Will the latest El Niño Southern Oscillation be the death knell for: The Largest Living Organism on Earth.?
The Great Barrier Reef has yet to recover from the 2016 El Niño. It takes a coral reef approximately 15 years to recover from a significant ‘Bleaching Event”, clearly, there will be no respite for an already ailing complex organism. That’s all happening, before Japan takes the cheapest option and dumps millions of gallons of radioactive sludge, being described as filtered water, into my beloved Pacific Ocean.
Here’s a question for informed readers. Could the sludge have been injected into a depleted oil well, rather than be simply dumped into the adjacent ocean? I’d love to know if that was a possibility, not considered, due to the cost!
Brace for grief, our own and more importantly, that of our youth, as day by day the realisation that they have next to no future, will trigger what I have previously described as: The Coming Tsunami of Grief.
I refuse to be the last generation of elders, lying to the last generation of youth. The Kids Are Not Alright: How Young People are Dealing with Climate Anxiety
A seminal event like the collapse of the GBR would shake this set of living arrangements to the core, then there will be another similar event, rinse and repeat.
A perfect example is the collapse of the Emperor Penguin colonies in Antarctica.
Capitalism and Industrial Civilisation is a “Confidence Game”. Losing something this significant or a city or region of people to Wet Bulb Extremes, will undermine all confidence in the future and this civilisation will unravel rapidly. Collapse: The Only Realistic Scenario

“Australia’s south-east is in for a marine heatwave that is literally off the scale, raising the prospect of significant losses in fishing and aquaculture.”

“The Bureau of Meteorology expects a patch of the Tasman Sea off Tasmania and Victoria will be at least 2.5C above average from September to February, and it could get much hotter than that.”
South-East Australia Marine Heatwave Forecast to be Literally Off the Scale

The embedded article above is another example of The Guardian pretending to cover the catastrophe but downplaying the cumulative effects. I’ve called out that strategy before on this blog at: The Rogues Gallery of the Climate Enemy Within.

Photo above, me and my beloved coral.

I first dived the Great Barrier Reef in 2001. I skippered a 37ft yacht from Micronesia to Cairns, then we sailed 800 miles down the GBR, diving every day for 6 weeks, before sailing the boat back to Aotearoa NZ. At the time, a marine biologist in Cairns conducted a seminar that I attended, and he said that the reef had only a generation of life left in it. His opening gambit in the lecture was “Turn to the person sitting beside you, pat them on the back and congratulate them for being the last generation to dive the Great Barrier Reef, before it dies”! Those were the days before abrupt climate change, when contemporary climate change awareness was in its infancy (George Perkins Marsh 1847 accepted). I thought he was exaggerating for effect, as people think I am doing now. He was right, I long to be proven wrong. I have Zero interest in being proven right.
I don’t believe that my marine biologist tutor really understood how fast our climate change catastrophe would unfold, but his estimate on the reef’s life expectancy appears, tragically, spot on.
In 2016, during the last significant El Niño Southern Oscillation, Cyclone Winston pummelled Fiji with wind speeds in excess of 220 miles/ hour, then dumped an enormous amount of rain on the Australian coast and in the Coral Sea, cooling both, had Winston not wrought its havoc, the reef would have been in far worse shape. Tropical Cyclone Winston Causes Devastation in Fiji

“The ENSO Outlook is currently at El Niño Alert, having met criteria 1, 3 and 4 – see below.”

“When El Niño Alert criteria have been met in the past, an El Niño event has developed around 70% of the time.”
ENSO Outlook: An Alert System for the El Niño-Southern Oscillation
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology is ultra conservative. Other analysis implies that the nascent El Niño will be very strong.
“The latest weekly values in the Niño 1+2 region (eastern Pacific) and Niño 3 region (east-central Pacific) are surpassed only by 1997, with records dating back to 1981. All indications are that this El Niño will peak as a strong, canonical event either very late in 2023 or early in 2024. The atmospheric response, measured by the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), has trended toward El Niño but continues to lag behind the oceanic progression.” Many thanks to Tomas Reis on Twitter/X

My colleague and dear friend Professor Guy McPherson and I have previously discussed the effects of the building El Niño in our discussion titled: The Convergence of the Next El Niño–Southern Oscillation & the Arctic Sea Ice Minimum

About Kevin Hester

I'm an anti-imperialist, environmental activist and blue ocean sailor, who is passionate about the earth and all it's inhabitants without favour. Brace for imminent impact as we bare witness to the non-linear unraveling of the biosphere and habitability disappearing for most if not all complex life on the only habitable planet we know of. To quote President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’. Folks we have lost the Arctic.