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It's So Cold Outside That Sharks Are Actually Freezing to Death (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: As climate change ushers in another year of extreme global temperatures -- a phenomenon President Trump seems a little confused about -- cities up and down the East Coast are facing record-breaking snowfall and subzero temperatures. But while city dwellers might be able to hide indoors and crank up the heat, some animals aren't so lucky. According to the Cape Cod-based Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, it's gotten so cold that sharks in the area have been washing up on the shore and essentially freezing to death. This week, the organization responded to three thresher sharks that likely suffered "cold shock" in the surrounding waters. Organisms suffer cold shock when they're exposed to extreme dips in temperature and can sometimes experience muscle spasms or cardiac arrest. Scientists believe the sharks swimming off the coast of Cape Cod -- where temperatures have dropped to 6 degrees -- suffered cold shock in the water, and then wound up getting stranded on the shore, where they likely suffocated. "If you've got cold air, that'll freeze their gills up very quickly," Greg Skomal, a marine scientist, told the New York Times. "Those gill filaments are very sensitive and it wouldn't take long for the shark to die."
So sharks freezing to death is blamed on the pseudo science of global warming?
I thought the missing heat (that which caused the pause for most of the first part of this millennia) was accumulating in the ocean...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Saltwater freezes at 28.4 degrees Fahrenheit. How did these sharks get so cold if they were underwater?
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
I read the first paragraph of the article - right up to where it berated our President and then I stopped.
Every article about climate change is framed that way. And it's why us deplorables become climate change "deniers".
I think the problem is, most "climate change denial" is politically based.
True, but equally true of 99% of the climate change alarmism. Lots of cooking of data and presentation of misleading graphs to make something seem much scarier than it is in reality.
Obviously the climate is changing, and will always continue to do so, including some massive swings. The real issue is, why ware we worried about warming? Never has warming been overly harmful to the the Earth as a whole, and generally supports more varied and diverse life in warmer times.
Yet we are being told to worry about this, mostly for political ends so vast sums of money can be diverted into the right pockets.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So when we have a Heat Wave and everyone is trying to tie it to Global Warming, you'll stand up and correct them, eh?
Maybe you have something to say about all the attempts to tie CA's drought to Global Warming. Having grown up there 50 years ago, I can tell you, it's doesn't really rain much.
How about all the attempts to tie the fires to Global Warming? Having grown up there 50 years ago, I can tell you CA has three seasons: Drought, Fire, Flood/Mudslides.
You people get all "scientific" when it's cold but when it's hot, all your reasoning goes out the window.
As for "trends", most of the temperature data you are relying on for a trend has been "adjusted" several times over, almost always to the warmer side later in the record and colder side earlier in the record.
The problem is this topic is so politicized - as is evidenced even in the commentary here - that any data comes with baggage. The earth is in a constant state of climate change based on any number of issues. We humans, burning fossil fuels might have some impact, but the earth flies around the sun in an elliptical orbit at 1,100 mph, wobbling all along the way. Our solar system speeds around the Milky Way at nearly 515,000 mph, and the Milky Way moves at an astounding (and approximate) 1.3 million mph through the universe. The sun we travel around expands about an inch per year, and by most measurements has been warming; still to date we can't explain all our global warming based on the warming of the sun. Our blue marble "currently" decides to flip its polarity every 200,000 to 300,000 years. How many times it has happened in its 4.5 billion life we can't be sure, but it has been plenty. So too have been the earthquakes, eruptions and other geologic events that impact land and air. Modeling climate change is a massive undertaking.I mean if we can't even measure the distance of a marathon correctly (Milwaukee), should we so readily and vehemently go at each other's throats based on models of an infinitely more complex problem? Listen, the problem isn't that we need to save the earth. It will be fine up until the sun swallows it whole. The problem is saving the humans. In that regard it doesn't matter if we are getting hotter, colder, more extreme, etc. What matters is weather kills. We need to build better and smarter. You know what else kills? Fossil fuels. They don't get a long with our biology. Here's another thing that kills: poverty. So the trick is affordable, clean energy and development. It's not that hard to do. Crap, we built the Hoover Dam, didn't we? And that was 80 years ago. In this day and age it should be a cake walk. But Nooooo. Thanks to our major political parties who would readily fight over length of a yard stick, we're missing the train out of Ignoreland.
Now you're telling me the impact is less than half a degree ON AVERAGE over a year? What disaster exactly do we have coming from all of this??
Here's an interesting exercise I worked out last year.
Take some amount of temperature change -- say half a degree. Work out how much energy per liter that is -- there are some HVAC sites with the information you need. You'll have to make some assumptions about the humidity and air pressure, which means that your results are likely going to be off by an order of magnitude, but that's fine for our purposes.
Now here's the good bit: multiply the change in energy per liter by the number liters in the troposphere. The answer you'll get is a half a degree equals a shit-ton of energy. As in it makes humanity's entire nuclear arsenal look like a damp squib.
Here's the thing: which scale is the ideal one for thinking about this in? The one liter scale or the troposphere-wide scale? The answer is neither. It's the effect of continent-wide pressure and temperature gradients we need to be worrying about. Even a half degree's worth of thermal energy/liter can on the meso-scale alter patterns of prevailing winds and precipitation, and those are very big things indeed.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.