ExxonKnews
August 31, 2023
As Hurricane Idalia rips through the Southeast — first making landfall in Florida at 125 miles per hour and leaving a path of destruction in its wake — its strength is being fueled by unusually high ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. As of Thursday morning, three people have been killed and hundreds of thousands of residents in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina are without power while others are returning to their partially destroyed homes to evaluate the damage.
It’s just one recent example of how severely climate change is altering the health of our oceans: mass coral reef die off is spreading across the globe, and more than 9,000 emperor penguins likely died in a “catastrophic breeding failure” after thinning Antarctic ice sheets broke around several breeding sites. While some scientists have called this rapid ocean warming “astonishing,” it’s no surprise to the fossil fuel industry.
Major oil and gas companies knew decades ago their products would cause irreversible harm to our oceans, including volatile temperatures, declining marine habitat, and melting polar ice caps.
