An Ominous Heating Event Is Unfolding in the Oceans | Hacker News Reader

An Ominous Heating Event Is Unfolding in the Oceans

wired.com

175 pointsmorsch119 comments

From the introduction:

> Rhode points out that temperatures this week were just under two-tenths of a degree warmer than the previous record. “Two-tenths doesn’t sound like a lot—but in ocean terms two-tenths is actually a lot because it doesn’t warm as quickly as the land,” he says. As you can see from the chart’s record of past years, March is normally when average sea surface temperatures start declining.

But then the article wanders away from that point before saying when the temperatures do start declining.

This is a big failing of science advocacy as it relates to journalism, public policy, and public discourse. Two-tenths of a degree requires interpretation to understand its significance, and it feels like a small number.

Instead, lead with something like the oceans should have started cooling down a month ago but they haven't. It's more relatable and gets right to the point.

I'm neither criticizing this article nor science journalism in general. I just wanted to draw a comparison to the issue where science communicators need to figure out how to more effectively present information to journalists, policy makers, and the general public.

Journalism continues to let humanity down as a (rightfully) protected profession that simultaneously uses that protection to operate with both impunity and irresponsibility.

And I'm not talking about political bias (though that contributes greatly to the distrust people have in media), I'm talking about what you describe; the failure to communicate nuance, the rush to publish without a clear picture of the facts, the use of emotional manipulation to generate clicks, the oversimplification or misrepresentation of the truth.

It doesn't matter when you're reporting on celebrity gossip. It matters greatly when you're reporting on things that could destroy our species.

> It doesn't matter when you're reporting on celebrity gossip

Umm, personally I find that fairly distasteful too.

"Paparazzi pictures of Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman and Bridget Fonda have circulated online, feeding into an odd desire to force reclusive actors back into the spotlight"[0]

Now everything is done in service of ever more clicks and hence ads, I find myself less and willing to consume traditional journalism. At all.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/apr/21/hollywood-actor...

Journalism has always been about ads, they just used to be bad at it.

It's more correct to say they could still be profitable while being bad at it. In the last 10 or so years, journalism has been captured by the dynamics of online advertising while the outlets themselves have become increasingly consolidated under profit-driven corporate masters. For a long time the newsroom, especially of TV and radio networks, was considered a cost center, but that was OK because the entertainment departments brought in the money. Now news organizations themselves are supposed to be profitable, which leads to incentives being skewed towards views and ad revenue.

> Journalism has always been about ads, they just used to be bad at it

I'm not sure what definition of "bad" we'd need to use (and btw, "bad" for whom?) for that claim to be true.

Evergreen food fights (eg bias, partisanship) serve to distract from the base truth:

Ad-based biz models (corporate media) do not hold power (elites) to account.

Journalist David Roberts (https://www.volts.wtf) does deep dives on climate crisis and renewable energy. Here he explains why he couldn't do this work as an employee of corporate media:

David Roberts: The Transition to Carbon-Free Energy: A Story of Tech, Politics, & Community

Jay Kapoor (VSC Ventures) podcast Apr 23rd, 2023

https://youtu.be/RTQo_TID804?t=60

TLDR:

Ads-based -> maximize audience & clicks -> publishers & editors aggressively dumb down content.

Per Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky's Five Filters model of Propaganda in a nutshell.

Science journalists are no better at describing chemistry, paleontology, or condensed matter physics. The climate is controversial because there are people who want it to be controversial.

There are plenty of articles that are perfectly clear, and have been for decades. Having this article be blinding clear and unambiguous would not change the underlying induced distrust. No amount of editing will fix climate denialism until the denialists cease making it a culture war, or readers decide they'd rather take an interest in reality.

All true.

It's also an unequal fight, per the asymmetry of bullshit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

The merchants of doubt dominate media. And spend billions of dollars shaping discourse.

Whereas intellectually honest explainers are fighting on hostile territory.

The meager amount of constructive debate we do have happens despite the system.

Who is spending "billions of dollars shaping discourse" exactly, unless you mean governments and their academics? The idea that people don't trust climatologists because they get paid not to is simply an absurd lie. It's the other way around: the budgets are all on the side of the academics.

Take it from climatologists themselves, talking about who are these skeptics who cause them so much trouble?

http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2012/01/email-4986-augsept-200...

    They are mostly people who correspond on the Climate Audit blog site. They all seem to have infinite time as they are all retired.

ExxonMobil reports record first-quarter profits of $11.4bn: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65427372

probably the most criminally underreported stroke of evil genius in the past 30 years, is how the Koch brothers managed to subvert the climate message of this country's most renowned national museum, the Smithsonian, by funding it. Specifically, the floor-filling installation on human evolution. I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the discussions among the curators about how to handle this conflict of interest, because the resulting exhibit doesn't reveal an obvious bias. But there certainly is one.

It only develops indirectly and cumulatively if you read the posters accompanying the various displays, many of which are skewed toward a particular emphasis on "adaptability." Which is to say, in blunt terms, "it's okay if the earth's climate is damaged by human activity, humans have adapted to so much worse, and will adapt again, because we are an adaptable species. Aren't we."

There is a climate change exhibit immediately outside of the new human evolution exhibit. It's clearly not an accident. I think the Smithsonian scientists were grumpy about taking Koch money, even for a good exhibit. (Which is actually only ok.)

That's a non-sequitur.

I know you believe that.

We've learned that Shell, at the very least, knew about the effects of climate change since the 60s. It's not suspicious at all that whether or not climate change is even real has been debated for decades. Shell definitely wouldn't use the billions of dollars at their disposal to protect their industry from existential threat by shaping discourse.

That's a lot of smears and hypotheticals, isn't it? You have to rely on those because the claim isn't true.

If Shell are really spending billions then it should be trivial to find armies of thousands, or tens of thousands, all of whom are directly receiving grant money from Shell to talk about climate full time (negatively). But no such people exist. As the climatologists say, the only people who have the time to double check their work are retirees.

Now go look at how much money governments, BMG Foundation etc spend on climate related stuff. It's huge.

If Shell is spending billions on people to talk about climate full time negatively, it seems a rather obvious oversight that they wouldn't include instructions to not advertise that fact. But I wasn't talking about an army of paid human shills. The majority of the "discourse" around COVID misinformation came from 12 sources - not everyone who repeated their talking points was paid to do so, yet shaped the discourse was.

Governments spending billions on "climate change related stuff", an existential threat to their continued existence, is not the conspiracy you think it is.

(...And by the same token, Shell spending billions protecting its continued existence/economic model would also not be some conspiracy...)

What exactly are you talking about then? What does this imaginary money get spent on, if not people?

This whole idea is a classic conspiracy theory. Do you realize that? Obviously the only way to shape discourse is with people, because discourse is something done by people. How do you think it's possible to spend literally billions of dollars - call it $3B and that's enough to pay for 30,000 people on great salaries making reports and blog posts all day, that this could last for years - and not have anyone notice this? Nobody ever asks where the money is coming from? Not one of these tens of thousands of people have ever gone to the press and said, I was paid by Shell to say repeat things that aren't true?

There are of course massive ecosystems of NGOs and the like that do exactly that, but they're all pushing doomerism. They're also pretty open about where the money comes from. They have to be, you can't hide movements of those sorts of sums. The Gates Foundation alone spends $1.4B on climate change "shills" as you'd put it, and it's only one of many.

BTW, no governments existence is threatened by climate change, not even in the discredited IPCC worst case scenario. Not even in fiction - Waterworld has a government in it!

I would love a job getting paid to write pro-climate blog posts all day. Can you link me to a job posting?

https://careers.bbc.co.uk/

What measure of proof do you require?

The recent book Merchants of Doubt is just one of dozens of such investigations.

In fact, the covert reactionary movement has begat its own little cottage industry working to expose the fraud.

Big Oil funded 100s of astroturf groups to oppose every single offshore wind project. Here's the receipts:

https://www.distilled.earth/p/the-man-trying-to-kill-america...

Just one example of 1,000s. Every single facet of every single effort faces this kind of manufactured opposition. Throw a rock in any direction and you'll hit one.

Did you check that receipt?

It talks about one organization, the "Caeser Rodney Institute", which received a $10k grant from an organization that disperses tiny grants to all kinds of random groups, like diabetes research and the "National Foundation for Women Legislators". The CRI does many things.

These guys are such oil company shills that if you check their website you will find them directly attacking the oil industry:

https://www.caesarrodney.org/energy-updates2/Cancel-Culture-...

"The big picture is that the oil industry is investing billions in offshore wind, and the Caesar Rodney Institute (CRI) opposes their projects."

"CRI receives donations from donors who agree with our policy recommendations, including about 1% of our total donations from the oil industry."

Your article says that "400 of those residents sent a combined $50,000 in donations to support the opposition effort", so this one man writing letters was able to raise 5x the amount of money from random locals as from (lol) Big Oil.

The guy claimed Big Oil is spending billions and this is the best example anyone can find? This is proving the point, isn't it? It's at the scale where maybe one guy who happens to work for an oil company decides he doesn't like wind turbines in his view of the sea, and this is supposed evidence of a global conspiracy.

Now compare that to the BMGF spending over a billion dollars on climate related topics. These things are in different leagues. All the financial power here lies with the net zero lobby.

Troll claims he's not a troll. I guess we have no choice but to believe him.

Seriously?

You are the living embodiment of Brandolini's Law.

Dave's CV shows he's deeply embedded in the climate denial (now climate slow rollers) strategy. Former DuPont exec. Henchman in Trump Admin's efforts to dismantle the EPA. Member of f!@king Heartland Institute, ground zero for the loons.

Oh yea, definitely a champion for our renewable energy future.

> The CRI does many things.

Yup, grifters gonna grift.

PS- ExxonMobil's wind energy bonafides are that they'll sell industrial lubricants for windmills. Separately, they're part of a group effort to stop new offshore wind in Texas.

You're talking about the CV that lists "promoting CO2 capture" and "co-founding Delaware's Green Building Council" as evidence that he's deeply embedded in climate denial. That's as convincing as "Big Oil spends billions of dollars ok maybe $10k on a guy who thinks offshore wind is has a bad cost/benefit ratio for CO2 reduction".

Your post is exactly the type of response that wakes people up to how extreme and dishonest the green movement has become. This guy thinks offshore wind projects are a bad idea and other green projects are a better investment. All you got in response is an endless procession of thought-terminating memes: he's a "troll", a "loon", a "grifter", in the pay of "Big Oil" and so on. It's a recipe for unproductive conversation. Even climatologists knew that wasn't true when they talked amongst themselves.

I'll ask again - where are these billions being spent by Shell or ExxonMobil or whoever? This thread proves my point that you can't hide money like that, you can't even hide a $10k grant from one trade group.

What measure of proof do you require?

Exxon Mobile, for example, is known to have had incredibly accurate warming models built by its own scientists going back as far as the 70s, and then lied to the public about the dangers. They also lied when the existence of these models became public knowledge saying the scientists told them they should "make up their own minds" about the science, but fortunately a bit of investigation into their internal communications revealed the differences in what they said internally and the lies they told the public.

1. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...

> The merchants of doubt dominate media.

Wrong. Literally, the merchants of oil dominate the media.

They're the same picture

> The merchants of doubt dominate media. And spend billions of dollars shaping discourse.

Then let them sow doubt. If the case is "we're not sure but it's very possible that continued CO2 emissions will cook the Earth", what should we do? Continue emitting CO2, or stop until we're sure that it won't cook the Earth?

It's the precautionary principle - if the science isn't settled, given the catastrophic risks, we should limit CO2 as much as possible until it is settled that emitting it is safe.

We’re sure and we won’t stop

But what if we make a cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable world for nothing?

To be the devil's advocate, the deniers will say "We've been emitting CO2 since the beginning of the world, and it's been fine, why are you worrying now?" - yeah sure that's ignoring the fact that there are now more cars, more planes, more factories, more cows, etc, but that's to be expected of these unscientific people.

You can use your eyeballs and look at the chart. The temps have not begun to decline yet.

I’m kind of annoyed by the idea of criticizing scientific journalism but not reading the charts referenced to form your own conclusion tbh.

I specifically said that I'm not criticizing the article or science journalism, but I edited my comment to further clarify that I'm only using the article as an example to tangent into a related issue. The actual facts and conclusions about the temperature are immaterial. I barely snuck in the edit before the time limit, so it's still probably not as clear as it should be.

I had to do another edit earlier when I realized that I had inadvertently invited criticism of science journalism, again despite the fact that I said I wasn't criticizing it. Maybe I should have followed my own advice and opened by saying it's a tangent.

> something like the oceans should have started cooling down a month ago but they haven't.

I don't disagree with your overall point, that science communication is frustrated by stubborn impedance mismatches between authors and the different audiences they're trying to reach.

However I would point out that if the article were written according to the example that you have just given, within minutes some crank would go find the original paper, skim the abstract and locate the actual 2/10 degree fact.

They would then blast social media with hot takes about how climate hoax scientists have once again spun a "nothingburger" story into a panic by deliberately concealing the "troof"

I'm not really concerned about that. You're right that propagandists will always find a way to exploit whatever you say or don't say, no matter how you say it. It's a fool's errand to try to manipulate the discourse through self-censorship, which is why I don't advocate for it. I'd have been perfectly satisfied if the temperature statistic was quoted in the very next sentence after the one I suggested. I did say "lead with", but it's kind of buried.

My only point was that science advocates need to modernize their persuasive argument repertoire.

most philosophy schools start when someone points out language is about setting meaning more than communication of meaning. from plato to Confucius...

> I'm neither criticizing this article nor science journalism in general

yes, you should be criticizing. specially the work of someone who decided to write for a living.

why people insist on thinking you can be neutral on mass media?

there's a newsroom joke where the editor, on a slow easter sunday, shouts to one of the idle reporters to just write something about christ. to which the reporter automatically replies "for or against?"

In practice it tends to be more cathartic than constructive. The advocate is always going to have a greater stake in their cause than the middle man.

I wrote my original comment that way because I prefer to discuss strategies for advocates. I am actually critical of mass media, I just let other people do the criticizing.

You make a good point about appearing neutral. Next time I'll try a different approach to inviting a different type of discussion.

How is it supposed to cool anyway when there's less and less ice storing the chill? I mean.. where is the coldness supposed to come from.

The coldness comes from space, which is very very cold. We tend to lose most of our heat to space via radiation, rather than convection. The difference is between one of those infrared dish heaters, and a heater that blows warm air. CO2, being rather opaque in the infrared, doesn't let the heat escape into space. Instead, the radiation is reflected back into the atmosphere, heating the planet and the oceans

Related, days ago the BBC reported what I assumed was a typo that the ocean temperature has risen 13.8C the past ~30 years. After reading the article I tried to double check the source but couldn't easily find it.

Yesterday HN's top 30 had a similar story from some blog I had never heard of. Their source was the BBC and a paper that didn't show 13.8C. Now we have a typo(?) spreading like a virus.

The chart in this Wired article shows a ~1.38C difference which is alarmingly high. What troubles me is how many people, even HN'ers, just ran with a 13.8C number without question. Am I missing something ? Is there any scientific paper showing 13.8C, which would likely kill a significant portion of marine life ? I'll do a time-boxed (2 years) boycott of the BBC until proven otherwise.

Obviously a typo

> I'll do a time-boxed (2 years) boycott of the BBC until proven otherwise.

Oh wow

I find it a bit weird that you’re publicly criticizing people for sharing poorly sourced claims…while not sharing any links to the supposed articles that were so bad.

Anyway, here’s a BBC article about oceans warming. “13.8C” appears in it. But it doesn’t claim oceans globally heated up by 13.8C. It says a specific area of the ocean was 13.8 C hotter than average in March, while making it clear that the oceans globally were nowhere near that much hotter than average. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65339934

P.S. I do think it's reasonable to be a little nervous about that 13.8C number--it's really enormous, and it is off the scale for that map that the Wired article shared. But that's not the same as what you said.

Jeez, embarrassing for GP

You are right, I saw what appeared to be a 10X lower value in Wired and posted my misunderstanding prematurely. Here's the the blog post that appeared on HN's top 30 from yesterday. But I still can't find a reference to a paper with the 13.8C number in either the BBC article or the blog post. It may be in my blindspot.*

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35747417

*Sorry HN (and BBC), I had surgery recently and am taking narcotics. I won't post for a while since I'm not sure my thinking is clear and I may be criticizing unfairly.

I dont think you did anything wrong. So while it wasn't on average 13.8C, even a specific area of 13.8C was still an order of magnitude wrong and clearly a typo.

And something that is so wrong, being repeated on HN, should be called out. So your Data and Facts may not be exact, your motive, intuition wasn't wrong though. You should always question what you are reading.

And even on technical subject this happens a lot. I had to spend 3 months on HN correcting what the public media called Apple's "Unified Memory" as if it was memory on Die. It is not, it was simple LPDDR Memory on same package. Or AirPod sold at BOM cost, Apple invented USB-C, AV1 being completely patent free. True 5G is all about mmWave etc.

Although my opinion of banning BBC for 2 years is a little too hash for a typo. It happens, and in fact in the modern era it happens more often than you can imagine. BBC is still far better news source than 99.9999999% of the Internet.

I find this temperature chart puts things into a proper perspective https://xkcd.com/1732/

Hate it when scientific publications too started focusing more on creating fear and uncertainty rather than explaining what is going on. This has been the case for a while now.

In this case, there are possible explanations as to why this is happening. [1] explains some of them. I don't understand why Wired chose to omit those. This Wired article just states that ocean temps are high, without going into causes, anomalies or even reasons or theories. Going by [1]

> But there's an immediate cause too: the rare triple-dip La Niña is over. During this cycle, cooler water from deep in the ocean upwells to the surface. It's like the Pacific Ocean's air conditioner is running. But now the air conditioner is turned off. It's likely we're set for an El Niño, which tends to bring hotter, dryer weather to Australia.

> When you run your air conditioner, you're masking the heat outside. It's the same for our oceans. La Niña brought three years of cooler conditions, while global warming continued apace.

I don't mind an article with details of what is going on. Obviously that is important. But as a science journalist, there is an equal responsibility to help try and explain it. If not anything else, contextualize it. Thousands of people will read it and share it.

[2[ is also a better coverage of the same story before the follow up with reasons. As a direct comparison, notice the difference in tone, and how they contextualize what is happening.

[1]: https://phys.org/news/2023-04-hot-ocean-temperatures-hottest...

[2]: https://phys.org/news/2023-04-earth-hot-sudden-ocean-spike.h...

> Hate it when scientific publications too started focusing more on creating fear and uncertainty rather than explaining what is going on.

Just so I'm clear, you are calling Wired a scientific publication?

EDIT: Thanks for the explanation of the science parts by the way. I read it instead of the article.

What i meant was that a publication which covers topics related to science and have specific reporters with beats around those topics. poor choice of words.

Also credit to phys.org to be honest. They explain these topics in very simple terms

Wired isn't a scientific publication.

> I don't understand why Wired chose to omit those.

I like to think I’m a rational person, but I read the headline, got alarmed and clicked on the link. I read the article and got more alarmed, and so I clicked on another link within the article. The purpose of news is not to inform. It’s to generate fear based on biases and use that to generate clicks and more fear. If done well, it’s designed to create an unvirtuous circle of fear and clicks. This article served its purpose perfectly.

> The purpose of news is not to inform. It’s to generate fear based on biases and use that to generate clicks and more fear. If done well, it’s designed to create an unvirtuous circle of fear and clicks.

Ding ding ding ding ding

It is a common claim that the way to fight misinformation and propaganda is with better ideas, clear and rational and calm explanation. At age 44 I only see evidence that the opposite is true. This is problematic of course, to accomplish something important or good, you have to be somewhat of a bad person at times, perhaps.

Or perhaps there is some other way, but the completely disingenuous fear uncertainty and doubt generated by the likes of big oil, the koch brothers, the heritage foundation, absolutely 100% worked. The calm rational approach lost. My children will suffer for it.

So at times I wonder if actually I should be encouraging the good causes to do what works. What do you think?

This isn’t too surprising. We already know the global currents are collapsing. That‘ll likely lead to an ice age for Northern Europe within the next 100 years.

Anyway, the graph isn’t too surprising. The northern hemisphere isn’t mixing with the cooler southern hemisphere much as it should, causing the spike.

Next, the northern Atlantic will stop mixing, and then high latitude places like the UK, France and east of there will freeze.

It’s kind of surprising the article doesn’t mention any of this. It made the news rounds again a few weeks ago.

The ice age prediction isn’t new, either: PBS ran a good special on it explaining the issue in the mid 1990’s. They predicted 10-50 years for the to ice age to start once the current started collapsing. We’re on track for a 2050-2090 start of ice age by their estimates, and events are tracking what I remember of their predictions.

Scientists are saying that, if it happens, it’ll be in 2100-2120 now, but I think they are overly-optimistic.

I wish I could find a copy of that program.

I thought that the sea caps were all going to melt, the polar bears would have no homes and the sea level was going to rise by like 50 feet.

I was also told that no one had ever predicted a global ice age, that was all conspiracy theory nonsense based on misinformation.

I'm not trying to even be snarky now I'm just wondering where the heck the prediction of an ice age is coming from?

Climate change is driven by increasing atmospheric opacity to infrared. The greenhouse effect: sunlight in, heating of the surface, infrared can't return to space.

This doesn't just warm the world evenly, it disrupts the circulation of winds and currents globally. As a result, some areas now warm will get cold, and vice versa. Some wet areas will dry up, some dry areas will get wetter.

That's the short term, climatologically speaking. Longer term effects are as you say.

There is a reason it is called “climate change”, not “global warming”. We are poking a big system we don’t understand, and are sure something bad will happen, just not exactly what.

In this scenario (which seems to be playing out), the ice caps rapidly melt, dumping cold water into global ocean currents, causing them to stall out for a thousand years or so.

Those currents cool the equator and warm the temperate zones. Without them, the habitable (without indoor heating/cooling) fraction of the planet drops by some large percentage.

_For Northern Europe_.

On average Europe has a much milder climate than Canada, despite being at the same latitudes. That may come to an end.

But that's a local effect, and doesn't change the global long term average story.

Are you thinking of the special with James Burke, “After the Warming”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=451xJqNGFqU

Complete thermohaline collapse takes a thousand years, not a hundred years. There will be a slight thermohaline weakening, but no collapse any time soon. Unfortunately journalists have gotten the concepts of complete collapse and weakening totally mixed up, to come to various conclusions that the peer-reviewed literature does not. The other various effects of climate change are much more significant and notable -- and are best documented by the new IPCC synthesis reports rather than one specific documentary film.

The fossil record (as of the 1990’s) has 100 year granularity, and it shows CO2 increases start in step N, then European ice age is underway in step N+1.

Statistics tells us that the expected time between the start of the event and the second sample is 100/2 = 50 years.

Current climate simulations are showing a reasonable chance of this happening over a 150 year span, but then the observed climate changes keep trending to worst case (and closer to fossil record).

Wow you sound very confident in your speculation. Surely predicting the outcome of lotteries is a more lucrative use of your skills?

Would need to dive deeper to get a better handle here. But if what they are pointing to is accurate and wholesale then that is disturbing. Insane amount of energy to heat up the ocean like that - transfer that to all our weather systems, yikes

How quickly could heat resistant fish be reproduced through natural selection? Years? Fish breed fast right? Sharks have been around for millions of years with a lot of variance in ocean temperatures.

Over the periods fishes evolved, their habitat wasn’t under heavy attack/occupation, neither were their populations hunted at the current scale.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200427125154.h...

Sharks are pelagic, which means that they live in the open ocean, they don't need to be near either any coast, the surface or the bottom. Pelagic fish can wander, with some restrictions.

Species that need a coast are in less luck, for example. The next appropriate coast may be far away. The Great Barrier Reef can't just migrate to Antarctica, even if there is a suitable coastline down there, because it can't get there from where it is. There is no continuously habitable area from where it is now to the potential new habitat.

Is there anything stopping it from migrating down to the southern coast of Australia?

As conditions change that is likely to happen. Corals are broadcast spawners. The larva will settle in a hospitable environment wherever that happens to be.

> Sharks are pelagic, which means that they live in the open ocean, they don't need to be near either any coast, the surface or the bottom.

Some sharks are. There are 400+ species and plenty of them live near coasts or the bottom.

Oh right, in theory I knew that. Sorry.

But have the non-pelagic shark species survived any climate changes that would force them to migrate across a large inhospitable area? Sharks have survived very long as a group, but it's not clear to me that most/all of the individual species that have existed still do.

Maybe some fish will survive a rapid change in their ecosystem. I'd be worried, that most probably will die when their capacity to adapt is exceeded either directly or through breakdown of food chains.

Though I'd be more worried about effects like seasonal oceanic dead zones increasing in size and persisting longer. I don't think too many fish will evolve into a species not requiring oxygen anytime soon.

Heat resistant and anaerobic ? Years? Why so long ? /s

https://xkcd.com/1732/ (natural speed of changes vs. anthropocene)

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-trajectory-of-the-An...

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

The "hockey stick" is just starting.

- Marine life: Warmer sea temperatures can lead to changes in the distribution and behavior of marine species, with some moving to cooler waters or changing their migration patterns. This can also affect the growth and reproduction rates of different marine organisms, which can have cascading effects on the food chain.

- Coral reefs: Coral reefs are highly sensitive to changes in sea temperature, and prolonged exposure to temperatures above 21 degrees Celsius can cause coral bleaching, which can lead to their death. This can have significant impacts on the many species that depend on coral reefs for food and habitat.

- Ocean currents: Changes in sea temperature can affect ocean currents, which can in turn impact weather patterns and climate. Warmer sea temperatures can lead to more frequent and severe weather events such as hurricanes and typhoons.

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

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

- Sea level rise: As sea temperatures rise, the water expands, contributing to sea level rise. This can lead to flooding and erosion in coastal areas and impact the livelihoods of people who depend on these areas for fishing and tourism.

- Decreased solubility: As sea temperature increases, the solubility of oxygen in seawater decreases. This means that warmer water holds less dissolved oxygen than cooler water. Therefore, as sea temperatures rise, the amount of oxygen available for marine life decreases.

- Increased stratification: Warmer water is less dense than cooler water, so as the sea temperature rises, the water column becomes more stratified, with warmer water sitting on top of cooler water. This can prevent oxygen-rich surface water from mixing with deeper water, leading to the formation of oxygen-depleted zones.

- Algae blooms: Warmer sea temperatures can promote the growth of certain types of algae, such as harmful algal blooms. These blooms can consume large amounts of oxygen when they decompose, leading to oxygen-depleted zones in the surrounding water.

- Oxygen-depleted zones, also known as hypoxic or anoxic zones, can have significant impacts on marine ecosystems. When oxygen levels become too low, many marine organisms, such as fish, shellfish, and crabs, can suffocate and die. This can have cascading effects on the food chain and lead to the loss of commercially important species. Additionally, the decomposition of dead marine organisms in these zones can release harmful gases such as hydrogen sulfide, which can be toxic to marine life and humans.

That XKCD is amazing but absolutely terrifying, so sad.

Several of the possibilities you raise here are disproven by real world data.

W.R.T. corals, claims of coral reefs being harmed by climate change have been discredited in recent years. Although scientists claimed for years that the corals were being severely harmed by emissions, 2022 had the highest coral cover in the GBR since records began in the mid 80s. It's confusing because the media reported several supposedly severe die-offs in the corals in the six years before 2022, but coral takes 5-10 years to regrow after a major die-off so those reports cannot have been correct.

Coral bleaching is caused by sudden changes in temperature, but most bleachings don't seem to cause die-offs and it's the speed of change that seems to trigger it, not so much the absolute temperature.

Sea level rise is small, constant over a much longer time period than the industrial era, and primarily caused by changes in the height of the land not the sea. That's why the Pacific islands that were supposedly in danger from climate change have actually grown over time, not shrunk.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02954-1

Finally, the hockey stick graphs that are so famous are all scientifically fraudulent, being based on techniques like dropping any input data that doesn't yield hockey stick graphs.

> claims of coral reefs being harmed by climate change have been discredited in recent years

https://theconversation.com/record-coral-cover-doesnt-necess...

"it’s more likely the reef is being dominated by only few species, as the report states that branching and plating Acropora species have driven the recovery of coral cover"

"these same corals are often susceptible to wave damage, disease or coral bleaching and tend to go bust within a few years"

"Without more information at the level of individual species, it is impossible to understand how much of the Great Barrier Reef has been lost, or recovered, since the last mass bleaching event"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/06/great-ba...

"Dr Emslie, who leads the ... monitoring, says the rise in coral cover was expected, given the relatively benign conditions, but four bleaching events in seven years was uncharted territory."

In some conservative media, the survey has been used to push arguments the reef is not under threat. “The naysayers can put their heads in the sand all they like, but the frequency of disturbances is going gangbusters,” says Emslie.

Wachenfeld points out that scientists have never said the reef is dead. “Scientists have been ringing an alarm bell, not a funeral dirge,” he says. “The notion scientists have been misleading people is a nonsense.”

He likens the reef’s resilience to a rubber band that can be stretched many times, but only so far before it snaps.

“It’s hard to predict when that will happen, but it’s a bit like that with the reef,” he says. “We have a limited amount of time to slow and stop the warming. There is no way this resilience can last forever.”

The rest I will leave for somebody else.

> Dr Emslie, who leads the ... monitoring, says the rise in coral cover was expected, given the relatively benign conditions

Was it now. A Guardian news report featuring Dr Emslie in March 2019 has one of his colleagues saying this [1]:

the preliminary results of the study, and the lack of observed improvement in previously surveyed reefs, showed how difficult it was for corals to rebound after mass bleaching. “That doesn’t surprise me because it takes 10 years for coral to rebound,” Hughes said. “There’s been some reports of magical recovery, but the ecological memory of the bleaching will be long-lasting. “The big unknown is when it will bleach again, but it will almost certainly be before those reefs have time to recover.”

In 2019 it is being predicted to take 10 years to rebound, any reports of recovery are "magical" exceptions to the rule and the next bleaching will "almost certainly" be before the reefs have time to recover.

In 2022 it is not only fully recovered but at record breaking levels, this was fully expected, the idea scientists misled people is "nonsense" and only those dastardly "conservatives" and "naysayers" have any issues with what's happened.

Do you see the problem here? These people aren't behaving like scientists, they are behaving like political activists. They make assertions that they fully understand the corals and that their predictions are "almost certain", then when the corals do things that contradict their prior understanding they lash out and argue that only "conservatives" care about the confidence bounds of modelling predictions. Observe how wildly biased that is. In the world they inhabit anyone who is pointing out inconvenient facts can be immediately dismissed by saying they're not a part of the tribe, nothing else is needed!

> "We have a limited amount of time to slow and stop the warming. There is no way this resilience can last forever"

... he said, fervently hoping that the reefs will just hurry up and die already so they can stop being shown up.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/04/some-gre...

> In 2022 it is not only fully recovered but at record breaking levels

No.

The article you yourself cited is headlined, "Record coral cover doesn’t necessarily mean the Great Barrier Reef is in good health".

Record coral cover !== fully recovered

From the article:

"Inferring that a reef has recovered by a person being towed behind a boat to obtain a rapid visual estimate of coral cover is like flying in a helicopter and saying a bushfire-hit forest has recovered because the canopy has grown back.

It provides no information about diversity, or the abundance and health of other animals and plants that live in and among the trees, or coral."

Uh huh. They were happy to use those measurement techniques just three years ago when they were predicting doom. They didn't even start measuring fish species until the 2019 survey. Now the coral has unfortunately rebounded, their prior methods suddenly aren't good enough anymore. She isn't even saying there's a problem here, just that she doesn't have data to say! That's really desperate.

She's also moving the goalposts, but her argument makes no sense. Now the coral is at record-breaking coverage the problem has become that it's the wrong type of coral - except the justification for it being the wrong type is that it consists mostly of the type of coral that grows the fastest. Which is obvious and circular: in any natural ecosystem that involves regular dieoffs and regrowths, some species will grow back faster. That's inherent to a diverse natural world, the exact thing she claims to be worried about losing.

Putting corals aside for a moment, I hope we can find agreement on the underlying meta-scientific issue here. Scientists in whatever field should carefully study their domain and either come to fully understand it, or if they can't do that, at least understand their own level of understanding. What people need to see from universities is a recognition when they make confident predictions that are later falsified. Without the recognition that falsification has occurred, science cannot advance.

In this case they're refusing to accept that falsification has happened, instead engaging in ad hominem attacks, goalpost shifting, circular reasoning and other fallacies. The approach of these biologists is summed up by this chef's kiss statement:

    "While there’s no data to prove or disprove it, it’s also probable ..."

Literally "although we have no evidence, we know what's happening anyway". The scientific method has gone AWOL.

>Additionally, the decomposition of dead marine organisms in these zones can release harmful gases such as hydrogen sulfide, which can be toxic to marine life and humans.

If human extinction occurs due to climate change, this will be how. Anoxic ocean events can lead to massive emissions of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) into the atmosphere. This is the speculated mechanism for the end-Permian extinction event, also known as the Great Dying, and several other mass extinction events in Earth's history. H2S is immediately dangerous to human life at concentrations as low as 100ppm. It's so dangerous that humans have evolved to smell it in concentrations as low as 100 parts per billion.

UW-Seattle professor Peter Ward has spoken about this at length:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS4FIoOKKfc

How do we prepare? Some kind of air filtering? Masks?

My understanding is that H2S is toxic to nearly all plants and animals. Barring some massive technical leaps, I don't see how humanity survives in the worst-case scenario. H2S on the levels of the Great Dying takes millions of years to clear from the atmosphere. Rich humans living in domes would probably die of equipment failure long before the atmosphere became safe once again for human life.

The H2S in question is produced mainly by sulfate-reducing bacteria in the ocean, so targeting these microorganisms might be one way to stave off disaster. That would require massive bio-engineering on a scale never before seen in history.

Right now we're just crossing our fingers and hoping we can reduce carbon emissions and ocean warming fast enough, and that we don't trigger (or haven't already triggered) runaway warming feedback loops such as the clathrate gun hypothesis.

Fish aren’t likely the ones at risk. Corals, plankton, and other invertebrates that can’t move too far are going to be heavily selected against if they aren’t heat tolerant. My lab in college used to study heat shock and how it impacted evolution. Our theory was that a rapidly heating environment could expose latent genetic diversity that heat shock proteins masked through chaperoning the folding. We demonstrated this in fruit flies.

We could see a rapid change if it’s prolonged enough.

Plankton concerns me because it's a primary source of the oxygen we breathe.

Also a major food source for plenty of species

Isn't spawning of some fish species heavily impeded by high ocean temperature? They'd probably adjust to it over a few generations if we weren't overfishing them at the same time, but as-is I'm not too optimistic.

That’s a good point actually and I hadn’t considered the fish that have delicate spawning. Eggs and fry cannot travel far.

I think years is several magnitudes off for how fast evolution works.

https://today.oregonstate.edu/archives/2011/aug/lasting-evol...

its also the people made speed of this change... natural selection works over a really long time period, requiring it work in a x years not so much :)

A problem is that because of the increased CO2 concentrations, ocean weather is becoming more acidic at the same time. That's a huge problem on its own for many species.

No paywall https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%...

Missing graph: https://media.wired.com/photos/644b17b8ef8671d76d4a856f/mast...

source: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/

Higher heat means a greater amount of dissolved gasses, which means more more acidity due to an ability to capture more co2.

Colder liquids hold more dissolved gas than warmer ones.

You've got that the wrong way around, higher heat means fewer dissolved gases [1]. This is part of the mechanism which lies behind the CO₂ concentration fluctuations in the atmosphere and the main reason why the atmospheric CO₂ concentration changes trail temperature changes in the same - temperature increases are followed by CO₂ concentration increases, temperature decreases lead to decreased CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere. The oceans are CO₂ sinks when temperatures go down, CO₂ sources when they go up.

[1] You can easily test this yourself by taking two bottles of carbonated water. Put both bottles in the fridge for a day or so until they reach the same temperature, the cooler the better. Now carefully open both bottles so as to avoid a pressure shock leading to outgassing. Put one bottle back into the fridge without the cap on and leave the other one out in some warmer spot, also without the cap. Leave them there for a day or so, then put the caps back on. Take the bottle from the fridge and put it next to the one in the warmer spot, both caps on and leave it there for a day or so until it reaches the same temperature. Feel the pressure on both bottles and notice the one from the fridge is higher. Open both bottles and notice more gas pressure has built up in the one from the fridge. Test the water and notice the water from the bottle from the fridge is more heavily carbonated than the water from the other bottle.

> the atmosphere and the main reason why the atmospheric CO₂ concentration changes trail temperature changes in the same - temperature increases are followed by CO₂ concentration increases, temperature decreases lead to decreased CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere.

Wrong. CO₂ concentration increases lead to increased temperatures.

> Greenhouse gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight. Larger amounts of these gases trap more heat in Earth's lower atmosphere, causing global warming.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change

Please don't confuse the public even more when a lot of people couldn't care less about climate change in the first place. If you confuse the half of the population that still cares about finding solutions to the problem, you'll end up causing more harm than good.

I don't even care if you're correct, but it's vital for the sake of the climate that we maintain a narrative that is simple and consistent over time. Saying "ahktchually, temperature increases are followed by CO₂ concentration increases" plays right in the hands of climate deniers, who will say we can't even get our story straight, and tune off the people who care, 99% of whom don't know more about climate change than I've written above.

In the realm of PR, the small print doesn't matter. People only care about the broad strokes. Save the footnotes and magic tricks for the seminars. And, yeah, PR matters to save the climate. Sorry for being a little confrontational, but I had to get this out.

I don't even care if you're correct, but it's vital for the sake of the climate that we maintain a narrative

This attitude is doing more damage than whatever possible misconception the parent comment had. It appears like you are acting on faith, not science. That you don't care about truth, but pushing an agenda.

They're only using the same strategy as climate academics themselves:

    the current diagram with the tree ring only data [Briffa’s] somewhat contradicts the [Mann] multiproxy curve and dilutes the message rather significantly.

    I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.

    What do you think would be the most effective way to radicalise the UN agenda and protect the climate from our current economic and political systems? There are plans for a team to work in USA on a parallel campaign.

    The new program [with people who disagreed] was "unacceptable" to King, says Peter Cox of the U.K.'s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter. "We knew that we would not get to the scientific issues if we went down every rabbit hole of skepticism."

(all from climategate emails)

It's the other way around: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gases-solubility-water-d_...

That's why if the ocean keeps warming sometimes in the future it will start emitting back all that carbon it absorbed so far... which is around 31% of our total emissions, leading to more warming...

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/quantifying-ocean-carbon-sink

Oops, wow, yep. #jetlag

Yep, it's genuinely hard to comprehend the levels of screwed we are in the long run.

I'm not sure if our run will be all that long.

Lost me at the second word in the title.

I need a quantified, ISO-standardized meaning for "ominous" ahead of mentally tagging The Famous Article as "clickbait". At best.

In startup jargon: Earth co announces end of life for most of its product line, unless it receives significant bail out.

> Lost me at the second word in the title.

Don't sweat it, that's what dictionaries are for.

Look at the chart. Looks pretty ominous to me.

It's supposed to.

Disingenuous take. The data itself is ominous. This is not manufactured.

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