What Happens When Oceans Warm to Levels of Climate Dystopia?
Heating oceans could lead to mass extinction.
I really always wanted to write more about the climate. It’s not as if I’m pessimistic either, but with a war, a pandemic, crippling recession on the way, and our young people more concerned about the environment, we have to be realistic.
Extreme heat in oceans ‘passed point of no return’ in 2014
How systems impact other systems is really important, and nothing is so central to the health of the world, as our oceans.
Climate change has been amplified on social media and politized for camps that are for and against. Many of the oil companies and foreign nation states who contributed to this won’t likely even be around in a few decades.
Extreme heat in the world’s oceans passed the “point of no return” in 2014 and has become the new normal, according to research.
Scientists have analyzed sea surface temperatures over the last 150 years, which have risen because of global heating. They found that extreme temperatures occurring just 2% of the time a century ago have occurred at least 50% of the time across the global ocean since 2014. This mirrors the higher frequency of “natural disasters” I wrote about last time.
You know, it’s hard to comprehend the scary headlines, but they are real. They are more real than the illusionary and temporary monetary system and consumer convenience society we have created at the expense of all else.
Global heating risks most cataclysmic extinction of marine life in 250m years
Still as global citizens, it behooves us to dig deeper into the research and warning of climate academics and scientists.
Apparently a lot of Americans don’t actually trust the Guardian as a source of real news. As someone who lives in Canada, this really shocks me.
The Guardian does climate change clickbait among the best of all of them. But for me this speaks from the world soul. But if I had more Republican or Conservative values, maybe I’d brush it off as kookie and quirky? I don’t have the answers on why a human being doesn’t consider (her or his) their place in the world.
We are in short the makers of the 6th mass extinction. We have become like Gods, just not the good kind.
If you believe evolution is fact, the evidence points to one stark conclusion. New research warns pressures of rising heat and loss of oxygen reminiscent of the ‘great dying’ that occurred about 250m years ago. We are in short the makers of the 6th mass extinction. We have become like Gods, just not the good kind.
The Holocene extinction, otherwise referred to as the sixth mass extinction or Anthropocene extinction, is an ongoing extinction event of species during the present Holocene epoch (with the more recent time sometimes called Anthropocene) as a result of human activity.
How are we to explain this to our children? We have to admit as a civilization that we don’t have much time left, human extinction is inevitable without becoming a multi-planetary civilization. There are too many points of multiple failure in the 21st century. History rewinds itself when a sentient species understands its own vulnerability in terms of the real probability of its own extinction.
As a dystopia watcher, I think about this probably every week.
The world’s seawater is steadily climbing in temperature due to the extra heat produced from the burning of fossil fuels, while oxygen levels in the ocean are plunging and the water is acidifying from the soaking up of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
If the world were one organism, Gaia has cancer of the blood.
This means the oceans are overheated, increasingly gasping for breath – the volume of ocean waters completely depleted of oxygen has quadrupled since the 1960s – and becoming more hostile to life. We are starving the world that was so hospitable to us, from the nutrients of life itself. It’s the greatest crime against nature possible. GenZ is also obsessed about it in the 2020s. However boomers still own the world and the majority of leadership positions.
How will history likely remember the Boomers and the gen that came before them, the Silent Generation? The Silent Generation is generally defined as people born from 1928 to 1945. They experienced such prosperity yet with such a narrow short-term vision of the consequences. And, we are doomed to repeat their mistakes with a poor model of capitalism and a terribly dysfunctional monetary system with bad incentives, corrupt leaders and misguided policies.
What Happens When the Oceans Overheat?
Aquatic creatures such as clams, mussels and shrimp are unable to properly form shells due to the acidification of seawater. The coral reefs are dying. Australia is throwing $Billions at the problem, but it’s likely too late. As a species we might not have the right to exist, after all that we have done.
I feel a measure of shame in admitting this. It is echoed in the cynicism of the GenZ people I talk with. They aren’t willing nihilists, they are closer to the dystopia of the future than I am. They have grown up in a social media matrix so divorced from the reality of our world, it’s almost perverse.
All of this means the planet could slip into a “mass extinction rivaling those in Earth’s past”, states the new research, published in Science.
Think about it, in some hot spots, extreme temperatures occur 90% of the time, severely affecting wildlife. More than 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is absorbed by the ocean, which plays a critical role in maintaining a stable climate.
Our Future: The “Great Dying”
We know the oceans will rise and the climate migrants it will create. We know Antarctica is melting faster than the climate models suggested it would. We don’t have much time, from the standpoint of evolution. We need to prepare for the actual future we’ll be living in.
The pressures of rising heat and loss of oxygen are, researchers said, uncomfortably reminiscent of the mass extinction event that occurred at the end of the Permian period about 250m years ago. This cataclysm, known as the “great dying”, led to the demise of up to 96% of the planet’s marine animals. We unfortunately, our descendants, are doomed to bear witness, to have a front row seat on climate change dystopia.
As per a 2020 study: Australia's Great Barrier Reef has lost more than half of its corals since 1995 due to warmer seas driven by climate change, the study concluded. Scientists found all types of corals had suffered a decline across the world's largest reef system. The steepest falls came after mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017.
I won’t tell the Dolphins and Octopi that we are responsible, if you don’t.
The 21st Century is the Last View of Nature
Truly catastrophic extinction levels may be reached should the world emit planet-heating gases in an unrestrained way, leading to more than 4C of average warming above pre-industrial times by the end of this century, the research found.
The next two generations Alpha and the cohort after it, might be the last two generations to witness planetary life as we know it today. It’s hard to mourn for something so very existential and primal to where we came from. We are the genocide bringers (ecotocide?) of all of biodiversity on our planet. If only the concept of “sin” had been actually useful in a planetary context.
It’s never enough. What I feel or the half-hearted choices we make.
At 2C of heating above the pre-industrial norm, which is forecast as likely even under current climate pledges by the world’s governments, around 4% of the roughly two million species in the oceans will be wiped out. As many members of GenZ and Alpha will choose not to have children, they will have a few years to ponder (more actively) the dying world.
The decline of biodiversity would be tolerable to some of us, but that it will lead to our own extinction is also a real worry. We cannot foresee clearly all the challenges that we will face as a global civilization. Our pandemics and geopolitical rivalries will need to be outgrown. We must learn to face bigger problems and align our GDP growth towards these new grander goals.
Nowhere to Go
Fish and marine mammals that live in polar regions are most vulnerable, according to the study, as they will be unable to migrate to suitably cooler climes, unlike tropical species. “They will just have nowhere to go,” said Penn 9 Justin Penn, a climate scientist at Princeton University who co-authored the new research.
How do you absorb the messages of climate change doomsday studies?
Between 10% and 15% of marine species are already at risk of extinction because of these various threats, the study found, drawing upon International Union for Conservation of Nature data.
How do you humanize the numbers? How do you feel empathy with other forms of life? Will humans ever get better at this? Are we doomed to kill and then suddenly go extinct? Doomed to remain so selfish?
The oceans are fragile too. It turns out ecosystem degradation already started to occur as we’re already seeing after less than 1C of warming. People have microplastics even in their lungs in 2022. We too have nowhere to go.
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