By Brianne Hogan / Source: Ecorazzi

The warming of the oceans due to climate change is increasingly hot and the warmest it’s ever been, US government climate scientists said on July 16.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the American Meteorological Society’s annual state of the climate report found record warming on the surface and upper levels of the oceans.

Co-editor of the report, NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt, said the seas last year “were just ridiculous.”

You can thank man-made energy for the increase of temperature. About 93 percent of fossil fuels went into the world’s oceans, said NOAA oceanographer Greg Johnson, which helped contribute to severe storms, like tropical cyclones.

Johnson also noted that subtropical fish not normally seen that far north were appearing off the coast of an unusually warm Alaska.

However, Johnson doesn’t believe a sudden cut of carbon emissions would help because, basically, the effects are too far gone.

“I think of it more like a fly wheel or a freight train. It takes a big push to get it going but it is moving now and will continue to move long after we continue to pushing it,” he told reporters. “Even if we were to freeze greenhouse gases at current levels, the sea would actually continue to warm for centuries and millennia, and as they continue to warm and expand the sea levels will continue to rise.”

The report was based on research from 413 scientists from 58 countries. Highlights included that many places, including Europe, had record averages of heat. There were also more tropical cyclones with 91 of them worldwide in 2014, which is slightly more than the 30-year average of 82. Glaciers worldwide also continue to shrink, while Arctic sea ice is declining regularly.

Jeff Severinghaus of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who wasn’t part of the report, probably summed up the report best, saying that if this is Earth’s annual checkup, “the doctor is saying ‘you are gravely ill.’”

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