Crushing heat wave in Pacific Northwest cooked shellfish alive by the millions

Crushing heat wave in Pacific Northwest cooked shellfish alive by the millions(washingtonpost.com)

56 points by justinboogaard 4 years ago | 11 comments

ttul 4 years ago |

I was just at one of those beaches. Dead muscles dominate the landscape by the million. One can only imagine the impact this is having on the intertidal sea life and the land life that depend upon it, such as birds.

BrianOnHN 4 years ago | |

In Tampa bay, red tide is already[1] killing literally tons[2] of fish per day. How long can this last without a complete collapse of the ocean ecosystems?

[1] https://www.fox13news.com/news/red-tide-temporarily-closes-s...

[2] https://www.fox13news.com/news/in-one-day-nine-tons-of-dead-...

stuntkite 4 years ago | | |

I'm pretty sure what we are seeing in very rapid real time is the collapse of not just the ocean ecosystem but all of them. It does appear that the time to turn around what we are doing was.... a while ago.

cmurf 4 years ago | | |

Oceans provide a huge amount of food. How long can humans manage even a partial collapse of the ocean ecosystem before there's a cascading collapse of civil society?

deevolution 4 years ago |

Events like this happen and yet no on wants to adopt nuclear energy. Instead the narrative is natural gas supplemented by wind, solar, and batteries all of which cause more environmental destruction. Even in catastrophic nuclear failures, nature inevitably reclaims the land. On the other hand Solar panels and wind farms decimate local wildlife populations and require large amounts of land use - not to mention the mining operations.

uminer6ugr4 4 years ago | |

You realize if we used only nuclear power we'd have to mine an absolute crap ton of U right? Only a few percent is even usable, U235, so imagine the mega scale strip mining required.

I'm not going to go into why nuclear is dead, but I think it's interesting that so many people think it's so easy to build more nuclear. There's a lot of things to scale of we wanted to do that, and right now the industry is scaling renewables, which isn't going to stop anytime soon, so if you want more nuclear I suggest you become a billionaire and build your own.

geocrasher 4 years ago |

I wish people would remember the wonderful effects that lockdown had on the environment. Clearer air in places all around the world. Our daily activities as individuals have an impact on the environment, but only when we act in unison.

premium-gecko 4 years ago |

The Washington Post is a propaganda outlet, and this is fear propaganda. This type of organization has learned a wonderful trick, and they use it all the time: they report current events without checking for precedent. Why? Because there almost always is precedent, which makes the current event seem less alarming, which is obviously no good for them.

This story is supposed to be due to global warming / climate change, right? If so, why is it easy to find reports of the same kind of thing happening over a hundred years ago, before humans had emitted any appreciable amount of CO2?

Here's one from 1912: https://www.nytimes.com/1912/02/12/archives/hot-ocean-boils-... "HOT OCEAN BOILS FISH.; Gulf Sailors Report Passing Through Zone of Scalding Water." Inconvenient for the CO2 hypothesis, huh.

Please. Start checking for precedent when you see stories like this. I think you'll find it eye-opening.

uniqueid 4 years ago | |

  Please. Start checking for precedent when you see stories like this. I think you'll find it eye-opening.

The math for a big newspaper is something like 100 years x 365 daily editions a year x 100+ stories per day. It's rather hard to avoid innocent repetition after you've published millions of stories.

premium-gecko 4 years ago | | |

I don't think innocent repetition does much harm. What I'm saying is harmful is reporting some current event as if it is new and startling and unprecedented, when in fact it's not that unusual, and has even been reported on before in that very newspaper, which would be uncovered by a search. Obviously they're not even doing that.

But why would they? They don't want to report "thing that happens fairly frequently happened again"... the story being scary translates directly into dollars going into their pockets. In other words, they terrify people by lying, for money.