A new study has confirmed what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration originally found in 2015 – the oceans are warming at nearly twice the rate we originally thought.
After publishing their findings in 2015, the NOAA was immediately attacked by members of the GOP. GOP members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, headed by Rep. Lamar Smith, opened an investigation into the conclusions. According to Smith, “NOAA has failed to fully explain the conditions surrounding its process and procedures for adjusting upward temperature readings that eliminated the ‘pause’ in global warming.”
Smith specifically attacked Thomas Karl, lead author of the original study, and attempted to impugn his credibility.
When the NOAA scientists recalculated the ocean’s warming they found that over the past 18 years ocean temperatures have increased 0.22°F (0.12° C) per decade. Originally it was believe that the oceans were warming by .13°F (0.07° C) per decade.
The newest study, conducted by independent scientists based at University of California Berkeley, looked into the most accurate results and methods used to calculate warming temperatures, specifically how the measuring of ocean temperatures is handled.
Authors of the study, stitched together different temperature results from different sensors, first by reading the data up into groups according to the measurement device (for example, buoys, satellites, ships, etc.) and then evaluated the warming rates separately for each group.
After doing this, they found that the results that were published by Karl at the NOAA were actually the best, whereas other groups presented results that were too cold. This is most likely because in 2014 the NOAA changed the way they were doing data collection, no longer weighing boat and buoy data the same due to the fact that data coming from boats wasn’t accurately capturing the change in water temperatures.
Not only was this new study a great way for scientific results to be checked by an independent body, but it showed that the original results that were attacked by politicians, many of them climate change deniers, were extremely accurate.
You can watch Zeke Hausfather, lead author of the newest paper, explain the findings below:
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