12 months of record ocean heat has scientists puzzled and concerned

I always think it's interesting when I read these stories. No matter how bad it gets. No matter how many red flags are raised no one is going to do a single thing. Our governments are completely failing us by doing nothing useful.

I'd guess it's largely just a consequence of the Tragedy of the Commons. My favorite example demonstrating the effect I read in Meditations on Moloch:
The Fish Farming Story
As a thought experiment, let’s consider aquaculture (fish farming) in a lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month. For a while, all is well.
But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake. Let’s say each fish farm produces enough pollution to lower productivity in the lake by $1/month.
A thousand fish farms produce enough waste to lower productivity by $1000/month, meaning none of the fish farms are making any money. Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system that removes waste products. It costs $300/month to operate. All fish farms voluntarily install it, the pollution ends, and the fish farms are now making a profit of $700/month – still a respectable sum.
But one farmer (let’s call him Steve) gets tired of spending the money to operate his filter. Now one fish farm worth of waste is polluting the lake, lowering productivity by $1. Steve earns $999 profit, and everyone else earns $699 profit.
Everyone else sees Steve is much more profitable than they are, because he’s not spending the maintenance costs on his filter. They disconnect their filters too.
Once four hundred people disconnect their filters, Steve is earning $600/month – less than he would be if he and everyone else had kept their filters on! And the poor virtuous filter users are only making $300. Steve goes around to everyone, saying “Wait! We all need to make a voluntary pact to use filters! Otherwise, everyone’s productivity goes down.”
Everyone agrees with him, and they all sign the Filter Pact, except one person who is sort of a jerk. Let’s call him Mike. Now everyone is back using filters again, except Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everyone else earns $699/month. Slowly, people start thinking they too should be getting big bucks like Mike, and disconnect their filter for $300 extra profit…
A self-interested person never has any incentive to use a filter. A self-interested person has some incentive to sign a pact to make everyone use a filter, but in many cases has a stronger incentive to wait for everyone else to sign such a pact but opt out himself. This can lead to an undesirable equilibrium in which no one will sign such a pact.
Until it's more profitable to do the right thing it's likely we'll continue doing nothing, if not outright exacerbating things, just so we can get ours before it's all gone.
- The example is pretty standard, but I feel obligated to caution people about the author (just because he's linked to here and some unassuming people might dive in).
  Scott Alexander falls loosely under the TESCREAL umbrella of ideologies. Even in this article, he ends up concluding the only way out is to build a superintelligent AI to govern us... which is like the least productive, if not counterproductive, approach to solving the problem. He's just another technoptimist shunting problems onto future technologies that may or may not exist.
  So, yeah, if anyone decides they want to read more of his stuff, make sure to go in informed / having read critiques of TESCREALism.
- Humans can be so disappointing sometimes.
Europe's governments are doing a pretty tight job, I feel personally. Actually a LOT of proper handling of issues. I'm surprised over the decades, honestly. I voted no to EU back then, but now I'd see it as an obvious yes, even if this or that cunt got rich in the process. It's still a sane fucking system, it's just under attack from organized trolls with nukes.
Part of the problem is that our atmosphere and oceans are shared across the planet. Stop fishing one spot? Another country will poach the fish. Stop buying oil/coal from one country and they just sell it to another.
I'm not trying to justify not doing anything. When it comes to our oceans and atmosphere we will need a global effort but localized efforts can still help and will teach us what is effective.
But, but, what about the shareholders? /s

"puzzled and concerned?" Like they're surprised about this thing called global warming they've already been talking about for the last 20+ years?

TL;DR

Abraham suspects the main cause of the trend is climate change, with some natural ocean processes that aren’t well understood playing a role, as well.

You miss understand.
It's like saying if we double the weight of our go-kart we will go twice as fast. But instead of going twice as fast they went 50 times as fast. Then every says "that's fucking weird why did it do that?"
- You mister understands.
Every climatologist and entomologist I personally know have been low key shitting themselves for the last eight years and telling everyone they know not to have kids.
Well, it might not be climate change. Plenty of volcanoes underwater and there has been an increase in newsworthy activity. (Needs someone who knows to confirm or deny actual increase in volcanic activity.)
The pot might be set to boil.

Everyone is puzzled. What on Earth could have caused this? The answer to the mystery keeps eluding scientists!

Oh the scientists know, but the billionaires are spending a lot of money to convince 40% of the population otherwise.
- You don't have to fool all of the people all of the time...

It's going to be an entire year of

"How many weather records did we break today? Two, three?"

"Five records broken today. It's been a rough day."

"Five?! That's got to be a record."

"They've only been tracking for decades, don't believe their lies. They just want to tax and control you. Volcanoes exist so it is impossible for carbon to even be bad. Its just a warm year, jeez people really forget the weather can have ups and downs. I wouldn't mind every winter being warm anyway"
-your local climate change denier
- Almost didn't see the quotation marks man

This reply brought to you by the Didn’t Have Kids Gang™️

I wish your parents had been part of that gang. Then I wouldn't have to read your inane comments.
- It’s just a joke, buddy.

Just wait until the ocean burps hydrogen sulfide again,

We'll get massive methane outgassing from Siberia before we hit that point, and once that happens we are just a few centuries away from being Venus.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“It’s not just an entire year of record-breaking ocean temperatures, but it’s the margin it’s breaking them by — it’s not even close to what the previous record was,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science.

The data used to measure these trends dates back more than 40 years and comes from networks of monitoring buoys and robotic devices designed to help meteorologists make weather forecasts.

Some of the largest sea surface temperature anomalies are in the Atlantic and off the Horn of Africa, where the hurricanes that rattle the East Coast of the United States often start.

What’s more, the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center says that there is a 62% chance of a La Niña — which is associated with active and damaging hurricane seasons — developing in late spring.

High sea surface temperatures can contribute to more intense coastal rainstorms, as well, Abraham said, by helping to build a more moist and hot atmosphere.

Warm waters caused some of the worst bleaching events ever observed in Florida and the Caribbean Sea, with stressed corals turning white and expelling the photosynthetic algae that lives in their tissue.

The original article contains 968 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I think there's a misunderstanding here with some people. Climate change is ~~one of the~~ a significant underlying cause, yes, but the observed temperature rise is too high to be from just climate change. The article isn't saying "damn if only there was some global phenomena scientists had identified decades ago", it's saying that global warming alone isn't enough to cause this -- and there must be other factors at play we're not understanding.

No, the article clearly says the main cause is climate change.
Abraham suspects the leading cause of the trend is climate change, with some natural ocean processes that aren’t well understood playing a role, as well.
It's not one of the causes it's the leading cause. This is to say that if global warming didn't exist, the sea temperature event would also not exist.
Your comment is wrong, and you should delete it.
- Human-caused climate change is likely playing a role, researchers said, but is probably not the only factor. Climate models predict a steady rise in sea surface temperatures, but not this quickly, and ocean surface temperatures also fluctuate and can be affected by natural climate variability, including patterns such as El Niño and La Niña.
  So scientists don’t yet know precisely why sea surface temperatures have climbed so high.
  The article is pretty damn clear that there's something else going on, and it isn't only climate change. Your own quote says "with some natural ocean processes that aren’t well understood playing a role, as well".
  My point is not that climate change isn't playing a big role or the main role here. My point is that there's something else that's also going on, and it's there's way too many comments saying "it's climate change lmao". The entire thesis of the article is that something beyond climate change is also raising temperatures.
  I'll edit my comment to make it clear that climate change is likely the major cause, but I'm not going to delete a comment that's trying to reinforce what the article is actually saying. As an engineer I consider it part of my job to make it clear what science news is actually saying. I'm no climate scientist, but I would prefer for people to actually listen to what the climate scientists are saying. And they're saying it isn't only global warming.

Human-caused climate change is likely playing a role, researchers said, but is probably not the only factor.

Whut? I stopped here. Because it is the only factor!

Typical media
Scientists: "IT'S GLOBAL WARMING!" Media: "Scientists are puzzled"
Fuck this world we've created for ourselves.
- yeah headline should have been "told ya so"
So you feel bad if republicans ignore science in regards to, let's say, Covid, but if the science doesn't fit your world view you feel okay to ignore it yourself?
A tad ~~hypocratic~~ hypocritical, no?
- Minor correction:
  It's hypocritical. Hippocratic is the oath that doctor's take to do no harm.

if i'm not burning alive by 50 i'm gonna be really disappointed by all these headlines

disappointed is an interesting choice of words. But I guess not having a roving hellscape is kind of boring.
You'll be overwhelmed by climate refugees and food riots long before your piggy pasty skin burns.
You lack imagination on exactly how fuckdamn bad its going to get. Hint: pretty fuckdamn bad and if you aren't rich it is going to hurt.
You think groceries are expensive NOW?! Wait till 30% of equatorial farmland is dead and unusuable. It's ALREADY happening.
And when Siberia starts to melt, viruses that make COVID look tame and that our immune record has no knowledge of because they've been dormant under ice since we were monkeys.
Shit is so bad and people like you are the reason why we never addressed it until it was too late.