Dying Orchards, Missing Fish as Climate Change Fueled Europe's Record Heat

[bronxiteforever]

INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS

Earth’s hottest June on record was followed by a sizzling July that either tied or exceeded another global extreme. New studies point to global warming connections.

BY BOB BERWYN, INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS
AUG 3, 2019

VELA LUKA, Croatia — The harvest in Mirjana Štimac's almond orchard usually starts in late July, but this year, the crop has failed, with only a few mature nuts per tree. The trees are dying, and she blames a series of heat waves that have struck in recent years in an orchard that was already under stress from steadily rising global temperatures. Europe saw off-the-charts heat this summer: June was 2 degrees Celsius (3.6°F) above average and crushed the record for the month by a full 1°C (1.8°F), and a late July temperature spike set new record highs across the continent.

...Štimac has been tending almonds, olives, grapes and figs on the north shore of Korčula Island for 25 years...snaps off a branch covered in dead leaves and shriveled nuts and points to something unexpected—a few bright green leaves at the tip. "I've never seen that before in July," Štimac says. "I think climate change has shifted the seasons. It just keeps getting warmer. The last three years there was no spring, no fall, just long, hot summer”...Since the oldest trees in the orchard were planted about 100 years ago, the regional temperature has gone up by about 1.8°C (3.2°F), as has the sea surface temperature around the Dalmatian Islands off the coast of Croatia, and rainfall has steadily declined.

Heat waves also affect the ocean. In the Vela Luka harbor on Korčula, boat captain Tonko Barčot steers his fishing boat alongside the pier and shrugs his shoulders as he tells waiting buyers that his holds are empty. A long night at sea in search of sardines brought up only empty nets...
Land heat waves can spill over to the ocean and affect marine ecosystems, said Dan Smale, an ecologist at Britain's Marine Biological Association in Plymouth...It's shape and geographic position make the Mediterranean especially sensitive to global warming, and cold water species are quickly being squeezed out of their habitat and replaced by warm-loving species, including invasive organisms from the tropics, said Joaquim Garrabou, a senior researcher with Spain's Institute of Marine Sciences...




The entire article is worth the long, emotionally tough read. For years our Party has been lectured to by the so called “evangelical and moral” GOP. Yet it is they who birthed and nursed climate change which closely resembles any number of Old Testament plagues.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02082019/extreme-heat-wave-climate-change-attribution-europe-almond-trees-fish-hottest-july-june

[democratisphere]

1. The world is already in a disastrous situation that will very quickly become much worse.

The USA needs to the eradicate the GOP from our governments so that the problem of global warming and climate change can seriously be addressed.

[bronxiteforever]

3. +1 Couldn't agree more. The GOP war on science

Has robbed us of decades where we could have addressed the issue of climate change. The bill is coming due and it will be steep. To have a chance to save ourselves we have to vote out the GOP.

[Mike 03]

2. Thanks for posting this

Most articles focus on the human cost of the heat waves. I've been looking for articles that touch on the devastation to fish and animals. This is getting really disturbing. I can only read so many of these articles a day or I start to feel paralyzed.

[bronxiteforever]

4. +1 I know how you feel about the mental disturbance

Of these articles. You do have to take a break from it. But like the patient at the doctor’s office I want to get our condition straight up from the specialists (scientists ).
The impact of climate change on wildlife on our planet is horrific.

[mopinko]

5. i'm supposed to be in a sweet spot. i thought i was.

i'm in chicago, near the lake. i'm in a little micro-climate that is buffered by the lake.
i am well above sea level, and far enough from the lake at any rate.
we dont get big storms here, and have a pretty heavy duty storm water system.
i have all the cheap water i could ask for.
nothing i saw affecting others seemed in the cards for me.

i did not think i was going to be impacted any time soon, and that i had as much time as there was to get my farm established.
boy was i wrong.

this is year 7 for us.
the first year, spring came an entire month early.
i have had 3 years where spring was so cold and rainy that a great start under lights was literally turned around as soon as they hit the outdoor weather.

but this year, i have had so much tree damage, i cant believe it.
a lot of the damage was squirrels stripping buds. usually i lose some of the flower buds on my big magnolia, to no lasting harm to the tree.
this year they stripped most of the leaf buds, too.
they cant get all the way to the tips of the branches, so the last foot or 2 was fine, but the rest of the very large tree was just stripped bare.

now, this may or may not have anything to do w climate change, but this worsened greatly this last winter.
the fat grey squirrels that have been here as long as me have been replaced by a smaller, nimbler red squirrel. bolder too, imho, the bastards.
besides the magnolia, they stripped about half of my young fruit trees to one extent or another.
they got most of the flower buds, and over half the leaf buds on 3.
i have zero fruit growing. i had sour cherries on an old tree, but all of 1 cherry on my younger trees.

it went from cold and rainy to hot and sunny on a dime.
we have had great rainfall. i have barely had to water.
nonetheless, i have had huge heat damage to my trees, old and young. from what i see on fb, it has been widespread in the region.
about 20% of the surviving leaves on that magnolia have burned up. now i have leaves sprouting all over the limbs and trunk. grateful as i am for the signs of life, i see a long term nightmare for this tree.
it needed a haircut going in to the year, so i got that done a month ago. right now, it needs another but i will wait to see what comes back. but all these little sprouts on that trunk will have to go eventually.

and that's just the spring/heat damage.
winters are a whole other threat.

i used to tell my detractors- i smell the planet burning. do you?

these days, it's getting hard to breath for the smoke.
at least i wont have to ask that question much longer.

[bronxiteforever]

6. +1 Thanks for your story.

I never realized how many streams and creeks were around my house until we started to get massive rainfall. Another crisis point in climate change is that research demonstrates that warming trends are nonlinear, that warming accelerated over most of the twentieth century and is much stronger since 1980 than calculated by linear methods.

I like your point about the planet burning. I will steal from James Baldwin’s quote from the spiritual
"God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water but fire next time".

[Frustratedlady]

7. I've lost both of my old-fashioned lilac bushes.

They were doing fine, bloomed late and then started turning brown. Never seen this before and I've always had the old lilac bushes. No one can give me an answer.