Ocean News

Hi Myark, welcome back . . - - - You were sorely missed on the thread . . .

 

Myark - a biased an unsubstantiated guestimate is what the deniers do. Buck up your game.

 

Hi Angelique

 

I haven't read the other replies, but the thing you posted is from 2014 and is another event entirely, some sort of virus.

I was making a dig on that Conway creature, where she said people can always move to the states that have better health insurance if they need it. I know, health insurance is not a subject you have to think about very much. And I actually don't think starfish are especially or particularly lazy.

As for all those starfish, they all died recently and I don't think it was warmer water that did them in but cold water, brought about by extreme weather instigated by climate change.
Tens of thousands of dead starfish wash up on beach after extreme weather https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tens-thousands-dead-starfish-wash-12126152

 

Why climate change is such an important issue
U.K. winter storm kills thousands of starfish
U.K. winter storm kills thousands of starfish https://boingboing.net/2018/03/05/u-k-winter-storm-kills-thousa.html
Storm Emma, a massive weather system that brought bitter cold and snow to the U.K. this past week did a lot of damage to power grids, forced the closure of schools and caused havoc for anyone looking to travel anywhere in Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland (the Republic of Ireland took its share of knocks, too.) Perhaps worst of all, was the destructive effect the drastic drop in temperature had on sea life in the water surrounding the United Kingdom. This YouTube video shot at Ramsgate Beach in Kent, illustrates what a change in temperature can do to a delicate species of animal--if this isn't a prime example of why climate change is such an important issue.


Scientists Find Out What Killed Millions of Starfish
A new study shows warmer ocean temperatures are likely responsible for the mass die-off, threatening the biodiversity of marine life from Alaska to Mexico.
The team analyzed water temperature records taken before, during, and after the wasting episode at locations around the San Juan Islands and Puget Sound in Washington state. They found that as water temperatures rose across the region, so did the risk of infection for sea stars. Sites where water temperatures rose the most left sea stars at highest risk of infection.
Researchers also placed sea stars in aquarium tanks set to temperatures ranging from 54 degrees to 66 degrees Fahrenheit. The hotter the tank, the more quickly starfish succumbed to wasting, Harvell said.
“That confirmed that water temperature can affect mortality,” she said.
With ocean temperatures steadily increasing thanks in part to human-induced climate change, the future of sea stars could be threatened.
Scientists Find Out What Killed Millions of Starfish http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/02/19/sea-star-disease-climate-change

 

Arctic has warmest winter on record: 'It's just crazy, crazy stuff' | The Guardian

The Arctic region experienced its warmest winter on record. Sea ice hit record lows for the time of year, new US weather data revealed on Tuesday.

The land weather station closest to the North Pole, at the tip of Greenland, spent more than 60 hours above freezing in February. Before this year, scientists had seen the temperature there rise above freezing in February only twice before, and then extremely briefly. Last month’s record-high temperatures have been more like those typical of May, said Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute.

In February, Arctic sea ice covered 5.4m sq miles, about 62,000 sq miles smaller than last year’s record low, and it was 521,000 square miles below the 30-year normal...

 

Sea Otters May Be Global Warming Warriors
Sea Otters May Be Global Warming Warriors https://www.livescience.com/23030-sea-otters-may-be-global-warming-warriors.html

 

Transfer of European coastal pollution to the arctic: Radioactive tracers | Science Direct

Abstract
Controlled discharges of man-made radionuclides from the nuclear reprocessing facilities at Sellafield (UK) and La Hague (France) have been utilized to trace the transport of European coastal contaminants to the Barents Sea, the Kara Sea, the Arctic Ocean and the East Greenland Current. The transfer is quantified by a transfer factor (TF), calculated as the quotient between observed concentrations in the environment and an average discharge rate t years earlier, where t is the transport time. A TF value of 1–2 ng m−3/t yr−1 has been found for Sellafield discharges in East Greenland Current Polar Water—a water mass reflecting contaminant levels in Arctic Ocean surface water. Such transfer factors are also valid for other conservatively-behaving pollutants discharged to the European coastal zone. Even non-conservative particle-reactive elements (e.g. plutonium) have now been traced from European coastal waters to the Arctic.

 

The science is nothing new; global warming is causing ice to melt and seas to expand, leading to increased flooding - but the realities have hit home in recent years.
'We share the same backyard': The islands disappearing off Australia https://www.sbs.com.au/news/we-share-the-same-backyard-the-islands-disappearing-off-australia??connectsbs=1&cx_cid=sbs:bench:naca:EN:native:evergreen:2018isappearingIslands
Kathy thinks the at-risk Marshall Islands could be underwater in the next half-century: “50 years… that makes sense to me, but I’m not a scientist,” she says.
But some islands may be uninhabitable well before then.

 

This mind-boggling study shows just how massive sea level rise really is | Washington Post

It may sound ridiculous to even contemplate. But in a new study just out in the open access journal Earth System Dynamics, scientists have actually published an idea and calculations for what it would take to keep the oceans from rising. The idea is to pump excess seawater more than two miles into the air to the top of the Antarctic ice sheet, where it would freeze and stay put — for a very long time, although not forever.

360 billion tons of ocean water would need to be pumped to lower the oceans by one millimeter -- and the oceans are currently rising at a rate of 3mm per year. To pump that volume of water would require 7% of the total energy that we generate each year. Or we could install 850,000 wind turbines around Antarctica to provide the power.

The scale of this proposal is, in the end, self-refuting — which, again, is part of the point.

 

20,000 Scientists Have Now Signed 'Warning to Humanity'
20,000 Scientists Have Now Signed 'Warning to Humanity' https://www.ecowatch.com/warning-to-humanity-scientists-2544973158.html

COMMONWEALTH ACADEMIES OF SCIENCE
CONSENSUS STATEMENT ON CLIMATE CHANGE
12 MARCH
2018
https://rsc-src.ca/sites/default/fi...ent on Climate Change - 12 March 2018 - 2.pdf

 

A solution to plastic in the ocean

 

Climate Change Could Force Over 140 Million to Migrate Within Countries by 2050: World Bank Report

The report, Groundswell – Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, is the first and most comprehensive study of its kind to focus on the nexus between slow-onset climate change impacts, internal migration patterns and, development in three developing regions of the world: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.

It finds that unless urgent climate and development action is taken globally and nationally, these three regions together could be dealing with tens of millions of internal climate migrants by 2050. These are people forced to move from increasingly non-viable areas of their countries due to growing problems like water scarcity, crop failure, sea-level rise and storm surges.

These “climate migrants” would be additional to the millions of people already moving within their countries for economic, social, political or other reasons, the report warns.

 

Chevron says it will not dispute climate science in U.S. lawsuit | Reuters

A Chevron attorney said in court on Wednesday that the company supports scientific conclusions that humans are causing climate change, a response to a lawsuit that accuses five major energy producers of misleading the public for years about their role in global warming.

At a hearing in San Francisco federal court, Chevron attorney Theodore Boutrous also said that the scientific consensus about greenhouse gas emissions did not fully form until the past decade.

The judge asked Boutrous if the other four companies agreed with his presentation, and Boutrous said he was only speaking for Chevron.

“I’m going to ask them at some point if they agree with everything you said,” Alsup said.

 

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch counts 1.8 trillion pieces of trash, mostly plastic | LA Times

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an accumulation of junk that has collected in the waters between California and Hawaii -- and it's getting larger. Twice the size of Texas, the floating mass of about 79,000 metric tons of plastic is up to 16 times larger than previously thought, according to scientists who performed an aerial survey. The results, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, reveal that this plastic blight in the Pacific Ocean is still growing at what the researchers called an "exponential" pace.