Extreme Heat Has Killed an Estimated 1 Billion Small Sea Creatures (axios.com) 53
The combination of extreme heat and drought that has scorched the Western United States and Canada over the past two weeks has killed hundreds of millions of mussels, clams and other marine animals, the New York Times reports. From a report: An estimated 1 billion small sea creatures died during the heat wave in the Salish Sea at the end of June, according to marine biologist Chris Harley, per the Washington Post. The sea creatures' deaths coincide with the heat wave that hit the Pacific Northwest last week, which led to more than a hundred human deaths.
A study by an international team of climate researchers said the heat wave would have been "virtually impossible without human-caused climate change." Mussels attach themselves to rocks and other surfaces, but they generally can't survive temperatures over 100 degrees for extended periods of time, CNN reports.
Re:CLIMATE CHANGE has killed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Education and industrialization has shown to be sufficient to reduce populations. Specifically, girls education. Japan and much of Europe have declining populations. The US would be declining if not for immigration.
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Throw in easy to access birth control, something that is under attack by the religious control freaks.
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"These projections are pretty alarming, can we dial things back a bit?" "No! I want a smoother ride."
"Umm we're starting to see shit happening, we haveta dial it back more severely now." "No. It's fake news!"
"WE'RE SEEING ACTUAL DEATH NOW!" "Keep your damn hands off my gasoline. Tell you what tho, let's pivot towards reducing the population"
Re:CLIMATE CHANGE has killed... (Score:4, Insightful)
So with 7.67 billion people, an average age of 30 years old, and an average life expectancy of 72.5 years, we'll get to a billion or two... when exactly?
Half of it is managed population decline only if you start throwing people into gas chambers. Time to rebalance your assessment.
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No doubt [worldometers.info]. But that decline is not of a magnitude and rate sufficient to deal with a good "half" f climate change within any reasonable time frame. The idea that you're going to trim 5.5. billion people from the planet by 2100. The low end estimates [wikipedia.org] have us returning to 7 billion by 2100.
Strawman.
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But that decline is not of a magnitude and rate sufficient to deal with a good "half" f climate change within any reasonable time frame.
That heavily begs the question, what is a reasonable time frame and why?
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That's not what begging the question means, and read the IPCC reports [www.ipcc.ch] if you have such a question, why don't you.
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That's not what begging the question means,
It definitely does, read what you wrote again.
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It definitely does not, and you read what I wrote gain. That sentence does not have a premise that any particular date is a reasonable time frame. You're connecting up a subsequent sentence with an example time frame, which I've adequately justified.
Now bugger off you little denialist wannbe pedant.
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And health care! In many places, people have lots of children because they're hedging against their kids dying and being left with no offspring to care for them when they get old. So reliable and available health care also drops birth rates.
Re: CLIMATE CHANGE has killed... (Score:1)
Why rebalance? It's exactly what he plans.
It's been a quiet, but real goal of the environmentalist movement that mass human deaths are a necessity.
Population control, sure... (Score:1)
Look at the population pyramid of Africa, and think about what effects it will have. Climate change, sure, but also warfare, migrants, famine... Take your pick, they're all coming.
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Africa's birth rate is declining and has been for many decades, one imagines corresponding to the reduction of infant mortality.
https://www.macrotrends.net/co... [macrotrends.net]
Also not all populations are equal in environmental impact. It's a very fuzzy measure sure, but https://data.worldbank.org/ind... [worldbank.org] South Sudanese produce 0.1 metric tons of CO2 and Qatar produces 34.2 South Africa being one of the more industralised is in the middle but many of the other countries in Africa are quite low.
Warfare, migrants, famine are
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Excellent idea! Rich people can afford to have large families; poor people cannot. In the fullness of time, the rich will be able to stop buying politicians and just elect them directly instead.
Fre oyster-buffet for other fish (Score:2)
It doesn't go to waste.
Re: Fre oyster-buffet for other fish (Score:2)
Probably mainly birds but the issue is that after the buffet is finished, the food chain will be rather hard hit for awhile. People often fail to see anything past the immediate which returns to the root of debate about climate change.
Re: Fre oyster-buffet for other fish (Score:4, Informative)
It's not just climate change. China, under Mao, failed miserably to see anything past the immediate when it came to killing the four pests [amusingplanet.com], particularly sparrows.
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I am going to go out on a limb and say Mao wasn't that well advised in science, especially something like ecology. Mao's vision was to modernize China so western nations could stop strong arming them, though even the Japanese were kicking their ass so it's not just the west but there is a century where China suffered severely under the British.
So the comparison is kind of like saying Roosevelt didn't do enough to avoid the dust bowl. Also these kind of "pest" kill offs aren't that rare for new found leaders
The upside is (Score:1)
you don't have to cook them first
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Of course there is no way that the tide rises and falls, the moon does not even move!
Do you think that it might be possible that muscles are fine when the tide is in and they are under water but maybe not so fine when the tide pulls back during the day exposing them to the sun? Apparently you do not live near an ocean.
Re:Salish Sea water temp = 55F not 100+F (Score:5, Insightful)
Boy, it's a good thing that tides don't exist in your world, because sea life living in a tidal zone and being exposed directly to sun and air with air temperatures over 100F [cnn.com] would be really screwed.
Oh wait, that's exactly what's being described here.
"There's 4,000-some miles of shoreline in the Salish Sea, so when you start to scale up from what we're seeing locally to what we're expecting, based on what we know where mussels live, you get to some very big numbers very quickly," he said. "Then you start adding in all the other species, some of which are even more abundant."
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The air gets to 100F in the city of desert, but some below sea level rocks are not going to be 100F.
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If you can't even be bothered to read the article, don't comment. Again, tides exist, and these "below sea level" rocks were exposed to 110F air temperatures, at low tide, during the daytime [climate.gov]
The heat reached right to the coast, too, as Quillayute, Washington, on the Pacific Ocean reached an all-time record of 110 degrees Fahrenheit, a âoemereâ 45 degrees above-average
so that yes, the surfaces of tho
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I understand tides, but ground temps and air temps are different things.
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The mussel attached to the rocks are in the air, on the surface of the rocks, not within the rocks. And yes, ground temperatures and air temperatures are different things. Ground temperatures in sunlight are higher [whas11.com] by the time you hit mid-afternoon.
Just keep on digging that hole.
Re:Salish Sea water temp = 55F not 100+F (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, you clearly don't know what you're talking about. In this part of the world, the tidal range is a good 12 to 14 feet. It just so happened that we were in spring tides (largest tides) and the low tide of the day occurred in the early afternoon, the hottest time of the day. Additionally, the mussels and the like are typically dark coloured, causing them to absorb more heat.
So yeah, it was a perfect storm. Tide went way out, exposing huge swathes of mussel beds, right at the perfect time for them to be cooked in the sun, in the hottest weather that's ever been experienced here.
This can also be confirmed using one's nose. I'm a recreational sailor here on the Sailish Sea, and the stench at low tide is beyond anything that I've ever smelled before in my 40 years. There is an enormous amount of biomass rotting away.
As far as the numbers, sure, it's an educated statistical approximation. We know the shoreline, the typical foreshore area, and how much is exposed at these very low tides. Multiply that by the typical density of life, and you wind up with the numbers presented.
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It will be interesting to see how long it takes the ones that DIDN'T get cooked to repopulate the areas that did.
Re:With more to come. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, those imaginary leftist straw men living rent-free in your head sure are scary! Gosh they certainly are hypocritical, aren't they!
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Go fuck a donkey, Dulcinea.
Re: With more to come. (Score:2, Troll)
The difficultly you will run into with the far left is that they're extremely fractured at the moment. Most often they have an issue they think is THE MOST IMPORTANT and will cancel any leftists who don't align with the cause of the week full throttle. Thankfully "The Left" is getting a bit smarter and recognizing everyone has a part to play in pursuing the causes that engage them
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The difficultly you will run into with the far left is that they're extremely fractured at the moment.
Well, that's to be expected when the nominal right devolved from having substantial views to Trump-worship. The ones concerned with issues rather than cult worship are now tagged 'leftist', so at this point the oversimplification of 'left' and 'right' which was already bad enough is even worse in a context where one half is hijacked for just odd reasons.
On the nuclear front, it's easy to see what happened if you look at reactor construction projects over time. There was a steady rate of new reactors up unt
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This is why I don't like 'left' versus 'right', it's not one spectrum for everything.
1) There are plenty of people saying nuclear is an important component of moving off of fossil fuels. This will require reworking regulations to go towards safe, but more cost effective approaches. For example, PBR look quite promising and may pave the way to more manageable approach to nuclear safety.
2) This is unfortunate, particularly when natural gas plants get spun up to back fill the lost nuclear capacity. However, si
Re: The Internet has died. (Score:2)
So in the end, what made you decide not to get the surgery?
Dear God! (Score:2)
Won't somebody please think of the [youtube.com] small sea creatures!?
Summary Forgot the Most Important Part (Score:4, Interesting)
Mussels attach themselves to rocks and other surfaces, but they generally can't survive temperatures over 100 degrees for extended periods of time, CNN reports.
Where's the context? The ocean was 100 degrees?! Oh, wait, there's an answer in TFA (and should have been included in the summary)...
"A very low tide in the afternoon in the Strait of Georgia that happened to coincide with the hottest part of the day, exposing the sea animals to the worst of the extreme heat," the Post reports.
The CNN article elaborates:
At this time of the year, low tide hits at the hottest part of the day in the area, so the animals can't make it until the tide comes back in, [zoology professor Christopher Harley] said.
So, exposure to air at low tide + temps (especially surface temps!) over 100 degrees = fried seafood. Got it! Makes sense!
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Well, CNN is a little wrong there, High and low tides shift about 26 minutes per day due to the combination of the earth spinning on its axis, the earth moving in its orbit, and the moon moving in its orbit. As such, the tides are constantly shifting (but relatively easy to predict mathematically) but it's not "at this time of year." Rather the correct language would be "At this point in the tidal cycle, extra low tides happened to occur in early afternoon, the hottest part of the day."
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Except the CNN article is wrong. Tides follow a lunar cycle (about 50 minutes later each day) and every year is different when it comes to the timing of the tides. This year happened to be an extra low tide in the hot afternoon.
No one seems to be mentioning that with all the filter feeders dead, there is also likely to be algae blooms and such.
Why is no context provided? (Score:2)
One billion from a population of what? 1.00000001 billion? Or trillions? Why is there no context provided to these numbers? What is the narrative or agenda here?
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This would be the reporting of the first evidence of the impact of heat on the environment. Don't worry you will have plenty more, plants and insects dying off. Don't worry the weed and pest species will spring back first, the predators who kept the numbers down will take longer. You will have an interesting time of it, various plagues of insects, have fun.