from Hacker News

World’s oceans at record high temperature for 80 consecutive days

by edgefield on 6/4/23, 4:58 PM with 119 comments

by submeta on 6/4/23, 6:17 PM
I find myself losing hope for humanity when I observe a significant portion of society in Germany, for instance, either voting for or intending to vote for a party known as the 'Alternative für Deutschland'. This party is primarily defined by what it opposes. Its supporters are often frustrated and resistant to evidence that their meat consumption contributes to climate change, or that fossil fuels exacerbate this global crisis. They seem to long for the past, harking back to the ways of the 1980s, and are generally resistant to change. They often resort to derogatory names for those advocating for environmental responsibility and believe in conspiracy theories about hidden powers controlling the media and society. These theories often involve notions of a deluge of immigrants designed to alter the fabric of Western societies and strip them of their privileges.
Engaging in rational debates with these individuals proves challenging, as they often dismiss any evidence presented as a sign that you are 'woke', deluded, or part of a clandestine group intent on their destruction.
by myshpa on 6/4/23, 6:09 PM
The warming of the oceans could lead to the following consequences:
- Coral reef collapse and loss of marine biodiversity.
- Accelerated sea-level rise, resulting in coastal flooding and displacement of populations.
- Ocean acidification, harming shell-forming organisms and marine ecosystems.
- Disruption of ocean currents, leading to altered weather patterns and increased extreme weather events, potentially causing massive oceanic dead zones leading to
- Release of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) from warming ocean sediments and decaying organic matter, a potential extinction event.
---
Peter Ward: “Oceans - What’s the Worst that Can Happen?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eM1aakTzMw
by bmmayer1 on 6/4/23, 5:35 PM
Scuba diver here. I highly recommend the documentary Chasing Coral about coral bleaching, a direct result of high ocean temperatures (and, I highly recommend taking up scuba now before it's too late :))
by gmuslera on 6/4/23, 5:47 PM
It is not just record, it is well above all the previous records, including some strong El Niño years (that didn’t started yet).
by adrianN on 6/4/23, 5:48 PM
At least renewable energy generation is still following a nice exponential growth curve. It's too slow to prevent dire climate change, but it might be fast enough to prevent complete collapse of technological civilization.
by fallingfrog on 6/4/23, 6:10 PM
I see 3 semi-distinct bands in the data, where there are dense clusters of lines, and gaps in between where the lines are a bit more sparse. It looks to me like the line jumps from the bottom band to the middle band in 1997, then back down, then up again in 2001, and then stays there until 2014/2015 when it jumps up a second time. You can see them better if you remove the mean/+2sigma/-2sigma lines. I wonder the reason for that? Could be I'm just seeing patterns where none exist of course.
Edit: the jumps kind of correspond to moments in time when the solar insolation was on its upswing and the periods when it temporarily slowed kind of correspond to periods when insolation was declining, I think however I'm exceeding my training a bit, perhaps an actual climate scientist could tell us more precisely what's going on.
by scoofy on 6/4/23, 5:45 PM
When some scientific organization comes out with a survivability index map for future locations by year, I'll like and subscribe.
by 29athrowaway on 6/4/23, 6:28 PM
Every society is 3 meals away from total chaos.
What provides those meals is a system built on top of topsoil, fresh water, fish, oil, pollinators, and atmospheric conditions of humidity, temperature, precipitation, etc. And the absence of pollution.
Topsoil is not dirt, it's an habitat for organisms that make soil fertile. It takes many years to regenerate 1 inch of topsoil. Agriculture consumes topsoil faster than it regenerates.
Fresh water is water with low saline content. Desalination does not work at scale, and if it did, it would still make food prices rise. Fresh water is only 2.5% of Earth's water. Rivers are being polluted, groundwater is being pumped faster than it is replenished. Rainwater is not enough to sustain agriculture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q
Sustainable fishing requires harvesting only fish above reproductive age. Fisheries do not care about this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawling
Pollinators everywhere are dying due to habitat destruction and products used in agriculture.
And on top of that we are changing the composition of the atmosphere via pollution, causing it to trap more heat, and causing oceans to become acidic, which in turn causes climate to behave differently in ways that affect agriculture.
In short, it's an ecocide. We are in the middle of an extinction event: the Anthropocene extinction, an extinction event caused by humans. Animals above certain weight are dying and that is an excellent indicator that we are next in line.
Each human has a stomach which is a chemical reactor, and food is its fuel. And as more humans are added to the population the rate at which we process (destroy) the environment accelerates. We are already beyond the point of sustainability and heading towards a predictable collapse.
Putting a single-use plastic container into a recycle bin won't do shit for the environment. Our civilization is just a giant ant death circle following each other's pheromone trails until we collapse collectively.
Not much can be done other than downscale your lifestyle, avoid traveling, go zero waste, stop buying from ecocidal corporations. But this will only delay the inevitable: more environmental impact, and ultimately, global conflict.
Remove the 3 meals from people's tables, and you'll get conflict over the resources that are left. The strategic pieces in this conflict are already being placed on the board.
by pluc on 6/4/23, 6:14 PM
You mean switching to paper straws did nothing?
by tpmx on 6/4/23, 6:03 PM
So it all boils down to how https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/optimum-interpolation-sst is created.
The NOAA 1/4° Daily Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature (OISST) is a long term Climate Data Record that incorporates observations from different platforms (satellites, ships, buoys and Argo floats) into a regular global grid. The dataset is interpolated to fill gaps on the grid and create a spatially complete map of sea surface temperature. Satellite and ship observations are referenced to buoys to compensate for platform differences and sensor biases.
by oneTbrain23 on 6/7/23, 12:02 PM
Do take note, Siberia will thaw and this will give great opportunity to Russians to farm and dominate in future. So at least from their perspective this is good for them. Of course the rest of the world will suffer with USA destine to be dustbowl as foretold in Interstellar.
by _Microft on 6/4/23, 5:49 PM
What does 2σ mean here? Is that referring to a normal distribution with the given mean, i.e. if temperature were following a normal distribution with a mean like from 1982-2011, then 95% of the temperatures would fall into the 2σ range?
by PheonixPharts on 6/4/23, 5:30 PM
It's certainly a strange time to be alive. I was explaining to my child my work in AI, showing him images of himself as a character from his DnD campaign and at the same time am gently introducing him to the increasingly dire state of our climate. For parents of my generation "the talk" is not about sex, it's about the reality that we might not have a future to offer our children.
It feels like I am very literally living the life depicted in sci-fi novels of my youth. Equal parts wonderful and terrifying.
by ioslipstream on 6/4/23, 5:46 PM
For an alternate take on this: https://twitter.com/ethicalskeptic/status/166465744222596300...
His data suggests that the rate of rise in ocean temperatures can not possibly be due to man made circumstances and is instead due to earth core leakage.