Oceans are heating up and El Nino will make it worse

People bathe in the Mediterranean sea water off a beach in Libya's capital Tripoli in 2020, amidst an ongoing heatwave and repeated electrical power cuts. — Bloomberg

EVEN if you hate the beach, live inland and aren’t bothered by dwindling fish, the latest spike in ocean temperature matters to you. The ocean is like a huge closet where we’ve been able to store 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. That closet is now stuffed. The latest readings from more than 4,000 buoys around the world show record-breaking sea-surface temperatures from January to March this year.

And we’re on the cusp of an El Nino event – a shift in wind patterns and ocean currents that opens the closet door and lets heat and energy spill into our atmosphere. That’s where the heat buried in the ocean comes back to haunt us.