Australia — Record Heat on Land, Devastating Heatwave Offshore

The temperatures in Australia have been hotter than ever recorded in history. Wildfires are raging, filling the air of several cities, including Sydney, with acrid smoke.  Drought is choking a significant portion of the country.

As bad as things are on land, they are just as bad offshore where Western Australia’s coastline is in the midst of the most widespread marine heatwave it has experienced since reliable satellite monitoring began in 1993. The heat is killing fish, shellfish, crabs, and kelp. 

The Washington Post reports that over recent decades, the rate of ocean warming off Tasmania, Australia’s southernmost state and a gateway to the South Pole, has climbed to nearly four times the global average, oceanographers say.

More than 95 percent of the giant kelp — a living high-rise of 30-foot stalks that served as a habitat for some of the rarest marine creatures in the world — died.

Giant kelp had stretched the length of Tasmania’s rocky east coast throughout recorded history. Now it clings to a tiny patch near Southport, the island’s southern tip, where the water is colder.

We recently posted about the return of the Blob, a large patch of unusually warm water off Alaska and the Pacific Northwest that has had a devastating impact on cod and other fish. Climate change appears to increasingly make unusually hot ocean waters more the rule than the exception.

Comments

Australia — Record Heat on Land, Devastating Heatwave Offshore — 6 Comments

  1. Why will no-one understand that the prime cause of the catastrophic global warming is ourselves….massive over population. Population growth must be curtailed or even halted for a while.

  2. Population’s tricky to discuss not the least because of China’s botched “one child” program. And our biology, of course.

    The tricky thing: how to let population ramp down in a gentle way, without leaving a bunch of geriatrics unable to feed themselves. Japan urgently needs to solve this problem and no doubt will produce some useful approaches.

  3. Overpopulation, through its various effects, is the major cause of climate change. How to let population ramp down in a gentle way, without leaving a bunch of geriatrics unable to feed themselves is tricky – and we do not have the time. With the recent COP-out of world leaders, the climate change process is now irreversible. Nature and Human nature will combine, through famines, war (incl. nuclear) and pestilence to reduce the human population to near nothing and quite likely to extinction which has been the lot of the dominant species in every geological mass extinction…

  4. Fires also killing Koala bears.

    THEY also have Chlamida
    an STD.
    Australian koala
    hospital photos show
    wildfire devastation
    Business Insider
    https://
    http://www.businessinsider.com/
    australian-koala-hospital-
    photos-show-wildfire-
    devastation-2019-12
    Watch This Adorable
    Koala Drink From a
    Cyclist’s Water Bottle
    Bicycling
    https://
    http://www.bicycling.com/news/
    a30359987/koala-drinks-
    from-cyclists-water-
    bottle/

  5. It was with deep concern even shock that one read the above comments regarding population control. Is it now acceptable to reduce by “ethnic cleansing” ? What is wrong with you people ?
    Having just celebrated my 83rd. birthday at Christmas I am without doubt a “geriatric” by the commenters standards. Believe me I have no wish to be the subject of a “tricky” experiment nor have my grandchildren told they may not have children if they so wish.
    Having grown up in Europe during WW2 one remembers Nazi thinking and the savage work of the SS which we are seeing repeating itself in the New York area.
    For the sake of humanity think before you write these comments.

    HAPPY AND BLESSED NEW YEAR AND NEW DECADE TO ALL OF YOU