Thread by @chriscmooney

1. For our 7th “2C: Beyond the Limit” piece, @maxbearak and @vanhoutenphoto visited Angola, and found a gut-wrenching story about a town that's contributed virtually nothing to climate change – but is being targeted with eerie precision nonetheless.
washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/…

2. Meet Tombwa, Angola, built on fishing. It sits onshore of a crucial oceanic juncture where the Benguela Current, traveling up from southern waters along Africa’s southwest coast, has traditionally delivered nutrient rich, cool waters through a process called upwelling.

3. That made this an ideal place for fishing – and that is still what the town of 50,000 runs on. For now.

4. But the signs of decline are already apparent, @maxbearak writes

5. You see, Tombwa's coastline lies along the upper reaches of the Benguela upwelling system, at an oceanic “front” where the Benguela meets the warmer, oxygen-poor Angola current, which travels southward from the equator.

6. That’s what has set the town up for climate disaster.

7. The Angola-Benguela frontal zone is moving southward for very complex reasons involving global circulations of winds and currents. An video by the very talented Bill Neff explains how it all works washingtonpost.com/video/national…

8. This has created an ocean warming hotspot directly off Tombwa’s coast. Seen in high resolution @NOAA sea surface temperature data, it lies right next to Tombwa and shows a change of nearly 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) in just 36 years!

9. Longer term data suggest Angola’s entire coast has also warmed a great deal over more than 100 years -- at least 1.5C. And it could be a lot more, as the data from 1880-1910, which show a lot of warming, are sparse and unreliable, so we did not include them in our analysis.

10. As if all of this wasn’t enough, this stretch of ocean is also losing oxygen rapidly and suffering from overfishing, including illegal incursions by trawlers from abroad.

11. There’s a ton of science packed into the foregoing tweets, which we spent months collecting and reporting out, so let me pause and provide some references.

12. On the disproportionate warming of the southern Angola coast and especially the region around Tombwa onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…
link.springer.com/article/10.100…

13. On the southward moving Angola-Benguela front and declining ocean upwelling link.springer.com/article/10.100…
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

14. [Can I just note that this series would have been impossible without all of the little noticed studies lying in the scientific literature which are just waiting to be found by reporters, and to have their stories unlocked?]

15. This rapid ocean warmup near Tombwa has had all kinds of consequences – biological, economic, social.

16. Since I contributed a lot of the science reporting to this story, I just want to flag one that is particularly striking on a scientific level -- the kind of thing I have not really head of before.

17. @wpotts18, a researcher from South Africa who heads the @safer_lab and who has documented the fisheries changes along this coastline up close, has found something bizarre and striking.

18. A large fish sought by anglers, called the dusky kob, actually been driven southward by the warming waters -- and started interbreeding with another kob species, from which it had previously been separated for some 2 million years.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

19. To me that is pretty suggestive evidence, at least, that warming has pushed us into a new ecological regime in this area. That’s now inscribed in the very DNA of these fishes.

20. Oh, and it means that #climatechange is driving #evolution. Right now.

21. But let's turn from science to the human toll, documented by our reporters.

22. People are actually moving to Tombwa from Angola’s interior, hoping to find something better, only to learn that its fishing is in fast decline. Again, @maxbearak captures it:

23. As the story emphasizes, Tombwa is being pinpointed by climatic forces, but it isn’t contributing much to the problem – nor is Angola. The entire country’s emissions are about 10 million tons of carbon per year – or about .1 percent of the global total.

24. And so what we have here, in the end, is a harrowing story about climate injustice.

25. It's the story of a climate change hotspot rapidly appearing where there’s little ability to adapt or adjust to it – something that, sadly, will often be the case in the new regime towards which we’re pushing the planet.

26. And with that, I'll point you back to our story itself -- by @maxbearak and @vanhoutenphoto, with contributions by myself on science and @JohnMuyskens on graphics washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/… /end