Warming The Atmosphere By Shipping.
The Baltic and North Sea proves it.
August 10th, 2024
During the last two decades science indicated frequently, that the Baltic and North Sea are in the first row when one is looking for the highest warming across the earth. The Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres assessed again few day ago : ‘Researchers around the globe are sounding the alarm: ocean temperatures are the warmest ever recorded. In 2023, the North Sea also experienced dramatic record highs…..and this trend continues ….as the mean values for January, February, March and April 2024 are among the top 10 warmest months since 1962.” (1)
Such alarm have become regularly, as indicated by a title in November 2022: Severe heat spikes hit North Sea and Baltic Sea in summer 2022 (2), repeating the claim by the BSH (Bundesamt für Schifffart und Hydrographie) that: Climate change is causing an energy surplus of which 90 percent is absorbed in the form of heat by the ocean (1).
Looking for analysis of the causes of the temperature evolution specific to the North and Baltic Sea region there is little more than superficiality, by indicating that anthropogenic greenhouse gases release by industrialization since the 19th century has become the dominant forcing.
The starting point is: that marginal seas around the globe have warmed faster than the global, and the Baltic Sea has warmed the most, at all monitoring stations by 1.07◦ over 35 years, approximately twice that of the upper 100 m in the Atlantic Ocean (3) . Then it’s time to ask why it’s particularly high here in the North- and Baltic Sea. The reason is that there is no other semi-enclosed sea anywhere as heavily treated by human activities as the North- and Baltic Sea. There are so many human activities at sea; permanently; shipping, fishing, off-shore wind farms, and so on. Each activity ‘shovels’ mixes warm with colder water, by either warm water up to colder water, or vice versa. As water can storage heat quite well, more heat cab be stored and later released, but the scientific community is not willing or able to reckon this fact.
Climatologists who do not regard the Baltic Sea functioning partly like a baby-bath-tube are of no help (4). Water is the main source of weather — and climate; and concerning water the oceans are the absolute dominant factor on earth with a ratio of 1:1000 (air/water). This to recognize cannot be so difficult, but would alter substantially the climate change debate.
(1) https://phys.org/news/2024-06-highs-north-sea-german-bight.html
(2) https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/severe-heat-spikes-hit-north-sea-and-baltic-sea-summer-2022-maritime-agency
(3) https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/13/457/2022/
