As Oceans Warm, Weather Goes Berserk

Hotter oceans kill plankton, upon which the entire maritime ecosystem depends. They are the meal at the base of the food chain – seas without plankton will rapidly become seas without fish and then without marine mammals. Already depleted by industrial over-fishing and immensely destructive techniques like trawling the sea floor (now fortunately banned in many locations across the globe), oceans cannot tolerate the disappearance of plankton due to hotter water; that would cause cataclysmic ichthyologic decimation. But hotter oceans don’t just mean no sushi on the menu. They engender more hurricanes, and indeed the most recent hurricane season so far cost the U.S. over $100 billion.

 Still, the water keeps getting hotter. Arctic and Antarctic sea ice melts, so that in a few short years the Arctic may be ice free in summer. That will cause oceans to warm even faster, and the Antarctic to become ice free in summer sooner, too, as Robert Hunziker reported in CounterPunch November 1. This also means the albedo effect will clobber the climate, boosting already high temps, as absent sea ice can no longer reflect sunrays back into space, and those rays will instead be absorbed by seawater. This heats oceans, which are our desperately needed carbon sinks, though those sinks are overflowing, and kills plankton, coral reefs, and thus other fauna, further destroying pelagic ecosystems, therefore also damaging the climate.

Another carbon sink already releases greenhouse gases, and that’s Arctic permafrost. You don’t even want to imagine how much trouble this happening in the oceans will cause, because if THAT carbon sink backs up, the carbon will remain in the atmosphere, warming it ferociously. Meanwhile, hotter seas speed the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, which includes the Gulf Stream. When that happens, say in 2025, we would get “much more extreme winters and sea level rises…and a shifting of the monsoon in the tropics,” CNN reported July 26.

We know what’s in store for us, because this halt of the ocean conveyor belt happened 12,000 years ago. Then “rapid glacier melt caused the AMOC to shut down, leading to huge Northern Hemisphere temperature fluctuations of 10 to 15 degrees Celsius (18 to 27degrees Fahrenheit) within a decade.” CNN cites a new study showing that this vital ocean current could cease functioning in 2025, though more likely between 2039 and 2070. (Nota bene: so far climate scientists’ warming and weather estimates have been so absurdly conservative as to be outright goofs.) But it’s gonna shut down. That’s the fate rich countries burning too much oil and gas have sealed for planet Earth.

Record breaking heat in the Gulf of Mexico helped cause Hurricane Helene, reports Carbon Brief October 9, and likely fueled Hurricane Milton. The warmer the planet, the more intense the hurricanes, scientists told the publication. One study this journal cited noted that marine heatwaves make the “rapid intensification” of hurricanes 50 percent more likely, while another study from Climate Central “indicates that, over the past two weeks, the record-breaking temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were made 400-800 times more likely by climate change.”

Carbon Brief cites one researcher attributing more hurricanes to warmer oceans and another arguing that temperature hikes of a statistical model of 1.3 degrees centigrade were “responsible for an increase of about 150 percent in the number of such storms [like Helene] (now once every 53 years on average, up from every 130 years) and, equivalently, that the maximum wind speeds of similar storms are now about 6.1 m/s (around 11 percent) more intense.”

This is all lousy news and comes amid widespread climate apathy, also noted by Hunziker. Worst of all is such languor among those with the most power to combat the catastrophe, namely western elites. Joe “War Over Climate” Biden abandoned cutting use of oil and gas with his aggressive boom in new oil leases – only partially offset by his $391billion to reduce carbon emissions in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act – because his appalling proxy war with its attendant idiotic sanctions on Russia required it. Prices at the pump skyrocketed with Biden’s sanctions and, like any self-respecting American pol, he responded true to form – by draining the strategic petroleum reserve and flooding voters with cheaper gas. (It still ain’t cheap, and let’s just keep our fingers crossed we have no oil or gasoline emergency, cause if we do, the SPR’s just about empty.)

So the Climate President became the War President and voila! The world kept getting hotter faster. Now we’ve got Trump, an anthropogenic climate change denier, so don’t expect any respite from deadly burning of oil and gas. Given that 2023 was the hottest year on record and 2024 will probably beat it, in keeping with the pattern over the last decade, you’d think our plutocratic rulers would, if only out of self-interest, try to cope with this fiasco. The Chinese have. They’ve even got a successful business model when it comes to producing and marketing green tech.

China’s solar companies not only lead the world, its seven solar power giants provide more energy than the west’s Seven Sisters oil conglomerates – Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell and the others. Biden responded to such developments with tariffs on climate-change-curbing technology. Expect Trump to do the same. It won’t matter much to Beijing – China trades mostly with the Global South now and countries that aren’t the U.S. All that dimwit congressional bluster about decoupling the American and Chinese economies evidently paid big dividends for Beijing. It’s trading with the non-U.S. world like mad, as its green sector booms.

But the U.S. remains a huge carbon polluter, threatening the planet with its dirty energy. China does so too – but hasn’t been at it nearly as long as the west in general and the United States in particular. And Beijing cares about the oceans. Witness its sensible ban on Japanese fish, due to Tokyo’s criminal dumping of radioactive Fukushima wastewater into the ocean. Washington is far more nonchalant about trashing the air and water, and our oligarchs are apparently happy to leave an overheated world, with oceans nearly empty of everything besides carbon, to their children and grandchildren. For this greedy imbecility they will be hated, and history will condemn them as the avaricious fools they are, whistling past the graveyard.

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