ELEANOR HALL: And staying with climate change, another international group of scientists says it has new evidence that ocean currents around the world are being affected by global warming.

The scientists said it was not news to them that the East Australian Current was a hot spot but when they examined several other currents near Japan, Africa and North America, they found a worldwide trend of warming waters, as Felicity Ogilvie reports from Hobart.

FELICITY OGILVIE: The scientists have studied and compared five ocean currents that run along the east coasts of Africa, Japan, the USA, Brazil and Australia.

They’ve found that over the past century the water in the currents has warmed two to three times faster than the rest of the world’s oceans.

An Australian scientist who worked on the study is Wenju Cai from the CSIRO.

WENJU CAI: The significance is that we can now link to the changes of these currents to global warming because it is synchronised around the globe, not just an isolated part of the Tasman Sea.

FELICITY OGILVIE: The study is being published in the journal Nature Climate Change and another one of the authors is Michael McPhaden from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the USA.

MICHAEL […]