> … due to climate change, or at least warmer ocean water from further South that we've had for the last 5 or more years, has caused the kelp to die off at a rapid rate
Do you know what's normal? Abnormal weather. Exceptional circumstances happen all the time, weather conditions do not follow a bell curve.
I am not at all denying climate change, but you can never point to an event and shout about it. It's a long term statistical trend, not a few coincidental events. It's one variable out of many that cause every weather event.
Warmer water is absolutely not related to climate change when you're talking about small scale short term events.
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/21852/attribution-of-extreme-wea...
I think you got your "not" in the wrong place. No, climate change isn't the only thing, however it can be, along with human caused acidification / pollution.
The fact is this systems are so complex and so integrated that we do not know "absolutely", but we have a good idea.
But hey, if it isn't absolute, lets carry on destroying our planet, we have a backup plan after all... oh wait
It’s neither informative nor helpful to dismiss such individual articles as being non-indicators of global warming because they don’t cover all the other evidence at the same time.
Some of them, like a coin landing perfectly sideways will just go on Youtube. Some of them will end up in the news.
I'm not saying "hey this is definitely due to climate change", but ridiculing the suggestion that an event apparently linked to increased ocean temperatures might have something to do with climate change seems a little off.
You say "...it's not climate change, it's [X,Y and Z]." But you list things that are perfectly consistent w/ dire warnings from consensus scientific community that global warming is _definitely_ real and _probably_ anthropogenic (tho this latter is less important).
Then (paraphrasing), "things have been getting warmer for a long time so it's ridiculous that there was a tipping point in 2015".
And you detest people who don't follow this "logic".
Next we have a half-baked strawman arg about blaming capitalism...
You're right that pollution is a massive problem, but while true it's also (nearly) irrelevant to the question of ocean temp.
I strive to avoid feeding trolls, but posts like this that only look substantial on the surface are even more corrosive and imho worth calling out.
But actually, California Fish and Wildlife DO know what’s going on:
“Environmental stressors included impacts from a toxic algae bloom off the Sonoma coast in 2011, a widespread sea star disease in 2013 that was followed by an explosion in the sea urchin population, and the warm water conditions that have persisted offshore since 2014. In 2014 and 2015, coastal water temperatures along the West Coast rocketed upwards due to a combination of oceanographic features: the “Warm Blob” in 2014, combined with a strong El Niño that began in 2015.”
https://cdfwmarine.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/perfect-storm-de...
Climate change seems like a religion. “We don’t know why x is happening, so we’ll just say it’s God’s will.” That’s about the most anti-science attitude possible and it’s being embraced by people who purport to care about science. But, in the case of California kelp, we actually do know what is happening and it has nothing to do with long term climatic events — the warm water was due to cyclical ocean activity: La Niña and that combined with a sea star disease and toxic algae caused this problem. And notice, the problem didn’t exist in 2010. So global warming for hundreds of years, but it had little impact on kelp until just magically in 2015 — that was the tipping point for kelp? This is the sort of nonsense that makes me detest the global warming crowd. Clearly global warming isn’t the cause of the California kelp issue, yet, predictably, that issue gets added into the propaganda machine.
Let’s say climate change isn’t the cause of Absolutely Every Natural Phenomenon.. but there are those that would make policy as if it were. A half degree rise in temperature — assuming that is actually true, isn’t going to cause a massive kelp die-off, considering Pacific ocean temperatures fluctuate by far more dramatic amounts routinely due to El Niño/La Niña. The ocean is far more resilient. Pollution is a far more dire danger. Chemical runoff, trash dumping — far more toxic to the ocean than anything else.
But, it easier just to spout “climate change” and the “woke” folks will just nod knowingly, actual causation or proof be damned. And we just continue along the socially acceptable path of blaming capitalism for all the world’s problems without actually doing much to solve anything.