News from a Changing Planet -- This Week on Earth #14
The miracle of more precise forecasting and what it can tell us (about lobsters), Jimmy Buffett: wildlife defender, California takes on Scope 3 emissions and more news from your home planet.
WINDS OF CHANGE: On prediction science and what these predictions are telling us, with respect to lobsters. (Provincetown Independent via Inside Climate News)
As I sit and wait to see just where Hurricane Lee ends up, compulsively refreshing the National Hurricane Center’s website, I’ve been thinking about two main things. One: how amazing it is that forecasters can predict with any accuracy when a hurricane might hit and where and what the wind speeds or amounts of rain might be. This isn’t just true for hurricanes, but for other major weather events or even the daily forecast. Satellites and drones and sophisticated calibrations of weather not only save lives, but are also just so cool. These abilities are exploited by the news media/broadcasters standing outside in a tight white shirt to give us “breaking news updates” but they never give a sense of how incredible it is — and how different from the recent past — that we know where these storms are going before they arrive.
Which leads me to my second thought: we are beginning to really understand these patterns — hurricanes and storms and everything else — at a moment of rapid and intensifying change. Obviously predictions aren’t perfect, and predictions don’t matter much when we are dealing with unfamiliar and unprecedented data and phenomena. And that brings me back to one of my favorite (climate-science-related) quotations, from the Nobel prize winning scientist who was part of the team that discovered the hole in the o-zone layer: "What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?"
One of the patterns that’s being changed by global warming is the wind. For example, on Cape Cod, the prevailing winds have historically come from the southwest. These winds trigger upwelling — pushing warmer surface water out to sea and pulling up colder, oxygen-rich water up towards the surface — often associated with particularly productive marine ecosystems.
However, climate change is causing pressure patterns to change, so the winds are now coming from the northeast more often, and these northeasterly winds have the opposite effect — pushing warm water down and making it harder for that water (now warmer) to hold as much oxygen. The warmer water, now down towards the bottom, is more buoyant than the cold water it’s sitting on top of, and prevents the water from mixing between the different temperature layers.
This matters because it means that many bottom- or near-bottom-dwelling creatures can’t survive in this less-oxygenated water, and either they die (as many lobsters did in 2019 in Cape Cod Bay), or they migrate, both of which create problems for the lobstermen who make their living this way, and the tourist industry that has grown up around them and the people who rely on that. According to one lobsterman with 500 pots, “When I started lobstering seven years ago, 500- to 600-pound days were the average,” he said. “Now I go out and haul a couple of hundred traps and it’ll be around 50 pounds of lobster.”
But on the bright side…
LET’S RENAME PARROTHEADS MANATEE-HEADS:
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