[ti:Scientists: 2019 Ocean Water Temperatures Were Hottest Ever] [by:www.51voa.com] [00:00.00]更多听力请访问51VOA.COM [00:02.12]Scientists reported this week that the world's oceans were warmer in 2019 than they had ever been before. [00:13.04]The report comes at a time when studies have linked rising ocean water temperatures to manmade pollution. [00:22.16]Researchers say the rate of warming is speeding up and may cause a planet-wide disaster. [00:31.56]The oceans take in more than 90 percent of the extra heat [00:35.68]created by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. [00:43.12]Greenhouse gases are a product of pollution from factories, [00:47.96]driving motor vehicles and other human activities. [00:53.56]Scientists are able to measure the rate of global warming [00:57.60]when they compare current ocean water temperatures with those measured over the past few years. [01:06.08]For a better understanding of ocean warmth, scientists from around the world [01:11.36]studied records shared by China's Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP). [01:19.20]They found that the latest water temperature was 0.075 degrees Celsius higher [01:28.24]than the average temperature from 1981 to 2010. [01:35.28]Their findings were published in the scientific journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. [01:43.40]The scientists pointed to the many extreme weather events of 2019 as one effect of warmer oceans. [01:53.68]They added that warmer water also endangers some sea creatures and causes higher sea levels. [02:03.24]Lijing Cheng is with the International Center for Climate and Environmental Sciences at the IAP. [02:13.04]He also was the lead author of a paper on the study. [02:18.32]He says the heat the oceans have taken in to make the temperature change [02:24.08]amounts to 228 Zetta Joules (228 billion trillion Joules) of energy. [02:36.84]"That's a lot of zeros indeed," he said. "To make it easier to understand, I did a calculation... [02:45.56]The amount of heat we have put into the world's oceans in the past 25 years [02:52.08]equals to 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bomb explosions." [02:59.88]Michael Mann is director of the Earth System Sciences Center at Penn State University in the United States. [03:09.32]He says the energy that caused the warming is equal to "everyone on the planet [03:15.60]running a hundred hairdryers or a hundred microwaves continuously for the entire year." [03:24.16]He spoke to the French news agency AFP. [03:28.04]The past five years are the five hottest years for the ocean [03:34.60]since scientists began keeping records, the study found. [03:40.48]John Abraham is a co-author of the paper. [03:43.80]He said it is important to "understand how fast things are changing. [03:50.88]The key to answering this question is in the oceans -- that's where the vast majority of heat ends up. [03:59.56]If you want to understand global warming, you have to measure ocean warming." [04:06.08]Abraham is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. [04:14.64]In 2015, world leaders signed the Paris Agreement as part of efforts to limit climate change. [04:23.72]The agreement took effect the following year. [04:26.76]It aims to limit global temperature increases to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius, [04:34.64]and to 1.5 degrees Celsius if at all possible. [04:41.20]There has been about 1 degree Celsius of warming [04:44.88]since the start of the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. [04:50.60]Yet the result of rising water temperatures is not evenly spread in the world's oceans. [04:57.88]The report says that warmer temperatures are partly to blame for heavy rainfall in Indonesia [05:06.08]and the drying of Australia, leading to wildfires in Australia and the Amazon. [05:15.08]Mann explained that there is still hope for the climate to recover from this temperature increase. [05:22.24]"If we stop warming the planet, heat will continue to diffuse down [05:28.12]into the deep ocean for centuries until eventually stabilizing." [05:35.48]I'm Jill Robbins. 更多听力请访问51VOA.COM