Are you dubious about whether there's climate change?

Just google the following phrases. ocean dead zone. melting glacier. warmer ocean. drought cycle. I'm sure there are others. The striking thing about googling this kind of phrase is that google immediately retrieves batches of links to articles about the chosen subject from all over. Google makes clear that there are places all over the world which are experiencing the same phenomena. The Oregonian this morning had a front page article on very high numbers of seabirds starving because the upwelling cycle off our coast shut down this spring. The close of the article noted that a later return of the upwelling cycle had led to massive plankton blooms and could lead to an anoxic dead zone. That reminded me that I had recently seen an article about a massive, recurrent dead zone being studied in the Gulf of Mexico. Google turned up an article leading with an assertion that there were 150 such dead zones.

Notice that I'm not throwing down a gauntlet in this discussion and saying 'kill your suv you're warming the world'. I think the debate about the causal piece might already be too late. The reality is that there is climate change going on in a direction we have not 'lived through' in modern times. The reality is that climate changes on a global scale have global impacts. The reality is that we don't know what those will be, but we have the intellect to model some of them. And the likelihood is that we will not have the luxury of just sitting back, retaining our lifetyle, and watching the psychedelic sunsets.
What would crop failure in soy or wheat across a wide swath of the world do? What if Californian and Chilean produce crops wiped out? I don't know the answers. I expect we'll find out.

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