Posted by mitchbob 1 day ago
As an aside, Panama is a particularly sensitive point in climate models I've run.
(Disclosure that I manage a climate research group)
Here is a nice interview highlighting a couple of improvements people are driving for a niche sport weather forecast: https://magazine.weglide.org/skysight-interview-matthew-scut...
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/index.h...
and will be watching for the Panama upwelling more carefully, but my eye has been drawn to the intersectiin of the labrador current and the gulf stream this year, which looks off a bit with the labrador erratic and the gulf stream tending a bit south. Also surface currents are exceptionaly visible in the artic sea ice, right now
> Upwelling began significantly earlier during El Niño versus La Niña, but duration and minimum temperature did not differ significantly between El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) states ...
Slow changes, a return to a Cretaceous-style climate, etc. are a very different story than an "overnight" exponential and unstoppable Venusification of the planet.
Slowly rising sea levels in Miami vs one day you wake up and can't breathe anymore. Very different situations.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180513182952/http://burro.case...
The short summary of this hypothesis is that the ocean develops hypoxic zones, anaerobic bacteria boom, and eventually the ocean starts releasing masses of poisonous H2S gas that wipes out most life on land (and strips the ozone layer for good measure).
They speculate that this might have been a mechanism behind the "great dying" at the end of the Permian. I'm sure the thinking has advanced in the last 20 years, but whenever people ask what the worst-case scenario for global warming could be, my mind drifts back to this.
>An anoxic event describes a period wherein large expanses of Earth's oceans were depleted of dissolved oxygen (O2), creating toxic, euxinic (anoxic and sulfidic) waters.[1] Although anoxic events have not happened for millions of years, the geologic record shows that they happened many times in the past. Anoxic events coincided with several mass extinctions and may have contributed to them.[2] These mass extinctions include some that geobiologists use as time markers in biostratigraphic dating
As the arctic ice will disappear we will not just loose a few shiny white objects, but we will loose a heat buffer, to the tune of 334 kJ/kg ... times 18 000 cubic kilometers. That is 6 x 10 ^ 21 Joules.
Check this graph (note the zero is absolute):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_of_sea_ice#/media/...
We are going to witness the loss of a huge thermal buffer in a few decades at most.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blob_(Pacific_Ocean)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_blob
Blob is perfectly good word, and much more precise in this case than 'mass'.
The people tasked with knowing why it happens dont know why it happens
The scientists don’t know why it happened, because they haven’t proved why it happened.
I’d wager that the average reader knows perfectly well why it happened.
Fossil fuel barons are funding this so they can lord it over us up to the end and then they retreat to their bunkers. It would make for a great thriller of a movie but it's a shit timeline to actually live through.
I don't think this is unique to climate research, I can imagine headlines, "Ground shakes beneath Mt. Rainier, alarming scientists," or "Ebola spreads unconstrained in Africa, alarming scientists."
It's fear driven because it might kill people. Unlike something along the lines of, "Mars mission fails as rocket explodes." That's sad but not necessarily causing harm across the population.
"Yes."
Your complaint is with science journalism, not science. Let’s look at the actual quoted scientists:
“It came as a surprise,” said Ralf Schiebel. . . “We’ve never seen something like this before.”
Andrew Sellers. . . “major repercussions throughout the food web.”
“The climate is warming, that’s putting coral reefs at risk,” said Dr. Aronson. . .
But if [the current] disappears repeatedly, then “it’s cause for grave concern,” Dr. Aronson said.
Dr. Schiebel said. . . “Our fear is now that it would also happen to other upwelling systems,” he said.
With the exception of “grave concern,” these are statements of fact and falsifiable predictions, not “end of the world” prophecies.
As to why the New York Times indulges in such histrionics, well, how else are they going to maintain relevance in the digital era, by which I mean, how else are they to extract value from their advertisers & subscribers? We’ve proven at this point that the only thing people click on en masse is clickbait.
The reporting of astronomical objects is very fear/clicks driven when they find something that will come "close" to the earth.
With climate, there are the occasional "not as bad as we thought" articles when we get some new knowledge about a particular system, but the majority of it is fear driven as it's mainly bad news.
40 data points isn't a lot.
But dont dismis climate science that easily.
> An increasingly popular method to deduce historic sea surface temperatures uses sediment-entombed bodies of marine archaea
https://www.ocean.washington.edu/story/Ancient_Ocean_Tempera...
When did I do that?
This could easily be a 99% phenomenon and it's easily possible to not have seen this happen. If it happens next year, I'll be concerned, if it happens the following year, I'll be alarmed.
https://www.earth.com/news/unprecedented-collapse-panamas-oc... mentions a lot of date oriented measurements which suggest they probably have at least 52 samples per year, if not daily samples:
> The 40-year record makes the 2025 failure stand out. Average historical onset around January 20 contrasts with a March 4 threshold crossing in 2025.
> The cool season shrank from roughly nine weeks to less than two weeks. Minimum sea surface temperature (SST) rose from historical lows near 66.2°F to about 73.9°F.
Aaron O'Dea, told me in an email that the upwelling has been "as predictable as clockwork" for at least 40 years of detailed data used in the study. They have less detailed data showing that it goes back at least 80 years. And while this doesn't mean it never vanished before, he said they can trace the the upwelling's impact on coastal ecology and humans for 11,000 years.
11,000 years of data doesn't give you any meaningful data unless you can show that this _never_ happened in the past. 40 years is the amount of data for that.
There's no good evidence to suggest that 1/40 of it not happening is an abberation. It could be 1/100 of those 11,000 years this happened and there'd be no way to know.
If it continues to happen, we'll have something. For now nobody should be "alarmed".
