Heat this summer has not been normal for most of the world. Globally, July 2023 was the hottest month on record, mainly because the oceans are at record-high temperatures.
This week the team talked with climate scientist Zeke Hausfather about the short term and long term reasons why. They also discuss how we get the ocean data, whether that be from satellites, remote controlled ocean floats, and in some cases — seals. Yes, seals.
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About the Across the Sky podcast
The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:
Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.
Episode transcript
Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:
Hello everyone. I'm meteorologist Sean Sublette and welcome to Across the Sky our national Lee Enterprises weather podcast. Lee Enterprises has print and digital news operations in more than 70 locations across the country, including at my home base in Richmond, Virginia. I'm joined by my meteorologist colleague Matt Holiner in Chicago. My pals Kirsten Lang and Joe Martucci out of the office today.
Our guest this week is Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist. Very deep into the data, has a wealth of information about how much warming is taking place globally. And we really wanted to pick his brain about what's going on in the oceans this year in particular. There has been so much buzz, Matt, about how hot the oceans are right now.
So we wanted to kind of get into some of the reasons for that. Yeah, that's the headline I think grabbed people's attention. Of course, you know, as soon as there was those 100 degree temperature readings off the coast of Florida, then immediately all the headlines were Hot Tub water and everybody knows what a hot tub feels like. It's like, yeah, I don't think the ocean should just be naturally that hot if it's, you know, not being artificially heated.
But I mean, it is just getting warmer. But I also think that sometimes, you know, and that's the challenge, you know, where there's, you know, still doubt, unfortunately, that comes up with climate change because then certain things get exaggerated because there is something because they're also following that. Lots of headlines about the thermal hailing circulation shutting down. And what I liked in our discussion coming up with Zeke was he really dived into that and explained how likely it is and what's really going to happen, because immediately all the means of the day after tomorrow came and it's like, oh, the ocean current shuts down.
It's going to be a global ice age, you know? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's talk about what's really going to happen, how likely the circulation shutting down really is. That was just one of the things that we discuss about with them. But it's always good to come back to the experts that really know what's going on rather than just people just throwing stuff out there on social media because there's a there's still a lot of bad stuff on social media.
Yeah. And he talked about, you know, if you've never heard of the thermo heal hailing circular ocean, sometimes it's called the MOOC. It has a lot of different nicknames, but he talks about what that is why it's important. He also addressed that 101 degree water temperature, some some things that are going on with that. And we just talked about where we're climate changes now and how much more warming we should expect.
So lots to get to with our conversation with Dr. Zeke Zeke Hausfather, let's go right to it. Dr. Zeke Hausfather father is