Topline:
Worldwide the average ocean temperatures have been in record-breaking territory for 15 months straight since last April. What's going on?
Why it matters: Abnormally hot ocean water helps fuel dangerous hurricanes. And when the water gets too hot, fish and other marine species also struggle to survive.
Why now: Climate change is broadly to blame, but there are other factors. Keep reading for four of the prime suspects.
The oceans are extremely warm right now. Worldwide, average ocean temperatures were in record-breaking territory for 15 months straight since last April.
That’s bad news on multiple fronts. Abnormally hot ocean water helps fuel dangerous hurricanes, like Hurricane Ernesto, which is expected to rapidly gain strength this week in the Atlantic, and like Hurricane Debby, which dumped massive amounts of rain along the East Coast of the U.S. last week. And when the water gets too hot, fish and other marine species also struggle to survive. For example, the ocean water near Florida is so warm that it’s threatening coral reefs.
So, why are the oceans so hot right now?
Let’s start with what we know: Climate change is broadly to blame. Humans continue to burn fossil fuels that release heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere, and most of that extra heat is absorbed by the oceans. Ocean temperatures have been steadily rising for decades.
The cyclic climate pattern El Niño is also partly to blame. When El Niño is happening, there’s warmer water in part of the Pacific, and that generally means the Earth is slightly warmer overall. In 2023 and the first part of 2024, El Niño was happening and it caused global average temperatures to rise, including in the oceans.
“The two primary things are obviously global warming and El Niño,” says Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M. But that’s where the certainty ends, because the oceans are even warmer than scientists expected from those two trends.
“Think of it like, the house was burglarized, and you have video of those two suspects doing it. And the question is: Is there somebody else helping them?” Dessler explains.
It seems like there probably was another suspect. And over the last 18 months or so, a few major theories have emerged about what it might be. Testing those theories is slow, laborious work for scientists, but after months of crunching the numbers, some early answers are emerging.
One reason that ocean temperatures started to spike last year is that ships stopped releasing so much pollution into the air.
In 2020, new international shipping regulations went into effect that required ships to use slightly cleaner types of fuel. The new fuel still releases planet-warming gasses like carbon dioxide, but it releases a lot less pollution into the air.
That’s good news for the overall health of humans and other animals – air pollution, particularly the sulfur-heavy pollution released by dirty shipping fuel, leads to serious illness. “This saves lives,” says Stephen Smith, an expert on air pollution and climate change at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
But all that pollution was also reflecting some of the sun’s heat, because sulfur helps clouds form and those bright, white clouds reflect sunlight. When the extra sulfur from ship pollution went away, scientists wondered if more of the sun’s heat would be absorbed by the oceans.
Teasing apart how much of an effect cleaner air over the oceans might have on ocean temperatures is surprisingly difficult. That’s because there are still lots of unanswered questions about how air pollutants affect clouds, which in turn reflect sunlight. “It’s a complicated system and it’s going to take some time to sort that out, but people are trying to do that,” says Smith.
The most cutting-edge research in the field does suggest ocean temperatures may have increased slightly in some parts of the world as sulfur pollution from ships decreased. In major shipping lanes where pollution from ships decreased significantly since 2020, there are fewer so-called ship tracks – long, thin clouds that form with the help of sulfur pollution, and look kind of like plane contrails – according to a new study published this week.
Without those reflective ship track clouds, more of the Sun’s energy does, indeed, seem to be making it to the surface of the ocean, where it is absorbed, the study finds. “This could be contributing to the warm temperatures we’ve seen in the last couple years,” says Andrew Gettelman, a climate scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and one of the authors of the forthcoming study.
The good news is that this type of warming, from cutting dangerous air pollution, isn’t caused by humans releasing new, additional greenhouse gas emissions. Humans already caused this warming, but weren’t feeling it because air pollution was protecting us.
When ocean temperatures started surprising scientists last year, one of the theories was that a massive volcanic eruption in 2022 might be partly to blame.
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption happened off the coast of the Pacific island of Tonga. An underwater volcano erupted, sending sulfur, ash and water vapor into the atmosphere.
Usually, volcanic eruptions temporarily cool the Earth slightly, because the sulfur and ash in the atmosphere spread around the world and reflect extra heat from the sun.
But because the Hunga-Tonga eruption happened underwater, it spewed a lot of water vapor into the atmosphere as well. Unlike ash, water vapor absorbs heat from the sun. “Water is a greenhouse gas,” Dessler explains.
A handful of scientists publicly wondered if all that water vapor might be trapping extra heat, and contributing to off-the-charts ocean temperatures.
Recent research suggests that the answer is “No.”
“I was very skeptical of the warming effect,” says Dessler, who is an expert on how water vapor in the stratosphere affects the Earth’s climate. He points out that, despite the size of the eruption, it changed the total amount of water in the atmosphere very little. But, to know for sure, he and scientists at NASA had to analyze reams of data from satellites and other sources.
In July, they published a study showing there was no evidence that the eruption led to overall warming. If anything, like past eruptions, it contributed to slight cooling. “The bottom line is that this had a very tiny impact on the climate,” says Dessler.
But other scientific analyses about the potential role of the eruption on global temperatures are still underway, says Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA who was not involved in the newly published study. “I’d caution against assuming that a single [research] paper will end up being the consensus,” he says.
Since the heat in the oceans originally comes from the sun, our local star is one place to look for answers about abnormal temperatures here on Earth.
The amount of energy coming from the sun changes a little bit over the course of an 11-year solar cycle. “As the sun’s output gets brighter and dimmer by about 0.1% over its 11-year cycle, the Earth’s global temperatures increase and then decrease by a little less than 0.1 degree [Celsius],” explains Gregory Kopp, a solar physicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
But that tenth of a degree Celsius change doesn’t account for the abnormally hot ocean temperatures of the last couple years. “The sun isn’t causing the recent record-breaking sea-surface temperatures,” Kopp says. The ocean is simply too large to immediately heat up or cool down in response to changes in the sun. “The sea contains so much heat energy that it doesn’t respond on the relatively short solar-cycle timescales,” Kopp explains .
So, in the quest to understand current record-breaking ocean temperatures, the sun doesn’t offer any answers.
The upshot is that scientists don’t know for sure what’s driving ocean temperatures into record-breaking territory. In addition to climate change and El Niño, cleaner air seems to be playing a role.
The last possibility is what Dessler calls “weirdness.”
The Earth’s climate is incredibly complex, and there’s some natural variability in temperatures on short time scales like one or two years. A few extra tenths of a degree of heat in the Atlantic due to nothing more but natural variability could account for a couple of record-breaking years, when it’s layered on top of warming from climate change and El Niño.
“My guess is, in the end, it’s just going to be internal variability,” Dessler explains. “Like, something weird happened! Because the climate’s always doing something weird.”
Gettelman agrees that normal year-to-year temperature variability is an important factor.
“We're going to see the planet warm in fits and starts,” he explains. For example, there was a period in the 2010s when the Earth didn’t warm very much. “People were saying ‘Oh, global warming's over,’” remembers Gettelman. “It wasn't. It was just a transient thing, and we now may be recovering from that.”
The real concern for climate scientists isn’t so much what happens to temperatures in a given year or two, but whether the overall warming trend is accelerating. If the oceans don’t cool off somewhat in the coming months, that would suggest that the Earth is heating up very quickly.
“I think people are starting to get a little worried that we are warming at the high end of what [climate models predicted],” says Gettelman.
“We’ll see,” Dessler agrees. “The next few months will tell us if we’ve really broken the climate.”
Copyright 2024 NPR
In this edition:
This weekend, check out Super Bowl (and Puppy Bowl!) watch parties, a Matisse talk, Joe Wong (in Mandarin and English) at the Improv and more of the best things to do.
Highlights:
Look, we don’t need the New York Times to tell us that L.A. has more to offer art-wise than any other city in the country right now, but you know we love to see it.
I think there’s a football game on Sunday — before and after the Bad Bunny concert. Don’t worry, there are some watch party options (and Super Bowl alternatives!) in today’s newsletter. If football isn’t your thing, there are plenty of other sports options available in the form of the Winter Olympics, which begin this weekend.
We’re all getting a free concert on Sunday, but Licorice Pizza has the rest of your music picks for the week, including hometown faves the Silversun Pickups album release party at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah at Barnsdall Gallery Theater, Aimee Mann at Pacific Electric and Mandy Patinkin singing Sondheim and more at the Carpenter Center on Saturday.
Elsewhere on LAist, you can learn about Death Valley’s stargazing festival, the Bob Baker marionettes stage their first new show in 40 years and we visit Mel’s Diner at the end of Route 66.
Sunday, February 8, 7 p.m. (Mandarin) and 9:15 p.m. (English)
Hollywood Improv
8162 Melrose Ave., Hollywood
COST: $44.79; MORE INFO
Comedian Joe Wong has done what few comics can — build an audience in two languages — and he’s bringing his show, Twin Lunarcies, to the Improv in both Mandarin and English. Wong hosted a TV show in his native China for a decade before exploring and finding success in the U.S., where he’s roasted Joe Biden at the Radio & TV Correspondents Dinner and appeared on many late-night talk shows. Catch him before his Netflix is a Joke show in May.
Saturday, February 7, 8 p.m.
Lodge Room
104 N. Ave. 56, 2nd floor, Highland Park
COST: $45.50; MORE INFO
The dream of the ‘90s is alive and well at the Lodge Room as a supergroup with members of R.E.M., Screaming Trees (remember when all the bands had gerunds in their names?) and Them Crooked Vultures join forces for a new band, Drink the Sea.
Saturday, February 7, 10 p.m.
Harvelle's Long Beach
201 E. Broadway, Long Beach
COST: $22; MORE INFO
We’re getting a little racy at Best Things To Do this week, but this one is too good not to include, because just 15 minutes of Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl is not sufficient. Get the party started early with this burlesque tribute to the Puerto Rican superstar from Dirty Little Secrets Burlesque. Obviously, this event is 21+.
Sunday, February 8, kickoff at 3:30 p.m.
Various locations
COST: VARIES
Speaking of the Super Bowl, there is no shortage of places to catch the big game around town, no matter who you’re rooting for. Here are a few suggestions: Precinct DTLA is hosting a watching party with no cover and $4 beers; Copper Door in Santa Ana has $1 beer and $3 margarita specials; Volo Sports is teaming up with Benny Boy Brewing for a party that includes local food, drink specials and a cornhole competition. Angel City Brewery in the Arts District, 1212 in Santa Monica and Harriet’s Rooftop in West Hollywood are also all good choices. For something on the fancy side, Casaléna will have chef-driven food stations and an open bar with game-day cocktails at $120 per person.
Sunday, February 8, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Wallis Annenberg PetSpace
12005 Bluff Creek Drive, Playa Vista
COST: FREE; MORE INFO
Watch the Puppy Bowl while surrounded by actual puppies?! I think this one speaks for itself. Ruff!
Through Thursday, February 19
Saban, Fine Arts and Regal North Hollywood
COST: VARIES; MORE INFO
The 37th annual Israel Film Festival kicks off this week and will host four U.S. premieres, plus a 40th anniversary screening of Ricochets, the 1986 film about the First Lebanon War starring Alon Aboutboul. Many new Israeli films will screen at three area venues — the Saban and the Fine Arts theaters in Beverly Hills, and the Regal in North Hollywood. The festival has a wide range of films, from comedies to features to docs, and many of the screenings include Q&As with talent afterward.
Sunday, February 8, 3 p.m.
Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood
COST: FREE; MORE INFO
Aha! I found excellent art nerd Super Bowl alternative programming. Head to the Hammer and listen to independent art historian and former Getty Museum director John Walsh discuss Matisse’s painting of the female form between the wars. Walsh will explore the influence of Matisse’s time in Nice and emerging art eras like Cubism on his work. This is the third of four in a lecture series about Matisse with Walsh at the Hammer; the last one follows on Sunday, Feb. 22.
Saturday, February 7, 8 p.m. and 10 p.m.
The Broad
221 S. Grand Ave., Downtown L.A.
COST: $25; MORE INFO
The Broad’s current exhibit, Robert Therrien’s This is a Story, plays with the idea that everyday objects and materials can become art and move between worlds. The Grammy-nominated orchestral collective Wild Up takes a similar approach to their music and will work with a group of 30 non-musicians when they take the stage at the Broad to perform The Great Learning, Paragraphs 2 and 7, written in the late 1960s by Cornelius Cardew. The public ensemble will learn the work “through repetitions and echoes, culminating in a performance where music becomes a shared space to embody collective creativity.”
Topline:
After concerted pushback from faculty, students and alumni, Cal State Dominguez Hills has decided not to eliminate six academic programs that were on the chopping block for months.
The programs: Art history, earth sciences, geography and philosophy, along with labor studies and “Negotiation, Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding,” which are rare at most campuses.
Why it matters: Critics said that cutting classic majors like art history and philosophy would be unthinkable at elite universities. They also held that Cal State Dominguez Hills, where Black and Latino students make up the majority and where more than 60% are eligible for federal Pell Grants, should have continued access to robust course offerings.
The backstory: Faced with a potential $375-million cut in state funding last winter, campus leaders across the CSU system moved to lay off faculty, shutter athletics programs and end majors.
What's next: In an email, campus spokesperson Lilly McKibbin said “No programs are currently being considered for potential discontinuation.” She also said that, as the campus continues “the process of reviewing our academic offerings, faculty and university leaders will consider many options, which could include expanding or consolidating existing programs, launching new ones, developing more interdisciplinary programs, discontinuing some offerings, or a combination of these possibilities.”
Go deeper: Cal State Dominguez Hills students, faculty rally to save 6 'essential' programs from chopping block
After concerted pushback from faculty, students and alumni, Cal State Dominguez Hills has decided not to eliminate six academic programs that were on the chopping block for months.
Faced with a potential $375 million cut in state funding last winter, campus leaders across the CSU system had moved to lay off faculty, shutter athletics programs and end majors.
At Cal State Dominguez Hills, campus leaders considered eliminating art history, earth sciences, geography and philosophy, along with labor studies and “Negotiation, Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding,” which are rare at most campuses.
This week, interim provost Kim Costino informed LAist that the programs will not be eliminated.
“Instead,” Costino added via email: “over the next year, [Cal State Dominguez Hills] will engage in a broad, holistic redesign process that will result in a leaner academic program portfolio that aligns the university’s academic offerings with our strategic plan, the CSU strategic plan, our university mission, the needs of our students and the job market demands of the region.”
In a followup email, campus spokesperson Lilly McKibbin said, “No programs are currently being considered for potential discontinuation.”
“Throughout the process of reviewing our academic offerings,” she added, “faculty and university leaders will consider many options, which could include expanding or consolidating existing programs, launching new ones, developing more interdisciplinary programs, discontinuing some offerings or a combination of these possibilities.”
For educators like labor studies professor Stephen McFarland, Cal State Dominguez Hills’ decision to change course for now comes as “a big relief.”
In December, the California Faculty Association rallied against the proposed cuts. If implemented, members said, they wouldn’t just be detrimental to their colleagues but also to students.
In an email, McKibbin had told LAist: “Like all universities, [ours] must continually assess academic programs and invest in those which meet student needs, fulfill job market demands, and advance our mission. The university’s current financial constraints limit our ability to invest in new or expanded programs that could meet those needs.”
Students and alumni also spoke out against the proposed cuts. Noting that more than 60% of students are eligible for federal Pell Grants and that most financial aid awards go to families with incomes below $20,000, critics expressed concern that students from working-class backgrounds would have less access to humanities and social sciences.
Cutting classic majors like art history and philosophy, they told LAist, would be unthinkable at elite universities.
For months, non-tenured faculty in the designated programs navigated the anxiety of losing their employment. (McKibbin said the campus did “not anticipate layoffs of tenured or tenure-track faculty as a result of program discontinuation.") Meanwhile, the campus promised that if the cuts were made, students enrolled in those programs would still be able to finish their degrees at Cal State Dominguez Hills.
Labor studies professor McFarland, a CFA executive board member, credits the administration’s about-face to the “quick and rapid action” of faculty, students, alumni and other community supporters. They “really banded together” to make phone calls, send emails, show up to rallies and speak up at meetings, he said, all to convey the message that the programs are “core to any university that claims to be comprehensive.”
“We feel vindicated,” McFarland added. “And we're proud of the community effort that came together to protect these programs.”
The professor also believes the campus’ new leadership was central to the decision. Interim provost Costino and interim president Mary Ann Villareal “recognize the value of the humanities,” McFarland said because they come from humanities backgrounds.
But how the relationship between faculty in these departments and the administration pans out remains to be seen.
When it comes to his students, McFarland said, there is a belief that because most of them are the first in their families to go to college, they “ought to be steered into hard science: engineering, computer science, you know, [programs] with a clear career payoff.”
McFarland says he and his colleagues view the university “much differently.”
“We see it as a forum for students to study any subject they want,” he said, “to explore the worlds of creativity and human inquiry — and then decide which career path [to pursue].”
Topline:
'Sinners' producer Sev Ohanian is the first Armenian immigrant to the U.S. to be nominated for best picture.
The context: Ohanian produced Sinners, along with writer/director/producer Ryan Coogler and Coogler’s wife and fellow producer Zinzi Coogler.
The 2025 film made history in more way than one with its 16 total Oscar nominations, breaking the previous record of 14 set by All About Eve and later matched by Titanic and La La Land. It also marked the first time that an Armenian American immigrant was nominated for Best Picture.
Ohanian was born to Armenian parents in Germany, immigrated to Glendale with his family when he was a baby. Hank Moonjean (Dangerous Liaisons) was the first Armenian American to be nominated for best picture in 1989.
Read on ... for more from Ohanian about the making of Sinners.
The vampire epic Sinners made history in more ways than one this year with its Oscar nominations.
The film’s 16 total nominations broke the previous record of 14 set by All About Eve and later matched by Titanic and La La Land. It also marked the first time that an Armenian American immigrant — Sev Ohanian — was nominated for best picture.
Ohanian produced Sinners, along with writer/director/producer Ryan Coogler and producer Zinzi Coogler.
LAist News host Julia Paskin spoke with Ohanian about Sinners and how making funny YouTube videos about his Armenian parents helped kick off a creative partnership with his fellow USC film school classmate Ryan Coogler.
Below are highlights from the conversation and an extended version of the interview is available here.
Ohanian says he describes Sinners as like “the final exam of filmmaking,” with some more common challenges and others that were more unique.
That included casting: “Ryan knew from the very beginning [that] he wanted to find almost like a young unknown talent who would be great at acting, great at singing, could play guitar, [...] someone who had a youthful face, but a voice that was far beyond his years, which, how do we even find that? Is that something that people put on their resumes?”
With the help of casting director Francine Maisler (also nominated for an Oscar in the Academy’s first year bestowing a casting award), they found newcomer Miles Caton.
Then there were challenges unique to shooting in the swamps of Louisiana. Ohanian says there were “I think 6,042 mosquitoes at any given day. There was that one time an alligator literally showed up on set. Thankfully, it was all taken care of. Everyone was safe.”
Growing up, Ohanian says he loved the idea of making a career in filmmaking but was daunted.
“I had this idea that to be a filmmaker, you’ve gotta have connections and resources and knowledge, things that will be passed down. But as an Armenian American immigrant,” Ohanian says, “those are not things that were part of my community.”
He put the idea of filmmaking as a career to the side, but after making some YouTube videos about his Armenian parents for fun, “they blew up. Armenians all around the world were sharing them. They were going viral. And I ended up writing a movie called My Big Fat Armenian Family,” inspired by My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
He screened the movie at Glendale High School, got the word out to the Armenian American community, and people showed up and paid to see it.
"That experience, beyond the success of it on the financial level,” Ohanian says, “the fact that my community responded to something that I thought of, that I shot with my friends, it kind of made me realize that those things that I thought were necessary — connections and resources and knowledge — I had those this whole time in my community. That's what got me into USC where I started doing it for real.”
Topline:
Thousands of students from schools across Los Angeles walked out Wednesday in peaceful protest of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The Los Angeles Unified School District estimated 4,400 students from about two dozen schools participated.
Hear it from a student: “The reason I came out is 'cause we're so young and I feel like people always think that like young people don't have a voice and in reality we have one of the strongest voices,” said Jazlyn Garcia, a senior at Alliance Gertz-Ressler High School. “I want people to go out and vote for midterms, pre-register to vote.”
Why now: Students say the Trump administration's immigration raids threaten their families, communities and education. Alexis, a senior at Brío College Prep, said administrators locked down his campus after agents detained a nearby fruit vendor. “He was a part of our community,” Alexis said. “He would always be out there selling fruits to us after school.”
What's next: San Fernando Valley students at more than 40 schools plan to walk out Friday. “Los Angeles Unified supports the rights of our students to advocate for causes important to them,” a district spokesperson wrote in a statement to LAist. “However, we are concerned for student safety at off-campus demonstrations as schools are the safest place for students.” The district encouraged students to exercise their rights in on-campus discussions and demonstrations.
Thousands of students from schools across Los Angeles walked out Wednesday in peaceful protest of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
The Los Angeles Unified School District estimated 4,400 students from about two dozen schools participated.
“ I think it's really empowering that we aren't being discouraged to [protest], but it's also really discouraging to have to live through this,” said Roybal Learning Center senior Melisa.
“The reason I came out is 'cause we're so young and I feel like people always think that like young people don't have a voice and in reality we have one of the strongest voices,” said Jazlyn Garcia, a senior at Alliance Gertz-Ressler High School. “I want people to go out and vote for midterms, pre-register to vote.”
Leonna, a senior at Downtown Magnets High School and daughter of immigrants from Cambodia, said she was thinking of her neighbors. “We need to protect the people that make sure that the economy is running and make sure that our lives are the way that they are every day.”
Students said the Trump administration's immigration raids threaten their families, communities and education.
Alexis, a senior at Brío College Prep, said administrators locked down his campus after agents detained a nearby fruit vendor. “He was a part of our community,” Alexis said. “He would always be out there selling fruits to us after school.”
San Fernando Valley students at more than 40 schools plan to walk out Friday.
“Los Angeles Unified supports the rights of our students to advocate for causes important to them,” a district spokesperson wrote in a statement to LAist. “However, we are concerned for student safety at off-campus demonstrations as schools are the safest place for students.”
The district encouraged students to exercise their rights in on-campus discussions and demonstrations.
