Food safety in U.S. at risk from draconian budget and staff cuts

 The United States has the safest food in the world, but maybe not for long.

Massive cuts in the agencies that oversee the healthiness of our grocery store products are threatening the nation.

Food safety has long been protected by four major government offices: the DHHS’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Department of Commerce’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). Those agencies work together under dozens of interagency agreements to keep our groceries safe.

Food safety includes far more than just looking for toxic compounds and disease agents in food. There is safe packaging, sanitation in processing plants, pesticide residue testing, animal drug guidance, animal carcass inspections, checking for contamination from insect parts, all kinds of things.

State and local health departments play a role, but that role is widely different in differing jurisdictions. One of the main functions of those local authorities, often working with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is investigating outbreaks after the food safety system has failed. Outbreaks like communicable diseases and foodborne pathogens like Salmonella, Shigella, Campylobacter, and E. coli

The broad consistent protections of the food supply come from the actions of the national government.

And the federal government is actively in the process of abandoning the safety of our food supply.

An April 10 White House memo disclosed plans to cut 40% from the budgets of the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

The DHHS is facing $40 Billion in cuts, a third of its discretionary budget. /

 Staffing cuts have already significantly cut services, and the FDA just announced that it will stop testing milk.

And the Administration laid off bird flu investigators at the FDA, while they were working on an active and spreading bird flu virus.

The EPA has been charged with cutting its budget 65 percent, although EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin says the environment will be protected even with the cuts. 

NOAA has been told to cut its budget 25 percent, and the NMFS (NOAA Fisheries) is looking at 28 percent.

A leaked White House document says FDA won’t be inspecting food processing any more, but that states will cover that under contracts from the FDA. 

"The budget eliminates FDA's direct role in routine inspections of food facilities," says the document. "FDA will expand the current state contracts for routine food facility inspections program to cover 100 percent of all routine foods."

But with the giant budget cuts, it is not clear from where will come the money to pay the states to do that.

Indeed, it is not clear how we can keep American food safe by cutting tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs out of our food safety programs.

In a current case, a warning of slivers of metal in pork carnitas, it wasn’t government inspectors that discovered it. The FSIS put out the warning after the factory processing the carnitas identified the problem.

In another current crisis, there are four major listeria outbreaks underway right now, with more than 120 people sick at a dozen dead. That would be the FDA and the CDC, both of which are undergoing or facing severe staff reductions.

Food safety seems like something we’d want to support.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2025

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

For Hawaiian monk seals, a glimmer of hope

There were years when we despaired about the survival of Hawaiian monk seals. 

 Image: A young seal at Pearl and Hermes Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Credit: NOAA Fisheries Hawaiian monk seal research program.

 

Populations were dropping year after year and nothing seemed to be able to turn that around. Take a look at RaisingIslands' 2008 post on the distressing status of seals at that time.

Now, a little hopeful news. It’s a slow process, but there has been a stabilization, and a tiny, steady increase in numbers for about the last 10 years. Over that time, up from just 1,400 to a current population estimated at about 1,600. 

That’s still only a third of what is believed to have been the stable healthy
population in the Islands, before they ran into humans. 

And right now, that increase is in spite of incidents of people shooting them, their getting hooked on fishing hooks, getting entangled in nets, picking up disease from land animals like dogs and cats, their Northwestern Hawaiian Islands pupping grounds disappearing due to ocean changes, shark attacks, and incidents of attacks by pet dogs. 

NOAA Fisheries in a 2022 release noted that the population had surpassed 1,500 for the first time in some 20 years. 

“From 2013 to 2021, the monk seal population grew at an average rate of 2 percent per year, providing hope for the species’ long-term recovery. Even so, the level required for the species to be down-listed from endangered to threatened under the Endangered Species Act is more than double the current number of monk seals,” the report said. 

It is an enormous task to care for the seal population. Federal officials and volunteers keep close watch on them. Sick and injured seals are regularly removed from the wild for hospital care. 

In November 2024 a malnourished pup from an O`ahu beach was transported to the Marine Mammal Center’s Hawaiian monk seal hospital, Ke Kai Ola, in Kona. 

In October a thin and weak pup from Lana`i and Maui was brought into care. 

In September, three malnourished pups from Pearl and Hermes Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands were transported to the medical facility. 

In June, a Kaua`i pup suffering multiple infectious diseases was hospitalized. He was released back into Kaua’i waters healthy in late November. 

Occasionally, seals are relocated to move them from beaches with threats to beaches where they will be safer. 

The effort involves NOAA Fisheries, the Coast Guard, the Department of Land and Natural Resources, the Marine Mammal Center and lots of volunteers. 

Hawaiian monk seals, the most endangered seal species in the world, are found in the Main Hawaiian Islands, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and on Johnston Atoll, which is about 700 miles southwest of O`ahu. 

If you see a seal in trouble, you can email pifsc.monksealsighting@noaa.gov. Or call the Pacific Islands NOAA Marine Wildlife Hotline at (888) 256-9840. 

Here is a NOAA Fisheries resource page for more information about Hawaiian monk seals. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

China fires missile into the South Pacific. Provocation? Islanders are concerned.

China just launched a nuclear-capable ballistic missile smack into the central South Pacific, without bothering to notify the target country.

What the heck could that mean?

The rocket didn’t come near Hawai’i. It was at little over 2,000 miles south. 

But that rocket flew some 7,000 miles from China to its watery landing spot. The distance from Beijing to Hawaii is just 5,000. Beijing to San Francisco is 6,000.

Was the Sept. 25, 2024, missile a message, or, as China suggests, just a routine test? Not routine, certainly, since China hasn’t done anything like this in more than 40 years.

Hawai’i folks have expressed concern about North Korean rockets gaining the capacity to fly as far as the Hawaiian archipelago, but China has long had that capacity, and it demonstrated that with the Sept. 25 launch, which reportedly terminated within the exclusive economic zone of Kiribati, near Caroline Island.

Caroline is an uninhabited atoll south of the Equator, in the Southern Line Islands. French Polynesia is to the south and east of it. The Cook Islands are to the west. U.S.-controlled Jarvis and Palmyra are to the north.

China warned the United States and Russia of the proposed launch, which is required by treaty, but did not bother notifying the target nation, Kiribati. France, New Zealand and Australia also got notice. Japan and French Polynesia did not.

China reported the missile carried a dummy warhead.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies reports that China has three models of nuclear-weapon-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles, known as Dongfeng, or East Wind. They are the DF-5, DF-31 and DF-41. Sources differed over whether the Sept. 25 missile was a DF31 or 41.

All three of the missiles have the range to reach either Hawai’i or the West Coast. The DF-5 is silo-based while the other two are transported on mobile carriers, some of which are off-road-capable.

The nation of Kiribati, which has benefitted from Chinese investment in recent years, expressed concern about the launch of a military rocket into its waters. 

French Pacific waters are just south of the rocket landing zone, and officials in Papeete also expressed concern. Radio New Zealand reports that China threw a dinner party in French Polynesia to calm the waters.

The international only news magazine The Diplomat suggested the launch was hardly “routine,” as China suggested. It was the first Chinese launch into international waters since 1980—more than four decades.

That doesn’t mean it was provocative. “Beijing’s motivation for this test launch might not have been the desire to send a political signal, but rather a need for technical data,” The Diplomat wrote.

That said, officials of numerous of the nations of the Pacific have expressed concern. China has been actively courting Pacific nations on the trade front, but until now, it has not suggested that it carries a big stick behind the open pocketbook.

Wrote The Diplomat: 

“China has made progress in winning over some of the Pacific Island states, but has run into resistance from others that fear turning the region into an arena of China-U.S. strategic competition. Firing a nuclear-capable missile into the midst of the islands not only stokes that fear, it positions China as an aggressor.”

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

Navy: Targeting Ka'ula Island bird refuge weekly with bombs and guns would only result in "incidental" take

 The Navy’s new proposal to expand bombing and gunnery practice at Ka’ula Island seems insupportable, both morally and as a matter of federal law.

Here is the Draft Environmental Assessment that includes the Ka’ula impacts.

It expands potential military operations at the tiny island to 55 per year, more than one a week. That is on an island that is a designated state seabird sanctuary (established 1978) and contains endangered and state and federally protected plants and birds, and marine protected species in the nearshore waters.

Ka’ula is one of the four islands of of Kaua’i County (Kaua’i, Ni’ihau, Lehua and Ka’ula). The designated weaponry impact area is 11 acres at the southern end of the 130-acre island.

Ka’ula is well known in Hawaiian history and chant. The bird life there was once so dense that the island was used as an example of overcrowding. 

(Hā’iki Ka’ula I ka ho’okē a na manu. There is no room on Ka’ula, for the birds are crowding. –from ‘Ōlelo No’eau by Mary Pukui.)

It has been bombed since 1952.

The Navy over the years has steadfastly resisted calls to end its bombing, from fishermen, from U.S. Congress members, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, from the Kaua’i County Board of Supervisors (1961) and Kaua’i County Council (1975), and from federal fisheries and wildlife officials.

And from the State of Hawai’i, whose attorney general in 1978 asserted the island belongs to the state. That conflict over ownership was not resolved, and state officials now say the ownership is contested but no recent efforts to assert state control have been reported.

Weapon strikes are proposed to be limited to the designated 11-acre “impact area.” But that has not always been the case: 1) A 1978 fisherman’s report saw bombs exploding both in the water and among seabirds; 2) The Draft EA says there are likely live munitions on the island outside the impact area; 3) On one occasion in 1965, bombs intended for Ka’ula landed on Ni’ihau, more than 20 miles away.

The new proposal says only inert weapons will be deployed in the future.

The birds and seals of Ka’ula, as well as passing whales and dolphins, are protected by the US. Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act as well as the island’s designation as a State of Hawai’i bird refuge.

The Draft EA proposes that the impact of bombing, gunnery exercises, helicopter landings and other activities are acceptable. There are Hawaiian cultural sites, including stone temples and habitation sites, but they are outside the designated impact zones and so, “impacts on cultural resources would be less than significant.” (Page 3-86)

The Navy’s legal justification for harming wildlife is contained in a federal law, the 2003 National Defense Authorization Act. It “gave the Secretary of the Interior authority to prescribe regulations to exempt the Armed Forces from the incidental taking of migratory birds during authorized military readiness activities,” the Draft EA says.

Based on that, the Draft EA argues that targeting a wildlife refuge and protected bird nesting site with bombs, shells and landing helicopters would result in takes that are merely incidental. The Draft EA says (Page 3-30) that the Department of Defense has a responsibility to minimize and mitigate its impacts. But it seems at least problematic to argue incidental and minimized when the wildlife refuge is the target.

The Draft EA argues that health, safety and noise are not issues because there are “no human sensitive receptors” nearby. This, of course, does not address the impacts on the health, safety or hearing of protected sooty terns, threatened black-footed albatross or endangered Hawaiian monk seals.

The Navy asserts that it owns Ka’ula. That position has long been challenged by Hawai’i.

The island was set aside by the Territory of Hawaii for use by the U.S. Department of Commerce under the U.S. Lighthouse Service in 1924 as a lighthouse reserve. Commerce conveyed it to the Coast Guard, which operated a navigational light there until 1947, when it was permanently shut down.

Instead of returning the island to the territory, the Coast Guard in 1952 authorized the Navy to conduct bombing exercises, apparently without the authorization of territory. 

Kaua’i County residents began regularly protesting the activity within a few years, at the behest of anglers who said the bombing was impacting birds, which the fishermen depended on to locate schooling fish.

U.S. Rep. Patsy Mink in the early 1960s urged the island’s inclusion in the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, and the Department of Interior started but failed to complete that inclusion.

The Navy rejected the Hawaiian ownership arguments, and in 1965, U.S. Rep. Spark Matsunaga reported that the Coast Guard had transferred its authority over the island to the Navy.

The comment period for this Draft EA is ending. Comments go to pmrf-lbt-ea-comments@us.navy.mil.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

Global temperature estimates are way low; newest data shows the pace of change is accelerating

 

Global temperature will rise far faster than current UN estimates, even if we don’t keep dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A lot of the projected heating is already baked in.

That will lead to temperatures higher than the human race has experienced in its few hundred thousand years of existence, according to new research published in June 2024.

For coastal areas like the Hawaiian Islands, that also means dramatic changes in sea level estimates. Changes in terms of several feet rather than inches. In some areas, even rock walls won’t protect from that. Retreat to higher ground may be the only option. The cost, for low-lying facilities like airports, harbors, resorts and high-end beach communities may be unsupportable.

Here’s the threat, in jargon:

“We calculate average Earth system sensitivity and equilibrium climate sensitivity, resulting in 13.9 °C and 7.2 °C per doubling of pCO2, respectively. These values are significantly higher than IPCC global warming estimations, consistent or higher than some recent state-of-the-art climate models, and consistent with other proxy-based estimates.” (Those numbers in Fahrenheit are 25 and 13 degrees.)

That quote is from a paper by a team of Dutch and British researchers who tracked global temperatures against atmospheric carbon dioxide over 15 million years, using proxy sources including deep ocean core samples.

You can read what the journal Phys.Org wrote about the paper, in plainer language, here.  

The authors are Caitlyn R. Witkowski, of the Department of Marine Microbiology and Biogeochemistry at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, and Anna S. von der Heydt, Paul J. Valdes, Marcel T. J. van der Meer, Stefan Schouten and Jaap S. Sinninghe Damsté.

Another team last year had more modest estimates, but they were still higher than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They argued that doubling CO2 could result in 5-8 degrees Centigrade in warming, or 9-14 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has gone up 30 percent in just the last 60 years or so, according to Keeling Curve records at Mauna Loa on Hawai`i. Before the Industrial Age, there were 280 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. That number now is 419. That’s a 50 percent increase. And it continues to rise faster.

The CO2 numbers are the catalyst for catastrophic change.

There is an estimated 50-year lag between when the CO2 enters the atmosphere and when the temperature responds.

So it’s going to keep getting hotter for generations, based on what we’ve already done to the atmosphere.

And there is an additional lag between temperature increase and sea level rise, because of the thermal inertia in melting glaciers and thermal inertia in the oceans.

What does that mean for my favorite beach, surf break, coastal restaurant or shoreline hotel?

In the most recent estimates, the best case, according to an article in MIT’s Climate Portal, is 8 to 20 inches of additional sea level rise by 2100. That’s still catastrophic for low-lying areas. But the worst case is six feet.

The National Ocean Service estimates by 2100 we will have between 1 and 8 feet of sea level rise, a little higher at the top end. 

CO2 is not only rising, but the rise is accelerating. New data from this month. 

Temperature is not only rising, but accelerating.

The melting of Antarctic glaciers is accelerating, too. And another source on that.

Ocean temperature increases are accelerating.  

Sea level is not only rising, but the that rise is accelerating. 

It’s a bad trajectory, and as a species, we’re not taking it seriously.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

Gray-backed terns produce a second keiki at Palmyra since rat removal at the atoll

 A second gray-backed tern chick has been spotted at Palmyra Atoll, several hundred miles south of Hawai`i.

Gray-backed tern chick at Palmyra.
TNC photo.

The first was raised last year.

The birds were killed off on the atoll by rats, but have begun to return since The Nature Conservancy, which manages Palmyra with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, eradicated the invasive rat population.

Many seabirds nest at Palmyra and many of the other remote atolls and islands of the central Pacific. But eight species known to the region were absent from Palmyra, and rats, which take both eggs and chicks, were believed to be the reason.

Rats were wiped out in 2011, and the island’s managers quickly began to see changes in vegetation and wildlife. In 2020, they began experiments to try to attract seabirds that might be flying by, using both recorded calls and decoy birds.

Last year, the first gray-backed terns nested at the atoll, and this year, more did.

 “Our science volunteers Oliver (Dunn) and Cass (Crittenden) saw 5 adults in the last month and three adults in the area near the chick. They also saw an adult feeding a chick. Thanks to their efforts, we have more data to show that our seabird attraction efforts are working,” said Katie Franklin, Island Conservation Strategy Lead for The Nature Conservancy, Hawaiʻi and Palmyra.

Alex Wegmann, lead scientist for The Nature Conservancy’s Island Resilience Strategy, said it is a milestone for TNC’s efforts.

 “It also emphasizes the value of decades of conservation and management by TNC, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and our many partners, as well as the efficacy of seabird social attraction methods,” Wegmann said.

Adult gray-backed terns at Palmyra.
TNC photo.

Gray-backs are one of eight species of seabird now missing but which may once have nested there. The grays are the first to return after the rat eradication. They are known in Hawaiian as pākalakala and their scientific name is Onychoprion lunata.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

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

Hawai'i ocean levels inches below normal--what's going on?

 Sea levels around Hawai’i are unusually low, and have been for some months.

Experts aren’t sure why. They are pretty sure they’ll come back to normal, and higher. But because they’re not sure precisely why, they also can’t be sure when.

My canoe paddling clan in recent month has noticed that low tides have seemed really low. Like, mud flats where there’s normally water. Others may be seeing reefs where there's normally water. And seeing beaches bigger than they were last year.

To figure this out, I called Chip Fletcher, who didn’t know, but knew who would. Fletcher is the interim dean at the University of Hawai’i Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. He’s the go-to guy on impacts of sea level rise in the Islands.

He suggested calling the university’s Sea Level Center, where associate director Matthew Widlandsky confirmed what we’d been seeing.

“You are right about the sea levels this year around Hawaii being lower than in recent years,” he wrote.

But while he and his colleagues have a theory about the reasons, nobody’s actually gone out and done the work to prove them. “We have not yet studied this event in detail,” Widlansky said.

One theory is that it’s associated with cooler water in the central Pacific, in connection with our just-ended three-year La Niña. Cooler water is denser, meaning it takes up less volume.

One of the several drivers of sea level rise is warmer water expanding, and this would be the reverse, a temporary situation in which cool water contracts.

But there might be more to it than just that.

We’ve experienced this kind of condition before in connection with El Niño (warm conditions) and La Niña (cooler conditions) climate cycles. A study in 2020 reviewed a 2017 period when we were having super-high tides.

Widlansky was a co-author of an article on that study, published in the Journal of Climate. Other authors were Xiaoyu Long, Fabian Schloesser, Philip R. Thompson, H. Annamalai, Mark A. Merrifield and Hyang Yoon.

“Hawaii experienced record-high sea levels during 2017, which followed the 2015 strong El Niño and coincided with weak trade winds in the tropical northeastern Pacific,” the authors wrote.

“During August 2017, the Honolulu Harbor tide gauge recorded the highest monthly average water level since records began in 1905.” That record was 17 centimeters, or more than half a foot higher than expected.

That said, high sea levels don’t always follow strong El Niño events, and didn’t after the strong 1997 event. So there’s something else also going on. Maybe winds. Maybe other stuff.

“The processes controlling whether Hawaii sea levels rise after El Niño have so far remained unknown,” they wrote.

In 2017, "the high sea levels were caused by the superposition, or stacking, of multiple contributions.”

The high sea levels associated with the 2015 strong El Niño lasted from 2016 until the end of summer in 2017, and then tapered off.

The current low water is just a couple of inches lower than normal, and it's different in different locations. 

It is not clear how long the current low stand of Hawaiian water will last. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2023

I guess it's possible to be optimistic about the new IPCC report, and some are. I'm not.

The newest United Nations report on planetary climate, different from previous cautious reports, minces few words. 

Things are getting worse, and faster than ever, and we have no time left to act. Paraphrasing Yoda, it's time to do something; simply trying is not an option.

“The report is a full-throated call for the massive—yet doable—changes our species must enact to limit the damage that comes with each fraction of a degree of warming,” said Wired, the online magazine. 

There is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 410 parts per million, than in the past 2 million years—that’s before there were humans on our planet. No other period in the past 2,000 years has seen climate warming as fast as in the past 50 years.

The impacts of these changes have been seriously inequitable. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2023 report says the people least responsible for the change are suffering the most.

“Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred. Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. This has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people. Vulnerable communities who have historically contributed the least to current climate change are disproportionately affected,” the report said in its summary for policymakers.

You can find the actual report summary and various associated documents here. 

Nearly half the world’s population is vulnerable and at risk of climate change disruptions, from coastal inundation, storms, flooding, drought, food and water shortages, and related issues. That risk is playing out now, and continues to increase.

“Between 2010 and 2020, human mortality from floods, droughts and storms was 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions, compared to regions with very low vulnerability,” the report said.

The already-observed changes include water shortages, crop failures, livestock health problems, reduced fishery yields, malnutrition, infectious diseases, community displacement, and immense impacts on ecosystems. The report cites throughout how much faith it has in its observations.

“Climate change has caused substantial damages, and increasingly irreversible losses, in terrestrial, freshwater, cryospheric, and coastal and open ocean ecosystems (high confidence). Hundreds of local losses of species have been driven by increases in the magnitude of heat extremes (high confidence) with mass mortality events recorded on land and in the ocean (very high confidence). Impacts on some ecosystems are approaching irreversibility such as the impacts of hydrological changes resulting from the retreat of glaciers, or the changes in some mountain (medium confidence) and Arctic ecosystems driven by permafrost thaw (high confidence.)”

As we move along in time, it gets worse. “Every increment of global warming will intensify multiple and concurrent hazards.”

There are two primary options: Mitigation, or doing something about it; and adaptation, or learning to live with it.

The report says we have the technology to mitigate, to turn things around. But it would take severe and dramatic action. We do not seem to be willing as a planet to do what’s necessary.

“Deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would lead to a discernible slowdown in global warming within around two decades, and also to discernible changes in atmospheric composition within a few years.”

But we are not spending enough money on it, and not committing enough of our policy initiatives to it.

So what about adapting? Realistically, even with drastic action, things would get worse before the arrow of livability starts to turn upward. So some adaption will be required anyway.

Clearly the poorest among us will be hit soonest and hardest, and they will have the fewest opportunities to adapt. The wealthier communities will be able to adapt, to a degree. But increasing climate change will threaten even their adaptation options.

“Adaptation options that are feasible and effective today will become constrained and less effective with increasing global warming. With increasing global warming, losses and damages will increase and additional human and natural systems will reach adaptation limits,” the report said.

To avoid catastrophe, the report says, the world needs immediate and severe cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. To limit the worst impacts in the coming few decades, emissions need to be driven to near zero.

But policies currently in place don’t do that. If anything, they leave emissions flat, meaning the situation continues to get worse.

This is the frustration. We can do it. We must do it.  But it is not clear we will do it.

What are the odds that this particular planet can galvanize its systems to do what the IPCC says is required? Here is the IPCC’s vision:

“Effective climate action is enabled by political commitment, well-aligned multilevel governance, institutional frameworks, laws, policies and strategies and enhanced access to finance and technology. Clear goals, coordination across multiple policy domains, and inclusive governance processes facilitate effective climate action. Regulatory and economic instruments can support deep emissions reductions and climate resilience if scaled up and applied widely. Climate resilient development benefits from drawing on diverse knowledge.”

Lots of media reports—ignoring the essence of the report—are all about the upside: “We can fix this! Yes, we can!”

The Christian Science Monitor takes the middle path, noting that the IPCC “walks a fine line between desperation and hope in an effort to spur a more forceful global response.”

Some publications get lost in the weeds. CNBC decided to focus on reflecting the sun's light and heat back into space. Others wondered whether carbon capture technology is ready for prime time.  

All the while ignoring the elephant in the room--we need to stop burning oil and coal.

So, the thinking goes, maybe we can do these interesting techie things, and keep on burning coal in power plants and gasoline in our big luxury cars. And everything will be just fine.

That, of course, is dithering. And while dithering, perhaps we can ponder this: 

How much misery are we willing to subject our grandchildren and their grandchildren to, to keep living the way we are living?

© Jan TenBruggencate 2023 

Climate shifts further: La Niño is over, El Niño coming by summer

The La Nina oceanic condition, which we’ve been in for many months, has ended, and an El Nino appears likely to form in the summer or fall.

That’s the latest prediction from the Climate Prediction Center: 

It builds on the report we filed last month, when we suggested a fair chance of El Nino by mid year. That fair chance now seems to have been elevated to a pretty good chance. Spring predictions tend to be problematic, but most models see us going that way.

Thus the La Nina cool phase of Central Pacific climate is behind us, and we are in something called ENSO-neutral, ENSO being the term for the whole warm-cold cycle, El Niño Southern Oscillation.

Most climate prediction models now suggest we should shift into El Niño during the summer, and it might happen pretty quickly: “it is possible that strong warming near South America may portend a more rapid evolution toward El Niño.”

One of the things that can mean for Hawai’i is that we are likely to have a more active hurricane season. Also some other changes. More on that a little further down.

But one the questions that still challenges climate researchers is where climate change is taking the ENSO pattern broadly. There’s some suggestion that the past 40 years—since 1980—have been a little cooler than expected, a little more La Niña.

Now, many researchers say their models suggest the next few decades may swing toward more active El Niño conditions. But they don’t fully trust those models: the computer climate models of past climate don’t match up real will with actual observations of the climate. So how to be sure? A whole lot of smart people are working hard to make sense of that.  A discussion on this can be found at the ENSO blog. 

Among the variables: Warmer oceans can feed circulating storms, but warmer oceans and changing wind conditions can also cause changes in deep ocean upwellings. If they bring cool water to the surface from the deep ocean, then that could reduce the energy available to circulating storms like hurricanes. Changes in cloud cover could also create cooler surface conditions. And there are other variables.

“Heroic efforts are being done at modeling centers around the world to improve the representation of the physical processes,” wrote Kris Karnauskas, of the University of Colorado-Boulder.

That’s the long term.

For the coming year, what does an El Niño mean for us? There’s a nice NOAA fact sheet here. 

It suggests wetter weather at first, in late summer and fall, then drier. Maybe a dry winter this year. Weaker trade winds. More hurricanes and tropical storms. Warmer water around the Islands.

And sea levels slightly higher than normal, meaning big storm surf will reach farther inland.

All in all, interesting times.

© Jan TenBruggencate

The international enigma, a baffling sphere on Japan beach, would be no mystery to Hawai'i beachgoers

(Image: Fuji News Network image of the globally baffling sphere on Hamamatsu City beach.)

A UFO. A dragon egg. A communist plot. Another spy balloon.

Wow.

International media report they’re baffled by a mysterious metal sphere that washed up on a Japan beach.

It wouldn’t be baffling to any Hawai’i beachgoer, because we see them all the time. They wash up regularly, sometimes painted orange or yellow, but most often covered with brown-red rust. Big, hollow (or occasionally foam-filled) steel spheres used in various maritime activities.

The sphere in question, 4-5 feet in diameter, washed up on a long stretch of sand off Hamamatsu City. It caused great consternation, locally and internationally. It was isolated with yellow caution tape. Authorities subjected it to tests to determine it was empty. Eventually they hauled it off the beach and disposed of it.

And international media had fun with it. Perhaps because, after the Chinese balloon and the “pico” balloons shot down over Alaska, Canada and Lake Huron, we were primed for stories about weird round things.

The Guardian breathlessly wondered whether it was a “Spy Balloon, UFO or Dragon Ball” or maybe even a stray mine. 

Nope.

The BBC called it a “mystery sphere” and said Japan was perplexed, with some folks calling it a “Godzilla egg.” 

Oh my. But, nope.

The British media network Unilad suggested some folks thought it was a devious device sent by China or North Korea. 

Uh, uh.

The India Times reported that February 23, 2023, Japanese authorities confirmed it was “marine equipment” that had washed ashore. 

They wash up periodically on Hawaiian beaches, too. They are industrial buoys, used by maritime industries for various purposes. One popular purpose in Hawai’i is as floats for FADs or fish aggregating devices. They are also used as moorings for ships, with one end chained to an anchor and the other tied to the boat. They are sometimes used to support oceanographic monitoring equipment.

And occasionally they break free and end up as marine debris on beaches.

You can buy them. 

And they don’t always come as spheres. 

Many, like the Hamamatsu City sphere, have connection points at both ends. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2023

Have we already seen peak humpback whale populations? Maybe.

 Long-time Hawai’i residents have seen the remarkable increase in humpback whale numbers since the 1960s, but that increase could be over.

Whale numbers dropped catastrophically in the middle of the last decade, and there are suggestions that climate changes mean we may have already seen peak whale numbers. 

Although whales are impacted by lots of things, including entanglement with marine debris, swallowing marine debris, overfishing of prey resources and other issues, the key threat may be reduced food availability associated with a warming climate.

A little background.

The numbers of humpback whales got so low that the International Whaling Commission banned humpback hunting in 1966, although a couple of countries continued hunting them for several more years. They were placed on the Endangered Species List in 1970. 

In 1992, the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary was established to add protection to the Hawaiian Islands breeding grounds for the central North Pacific population of humpbacks. 

Today, there are close to 100,000 humpbacks alive globally, living in 14 identified breeding groups that do not often interbreed. At the peak population, before whaling, there may have been 125,000 to 150,000. See this source.

Around Hawai’i, at their lowest, in about 1965, there were only a few hundred animals. Hawai’i residents back then would spot an occasional spout, but nothing like the great shows of spouting and slapping and leaping that we see commonly today. Today the Hawai’i humpback whales number about 12,000 in the Islands.

The animals summer in their feeding grounds off Alaska, where they feed on the huge schools of small fish and krill, a shrimp-like creature. The whales that come to the Hawaiian Islands winter in shallow coastal waters, where they give birth, mate, and feed their young, but do not eat much. They rely on the fat stores from all that krill they have eaten during the summers up north.

But after decades of increase from their low numbers in the 1960s, the whale numbers stumbled 10 years ago, particularly from 2015 to 2016.

“Numbers then declined, including a precipitous 60% drop between 2015 and 2016,” wrote Adam Frankel, Christine Gabriele, Susanne Yin and Susan Rickards, of the Hawai’i Marine Mammal Consortium in Kamuela.

It seemed to have been linked to warming waters in the feeding grounds. An extended warm period described as “the largest marine heatwave event ever recorded in the Northeast Pacific Ocean” started in late 2013. It caused serious disruption to the ocean ecosystem. These authors didn’t know exactly how that impacted whales, but they suggested that the temperature changes impacted the food web, reducing humpback feeding success.

They are not alone. The authors of this 2022 paper said that North Pacific Heat Wave was associated with fewer surviving female whales, fewer calves, and a lower survival among those calves that were born.

“Calf survival dropped tenfold,” the authors said, and older animals also were impacted. They said “documented changes to the forage fish and zooplankton prey base” were the likely suspect.

Now, a new paper seems to confirm that hypothesis—although in the Antarctic rather than the North Pacific. It was published last month in the journal Global Change Biology, under the title “A surplus no more? Variation in krill availability impacts reproductive rates of Antarctic Baleen Whales.” 

The authors found that “krill availability is in fact limiting and affecting reproductive rates” and that humpbacks “may be at a threshold for population growth.” They said similar issues are occurring with several species of whales, as krill numbers decline in their traditional grounds, and some of them move to different parts of the sea.

That heat wave of a decade ago ended. But researchers say such heat waves have been increasing and are going to be happen more often. And that’s not good for the humpback population.

“Climatic extremes are becoming increasingly common against a background trend of global warming. In the oceans, marine heatwaves—discrete periods of anomalously warm water—have intensified and become more frequent over the past century, impacting the integrity of marine ecosystems globally,” wrote the authors of the 2023 Annual Review of Marine Science.  

These marine heat waves, the authors write, “are emerging as pervasive stressors to marine ecosystems globally.”

© Jan TenBruggencate 2023