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Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures

#51

Post by Dylan16807 »

plank_time wrote: post #10
dyeje wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How fast do these creatures reproduce? Are they going to generate billions in between now and the next hot season? How many more will die this hot season? Will even more die next hot season?

It’s not “hot season”. It was a historically abnormal heat wave. I lived in Vancouver. You don’t normally see temperatures like that. It doesn’t have to reproduce right away, that’s just unrealistic. But the larger amounts of free space will mean a land grab by the survivors. That’s how it works in nature. If the climate changes and the water heats up then the ecosystem will be replaced by those animals that would su…

> It’s not “hot season”. It was a historically abnormal heat wave.

It's july 18. It both is hot season and was an abnormal heat wave.

So the questions are valid.

Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures

#52

Post by martinpw »

spiffydave wrote: post #40
plank_time wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of this was farmed seafood? I have a friend right now who is planning on opening fish farms because he feels it will have less of an environmental impact.

Looks like farmed fish is 50%. However, they feed farmed fish wild fish apparently. Takes 5 lbs. of wild fish to grow 1 lb. of farmed fish. Hmmm... doesn't sound sustainable. https://www.livescience.com/5682-milestone-50-percent-fish-f...

Your link refers specifically to salmon for the 5:1 ratio.

Overall the article says it takes 20 million tons of wild fish to feed 51.7 million tons of farmed fish. Which is still a significant amount.

Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures

#53

Post by supercanuck »

inasio wrote: post #15

What does the number even mean, is it a lot, what is the denominator? Doing a rough back of the envelope calculation, looking at tidal areas, barnacles and other creatures there go from one milliliter to one centimeter square, meaning that the dieoff represented 1000 square meters to 10 hectares, which in all honesty is probably not a lot

>What does the number even mean,

It means that climate change is affecting the food supply

Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures

#54

Post by wizzwizz4 »

plank_time wrote: post #25
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the waters heat up are you saying that no creatures will ever survive? That’s anti-science. • Science is a way of finding out about the world, not a list of facts. • No, actually. Rather, these creatures will die and we might lose entire species, significantly reducing biodiversity. > The space will be reclaimed by other creatures that can survive in that environment. To think otherwise goes against basic scienc…

Your understanding of “science” is absurd. Yes, those creatures that died will be dead. When the environment changes and creatures are selected against, they will die out. This is called the Theory of Natural Selection. Does it suck that it’s happening in situations like this heat wave? Yes. Should we do whatever we can to stop our contribution to this? Absolutely. Should we expect that it never should happen? No, ot…

No, not absurd. Actually I agree with all of that stuff, up until your last paragraph.

> Since when is the environment “stable”? Climate is always changing.

Your car is always oxidising. https://xkcd.com/1693/

> To believe that the climate has to be stable in order for life to thrive is anti-science.

Plenty of creatures survive in the arctic. Plenty of creatures survive in the desert. Few creatures survive when you subject them to twice-daily 80°C changes of temperature.

Selection pressures reduce (local) genetic variation. If the selection pressures remain high (i.e. members of a species aren't well-adapted to their environment) then you'll burn through the available genetic variation, you'll run out of individuals, and then the species will go locally extinct.

Evolution isn't magic that “science” discovered. It's a consequence of lower-level rules. You can't reason about many scientific discoveries without reductionism; it seems like you're treating evolution as a Fundamental Law of Nature, when it's more like a non-axiomic property of certain mathematical systems, arising under certain conditions (but not others) in the real world.

> Even a nuclear catastrophe like Chernobyl and Fukushima hasn’t stopped life from taking over in time frames that scientists thought were impossible.

Okay… but that's because the environment after those kinds of nuclear catastrophe isn't actually all that different to the environment that those creatures are adapted to. (That's the once-surprising part.)

Disagree? What adaptions do the plants and animals in those exclusion zones exhibit, and how is that analogous to what would be needed for the situation described in the article?

Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures

#55

Post by foobiekr »

will4274 wrote: post #29
spiffydave wrote: post #27

In other news, 288,000,000,000 pounds of seafood was consumed last year. If we give a rough estimate of 5 lbs. per animal (probably a lot less than that) that's around 60 billion animals killed last year so we can eat them. It's estimated we can add another 40% to that as unwanted by-catch. So now we have 84 billion sea creatures killed each year on purpose. If you're concerned about the environment you might conside…

I mean... I have to eat. Is seafood any worse than land animal production?

Yes. A lot. Especially ghost nets and other issues. Land animal production has issues with cruelty and pollution but it’s nowhere near as bad as seafood.

Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures

#56

Post by cwilkes »

inasio wrote: post #15

What does the number even mean, is it a lot, what is the denominator? Doing a rough back of the envelope calculation, looking at tidal areas, barnacles and other creatures there go from one milliliter to one centimeter square, meaning that the dieoff represented 1000 square meters to 10 hectares, which in all honesty is probably not a lot

The article mentions 1 million mussels in the size of a tennis court.

Course they probably weren’t living that close to one another.

As for the percent of the total mussel population the article didn’t say.

Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures

#57

Post by billjings »

throwawaysea wrote: post #50

Since Scientific American was one of the first to push false articles ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unprecedented-hea... ) claiming the PNW heatwave was primarily caused by climate change, I’m sharing this analysis from a UW Professor who is considered to be the foremost expert on northwest climate, where he shows that the event was less due to climate change and more due to a rare mix of factors (a bl…

"In other posts he mentions the record breaking event would have taken place even without climate change, but that climate change contributed a few degrees to the peak temperatures."

The reason that we refer to this phenomenon as climate change now and not global warming is that average temperature doesn't accurately capture the ways that the climate will change as it warms. We will also experience more outlier events, more heat waves and bizarre cold snaps. This is an excellent example of the former; the shift of the Arctic air off of the polar regions south produces other anomalies. But the term "climate change" is intended to capture the increased frequencies of all these kinds of anomalous events, not just the steady increase in average temperature.

Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures

#58

Post by morpheos137 »

klyrs wrote: post #34
morpheos137 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world has always changed. We only have moderately good climatic records from dendrochronology for the past 1000 years or so. A meteor impact or supervolcanic eruption could disturb the climate far more rapidly than a few tens of decades burning fossil fuels. Life will go on. It always has.

Life will go on, the earth will continue to orbit the sun. Even if the earth was flung away from the sun, life would go on, in the form of subterranean bacteria. The thing we're concerned about is that humans are apex predators and depend on a functioning food chain to survive. Filter feeders eat algae. Unconstrained algal growth is toxic to fish (salmon) that we eat. Oyster and mussel farms were devastated and some…

often food chains are actually more of food webs. Most species, especially humans, are adaptable as their environment changes. Look at polar bears. They started out as normal brown bears. Then during the ice age they developed polar attributes, like white fur and maratime diet. If the climate in the arctic warms they will move inland again and likely merge with existing brown bear populations in the taiga. Those that don't adapt will die. That is how evolution works and always has worked.

In the past the environment has changed very rapidly at time. All life eventually dies. That which endures longer is that which adapts.

A warmer more carbon rich atmosphere has some benefits:

Expanded arable regions, fewer droughts, more rainfall, more carbon for plants to grown (try turning all your carbon in the atmosphere into rock and let me know how life fares then.)

Carbon based life needs CO2. They have done experiments where a forest is subjected to increased CO2 ppm by plumbing and nozzels. It grew faster and more robustly. Life also needs warmth. During the Eocene epoch some 50 milion years ago the Arctic was sub-tropical and teaming with life.

Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures

#59

Post by spiffydave »

martinpw wrote: post #52
spiffydave wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like farmed fish is 50%. However, they feed farmed fish wild fish apparently. Takes 5 lbs. of wild fish to grow 1 lb. of farmed fish. Hmmm... doesn't sound sustainable. https://www.livescience.com/5682-milestone-50-percent-fish-f...

Your link refers specifically to salmon for the 5:1 ratio. Overall the article says it takes 20 million tons of wild fish to feed 51.7 million tons of farmed fish. Which is still a significant amount.

Thank you for clarifying. Appreciated.
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