New Record for Ocean Heat Content

Ocean heat content reached a record high in the first quarter of this year:

data: 0-700 m, 0-2000 m

The quarterly changes were mostly negative for the three quarters before this one, but this time increased by large amounts: 3.1 W/m2 for the 0-700 m region and 3.0 W/m2 for the 0-2000 m region.

Over four quarters the increases were 0.2 W/m2 and 07 W/m2, respectively.

1.5°C by 2035

Note 6/10 2:20 pm: Oops, this is the graph is for Mays. I've put the graph for all months down at the bottom. Sorry.

Here's a graph Berkeley Earth presented today:

The trend, a 30-year LOESS smooth regression (the thin red line), is a little over 1.3°C right now. Their trend is 0.20°C/decade, perhaps (paper coming out next month) 0.25°C/decade. 

That means the trend line will hit 1.5°C in about a decade. The 2023-2024 warming spike will then appear relatively cool from that perspective.

0.25°C/decade is a monstrous value. (Even 0.20°C/decade is.) It's hard to get one's head around it, it's such a rapid increase. It's changing the future incredibly fast. It's like the last ice age global maximum went to the Holocene in only 240 years, instead of the actual 12,000 years it actually took. Warming now is 50 times faster. 

It's just worthless now to talk about limiting warming to 1.5°C. It will not happen, hard stop. At that point 2.0°C will be here by 2055-2060, looking also a done deal. It's tragic, and absolute failure of world leadership. The worst failure in human history.

Extremely discouraging. 

==

Added, as noted at the beginning of the post: Average global temperatures for all months:

Americans to Pay More to Cause Even More Climate Change

I don't even know what to call this--a reverse carbon tax?--but it's laughable and incredibly stupid. (But what isn't from Trump?) From the NY Times (free link): 

A 63-year-old coal-fired power plant was scheduled to permanently close its doors in Michigan on June 1. So was an oil- and gas-powered plant that was built in the 1960s in Pennsylvania.

But at the last minute, the Trump administration ordered both to stay open. The orders came as it pursues a far-reaching plan to boost fossil fuels, including coal, by declaring a national “energy emergency.”

The grid operators in Michigan and Pennsylvania said they hadn’t asked for the orders and hadn’t planned on using the plants this summer.

The costs to keep the plants open, which could total tens of millions of dollars, are expected to fall on consumers. Experts have said there’s little evidence of a national energy emergency, and 15 states have sued to challenge President Trump’s declaration, which was issued the day he took office.

Of course there is no "energy emergency" in the US. (Trump is declaring emergencies everywhere, like with immigration, so he can use special powers given to the President is such situations.) It produces more oil than it consumes, oil exports are growing and there is certainly no shortage of natural gas.

But Trump hates clean energy, because he's stuck in a 1970s mentality and maybe because he couldn't stop a wind turbine being installed in view of his golf course in Scotland. 

And he did ask the fossil fuel industry for a billion dollars for his last campaign. Presumably this is the quid of that quid pro quo.

America is already one of the largest CO2 emitters per capita, but apparently that's not good enough, Americans will have to pay more to emit more and cause more climate change. 

It's really shocking how fast the US is declining.

2nd-warmest May Globally

Both Copernicus and Berkeley Earth reported today that May 2025 was the 2nd warmest May -- in BE's case, since 1850.

BE had a Monthly Press Briefing Zoom call this morning with more details:

• May 2025 was 1.33 C above the 1850-1900 average
• that's 0.15 C below April 2025 and the first month in 12 months below 1.5 C
• 2nd warmest Spring (Mar-May)
• 2nd warmest spring (March-May)
• 5th warmest May for land temperatures
• Third warmest May for ocean temps
• notable: the marine heat wave around UK, probably due to short-term meteorological conditions
• 4% of the Earth’s surface had a locally record warm May average
• 1% of land surfaces and 5% of ocean surfaces
• India cool in May; record high rainfall
• A city in central India had coolest May in 100 yrs
• Land only anomaly – +1.62 C above 1850-1900 avg
• Ocean third warmest for May, +0.99 C
• Probabilities for 2025:
• 5% chance 2025 could be the warmest yar
• 50% chance 2025 is 2nd warmest year on record
• 43% chance to be above 1.5 C
• Long-term trend presently reads 1.4 C, rising at 0.2 C/decade.
• 2023/2024 warming spike likely to be the average year a decade from now
• Paper coming out next month: rate of rise has increased to 0.25 C/decade
• Likely due to declining aerosols

HadCET: Warmest Meteorological Spring

Meteorological spring is March to May. (*In the Northern Hemisphere.)

The Hadley Central England Temperature (HadCET) just had the warmest meteorological spring in its 367-year history.

(OK, it's really only 303 years, because some of those early years had temperatures taken inside buildings, etc., not in a systematic fashion, but can you really blame them for trying?)

But still, 303 years. That's pretty impressive.

And this year's March-April-May average saw the warmest temperature anomaly in that little region, 2.26°C, which was the same as last year's value, exactly.

Baseline is 1901-2000.

Still, this year's year-to-date average only ranks 11th highest in all those years.

But things are cooking.

The 10-year moving average for HadCET is at a maximum, 0.52°C higher than 10 years (120 months) ago.

The 50-year linear trend is an impressive 0.31°C/decade.

But it's just a little region in England.

Some Retractions and Clarifications

So I wrote a few things the other day that were pretty dumb and which I don't really think. 

What can I say? I was having a bad day. A very bad day. It happens, more than I'd like. I've been dealing with bad days (and bad weeks and bad months) since I was 17 years old. Depression is an illness and one of the worst illnesses, I think. I've often wished I had cancer instead, because then you get to die from the disease and it's over, or you are (usually) cured and get over it and move on. Not always, I know. 

Psychiatrists and doctors and therapists like to say depression is curable, like a doctor I recently read in the NY Times. But I've never found that cure. There is such a thing as treatment-resistant depression. Or maybe, perhaps, and I'm not kidding, I'm just a weak person. It's a real possibility. In any case, nothing else has had such a large impact on my being in the last 50 years. 

On May 24th I wrote:

...but I'm also not that interested in climate change anymore. I was only ever interested in the science, not the politics, but as the science seems more and more established it's falling out of my Overton Window. I'm not interested in every nuance of the AMOC ocean stream and polar ice and carbon capture, and certainly not whether the world will seriously address the problem.

It's true that the US politics are a mess, and I don't want to write about every stupid thing Trump says or all the other deniers who, to me, seem less relevant every year. Of course, since Trump is cutting science in about every way possible, including climate science and meteorology, deniers like Anthony Watts probably think they are winning, or have won. 

But that just speaks to their ideological focus and lack of scientific understanding. It's always been clear that Watts knows little science and was more interested in traffic and money than in publishing the truth.... Of course, no professional scientist or expert thinks climate change is done, and no sane person would believe the usual denier suspects than the professionals. They will have to answer to someone, someday, though surely are too arrogant and full of themselves to do so honestly.

We have a lot of climate change still ahead of us, probably enough to get us to at least 3°C. 

One-half of an ice ages' worth of warming. My God.

While I might not be interested in every up and down of the AMOC's decline, I know the trends and they are extremely worrisome. Few people outside the climate community and smart readers (like you) understand this.

I also wrote:

I hope he [Trump] brings about the collapse of the US as soon as possible--it's been coming on for 50 years, and America certainly deserves it--so US regions can secede and start again. But I don't care about that either--I'm not married, I don't have any kids, so I don't have any stake in the future.

Well, to be honest, I do hope the US collapses soon. It surely won't be pleasant, but it is necessary, I believe--not just for Americans, but for the entire world. The US is now 1/3rd of a billion people, too big to form a true democracy, even a democratic republic. Our representatives don't give a shit what their constituents think, there are simply too many of them. I've read that they all spend a significant fraction of their time simply on the phone calling past donors for more donations. I don't doubt it. Citizen's United, and all that, set the ultimate destruction of the US in place. Yet I don't think it was incorrectly decided. This was a fundamental flaw in the Constitution (speech=money), which I don't see any way out of. If newspapers get free speech, why doesn't anyone else get it in a similar fashion?

The US needs to break up to return government closer to the people. 

Trump -- probably the devil incarnate (if I believed in supernatural beings like the devil) -- isn't fixing anything, and only accelerating our downfall.

Yes, I'm not married, never will be, don't have any children and never will. I have a niece and nephew whom I love, but they are pretty intelligent and come from a great home and have (and will have more) a ton of advantages. They'll get by, even if maybe they need to leave the US to do it. But what am I to do? I can hope the future is amenable to them, but there's nothing I can do to make it so, besides loving them. But now that they're no longer children, they need me less, and frankly not at all anymore.... 

None of us can do anything else for them. That's the huge tragedy of all this. It's long since been out of our hands. And, what did we really do wrong? 

Again, the country (and the world) is too big.

More and more it seems futile to me to hope for a better future when there's nothing I can do to make it so. Not really. And I'm getting old and tired and sore and am all stoved up and just don't have the energy I used to. Not that my energy has ever done any good anyway. I really don't see that I've accomplished anything in my life. I didn't even pass my genes on--intelligent genes, even though they carry depression.

This is what I felt I needed to say about that post, now over a week old. It's embarrassing, and I hope you will forgive me.

Cheers.

Excellent Anthropology YouTube Channel: @stefanmilo

I recently discovered a great YouTube channel called @stefanmilo about issues in anthropology, and I've been watching its back issues. It's by Stefan Milosavljevich, who, it turns out, lives in Portland, Oregon, just an hour north of me. He's interesting, he's a very good video producer, level-headed and enticingly curious, has a global perspective, and he asks real scientists for interviews. He writes:

"To ensure I'm not spewing bollocks into the void I follow these golden rules: 

Use only academic sources for my videos

Share those sources with the viewers

Make it obvious when I'm just giving my personal opinion

No Atlantis, No Aliens, No Nonsense."

It's very engaging and has really open my eyes to world of anthropology (in a way a 6-9 pm college course never did) and the modern issues within it. One of the best channels I've found in awhile.