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."

Comments

Oceans getting colder?

[LynnwoodRooster]

I thought the missing heat (that which caused the pause for most of the first part of this millennia) was accumulating in the ocean...

Re:Oceans getting colder?

[King_TJ]

That's what I heard too. I'd honestly like some more of a scientific explanation for the claims so off-handedly thrown out there in the topic heading here?

Picking on Trump's comment aside (and honestly, I'm pretty sure he said that in jest) .... what's the reasoning for climate change causing these low temperatures and snowfall along the East coast? Last I checked, the record low temperatures in Washington DC for NYE was set way back in 1912 or some-such. As cold as it was at the end of 2017, it wasn't record-breaking or anything.

But how cold is the water?

[Atmchicago]

Saltwater freezes at 28.4 degrees Fahrenheit. How did these sharks get so cold if they were underwater?

Re:Not a climate change article

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re: I bet the friggin sharks

[hey!]

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.