The Warm Blob is Heating Up
This one will be short, but no less important for its brevity.
Whether we’re concerned with climate, economics, or social unrest, it seems that many in our country are making a concerted effort to simply ignore news that doesn’t comport with their beliefs (another faith issue?). Fortunately, such a “head-in-the-sand” approach is not shared by everyone else who has a stake in maintaining a viable planet.
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I read an article on the BBC website (18 October 2025) that gave an update about what is called the “Warm Blob” in the Pacific Ocean. This is a portion of the northern Pacific that extends from the east coast of Asia to the west coast of North America.
To quote the key take-away from the article:
Sea surface temperatures between July and September were more than 0.25C above the previous high of 2022 – a big increase across an area roughly ten times the size of the Mediterranean.
This is not going to be a short-term impact. As discussed in several earlier posts regarding the physics of climate change, water has a “high” specific heat. I point you to a portion from the end of a post titled “Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change For Dummies”, where I attempt to go through the science behind climate change and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere:
In case you were wondering: specific heat is a measure of how much energy is transferred when the temperature of a material goes up… or down. Water has a very high specific heat at 4.18 joules/gram, while the specific heat of just about everything else is well less than 1.0 joule/gram. This is why you need to use a potholder long before the water starts to boil.
No matter what we do, the climate will likely warm to the point that enough ice will melt to flood coastal cities. How long can you tread water?
What this means is truly unfortunate for humanity, and many of the other species doomed to share this flicker of Earthtime with us: even if we stop burning oil RIGHT NOW and therefore stop adding CO2 back into the atmosphere, the oceans — which are already measurably warmer than they were a couple hundred years ago and getting warmer — will take just as long to cool back down as they did to heat up. It is likely that, no matter what we do, the ice caps are going to melt, sea level will rise and flood the coastlines, and if anyone is still living near the beach they will probably want to relocate inland.
I encourage you to review the entire discussion if you have any questions regarding CO2 and greenhouses (or doubt human contributions).
Another snippet from “Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change for Dummies”:
Take a closer look at the CO2 graph in the image. The blue line indicates the historic trend over the past 400,000 years (these values are not made up, but derived from ice cores drilled into the Antarctic ice cap). The red line at the far right shows how CO2 levels have increased since the Industrial Revolution began pumping carbon into the atmosphere; beginning at approximately 280 parts per million (ppm), but soaring to over 400 ppm after only a couple hundred years of industrialization.
There can be little doubt that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have a direct impact on surface temperatures, as evidenced by the advance and retreat of glaciers.
Compounding this is a recent report from the United Nations, as discussed in a New York Times article (16 October 2025), titled “Carbon Dioxide Levels Jumped by a Record Amount, U.N. Says”.
The short version says that carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, and that between 2023 and 2024, atmospheric CO2 jumped to 423.9 ppm.
Add to this the issues related to subsidence of the land, due in large part to extraction of groundwater. I discuss this in an earlier post titled “What happened to my water?” This specific blather focuses on the situation in Mexico City, but similar subsidence is being noted around the globe; including the entire Eastern Seaboard of North America, Bangladesh, and the Low Countries of western Europe (I can’t seem to get the image of the “Little Dutch Boy” with his finger plugging the dike out of my mind).
I’ve been meaning to do a post on coastal subsidence, and have even been bookmarking appropriate support materials for over a year, but it just hasn’t come around on the guitar yet (to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie in Alice’s Restaurant Massacree). One example — from Newsweek (23 February 2024) titled “NASA Images Show Where US East Coast Is Sinking” — pretty much sets the stage, with art to boot..
Anyway, put it all together — the high specific heat of water, increasing levels of atmospheric CO2, land subsidence — and none of this paints a happy picture for future inhabitants of Planet Earth.
Especially coastal dwellers.
But hey — Susie and I live above 1500 feet, as do all of our boys and their families, so who cares…
You probably already have this in your guitar music pile, but it is very relevant to subsidence on coasts where the input of sediments is high. In this case, the Gulf of America (…cringe…):
https://www.boem.gov/oil-gas-energy/mapping-and-data/map-gallery/northern-goa-deepwater-bathymetry-grid-3d-seismic
Add the topography of this bathymetry (showing a gigantic landslide toe pierced with salt diapirs) to over 20,000 feet of Pleistocene sediment off the SE coast of Louisiana, to growth faults that offset man-made pavements, to mud lumps, to the transgression of the Chandelier Islands and Texas beaches when the Army Corps of Engineers deny sediment to the parts of the coast, and to salt water invasion into aquifers. All these point to the Gulf coast being part of a ginormous landslide. Groundwater withdrawal is secondary on the Gulf Coast. Any beach or floodplain where sediment is denied starts to subside immediately. I have pictures of a growth fault with one foot of displacement over 30 years marked by WW2 blimp base tarmac on Galveston Island. I have pictures of multiple rows of inundated beach houses next to the Colorado River delta in Texas due to Corps redirection of sediment to the lagoon behind the beach. I have waded on the drowned St. Bernard lobe of the Mississippi Delta complex where all that is left is an oyster lag of transgressive sand called the Chandelier Islands. Groundwater or hydrocarbon withdrawal did not cause any of these. The only reason that Texas coastal cities are above sea level is the huge amount of sediment input from rivers. New Orleans is already partly below sea level.
Add any kind of subsidence to arctic and antarctic ice melt and we have a global disaster coming. If global warming also causes lower river flows in some areas, the coasts where these rivers dump their sediments will subside even more.
I could go on and on about the ramifications of sediment loss along both coasts of North America. I’m thinking about dams upstream and groins disrupting the long-shore drift, but these realities may (or may not) rear their most certainly ugly heads in a later post.
I’m also reminded of a subsidence issue related to petroleum extraction along the Gulf Coast in the late 50s and early 60s that was initially a VERY sad story for the locals, but ultimately bit the company where it hurt. This story will likely never make it onto my blog.