Florida ocean temps surge to 100F; mass coral bleaching event is found in reefs

https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/us/florida-ocean-heat-coral-bleaching-climate/index.html

by rntn • 3 years ago

200 204 3 years ago

xwdv3• 3 years ago

The reefs are gone. A couple more hot summers will finish off the stubborn survivors.

benatkin• 3 years ago

The article about the schools of fish washed up dead on the Texas coast due to heat said other animals would benefit. What about here?

jpmattia• 3 years ago

Am I the only one who is stunned that there appears to be a climate catastrophe happening with virtually no reaction from the general population?

croes• 3 years ago

Because back then we had hot summers too /s

twiddling3• 3 years ago

trot out some maps from 1934. or maybe relate MeeMaw's recollection of "that hot summer"

generalizations• 3 years ago

I guess people adapt quickly.

justinator• 3 years ago

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!

doitLP2• 3 years ago

It’s almost like…several major scientific and political institutions spent the last 3 years destroying what little trust they had left, campaigning under the banner of “trust the science!” /s

The information war rages on both sides. But the fact remains that too much doomerism without any clear way for an individual to make a difference and politicians carrying on like normal leads to apathy. Our movies and TV are already saturated with barren hellscapes. Why confront the actual reality when you feel powerless to stop it, and doing anything necessarily means austerity?

akira25012• 3 years ago

Or fatigue. You can't continually hype total doom and "near catastrophes" lacking any sort of solution, and in some cases explicitly denying that there even could be a solution, for a decade and expect people to keep showing up to care.

This recent version of climate doomerism lacks all practicality and provides no solutions other than total tyranny of the state over the individual, for your own good, of course. It appears to me that the movement has been fully captured by politicians who are no longer interested in actual science or engineering of solutions.

Personally, I checked out about a year ago. As I suspect the people pushing this message the hardest don't actually want to work with me to improve the future, they just want to control my purchasing decisions.

mdasen• 3 years ago

I'd expand on this to say that it's not just a campaign against science and facts. It's also a campaign that certain ways of living are a lifestyle or even essential. If something is essential, then even if it's killing the planet we can't do anything to change that.

For example, living in a suburban house with multiple trucks/SUVs and driving a lot is seen as part of a lifestyle that borders on essential. Suggesting that people can drive smaller, more efficient vehicles will receive such vitriol in so many parts of society. Suggesting that cars should pay for their road use will get people attacking you in online forums. Even the right-leaning Tax Foundation believes that drivers pay for about half of their road costs - and they don't account for things like pollution [1]. Drivers will say that their gas taxes, tolls, and registration fees fund the roads they use, but that really isn't the case. When we map out carbon emissions, cities do very well and suburbs often use 2-3x more than cities [2].

It's not just a campaign against science and facts. It's also a campaign that pushes a narrative that many of the things that pollute are what you should desire in life. You should want a big grass lawn. You should want a large vehicle that can fit 5-10x more than you normally carry on a given day.

I think it's also tough because many of the things we need in order to combat climate change will require an amount of change that can cause resistance. Taking space away from cars for bike or bus lanes means that if you made the choice to live in a car-dependent area, you can find your commute getting slightly worse. It's usually not as bad as drivers fear because more efficient transit options often divert a lot of people who would end up as traffic with the drivers, but it does make things slightly worse. Housing is the biggest investment in most households and two-thirds of Americans own their homes - higher in car-dependent areas. Telling such a large group of people that they made a slightly worse choice is hard. Even if their investment is secure, it might not be as positive as they had assumed.

Right now in Arizona, there are huge water issues in communities that haven't secured long-term water resources. People bought houses, invested their money, and they want the government to ensure their investment is prosperous - which means having access to affordable, abundant water. They don't want to be told that they shouldn't have built outside of the Scottsdale municipal boundaries and that there was a reason the land was cheap there. Likewise, suburban owners don't want to be told that their location isn't as sustainable and that in order to ensure life on the planet we'll need to wean them off of parts of their lifestyle (which will become more expensive compared to urban dwellers).

It's hard to change how people think about their world and their position in it. So many people think of cities as "that's now how I live." We've spent the better part of a century painting a picture of what prosperity means that is now running into the reality of climate change. It's not just the campaign against science. It's also about how we've shaped what people think of as good and desirable; what they see as their lifestyle and even what they see as essential. There are lots of suburban Democrats who believe in climate change, want the government to address it, but will balk at the idea of driving less, increasing housing density, or living in a slightly smaller home that doesn't require as much fuel. They'd rather talk about giving up straws while their cars put out way more micro plastics from their tires. They want to find the things that they can "sacrifice" without major lifestyle changes.

The campaign against science is important. I think the social perception of what defines prosperity and a good lifestyle is also important. It's been shaped by decades of policy and media and it can be hard to combat even when you're in a circle of people who believe in climate change.

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/

[2] https://coolclimate.org/maps

morkalork4• 3 years ago

Don't worry, those just stop oil protesters blocking roads for the average citizen will save us!

fuddle• 3 years ago

Unfortunately news sources such as Fox News don't mention climate change when reporting on this. A lot of people aren't even aware of the impending climate catastrophe. https://www.foxnews.com/us/florida-water-topped-100-degrees-...

frabjoused• 3 years ago

Read the comment section of that article, it is pretty grim.

melling• 3 years ago

Fox frequently mentions Climate Change. They simply have a different point of view. People trying to address the issue are “alarmists “

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6313629464112

https://www.foxnews.com/science/climate-alarmism-robbing-stu...

ndsipa_pomu7• 3 years ago

news sources such as Fox News

Well, that'll be your problem right there

vkou3• 3 years ago

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.

[1] Or stand to lose from trying to stop one.

berkle4455• 3 years ago

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.

afarrell• 3 years ago

What reaction would you expect to see?

ndsipa_pomu7• 3 years ago

I'd like to see people pushing back against motor-normativity and voting out any politician that makes money from oil companies. Also, boycotting any sports event that has a major oil company sponsor would be an easy thing for people to do.

I think it's going to keep carrying on like this for a while until people start rioting and destroying the capitalist institutions that have been hiding and dismissing our problems for decades.

enraged_camel• 3 years ago

Mass panic. IMHO it is the only rational reaction to various climate systems (and associated biosphere ecosystems) starting to break down.

HardlyCurious2• 3 years ago

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.

kerowak• 3 years ago

sun

empath-nirvana• 3 years ago

This particular buoy is in shallow water in waters with seagrass and run off from the land.

In general though, the ocean is _vast_ and stores a lot of heat, and changes temperature slower than the air does. When it's cold outside, the ocean radiates heat to warm the air and vice versa.

Jtsummers• 3 years ago

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.

A lot of light passes through the atmosphere and that energy is absorbed and reflected by the solid and liquid surfaces below the atmosphere (the amount absorbed or reflected depending on albedo and other properties of the material). The energy heating the ground or the ocean does not all come from the atmosphere itself (though certainly some does).

throwaway727622• 3 years ago

If you're sincerely interested the IPCC reports and their summaries describe the basic science and the projections and are surprisingly readable if you're willing to read scientific writing.

Solvency• 3 years ago

Big glowing sun ball make hot. Ocean get shallow close to land. Shallow water get hot.

soulofmischief2• 3 years ago

Conduction is just one type of heat transfer. There is also heat from radiation from sources such as the Sun.

Furthermore, an increased level of dissolved CO2 in the water is increasing its susceptibility to warming.

And then you have greenhouse gases, which are good at trapping in heat once it's entered the atmosphere. The ocean has the capacity to absorb this heat while it's trapped.

code_duck• 3 years ago

The same reason people have been falling down in Arizona and suffering burns from the ground, but the air doesn’t burn them.

soulofmischief2• 3 years ago

Everyone's too busy keeping up with rent and inflation.

tick_tock_tick• 3 years ago

climate catastrophe

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.

esalman3• 3 years ago

Average people are already losing flood insurance in Florida and fire insurance in California. Sooner or later they are going to feel the pinch.

netsharc2• 3 years ago

February 2020: "So it's a fast spreading virus affecting a lot of Chinese people, but the effect on this country is little to nothing...".

ndsipa_pomu7• 3 years ago

The big problems are going to be when unstable weather patterns destroy food harvests and we end up with huge famines and wars over food crops and liveable habitats. Currently the world's food production is very much just-in-time, so there's going to be hungry people. Civilisation is only ever three meals away from collapse.

UncleOxidant4• 3 years ago

The average person in this country just isn't able to connect the dots yet - but I think they're starting to. Average people in places like Phoenix where it's been over 110F for the last 3+ weeks are starting to make the connection. As well as average people in places heavily impacted by wildfire smoke over the last month or so. Average people in Florida who can't get homeowner's insurance (or have to pay $6K+/year for it) must be starting to notice something is amiss.

netsharc2• 3 years ago

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).

matthewdgreen6• 3 years ago

We need to rapidly increase spending on low-carbon infrastructure, remove permitting delays on building new power systems, and add carbon taxes. We also need to get serious about emergency solutions like solar radiation management, because it looks increasingly likely we'll need them to stave off total disaster.

There are still technical arrows in our quiver that could save us, but none of them matter if major political parties decide to prevent us from using them. So the real answer is: vote.

dqv• 3 years ago

stunned

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.

local_issues• 3 years ago

I'm a part of a group trying to reduce driving on 1 small section of a neighborhood street in favor of wider sidewalks and maybe bike parking, in a very liberal area.

You would think we're proposing a second Holocaust from the reaction. Insane. Accusations that we're trying to round everyone up so we can send them to Trump's camps, to wipe out everyone over 50, etc.

We're fucked. I don't pay attention to this stuff anymore, I've done what I can.

gmerc• 3 years ago

Fundamentally everything comes down to that people don’t want to change. Any solution pushed is a solution that does not require change.

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

fnimick7• 3 years ago

Humans on a large enough scale are basically toddlers, it seems. Nobody is willing to give up the slightest luxury today in order to have a better tomorrow. It's incredibly disappointing.

matthewdgreen6• 3 years ago

Human beings are making a conscious decision to fight change. See e.g., the two-year delay on offshore wind construction under the previous administration. There are still fossil-fuel adjacent groups fighting this: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/21/us/offshore-wind-delays-infla...

Zetice• 3 years ago

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.

UncleOxidant4• 3 years ago

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.

jredwards4• 3 years ago

When did you become stunned and how long has it lasted? Most people don't have the stamina to remain shocked for decades.

sfn423• 3 years ago

What are you doing?

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.

doitLP2• 3 years ago

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?

ndsipa_pomu7• 3 years ago

Is this any help?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/25/florida-ocea...

alistairSH• 3 years ago

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/07/25/florida-re...

More here. It wasn't just one buoy - almost all the measurements in Florida Bay were near or beyond records. Yes, it abnormal - this could be a world record for hottest ocean water (previous record was off Kuwait). And it's not just Florida - the Med, North Atlantic, and waters off Peru are all seeing record or near-record water temperatures as well.

wing-_-nuts5• 3 years ago

This, combined with the stalling AMOC current is bad news. expect sea surface temps to rise, the depths of warm water columns to deepen, and hurricanes that pass over these waters to explode in intensity.

TLDR: Anyone trying to insure a property within 100 miles of the south eastern coastline is probably going to have a bad time, much of florida is already in this situation today

twiddling3• 3 years ago

insurance companies are a good proxy for existential risks. The withdrawal of major ones from Florida is indicative.

WarOnPrivacy2• 3 years ago

Dr Jeff Masters blogs historical weather analysis. He's likely preparing a post. When done, it'll appear here: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/topic/eye-on-the-storm/

Meanwhile he posted this: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1683660816610893826.html

Elyra• 3 years ago

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

atleastoptimal• 3 years ago

In climate change policy, perfect is the enemy of good.

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

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.

_hypx2• 3 years ago

That's pure delusion. People will reject your solution just like they reject nuclear. Even more so, since millions of people can't afford them.

HDThoreaun• 3 years ago

People don't live in coral reefs, so they don't really care about them.

throwaway727622• 3 years ago

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.

bryanlarsen3• 3 years ago

We need to get generation to carbon neutral within ~10 years. Nuclear can't do it on that timeframe, and conservation can't reduce to 0.

OTOH, wind and solar can reduce emissions by 70% and save money over the long term while doing so. Wind + solar + short term storage can reduce emissions by 99% and save money over the long term while doing so.

Getting from 99% to 100% will be hard and will require likely either long term storage or carbon capture, which will be expensive. But don't let that get in the way of getting to 99%.

cameldrv• 3 years ago

It's perfectly possible, it would just take will. We'd need about 5000-10000 GW. Even if you take the very high cost of the newest U.S. reactor at 11.6 Billion for 1.12 GW, you get about 50-100 trillion. Gross World Product is about 80 trillion, so if you did it over 20 years, it's 3-6% of Gross World Product.

kzrdude• 3 years ago

We need to stop fighting about the choice of best technology and build more of all the good ones. Nuclear, solar, hydro, etc, use all we have.

mrguyorama9• 3 years ago

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.

wing-_-nuts5• 3 years ago

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.

ndsipa_pomu7• 3 years ago

It's obviously a good idea to pursue new technologies if they can make a big difference, but I'm not convinced that putting sulfides into the stratosphere is a good idea as we don't have a sound understanding of what the effects would be. History demonstrates that there's often unintended consequences of introducing novel animals/chemicals/humans into environments so we should have some caution.

The simplest solution is to stop digging for yet more fossil fuels to burn and to put our efforts into moving completely away from oil/coal/gas use. However, there's a lot of powerful money invested in continuing to make vast profits from fossil fuels and so there's going to be pushback from politicians that sit in their pockets.

ClumsyPilot4• 3 years ago

we don't have a sound understanding of what the effects would be

Inaction is also a choice, and a terrible one.

wing-_-nuts5• 3 years ago

I'm not convinced that putting sulfides into the stratosphere is a good idea as we don't have a sound understanding of what the effects would be.

Neither am I, but everything I've read seems to indicate that SSI is cheap enough that many nation states could comfortably do it. That all but guarantees it will be done when places like china or india start losing tens of thousands of people to heat waves (See 'The ministry for the future' for a fictionalized account). We as a species are short sighted. We'll go for the quick fix and hope we can deal with the consequences later. The bad thing is we have no idea what those consequences will be or how to address them. It's completely uncharted territory.

jeffbee• 3 years ago

I thought climate researchers have a fairly good understanding of the outcomes of high-altitude aerosols, since the reason sea level rise is trending slightly below the central estimate of IPCC 1990 is volcanic activity. See: negative forcing from aerosols https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WGI_AR5_FigB...

justinzollars• 3 years ago

3 Million years ago most of Florida was submerged by water. The ice has been melting for 20,000 years and the water has risen over 400 feet [1].

1. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/coastline-eastern-us-chang...

ClumsyPilot4• 3 years ago

all of their low rcp outcomes depend upon direct carbon capture, a technology we haven't really figured out yet,

I was flabbergasted when I discovered this, absolutely none of the media mentions this. You can read right wing, left wing, looney wing- unless you are one of the 0.1% of people that read the report, no-one knows this.

One you realise that the only 'hope' is a technology that will ,at best, just cost a colossal amount of money and needs to be deployed at the scale of the oil industry, the position changes.

SoftTalker4• 3 years ago

When the primary persuasive technique is fear and the proposed solution is "send us all your money" then it's natural to be skeptical.

WarOnPrivacy2• 3 years ago

'ah well, glad I didn't have kids and I'm dead in the 2060's'.

My kids can't afford to have kids so that'll be how my line escapes.

nancyhn4• 3 years ago

Here, have a white pill:

Last year, Two-thirds of Australia's Great Barrier Reef showed the largest amount of coral cover in 36 years. Corals have survived millions of years and are already bouncing back in other places as evidenced by the Great Barrier Reef, which we were all worried about not long ago.

api2• 3 years ago

True. To quote George Carlin: “The Earth will be fine. We’re fucked.”

The Earth has been much warmer than this in the past. It’s been much colder too. Life will adapt. The question is whether we will adapt, and more specifically whether our current civilization will adapt. I severely doubt that Homo sapiens would go extinct, but massive civilization collapse would kill billions.

Then there’s what civilization might do short of full collapse. A moderate limited duration refugee crisis and some inflation has led to a full scale resurgence of fascism in Europe. Imagine if we see hundreds of millions of refugees from equatorial regions pouring into countries with better climates while we have crop failures and coastal cities getting flooded. Can our political systems remain sane and rational through that or will we succumb to demagogue cult leaders with easy “solutions?”

The thing that’s likely to kill the most people from climate change is how people react to climate change. Remember that totalitarian schemes were a leading cause of death in the 20th century. Add up the death toll from Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot and scale to current population.

jghn2• 3 years ago

"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'."

I'm in my mid-40s and don't have kids. In the last 5-6 years I've gone from figuring it'll be ok-ish in my lifetime but will suck for the next generation, to legit wondering if life will be a complete hellscape by the time I'm a senior citizen. And more important, what if anything that means in terms of how I live the rest of my life. For instance do I live life to the fullest now? Or do I skimp and scrounge now to have some hope of surviving when things really go sideways.

I hope that it's just doomerism on my part, but the fact that someone like myself is already putting mental energy towards this does say something in my opinion

antisthenes2• 3 years ago

For instance do I live life to the fullest now? Or do I skimp and scrounge now to have some hope of surviving when things really go sideways.

As someone in the mid 30's who survived a bad accident with a TBI: it's never early enough to start living life to the fullest.

A lot of things you might want to do now and are able to do, you might not in your 60s for health reasons.

Do them now.

wing-_-nuts5• 3 years ago

And more important, what if anything that means in terms of how I live the rest of my life. For instance do I live life to the fullest now? Or do I skimp and scrounge now to have some hope of surviving when things really go sideways.

I'm facing the exact same question. I think I've mostly resigned myself to appreciating the world as it is today, while it's still recognizable. I want to see glacier national park while there are still glaciers. I want to see others before forests give way to savanna. I want to see the old world before things really destabilize.

Don't get me wrong, I've made choices to reduce my impact on the world, and I'll continue to vote for anyone who I think will seriously help on the issue, but I'm not going to live some 'hairshirt' existence of climate piety when my sacrifices amount to a fart in a hurricane compared to the actions of corporations and the ultrarich.

bamfly• 3 years ago

Move to New Zealand. It'll be kinda OK, the government's stable and democratic, and they aren't gonna be machine-gunning waves of climate refugees (or else getting overrun and seeing QOL plummet) like most other democratic countries will in the next few decades.

I reckon that's why there's been a trend of billionaires buying citizenship there. Guaranteed entry if they get citizenship, even if things get bad, and they're not autocratic so they probably won't seize all their stuff.

myth_drannon2• 3 years ago

It's just a media doomerism. Life in western/eastern societies improved every generation. I speak as someone who talked to a lot of old people in my family and is interested in genealogy. When you don't have kids, someone else will have 5 and that someone else will most likely be a religious fanatic. In couple of generations they will overwhelm our socities and then it will be the end/modern Dark Ages. What is happening in Israel right now is prime example of this demographic disbalance.

pengaru• 3 years ago

the fact that someone like myself is already putting mental energy towards this does say something in my opinion

Wouldn't it be expected that you'd have the mental energy to put towards such things, lacking the tried and true distraction of having puppies?

nancyhn4• 3 years ago

Look at how climate related deaths have dropped dramatically over the past century.

https://www.humanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/cha...

https://images.wsj.net/im-428434/?width=700&height=434

What are you worried about, exactly?

toss12• 3 years ago

You are right to worry; these things are insanely nonlinear, and we're already well into the meat of several feed-forward loops / tipping points (e.g., melting permafrost releasing gigatons of methane which is 22x as effective at blocking IR radiation vs CO2, melting of arctic icecap leaving open ocean absorbing far more heat vs white snow/ice, etc.).

Worse yet is the threat that few are mentioning: the breaking of the food web. This incredibly delicate web literally keeps us alive and is under threat not only from anthropogenic climate change but also from everything from pesticides, plastic & microplastic pollution, habitat destruction, slowing and impending collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, and 100 other scaled-up threats. We're already in the anthropocene era marked by the sixth mass extinction in the planet's history, and everything from fish to insects are nearing single-digit percentages of their pre-industrial populations.

Disaster can be averted, but only if we take serious action. Good luck with that.

yodsanklai• 3 years ago

to legit wondering if life will be a complete hellscape by the time I'm a senior citizen.

Climate change is one thing, but another is resource scarcity which will also hit (some of) us within our life time. We owe our lifestyle to fossil fuel, and we'll have to reduce it at the time we need it most.

madaxe_again2• 3 years ago

I don’t see complete collapse - but I do see the doom of billions. The security states that have been set up over the past decades, the increased hostility to migration, all of this is a prelude for what inevitably follows, when vast diaspora try to find a better life outside of their bankrupt, climate-change-ravaged countries.

It’s going to get ugly. Being anything but wealthy in a sufficiently wealthy country is going to be uncomfortable, to say the least.

There will be famine, fire, flood, pestilence, and all the rest - but unless we entirely lose our heads, which isn’t impossible but remains less than probable, humanity will go on, chastened and winnowed.

wing-_-nuts5• 3 years ago

Yeah, it would be very hard to entirely wipe out human civilization in any form, even in the worst of scenarios; but I expect that the world as we know it today will seem like a lost paradise compared to the one I will leave when I die.

mrguyorama9• 3 years ago

Start thinking about how FUCKED the tech industry will get when your average person can barely afford the basics, let alone the ballooned price of garbage goods that an advertising economy requires to keep up the current system.

wombat-man• 3 years ago

Well, people don't want to cut back right now. Or at least not enough of us. So we're just going to have to wait for things to get bad enough.

We'll either find a way to fix it, or not. But we're definitely not preventing the problem in a meaningful way.

apr2• 3 years ago

Recent? This scare mongering is perennial.

""" UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. """

https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

""" The following year that notable news magazine, Newsweek, April 28, 1975, under its Science section in the back, talks about the cooling world. There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may be bringing a drastic decline in food production throughout the world. """

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-2009-12-15/html/CRE...

appplication• 3 years ago

I’m going to have a hard time responding to this comment without breaking HN guidelines by being completely candid about how irresponsible, uninformed, and bad faith your comment seems to be.

But let me go ahead and try: one anxiety-riddled UN official and a random Newsweek article do not represent, or supersede, scientific consensus. Your points are not only irrelevant, it’s not even clear to me why you felt the need to bring up either of these links as if they carry any weight at all, or are corroborated meaningfully by any members of the scientific community.

If you care, Newsweek and Peter Gwynne, the author of your mentioned 1975 article, have both independently retracted and clarified their positions and recognize the nature and significance of modern climate change: https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-rewind-debunking-global-co...

tito• 3 years ago

We're on a quest to remove a billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide by 2030. Join us!

https://airminers.org/

mrguyorama9• 3 years ago

This problem is not solvable through capitalism without strong regulatory burdens placed on emitting carbon, a solution that oil companies actively "seek" because they know it will never happen, and their marketing directors are on video saying exactly that.

willio58• 3 years ago

I’m in my mid 20s and I’ll be having kids despite the doomerism. I believe it will get worse, I honestly think we’ve experienced 1% of how bad it will get. But I also believe we will overcome the effects of climate change through strict regulation, funding, and scientific + engineering developments.

I get the idea that you don’t want your kids to suffer. But what’s the alternative? Just let the climate change deniers populate the earth with little deniers who continue polluting? We need coming generations to help us solve this.

xwdv3• 3 years ago

I was with you until the last couple words of your post.

sys_64738• 3 years ago

I get this but I'm more worried about these super hurricanes feeding on these extremely hot temperatures.

happytiger2• 3 years ago

Despite the headlines, the official forecasts favor a normal season:

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.

xwdv3• 3 years ago

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.

IAmGraydon• 3 years ago

This might be the dumbest strong ignorant opinion post I've seen on HN in quite some time. Unfortunately, this kind of poster is becoming more common.

happytiger2• 3 years ago

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.

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.

crypot• 3 years ago

"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."

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...

Scalene2• 3 years ago

Why isn't carbon capture just: Take the fastest growing plant, grow as much as possible, turn it to charcoal or similar substance and bury it?

YellOh3• 3 years ago

Fun fact: you don't have to bury it, you just have to not burn or decompose it. Hence why wood used in architecture functions as a carbon sink. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sink#Artificial_carbon_...

juancampa• 3 years ago

If you just keep it alive, it occupies land. If you kill it, it will decompose. Hence the burying, right? Or am I missing something?

morkalork4• 3 years ago

Should be genetically engineering plants to optimize carbon capture too.

coffeebeqn• 3 years ago

Great, let’s create the ultimate invasive species

ericd• 3 years ago

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.

Good primer on carbon tax with dividend and border adjustment: https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/

sfn423• 3 years ago

Carbon tax in the west doesn't matter when china and India keep pumping out CO2.

I agree that carbon tax would be good, but unless it's a worldwide implementation it just won't have the desired effect - all it will achieve is disadvantage those who implement it relative to those who don't.

sillywalk• 3 years ago

Grow it where? You'd need to cover significant land mass, where food is being grown.

water-data-dude• 3 years ago

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event

usefulcat• 3 years ago

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.

UncleOxidant4• 3 years ago

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".

We're fucked.

heredoc• 3 years ago

37.77_°C FWIW

toss12• 3 years ago

That temperature map is insane — all that free energy in the water just waiting for the right weather system.

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

underseacables• 3 years ago

Does this mean the water is boiling…?

Triesault• 3 years ago

Water boils at 100C. The article states the water temperature is 100F / ~37.8C

ChrisArchitect• 3 years ago

[dupe]

Earlier conversation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36855773

neuronic• 3 years ago

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.

chmod600• 3 years ago

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?

Florida ocean temps surge to 100F; mass coral bleaching event is found in reefs

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