Addressing carbon pollution has come too late for billions of intertidal animals in the PNW.
The extreme heatwave baked sea creatures in their shells in Western Canada - CNN
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I see this and 3meterswell and Lila leap to mind. There are, no doubt, others here who are experiencing this first hand right now. There was a pretty in-depth discussion of this on NPR recently. Recovery from this will be slow and the ecological implications will likely be large. Mussels just arenât on the top of the list of priorities for most of us, myself included - and that is a major oversight on the part of most of us, Iâd guess. And the problem isnât just carbon/heat, though thatâs what seems to have brought about the current PNW calamity .
Here on my âhome watersâ in Wisconsin freshwater mussel species are in trouble, have been for a while, and its not just here. Again, NPR seems to have had an eye on this and before anyone outside of DNR circles has noticed or spoken of it publicly in any depth. (At least to my limited knowledge.) This is from 2019:
Quaggas and zebra mussels seem to be doing OK thoughâŚ
The âecosystem servicesâ provided by mussels have been underestimated by myself and most others, I think. Iâm not holding my breath for the phrase âcritical infrastructureâ to be applied to their legal protection though. âShe says ecology, he says economy, letâs call the whole thing offâ seems to be the popular song of the day. Got the short-termitis blues.
And if we care as much about the water weâre paddling in as the boat weâre paddling in, this is a paddle-related topic. Its not just PNW paddlers who are on the âfront line.â
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Right on target, and the economy seems to garner the most importance. Being trained in the biological sciences and sciences in general should be a requirement for ALL economist. Our planetâs ecosystem components are the basic âcritical infrastructureâ that allows for a human economy to even exist! Human Hubris magnified by a population in the billions is an unimaginably destructive thing.
As for freshwater mussels they have been on a long decline. The many different native species here in SC have been mostly displaced by the small Asian Clam.
Iâd take anything government media says with a grain of salt. It would be better for us to go back to global cooling and the new ice age as the settled science and besides, I like cooler weather better.
I find it preferable to trust science searching for the facts rather than entertainment for profit disguised as news, and climate change spread over tens of thousands of years rather than in a matter of decades. Regardless what we choose to believe the facts will remain, and science will continue to try and understand them.
I tend to agree it would be better if we allowed nature to run itâs course over the millennia than what is currently happening at the hand of man. However, it looks like we will be âsweatingâ the future instead of being âcoolâ about it.
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Yes it is too late. But maybe climate deniers will come to their senses when their fields dry up and the river and lakes are dry. I spent the last two weeks visiting our farm on the Utah Idaho Border, and visiting my youngest son in Portland. Very long road trip. Irrigation water to run out in Utah in early August. Temperatures too hot to drive across Mojave in daytime (119 F, my car is too old), 106 F in Weiser Idaho!, 111 F outside of Pendelton OR, Shasta Lake is almost dry, fires burning all around around the tree line on Mt Shasta. Dead yellow rice fields in NorCal. 106 near San Luis Obisbo (that lovely non-airconditioned retirement hospot, ) 102 at Pismo Beach. Central Valley too hot 112-114 F for my old car. And on and on.
They will not come to their senses.
We are about to map the Nearshore of Puget Sound. Please check out EarthViews and let us know if you know of any paddlers in the area.
The world will be heated up somewhat soon and it wonât be from climate.
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Iâm a big fan of science too, but groups tend to be on a crusade about some things and usually at the base of their beliefs is more about controlling other people rather than just follow what the science shows.
Anyone remember the 70s-80s when the âsettled scienceâ was global cooling and the new ice age? Yeah, noaa promoted that too along with all the âeducation institutionsâ. And there was only 25 years left of oil on the planet. A lot of the peopleâs beliefs go back to rachel carsonâs âsilent springâ book.
That crusade to control others (conserve or else we all die!) started out as global cooling and the new ice age, then when the data didnât support that, it went to global warming and the ice melt. then when data didnât support that it went to something unproveable, âclimate changeâ. Ummmm yeah, climates do change. Utah used to be a jungle IIRC.
This emotional crusade has caused âscientistsâ to actually change the data to get their desired outcomes. That is NOT science. That is cynical manipulation with the intent of lying to force something upon others. NOAA has also been caught manipulating the data. Even things like sample sizing or population size of statistics have been altered to get the result they wanted, be it cooling, warming, or just changing.
When a population is gaslighted, manipulated, the first victim is science. The second is so called âjournalismââŚthat has been replaced with âadvocacy journalismâ.
Humans in good faith think we can change something as large as
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I am a retired environmental consultant and worked for years with meteorology and air quality issues. We know the climate is warming because we can measure it. The question is why? The answers are complicated and not easy to prove.
Drier climates like those in the West, typically show greater variability than wetter climates. I live in northern Nevada and there is no doubt this is a hot summer. We are in a drought. Last year we did not have one day over 100 degrees. This year we have been up around 100 for weeks.
The climate record is short only a little over 125 years. We can use glacial varves and tree ring data to examine climate in earlier times.
When I hear people talk about this yearâs unprecedented drought, I would like them to think about the standing dead forest under neath Lake Tahoe. It took a long time for the lake to drop 100 feet and then stay there long enough for a forest to grow. Now that was a drought.
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Actually the data collected by David Keeling starting in 1958 on Mauna Lou, Hawaii was already showing the rapid increase of CO2 in the global atmosphere, and the green house effect as a consequence was being discussed in my science classes in 1970. Donât conflate reporters accounts and news as entertainment with science.
It is true that we are in an interglacial period and another ice age is coming, but not in the near future but thousands of years in the future. They last about 40,000 years, and we are at about 17,000 years into our current interglacial period. That type of slow change allows for life on earth to adapt. Drastic change over a couple of hundred years is orders of magnitude more destructive to life on earth.
The main resource that may be the first Global shortage is fresh water. Destroying the Amazonian rainforest will have a huge impact of the annual water cycle in the Northern Hemisphere. Deforestation help to turn the fertile crescent into a much more arid region. Depletion and contamination of the aquafers of this country, as well as higher average temperatures will have significant impact on the nations agriculture.
Science is about understanding the true nature of the word around us. Scientific thought changes as new data and scientific discoveries are made. This is a strength of the scientific method not a weakness.
Much of human history is about controlling people. Nothing new there. It can better the human condition or worsen it. We in a democracy get to help direct that control for good or bad. At least science allows for fact based choices to be made. I prefer that to self serving biases of the powerful few making the choices.
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Where I live up on Lake Erie 18,000 years ago we were under a 2.5 mile thick layer of ice that dug out the lakes as it moved. I would have to say from then till now we have experienced global warming. I donât think a great deal of that was man made warming though.
Mankind managed to survive that and grew in numbers and evolved to where we are today despite it.
Dinosaurs were in contrast about 65 million years ago and their stay here was a good 150 million years. Many feel that was also a climate event.
Everyone is free to believe how much man has caused in the last 150-200 years. That is like a blink of the eye on the time line. Then we hear people talk year to year change or I have even heard people say âMy god it was 95 two days ago and today it is 65 this world is so crazyâ.
As to CO2 my understanding is we are at one historical low point of CO2 and elevating it will promote positive global changes.
I remember that time well. And the way the theory went, at least as some then saw it (and forgive me if this is something youâre already familar with), was that global warming, counterintuitively, might trigger an ice age. I had a prof back then who spent his summers drilling glacial ice cores and analyzing the gasses found in the bubbles. The thinking, a theory that he was investigating, was that an increase in CO2 and the resultant increase in average global temperatures would increase the evaporation rates of water over the entire planet. This would result in more moisture in the atmosphere, increased cloud cover over much of the planet and, of special significance, increased snowfall at the poles.
Ice sheets advance when the winter snowfall accumulation exceeds the amount the snow melts during the summer, regardless of temperature. Increased cloud cover coupled with the increasing reflectivity of greater areas of snow and increased polar cloud cover would favor the advancement of ice sheets until a tipping point was reached when temperatures would drop. And that drop would continue until evaporation rates decreased causing decreased snowfall and would halt glacial advance.
In short, they were looking for a negative feedback loop that would allow the average planetary temperature, like the thermostat in your house controlling the furnace, to cycle over a range of temperatures, avoiding the temperature extremes seen on planets lacking earthâs surface water cover.
Turned out not to be true⌠but the idea wasnât insane and, when understood, shouldnât be the subject of mockery. (Maybe it could be called âthe optimistâs fallacyâ and arenât we all subject to similar errors of logic?) There are negative feedback loops found all over the place in nature⌠why would anyone assume that they donât apply to average temperatures or pretend to know the limits of the scale to which they might apply?
Thatâs how science works, and this isnât some blinding news flash. Been with us since the Enlightenment and has served us well. Not all ideas are correct, in fact most arenât, but that is only revealed by investigation. And it takes time and examination by various methods.
Plate tectonics was the big theory of contention back then, as I recall. The idea just made some folks crazy. There were plenty of outspoken plate tectonics deniers back them, and they werenât dummies.
Skepticism is not a bad stance to take regarding any source of information and knowledge is ultimately always tentative⌠but some knowledge is more tentative than other. One is usually on firmer ground accepting (tentatively) the findings of someone who has studied the subject they are speaking on. And who knows the difference between findings and taking a survey of what âmany people think.â Many people spend most of their time thinking about something else, quite possibly to good effect. But apparently many people also think that dinosaurs and people coexisted after extensively studying Ally Oop and the Flintstones. But that doesnât mean their thinking on other subjects is to be dismissed out of hand⌠That might be exactly the person I would first consult if I had a comic collection I wanted to find the value of.
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The initial link in the OP was from CNN. CNN has a very strong bias in one direction of the âscienceâ and then with their writing and producing skills are good at embellishing the story in the direction they want.
Example the other day when the condo fell in Fla the question evolved in their reporting and eventually asking the government official the question âDo you think the cause could be climate change?â the person being interviewed cleverly phrased the answer we donât know yet but that could be a possibility, and the rest of the conversation went in the direction it was a likely cause and we desperately need infrastructure to hold the seas back among a dozen other things.
There is so much of this polluting of the science in certain groups that I no longer give the reporting any credit even when it may well be correct.
This idea of carbon credits and what carbon is good and what is bad is hard to figure out. Not very scientific IMO but a great way to direct social outcome. Iâm told burning wood as a fuel is a good form of CO2 release as the CO2 has only been trapped in the wood a short time say 50 years, but burning coal is bad as the CO2 has been trapped a very long time. The odd thing is a tree rotting on the forest floor is giving off CO2 the same as if you burn it just slower. It is an oxidation process. As more CO2 enters the air plants grow faster and better and sink the CO2. There are many scientific reports explaining where the CO2 is going but the media doesnât report the balancing act of CO2.
The carbon produced by those who want to be in control is good, the carbon you proletariat create is bad unless controlled. Simple.
Does anyone else notice that when it gets real hot, it is climate change on the news, but if it is breaking record lows, its weather and doesnt count?
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What I have noticed is that the global warming crowd claims itâs just weather when there is a cold spell, but it is climate change when there is a hot spell.
The real weather/climate people say that the average Earth temperature has not changed a bit in the past 60 years and the 60 years before that it might have risen a tiny bit. I personally have witnessed 78 years of weather in my little part of this world and as my Grandfather told me many years ago when I asked him in his 80 something years of observing weather had he noticed a trend. His answer was âNo, just that some years are colder than others.â That about sums it up for me too. Anyway, weather and the climate will do what it will do in spite of what man does, or doesnât do. So man should do what he can to try to keep the air as clean as we can, but keep it reasonable and doable.
One large forest fire, or active volcano can cancel all of our best intensions, but keep on keeping on anyway. We should all be aware also that at least some theorists show how global warming eventually does in some cases bring on an Ice Age. And never doubt that the one unit that does have the greatest affect on the weather and the climate is the suns variable energy output.
I suppose NOAA isnât a real weather/climate organization.
Climate Change: Global Temperature | NOAA Climate.gov
Growing up in FL I remember using hurricane tracking maps each summer We would plot the coordinates each time they were posted to hopefully see where the hurricane might eventually go. There was always a lot of uncertainty until it came close. Now the hurricane track predictions have become very accurate projecting the probable locations many days in advance because of the computational power of computers and impressive modeling based on the current scientific understanding of the atmosphere. I am impressed by the science that can do this.
As a commercial beekeeper from 1985 to 2001 I payed close attention to the timing of the bloom for many species of plants. I always enjoyed seeing the Red Maple bloom slowly move northward As I would travel back and forth from South FL to the Piedmont of SC. The Red Maple blooms very early in the year adding a reddish cast to the trees. It was a sign that the bees would be coming out of their winter dormancy. I could watch this blush of red tinted maple limbs as it moved north from FL through GA and into SC arriving toward the end of February. I would be traveling back and forth between my home in SC and my winter bee yards in FL that pollinated winter crops, and would go on orange groves for honey production in early February. I became attuned to the seasonal changes that drove the life cycle of the bee hives. This timing is changing.
I suspect a change in seasonal timing is a better indicator of climate than isolated weather events.
I can say with certainty here in SC that spring comes earlier now than it did back in the 1980s
My personal experience here in SC hunting turkeys every year since 1983 is that the dogwood bloom has come earlier as time has passed. Why am I talking about Dogwood? April first has been opening day for turkey season in the Piedmont since I have lived here. The woods would be grey, and the leaves on the trees would be still just dormant buds. there would be frost on the ground, and cold as I listened in the dark before the dawn for a gobble. The dogwood in the forest would not bloom for two more weeks in mid April. The snowy white of the Dogwood bloom would shine through the grey woods. They heralded a forest change to green with the flush of new leaves. Before the month was over the woods would be green.
These days the dogwood bloom in the forest before April first. The trees become green earlier too. The frost is more rare than in the past. Would you ascribe these changes to weather or climate? This change in the seasonal timing here in SC has taken place in just 4 decades.
Believe what you want. This is my experience, and yes this is antidotal evidence not rigorous science, but the bees, the Dogwoods, and the forest have influenced what I believeâŚ
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The Fiber of Optics
In the blink of an eye
Lucyâs left Olduvai.
Branson and Bezos will fly others away.
For leeching hearts hemorrhagic
thereâs no meatier logic,
stoking Brahmsâ Vampire Requiemâs play.
So letâs grow in numbers.
Evolution needs plumbers.
I think the backup is heading our way,
where thereâs no balancing act
when the last forest tract
took last exit from excessive free way.
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I donât know where you got it that I was just relying on entertainment. Thatâs sort of condescending of you, like only you have the real science or the truth and others are just stupid people who use entertainment as a source for their information. But therin lies a kernel of truthâmany people thought Gov Palin did say what turned out to be from a skit on saturday night live.
In the universities and colleges in the 70s and 80s, they taught âglobal cooling and the new ice ageâ. I was there then and it was so pervasive that I thought moving to missouri should be something I should do. This is academia who put forth the âsettled scienceâ of that era.
I think I also said that NOAA in boulder said the same thing, global cooling is the threat. So many leftists quickly discounted this, so I went back and found NOAA documentation and presented it to them. Of course I never heard from them again. I bet I still have it on my computer somewhere, but like I said, when Iâve put out something contrary to their worldview/POV, they donât consider it, they just disappear and attack somewhere else or someone else. Thatâs always been amazing to me when people do that. It does show how some people can be programmed to not think and/or not accept anything contrary to what they were âschooledâ in.
That also was the era in which we were told there was only 25 years worth of oil left in the world. I hope we all can agree that that âscienceâ was nothing but a guess based on the desired outcomes of some people. Those outcomes was that we serfs would change our lifestyles to âconserveâ. The âbrick in the toiletâ era.
Changing of the data after the factâŚthe same thing happened at gulf war 1. So many people who hated president bush stated there were no wmds in iraq. It was a UN mandate that resulted in that war and that was he refused to let UN inspectors inspect his wmd sites. The UNâs IAEA even had their analysis that stated he had wmds and programs in place to manufacture them. But in 2003 there was a full court press against pres bush, so they attacked his strengthâthe war. And the IAEA inspectors reports disappeared. I knew I should have DLâd it, but I didnât. I donât remember if they did another one or just didnât replace that original one. This is one of many examples how âscienceâ is changed to give someone/group the desired political outcomes they want. Same with with noaa. Their âhockeystickâ historical graph is nothing more than lying with statistics. IIRC they did that thru grouping to get what they wanted.
There never was any â97% of scientistsâ. That was a lie. There were though, 300 scientists who wanted noaa investigated when they removed 15 years from their global warming dataâŚ