Really looking forward to Earth Day 2024 at UW-Madison Nelson Institute, where I'll be in conversation with Andrea Dutton, a deeply thoughtful and brave scientist who understands what's going on in our world better than just about anyone.

The 2024 mass coral bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef in numbers (preliminary analysis):

- 46% of reefs experienced record high DHW
- new record of 17.7 DHW from the southern GBR
- 37% of the GBR has been exposed to three or more >6DHW events in the past decade

(1/n)

'The most enduring legacy of air-conditioning may be the divide it has created between the cool and the damned,' writes Jeff Goodell in The Heat Will Kill You First. But don't sweat; the book isn't a downer. Find out why at Earth Fest! earthfest.wisc.edu/goodell UW-Madison Sustainability

And I, in turn, am really excited to be talking to Jeff Goodell next Monday - a truly gifted writer and communicator on climate change. The event is at noon on 4/22 at the Memorial Union and open to the public. Come join us!!

Unbleached reefs this year are coloured blue.

This is the most widespread and most severe mass bleaching and mortality event ever recorded on the Great Barrier Reef.

In 2024 only about 1/4 of reefs are green, unbleached.

Red, severely-bleached reefs in 2016 lost 51% of their corals. Half of that was within a week or two of peak temperatures.

EVERY MASS BLEACHING EVENTS IS ALSO A MASS-MORTALITY EVENT, killing hundreds of millions of corals

Cats 🐈‍⬛ 🐈 kill 1.85 billion birds 🦜🕊🪶 every year in #US

No calls for cats to be banned

Buildings 🏢 kill 675 million birds

Vehicles 🚛🚙 214 million birds

We poison ☠️ 72 million birds

Wind turbines kill just 328,000 and #climatechange deniers want to ban them!

“…bill is now awaiting to become law, which will ban offshore wind turbines in state waters. It also proposes to delete the majority of references to climate change found in state law” tampabay.com/news/environme…

The build up of heat exposure (Degree Heating Days) on the #GreatBarrierReef this summer has been extraordinarily brutal.

Compare late February with yesterday:

This is more widespread than any previous mass coral bleaching and mortality event.

Interested in working on thorny applied climate problems? Come work for me, and see where the rubber meets the road on climate mitigation/adaptation.

Esp looking for folks who can help us with engineering/vulnerability or transition risk analytics/integrated assessment modeling.

If you’re surprised that the #GreatBarrierReef is experiencing mass coral bleaching and mortality for the 5th time in just 8 years - you haven’t been paying attention.

I wrote this brief summary:

theconversation.com/the-great-barr…

I guess they feel if they don’t acknowledge it, then it will just go away.

And for those keeping track, global sea surface temperatures hit a new all-time modern record high yesterday, at 21.15°C.

Yep. It's all going swimmingly, as they say.

Wow! Welcome to the Anthropocene. “NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch introduced three new categories to their Bleaching Alert Levels, above the previously open-ended Level 2. Bleaching Alert Level 5, the new highest level, is categorized as a risk of “near complete mortality.” 1/

Coastal communities are staring down the barrel of climate-caused economic instability.

Tune in as Andrea Dutton discusses how the “potential for larger jumps in sea level” could lead to “sudden, widespread, and devastating” impacts.

TUNE IN: Wednesday at 10am as Kyle Schaefer, Andrea Dutton, Rashid Sumaila, and more testify about the growing threat to our oceans, coastal communities, and blue economies. #BlueEconomyInTheRed

Do you love forams? do you love lasers? do you love the PETM? Well I have a PhD project for you: noc.ac.uk/gsnocs/project…. More details here: thefosterlab.org/blog/2023/10/1…. Please spread the word and pass on to anyone who you think might be interested.

If you're at #GSA2023 , please stop by the UW-Madison Geoscience booth and say hi!

When they said flatten the curve, they didn’t mean vertically