Discussion

Yale Environment 360

ArchieScrivener: The thing about a shark, it's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When it comes at you it doesn't seem to be livin'... until he bites you, and those black eyes roll over white.

1234letshaveatw: It's strange they haven't considered diving an extra couple of inches to compensate (if it is even required)

sailingparrot: Warmer water also means less oxygen, thus fish have to swim closer to the surface to get enough oxygen.

vivzkestrel: - stupid question- if everyone on the entire planet went 100% vegan from tomorrow, will carbon emissions really go down by 60%?

kevinwang: for hn comment-only readers:paper link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt2981---Editor Summary:Body size and metabolic rate are intertwined, a factor that is especially important to understand with regard to animals that live in aquatic environments, where heat loss is related to water temperature. Payne et al. developed a method to estimate routine metabolic rate based on measures from tagged fish, and combined the estimates with published respirometry rates to create a dataset spanning the entire body size range of extant fishes. Using these data, the authors found a scaling imbalance between heat production and loss that affects especially large, mesothermic fishes in warm waters. This imbalance both explains the distribution of these fish in cooler waters and suggests a special sensitivity to warming waters. —Sacha Vignieri---Abstract:Body size and temperature set metabolic rates and the pace of life, yet our understanding of the energetics of large fishes is uncertain, especially of warm-bodied mesotherms, which can heavily influence marine food webs. We developed an approach to estimate metabolic heat production in fishes, revealing how routine energy expenditure scales with size and temperature from 1-milligram larvae up to 3-tonne megaplanktivorous sharks. We found that mesotherms use approximately four times more energy than ectotherms use and identified a scaling mismatch in which rates of heat production increase faster than heat loss as body size increases, with larger fish becoming increasingly warm bodied. This scaling imbalance creates an overheating predicament for large mesotherms, helping to explain their cooler biogeographies. Contemporary mesotherms face high fuel demands and overheating risks, which is a concern given their disproportionate demise during prior climate shifts.

ARandomerDude: I'm old enough to remember when the polar bears were all going to die. Turns out, they're adapting nicely.https://www.nbcnews.com/world/greenland/polar-bears-adapting...

mempko: Most of the emissions are done by the 100 biggest corporations. That's where I'd start fixing things.

carlgreene: Don't corporations just serve their patrons?

Supermancho: "just" is a weasel word there. Decisions are made and policies are enacted based on a number of factors.

fwip: Carbon emissions from food production may go down about that much. However, those emissions are only about 30% of the total CO2 emissions humans are responsible for, if I recall correctly. So, total CO2 reduction would be about 18%.

JMKH42: and likely other un predictable knock on effects would reduce the benefit, like going vegan would mean more food is available overall, and population might rise in response.

bilsbie: Do you think any researchers would get funding if they found out “sharks are doing just fine”.

JMKH42: who pays you trolls to post this nonsense?

Deukhoofd: That factoid always hides the real issue. The biggest reason that that factoid is true is that the 100 biggest corporations includes a large amount of the fossil fuel industry, and that that industry produces most emissions in the world. A company like Saudi Aramco produce 4% of global emissions.We need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.For full clarity, it's also not the 100 biggest corporations that produce most emissions, but the 100 biggest companies. A massive amount of the global emissions are done by state-owned companies.

bilsbie: My main skepticism (Shark lover here btw!)Is that sharks are an ancient species and they’ve survived way warmer oceans even relatively recently.For example the Medieval Warm Period Sargasso Sea surface temperatures were 1°C warmer than 400 years ago, and Pacific Ocean water temperatures were 0.65°C warmer than the decades before.

acuozzo: Were there any periods in which the rate of change in warming was the same or greater?

sebmellen: Time to make sunsets. https://makesunsets.com.I don’t see a way out except for stratospheric aerosol injection.

HelloMcFly: I want to ignore these articles as it is so painful to watch the beautiful clockwork of the natural world unravel. I hate facing the suffering, diminishment, and extinction of so much in the name of profiteering and ever-increasing growth.But this is the world now, there will only be more stories like this, and so I'm not turning away from it any further. The world becomes less beautiful, less rich, less full every year.I do volunteer, donate, and advocate and I won't use my extreme pessimism as an excuse not to engage. But in private, I mourn what is coming with little hope for substantial reduction in harm. If anything, those with power seem upset that we're not doing more to fasttrack catastrophe - if it's going to happen, may as well be the one to profit from it as much as possible before you're dead, the thinking seems to go.

concinds: Blaming "profiteering and ever-increasing growth" is way too easy.Can any legislature get away with dramatically increasing taxes on meat, fish, gas, and plane tickets, just at a level high enough to account for environmental externalities? Even dictatorships couldn't get away with it because it would cause too much unrest.

Insanity: First off, I'm vegetarian and generally climate-conscious. I think we humans should do what we can in order to protect our planet. I think we can do a lot to keep the planet a good place for all living beings.But to also say something unpopular, humans are part of the natural world. So these human driven changes to nature are just 'nature changing nature'. I understand that we are potentially causing mass extinctions, but this needs to be seen as natural unless you take for granted that humans are inherently 'special' which leads to speciesism. So, this might just be the way planets with intelligent species evolve, they outcompete the others and exploit natural resources to their benefit. It might just be a biological/evolutionary law.Also, to be fair, _most_ of life on earth will survive this. Bacteria outnumber all other class of organisms IIRC, and they are shown to survive in truly challenging conditions.

forlorn_mammoth: Yeah, but some of my favorite life forms are vertebrates. Would hate to see that branch go.

freediddy: No they aren't.They will move to different locations like they always have been for the past 400 million years. Sharks are older than trees, they can adapt to climate change better than anything alive right now.