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
Professor Guy McPherson and I have been beating the drum of Abrupt Climate Change together now for a decade. We’ve been branded ‘Alarmists”.
Damn straight, we are alarmed.
The Rate of Change is the critical detail. Guy goes into that aspect of the great unravelling below:
I always ‘populate’ the comments section of my blogs with additional evidence as it gushes forth, feel free to join the team by adding your thoughts and any other evidence corroborating or refuting my analysis.
By dropping a comment you’ll get a notification of any additional evidence coming to light.
“The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite…”
Jules Verne
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.
Kevin Hester 
Dear Kevin, I was fortunate to see and snorkel on a tiny part of the Great Barrier Reef in 1998. I was deeply saddened to hear that I was one of the last people to see it as it should be.
I agree with Guy that ‘civilization is a heat engine’ and do not blame one political system. The Socialists and Communists have not done much better. China had its disastrous Great Leap Forward that built steel mills and factories that ended up polluting their water. They build six times more coal burning plants than every other country. Russia destroyed The Aral Sea deliberately, planting cotton where it had no business to be. Their corporations are now destroying Lake Baikal.
The culprit is the attitude that humans are more important than any other being on this planet, and that we can take what we like, and not worry about the consequences. We as a species are chopping through the foundation walls of our only home. Some humans are deluded enough to think they can do the same thing on Mars.
I have never believed that humans are a rational species. Some individuals are, but not many. You and Guy and Pauline are three of them. I don’t include myself because I’m aware that the minute the heat goes up, I go out. Maybe it’s preferable to the alternatives.
thank you for your brave and impassioned defense of the beautiful Reef.
Nancy Beiman
LikeLike
Thanks Kevin, it’s painful to watch.
LikeLike
Now the scientists are thinking that El Nino was mainly caused by sun activity is now switching to the concept of being a human-caused intensification due to, you guessed it, global warming:
https://weather.com/news/climate/video/el-nino-cause-changed-in-last-50-years-study-finds
___
25Oct
And here in the Inland PacNW mountains the 21/22’C days of all last week just switched to snowing out the window this morning with a monster bulge of extremely cold air barreling out of Canada this week. I’m on the western edge of it and, so far, it’s not sticking because the ground is just too damn warm.
The potential temperature change is that I could be brushed by the intense chill of below -10’C this week. Body is NOT ready for that big a shift! Nor is the winter woodpile…
sealintheSelkirks
LikeLiked by 1 person
From Washington State University on this El Nino:
What is a strong El Niño? Meteorologists anticipate a big impact in winter 2023, but the forecasts don’t all agree
https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-strong-el-nino-meteorologists-anticipate-a-big-impact-in-winter-2023-but-the-forecasts-dont-all-agree-215395
___
sealintheSelkirks
LikeLiked by 1 person
Much ado about Tipping points;
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-critical-climate-collapse-conditions-ecological.html?fbclid=IwAR3LY8ReIQBNnLQ0Y7nwqvCJg7r-7F6Mi6COBGwVJeNhMUhlRipIpKHxQi4
LikeLike
Another Holy Hell moment:
Great Barrier Reef Suffering Record Coral Bleaching With Damage 59 Feet Below the Surface
https://www.ecowatch.com/great-barrier-deep-coral-bleaching.html
___
20 meters down?! That is…just nuts, Kev.
DP on Windward Side of O’ahu doesn’t dive (ears won’t let him anymore), but his last paddle dragging a line fishing in his sea kayak about a mile offshore said it was obvious the bleaching is getting worse there, too, and it isn’t even summer yet.
And with La Nina coming back? Ah damn! Off the NW coast here is going to be bad this summer I’m guessing. More rotting 1-arm starfish, more dead oyster beds, more…bad in every category because I’m expecting some kind of stagnant ‘heat dome’ to show up like 2021 somewhere between Alaska and Washington State again. Starving Gray Whales washing up on beaches seem to have become the norm now, too, all up and down the Pacific Coast.
It doesn’t collapse ‘cleanly,’ does it? Not like flipping off a light switch. Piece by rotting piece it shows us where we are headed planet-wide.
And the crazies are in control of the planet.
sealintheSelkirks
LikeLike
And right now there’s Hurricane Debbie about to slam into the West side of Florida…
In the South, Sea Level Rise Accelerates at Some of the Most Extreme Rates on Earth The surge is startling scientists, amplifying impacts such as hurricane storm surges and nuisance flooding and testing mitigation measures like the Resilient Florida program.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11072024/florida-sea-level-rise-accelerates-at-extreme-rates/
___
This next two months could be very active…
sealintheSelkirks
LikeLike
Latest on the Great Barrier Reef from Hunziker. Never any good news.
Killing the Great Barrier Reef
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/31/killing-the-great-barrier-reef/
____
sealintheSelkirks
LikeLiked by 1 person
Don’t know where to put this, but since acidifying the worldwide ocean sounds rather bad being as it is being called the 7th planetary boundary, I guessed that the Goodbye Coral Reefs thread would be acceptable.
The Oceans Just Hit an Ominous Milestone
A new report sounds the alarm on ocean acidification as Earth breaches the seventh of nine “planetary boundaries.”
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-oceans-just-hit-an-ominous-milestone/
__
As I don’t live on and in the ocean anymore, I’m not personally seeing this but I am hearing from my best friend and longest surf/skate/snowboard partner about what is happening off their place on Windward Side of O’ahu. His personal experience with the reefs (and outer reefs he kayak fishes from) supports this article. It’s really REALLY bad as death haunts the coral waaaaay off the coastline now. That’s over 35 years of observation from above and in the water…
Big sigh.
sealintheSelkirks
LikeLiked by 1 person
What started out as a good but disturbing article is ruined by the misguided and unrealistic ‘Hopium’ at the end!
LikeLike
Always hopium, Kevin, in damned near every article. It’s a freaking feature because, honestly, do you think anybody wants to hear that we have totally fucked ourselves over and our civilization is going to utterly collapse?
No.
Anthropologists classify our worldwide civilization as the 23rd ‘major’ civilization to have appeared in the last 9,000 years. And what they have found left in the upper layers of the rubble of most of these they have found and dug into? Cooked human bones cracked for the marrow. I’m sure that just shortly before this happened to them the people living there were full of hope for the future, too, eh?
Here is more hopium about how we ‘just discovered’ how planting trees in the Tropics actually cools down the planet better than planting them anywhere else. Not to seem too ironic but Isn’t that wonderful news?
https://weather.com/news/climate/video/tropical-trees-help-cool-the-planet-climate-change
__
sealintheSelkirks
LikeLiked by 1 person
The latest on coral from Grist, calling it a ‘tipping point.” Yeah, well, been a lot of those already, ya know?
Corals are disappearing, pushing Earth to its first major ‘tipping point’
A new report says Earth has reached a dire milestone with the widespread death of warm-water coral reefs. But it’s not too late to save what remains.
https://grist.org/oceans/coral-reefs-climate-tipping-point/
__
Never any good news.
sealintheSelkirks
LikeLiked by 1 person