De-centralized solar power would save lives during disaster recovery

Regardless of what is feeding power to a centralized grid, disasters sometimes cut off that source of power. Sometimes power lines are broken, other times the generator is forced to shut down due to flooding, heat, or other conditions.

If this happens during hot weather, hundreds of thousands of people are faced with a choice between generating their own power, or losing perishable food and suffering – or dying – from the heat.

At the moment, most emergency generators available run on gasoline or diesel, which comes with a few problems. Ensuring a fuel supply can be difficult under disaster conditions, and stockpiling fuel can be dangerous, and can be vulnerable to damage from the same conditions that make the generator necessary in the first place. On top of that, having thousands of households burning fuel to power their cooling systems during hot weather is going to increase local, ground-level air pollution, and all the health problems that come with that.

And most urgently, these generators produce carbon monoxide, which can be lethal if there’s not adequate ventilation. NPR reports that in the aftermath of Hurricane Laura, more people have already died from carbon monoxide poisoning than died from the storm itself, and tens of thousands are still facing weeks without power.

Eight of the 15 hurricane-related deaths confirmed by the Louisiana Department of Health are attributed to carbon monoxide poisoning from portable generators, which can provide life-saving power in emergency situations but also pose a deadly threat if used incorrectly.

The unidentified victims of carbon monoxide poisoning range in age from 24 to 84 years old, and outnumber the deaths caused by drowning, fallen trees and storm cleanup.

Officials in Lake Charles said at a press briefing on Friday that five people in one house succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning after fumes from their generator — which was running in an attached garage — entered through a door that was either partially or fully open.

Most generator-related fatalities are caused by carbon monoxide, a colorless, odorless gas that can build up especially quickly in enclosed spaces. At certain levels, just five minutes of exposure is enough to be fatal.

Lake Charles Police Chief, Shawn Caldwell, acknowledged that many people are likely relying on generators in the aftermath of the storm but cautioned they should be used at a distance. The safest place for a portable generator is at least 20 feet away from any door or window.

“Chain it to a tree if there’s one left out in the yard,” he said, “but don’t let a generator cost your life.”

It’s common, in circumstances like this, to wave this sort of thing away as people being stupid about how they use their generators, but the reality is that people do make mistakes, especially in a crisis. Ignorance or carelessness does not need to be lethal. Beyond that, generators like this aren’t likely to be practical for emergencies in the long term.

Regardless of what mix of power sources we use to replace fossil fuels, the goal is to eliminate their use to the greatest degree possible. Under those circumstances, fuel for generators will become increasingly difficult and expensive to get. Under those circumstances, having access to individual-level or community-level solar power would save food, purify water, and save lives. We should expect climate-related disasters like this to be an increasingly large part of our lives going forward, and under those circumstances, I think federal and local governments should be investing in the widespread distribution of emergency photovoltaic generators to aid in relief efforts, help maintain communications, and to reduce the harm caused when the power grid becomes unavailable.

This blog, and its associated podcast, are made possible by my wonderful patrons. Their funding has made a huge difference in my life, but I’m still short of what I need to make ends meet, and it’s still very difficult to find conventional wage labor, what with the pandemic and all. If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, fund my work, and feed my household, you can head over to patreon.com/oceanoxia to help pay for this content. As with so many other good things, crowdfunding takes a collective effort, and every little bit helps.

Hurricanes and disaster response: rebuilding society from the ground up

There has been a long-standing assumption among some climate activists that as things really start to get bad, cities and countries will take appropriately drastic action to deal with climate change. The idea is that natural disasters will create a public demand for action, to which leaders will be forced to respond if they want to keep their power. In many ways, this is probably the longest-standing dynamic in societal governance. Whether the ruling class justifies its power through might, claims of divine authority, or a claim to some form of democratic mandate, if its rule doesn’t result a somewhat decent life for most people, the odds are good that their power will be taken away, either by the people themselves, or by some other ruling faction that thinks they can get the people on their side.

It’s a reliable process for very small, very slow levels of change, and because it’s been around for so long, there are also known ways to weaken that dynamic. The “Divine Right of Kings” is one of the more well-known methods – use religion to justify power. Other forms of propaganda and ideology, like liberalism, seem to work better in much of the world today. Rather than a devout faith in divine intervention to deal with big problems, people have devout faith in capitalism, and the notion that we’ll be “saved” by some science fiction tech innovation.

It’s been clear for some time that we’ve got a pretty big capacity for taking disasters in stride – particularly those that don’t cause us direct harm. Big weather events have been a part of human life for all of history, and it’s not hard to see any one or two events as just par for the course. Many parts of the world have hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, and so on, on a yearly basis. Combine that with the erroneous belief that “market forces” will solve all our problems, and it’s not surprising that, in general, disasters don’t motivate significant change. Quote from and Oregon State University press release:

Natural disasters alone are not enough to motivate local communities to engage in climate change mitigation or adaptation, a new study from Oregon State University found.

Rather, policy change in response to extreme weather events appears to depend on a combination of factors, including fatalities, sustained media coverage, the unusualness of the event and the political makeup of the community.

For the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, Giordono and co-authors Hilary Boudet of OSU’s College of Liberal Arts and Alexander Gard-Murray at Harvard University examined 15 extreme weather events that occurred around the U.S. between March 2012 and June 2017, and any subsequent local climate policy change.

These events included flooding, winter weather, extreme heat, tornadoes, wildfires and a landslide.

The study, published recently in the journal Policy Sciences, found there were two “recipes” for local policy change after an extreme weather event.

“For both recipes, experiencing a high-impact event — one with many deaths or a presidential disaster declaration — is a necessary condition for future-oriented policy adoption,” Giordono said.

In addition to a high death toll, the first recipe consisted of Democrat-leaning communities where there was focused media coverage of the weather event. These communities moved forward with adopting policies aimed at adapting in response to future climate change, such as building emergency preparedness and risk management capacity.

The second recipe consisted of Republican-leaning communities with past experiences of other uncommon weather events. In these locales, residents often didn’t engage directly in conversation about climate change but still worked on policies meant to prepare their communities for future disasters.

In both recipes, policy changes were fairly modest and reactive, such as building fire breaks, levees or community tornado shelters. Giordono referred to these as “instrumental” policy changes.

“As opposed to being driven by ideology or a shift in thought process, it’s more a means to an end,” she said. “‘We don’t want anyone else to die from tornadoes, so we build a shelter.’ It’s not typically a systemic response to global climate change.”

In their sample, the researchers didn’t find any evidence of mitigation-focused policy response, such as communities passing laws to limit carbon emissions or require a shift to solar power. And some communities did not make any policy changes at all in the wake of extreme weather.

As the climate warms, disasters will become more frequent and more severe, but at the same time, populations will become more accustomed to living with them. This will happen regardless of whether significant policy changes are made. If things get bad enough, there will be pressure for change, but the ruling class will always fight changes to the system that gave them their power, and ensure that those changes are as small and ineffectual as possible.

For something on the scale of climate change, that’s a recipe for endlessly escalating disaster.

Last week I wrote about Hurricane Laura’s approach to the American Gulf Coast, and while news of that has been somewhat muted by the ongoing pandemic and the rise of fascism, the damage has been significant. Weather.com reports that hundreds of thousands are without power, and that situation could last for weeks, because our infrastructure is not equipped to handle storms like this.

Rebuilding after a disaster is never easy, but recovering from Hurricane Laura in southwestern Louisiana will require a herculean effort.

Electricity could be out for weeks, water can’t flow from damaged systems and the heat index could reach 110 degrees.

Six parishes had been declared federal disaster areas: Allen, Beauregard, Calcasieu, Cameron, Jefferson Davis and Vernon. On Tuesday, Gov. John Bel Edwards announced the Federal Emergency Management Agency approved his request for individual assistance in three more parishes: Acadia, Ouachita and Vermilion. The governor’s request for another 14 parishes is still pending federal approval.

Edwards said power could be restored to most damaged locations in central and northern Louisiana in the next few days.

“But the damage to the grid infrastructure in Southwest Louisiana, from Cameron Parish to Vernon or so, is very extensive, especially in Calcasieu,” he said.

Getting the electricity back in Calcasieu Parish, home to Lake Charles, could take three weeks, Edwards said during a briefing Monday afternoon.

More than 102,000 homes and businesses in Calcasieu had no power on Tuesday morning, according to poweroutage.us. Altogether, Louisiana still had over 260,000 outages Tuesday due to the storm that killed at least 42 people in the U.S. and Caribbean. Fifteen deaths have been confirmed in Louisiana, and four people died in Texas.

Crews also are racing to repair damaged water systems. More than 177,000 people had no access to water because of the storm, according to the Advocate.

In Beauregard Parish, officials are arranging transportation for anyone wanting to evacuate voluntarily, especially the elderly and people with medical needs, KPLC-TV reported.

Louisiana officials have been trying to avoid using shelters where large numbers of people congregate because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, anyone looking for a place to stay is told to go to a reception center in Alexandria, where they are then sent to a hotel or another smaller shelter.

Officials opened the Alexandria MegaShelter after hotels in the New Orleans reached capacity for evacuees. At that point, the reception center at the Shrine on Airline stadium in Metairie was closed.

Edwards said more than 10,600 evacuees are staying in hotels statewide. More than 9,000 of those were in the New Orleans area. In addition, 4,000 evacuees are in Texas hotels.

In the meantime, officials are warning people who haven’t gone to shelters to pay attention to the heat.

Southwest Louisiana is under a heat advisory through 8 p.m. Tuesday. Temperatures are expected to climb into the 90s, which, when combined with the humidity, could lead to heat index readings between 105 and 110.

As with so many other things, the ruling class is largely immune to this damage. If any lived in the path of this storm to begin with, they can all simply go live somewhere else, or even pay to generate their own power. They are already isolated from climate change, and are making plans to use the obscene wealth they’ve hoarded while destabilizing our climate to further insulate and isolate themselves, and protect their wealth and power.

Without clean drinking water and power, storms move from events that can cause immediate danger through high winds and floodwaters, to catastrophes that cause people to die from exposure to the elements, and from diseases caused by contaminated food and water. The lack of hurricane-proof infrastructure, and the failure of the government to provide adequate aid killed thousands when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, despite the United States being, on paper, the wealthiest, most powerful country on the planet.

Whether or not Hurricane Laura will cause the level of human suffering we saw from Hurricanes Maria or Katrina remains to be seen. What’s certain is that it does not need to. We have the resources to save lives and livelihoods, and to repair the damage. Any scarcity is caused by the way we distribute those resources.

Likewise, when it comes to repair and rebuilding, the current system will not spontaneously rebuild with climate change in mind. We could use events like this as an opportunity to replace what was destroyed with infrastructure designed to withstand high winds and flooding without significant harm. We could move communities inland or to higher ground. We could relocate whole cities, rather than waste money on things like sea walls that are likely to be swamped by rising seas and strengthening storms within our lifetimes.

As I’ve said before, we have a good idea of what’s coming, and that means that we can prepare for it. We have the means.

But we’re currently crippled by a system that only considers an endeavor to be worthwhile if it’s profitable, not for society as a whole, but for those who are already wealthy. And a proactive response to climate change is not profitable in that way.

The decades-long propaganda campaign by the fossil fuel industry was an exercise in causing long-term death for short-term profit. The people that those corporate executives and shareholders chose to sacrifice have started to die. When Exxon chose to hide what they knew and instead fund misinformation campaigns, they chose to kill thousands of people, to add to their personal wealth. Had they done it in person, they’d be called assassins, and locked up.

But like all those who decide to perpetrate mass slaughter on this scale, they’ve chosen to do it at a distance, both in space and in time, and to do it as cheaply and obscurely as possible – letting the natural disasters they knew would occur do the killing for them, and simply withholding the means to survive.

So what do we do? We can start at the community level, preparing for disasters, sharing skills and resources, and building resilient networks – human infrastructure to meet the needs of the moment. In doing so, we will also build at least some of the strength we will need to seize control of society, and force it to serve the needs of the many, rather than the greed of the few. The only way we can make things better is from the ground up. By doing the work necessary to deal with individual disasters in a collective manner, we will also build the power and resources we need to tackle bigger, more systemic problems. Direct action gets satisfaction.

This blog, and its associated podcast, are made possible by my wonderful patrons. Their funding has made a huge difference in my life, but I’m still short of what I need to make ends meet, and it’s still very difficult to find conventional wage labor, what with the pandemic and all. If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, fund my work, and feed my household, you can head over to patreon.com/oceanoxia to help pay for this content. As with so many other good things, crowdfunding takes a collective effort, and every little bit helps.

Where we’re at, where we might be heading, and what we can do to help regardless

Things are bad. It sure looks like the US is headed down a dark and bloody road, and it’s not clear to me that changing course is even going to be possible. If civil war in the United States can be avoided, I think it should be. To be clear, that does not mean appeasing a fascist regime – history has shown that doing so won’t help us avoid violence, and might make it significantly worse. If the Trump administration continues down the road it’s on, war seems unavoidable, in one form or another. I’m no historian, but from what little I do know of history, I think Beau of the Fifth Column is right about where we are:

As with climate change, we’re caught in a bad place. There aren’t really any good options, just the hope that through effort and luck we can find a way to a situation where there are good options. And as with climate change, there are some things we can do that will help us regardless of what happens next. Sticking with Beau here, there’s something that you can do that will help with the current political situation, and with climate change.

Form, maintain, and strengthen local community networks. This is not something I’m good at, myself. In many ways I’m a classic introvert, in that social activities and activism wear on me in a big way. There are plenty of people out there who know way more about this kind of organizing than I do, so if you’re not one of those folks, keep an eye out for them, or seek them out. Beau has a bunch of good advice, not just in the following video, but elsewhere in his body of work.

Look into mutual aid groups, like the ones that have sprung up in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Look into anarchist approaches to building communities and self-reliance. If you hear “anarchist” and think of violence and chaos, set that aside for right now, and spend some time thinking about people might look into organizing a peaceful, just society without any government enforcing rules from the top down. Even if you don’t want to live in that kind of society, the sorts of community building that anarchists tend to advocate and practice will also make for a more peaceful, democratic society even with there being a government involved. There’s a wealth of literature, so start looking through it. If you don’t know where to begin, head here, and look for titles that seem interesting.

Think of this as the pro-social version of “doomsday prepping” – not prepping to be a “sole survivor” in an action movie, but rather to be part of an effort to maintain community and build whatever society we have now into something better. If you have food stored, you can share it with neighbors, should there be a shortage. If you have the means to make water safe to drink, you can save lives and bring people together. If you have a network of people who know they have allies who’re also taking this approach, that’s a foundation on which you can rebuild, even if everything else is washed away.

Humans have a variety of different responses to scary situations. The one that has served us best, and will continue to serve us going forward, is the instinct to reach out to others to comfort and to seek comfort; to help and to seek help. As with so many other social species, our greatest strength is our ability to come together and share burdens that are too heavy for any of us to bear alone.

This blog, and its associated podcast, are made possible by my wonderful patrons. Their funding has made a huge difference in my life, but I’m still short of what I need to make ends meet, and it’s still very difficult to find conventional wage labor, what with the pandemic and all. If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, fund my work, and feed my household, you can head over to patreon.com/oceanoxia to help pay for this content. As with so many other good things, crowdfunding takes a collective effort, and every little bit helps.

Hurricane Laura – get out while you can

If you live on the coast in Louisiana or Eastern Texas, get out now if you can.

Set to hit Louisiana as a Category 4 hurricane on Thursday morning, Laura is expected to bring with it strong winds and heavy rain. Storm surges could reach 20 feet in areas from Johnson Bayou, Louisiana, to Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge, and other parts of the state and eastern Texas could see water heights surge to 15 feet.

“It’s really just unimaginable numbers and certainly not survivable in some locations so we really hope people are evacuating and doing everything they can to get out if they haven’t already,” Joel Cline, a tropical program coordinator for the National Weather Service, told Newsweek.

By now we’ve all seen how well the Trump administration handles disasters, particularly when they’re hurting people that don’t normally support the GOP. Whether Hurricane Laura will cause similar damage to New Orleans as Katrina did in 2005 remains to be seen, but I can’t help but worry that whatever damage is done there will be handled even worse than Bush handled Katrina. Just as thousands died needlessly in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria and its aftermath three years ago, I’m very much afraid that many will die in the aftermath of Laura, based on the predictions we’re seeing now.

I doubt anyone who lives in the region is unaware of what’s coming at this point, but it’s important that the rest of us pay attention, and do what we can to help.

Hurricane Laura powered its way to major hurricane status overnight, putting on an impressive display of rapid intensification over the very warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Laura is headed towards a landfall expected Wednesday night or early Thursday morning in northeastern Texas or western Louisiana as a major category 4 hurricane, and is expected to cause “catastrophic” wind and storm surge damage, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC). Rain squalls from Laura’s outer spiral bands were already affecting the coasts of Texas and Louisiana on Wednesday morning, and they will increase in intensity throughout the day.

Laura rapidly intensified by an impressive 50 mph in the 24 hours ending at 11 a.m. EDT Wednesday, with the winds rising from 75 mph to 125 mph and the pressure falling from 990 mb to 956 mb. This far exceeds the definition of rapid intensification, which is a 24 mb drop in 24 hours. Buoy 42395, located just east of Laura’s eye on Wednesday morning, reported sustained winds of up to 76 mph, wind gusts as high as 107 mph, and a wave height of 37 feet (11 meters).

At 11 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Laura was already generating a storm surge of 1 – 3 feet along much of the Texas and Louisiana coasts; the largest surges, between 2.5 – 3 feet, were at Shell Beach, Louisiana, located to the southeast of New Orleans, and Freshwater Canal Locks, on the south-central coast of Louisiana. Laura’s storm surge can be tracked using the Trabus Technologies Storm Surge Live Tracker or the NOAA Tides and Currents page for Laura.

There’s likely to be lingering damage from this, with standing floodwaters, stranded people, and  a wide range of horrible chemical and biological contamination (from last year):

On a day like Wednesday, when the New Orleans area was pounded with as much as seven inches of rain in less than three hours, it may seem like the only way past floodwater is through it. However, experts warn that wading — and especially swimming — through a flood could expose people to a stew of toxic waste and chemicals.

The CDC provides this list of warnings and recommendations with regard to floodwater, which are unlikely to be helpful to anyone caught in the storm, but give a good breakdown of the kinds of problems we can expect to arise from this disaster, if it’s anywhere near as bad as seems likely:

Stay out of floodwater.

Floodwaters contain many things that may harm health. We don’t know exactly what is in floodwater at any given point in time. Floodwater can contain:

  • Downed power lines
  • Human and livestock waste
  • Household, medical, and industrial hazardous waste (chemical, biological, and radiological)
  • Coal ash waste that can contain carcinogenic compounds such as arsenic, chromium, and mercury
  • Other contaminants that can lead to illness
  • Physical objects such as lumber, vehicles, and debris
  • Wild or stray animals such as rodents and snakes

Exposure to contaminated floodwater can cause:

  • Wound infections
  • Skin rash
  • Gastrointestinal illness
  • Tetanus
  • Leptospirosis (not common)

It is important to protect yourself from exposure to floodwater regardless of the source of contamination. The best way to protect yourself is to stay out of the water.

If you come in contact with floodwater:

  • Wash the area with soap and clean water as soon as possible. If you don’t have soap or water, use alcohol-based wipes or sanitizer.
  • Take care of wounds and seek medical attention if necessary.
  • Wash clothes contaminated with flood or sewage water in hot water and detergent before reusing them.

If you must enter floodwater, wear rubber boots, rubber gloves, and goggles.

As I’ve said before, we’re in an era of endless recovery. The longer we go without taking a proactive approach to preparing for climate change, the worse disasters like this are going to get, as the storms get stronger, the floods reach farther inland, and the people in at-risk zones are increasingly those without the financial resources to escape. Disasters like this are not just the result of the storm – they’re the result of policy decisions, and the choice to avoid taking the kind of action needed in the face of our warming climate.

Podcast episode: Climate and agriculture

The podcast version of my post on climate change and agriculture is up on Podbean and YouTube now!

This blog, and its associated podcast, are made possible by my wonderful patrons. Their funding has made a huge difference in my life, but I’m still short of what I need to make ends meet, and it’s still very difficult to find conventional wage labor, what with the pandemic and all. If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, fund my work, and feed my household, you can head over to patreon.com/oceanoxia to help pay for this content. As with so many other good things, crowdfunding takes a collective effort, and every little bit helps.

Climate change and individual action

The concept of individual action to solve systemic problems has long plagued the environmental movement. For most of my life, a majority of the environmental messaging I encountered centered on the capitalist notion of “voting with your dollar”, and supporting corporations who did “good things”. It would be nice to believe that everyone has seen through that lie, but despite the decades of inaction on climate change, exposed “greenwashing” campaigns by destructive corporations, and continued environmental degradation, it has shown a great deal of persistence.

As with many other lies relating to climate change, I suspect the biggest reason for that is the way in which belief in that lie benefits those same corporations. The millions invested in corruption and propaganda to prevent systemic responses to climate change have protected billions in profit. The only downside is the billions who will have their lives upended or destroyed, and by now it’s abundantly clear that the “captains of industry” and their pet politicians consider life to be of little intrinsic value.

And so the narrative continues, and efforts to persuade people to support systemic changes are misinterpreted – deliberately and not – as personal attacks, and demands for individual changes, without any supportive infrastructure to make those changes feasible.

Andreas Avester has a good post on this problem:

If I started telling other people to live the way I do, that would be plain nasty. I have chosen to reduce my greenhouse gas emissions in areas where it requires relatively little or even zero sacrifice from me. For example, for me not buying coffee and drinks in PET bottles requires zero inconvenience or sacrifice, because I don’t even like these drinks. Alternatively, avoiding plastic bags and plastic food packaging is a bit of hassle, because I have to remember to take my own empty containers with me whenever I go grocery shopping, but it doesn’t feel like a huge inconvenience for me; I also have to avoid supermarkets and instead walk a bit longer distance to a store with bulk bins, but it’s not that terrible. The catch is that for a another person with different food preferences who lives somewhere else doing the same actions (avoiding coffee, drinks in PET bottles, and food packaged in plastics) can be much harder than for me.

This is why I cringe whenever I hear somebody say that meat isn’t even tasty and legumes taste much better anyway, thus it ought to be easy for everybody to be vegan, and not eating animal foods doesn’t even require such a huge sacrifice. Indeed, if somebody doesn’t even like the taste of beef then not eating it really is a great idea. But it is wrong to assume that a plant-based diet is just as easy for everybody else. Never mind that some people are allergic to vegan staples or must limit their carbohydrate intake due to diabetes.

Whenever a vegan with a car, two kids, and a coffee drinking habit tries to lecture me about how I am destroying the planet (I do eat animal foods), I perceive that as hypocritical even though I can agree that eating more legumes and less meat is beneficial.

Taking a systemic, policy-based approach to climate change has two major benefits. The first is that it provides a means to deal with the corporations whose activities and spending are responsible for a majority of the problem, and for the funded opposition to the changes we need. The second is to make the individual choices Andreas writes about easier for more people. Mass transit, readily available appliances like LED bulbs, subsidies for more environmentally friendly farming practices and food sources, and a thousand other changes are designed to achieve the changes we need to make to our personal lives with as little discomfort or added effort as possible. The persistent narrative that climate activists want everybody to take on the incredibly difficult task of eliminating their individual carbon footprint without societal support has been an effective barrier to useful discourse on this issue. I can’t count the number of conversations about climate solutions I’ve had, in which I first had to spend time convincing one or more people that I was not attacking them for not already living in the way I wanted all of us to live after systemic changes had been made.

Andreas’ article includes some useful data and graphics, and I recommend you all check it out. We didn’t get to this point through individual action, and individual action won’t solve societal problems.

I have a podcast!

Did you ever want to know what I sound like?

Do you already know, and crave to hear more?

Would you prefer to listen to this blog, rather than reading it?

I have good news! Starting today, I’ll be publishing audio versions of various blog posts!

For now, it’s just on Podbean, but in the near future I’ll be adding them to Youtube, and possibly other platforms. I’ll also b embedding them in blog posts here, if you don’t feel like going elsewhere. Now you can listen to my work while you commute, game, do dishes, or anything else, really.

At minimum, I’ll have a new episode up every Sunday. As time goes by, I may look into expanding this aspect of my work, but for now, enjoy the new medium!

Hey, did you know that in this capitalist hell-world I need something called “money” to get shelter and food? It’s true! It’s also true that because of the global pandemic, there are literally hundreds of people applying for every job to which I or my wife apply, and nobody seems particularly eager to hire immigrants here. If you want to help out, you can do so for as little as $1.00 USD per month (about three pennies per day) at patreon.com/oceanoxia

My patrons are a collection of wonderful people who want to support the work I’m doing, and are contributing a little bit of their earnings to help me keep providing free content here! You could join them in that endeavor, and earn my sincere gratitude, as well as some extra content every month.

It’s not just us: Ocean heatwaves are changing the landscape beneath the waves.

For those who know what to look for, the world around us is on the move. Every ecosystem on the planet exists where it does because of the abiotic environmental factors that exist in any given location. Temperature, rainfall, prevailing winds, proximity to water sources – all of these things govern what lives where. The temperature is changing now. It’s changing more in some places than in others, but it is changing across the entire surface of this planet.

And so ecosystems are changing too. Range shift was one of the most predictable responses to a warming world. Plants die out at one edge of their range and expand at another, moving like giant, slow amoebas toward cooler temperatures, or more reliable water sources. Animals, not rooted in place, simply relocate. As the 21st century continues, we’ll see more reports of animals showing up where they never did before, and with them will come a variety of problems, not least being new diseases like the one behind the COVID-19 pandemic. For a while, my job involved keeping track of research into range shifts like this, particularly in the New England region of the United States. It’s been happening on both land and sea.

When it comes to the oceans, however, it’s a little harder to track what’s happening, and a lot of the news has focused on things like coral reefs, that see a lot of human activity, and make for dramatic pictures. High temperatures have been linked to coral bleaching and plankton decline, but I have to confess that I never really thought about “marine weather” as having things like heat waves. It makes perfect sense that such events would exist, of course, I just never thought about it in those terms.

Just as heat waves can cause a great deal of damage, and long-term change here on dry land, it seems they can also cause a great deal of change down where it’s wetter:

Changing Temperatures Highlight Management Questions

For example, a 2012 marine heatwave in the northwest Atlantic pushed commercial species such as squid and flounder hundreds of miles northward. At the same time it contributed to a lobster boom that led to record landings and a collapse in price.

“Given the complex political geography of the United States’ Eastern Seaboard, this event highlighted management questions introduced by marine heatwave-driven shifts across state and national lines,” the scientists wrote.

“While these management issues are often discussed in the context of climate change, they are upon us now,” the scientists wrote. “Modern day marine heatwaves can induce thermal displacements comparable to those from century-scale warming trends, and while these temperature shifts do not solely dictate species distributions, they do convey the scale of potential habitat disruption.”

A 2014-2015 Pacific marine heatwave known as “the Blob,” shifted surface temperatures more than 700 kilometers, or more than 400 miles, along the West Coast of the United States and in the Gulf of Alaska. That moved the prey of California sea lions farther from their rookeries in the Channel Islands off Southern California. This left hundreds of starving sea lion pups to strand on beaches.

Across the world’s oceans, the average long-term temperature shift associated with ocean warming has been estimated at just over 20 kilometers, about 13 miles, per decade. By comparison, marine heatwaves have displaced temperatures an average of approximately 200 kilometers, roughly 120 miles, in a matter of months. In effect, marine heatwaves are shifting ocean temperatures at similar scales to what is anticipated with climate change — but in much shorter time frames.

As the article states, this is going to have a lot of implications in the coming decades. According to the World Wildlife Fund, something like 3 billion people currently get a sizable portion of their protein from wild-caught seafood. As the ocean warms, traditional fisheries – already strained by over-fishing – are likely to collapse. This is something we should be preparing for. It may be that increasing the farming of fish will be a viable option, if we can work to reduce the environmental impact of doing so, and it’s probably a good idea to look into things like algae and insect farming to create new sources of protein to take pressure off both fisheries and to make it easier to scale back energy-intensive livestock farming.

As always, there’s a lot of work to do, and not much time in which to do it.

Hey, did you know that in this capitalist hell-world I need something called “money” to get shelter and food? It’s true! It’s also true that because of the global pandemic, there are literally hundreds of people applying for every job to which I or my wife apply, and nobody seems particularly eager to hire immigrants here. If you want to help out, you can do so for as little as $1.00 USD per month (about three pennies per day) at patreon.com/oceanoxia

My patrons are a collection of wonderful people who want to support the work I’m doing, and are contributing a little bit of their earnings to help me keep providing free content here! You could join them in that endeavor, and earn my sincere gratitude, as well as some extra content every month.