And so if we sit back apathetically, we have no right to bitch and complain about the way things play out.

For listeners who wanna get involved and have signed action alerts, um, I know we've seen protests taking place at different times for different occasions.

Um, are you...

Does Surfrider or Patagonia, are they actively involved in organizing these? And what is your guys' policy and general thoughts on that type of activism? Yeah.

I mean, you know, at the end of the day, right, we're trying to signal to decision-makers at the federal level, uh, the will of the people.

Um, and what we wanna do is make that so strong that, uh, they come around to decisions that we think are important, protecting our natural resources, land and sea.

So, um, the sorta more active you get, the more influence that you potentially have.

So let's make sure it's not, doesn't become a bad word or something from our past, but instead, a, a critical tactic in our future.

Yeah.

So, like, w- we have kind of average temperatures, and even that's hard to describe, right, 'cause things are changing around a lot, and, uh, but we've been measuring the sea surface temperature for a long time.

El Niños are variable, right? So we have strong ones and weak ones, and there's some cycle happening, and you can look back 2015, 1982, '83, and see these strong ones all, you know, uh, back to 1850, and, um, and so there's clearly some cyclical nature of them being kinda, like, medium or, or strong.

And, you know, it's worth noting that the opposite of a El Niño is the La Niña, which is these abnormally cool times.

But I think I do know what's happening is leading into this El Niño period, the Pacific was already really warm, and, uh, we're, we, you know- In the past, we talked about the blob, this big blob of warm water off the Pacific, and, um, you know, now, now we call those marine heatwaves, which is a term that I didn't learn about in grad school when I was doing oceanography because I don't think we really understood them.

And, uh, marine heatwaves are a result of excess warming of the planet, climate change.

You know, 90% of that excess heat has been absorbed by the ocean.

Um, can you explain Surfrider's role in that project and how it has held up to storms historically versus how it's performing now?