Seeing how badly the world responded to the pandemic, I can't say I have very high hopes for this one. I'm pessimistic enough for it that we'll keep hiding the problem under a carpet until it's...
Seeing how badly the world responded to the pandemic, I can't say I have very high hopes for this one. I'm pessimistic enough for it that we'll keep hiding the problem under a carpet until it's way too late to do anything meaningful.
Even if, say, the EU and the US actually did go completely carbon-neutral (or better), that would still leave Russia, China, India, and smaller countries that are transitioning from developing to developed economies. Some of which (like Russia) allegedly directly benefiting from climate change.
“I knew that this could happen because I’ve been working on these models for 10 to 15 years, so it’s not surprising,” she said. “But now we can see it firsthand — we have a signal of it going on in the real world. And that’s frightening because it means it’s not just my computer saying this anymore: It’s satellite sensors saying, ‘Yes, the ocean’s color is changing and really fast.’”
For now, at least, the changes in the ocean’s colors are hard to perceive with the naked eye — “it’s not like you’re going to go to the beach one day and it’s a different color,” Dutkiewicz said.
“But just because you can’t see it, it doesn’t mean it’s not happening and that it doesn’t have the capability of impacting us in different ways,” Dutkiewicz added.
Twenty years-worth of data showed that colors had shifted in more than half of the world’s oceans, the study states. And scientists said the changes went beyond what’s expected due to natural occurrences.
“We think about ocean as this big bunch of water, but it has a huge variation in ecosystems and organisms and nutrients,” Cetinić said. “There’s no other way of understanding what’s happening and observing all of that continuously than from space — and the only way we can do it is by looking at the different colors in the ocean.”
“These ecosystems have taken millions of years to evolve together and be in balance,” said Stephanie Dutkiewicz, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-authored the study, which was published last week in Nature. “Changes in such a short amount of time are not good because they put the whole ecosystem out of balance.”
Dutkiewicz says “Climate change can cause a shift equivalent to, say, having palm trees grow in the middle of a tundra. And then you know, what do the elks do since they’re not used to palm trees?”
Really feels like climate change has been a lot more visible this year
I have a feeling we're gonna be saying that every year from now..
I can only hope that corresponds with trying to mitigate it more seriously
Seeing how badly the world responded to the pandemic, I can't say I have very high hopes for this one. I'm pessimistic enough for it that we'll keep hiding the problem under a carpet until it's way too late to do anything meaningful.
Even if, say, the EU and the US actually did go completely carbon-neutral (or better), that would still leave Russia, China, India, and smaller countries that are transitioning from developing to developed economies. Some of which (like Russia) allegedly directly benefiting from climate change.