Ocean News

Discussion in 'All Things Boats & Boating' started by ImaginaryNumber, Oct 8, 2015.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. SamSam
    Joined: Feb 2005
    Posts: 3,899
    Likes: 200, Points: 63, Legacy Rep: 971
    Location: Coastal Georgia

    SamSam Senior Member

    I'm guessing deniers will take this as proof positive that Anthropogenic Global Warming has peaked and we've dodged the bullet once again. Climate change is done, sea levels have stabilized and all is hunky and dory once again.
     
  2. ImaginaryNumber
    Joined: May 2009
    Posts: 436
    Likes: 59, Points: 28, Legacy Rep: 399
    Location: USA

    ImaginaryNumber Imaginary Member

    How farmers convinced scientists to take climate change seriously | Washington Post

    Almost immediately after the U.S. started atmospheric nuclear testing on the continent in 1951, farmers began to blame the bombs for triggering unseasonable cold snaps and hailstorms that damaged their crops. Congressmen pressed the White House for answers, dragging all branches of the military, as well as the Atomic Energy Commission and Weather Bureau, to testify in hearings... By the end of the decade, the farmers had won the war of public opinion. City-dwellers were just as likely as rural folk to believe in “atom weather.” When atmospheric nuclear weapons testing ended in 1963, so too did public fixation on anthropogenic extreme weather.

    Just when the public forgot about the issue, the very scientists who had previously denied its possibility became obsessed with it. By the end of the decade, these scientists were writing articles about “inadvertent weather and climate modification” by industrial pollutants like greenhouse gases, CFCs and aerosols.

    [​IMG]
     
  3. ImaginaryNumber
    Joined: May 2009
    Posts: 436
    Likes: 59, Points: 28, Legacy Rep: 399
    Location: USA

    ImaginaryNumber Imaginary Member

    Most popular climate change stories of 2017 reviewed by scientists | ClimateFeedback.org

    SUMMARY

    Many stories were written about climate science in 2017, but were the ones that “went viral” scientifically accurate? To find out, we compiled a list of articles with the most comments, shares, and likes on social networks using data from Buzzsumo*. From that list, we selected the articles containing verifiable assertions on the topic of climate science (we searched for articles containing “climate change” or “global warming”, leaving aside stories about politics, or stories about natural disasters with no substantial discussion of climate change).

    We then asked scientists with relevant expertise to provide a brief assessment of their scientific credibility....

    Only about half of the stories are completely accurate...

    The top 5 articles are at least somewhat misleading...


    Misinformation makes it to the top...

    LIST OF ARTICLE REVIEWS...

    [​IMG]
     
  4. ImaginaryNumber
    Joined: May 2009
    Posts: 436
    Likes: 59, Points: 28, Legacy Rep: 399
    Location: USA

    ImaginaryNumber Imaginary Member

    Deadly ocean heatwaves were made over 50 times more likely by climate change, scientists report | The Independent

    A new study, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, explores the causes of the 2016 heatwave in south east Australian seas. It concludes that underwater heatwaves in their study regions had been made 53 times more likely as a result of human-induced climate change. The heatwaves seen in the northern Pacific and Australia in 2016 were both the most intense and longest lasting on record.

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Jan 22, 2018
  5. Angélique
    Joined: Feb 2009
    Posts: 3,003
    Likes: 336, Points: 83, Legacy Rep: 1632
    Location: Belgium ⇄ The Netherlands

    Angélique aka Angel (only by name)

    I'll guess the last above picture is an artist impression of the nowadays Aral Sea, right ?

    [​IMG]

    Below how it once was . . .

    [​IMG]

    Not so long ago, below 1989 & 2008 . . .

    [​IMG]

    ‘‘ From 1960 to 1998, the Aral Sea’s surface area shrank by about 60%, and its volume by 80%. ’’
     
    Last edited: Jan 23, 2018
  6. ImaginaryNumber
    Joined: May 2009
    Posts: 436
    Likes: 59, Points: 28, Legacy Rep: 399
    Location: USA

    ImaginaryNumber Imaginary Member

    Climate engineering, once started, would have severe impacts if stopped | PHYS.org

    It has been proposed that we could cool the Earth by spraying sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to form a cloud that reflects sunlight. This happens naturally, though erratically, during volcanic eruptions. But suddenly stopping the spraying would have a severe global impact on animals and plants, according to a study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The problem is that deliberately cooling the planet would mask any additional warming produced by greenhouse gases. This means that if the world decided to stop geoengineering, say, 50 years later, the greenhouse effect that had built up during that time would warm the planet very rapidly. In many areas, temperatures would rise two to four times faster than historical averages.

    One surprising side effect of rapidly starting geoengineering would be an El Niño warming of the sea surface in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which would cause a devastating drought in the Amazon.

    [​IMG]
     
  7. ImaginaryNumber
    Joined: May 2009
    Posts: 436
    Likes: 59, Points: 28, Legacy Rep: 399
    Location: USA

    ImaginaryNumber Imaginary Member

    We’re about to kill a massive, accidental experiment in reducing global warming | MIT Technology Review

    Studies have found that ships have a net cooling effect on the planet, despite belching out nearly a billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. That’s almost entirely because they also emit sulfur, which can scatter sunlight in the atmosphere and form or thicken clouds that reflect it away. And we’re about to take it away.

    In 2016, the UN’s International Maritime Organization announced that by 2020, international shipping vessels will have to significantly cut sulfur pollution. Specifically, ship owners must switch to fuels with no more than 0.5 percent sulfur content, down from the current 3.5 percent, or install exhaust cleaning systems that achieve the same reduction.

    [​IMG]
     
  8. rwatson
    Joined: Aug 2007
    Posts: 6,163
    Likes: 495, Points: 83, Legacy Rep: 1749
    Location: Tasmania,Australia

    rwatson Senior Member

    I hope you're not advocating abandoning the improvement in ship fuels, which is also for the better health of maritime employees.
    If you want to increase the Albedo protection, water is by far the better way.
    eg.
    geoengineering_big1.jpg


    cloudia.gif
    Geoengineering: Time to get serious? - Eartheasy Blog http://learn.eartheasy.com/2009/03/geoengineering-time-to-get-serious/
     
  9. ImaginaryNumber
    Joined: May 2009
    Posts: 436
    Likes: 59, Points: 28, Legacy Rep: 399
    Location: USA

    ImaginaryNumber Imaginary Member

    A Radical New Scheme to Prevent Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise | The Atlantic

    Geo-engineering, its most enthusiastic advocates will tell you, isn’t only possible. It’s already happening.We know, they say, because we’re doing it—we just call it global warming.

    Michael Wolovick, a glaciologist at Princeton University, has studied whether a set of targeted geo-engineering projects could hold off the worst sea-level rise for centuries, giving people time to adapt to climate change and possibly reverse it. He is exploring whether building underwater walls at the mouth of the world’s most unstable glaciers—huge piles of sand and stone, stretching for miles across the seafloor—would change how those glaciers respond to the warming ocean and atmosphere, dramatically slowing or reversing their collapse.

    If they work as planned, these large walls could make glaciers last as much as 10 times longer than they otherwise would. In rudimentary simulations, the walls make a glacier that would collapse in 100 years last for another millennium.

    [​IMG]
     
  10. ImaginaryNumber
    Joined: May 2009
    Posts: 436
    Likes: 59, Points: 28, Legacy Rep: 399
    Location: USA

    ImaginaryNumber Imaginary Member

    11 Billion Pieces of Plastic Are Riddling Corals With Disease | The Atlantic

    Coral reefs are meant to be riots of color, but those that Joleah Lamb studied in the Indo-Pacific were colorful for all the wrong reasons. Their branches and crevices were frequently festooned with plastic junk. “We came across chairs, chip wrappers, Q-tips, garbage bags, water bottles, old nappies,” she says. Whenever Lamb or her colleagues from Cornell University found a piece of plastic, they would lift it up to study the health of the coral underneath. And almost every time, that coral would be riddled with disease. “It’s just a disaster under there,” she says.

    Over four years, the team analyzed more than 124,000 corals, spanning 159 reefs in four countries: Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, and Australia. They found that under normal circumstances, just 4 percent of corals are afflicted by some kind of disease. But infections strike down 89 percent of corals that come into contact with plastic.

    This problem is only going to get worse. Half of all the plastic that has ever existed was made in just the last 13 years, and production is still accelerating.

    [​IMG]
     
  11. ImaginaryNumber
    Joined: May 2009
    Posts: 436
    Likes: 59, Points: 28, Legacy Rep: 399
    Location: USA

    ImaginaryNumber Imaginary Member

    Climate Change Could Make Borrowing More Expensive | Bloomberg

    Bond rating agencies such as Moody’s Investors Service and S&P Global Ratings are looking at whether they should be including more disaster forecasting in calculating the grades they give to government debt and to companies in industries ranging from insurance to construction.

    In November, Moody’s warned coastal cities and states to address their climate risks or face possible downgrades. A month later, it issued a report highlighting 18 small islands, from Fiji to the Bahamas, that were “particularly susceptible to climate change.”

    Lower ratings can translate into higher borrowing costs for companies, and investors are pushing ratings firms to give them more of a warning about the risks.

    [​IMG]
     
  12. ImaginaryNumber
    Joined: May 2009
    Posts: 436
    Likes: 59, Points: 28, Legacy Rep: 399
    Location: USA

    ImaginaryNumber Imaginary Member

    Bigger, Faster Avalanches, Triggered by Climate Change | New York Times

    When a flat glacier collapses, it can move a lot of snow and ice, but in slow motion. Steep glaciers appear perilously affixed to mountain walls, and when they do collapse they create avalanches with speeds up to 250 m.p.h. In Tibet, however, researchers saw a frightening hybrid of the two; a flat glacier that produced speeds of up to 300 kilometers per hour, or 186 m.p.h.

    Normally, the cold air in the Tibetan plateau can’t hold much moisture. But warmer air caused by climate change — the region has warmed 0.4 degrees Celsius per decade since the 1960s — holds more moisture, leading to more winter snowfall. In the summer months, there has also been more rain. That water created crevices through the glacier and saturated the ground below, acting as a kind of lubricant. With more weight on top and less friction to hold the glacier in place on the bottom, it collapsed.

    An analysis of these glaciers was published in Nature Geoscience.

    [​IMG]
    View from July 2016, left, showing the aftermath of one of the avalanches.
    The image at right is from June 2016, before both glaciers collapsed.
    Credit NASA Earth Observatory


     
    Last edited: Jan 28, 2018
  13. ImaginaryNumber
    Joined: May 2009
    Posts: 436
    Likes: 59, Points: 28, Legacy Rep: 399
    Location: USA

    ImaginaryNumber Imaginary Member

    How climate change weakens coral ‘immune systems’ | Ohio State University

    What we think of as coral are really the animal host, symbiotic algae and symbiotic microbes all living together. We no longer think of coral as a symbiosis between two organisms, but a symbiosis among three organisms, what is called a holobiont. Researchers have demonstrated how two separate effects of climate change combine to destabilize different populations of coral microbes—that is, unbalance the natural coral “microbiome”—opening the door for bad bacteria to overpopulate corals’ mucus and their bodies as a whole.

    Two species of coral that are extremely common around the world, staghorn coral and yellow scroll coral, were tested by increasing the temperature and acidity of the seawater. The more temperature-sensitive staghorn coral had a weaker microbiome, bleached in response to stress, and showed signs of overall health decline. Conversely, the temperature-hardy yellow scroll coral had the strongest microbiome, did not bleach and had the best health overall – suggesting that something about the relationships among its animal, algae and microbe components makes it especially resilient.

    The study appeared in the journal PLOS ONE

    [​IMG]
     
  14. ImaginaryNumber
    Joined: May 2009
    Posts: 436
    Likes: 59, Points: 28, Legacy Rep: 399
    Location: USA

    ImaginaryNumber Imaginary Member

    2018 to see Third Consecutive Mass Coral Bleaching Event for the Great Barrier Reef? | Robert Scribbler

    Because corals are so sensitive to temperature change, it is expected that about 90 percent of the world’s corals will be lost if the Earth warms by 1.5 C. Meanwhile, virtually all of the corals (more than 95 percent) could be gone if the world warms by 2 C. With global temperatures at around the 1.1 C threshold and rising, we are in the danger range for corals at this time. And the world stands at the brink of losing the majority of this vital species with the potential to see 90 percent or more of the world’s corals lost over the next 3 decades under various scenarios in which fossil fuel burning continues.

    During 2018, La Nina in the Eastern Pacific has generated relatively cooler surface waters in a number of locations. And we would normally expect La Nina to beat back global coral bleaching severity. However, an anomalous hot blob of ocean water between Australia and New Zealand is causing an unusual spike in ocean temperatures for the zone east of Australia. The result is that the GBR is again at risk.

    [​IMG]
     

  15. ImaginaryNumber
    Joined: May 2009
    Posts: 436
    Likes: 59, Points: 28, Legacy Rep: 399
    Location: USA

    ImaginaryNumber Imaginary Member

Loading...
Similar Threads
  1. hoytedow
    Replies:
    147
    Views:
    16,065
  2. sun
    Replies:
    0
    Views:
    749
  3. Squidly-Diddly
    Replies:
    7
    Views:
    1,039
  4. JosephT
    Replies:
    11
    Views:
    1,792
  5. Waterwitch
    Replies:
    44
    Views:
    6,154
  6. Milehog
    Replies:
    1
    Views:
    3,785
  7. daiquiri
    Replies:
    2,748
    Views:
    126,279
  8. rwatson
    Replies:
    0
    Views:
    2,042
  9. BPL
    Replies:
    0
    Views:
    2,317
  10. urisvan
    Replies:
    8
    Views:
    2,352
Forum posts represent the experience, opinion, and view of individual users. Boat Design Net does not necessarily endorse nor share the view of each individual post.
When making potentially dangerous or financial decisions, always employ and consult appropriate professionals. Your circumstances or experience may be different.
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.