Oceans are as hot as humans have known them and we’re to blame

Every year, unfathomable amounts of energy are added to the oceans. Scientists measure heat in a unit called a joule; the amount of heat in the oceans is so large, we report it in zettajoules. What is a zettajoule? It is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules. To put this in perspective, the amount of heat we are putting into the oceans is equivalent to about five Hiroshima atom bombs of energy every second. I am part of the team of researchers that published the new paper on ocean warming which shows that the total heat of Earth is increasing with global heating, as scientists have predicted for decades. Each year, we take the Earth’s temperature to try to determine what is...