I like reading my local newspaper, (online edition), the Wichita Eagle.
The Tuesday edition had a nice story about climate change:
eedition.kansas.com/…
That link takes you to the latest edition. I can navigate to back issues, but, since I pay $220 per year for access to the Wichita Eagle, I do not know if you will be able to look at it. As folks here say, it may have a paywall, for you.
Anyway.
‘It’s like the gates of hell have been opened’
Climate change wreaks havoc in the Arctic and beyond
That is the dramatic title of the article.
Let’s look at a few segments of the article:
“You can think of it in terms of winners and losers,” said Janet Duffy-Anderson, a Seattle-based marine scientist who leads annual surveys of the Bering Sea for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “Something is going to emerge and become the more dominant species, and something is going to decline because it can’t adapt to that changing food web.”
That is where I got the title of my diary. Humans always adapt. Humans always win.
Whales are having trouble:
In September, an emaciated young male gray whale was seen off a beach near Kodiak, behaving as though it were trying to feed, scooping material from the shallow shore bottom and filtering it through his baleen, a system many leviathans use to separate food from sand and water.
Three weeks later, that same young male washed ashore dead, not far from where he had been spotted previously.
Apparently, not cold enough, means, not enough food:
Researchers are focused on ice – or the lack of it – because the frozen ocean is the foundation of the region’s rich ecosystems. It not only keeps the waters beneath it cool, but a layer of algae grows on the underside of these ice sheets – the key to the entire food web.
And, in that region of the Arctic, the change is very big:
A 2020 study published in the journal Science documented a reduction in ice extent unlike any other in the last 5,500 years: Its extent in 2018 and 2019 was 60% to 70% lower than the historical average. In an Arctic report card released just this week, federal scientists called the region’s changes “alarming and undeniable.”
Alright, there are some losers. Who are the winners?
There are also reports of killer whales – also known as orcas– showing up in areas they haven’t been spotted before, feeding on beluga whales, bowheads and narwhals, said Giles, the University of Washington orca researcher.
“They are finding channels and openings through the ice, and in some cases preying on animals that have never seen killer whales before,” she said.
Killer whales, like killer humans, move in for the kill.
Also, albatross birds:
Not all bird species are suffering. Albatross, which are surface feeders, are booming, underscoring for Kuletz the idea that there could be “winners and losers” in the changing region. Albatross do not nest in Alaska. They only come in the summer to feed, and are therefore not tied to eggs or nests while looking for food.
Life finds a way, even if change can be brutal:
Yet for some scientists, it isn’t easy to reconcile how a system in balance could so quickly go off the rails, even if some species adapt and thrive as others struggle.
Life finds a way.
Humans find a way.
Thanks for reading.
By the way, go to this link:
www.worldometers.info/…
We have 7 billion, 917 million humans on this planet.
That number grows by 80 million, per year.
One year from now, we will be at
7 billion, 997 million humans.
If, somehow, we humans cannot maintain a steady flow of food, in our food supply chain,
we can lose a billion or two to famine,
and we will still be at 6 billion.
6 billion strong.
I mention this, to refute those who fail to see,
1. Life finds a way.
2. Humans cheat, and certainly find a way.
3. Extinction of humans would mean the death of 8 billion of us.
Not possible, until the sun boils the oceans away, which will happen, almost a billion years from now:
www.google.com/...
Thanks for reading.