Updated post-AMA: Hi Reddit, Thanks to all of you who submitted questions, answers and insights. I wish I could have gotten to all of them and I thank you for your interest! Laura Jurgens (tweeting @seacurious) Hi Reddit, My name is Laura Jurgens and I am a postdoctoral researcher at Temple University and Smithsonian Institution. My research focuses on how marine organisms, and the interacting communities they form, respond to extreme events and global change. Together with a wonderful group of collaborators, I recently published a study titled “Patterns of Mass Mortality among Rocky Shore Invertebrates across 100 km of Northeastern Pacific Coastline” in PLOS ONE. In it, we describe an unusual event that killed nearly 100% of two species, a tiny sea star and a sea urchin, over a large region, following a harmful algal bloom or “red tide”. We discuss why it’s especially important, but often hard, to document such events, which may be increasing in severity and frequency with human-induced changes to our oceans. We also discuss how lifestyle differences between the affected species could determine how long it takes them to recover, and what that means for coastal ecosystems. I will be answering your questions at 1pm ET. Ask me Anything! You can also follow me on Twitter @SeaCurious.

EDIT: Okay everyone, thanks for all of your questions! We hope we got to them. If we didn’t feel free to message me at /u/past_is_future and I will try to answer you specifically! Thanks so much! Hello there, /r/Science! We* are a group of researchers who just published a paper showing previous comparisons of global temperatures change from observations and climate models were comparing slightly different things, causing them to appear to disagree far more than they actually do. The lead author Kevin Cowtan has a backgrounder on the paper here and data and code posted here. Coauthor /u/ed_hawkins also did a background post on his blog here. Basically, the observational temperature record consists of land surface measurements which are taken at 2m off the ground, and sea surface temperature measurements which are taken from, well, the surface waters of the sea. However, most climate model data used in comparisons to observations samples the air temperature at 2m over land and ocean. The actual sea surface temperature warms at a slightly lower rate than the air above it in climate models, so this apples to oranges comaprison makes it look like the models are running too hot compared to observations than they actually are. This gets further complicated when dealing with the way the temperature at the sea ice-ocean boundaries are treated, as these change over time. All of this is detailed in greater length in Kevin’s backgrounder and of course in the paper itself. The upshot of our paper is that climate models and observations are in better agreement than some recent comparisons have made it seem, and we are basically warming inline with model expectations when we also consider differences in the modeled and realized forcings and internal climate variability (e.g. Schmidt et al. 2014). You can read some other summaries of this project here, here, and here. We’re here to answer your questions about Rampart this paper and maybe climate science more generally. Ask us anything! *Joining you today will be: Zeke Hausfather aka /u/ZekeHausfather Ed Hawkins aka /u/ed_hawkins Peter Jacobs aka /u/past_is_future Michael Mann aka /u/MichaelEMann Robert Way aka https://twitter.com/labradorice and perhaps some others if they have time