Ocean temperatures are off the charts, and El Niño is only partly to blame

With the golden glow of the sunset, surfer Dylan Sloan, 15, of Huntington Beach, gets a coveted tube ride while surfing big waves generated by winter storms at the Seal Beach pier in January. “There has never been any day in observed history where the entire North Atlantic has been nearly as warm as it is right now, at any time of year.” Nearly all of the Atlantic basin is experiencing anomalous warmth, including the Irminger Sea southeast of Greenland, the western Mediterranean Sea, and the tropics “all the way from Africa to at least the Caribbean,” said Gregory Johnson, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. “That’s on top of the human-caused warming that we’re already seeing, so that may be part of why we’re seeing such a spike right now in some global ocean temperatures and in global atmospheric temperatures.” Meanwhile, a major change in regulations around the sulfur content of shipping fuels could also be behind the warming spike, according to both Swain and Jacobson. “It is being speculated that this is part of the reason why we’re seeing such record-breaking global ocean temperatures and atmospheric temperatures right now,” he said. Though concerning, the conditions aren’t “completely out of left field” based on global warming trends, Swain said.