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Good and bad news on the climate

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  • #61
    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    Kinda like Arizona isn't prepared for this sort of weather either or northern Canada not ready for a week solid of upper 90 degree weather.

    I knew someone stationed in Greenland for over a year (apparently he must have pissed someone off) and he talked about the long and involved processes required just to keep their firearms from freezing solid.
    There are a bunch of telescopes and a neutrino observatory at the South Pole, and a server farm to handle all the incoming data. And they have to warm up their cooling air before exposing the servers to it, since air straight from the outside world would cause failures.
    "Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from trolling."

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    • #62
      Still no warm weather for me. It snowed last week. Cool and breezy today.

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      • #63
        Bad climate warming news in the Caribbean between 50 and 80% of the corals have perished due to the warming waters. PBS has a good program that goes into this.

        Source: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/17/eaax9395



        Widespread loss of Caribbean acroporid corals was underway before coral bleaching and disease outbreaks

        RESEARCH ARTICLEOCEANOGRAPHY Widespread loss of Caribbean acroporid corals was underway before coral bleaching and disease outbreaks

        1. View ORCID ProfileKatie L. Cramer1,2,*,
        2. View ORCID ProfileJeremy B. C. Jackson3,4,5,6,
        3. View ORCID ProfileMary K. Donovan7,8,
        4. View ORCID ProfileBenjamin J. Greenstein9,
        5. View ORCID ProfileChelsea A. Korpanty10,
        6. View ORCID ProfileGeoffrey M. Cook11 and
        7. View ORCID ProfileJohn M. Pandolfi12
        Abstract

        The mass mortality of acroporid corals has transformed Caribbean reefs from coral- to macroalgal-dominated habitats since systematic monitoring began in the 1970s. Declines have been attributed to overfishing, pollution, sea urchin and coral disease, and climate change, but the mechanisms are unresolved due to the dearth of pre-1970s data. We used paleoecological, historical, and survey data to track Acropora presence and dominance throughout the Caribbean from the prehuman period to present. Declines in dominance from prehuman values first occurred in the 1950s for Acropora palmata and the 1960s for Acropora cervicornis, decades before outbreaks of acroporid disease or bleaching. We compared trends in Acropora dominance since 1950 to potential regional and local drivers. Human population negatively affected and consumption of fertilizer for agriculture positively affected A. palmata dominance, the latter likely due to lower human presence in agricultural areas. The earlier, local roots of Caribbean Acropora declines highlight the urgency of mitigating local human impacts.
        SIGN UP FOR THE SCIENCE ADVANCES eTOC

        INTRODUCTION


        The living cover of Caribbean reef-building corals has declined by 50% since systematic reef monitoring began in the late 1970s (1). During this time, the majority of Caribbean reefs have been transformed from habitats dominated by reef-building corals into habitats dominated by macroalgae, sponges, and/or non–reef-building invertebrates (24). The decline in corals has been attributed to fishing, land-based pollution, anthropogenic ocean warming, and outbreaks of coral and sea urchin diseases (1, 5, 6).

        Modern ecological studies of Caribbean reefs began in the late 1960s, less than a decade before a series of acute events acted in synergy to rapidly transform coral communities. Outbreaks of “white-band disease” (WBD) appeared on many reefs in the late 1970s and early 1980s, eventually killing over 80% of the populations of the elkhorn coral Acropora palmata, which previously dominated reef crest zones, and the staghorn coral Acropora cervicornis, which previously dominated midslope zones (1, 79). Mass mortality of the sea urchin Diadema antillarum in 1983–1984 due to an unidentified pathogen removed this keystone herbivore from reefs that were already largely devoid of large herbivorous fish because of overfishing (1, 10, 11). Diadema mortality exceeded 90% (12), precipitating an explosion of macroalgae on reefs across the Caribbean. These events were followed by local outbreaks of coral bleaching beginning in the late 1980s followed by regional outbreaks in the 1990s, leading to further increases in coral disease and, in some instances, a further replacement of corals by macroalgae (1, 2, 13).

        Despite decades of research, the origin and transmission of WBD in Caribbean Acropora are still poorly understood. However, multiple anthropogenic stressors appear to have played a role. Recent observations (1997–2004) of the presence of WBD on Acropora corals across the Caribbean show a link between contemporary WBD and elevated sea surface temperature from anthropogenic climate change (14). Although the coverage of early survey data is insufficient to investigate causes of the initial WBD epidemics of the late 1970s and early 1980s, they may also have been related to temperature stress: Anthropogenic warming of sea surface waters in the Caribbean first became pronounced in the 1970s (15, 16). Initial and subsequent WBD outbreaks may also have been caused by increased macroalgal abundance related to overfishing of reef herbivores and/or reef eutrophication, as numerous experiments have found increased disease prevalence in other Caribbean scleractinian coral species associated with macroalgal contact (1719). Nutrient enrichment from land-based runoff has also likely exacerbated WBD outbreaks by suppressing coral immunity and encouraging growth of pathogenic microbes and allelopathic algae (1921). Another hypothesis is that declines in acroporid and other corals in the Caribbean are related to an increase in hurricane frequency and intensity due to climate change, which could limit Acropora recovery on reefs already degraded by overfishing and nutrification. Although hurricanes have been a natural occurrence on low-latitude Caribbean coral reefs for millions of years, corals in this region have increasingly failed to recover following major storms (2, 22).

        © Copyright Original Source


        Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
        Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
        But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

        go with the flow the river knows . . .

        Frank

        I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

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