Everything fails at the threshold we are now reaching. Our civilization doesn't survive it. Democracy has its throat slit by fascism and theocracy, as people, afraid, angry, desperate, turn to fundamentalist religion or authoritarian brutality to give them answers — or just a meal. Economies become mechanisms for basic survival, not opportunity or prosperity. Society and community are destroyed by the bitter every-man-for-himself quest for self-preservation. This is the world we're heading into, and you can see it now spreading, from America to India to Europe and beyond. Umair Haque
The UK's Met Office describes an "unheard-of" marine heatwave off the coasts of Ireland and the United Kingdom that will take a horrible toll on marine life. The extraordinary sea temperatures have been labeled a Category 5 (beyond extreme) marine heatwave by NOAA, as the North Sea currently has the hottest anomalous ocean water on the planet. The remaining red and brown colors on the map above and below are Category 4 extreme heating.
This heatwave means there will be nutrient and oxygen disruption, disruption of the marine food web with serious harm to fisheries, and heating the islands downwind.
In a rapidly changing world from predictable weather to chaos, crops are at risk of failure simultaneously in all major food baskets. If anyone thought we could eat seafood instead, your bubble has popped. Take a peek in your pantry and think about it.
The marine system is unchartered waters. We have not seen the situation since records began. We will be flying blind this summer and in 2024. Expect the unexpected.
The temperatures off England's NE coast and Ireland's west coast are as high as nine degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Coastal waters are 70 degrees, and people could swim in that if it weren't for the release of raw sewage that the conservative UK government has so far not addressed. The UK has privatized water, and those companies do not regard land and sea ecosystems as worth saving.
“The world has changed. I see it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, For none now live who remember it.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien“Heat, like on land, stresses marine organisms. In other parts of the world, we have seen several mass mortalities of marine plants and animals caused by ocean heatwave which have caused hundreds of millions of pounds of losses, in fisheries income, carbon storage, cultural values and habitat loss. As long as we are not dramatically cutting emissions, these heatwaves will continue to destroy our ecosystems. But as this is happening below the surface of the ocean, it will go unnoticed.”
Dr Dan Smale from the Marine Biological Association has been working on marine heatwaves for more than a decade and was surprised by the temperatures.
He said: “I always thought they would never be ecologically impactful in the cool waters around UK and Ireland but this is unprecedented and possibly devastating.
Current temperatures are way too high but not yet lethal for majority of species, although stressful for many … If it carries on through summer we could see mass mortality of kelp, seagrass, fish and oysters.”
Piers Forster, a professor of climate physics at the University of Leeds, said: “Both Met Office and NOAA analyses of sea-surface temperature show temperatures are at their highest ever level – and the average sea-surface temperature breached 21C for the first time in April. These high temperatures are mainly driven by unprecedented high rates of human-induced warming.
From the BBC:
Scientists are not sure why we are seeing this record heat in the waters around the UK and across the North Atlantic, but they say climate change is certainly playing a crucial role. As we continue to pump vast quantities of planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere we are driving up global temperatures.
But other factors are likely also playing a role.
Professor Michael Mann, an atmospheric scientist at Penn State University, says weaker than average winds have reduced the amount of dust from the Sahara Desert in the atmosphere.
Saharan dust blocks and reflects some of the sun's energy out of the atmosphere, moderating sea temperatures.
The trade winds have been unusually light this year and, at the same time, a persistent weather pattern with easterly winds from the continental US may also have helped warm the sea surface.
Another factor that has received scrutiny is the regulations in 2020 by the International Maritime Organisation, which has reduced sulfur content in shipping fuel. The result has been a reduction in aerosols in the atmosphere. The aerosols help reduce heat by reflecting solar energy into space. Research is necessary to zero in on the causes and what, if anything, can be done to mitigate the damage.
Our future ocean — warmer and oxygen-deprived — will not only hold fewer kinds of fish, but also smaller, stunted fish and, to add insult to injury, more greenhouse-gas producing bacteria, scientists say. The tropics will empty as fish move to more oxygenated waters, says Pauly, and those specialist fish already living at the poles will face extinction.
Researchers complain that the oxygen problem doesn’t get the attention it deserves, with ocean acidification and warming grabbing the bulk of both news headlines and academic research. Just this April, for example, headlines screamed that global surface waters were hotter than they have ever been — a shockingly balmy average of 70 degrees F. That’s obviously not good for marine life. But when researchers take the time to compare the three effects — warming, acidification, and deoxygenation — the impacts of low oxygen are the worst.
“That’s not so surprising,” says Wilco Verberk, an eco-physiologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands. “If you run out of oxygen, the other problems are inconsequential.” Fish, like other animals, need to breathe.
The looming marine die-offs in the North Atlantic are not the first we have seen unfold. Heatwaves produced a mass mortality event in the Barents Sea between Alaska and Russia in 2022. Snow crab and King Crab populations were devastated. They still have not recovered.
That doesn’t mean — my usual caveats — that everything dies off. It means it the way biologists use the term — a mass extinction, in which many, many things do, and life resets itself, probably, in new ways. After us, comes a new earth. 300,000 years of us — barely the blink of an eye. Life will survive. But our civilization won’t. The Event — the time in between civilizations — will be a dark age. You can see that dark age falling now. It’s in every bird falling from the sky, every animal dropping dead from the heat, every democracy being shredded by lunatics, in all the deaths we will never count. Our systems — all of them — economic, social, political — are beginning to fail.What has happened between then and now? A sustained marine heat wave that prevented ice formation in the Bering Sea for two winters, thus vastly altering ocean conditions and seafood species’ health.
“We lost billions of snow crab in a matter of months,” said Bob Foy, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center, at a public forum held Dec. 12 at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. “We don’t have a smoking gun, if you will. We don’t have one particular event that impacted the snow crab — except the heat wave.”
That heat wave is now over, but its effects linger. A NOAA survey showed an 80% decline in Bering Sea snow crab, from 11.7 billion in 2018 to 1.9 billion this year. It could take six to 10 years to recover, experts told members of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which wrapped up a 10-day meeting in Anchorage on Wednesday.
Snow crab may be the “poster child” of climate change, council member Bill Tweit said during deliberations on a rebuilding program that was ultimately approved at the meeting, but much more will be affected by the long-term changes in the ocean.
“It’s going to be more and more a problematic question for us among a broader range of species than just snow crab,” Tweit said.
