San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
NOAA: Arctic destabilization a concern
DIARY OF A CHANGING WORLD Week ending Friday, December 15, 2023
Arctic Evolution
A new NOAA report says the Arctic environment con- tinued to be destabilized by climate change during 2023, causing problems for humans, plants and animals.
Rapid warming brought about a near absence of snow by June in the high latitudes of Eurasia, and there was extensive greening of the tundra across Alaska’s pristine North Slope.
Summer was the warmest ever, while many locations were doused by recordbreaking heavy precipitation.
As the Arctic gets wetter and warmer, plant coverage at high latitudes is in the process of shifting.
NOAA’s Arctic Report Card 2023 also points to how climate change is impacting nature and threatening the livelihoods of rural and Indigenous communities.
Earthquakes
The Virgin Islands were shaken by two unusually strong quakes in rapid succession. There were no reports of damage.
• Earth movements were also felt in central Mexico, Taiwan, the southern Philippines, the Scottish Highlands, Serbia and southern Nebraska.
Mega Goldfish
Goldfish discarded into Canadian waterways by careless pet owners are becoming an increasing threat to the ecology of stormwater ponds and the Great Lakes, where they are growing into a supersized problem.
“They can eat anything and everything,” Christine Boston, an aquatic research biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada and lead author of the new paper in the Journal of Great Lakes Research, told the New York Times.
And the quick breeders can survive in extreme conditions, including water with toxic blue-green algae.
Growing to up to 16 inches in length, they quickly become too large to be eaten by other predatory freshwater fish species.
Vampire Migration
Climate change appears to be causing vampire bats to move northward toward the United States, where they could arrive in less than 30 years.
Writing in the journal Ecography, researcher Paige Van de Vuurst says that the blood-sucking bats, currently found only in Mexico and Central and South America, are searching for more stable climates due to seasons where they now live that are becoming more extreme.
The concern is that the bats would also bring deadly rabies, considered the oldest pathogen known to humans, with them should they reach North America.
Rat Plague
A sea of rats, dead and alive, has swept across some beaches and other coastal areas of Australia’s Queensland state in recent weeks.
Officials say the rat population has reached a level not seen since 2011 due to a bumper harvest and favorable weather. Residents say the ravenous marauders can destroy a car overnight, munching away at its wiring.
Countless millions of rats that could not survive the fierce competition for food have died and fallen into rivers, only to later wash up en masse on Queensland’s picturesque beaches.
Coral Warnings
A leading expert on coral reefs warns that 2024 could see “unprecedented mass coral bleaching and mortality” from the Caribbean to the Indo-Pacific due to the record ocean heat now made even hotter by the El Niño ocean warming across the tropical Pacific.
Coral bleaching first became a significant problem in the 1980s, and is caused when warmer waters and other factors stress the coral, causing them to turn white as they lose the brown algae that covers them.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, from the University of Queensland, believes that the warming world may be at a tipping point, where temperatures remain so high that the algae cannot return to the coral reefs.
“We don’t know the implications of such a spike in temperature,” he told the COP28 climate summit.
South Sea Cyclone
Former Category-4 Cyclone Jasper roared ashore on Australia’s Queensland coast with tropical storm force. But it was still strong enough to knock out power and trigger lifethreatening floods.