Unprecedented In A Thousand Years

Fig. 1 What goes up NASA / Guardian

Some quotes from "Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies" and the Guardian:

The planet is warming at a pace not experienced within the past 1,000 years, at least, making it “very unlikely” that the world will stay within a crucial temperature limit agreed by nations just last year, according to Nasa’s top climate scientist.
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“In the last 30 years we’ve really moved into exceptional territory,” Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said. “It’s unprecedented in 1,000 years. There’s no period that has the trend seen in the 20th century in terms of the inclination (of temperatures).”

“Maintaining temperatures below the 1.5C guardrail requires significant and very rapid cuts in carbon dioxide emissions or co-ordinated geo-engineering. That is very unlikely. We are not even yet making emissions cuts commensurate with keeping warming below 2C.”

Schmidt repeated his previous prediction that there is a 99% chance that 2016 will be the warmest year on record, with around 20% of the heat attributed to a strong El Niño climatic event. Last year is currently the warmest year on record, itself beating a landmark set in 2014.

“It’s the long-term trend we have to worry about though and there’s no evidence it’s going away and lots of reasons to think it’s here to stay,” Schmidt said. “There’s no pause or hiatus in temperature increase. People who think this is over are viewing the world through rose-tinted spectacles. This is a chronic problem for society for the next 100 years.”

(Earth is warming at a pace 'unprecedented in 1,000 years', emphasis added). Some 93% (estimates vary a bit) of the heat increase, like the plastic garbage, finds its way into the oceans.

The heat and garbage have an impact on the five garbage gyres in the oceans of the world.

Fig. 2 Five Zeros For Civilization

In a recent post I focused on one of those five gyres (On Thermal Expansion & Thermal Contraction - 5, cf. New Continent Found - Garbage Gyre II - 9).

I did so because, among other things, various oceanographers were perplexed by what they call "the blob," which is an unusually warm spot in the eastern portion of the pacific ocean gyre area (could the garbage cause a darker albedo?).

Today, let's look at the other four garbage gyres, and specifically let's look under the covers with the World Ocean Database (WOD).

Compare Fig. 2 with Fig. 7 to locate the garbage gyres and the WOD zones.

Then view Fig. 3 - Fig. 6 to see what is happening with the temperatures from the ocean surface down into the depths.

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Fig. 6

Fig. 7 Sampled WOD Zones

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