I find it perplexing that some people can accept the 2-million-year recovery time for coral reefs, yet outraged due to Chernobyl's 24,110-year recovery [1]. If we had switched to nuclear we would be in much better shape.
Even if nuclear were built as fast as possible it can't replace fossil fuels fast enough to mitigate before major feedbacks kick in. We're left with significant decrease in energy use as the main thing that has to be done and that there's no will to do.
Nuclear would only have been the answer back in the 70s. We just cannot build enough of it fast enough while also convincing all the dumb (and less dumb) people that, no, a nuclear reactor has nothing to do with a nuclear bomb and CANNOT go critical and the damage from chernobyl wasn't even a nuclear explosion.
Meanwhile California adds about 5 gigawatts of solar power every year.
It's a classic case. The unimaginative always come up with solutions that don't work. "If only everyone would agree, we could have nuclear power plants" / "If only everyone would agree, we could have universal masking and vaccination" / "If only everyone would agree, we could have better public transit". Well, face it, everyone isn't going to agree.
That's why solutions like EVs and wind+solar win: their success is not conditioned on an impossible fact. Instead, wins can be incremental and progressive. You can put one EV on the road, and then two, and then more. You can put a few windmills in one place and more in another. It doesn't require you to convince everyone.
There aren't many cultural guardrails on consumption. We're not supposed to practice gluttony, but what does that mean in the modern world?
We can all agree that we shouldn't buy a private jet to fly between our yachts.
But what about that flight from NYC to vacation in Brazil? Is having lots of children gluttony? What about buying stuff online? Living in the suburbs? Driving kids to a better school for a better education? Driving kids to a special music school to develop their talents? Driving to save time vs public transit? Eating meat? That cross-country RV trip? Air conditioning in your house? What about an international flight to a climate conference? Building a big factory to restart American industry? A giant hospital for treating people who made poor health choices? Helicopters to rescue people from accidents during outdoor adventures? Is racking up billions of dollars in assets gluttony by itself, or only when you spend it in a gluttonous way?
Until today I never would have guessed it was possible for ocean water temperatures to get that high anywhere. The daytime high air temperature in Key Largo right now is only ~90.
When I read the headline I figured that it was the temp right at the surface (which would be bad enough), but it's at 5 ft deep:
> A buoy in the Florida Bay hit 101.1 degrees Fahrenheit at a depth of 5 feet Monday
That's really disturbing. It's one of those things where when you think about it you realize that it's probably more significant than anything else in the news right now and yet most people won't pay much (if any) attention to it and will continue on with their "happy motoring".
This is one of the potential paths (look up BECCS/bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration). Basically, grow something that grows very quickly (I think switchgrass is usually discussed), burn it for energy, and put something to capture carbon from the flue gas in the exhaust pipe, then sequester it.
But it has tradeoffs. It costs money, and compared to eg direct air capture, it uses land that would’ve otherwise gone to growing food or something else, so a not-insignificant opportunity cost.
And we’re not even doing carbon capture on coal plant flue gas, because there’s just no incentive.
If we rolled out serious carbon taxes, this would become more feasible in addition to putting capture on existing plants.
If you’re interested, I highly recommend the AirMiners course, it gives a good overview/survey of the literature. The tldr is that we’re going to need a cocktail of all sorts of these technologies to hit anywhere near our targets, in addition to getting to net zero. We need to be pushing for a carbon tax politically, hard, to make this economically viable to do at scale. People need to become single-issue voters on this, and let politicians know that they are.
This took place over ~800,000 years, and a lot of this is theory, but the Azolla event is an interesting parallel. Basically, you had a fast growing fern that was growing in an arctic basin. When they died, they sank to the bottom where conditions were anoxic, so they didn’t decompose and release carbon back into the atmosphere. Azolla was INSANELY good at sucking up CO2 (to the point that over those ~1 million years it might have reduced the CO2 in the atmosphere enough to end the last hothouse period).
I think the issue is that the scale of the problem is so big. This was close to the best case scenario for this kind of sequestration and it still operated on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years. It’s definitely something worth looking into (and I’m pretty sure people are, haven’t kept as up to speed as I’d like though), but we can’t expect it to save us on its own.
I don‘t like hyperbole and excuse my language but I firmly believe that we are utterly fucked.
The high amount of wildfires in the Mediterranean right now and other things happening this month are just the beginning.
Some very bad things will happen very soon and some very comfortable ignorant people will be in a world of pain.
Good luck to everyone, I sincerely mean it. I don’t think scientists have been successful in explaining what kind of painful times we are about to face.
It's almost like there's a... mass campaign against science and facts! Perhaps spearheaded by the very corporations that benefit from oil and gas extraction! And orchestrated by politicians who are given vast amounts of money from these companies to tell their party members not to worry, that those who believe in all this are damn dirty liars and to continue to spend spend spend!
What's happened that you expect the general population to care about? It's hotter, a couple more storms or fires but not too many more.... You call it a catastrophe but the effect on the average persons like in this country is little to nothing.
Weren't we told over and over again that cooler-than-normal years don't disprove climate change? Wouldn't that logic also apply here, that hotter-than-normal years don't individually demonstrate anything?
Sure, climate change is happening and it's making the hot years hotter, but pointing at this year as "the disastrous consequences of climate change" feels like trying to have your cake and eat it too.
The unfortunate truth is that a wide-reaching and long-lasting catastrophe is probably the only thing that will activate enough people's collectivist instinct to demand change. Sriracha shortages won't wake people up, but widespread monthslong food shortages will. Power outages for a few weeks in a few counties in Florida, USA won't wake people up. A hurricane that causes monthslong power outages for 50 million people in the southeast USA will.
The young ones obviously have a much stronger sense of this collectivism, but even then, they are stuck in the coerced-work-to-survive loop that isn't easily escapable without major system failures.
The general population reacts in a few prescribed pathways. People's opinions are almost entirely shaped by the media they consume, and people with power over that media use that to their gain.
Right now, a majority faction of the people with power stand to benefit from starting a climate catastrophe[1], so we're getting a climate catastrophe.
Maybe it's really head in sand sort of thinking, "If I ignore it, hopefully it'll go away and I'll be fine.". I think if people really come into grips with it, they'd be living in despair fighting a frustrating battle (either against the physics, or against the governments/corporations who are moving too slowly, or against the other humans who don't really seem to give a crap). Then there's a segment who are thinking "Well, we're fucked, might as well enjoy our short lives.", which I'll admit I'm a part of (cast the first stone, why don't you).
I also have a growing anxiety of how bad it'll be in 5-10 years (refugee crises, humans/countries becoming more selfish and isolationist, so the rise of tribalism (and great, I don't look like a native of where I live), countries growing desperate for food/water resorting to use their military, leading to resource wars).
> A buoy in the Florida Bay hit 101.1 degrees Fahrenheit at a depth of 5 feet Monday
I have a feeling that most people have no idea what it means - they don't have the science background to make any sense of it. 101.1 degrees at the surface would be bad enough, but this is 5 feet down. That seems pretty catastrophic.
We are reacting. I'm not having kids. That's my reaction. I wouldn't want to be born into a crumbling civilization so I won't put someone else in that situation.
Beyond that I'm living my life to the best of my ability, trying to make the most of my time here.
Can't really do much else, just grabbing some popcorn and watching it burn I guess.
I'm trying to understand how climate change can cause a heat wave in the ocean. Not saying Im skeptical curious, but I just want an explanation.
Temperature always tries to diffuse, increasing entropy in the process. So if there is an especially hot body of water due to climate change it means that water had to be in contact with air of higher temperature. And the water is currently hitting temps above the air temperature for the area. Key largo for example has highs in the 88-90 range this week. Heat index is much hotter because of the humidity, but that isn't relevant for heat transfer into the ocean from the air.
I get water is warmer on average because of global warming. So I get any hot spots will be hotter on average in a warmer world. I just don't get how water is ending up hotter then the air.
Is there some geothermal source we haven't identified?
Edit: So a number of responses have brought up solar heating, often in very dismissive ways. I'm certainly aware of solar heating of water, but the solar heating is the part of the equation that isn't changing. So yes, solar heating can make water hotter then the air, but I wouldn't expect the offset to be changed with or without global warming. Meaning that the delta between the normal ocean temp and this anomaly shouldn't be larger then the delta between normal air temp and the current air temp.
What I should have made more clear in my comment was that I didn't understand how a heat surge above air temperatures could be attributed to a atmospheric heat source such as GHGs.
With the current state of things, approximately half of the world's population actively fights or pushes back on the simple idea that this is even occurring, much less accepting it as reality, and definitely much less taking action to change behavior.
I try not to succumb to doomerism, but recent climate news has just gone from bad, to worse, to grim, to 'ah well, glad I didn't have kids and I'm dead in the 2060's'.
The IPCC has traditionally been conservative, but all of their low rcp outcomes depend upon direct carbon capture, a technology we haven't really figured out yet, deployed to a wider extent than we've done with anything.
I'm not saying DAC research isn't promising, but a lot of folks are just shrugging their shoulders and assuming that everything is going to turn out fine. It's not. At this rate, it basically boils down to dealing with global warming or dealing with the effects of stratospheric sulfide injection. Neither are going to be pretty and honestly either could have effects so dire it ends human civilization as we know and love it today.
Seems so counterintuitive when you read about these massively hot sea surface temperatures. I think the long term rise in sea level temperatures as a trend is more worrying than any one season, as the overall potential for a super-normal event is apparently rising.
Hurricanes don’t matter. Houses built in hurricane zones these days are built to strict code, every new construction is concrete blocks and impact windows, hurricane resistant roofs and doors. Some flooding occurs, but water dries up eventually and things go back to normal. They don’t have those little thin wall wood houses like they do up north.
I am not an expert. I'm just trying to contextualize the poor journalism in this article.
I don't know how the same article can say, 'Scientists are just really scrambling to keep what we have alive. It’s pretty crazy that at this point the best solution we have is to take as much coral out of the ocean as we can', 'while a lot of the coral was in OK shape, up to 10% of it was dying at the lab' and 'This is akin to all of the trees in the rainforest dying' in the same article without addressing the obvious discord of these statements with some objectivism, nor how much of this is about losing diversity for species that are not resistant to warming ocean temperatures (a very well known phenomenon) and how much of this is losing species that aren't resilient or are otherwise rare to start with (the article specifically states, "It includes corals like Staghorn and Elkhorn that are “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act because there are just a few hundred genetically unique individuals left").
We know it's bad, and it's a problem people are passionate about, and it's related to higher global average temperatures, but we have scientific models and don't need to rely on personal verbiage or sensationalism to understand the impact. How does this vary from existing models? Was this unexpectedly early? What is the implication for it happening earlier in the years compared to other years in terms of annual averages?
Phrases like, "depth refugees" and "little hope spots" do not help us all understand what's actually happening or the degree of the problem compared to predictions.
I witnessed the reefs in the Great Barrier reef go through bleaching over the last few decades, and it was horrific to behold personally. This article is making me feel dumber.
The results of the Australian bleaching were unintuitive, because the reefs actually ended up growing back to their highest levels after the events, though much like secondary succession in a forest it ends up favoring fast growing species and that has implications:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-04/great-barrier-reef-re...
The rapid growth in coral cover appears to have come at the expense of the diversity of coral on the reef, with most of the increases accounted for by fast-growing branching coral called Acropora.
Those corals grow quickly after disturbances but are very easily destroyed by storms, heatwaves and crown-of-thorns starfish. By increasing the dominance of those corals, the reef can become more vulnerable.
This research helped me contextualize some of this continually sensationalist and frankly utterly shit quality journalism in the CNN article.
Here's the most relevant parts of the nature article. Though the overall article is worth reading, this might be the most helpful part for those who don't want to read the whole thing:
In concordance with the global predictions24,25,26, in the last decade, coral bleaching has increased in frequency and intensity (Fig. 3). Yet, in the last decade, the onset of coral bleaching has occurred at significantly higher SSTs (~0.5 °C) than in the previous decade (Fig. 4). At the thousands of sites surveyed, the mean SST recorded during coral bleaching in the first decade of the dataset, from 1998 to 2006, was 28.1 °C, whereas the mean SST recorded during coral bleaching in the second decade, from 2007 to 2017, was 28.7 °C. This change in coral-bleaching temperature is significantly different (Likelihood ratio test, Pr(>χ2) = 0.001) between decades (Fig. 4). The increase in over half a degree celsius in coral-bleaching temperature suggests that past bleaching events may have culled the thermally susceptible individuals, resulting in a recent adjustment of the remaining coral populations to higher thresholds of bleaching temperatures26,27,28 (Supplementary Figure 19). Coral communities also may have acclimatized to increasing SSTs, highlighting the need for further research to understand the context dependencies of this trend towards a greater temperature threshold.
Our model showed that rates of change in SST are strong predictors of coral bleaching with faster rates of change correlating with higher levels of bleaching (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Figure 20). Global models predict a mean increase in SST of 0.027 °C per year from 1990 to 209029, which is almost double the rate (0.015 °C per year) of the previous 30 years. As SSTs continue to increase more rapidly, more localities are likely to experience coral bleaching. We show that coral bleaching is predictable, at large scales, by the intensity and the variance in frequency of extreme, high-SST events. We demonstrated that equatorial areas and areas with greater exposure to short-term SST fluctuations may be more resilient to high temperature events, and therefore may be important targets for conservation given their increased likelihood of persisting into the future30. Coral bleaching has had unprecedented negative effects on coral populations worldwide, and immediate action globally to reduce carbon emissions is necessary to avoid further declines of coral reefs.
I'm not in denial of the science, but when people write about the science as a personal tragedy and don't include any of the relevant information to contextualize what they are saying, they lose all credibility with me.
CNN isn’t my preferred news source. Internal links just go to more CNN articles. It sounds bad. Can someone weigh in on the implications? How abnormal is this? Is this the first time it’s happened?
"Earth has experienced cold periods (informally referred to as “ice ages,” or "glacials") and warm periods (“interglacials”) on roughly 100,000-year cycles for at least the last 1 million years. The last of these ice age glaciations peaked* around 20,000 years ago."
"The causes of ice ages are not fully understood for either the large-scale ice age periods or the smaller ebb and flow of glacial–interglacial periods within an ice age."
[+] [-] Elyra|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
[+] [-] throwaway72762|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atleastoptimal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrguyorama|2 years ago|reply
Meanwhile California adds about 5 gigawatts of solar power every year.
[+] [-] renewiltord|2 years ago|reply
That's why solutions like EVs and wind+solar win: their success is not conditioned on an impossible fact. Instead, wins can be incremental and progressive. You can put one EV on the road, and then two, and then more. You can put a few windmills in one place and more in another. It doesn't require you to convince everyone.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] HDThoreaun|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmod600|2 years ago|reply
We can all agree that we shouldn't buy a private jet to fly between our yachts.
But what about that flight from NYC to vacation in Brazil? Is having lots of children gluttony? What about buying stuff online? Living in the suburbs? Driving kids to a better school for a better education? Driving kids to a special music school to develop their talents? Driving to save time vs public transit? Eating meat? That cross-country RV trip? Air conditioning in your house? What about an international flight to a climate conference? Building a big factory to restart American industry? A giant hospital for treating people who made poor health choices? Helicopters to rescue people from accidents during outdoor adventures? Is racking up billions of dollars in assets gluttony by itself, or only when you spend it in a gluttonous way?
[+] [-] usefulcat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|2 years ago|reply
> A buoy in the Florida Bay hit 101.1 degrees Fahrenheit at a depth of 5 feet Monday
That's really disturbing. It's one of those things where when you think about it you realize that it's probably more significant than anything else in the news right now and yet most people won't pay much (if any) attention to it and will continue on with their "happy motoring".
We're fucked.
[+] [-] Scalene2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericd|2 years ago|reply
But it has tradeoffs. It costs money, and compared to eg direct air capture, it uses land that would’ve otherwise gone to growing food or something else, so a not-insignificant opportunity cost.
And we’re not even doing carbon capture on coal plant flue gas, because there’s just no incentive.
If we rolled out serious carbon taxes, this would become more feasible in addition to putting capture on existing plants.
If you’re interested, I highly recommend the AirMiners course, it gives a good overview/survey of the literature. The tldr is that we’re going to need a cocktail of all sorts of these technologies to hit anywhere near our targets, in addition to getting to net zero. We need to be pushing for a carbon tax politically, hard, to make this economically viable to do at scale. People need to become single-issue voters on this, and let politicians know that they are.
Good primer on carbon tax with dividend and border adjustment: https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/
[+] [-] YellOh|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sink#Artificial_carbon_...
[+] [-] water-data-dude|2 years ago|reply
I think the issue is that the scale of the problem is so big. This was close to the best case scenario for this kind of sequestration and it still operated on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years. It’s definitely something worth looking into (and I’m pretty sure people are, haven’t kept as up to speed as I’d like though), but we can’t expect it to save us on its own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event
[+] [-] morkalork|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sillywalk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neuronic|2 years ago|reply
The high amount of wildfires in the Mediterranean right now and other things happening this month are just the beginning.
Some very bad things will happen very soon and some very comfortable ignorant people will be in a world of pain.
Good luck to everyone, I sincerely mean it. I don’t think scientists have been successful in explaining what kind of painful times we are about to face.
[+] [-] toss1|2 years ago|reply
Wait until a reasonably-formed tropical storm hits that water and watch it explode into a massive hurricane...
And it is not even August yet. Just hope the wind shear keeps up and prevents organized systems from forming
[+] [-] jpmattia|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinator|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tick_tock_tick|2 years ago|reply
What's happened that you expect the general population to care about? It's hotter, a couple more storms or fires but not too many more.... You call it a catastrophe but the effect on the average persons like in this country is little to nothing.
[+] [-] Zetice|2 years ago|reply
Sure, climate change is happening and it's making the hot years hotter, but pointing at this year as "the disastrous consequences of climate change" feels like trying to have your cake and eat it too.
[+] [-] dqv|2 years ago|reply
Maybe. I would say it's more dismay.
The unfortunate truth is that a wide-reaching and long-lasting catastrophe is probably the only thing that will activate enough people's collectivist instinct to demand change. Sriracha shortages won't wake people up, but widespread monthslong food shortages will. Power outages for a few weeks in a few counties in Florida, USA won't wake people up. A hurricane that causes monthslong power outages for 50 million people in the southeast USA will.
The young ones obviously have a much stronger sense of this collectivism, but even then, they are stuck in the coerced-work-to-survive loop that isn't easily escapable without major system failures.
[+] [-] gmerc|2 years ago|reply
electric cars are still cars recycling means you don’t change consumption at all carbon capture means you continue to emit.
Humans don’t seem capable of change
[+] [-] fuddle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vkou|2 years ago|reply
Right now, a majority faction of the people with power stand to benefit from starting a climate catastrophe[1], so we're getting a climate catastrophe.
[1] Or stand to lose from trying to stop one.
[+] [-] netsharc|2 years ago|reply
I also have a growing anxiety of how bad it'll be in 5-10 years (refugee crises, humans/countries becoming more selfish and isolationist, so the rise of tribalism (and great, I don't look like a native of where I live), countries growing desperate for food/water resorting to use their military, leading to resource wars).
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|2 years ago|reply
I have a feeling that most people have no idea what it means - they don't have the science background to make any sense of it. 101.1 degrees at the surface would be bad enough, but this is 5 feet down. That seems pretty catastrophic.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] soulofmischief|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] croes|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfn42|2 years ago|reply
We are reacting. I'm not having kids. That's my reaction. I wouldn't want to be born into a crumbling civilization so I won't put someone else in that situation.
Beyond that I'm living my life to the best of my ability, trying to make the most of my time here.
Can't really do much else, just grabbing some popcorn and watching it burn I guess.
[+] [-] HardlyCurious|2 years ago|reply
Temperature always tries to diffuse, increasing entropy in the process. So if there is an especially hot body of water due to climate change it means that water had to be in contact with air of higher temperature. And the water is currently hitting temps above the air temperature for the area. Key largo for example has highs in the 88-90 range this week. Heat index is much hotter because of the humidity, but that isn't relevant for heat transfer into the ocean from the air.
I get water is warmer on average because of global warming. So I get any hot spots will be hotter on average in a warmer world. I just don't get how water is ending up hotter then the air.
Is there some geothermal source we haven't identified?
Edit: So a number of responses have brought up solar heating, often in very dismissive ways. I'm certainly aware of solar heating of water, but the solar heating is the part of the equation that isn't changing. So yes, solar heating can make water hotter then the air, but I wouldn't expect the offset to be changed with or without global warming. Meaning that the delta between the normal ocean temp and this anomaly shouldn't be larger then the delta between normal air temp and the current air temp.
What I should have made more clear in my comment was that I didn't understand how a heat surge above air temperatures could be attributed to a atmospheric heat source such as GHGs.
[+] [-] jredwards|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afarrell|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] berkle4455|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wing-_-nuts|2 years ago|reply
The IPCC has traditionally been conservative, but all of their low rcp outcomes depend upon direct carbon capture, a technology we haven't really figured out yet, deployed to a wider extent than we've done with anything.
I'm not saying DAC research isn't promising, but a lot of folks are just shrugging their shoulders and assuming that everything is going to turn out fine. It's not. At this rate, it basically boils down to dealing with global warming or dealing with the effects of stratospheric sulfide injection. Neither are going to be pretty and honestly either could have effects so dire it ends human civilization as we know and love it today.
[+] [-] heredoc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|2 years ago|reply
Earlier conversation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36855773
[+] [-] sys_64738|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] happytiger|2 years ago|reply
https://www.almanac.com/content/hurricane-forecast
https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/2023-atlantic-hurricane-se...
Seems so counterintuitive when you read about these massively hot sea surface temperatures. I think the long term rise in sea level temperatures as a trend is more worrying than any one season, as the overall potential for a super-normal event is apparently rising.
[+] [-] xwdv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] happytiger|2 years ago|reply
I don't know how the same article can say, 'Scientists are just really scrambling to keep what we have alive. It’s pretty crazy that at this point the best solution we have is to take as much coral out of the ocean as we can', 'while a lot of the coral was in OK shape, up to 10% of it was dying at the lab' and 'This is akin to all of the trees in the rainforest dying' in the same article without addressing the obvious discord of these statements with some objectivism, nor how much of this is about losing diversity for species that are not resistant to warming ocean temperatures (a very well known phenomenon) and how much of this is losing species that aren't resilient or are otherwise rare to start with (the article specifically states, "It includes corals like Staghorn and Elkhorn that are “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act because there are just a few hundred genetically unique individuals left").
We know it's bad, and it's a problem people are passionate about, and it's related to higher global average temperatures, but we have scientific models and don't need to rely on personal verbiage or sensationalism to understand the impact. How does this vary from existing models? Was this unexpectedly early? What is the implication for it happening earlier in the years compared to other years in terms of annual averages?
Phrases like, "depth refugees" and "little hope spots" do not help us all understand what's actually happening or the degree of the problem compared to predictions.
I witnessed the reefs in the Great Barrier reef go through bleaching over the last few decades, and it was horrific to behold personally. This article is making me feel dumber.
The results of the Australian bleaching were unintuitive, because the reefs actually ended up growing back to their highest levels after the events, though much like secondary succession in a forest it ends up favoring fast growing species and that has implications: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-04/great-barrier-reef-re...
The rapid growth in coral cover appears to have come at the expense of the diversity of coral on the reef, with most of the increases accounted for by fast-growing branching coral called Acropora.
Those corals grow quickly after disturbances but are very easily destroyed by storms, heatwaves and crown-of-thorns starfish. By increasing the dominance of those corals, the reef can become more vulnerable.
I found this article very helpful: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09238-2/
This research helped me contextualize some of this continually sensationalist and frankly utterly shit quality journalism in the CNN article.
Here's the most relevant parts of the nature article. Though the overall article is worth reading, this might be the most helpful part for those who don't want to read the whole thing:
In concordance with the global predictions24,25,26, in the last decade, coral bleaching has increased in frequency and intensity (Fig. 3). Yet, in the last decade, the onset of coral bleaching has occurred at significantly higher SSTs (~0.5 °C) than in the previous decade (Fig. 4). At the thousands of sites surveyed, the mean SST recorded during coral bleaching in the first decade of the dataset, from 1998 to 2006, was 28.1 °C, whereas the mean SST recorded during coral bleaching in the second decade, from 2007 to 2017, was 28.7 °C. This change in coral-bleaching temperature is significantly different (Likelihood ratio test, Pr(>χ2) = 0.001) between decades (Fig. 4). The increase in over half a degree celsius in coral-bleaching temperature suggests that past bleaching events may have culled the thermally susceptible individuals, resulting in a recent adjustment of the remaining coral populations to higher thresholds of bleaching temperatures26,27,28 (Supplementary Figure 19). Coral communities also may have acclimatized to increasing SSTs, highlighting the need for further research to understand the context dependencies of this trend towards a greater temperature threshold.
Our model showed that rates of change in SST are strong predictors of coral bleaching with faster rates of change correlating with higher levels of bleaching (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Figure 20). Global models predict a mean increase in SST of 0.027 °C per year from 1990 to 209029, which is almost double the rate (0.015 °C per year) of the previous 30 years. As SSTs continue to increase more rapidly, more localities are likely to experience coral bleaching. We show that coral bleaching is predictable, at large scales, by the intensity and the variance in frequency of extreme, high-SST events. We demonstrated that equatorial areas and areas with greater exposure to short-term SST fluctuations may be more resilient to high temperature events, and therefore may be important targets for conservation given their increased likelihood of persisting into the future30. Coral bleaching has had unprecedented negative effects on coral populations worldwide, and immediate action globally to reduce carbon emissions is necessary to avoid further declines of coral reefs.
I'm not in denial of the science, but when people write about the science as a personal tragedy and don't include any of the relevant information to contextualize what they are saying, they lose all credibility with me.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] underseacables|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benatkin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwdv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doitLP|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crypot|2 years ago|reply
"The causes of ice ages are not fully understood for either the large-scale ice age periods or the smaller ebb and flow of glacial–interglacial periods within an ice age."
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...