Random climate science: Hot seas, marine debris, changing forests and, of course, goats

They've been taking temperature measurements at San Diego's Scripps Pier for 102 years.

And on Aug. 1, 2018, they measured the highest temperature in all that time: 78.6 degrees. And summer's not even over yet. 

The same day, a half-mile offshore they measured 79.7 degrees, second highest at that location after a 2015 El Nino year measurement. 

Yeah, that's just one location, and you can get isolated peak temperatures, but large scale temperature data continue to move in one direction. The image at upper right represents global land and sea temperatures from 1880 to 2015. It comes from the National Climate Data Center.

There are still plenty of skeptics out there, but the science seems clear.

We all know about rising sea levels, California wildfires, increasing droughts, acidification of the oceans and so on. But what are some of the likely impacts that we don't hear much about?

For the Hawaiian and Pacific Islands, a warming climate has other kinds of implications. Marine debris, for example, can not only be a nuisance, an entanglement threat to turtles, an ingestion threat to seabirds, but a bunch of other things.

Climate change can alter storm frequency, change current patterns, and move plastic debris into new parts of the sea and the coast, according to a study in the journal Aquatic Invasions.  

"Climate change may also increase the frequency and magnitude of storm activity capable of washing the immense amounts of plastic material now poised on the edges of the world’s coastlines into the sea," the authors write.

Have a child interested in medical school? Suggest a career in treating parasitic worms. There's evidence that a warming climate will increase the populations and virulence in a range of nasty bugs that like to bore into human tissue.

In the PLOS journal Neglected Tropical Diseases, there's this paper: " Global 'worming': Climate change and its projected general impact on human helminth infections." 

Not every nasty parasite will increase but many will, and some of those will be able to move into areas where they now don’t exist. And here's a word to get familiar with: ancylostomiasis. It is caused by a hookworm and can cause anemia in humans. Here's another: ascariasis, a disease caused by a roundworm. Both are expected to thrive in a warming climate.

There are a lot of folks in the Midwest who have felt secure that climate change will impact them minimally, since, after all, they aren't going to be impacted by rising seas or tropical storm systems. But there's increasing evidence that they can expect disruptions, too.

The Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment suggests that the growing season will be longer, but that with more spring floods and summer drought, the state might not be able to take advantage of it. 

And not just Indiana. 

Northern European forests will see big species changes, with declines in species like silver fir, beech, common ash and common oak, and a better habitat for alien species like the Douglas fir, red oak and black locust. With the change in species will come a dramatic change in the natural species that rely on those forests, said a paper in the journal Global Change Biology called "How much does climate change threaten European forest tree species distributions?" 

Should you get used to goat-milk ice cream? One research paper suggests that in a more extreme environment, goats present the best option for milk and meat. 

"Goats have numerous advantages that enable them to maintain their production under extreme climate conditions. Principally, goats have higher capacity than other farm raised ruminants to effectively convert some feed sources into milk and meat," write authors Nazan Koluman Darcana and Nissim Silanikoveb in the journal Small Ruminant Research.

Additionally, they produce less methane than cattle, they write.

©Jan TenBruggencate 2018