The oceans have been record-warm for the past four years, scientists reported in January. Then in mid-March, climatologists noted that global sea surface temperature climbed to a new high.
The incredible trend worries experts about what could lie ahead, especially as forecasts predict El Niño is on its way starting this summer -- and along with it, impacts like extreme heat, dangerous tropical cyclones and a significant threat to fragile coral reefs.
The last three years have still been some of the warmest on record, even with La Niña's cooling effect."We're now switching that off," Professor Adam Scaife, head of long-range prediction at the UK Met Office, told CNN. The world has already seen around 1.2 degrees of warming, as humans continue to burn fossil fuels and produce planet-heating pollution. And despite three years of cooling La Niña, temperatures have soared to dangerous levels.
California already faces potential flood threats this spring, NOAA reported in March, after record-breaking snow fell in the Sierra and torrential rain drenched the rest of the state. The situation on the Colorado River, which provides water for drinking, irrigation and electricity for roughly 40 million people across the Southwest, has been plagued by overuse and a climate change-fueled drought. The water crisis has become so dire that the federal government announced never-before-seen mandatory water cuts in the last two years.
Its recent floods have also increased fears for a particularly destructive bushfire season, as increased vegetation growth could provide fuel for fires as the weather gets drier and hotter. Unlike La Niña, El Niño tends to reduce Atlantic hurricane activity, but creates the opposite effect in the Pacific, where warm waters can fuel more intense typhoons.
When they get too hot, corals will spit out the algae living within their tissue, which provides them with both their color and most of their energy. This causes corals to turn white -- in a phenomenon called bleaching. While they can recover if temperatures eventually cool, bleaching puts them at higher risk of starvation and death.
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