World’s oceans hit highest temperature on record

What happened

The world’s ocean temperatures reached 70 degrees Fahrenheit over the weekend, the hottest on record, Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced Monday. The previous daily average record was set in March 2024, but oceans may not have been this warm in “millennia,” The Washington Post said.

Who said what

Global ocean temperatures typically peak in March or April, so this off-season record is “another clear signal of an ocean under growing stress,” said Copernicus deputy director Samantha Burgess. The brewing “super” El Niño is “adding heat to the system, but it is doing so on top of decades of human-driven warming.” The seas are likely the warmest they have been “for the entire Holocene period, and possibly even as far back” as “125,000 years ago,” University of Ottawa environmental studies professor Ryan Katz-Rosene said on social media. “Should be major news!”

“An ocean this warm destabilizes weather patterns and threatens food security, economic prosperity and marine life,” former NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco told The Associated Press. “A warmer ocean is not our friend.”

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What next?

“Warmer seas help to fuel more extreme weather,” supercharging storms and intensifying heatwaves, the BBC said. This year’s El Niño “is expected to keep strengthening until Christmas” and is “on course to be the strongest in centuries.”