Wednesday, September 12, 2018

This is not Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry, Starry Night."


September 12, 2018
By Brian McNoldy and Matthew Cappuci

The Northern Hemisphere (click here) is facing an onslaught of hurricanes and typhoons, seemingly overnight. With three storms spinning in the North Atlantic — Hurricane Florence one of them — the tropics have exploded to life at the peak of the annual season. At the same, in the tropical Pacific, Super Typhoon Mangkhut is the most intense tropical cyclone in the world, packing 170 mph winds.

Why the remarkable uptick in activity? In the Atlantic, in particular, it's all thanks to a sudden alignment of the two things that fuel hurricanes: energy and wind.

If the winds aloft in the atmosphere are too strong, they can shear apart a developing storm. It’s ironic but true — calm winds are needed to brew a hurricane. The amount of shear in the Atlantic has reached its seasonal minimum, kindling any fledgling storm and fostering its growth....

How many people GLOBALLY are under the threat of severe storms TODAY?

The troposphere is hot, the global movement of air slow and incredible loss of carbon sinks, including massive fires with a three mile high fire tornado and coral reefs that are bleached to the depths of over 130 feet.

From Nature, this is the abstract, but, the entire SCIENTIFIC article is at this link:

Published: 

Deep reefs of the Great Barrier Reef offer limited thermal refuge during mass coral bleaching

  • By Pedro R. Frade, 
  • Pim Bongaerts, 
  • Norbert Englebert, 
  • Alice Rogers, 
  • Manuel Gonzalez-Rivero & 
  • Ove Hoegh-Guldberg 

  • Nature Communications, volume 9, Article number: 3447 (2018)

  • Our rapidly warming climate (click here) is threatening coral reefs as thermal anomalies trigger mass coral bleaching events. Deep (or “mesophotic”) coral reefs are hypothesised to act as major ecological refuges from mass bleaching, but empirical assessments are limited. We evaluated the potential of mesophotic reefs within the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and adjacent Coral Sea to act as thermal refuges by characterising long-term temperature conditions and assessing impacts during the 2016 mass bleaching event. We found that summer upwelling initially provided thermal relief at upper mesophotic depths (40 m), but then subsided resulting in anomalously warm temperatures even at depth. Bleaching impacts on the deep reefs were severe (40% bleached and 6% dead colonies at 40 m) but significantly lower than at shallower depths (60–69% bleached and 8–12% dead at 5-25 m). While we confirm that deep reefs can offer refuge from thermal stress, we highlight important caveats in terms of the transient nature of the protection and their limited ability to provide broad ecological refuge....

  • Earth's beauty lends itself to tourism and economic strength, but, the function of that beauty is far more important than any currency.

  • The Congress, especially the Republicans chronically make reference to "The captains of industry know their own business;" and bend to their will. But, when it comes to bending to the will of scientists attempting to save Earth, Congress' seeks every idiot form of hubris and slander that can be found to indulge the petroleum industry beyond reason.

  • I thank the Washington Post, it really is a very good article.