8 ms·

Warming Ocean Temperatures Are Starving Reefs and Harming Marine Life

66 points by ShubhamBadal 9y ago

rb808 9y ago
That Chasing Coral documentary is well worth looking at. They had the perfect metaphor - the divers were filming a dying reef, and staying on a floating bar/club just above it where people were partying. https://www.netflix.com/title/80168188 https://www.netflix.com/title/80168188
- gaahrdner 9y ago
  This is a fantastic documentary, and extremely sobering.
crispinb 9y ago
Hardly seems like news to anyone remotely sentient. Economic 'growth' at a real physical level is straightforward entropy increase. Complex evolved systems are destructured to fuel & supply crude technological systems. Expect more of this until most complex living systems collapse.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  ...And expect that collapse to be sudden (relatively speaking) and take a baffled majority by surprise. Then expect conflict, trending more and more to desperation and violence.
  - crispinb 9y ago
    A harbinger: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/04/bangladesh-climate-refugees-john-vidal-photo-essay https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/04/b... There are no waves of violence washing towards developed nations from Bangladesh. But it's going to come at some stage, from some similar quarter, and will hardly be unjustified. They are paying the price for 'our' insatiable greed.
    - candiodari 9y ago
      That article, sorry, is total bullshit. The rain season flooding large areas is neither new, nor strange. The same happens in a third of India, and large parts of Africa and I'm sure you can find the same phenomenon in areas around the equator in the Americas as well. Mass flooding during the wet season, with the "Monsoon" rains is the most predictable, normal and obvious thing in the world. But western audiences mostly don't know that. Monsoon rains are so bad that without protection from the rain, people can die from just how much water there is in the athmosphere. (If it's raining, that means the water in the atmosphere is more than 100%. If it's more than 37 degrees out and it's raining, that means there's more than 100% water inside your windpipe and inside your lungs. That means it's equally raining inside your lungs, and this can cause drowning. So you can't walk around in a Monsoon. That's how bad it can be. Luckily, because that's common knowledge it's not very common) The reason for most of the phenomena in the article is simply because in Bangladesh there is a general movement of people from areas like those that flood. These areas get abandoned, because the children can make more money in the cities and vastly prefer that over what their "traditional way of living" can offer. Then these areas get abandoned by everyone out of necessity, and swallowed by nature. Flooding is something that I'm sure is the "drop that makes the bucket overflow" for many young people, but it is not the cause of what's happening. And especially, rising sea levels do not make any difference here. If anything, economic inequality in Bangladesh is to blame.
- Florin_Andrei 9y ago
  Seems unnecessarily pessimistic. Life itself is a complex system that radically altered its environment - and here we are now, billions of years later. I'm not a climate change denier. The problem is very real, it's huge, it's definitely caused by us, and it needs to be addressed by taking a variety of vigorous measures. I just don't see it as a mandatory death sentence. There are some ways to deal with it, and we'll figure out more if needed.
  - dflock 9y ago
    Hopefully. Timing is everything, though.
  - crispinb 9y ago
    > Life itself is a complex system that radically altered its environment - and here we are now, billions of years later. We are replacing complex systems maintained by homeostatic dynamic stabilities with simple systems requiring continuous inputs from the very systems we're deconstructing. And we're doing so on drastically asymmetrical time scales -- we're increasing the complexity of the replacement systems orders of magnitude more slowly than we are deconstructing existing ones. > I'm not a climate change denier. The problem is very real Climate breakdown is not the problem. It's just the most exigent of literally hundreds of breakdowns caused by a malignant ideology (unending so-called economic growth). We have only 50-70 harvests left due to rapid topsoil loss. Freshwater is disappearing fast. Most ecosystems on the planet are in various stages of collapse. > There are ways to deal with it If we put all hands on deck and made it a global priority, we might avert the complete breakdown of the stable climate our agriculture depends on. Whether this would be enough to deal with other crises is questionable. It would be worth trying. But the question is irrelevant, because all hands are not on deck. They're mostly working on trivia, warfare, and further ecosystem destruction. There isn't the slightest hint that we are ready to deal with any of our global crises (indeed, on most issues, we're slowly retreating into national, mutually-hostile bunkers). > and we'll figure out more if needed. Ah. The faith-based solution.
    - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
      Climate change is the sick old man of HN. Post anything on this topic, and a bunch of strange things happen. For a forum for people who pride themselves on being rational, it sure is full of irrational, fact-averse deniers. Or, at the other extreme, you get all these fire-and-brimstone doom predictions. Weird.
- nshelly 9y ago
  Humans have solved many seemingly intractable problems related to economic growth on the local and national level, such as smog, acid rain and the pollution of water sources. And at least have indefinitely delayed many man-made problems on the global level, like a thermonuclear war and racially-defined empires. Will we have to adapt and possibly vacate large parts of the world? Yes. Will we have to look into hydroponics for seafood and other luxuries we have today? Possibly. But let's not give up hope. Negativity can lead to lack of action and there are millions, if not billions of lives at stake, and those of endangered species or large mammals for those who think there are already too many humans on this planet already. Canada, Alaska and land in developed countries in northern climates are well-positioned for climate change relative to other parts of the world. Maybe we could look at protecting vast swathes of open land, such as the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge or parkland in the western United States. There's incremental things everyone can do that make a huge difference.
  - crispinb 9y ago
    That's true, and I don't think the situation is technically hopeless. Human (& nature's) ingenuity & adaptability can go far. But right now ignorance is a much starker risk than hopelessness. The vast majority of people in wealthy countries still have increasing consumption as their top priority. And people in poorer countries are aspirants to the same. This leads to the abyss. Much of our amazing ingenuity is directed towards trivia, consumer-training, warfare etc, and far from being widely challenged, this trend seems to be accelerating. It's hard to imagine us not falling into a series of wars for diminishing spoils as the physical systems we're embedded in collapse. So as I said, I don't think the situation is technically hopeless. There's much we could do. I doubt we'll do it. But I'm absolutely certain we won't do it if most of our population maintains the dulled Panglossian-consumerist perspective.
  - crispinb 9y ago
    > Will we have to adapt and possibly vacate large parts of the world? Coming from a nation that specialises in imprisoning & torturing asylum-seekers, by the way, I must comment on this point. Hundreds of millions of people (mostly poor) live in these areas that will need to be 'vacated'. Do you think they will be welcomed? Where? And when they are not, that peace will be possible? And that we can deal with these huge global challenges while simultaneously fighting the inevitable wars?
arca_vorago 9y ago
When is the last time oceans were this warm and warming up this fast?
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  ~100k years ago https://www.sciencealert.com/the-last-time-the-ocean-was-this-hot-sea-levels-got-9-metres-higher https://www.sciencealert.com/the-last-time-the-ocean-was-thi...
  - woodandsteel 9y ago
    According to the link, the temperature was as warm back then, but the warming trend that got the ocean there was much, much slower.
vixen99 9y ago
Nature paper published January 2018. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25152 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25152 "Using a new method of measuring krypton and xenon ratios in Antarctic ice core, an estimated temperature rise of just 0.1°C over the last 50 years was determined. This is well below many other estimates of ocean temperature increase. Mean global ocean temperature increased by 2.57 ± 0.24 degrees Celsius over the last glacial transition (20,000 to 10,000 years ago)."
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  You linked to the journal abstract, but your quote is from this article: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/04/new-study-from-scripps-puts-a-crimp-on-claims-of-recent-rising-ocean-temperatures/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/04/new-study-from-scripp... Please attribute your quotes correctly.
  - vixen99 9y ago
    Correction noted - thanks! The same observation "0.1 degree warming in 50 years" is made here https://sciencesources.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-01/uoc--nsi010318.php https://sciencesources.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-01/u... as well and is evidently authorial - Severinghaus? "Our precision is about 0.2 ºC (0.4 ºF) now, and the warming of the past 50 years is only about 0.1 ºC," he said, adding that advanced equipment can provide more precise measurements, allowing scientists to use this technique to track the current warming trend in the world's oceans. "
notadoc 9y ago
Any diver, snorkeler, or spear fishermen can tell you reef ecosystems are in serious trouble. And it's certainly not just warming temperatures, it's also acidification, overfishing, destructive fishing with dynamite and cyanide, and overwhelming volumes of plastic and trash in the ocean. It's fairly rare to find a reef that doesn't have garbage embedded in it today.
RickJWagner 9y ago
From Newsweek. Of interest, Newsweek had a cover story in 1975 titled "The Cooling World" that suggested cooling "may portend a drastic decline for food production." A 1974 Time magazine article "Another Ice Age?" painted a similarly bleak picture: "When meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe, they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age." I guess the pendulum swings back and forth for some of these news sources.

66 points by ShubhamBadal 9y ago

That Chasing Coral documentary is well worth looking at. They had the perfect metaphor - the divers were filming a dying reef, and staying on a floating bar/club just above it where people were partying. https://www.netflix.com/title/80168188 https://www.netflix.com/title/80168188

gaahrdner 9y ago
This is a fantastic documentary, and extremely sobering.

crispinb 9y ago

Hardly seems like news to anyone remotely sentient. Economic 'growth' at a real physical level is straightforward entropy increase. Complex evolved systems are destructured to fuel & supply crude technological systems. Expect more of this until most complex living systems collapse.

QAPereo 9y ago
...And expect that collapse to be sudden (relatively speaking) and take a baffled majority by surprise. Then expect conflict, trending more and more to desperation and violence.
- crispinb 9y ago
  A harbinger: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/04/bangladesh-climate-refugees-john-vidal-photo-essay https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/04/b... There are no waves of violence washing towards developed nations from Bangladesh. But it's going to come at some stage, from some similar quarter, and will hardly be unjustified. They are paying the price for 'our' insatiable greed.
  - candiodari 9y ago
    That article, sorry, is total bullshit. The rain season flooding large areas is neither new, nor strange. The same happens in a third of India, and large parts of Africa and I'm sure you can find the same phenomenon in areas around the equator in the Americas as well. Mass flooding during the wet season, with the "Monsoon" rains is the most predictable, normal and obvious thing in the world. But western audiences mostly don't know that. Monsoon rains are so bad that without protection from the rain, people can die from just how much water there is in the athmosphere. (If it's raining, that means the water in the atmosphere is more than 100%. If it's more than 37 degrees out and it's raining, that means there's more than 100% water inside your windpipe and inside your lungs. That means it's equally raining inside your lungs, and this can cause drowning. So you can't walk around in a Monsoon. That's how bad it can be. Luckily, because that's common knowledge it's not very common) The reason for most of the phenomena in the article is simply because in Bangladesh there is a general movement of people from areas like those that flood. These areas get abandoned, because the children can make more money in the cities and vastly prefer that over what their "traditional way of living" can offer. Then these areas get abandoned by everyone out of necessity, and swallowed by nature. Flooding is something that I'm sure is the "drop that makes the bucket overflow" for many young people, but it is not the cause of what's happening. And especially, rising sea levels do not make any difference here. If anything, economic inequality in Bangladesh is to blame.
Florin_Andrei 9y ago
Seems unnecessarily pessimistic. Life itself is a complex system that radically altered its environment - and here we are now, billions of years later. I'm not a climate change denier. The problem is very real, it's huge, it's definitely caused by us, and it needs to be addressed by taking a variety of vigorous measures. I just don't see it as a mandatory death sentence. There are some ways to deal with it, and we'll figure out more if needed.
- dflock 9y ago
  Hopefully. Timing is everything, though.
- crispinb 9y ago
  > Life itself is a complex system that radically altered its environment - and here we are now, billions of years later. We are replacing complex systems maintained by homeostatic dynamic stabilities with simple systems requiring continuous inputs from the very systems we're deconstructing. And we're doing so on drastically asymmetrical time scales -- we're increasing the complexity of the replacement systems orders of magnitude more slowly than we are deconstructing existing ones. > I'm not a climate change denier. The problem is very real Climate breakdown is not the problem. It's just the most exigent of literally hundreds of breakdowns caused by a malignant ideology (unending so-called economic growth). We have only 50-70 harvests left due to rapid topsoil loss. Freshwater is disappearing fast. Most ecosystems on the planet are in various stages of collapse. > There are ways to deal with it If we put all hands on deck and made it a global priority, we might avert the complete breakdown of the stable climate our agriculture depends on. Whether this would be enough to deal with other crises is questionable. It would be worth trying. But the question is irrelevant, because all hands are not on deck. They're mostly working on trivia, warfare, and further ecosystem destruction. There isn't the slightest hint that we are ready to deal with any of our global crises (indeed, on most issues, we're slowly retreating into national, mutually-hostile bunkers). > and we'll figure out more if needed. Ah. The faith-based solution.
  - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
    Climate change is the sick old man of HN. Post anything on this topic, and a bunch of strange things happen. For a forum for people who pride themselves on being rational, it sure is full of irrational, fact-averse deniers. Or, at the other extreme, you get all these fire-and-brimstone doom predictions. Weird.
nshelly 9y ago
Humans have solved many seemingly intractable problems related to economic growth on the local and national level, such as smog, acid rain and the pollution of water sources. And at least have indefinitely delayed many man-made problems on the global level, like a thermonuclear war and racially-defined empires. Will we have to adapt and possibly vacate large parts of the world? Yes. Will we have to look into hydroponics for seafood and other luxuries we have today? Possibly. But let's not give up hope. Negativity can lead to lack of action and there are millions, if not billions of lives at stake, and those of endangered species or large mammals for those who think there are already too many humans on this planet already. Canada, Alaska and land in developed countries in northern climates are well-positioned for climate change relative to other parts of the world. Maybe we could look at protecting vast swathes of open land, such as the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge or parkland in the western United States. There's incremental things everyone can do that make a huge difference.
- crispinb 9y ago
  That's true, and I don't think the situation is technically hopeless. Human (& nature's) ingenuity & adaptability can go far. But right now ignorance is a much starker risk than hopelessness. The vast majority of people in wealthy countries still have increasing consumption as their top priority. And people in poorer countries are aspirants to the same. This leads to the abyss. Much of our amazing ingenuity is directed towards trivia, consumer-training, warfare etc, and far from being widely challenged, this trend seems to be accelerating. It's hard to imagine us not falling into a series of wars for diminishing spoils as the physical systems we're embedded in collapse. So as I said, I don't think the situation is technically hopeless. There's much we could do. I doubt we'll do it. But I'm absolutely certain we won't do it if most of our population maintains the dulled Panglossian-consumerist perspective.
- crispinb 9y ago
  > Will we have to adapt and possibly vacate large parts of the world? Coming from a nation that specialises in imprisoning & torturing asylum-seekers, by the way, I must comment on this point. Hundreds of millions of people (mostly poor) live in these areas that will need to be 'vacated'. Do you think they will be welcomed? Where? And when they are not, that peace will be possible? And that we can deal with these huge global challenges while simultaneously fighting the inevitable wars?

arca_vorago 9y ago

When is the last time oceans were this warm and warming up this fast?

anigbrowl 9y ago
~100k years ago https://www.sciencealert.com/the-last-time-the-ocean-was-this-hot-sea-levels-got-9-metres-higher https://www.sciencealert.com/the-last-time-the-ocean-was-thi...
- woodandsteel 9y ago
  According to the link, the temperature was as warm back then, but the warming trend that got the ocean there was much, much slower.

vixen99 9y ago

Nature paper published January 2018. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25152 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25152 "Using a new method of measuring krypton and xenon ratios in Antarctic ice core, an estimated temperature rise of just 0.1°C over the last 50 years was determined. This is well below many other estimates of ocean temperature increase. Mean global ocean temperature increased by 2.57 ± 0.24 degrees Celsius over the last glacial transition (20,000 to 10,000 years ago)."

anigbrowl 9y ago
You linked to the journal abstract, but your quote is from this article: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/04/new-study-from-scripps-puts-a-crimp-on-claims-of-recent-rising-ocean-temperatures/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/04/new-study-from-scripp... Please attribute your quotes correctly.
- vixen99 9y ago
  Correction noted - thanks! The same observation "0.1 degree warming in 50 years" is made here https://sciencesources.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-01/uoc--nsi010318.php https://sciencesources.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-01/u... as well and is evidently authorial - Severinghaus? "Our precision is about 0.2 ºC (0.4 ºF) now, and the warming of the past 50 years is only about 0.1 ºC," he said, adding that advanced equipment can provide more precise measurements, allowing scientists to use this technique to track the current warming trend in the world's oceans. "

notadoc 9y ago

Any diver, snorkeler, or spear fishermen can tell you reef ecosystems are in serious trouble. And it's certainly not just warming temperatures, it's also acidification, overfishing, destructive fishing with dynamite and cyanide, and overwhelming volumes of plastic and trash in the ocean. It's fairly rare to find a reef that doesn't have garbage embedded in it today.

RickJWagner 9y ago

From Newsweek. Of interest, Newsweek had a cover story in 1975 titled "The Cooling World" that suggested cooling "may portend a drastic decline for food production." A 1974 Time magazine article "Another Ice Age?" painted a similarly bleak picture: "When meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe, they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age." I guess the pendulum swings back and forth for some of these news sources.