Our planet is an ocean planet. Robert Heinlein, in his benchmark work "Stranger in a Strange Land," has his main character, a young man raised by an alien race on the desiccated pill of a world we call Mars, contemplating what he calls the "ungrokkable vastness of ocean." The world's oceans cover over 70 percent of the planet's surface. The average depth of the seven seas is around two miles. The oceans are the major geological and hydrological feature of planet Earth, the place from which all life on this planet arose, and our understanding of the vast expanses of the oceans is decisively on the lean side.
That's why any broad claims about the world's oceans warming, cooling or anything else should be viewed with skepticism. But now a 17-year-old girl from Brazil claims to have cut through all the scientific uncertainty.
We thought Greta Thunberg, the Swedish Doom Pixie, was annoying. Well, she is annoying, that much is certain. But now she has competition in the form of one Catarina Lorenzo, a surfer girl from Brazil - yes, really - who claims the oceans are growing warmer because she feels it.
You just can't make this stuff up.
Oh, look, The Guardian is at it again, serving up a piping hot plate of climate hysteria with a side of precocious child activism. This time, they’ve hauled out a 17-year-old surfer from Brazil to lecture us all at COP29 about how the ocean is allegedly “getting warmer.” Because, obviously, who needs thermometers, satellite data, or rigorous reconstructions of ocean temperatures when you’ve got a preteen paddling around on a foam board?
As a surfer, I’m constantly on the ocean, and I actually felt the oceans warming,” says Catarina Lorenzo, 17, a professional surfer from Salvador, in Bahia state in Brazil.
Here’s the deal: The Guardian breathlessly reports that this kid has “noticed the ocean getting warmer.” Wow, stop the presses! Cornwall’s pint-sized Jacques Cousteau has declared it so! I’m sure every scientist laboring over ARGO floats and analyzing centuries of proxy data is ready to throw in the towel, because we’ve discovered the ultimate climate measuring device: the “17-year-old personal feeling-o-meter.”
But it gets better. The kid was apparently speaking on behalf of “Surfers Against Sewage.” Yes, you read that right. The name alone sounds like something straight out of a Monty Python sketch. Their shtick? Conflating ocean pollution, sewage overflow, and global climate trends into one big glob of environmental alarmism.
Consider the implications of this. Multiple intersecting disciplines are trying to ascertain long-term trends in ocean temperatures and currents. The margin of error in these measurements is almost as huge as the oceans themselves. What's more, the methods used to measure current temperature trends are not the same methods used to determine the historical temps - and those methods involve very broad indications of trends over spans of geological time, another function of the earth that we have a hard time understanding.
The oceans, as noted above, are vast beyond our ability to clearly understand, but now, according to The Guardian's piece, we must surrender our modern technological lifestyle and surrender our access to abundant, cheap energy because a 17-year-old surfer girl from Brazil says she feels the ocean growing warmer.
That's well to the left of absurd. But then, Miss Lorenzo, the Doom Pixie Mk II, has plenty of company in panic-mongering.
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And here's where this entire episode descends even further into absurdity - what does Miss Lorenzo expect the nations of the world to do in response to her claims of supernatural ocean-temperature-sensing powers? Does she think nations like China and India will suddenly shut down all the coal-fired electrical plants they are building? Because that, frankly, seems unlikely.
Let’s be blunt: The ocean is vast, covering over 70% of the planet’s surface, with depths averaging over two miles. Measuring its temperature with precision is a Herculean challenge that makes building a Swiss watch look like child’s play. Yet here comes The Guardian, peddling the notion that a kid with a wetsuit can feel changes too subtle for many instruments to consistently detect.
And let’s not ignore the larger absurdity here. Will Xi Jinping read about Cornwall’s Surfer Oracle and suddenly decide to shutter his coal plants? Will India halt its drive to electrify rural villages because a 17-year-old thinks her ocean swims are a little toastier? Of course not. This is pure theater, designed to elicit emotion, not address reality.
This isn't science. This isn't a sincere, thoughtful discussion of policy proposals. This is pure emotional panic-mongering on the part of The Guardian. It's a hyper-emotional polemic, and it should be derided as the antithesis of actual science. And, frankly, the folks at The Guardian should be ashamed of themselves for giving it serious coverage.
