also been a major explanation for rising sea levels because water expands as it warms. JPL study authors noted that sea levels are still rising, but ocean warming contributed almost nothing to this rise since 2005...more