July 1, 2019: Climate Change - World's Oceans Now Hotter than Ever

 

July 1, 2019: No single day of record-high temperatures, no single month of highest average temperatures in one state, or one nation, and no cold snap in winter, wherever Trump has plumped his fanny down, proves nor disproves climate change. 

 

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What if it was sixty degrees warmer?

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We do know that climate change is not a hoax. The last twenty years, globally, have virtually the entire science community spooked. In 2018 the world’s oceans – measured at 3,000 locations, down to depths of 6,500 feet – had their hottest year ever. 

Even worse, as National Geographic explains, oceans have been acting as giant “thermal sponges.” They have sopped up 93% of all extra heat generated since the start of the Industrial Revolution. As a result, slowly rising ocean temperatures will have long lasting, potentially irreversible effects. 

Experts don’t mince words: 

“The oceans are the best thermometer we have for the planet,” says Zeke Hausfather, an energy and climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who used the ocean heat data published today in an analysis published last week in Science. “We can really see global warming loud and clear in the ocean record.”

 

Scientists say that if the oceans weren’t absorbing all that heat, the atmosphere might have warmed by sixty degrees. 

That’s no typo.

 

Any other worrisome signs? Globally, June turned out to be the hottest June on record, part of a daunting arc. National Geographic notes that the five hottest summers on record in Europe – in the last 500 years – are 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. This summer is starting off worse. 

In California, to start July, record highs at Bodega Bay, fifty miles north of San Francisco, left “scores of dead mussels on the rocks, their shells gaping and scorched, their meats thoroughly cooked.” Christopher Harley, a biologist at the University of British Columbia, warns, “Mussels are one of the canaries in the coal mine for climate change.” Or, a more apt metaphor might be, we humans are going to end up like the lobster in the pot. (See also: 7/4/19, 7/10/19, 7/11/19, 7/18/19, 7/21/19 and 7/25/19.)

 

 

FUN FACT: With 2019 now half over, we learn today that Big Pharma has raised prices on 3,400 drugs so far this year. 

Average price increase: 10.5 percent. 

That’s five times the rate of inflation.