A new study shows: Never, the oceans were as warm as today. The threat to the life of the sea, and favored a giant fire like the one in Australia.

the satellite: the Bush fires it looks on the kangaroo island in Australia photo: NASA Earth/Zuma Wire/dpa

BERLIN taz | The devastating forest fires in Australia are not only favored by the warming of the continent, but also from the heating of the oceans. This is the result of a recent study on the unprecedented heating of the world oceans in recent times.

"The increasing heat in the oceans is one of the main reasons why the earth is experiencing 2019 increasingly disastrous fire on the Amazon, in California and Australia, which extend in Australia to 2020", - stated in a recent survey of 14 leading climate researchers.

Under the direction of Lijing Cheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the researchers in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences with the "record heat in the oceans, 2019".

your conclusion: Since all the sea temperatures are measured, the upper 2,000 meters of the oceans have never been as warm as last year. The past five years, the hottest five since 1950, therefore, is.

The oceans store more than 90 percent of the heat that is generated by the enhanced greenhouse effect, they become warmer and expand. More dissolved CO2 increases the acidity of the water. And the more sour it is and the warmer the oceans become, the more decreases their ability to store CO2.

The report "is based on, and confirmed" the special report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change IPCC of the oceans in climate change by 2019, says Hans-Otto Pörtner from the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for taz. The biologist is one of the editors of the IPCC report. It is important to acknowledge in the climate debate, the "service of the oceans".

This will be threatened by more heat and acid, write the authors of the current study: warming reduces the ability of water to absorb oxygen and "significantly affected the marine life, especially corals and other organisms react to changing temperatures and chemical composition sensitive," it says.

Warmer oceans have led to higher humidity, more rain and more Floods, and a "more extreme water cycle, and more extreme weather (particularly hurricanes and typhoons)", warn the authors. Since climate change tends to be in the tropics, through more low-pressure wet and the subtropics areas would be more high-pressure zones of dry, fit the many years of drought in sub-tropical Australia into the picture.

Whether, and how, specifically, the fire disaster in Australia linked to climate change, is currently being investigated by researchers in the first place. First results are expected for the end of January.

slowly the warming of the oceans due to the inertia of the huge masses of water go ahead of you, so little you had to be stopped, the study to record heat in the sea water: Even if CO2 stopped emissions, went further with the processes in the sea for a long time. However, climate protection is necessary, according to the researchers: the lower the emissions, the more controllable the risks posed by the warming of the oceans.