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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."
You would think there would be a mention of lasers somewhere in the post. It is Slashdot after all. Sharks, ice, and ... Come ON, it writes itself... how we have fallen.
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!
It's all the environmentalists fault. If they had simply stuck with global warming, we wouldn't be having this problem. But nooooo, they had to change it to "Climate Change", which opened us up to wild swings in temperature in both directions.
I considered overly hot summers to be an acceptable tradeoff for having mild or almost non-existent winters. But now we have to deal with stupidly hot summers AND stupidly cold winters.
Go back to global warming!
I read the first paragraph of the article - right up to where it berated our President and then I stopped. If this is about real science, and I don't deny climate change, keep the politics out of it and just state the facts. We have plenty of time to do politics here or at the bar or wherever. Also, are these temperatures really record breaking or is that just more hype?
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.
Cold is Weather, Hot is Climate.
Temperature trends that continue for years are climate.
Temperature trends that last for a week are weather.
-- a phenomenon President Trump seems a little confused about --
FFS, I'm no Trump defender, but tossing in random, snarky asides in the summary immediately lowers the quality of the discussion.
Is math hard?
Here's four sets of 9 values.
Each subsequent one has a higher average, and also lower low and higher high.
5 6 7 5 6 7 5 6 7 : low=5; high=7; avg=6
4 6 8 6 6 7 5 6 7 : low=4; high=8; avg=6.1
3 6 9 6 6 8 6 6 7 : low=3; high=9; avg=6.3
2 6 10 6 6 8 6 7 8 : low=2; high=10; avg=6.5
Lots of cooking of data
Except that recalabration of data points based on new knowledge isn't cooking data, but rather valid adjustments.
The one that many of the doubters trot out is the adjustment that was made to the global seawater temperature data sets. For decades, sea surface temperatures were measured by ships, using a temperature sensor on the seawater intake used to cool the engines. As ships crisscrossed the ocean, they would record the temperature and location as part of their normal record keeping, and these have been compiled into large data sets.
In more modern times, the sea water temperature measurement has been supplemented by data recorded by buoys, which in turn report their data automatically. The trouble is that the two data sets didn't jive. The buoy data was showing things were slightly cooler (I think on the order of 0.25 to 0.5C) than what the data from the ships showed. If you took the temperatures at face values, it would make it appear that there had been a slight global cooling of the oceans rather than an ongoing increase, the so-called "Pause."
So what happened? Well, the scientists went back and looked at how the data was collected on ships, and realized that even with properly calibrated thermometers, they would read slightly high due to factors from the ship itself as it travels through the water. The ship's hull, engine room, plumbing, etc... slightly warms the water before it hits the temperature sensor, causing them to read high.
Once these factors were calibrated out, the "pause" largely disappeared. Is this cooking the books? I don't think so, but many people claimed it was.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Meanwhile in Europe we have been having much too warm temperatures for this time of year. Last week it was 15C (59 F) in central Europe where I live, which is practically spring temperature today it was 8C (46F) when it should be around the freezing point.
It's not the first time that Northern America receives all the dose of winter cold from from Europe. A couple of years ago we had the same situation - record lows in the US, much too high temperatures across Europe and Eurasia.
Nevertheless, global warming is a scientifically proven fact regardless what happens in Northern America, which is only a relatively small area of our globe. The oceans which cover two-thirds of our planet are warming, this is fact. The polar ice caps are melting, also fact. The glaciers are retreating, another fact.
Please just check this website of one very credible, US agency for the details if you still feel like denying it because Trump says so:
https://climate.nasa.gov/
First of all, it is dew point, not 'due point'. Second, climate is weather trends over decades. One weather event that is outside of the norm, regardless of how many standard deviations, is not climate. It might become a data point that in time can point to a change in overall climate, but you obviously have no idea what you're talking about.
In the 1970s, the theory successfully predicted a reversal of a three decade aerosol-driven cooling tend before it happened. That was the result of sufficient computing power becoming available to run detailed models, which successfully excluded the continuation of cooling.
It's also worth noting that by the mid 90s scientists were predicting that "global warming" would also include extreme cold weather events as well as heat waves -- thus the preference for the term "climate change".
Finally, if you actually look at global temperature anomaly map, it's quite evident that the cold snap we're in is a highly localized phenomenon. Almost the ENTIRE PLANET is ANOMALOUSLY HOT, except for parts of North America and Greenland.
It's easy to say a theory has no consistent predictions when you use a straw man.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
New England is not the entire planet.
I strongly disagree with your assertion. I've lived in New England for nearly 40 years, so I should know.
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.