Oceans May Have Already Seen 1.7°C of Warming

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https://eos.org/articles/oceans-may-have-already-seen-1-7c-of-warming

By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: Sponges from the Caribbean retain a record of ocean temperatures stretching back hundreds of years. These newly revealed paleoclimate records suggest that sea surface temperatures (SSTs) began rising in response to industrial era fossil fuel burning around 1860. That’s 80 years earlier than SST measurements became common and predates the global warming start date used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On the basis of these new sponge records, scientists think that temperatures are currently 1.7°C warmer than preindustrial levels. The study’s researchers argue that the world has already surpassed the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit atmospheric warming to less than 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures and that we could reach 2°C of warming before 2030. ...These results were published in Nature Climate Change.... 

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