News spotlight: Fossil fuels behind extreme ocean temperatures, study says.
For 450 straight days in 2023 and 2024, ocean temperatures hit record highs.
According to a new study, the world’s oceans are warming four times faster than they were in the late 1980s, and the burning of fossil fuels is behind the dramatic acceleration, Danielle Bochove reported for Bloomberg.
“With climate change, it’s the oceans that set the pace,” Christopher Merchant, lead author and an ocean and Earth observation scientist at the University of Reading, told Bloomberg.
Merchant said that without substantial moves to cut fossil fuel use, ocean temperatures in the coming decades could rise “by a significant margin” compared with the increase between the 1980s and today.
