Change

Actually, at the end of our rainy season it's often just like it was at the beginning, a bit stifling with high humidity and temps. Since cold fronts don't really affect us much at this latitude, we rely on the ocean to bring cooler water temps to our coast.

And increasingly we can’t rely on cooler water temperatures. As land-based humans, we tend to think only of how land is affected by global warming, but global warming is affecting the ocean environment even more than the land.

Climate Change: Ocean Heat Content

More than 90 percent of the warming that has happened on Earth over the past 50 years has occurred in the ocean. Recent studies estimate that warming of the upper oceans accounts for about 63 percent of the total increase in the amount of stored heat in the climate system from 1971 to 2010, and warming from 700 meters down to the ocean floor adds about another 30 percent.

In addition to the heat, oceans are absorbing carbon dioxide, increasing water acidity, and killing calcium-dependent marine life such as coral, oysters, etc.

The latter is why I ask people to please leave shells on the beaches, or better yet, throw them back in the ocean to help counteract the ocean's acidification. But I'm sure you can imagine the responses by some of the privileged folks who vacation on Sanibel Island, a vacation destination that touts itself as the "shelling capital of the world".