Can Sharks Off Santa Barbara’s Coast Help Reduce Global Warming?

---

Sign Up to get Nick Welsh’s award-winning column, The Angry Poodle delivered straight to your inbox on Saturday mornings.

---

SPLISH SPLASH: When in doubt, lead with the shark. That’s the first rule you learn in journalism school. Unfortunately, I never went. As a result, for this week’s column, I have prepared a smorgasbord of all the things my brain won’t stop sputtering about: the flippant, arrogant, heedless, blow-up-the-world incompetence with which Trump has pursued a war for which he never bothered to prepare — not us, not our allies, and, worst of all, not himself. 

Unfortunately, no 12-step program has yet been devised for people afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome. For the time being, I’ll leave it with this: If you’re not deranged, you’re not paying attention.

So how ‘bout those sharks?

It turns out that in the state of California, there are two coastal hotbeds of great white juvenile shark populations. For the last eight years or so, Carpinteria has been one of the two destinations for great whites who, in human terms, would fall between the ages of kindergarten and 6th grade. In shark terms, however, they tend to measure between four-and-a-half and eight feet long. That’s according to noted marine biologist Professor Chris Lowe of Cal State Long Beach’s Shark Lab, who has been studying them for about 20 years.. 

Lowe studies shark populations along the coast between San Diego and Morro Bay. Three years ago, he counted 40 juveniles hanging out by Carpinteria — the “World’s Safest Beach.”. That was in just one day….

So many great whites are out there, he told me, that any time we’re in the water, there’s a 97 percent chance there’s a shark down there with us. We just don’t see it because visibility is so murky. 

But not to worry. Right? 

Sharks, Lowe said, have gotten used to us. They don’t see us as predators they need to kill out of self preservation. They don’t see us as food to be eaten. “We don’t even smell good to them,” he said. Instead, sharks track us from 60-feet away, alerted by the splashing sounds we make while swimming. “We’ve become background noise to them,” he said.

That’s what they all say. Right?

 So why all the sharks? According to Eliot Jacobson, resident math genius, musician, and card shark who spends much of his spare time tracking the temperature of various ocean currents, it’s climate change. “The oceans are heating at a rate of over 12 Hiroshima bombs per second,” Jacobson said, “an unprecedented rate of warming over the last 66 million years.”

Lowe was less flamboyantly apocalyptic. Normally at this time of year, coastal ocean temperature would have been in the high fifties. Right now, the water off our coast is about 62-63 degrees. Sharks love it between 63 and 68. “That’s their sweet spot,” Lowe said. 

Down in La Jolla, another hot spot for great white juveniles, the water posted a record high of 71 degrees. That’s unheard of. This recent influx of unseasonably warm water is drawing shark populations from further south, where they more typically congregated and experienced all their coming-of-age life transitions. 

Maybe this would help penetrate the fog of our inertia and denial about climate change, I mused with idiotic optimism. There’s something about sharks that just grabs human attention. There’s nothing theoretical about it. But then, there’s nothing theoretical about war and hundreds of thousands of dead bodies and trillions of dollars spent on carnage either. 

You can do the math yourself. Start with the war we waged with Iraq over Kuwait back in 1990. Think about the second Gulf War, the eight-year adventure in why-are-we-here that began in 2003. Or the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan. 

Me, I’d go back even further. I’d start in 1953 when the United States and England engineered a coup that toppled the democratically elected president of Iran because he nationalized the oil industry. I’d also include the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979. That’s 444 days we’ll never get back. Or the eight-year bloody war between Iraq and Iran that killed half a million people. The United States turned a blind eye to Iraq’s use of chemical weapons in that war — that American companies manufactured and sold to Iraq’s regime — because we so hated Iran. 

And here we go again. 

It should have been obvious back in 1990 that, if the United States wanted to stay out of such wars, it needed to wean itself from fossil fuels. Pedal to the metal. Jimmy Carter got the message. Wear a sweater he said, as he installed a solar panel on the roof of the White House. But Carter, according to the conventional wisdom, was terminally decent. 

The first thing Ronald Reagan did upon being sworn in was remove those solar panels. Trump, of course, has not a decent bone in his body and is aggressively seeking to destroy all government funding or incentive for any energy source that might be construed as renewable. Just last week, Trump offered a $1 billion refund to a French wind company it had already paid the federal government to secure its offshore lease. Trump’s deal was that the wind project was dead in the water and that the French company would spend the billion bucks on oil development instead.

Just how many more sharks do we want in our water?

How many wars over oil do we really want our government to fight?

Oil, of course, makes hypocrites of us all. It’s easy — irresistible actually — to blame Trump for everything. Certainly, he’s guilty as charged. But there are thing we can do ourselves, little perhaps, but meaningful. According to the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments, the median distance South Coast residents drive to and from work is 3.3 miles. If you break that number down further, 54 percent of travel is four miles or less to get to work. What a statistical coincidence. 

Four just also happens to be the percentage of people who ride to work on their bikes. With the advent of the e-bike — and for all you nattering nabobs of negativity out there, a whole flotilla of new state laws just went into effect this year governing e-bikes — four miles is within easy, convenient, sweat-free grasp. 

I don’t mean to be screechy here, though of course I am. The good news is that we’re doing a little better. Two years ago, 67 percent of all South Coast commuters drove to work alone. Now it’s down to 60. 

Initially, I harbored happy delusions that our burgeoning population of baby great whites might imbue the subject of climate change with a desperately needed sensationalistic, pop culture, B-movie immediacy. But what climate change giveth, it also taketh away. 

It turns out that the acidification of the ocean — caused by massive increases in carbon dioxide it absorbs — is causing sharks’ teeth to go soft. Maybe they no longer pose the same blood-curdling threat. Maybe sharks are now our background noise. 

Maybe. But just to be safe, I wouldn’t go swimming out by the Channel Islands where those big boys swim, searching for the marine mammals they like to dine on.

In the meantime, if you go to Carpinteria, it still is the World’s Safest Beach. But if you go in the water, try not to splash too loud.