The other day I noted the end of climate "exceptionalism" in the latest IPCC report (5th Assessment) on the impacts of climate change. But I didn't know the half of it when I wrote that.
As The Dude said, new shit has come to light.
Let's look at some of that new shit (The Economist, April 5th, 2014).
In the oceans both animals and plants are migrating from the tropics to temperate latitudes in pursuit of cooler waters. Benthic algae—seaweeds, to the layman—are shifting their ranges polewards at 10km (6 miles) a decade. Their single-celled planktonic cousins are moving much faster: 400km a decade.
Since algae are the beginning of marine food chains, everything else changes with them. The result, says the report, is that by 2055 fish yields in temperate latitudes could be 30-70% higher than they were in 2005 (see map below).
Tropical yields, by contrast, could fall by 40-60%.
The yields in question are potential ones, and assume that overfishing has not denuded the oceans by then, but that matter is beyond the IPCC’s remit.
Green/Blue shows the areas where "maximum [fish] catch potential" will increase in the decade 2051-60 compared to 2001-10.
JFC!
Superficially, this result is a triumph of science by committee and specialization in the sciences. The climate people and the oceans people do not talk to each other. Marine biologists and ecologists—there aren't very many of them, compared to those in the huge (and profitable) "climate industry"—are a pretty depressed bunch, not only because nobody listens to them, but also because they are watching the wholesale destruction (or grim transformation) of life in the oceans, which is their chosen field of study.
At a deeper level, as I wrote in Life In The Oceans — Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind, the oceans are generally ignored by "environmentalists" whose sole focus is on the climate. Actually, the oceans are ignored by humans generally because humans live on the land. Hence The Economist continues like this—
From the human point of view, though biological changes in the ocean are important, the most crucial such changes will be on land, and will concern where particular crops can be grown...
And at an even deeper level, psychologically in the unconscious, U.N.-sponsored reports on the impacts of climate change are "designed" to tell humans exactly what they want to hear.
I could list all the reasons why life in the oceans will be fucked up beyond all repair by 2051-60, a list which would certainly include overfishing, which The Economist notes is "beyond the IPCC's remit." In short, I could explain all the science which tells us, based on current and apparently unalterable trends, why the IPCC is full of shit.
But, really, what's the point? It's not as though anybody important on this planet is going to be "rationally" persuaded to do the right thing.
Current trends are unalterable because humans can not even begin to acknowledge, let alone change, their own destructive behavior. The IPCC's fifth assessment is a case in point. To paraphrase The Economist, bad news about the consequences of human busy-ness on this planet is beyond the evolutionary "remit" of the species Homo sapiens.
Hell, Lisa-ann Gershwin, author of Stung! — On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean, thinks life in oceans is fucked up beyond all repair right now. She is almost certainly right.
Lisa-ann is not alone. Many marine scientists feel the same way. They keep issuing dire warnings which nobody reads, let alone acts upon. To make matters worse, the effects of ocean acidification seem to be happening faster than anyone anticipated.
And yet in 2014 the IPCC is telling us that "maximum [fish] catch potential" at temperate latitudes (though not in the tropics) will be much, much better in 50 years than it was during the decade 2001-10 (graph above).
All this tells me one thing, and I have written it before—Homo sapiens is clearly an evolutionary dead end, a very destructive cul-de-sac in the history of life on Earth (the "tree of life") since the "Cambrian Explosion" 542 million years ago.
And when you think about it, that's really the new shit that's come to light in the 21st century.
Shit! Words fail me (other than that first one). What happened to joined up thinking?
Posted by: Mike Roberts | 04/07/2014 at 05:50 AM