Ep. 29: Climate Change is (Still) Here

So what have been some of the most worrisome climate events this year so far? I mean, there's so much.

We can start kind of in the U.S. with record-breaking temperatures throughout the entire country, which then was also kind of at the same time we saw things like giant rainfall events and flooding in the Northeast, as well as a thousand-year rainfall event in Texas, where a year's worth of rain fell in like a week.

And if you remember our episode from last year about the flooding in Texas, that was very deadly and caused by like infrastructure and political failures.

You can probably imagine that this is quite catastrophic to happen again in Texas at So little time has passed.

But we had the World Cup this summer.

And I think one of the things that, you know, was very visible and perhaps enraged a lot of soccer fans was the introduction of the hydration break.

And I think that's just kind of a really interesting thing because it's kind of a microcosm of what is to come because a sport like a very classic sport like soccer is They've had to add in these like kind of mitigations for climate change.

And I think it kind of shows the new normal that we are seeing going forward or the new abnormal, as some people like to call it.

And I think that was very much shown in the U.S. this summer.

Yeah, absolutely.

And also within the US, we saw trends on especially the California coast, and these trends actually extended down into South America as well.

But we saw trends in record ocean temperatures, some of the hottest temperatures on record for the sea surface along the coast of California, but especially in central and southern California.

And this is One of the most characteristic aspects of an El Nino event is those warm surface temperatures on the west coasts of the Americas.

With that, we saw the shutoff of an upwelling, which is essentially like the rising of cold nutrient-rich water towards the surface on these coasts, which means that those nutrients were deprived out of the ecosystem.

And there was a lot of reduction in normal fisheries that was actually...

in some places, especially around Southern California, replaced with different species of fish that were coming up from tropical waters that normally would not be found here.

So larger tuna and swordfish and various other large fish like that were actually found off of the coast of California because the water was unusually warm and so they were able to travel further north.

But our normal fisheries were decimated by the lack of algae that the smaller fish rely on.

no bigger place than in the starvation of seabirds.

A record number of seabird deaths from all kinds of unusual species, including a pelagic species, so an offshore species that's normally not seen along the coast.

They were all coming in, essentially looking for food, and many of them are dying of starvation.

I know I personally have seen multiple deceased and very sick seabirds out on the shore, far more than I have in any year of living on the coast of California.

And I think that that's also very concerning because it's a sign that our ecosystems are responding radically.

There are ecosystems that are already extremely stressed.

These are fisheries that have historically been overfished, that are already suffering from overall global warming, that are now also suffering from a severe lack of nutrients.