More and worse than ever: World Meteorological Organization new climate report

 There are those—some of them in our nation’s leadership—who still deny climate science.

It’s a little like rejecting the rain forecast when the flood is already up to your knees.

The World Meteorological Organization just issued its State of the Climate report. It is no longer about predictions, because the predictions of past decades are all now coming to pass.

 Here is the WMO press release about the report. 

Here is the actual WMO report. 

World atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels are the highest they have been in 800,000 years, and so are its fellow greenhouse gases methan and nitrous oxide.

Global surface temperatures are the highest they have been since records have been kept. Last year was the single hottest year on record, and the past decade is the single hottest decade on record. And it continues. January 2025 was the hottest January on record.

The oceans, which store massive amounts of heat, are hotter than ever. Each of the past eight years has been the hottest. Oceans take up 90% of the heat rise that is driven by greenhouse gas increases. Without the oceans taking up heat, the atmospheric temperatures would be even higher.

In part because of the heat, sea levels are rising faster than ever—both because warmer water takes up more volume and because glaciers are melting their stored water back into the sea.

The ocean is acidifying at a record pace—and changing the chemistry of the oceans will have significant effects. Says WMO: “The effects of ocean acidification on habitat area, biodiversity and ecosystems have already been clearly observed, and food production from shellfish aquaculture and fisheries has been hit as have coral reefs.”

All that warming and its impacts lead to weather disruptions, and the report says that extreme weather events in 2024 led to the highest level of human disruptions on record.

It takes all kinds of forms. One of them, for Hawai`i residents, is an ongoing drought that has produced the lowest stream flows since we started keeping records more than a century ago.

 The changes in climate also lead to reductions in food and fishery production, driving food insecurity on a global scale.

The severity of the climate disruption is such that the WMO is now more about responding to the chaos than stopping it. In the foreword to the report, WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said this:

“WMO and the global community are intensifying efforts to strengthen early warning systems and climate services to help decision-makers and society at large be more resilient to extreme weather and climate. We are making progress but need to go further and need to go faster. Only half of all countries worldwide have adequate multi-hazard early warning systems. This must change.”

The World Meteorological Organization is a non-governmental international organizatioTn founded as a place where international researchers could share data. It was created in 1950, but is rooted in the International Meteorological Organization, which dates back to 1873.

It is not just WMO reporting this.

Here is NOAA’s report: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/global/202413

And here is the European Union’s Copernicus Program report: https://climate.copernicus.eu/global-climate-highlights-2024

 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2025

Oxygen deprivation will accompany warming for Hawai'i oceans

 

The ocean waters around the Hawaiian Islands are likely to become less productive as climate warming reduces their ability to hold oxygen.

Some ocean species may be unable to survive the depleted oxygen levels. And yes, that could translate to less sashimi on Island platters.

It is a silent crisis, driven by two linked inevitabilities: Climate change is driving warmer temperature that is being absorbed by the seas; and warmer water loses its ability to hold oxygen.

We have already seen fish kills in areas with high temperature waters with low dissolved oxygen. 

And various other places are already seeing reduced oxygen levels in warming deep waters, like this example in the Sea of Japan. 

A wide range of changes is occurring in the oceans as a result of both warming and the increased uptake of carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere, which results in acidification of the seas. That’s another thing that’s not good for much marine life.

This paper reviews some of the changes that are already occurring or soon will. It is ponderously entitled “An Overview of Ocean Climate Change Indicators: Sea Surface Temperature, Ocean Heat Content, Ocean pH, Dissolved Oxygen Concentration, Arctic Sea Ice Extent, Thickness and Volume, Sea Level and Strength of the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation).” 

The upshot of this for us is that things in Hawai’i’s oceans are going to be different. The consequences of lower oxygen levels are far-reaching.

Big game fish like tuna and marlin, which require high levels of oxygen, are particularly vulnerable. They may be forced to move to waters away from the Hawaiian Islands where temperatures are cooler, or to shallower waters where oxygen levels are higher, making them more susceptible to overfishing. Neither is good for Hawai’i anglers and seafood eaters.

Creatures like jellyfish, which do better in low-oxygen conditions, may become more common.

This article reviews many of the ways climate change is impacting key habitats for marine life. 

“Driven by climate change, marine biodiversity is undergoing a phase of rapid change that has proven to be even faster than changes observed in terrestrial ecosystems,” the authors say.

Some species may be able to respond by moving toward the poles where water is cooler and has more oxygen. Some may be able to abandon oxygen-deprived deep waters and move to shallower waters. But some may completely lose core habitat, the paper says.

And as long as climate change keeps going, the problem keeps getting worse. “Our study highlights that the degree of range contraction and loss of suitable habitat will critically depend on the realized greenhouse gas emission pathway.”

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

Mauna Loa is like "Jaws." Something's moving below the surface. When will it rise?

 

(Image: Webcam shot at Mauna Loa's Fissue 3, taken this morning, December 10, 2022. Credit: USGS.)

The Mauna Loa eruption right now is a little like the movie Jaws: something's moving under the calm surface...when will it rise?

The eruption that started November 27 has stopped producing much lava. Its threat to the Saddle Road is, for now, abated. It's not fountaining any more. There's just a pond of lava at the Fissure 3 vent, which is spilling over into short, stagnating flows. Significantly less gas is being pumped out of the fissure.

But deep below, magma is still moving up into the upper reaches of the mountain. 

"Tremor (a signal associated with subsurface fluid movement) continues beneath the currently active fissue," the USGS reported this morning,

"This indicates that magma is still being supplied to the fissure and activity is likely to continue as long as we see this signal."

Yesterday, the USGS suggested the fountaining could return any time, Today, the scientists downplayed that possibility: "None of the eight recorded eruptions from Mauna Loa's Northeast Rift Zone returned to high eruption rates after those rates decreased significantly." 

So the magma is still rising underground, but it's not erupting. 

Hmm. Can you hear the "Jaws" drumbeat?

© Jan TenBruggencate 2022

Homeschoolers new volume on Island crafts: The Hawai`iana Project.

A Big Island school project has led to fascinating book on Hawaiian crafts, The Hawai`iana Project.

The authors are seven homeschooled children who were aged 11 to 14 at the time the work was done in the 2012-2013 school year. They did the work as part of a writing and newspaper class taught by Susan Kilbride.

Their assignment was to write three or more articles on Hawaiian culture, on topics “that had a hands-on element in them,” Kilbride wrote.

Much of the work was not from book research, but from talking to people still carrying out the ancient crafts of the Islands.

“My students and I have spent the last year going to every Hawai`ian festival that we could find, meeting with people on field trips, taking classes, and doing everything we could to learn more about the Hawaiian culture,” Kilbride wrote.

The result is a book on making kukui nut oil, crafting bamboo and gourd instruments, tying Hawaiian fishhooks, lei making, stringing Niihau shell jewelry, featherwork, weaving, kapa making and more.

It is written in straightforward language, with ample black and white photography to explains steps in making projects.

The authors are Charlee Brown, Pearl Dickson, Dylan Kilbride, Hope Mashburn, Emily Risley, Molly Russell and Teah Van Bergen. Kilbride is the editor.

The Hawai`iana Projectis available at Amazon here.

There are lots of books on Hawaiian crafts, led by Arts and Crafts of Hawaii, the multi-volume set of scholarly pamphlets published by Bishop Museum Press and written by Te Rangi Hiroa. And there are whole books on many of the individual topics in The Hawai`iana Project. But the new book serves as a fine sampler, and with its instruction, you’ll be able to try your hand at some of the projects it presents.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2016

Fisheries science challenged: Little fixes won't do.

We assume that a high human population like O`ahu’s is why that island’s fisheries are depleted—more fishing, more activities destructive of reefs,  more development and the associated toxic runoff.

But the science is more sobering. 

(Image: The Hawaiian parrotfish uhu-uliuli, or Chlorurus perspicillatus. Parrotfish are among the first species to be fished heavily and to suffer significant population declines on human-impacted reefs. Credit: Dr. Dwayne Meadows, NOAA/NMFS/OPR.)

It doesn’t take near that many people to have deeply destructive impacts on coastal marine life. And the first impacts of human activity significantly change mix of reef inhabitants.

A new study from researchers at the University of Hawai`i’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) looked at nearly 2,000 sites on 40 islands and atolls around the Pacific. Among its conclusions is that a pattern of fishing regulation might not be as valuable in protecting reef resources as complete bans in some areas--what the authors refer to as "full protection over large areas."

They found that deep declines in fish abundance occur at pretty low human population densities. Sure, O`ahu and Guam are marginally worse, but human impact on reef populations is severe right from the start, and then declines at lower levels as human populations rise dramatically.

But the team also found that just because there’s no human impact, it doesn’t mean a particular reef will be amazingly productive. There are significant natural differences in reef productivity.

“Our results emphasize that coral reef areas do not all have equal ability to sustain large reef fish stocks, and that what is natural varies significantly amongst locations,” the authors wrote'

"It is...important to recognize that among islands and regions there are substantial differences in reef habitats and structure that are likely independent of human impacts, as well as in potentially influential oceanic factors such as wave energy, water temperature, and oceanic productivity that confound our ability to understand what might be considered ‘natural’ for a particular region or reef," they wrote.

The paper was published in the journal PLOS One by a team led by SOEST researcher Ivor Williams, along with Julia Baum, Adel Heenan, Katharine Hanson, Marc Nadon and Russell Brainard, under the title “Human, Oceanographic and Habitat Drivers of Central and Western Pacific Coral Reef Fish Assemblages.”

If you have swum some of the really impressive waters of productive tropical coral reef ecosystems, it’s not safe to assume, for example, that subtropical Hawai`i ever had that kind of assemblage of marine life.

“Perhaps the most important component of this study is the demonstration of the extent to which coral reefs’ capacity to support large fish populations varies among what we assume are relatively unimpacted reef areas,” they wrote.

“In our study, oceanic productivity appeared to be a key driver of those differences, but clearly there are also other factors driving differences among and within island reef ecosystems. We caution against any assumption that the spectacular high biomass fish assemblages seen at some remote reefs represent a natural level that all reefs would attain in the absence of humans.”

To assess impacts of human activities, the researchers looked at uninhabited islands like Jarvis and Kingman Reef, lower population islands like Ni`ihau and Samoa’s Ofu and Olosenga, and higher population islands like O`ahu, Tutuila in Samoa and Guam. A lot of the data was collected from 2010 to 2013 as part of the Pacific Reef Assessment and Monitoring Program (Pacific RAMP).

“Sharp declines in fish biomass at the low end of that human population scale are consistent with earlier smaller-scale studies on human impacts to coral reef fishes along fishing-intensity and population gradients in Fiji and the Seychelles,” they wrote.

Sharks and parrotfish are the first to go, along with total reef biomass. And this kind of removal has an impact. Groupers

“There is strong evidence that key aspects of reef fish assemblages including total biomass, top-predator density, and grazing potential, are highly susceptible to even low levels of human impacts, and therefore that full protection over large areas is probably necessary for a natural coral reef ecosystem to persis,” they wrote.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2015

Citation: Ivor D. Williams, Julia K. Baum, Adel Heenan, Katharine M. Hanson, Marc O. Nadon, Russell E. Brainard (2015) Human, Oceanographic and Habitat Drivers of Central and Western Pacific Coral Reef Fish Assemblages. PLOS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0120516.

Tuna, marlin, even birds seeing elevated mercury levels: Asian coal plants likely to blame

Pollution from human sources—like coal plants—is impacting oceans and marine life in worrisome ways. 

A variety of research papers has reported increased levels of toxic mercury in ocean water and marine life, in Hawaiian tuna,in South Pacific Wandering albatross and in other species.

(Image: Yellowfin tuna jumping. Credit: NOAA Fisheries image by Ken Neil.)

For Hawai`i residents, reports are of increasing levels of mercury in yellowfin tuna or ahi are deeply concerning.

There did not seem to be increasing levels through the turn of the century. A 2003 study looked at mercury in Hawaiian ahi during a 27-year span from 1971 to 1998. It found no change during that period in Hawaiian-caught yellowfin, with respect to methylmercury levels. 

But studies from 1998 to 2008 saw steady increases, according to a newly published review of previous studies.

“The authors found that the concentration of mercury in these fish currently is increasing at a rate of at least 3.8% per year. This rate of increase is consistent with a model of anthropogenic forcing on the mercury cycle in the North Pacific Ocean and suggests that fish mercury concentrations are keeping pace with current loading increases to the ocean,” the authors wrote.

Where's all that mercury coming from? It has been well-tracked, and most comes from Asia--China, Japan and Korea appear to be primary sources, according to this report from 2009.

What to do about it?

“Future increases in mercury in yellowfin tuna and other fishes can be avoided by reductions in atmospheric mercury emissions from point sources,” wrote the authors of the paper that found annual 3.8 percent increases in yellowfin.

A little information about methylmercury, the most toxic form of the silver metal.

“The organic form of Hg (mercury), methylmercury, is of greatest concern because it is a potent neurotoxin and because it accounts for > 95% of the Hg in fish,” says a report, “Methylmercury in Marine Ecosystems: Spatial Patterns and Processes of Production, Bioaccumulation, and Biomagnification.”  More on human impacts later in this article.

A 2013 study in the journal Nature Geoscience, by a team that includes Hawai`i researchers, had already suggested things were changing. 

It looked at nine species of marine fish that feed at different levels. It appears that the toxic methylmercury is formed by microbes that attach themselves to particles containing regular mercury, that fall onto the ocean from the atmosphere. It is formed, the paper says, “by methylating microbes that live on sinking particles.”

In theory, as more mercury from the stacks of Chinese and other Asian coal-fired plants blows out over the Pacific, it dumps more mercury on the ocean. That mercury is converted into methylmercury by marine microbes, and is taken up in the oceanic food chain.

"This study reinforces the links between mercury emitted from Asian countries and the fish that we catch off Hawaii and consume in this country," said the paper’s lead author, Joel Blum.

Since methylmercury is more prevalent in deeper water, it makes sense that deeper-feeding fish would have higher levels. And they do.

"We found that predatory fish that feed at deeper depths in the open ocean, like opah and swordfish, have higher mercury concentrations than those that feed in waters near the surface, like mahi-mahi and yellowfin tuna," said Brian Popp, a University of Hawaii at Mānoa geology and geophysics professor. He was quoted in a 2013 report.

 What's interesting there, of course, is that ahi are comparatively shallow feeders. If they're getting higher levels of methylmercury, that is perhaps an indication that the levels are far higher than they once were.

And as you might expect, mercury levels ARE up. This US Geological Survey study found mercury levels up 30 percent in the Pacific in the past 20 years. It projects another 50 percent increase by 2050. 

There's lots of data on this. Here's a paper from the journal Global Geochemical Cycles.

A report on the Wandering albatross, the bird with the longest wingspan in the world—from 8 to nearly 12 feet—finds increasing levels of mercury, cadmium and persistent organic pollutants in the birds.

While adult survival seems to be unaffected, the paper reports that the pollutants are “negatively impacted long-term breeding probability, hatching and fledging probabilities.”

Some of the pollutants, like PCB and DDT, are long-banned but still persist in the environment. Others like mercury may be associated with coal-fired power and industrial plants.

What this means to humans who eat marine life depends on the person. Methylmercury is highly toxic, but is most toxic to fetuses and infants—individuals with developing brains. It is less of a threat to adult males and adult women who will not become pregnant and are not breastfeeding infants.

The Hawai`i Department of Health factsheet on eating marine fish can be found here.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says “women of child-bearing age are the population of greatest concern. Children of women exposed to relatively high levels of methylmercury during pregnancy are at greater risk for a variety of developmental and learning disorders.”

And it’s not just ahi. Here is what the U.S. Food and DrugAdministration says about eating fish, specifically for women and children:

“Do not eat Shark, Swordfish, King Mackerel, or Tilefish because they contain high levels of mercury.

“Eat up to 12 ounces (2 average meals) a week of a variety of fish and shellfish that are lower in mercury.

“Five of the most commonly eaten fish that are low in mercury are shrimp, canned light tuna, salmon, pollock, and catfish.

“Another commonly eaten fish, albacore ("white") tuna has more mercury than canned light tuna. So, when choosing your two meals of fish and shellfish, you may eat up to 6 ounces (one average meal) of albacore tuna per week.

“Check local advisories about the safety of fish caught by family and friends in your local lakes, rivers, and coastal areas. If no advice is available, eat up to 6 ounces (one average meal) per week of fish you catch from local waters, but don't consume any other fish during that week.

“Follow these same recommendations when feeding fish and shellfish to your young child, but serve smaller portions.”

© Jan TenBruggencate 2015