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From the Sublimely Terrifying to the Ridiculous: Were Slimy Fish on Your Climate Change BINGO Card? [1]

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Date: 2023-01-30

Invasive weatherloach, from The NSW Irrigators’ Council Twitter account

In the preface to his stunning, must-read book “Eaarth,” – now more than a decade old! – Bill McKibben states,

…global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It's our reality. We've changed the planet, changed it in large and fundamental ways.

We have indeed. For an example of “large and fundamental changes,” we just need to look for the ice to melt. In his brilliant diary today on the Thwaites glacier, Pakalolo writes,

On January 23, 2023, satellite imagery captured the beginning of the collapse of the ice above the flow of a subglacial channel that runs between Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers.

That is the sort of consequence of climate change that most people think of – big, macro level changes that are easy to relate to the warming globe.

But there is, and there will be, so much more. In addition to that generally understood macro level of change, we have also unwittingly unleased nightmarish, utterly bizarre consequences that most people would not have had on their bingo cards. Changes to ecosystems, food webs, landscapes… everything. We have changed the details — the minutiae — of our planet’s systems, and many of the consequences are gobsmackingly strange.

Here’s one.

Swarms of slimy gray fish are clogging up irrigation water filters in Australia thanks to a flood-triggered boom in their population. The Murray-Darling River basin, which covers 14 percent of Australia's massive land area, has seen massive flooding in recent weeks, impacting over 3,000 homes in South Australia alone. Floods like these can cause numbers of weather loach to explode, especially if they happen to occur during the species' breeding season. "They boom every time there is a flood," Baumgartner said. "We've seen increased numbers of them across the Murray-Darling basin this year and we have also seen this with previous floods. The floodplain creates perfect conditions for spawning and for survival of the egg larvae. This year the floods coincided with their breeding season."

The NSW Irrigators’ Council (@nswirrigators) tweets:

#BreakingNews another unprecedented boom in class 1 noxious pest in #MurrayDarlingBasin (pic) of weatherloach having got past fish screens at Western Murray Irrigation to choke pump filters. Just adding water won't fix this. Urgent action #BeyondBuybacks can #auspol

“Urgent.” Yes. But just one small problem among a host of similar issues that will be coming at us thick and fast over the coming years, each urgent, each pressing, and each with unintended downstream consequences that do seriously boggle the mind.

For every individual event, all manner of sequalae, intertwined like a pail full of loaches: cost, logistics, disaster relief funding, getting water/food/supplies to people, infrastructure, impacts to local food webs as invasive species move in, repairs to the clogged filters, and on and on and on.

We have to be prepared (if we can) for terrifying macro level threats like the Thwaites glacier collapse.

But we also must realize that other things – “smaller” things like water filters full of loaches – will have a cumulative effect that may be even worse than the big stuff.

I don’t know how much we can absorb. I don’t know how much we can afford. I have no idea if we will ever be able to be prepared in any comprehensive way. And I don’t know if many people understand that these “little” “local” things might end up overwhelming us in the end.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/30/2150110/-From-the-Sublimely-Terrifying-to-the-Ridiculous-Were-Slimy-Fish-on-Your-Climate-Change-BINGO-Card

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