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WASHINGTON (AP) —
The amount of man-made heat energy absorbed by the seas has doubled since 1997, a study released Monday showed.
Scientists have long known that more than 90 percent of the heat energy from man-made global warming goes into the world's oceans instead of the ground. And they've seen ocean heat content rise in recent years. But the new study, using ocean-observing data that goes back to the British research ship Challenger in the 1870s and including high-tech modern underwater monitors and computer models, tracked how much man-made heat has been buried in the oceans in the past 150 years.
The world's oceans absorbed approximately 150 zettajoules of energy from 1865 to 1997, and then absorbed about another 150 in the next 18 years, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
To put that in perspective, if you exploded one atomic bomb the size of the one that dropped on Hiroshima every second for a year, the total energy released would be 2 zettajoules. So since 1997, Earth's oceans have absorbed man-made heat energy equivalent to a Hiroshima-style bomb being exploded every second for 75 straight years.
"The changes we're talking about, they are really, really big numbers," said study co-author Paul Durack, an oceanographer at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California. "They are nonhuman numbers."
Because there are decades when good data wasn't available and computer simulations are involved, the overall figures are rough but still are reliable, the study's authors said. Most of the added heat has been trapped in the upper 2,300 feet, but with every year the deeper oceans also are absorbing more energy, they said.
But the study's authors and outside experts say it's not the raw numbers that bother them. It's how fast those numbers are increasing.
"After 2000 in particular the rate of change is really starting to ramp up," Durack said.
This means the amount of energy being trapped in Earth's climate system as a whole is accelerating, the study's lead author Peter Gleckler, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore, said.
Because the oceans are so vast and cold, the absorbed heat raises temperatures by only a few tenths of a degree, but the importance is the energy balance, Gleckler and his colleagues said. When oceans absorb all that heat it keeps the surface from getting even warmer from the heat-trapping gases spewed by the burning of coal, oil and gas, the scientists said.
The warmer the oceans get, the less heat they can absorb and the more heat stays in the air and on land surface, the study's co-author, Chris Forest at Pennsylvania State University, said.
"These finding have potentially serious consequences for life in the oceans as well as for patterns of ocean circulation, storm tracks and storm intensity," said Oregon State University marine sciences professor Jane Lubchenco, the former chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
One outside scientist, Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, also has been looking at ocean heat content and he said his ongoing work shows the Gleckler team "significantly underestimates" how much heat the ocean has absorbed.
Jeff Severinghaus at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography praised the study, saying it "provides real, hard evidence that humans are dramatically heating the planet."
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) —
The cold, dust-blown prison yard where inmates are welding a new steel bell tower for the Feb. 17 visit of Pope Francis is a microcosm of the changes that have brought hope to the once-infernal border city of Ciudad Juarez, both inside and outside the walls.
Some see the pontiff's visit as a capstone on the city's transformation from one of the most violent places on earth; others hope Francis will draw attention to the problems that remain in the bustling metropolis.
The Pope will be making an unusual visit to Prison No. 3, which used to be a center and symbol of gang power. Warring gangs once wielded total control, shooting and knifing each other, selling drugs and locking themselves inside cellblocks to which only they had the keys. They alone enforced discipline, and marked the wings of the 3,000-inmate facility with gang-related murals.
"This was the biggest drug den in Ciudad Juarez," Chihuahua state prison director Jorge Bissuet Galarza said. Other lockups weren't much better: In 2010, the worst year of violence, 216 inmates were killed in the state.
"You couldn't enter a single prison ... without asking permission from the inmates. They were the ones who controlled things," said Bissuet Galarza.
He said officials finally wrested back control, and today the prison is calm enough that Francis will be able to enter and speak to prisoners, 250 relatives and 100 religious workers — even as masked guards with shotguns patrol the yard.
Inmate Juan Salazar recalled how after he arrived in 2011 to serve a seven-year sentence for auto theft, a fight between rival gangs killed 17 inmates in one day. "It's quieter now, you feel safer," Salazar said as a he helped weld beams in the prison chapel.
Juarez as a whole is still struggling to come to terms with its thousands of dead. Most fell in the drug wars, while others — especially poor female factory workers — simply vanished, only to turn up dead long afterward.
City officials point to a reformed police force and less corruption. But many residents think the turf war between Juarez's main cartel-backed gangs ended with a deal or simply burned itself out.
"It has calmed down. The ones that had to be killed were killed," said Joel Garcia, who makes a living selling candy outside the prison and safeguarding purses, keys and other belongings that visitors can't bring inside. "The authorities want to take credit. But it was (the gangs) themselves that made a pact."
In 2010, Juarez was widely considered the murder capital of the world with a homicide rate of about 230 per 100,000 inhabitants. In the first 11 months of 2015, it was about one-tenth that level, around 21 per 100,000.
Shuttered restaurants have re-opened, and street shootouts are rare. Tourists drawn by the slumping Mexican peso have begun crossing the border again to dine and shop. Billboards with Francis's image have sprouted with slogans like "Juarez is love. We are ready."
"This is what we need: to talk about Juarez now, not the Juarez of before," said Pedro Martinez, the engineer tasked with erecting a stage about 50 yards (meters) from the border where Francis will celebrate Mass for about a quarter-million people, with thousands more expected to watch from the other side of the Rio Grande. "This is why the Pope's visit is so important."
Martinez said it has been years since he's had to execute the traffic maneuver Juarez residents know all too well — the quick U-turn, sometimes jumping a median strip, to avoid a gun battle uip the road.
The stage is going up on a dusty lot with mounds of gravel. Martinez has already cleared a path over an expressway so Francis will be able to approach the river and El Paso, Texas. On the U.S. side, backhoes are furiously cleaning mud and silt out of the river.
Juarez's proximity to the U.S. has brought jobs through hundreds of foreign-owned "maquiladora" assembly plants that ship clothes, electronics and other goods north.
But many of those pay very little, and some residents link the low wages to the broader societal ills. At a ragtag protest camp consisting of a couple of tents and an old RV outside an Eaton Industries plant, demonstrators said they earn just $45 a week with scant vacation.
"If you really want to eliminate violence, you have to provide decent-paid jobs," said Antonia Hinojosa, a mother of two.
With the worst of the bloodshed behind it, Juarez has settled back into the more common but stubborn problems that afflict other border cities — deep social inequality, and waves of migrants heading north or being deported from the United States.
Monserrat Munoz, a construction worker deported several weeks ago, said crossing the border has become increasingly dangerous. Interviewed at a shelter in Juarez, he hopes the pope delivers a pro-migrant message.
"I hope that message gets through to the governors of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, where migrants are most being abused," Munoz said.
The Rev. Javier Calvillo Salazar, who runs the shelter, said the pope's visit promises to be a golden moment, but Juarez's root problems must still be addressed.
"All the women who were widowed, all the children who were orphaned, the young people who were traumatized, the people who ... witnessed a kidnapping or executions," the priest said. "All that can't be changed or swept from your mind or your heart in five years."
WASHINGTON (AP) —
Last year wasn't just the Earth's hottest year on record — it left a century of high temperature marks in the dust.
The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and NASA announced Wednesday that 2015 was by far the hottest year in 136 years of record keeping.
NOAA said 2015's temperature was 58.62 degrees Fahrenheit (14.79 degrees Celsius), passing 2014 by a record margin of 0.29 degrees. That's 1.62 degrees above the 20th-century average. NASA, which measures differently, said 2015 was 0.23 degrees warmer than the record set in 2014.
Because of the wide margin over 2014, NASA calculated that 2015 was a record with 94 percent certainty, about double the certainty it had last year when announcing 2014 as a record.
Although 2015 is now the hottest on record, it was the fourth time in 11 years that Earth broke annual marks for high temperature.
"It's getting to the point where breaking record is the norm," Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe said. "It's almost unusual when we're not breaking a record."
Scientists blame a combination of El Nino and increasing man-made global warming.
Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University said a strong El Nino, like this year's, can add about a third of a degree of warming to Earth'stemperature.
"Records will happen during El Nino years due to the extra warming boost they provide," Mann said in an email. "That boost of warmth however sits upon the ramp of global warming."
And it's likely to happen this year, too. NASA scientists and others said there's a good chance that this year will pass 2015 as the hottest year on record, thanks to El Nino.
"2015 will be difficult to beat, but you say that almost every year and you get surprised," said Victor Gensini, a meteorology professor at the College of DuPage outside of Chicago.
Measurements from Japan and the University of California at Berkeley also show 2015 is the warmest on record. Satellite measurements, which scientists say don't measure where we live and have a larger margin of error, calculate that last year was only the third hottest since 1979.