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The threats posed by climate change and overexploitation of the oceans are already being felt. All will be affected, none more so than the poorest costal and island populations. With the crisis in our oceans and its devastating ecological consequences now abundantly clear, global solutions are needed.

Overfishing, rising sea levels, huge dead zones, and waste plastic in the ocean: these are hard facts, generated from sound data brought together by renowned marine scientists from across the world and available internationally. Experts, relying on ever-improving digital measurement methods and imaging techniques, are extremely concerned and warn of a scenario that affects everyone. It is beyond dispute: our oceans are in crisis.

“We! Will! Die!” ran the headline in Jakob Augstein’s political column in the German current affairs magazine, Der Spiegel, in November 2017 following the UN climate summit in Bonn, chaired by Fiji. “It was good of the UN to pass the baton to the islanders before they sink”, Augstein continued. “Previously, when something could actually still have been done about rising sea levels, nobody would have thought to ask Fijians what they thought. There were more important things to think about, like cars, jobs, fridges… ourselves, really. And it’s not like Mallorca is going to sink. Not yet, anyway.”

Waves of concern: the consequences of climate change

The seas are suffering due to climate change. Scientists consider acidification, sea warming, and rising sea levels to be the three biggest problems we are facing. The main cause of climate change is CO₂ released by humanity into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels. As the ocean absorbs too much CO₂ it gradually becomes acidic, while increasing temperatures push sea levels up and cause huge changes to marine ecosystems.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

An Oceanic Problem: the Atlantic Overturning Current is Slowing

April 15, 2018

An Oceanic Problem: the Atlantic Overturning Current is Slowing

Photo by Michael Mayer | CC BY 2.0

The Atlantic Overturning Current is part of a worldwide twisted loop of ocean water, called the thermohaline cycle (thermo = heat, haline = salt), which emerges very salty and warm out of the Gulf of Mexico, travels north as a surface current along the east coast of North America, veers east in the North Atlantic toward Europe, then loops back west to a region just south of Greenland where it cools and sinks to the ocean floor – because it has become denser than the surrounding and less salty North Atlantic waters (colder water is denser than warmer water, and saltier water is denser than fresher water of equal temperature). The dense highly salted descending water then runs as a cold deep ocean current south along the east coast of South America, and continues in a complicated path along the ocean floor into the Pacific Ocean, where it warms and eventually rises to become a surface current of more buoyant less salty water. This current distributes solar heat collected by ocean waters in tropical latitudes to higher latitudes (closer to the poles).

In 2004, Peter Schwartz and Douglas Randall described the thermohaline cycle this way: “In this thousand-year cycle, water from the surface in tropical areas becomes more saline through evaporation. When it circulates to the poles and becomes cold (“thermo”), the greater density still present from higher salt (“haline”) concentration causes the water to sink to great depths. As with most large-scale geological processes, the thermohaline cycle is not thoroughly understood. Wallace Broecker has been studying the cycle for decades and, according to the December 1996 issue of Discover magazine, he has shown that the thermohaline cycle has not always been in operation, and that it has a strong effect on global climate.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Global Warming Zaps Oxygen

February 16, 2018

Global Warming Zaps Oxygen

Photo by Todd Huffman | CC BY 2.0

Take a deep breath. A recent scientific study reveals disturbing loss of ocean oxygen. Unnerving climatic events like this justify ringing and clanging of the bells on the Public Square, all hands on deck. In particular, and as expected, the culprit is too much anthropogenic-induced global warming or idiomatically speaking, human activities such as planes, trains, and automobiles… burning tons of coal. Somebody must do something to fix it… ah-ah-ah!

According to Denise Breitburg, lead author marine ecologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center: “The decline in ocean oxygen ranks among the most serious effects of human activities on the Earth’s environment.” (Source: The Ocean Is Losing Its Breath, University of Californian-San Diego, Science Daily, January 4, 2018)

A team of scientists with GO2NE (Global Ocean Oxygen Network) created by the UN Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission conducted a sweeping all-encompassing study of the state of ocean oxygen: “In the past 50 years, the amount of water in the open ocean with zero oxygen has gone up more than fourfold. In coastal water bodies, including estuaries and seas, low-oxygen sites have increased more than 10-fold since 1950. Scientists expect oxygen to continue dropping even outside these zones as Earth warms,” Ibid.

According to Vladimir Ryabinin, executive secretary of the International Oceanographic Commission that formed GO2NE: “Approximately half of the oxygen on Earth comes from the ocean.”

Today, there are actual dead zones where oxygen has plummeted so low that life suffocates. Not only, low oxygen that doesn’t suffocate life still stunts growth, hinders reproduction, and promotes disease. In short, low oxygen stresses the entire ecosystem.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Inside the Dead Zone

January 29, 2018

Inside the Dead Zone

It was at a point when linguistics, cultural anthropology and continental philosophy were converging that philosopher Martin Heidegger proclaimed ‘language is the house of the truth of being.’ The problem at hand was conceiving the role of language in an experiential (phenomenological) sense that closed the distance between the Western inheritance of Cartesian dualism, and with it the need for ‘transcendence,’ and the world.

As abstruse as this probably reads, the political, economic and cultural subtexts of Western modernity: social control, economic concentration and commodification of the social realm, tie through the all-purpose apologia of neoliberal capitalism to shared premises about the structure and nature of the world. What then is to be done regarding the colloquialism ‘don’t shit where you eat’ when the world is home.

Image: Oceanic ‘dead zones’ where climate change, industrial pollution and agricultural runoff, have depleted oxygen levels to the point where nothing lives, surround the U.S., developed Europe, Britain and Japan. The common link is capitalism. One would think the term ‘dead zones’ would cause reconsideration on the part of those causing them. What relationship with the world explains treating it is a garbage dump?

At the nexus of linguistics and cultural anthropology is the otherwise banal observation that different peoples approach ‘the world’ differently. The Western, predominantly Platonic / Cartesian, conception of ‘the world’ as an external object has rough corollary in the astrophysicist’s distinction between the ‘big bang’ as expansion of, rather than in, space. In the prior conception there is no dimension in which to put space. Allow for a moment that this problem of dimensionality applies to key conceits of the Western worldview.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Sea sends early warning of heatwaves

April 8, 2016

Sea sends early warning of heatwaves

Feeling the heat as New York City swelters in extreme summer temperatures. Image: Bill via Flickr

Surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean can give the US Midwest and East Coast 50 days’ notice to prepare itself for a dangerous spell of extreme heat.

LONDON, 8 April, 2016 – Americans could have as many as seven weeks’ advance notice of devastating heatwaves. A telltale pattern of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean could presage weeks of intolerable temperatures in the cities and plains of the US.

Research published in Nature Geoscience reveals that a “fingerprint” of sea surface temperatures about 20 degrees north of the Equator – and dubbed the Pacific Extreme Pattern – meant that the chances of sustained and extreme heat 50 days later in the US Midwest and East Coast stepped up from one in six to one in four. And 30 days ahead, the same pattern brought the odds to better than one in two.

Critical aspects

“Summertime heatwaves are among the deadliest weather events, and they can have big impacts on farming, energy use, and other critical aspects of society,” says Karen McKinnon, a post-doctoral fellow at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

“If we can give city planners and farmers a heads up that extreme heat is on the way, we might be able to avoid some of the worst consequences.”

Climate scientists have consistently predicted that climate change will be driven by global warming that will manifest itself in ever more intense, and more frequent, extremes of heat.

In 2012, the US was hit by an unprecedented and sustained heatwave that broke thousands of local temperature records, and claimed an estimated 100 lives.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Oceans are heating up at the double

February 8, 2016

Oceans are heating up at the double

The British survey ship HMS Challenger blazed an oceanic trail a century and a half ago.
Image: William Frederick Mitchell via Wikimedia Commons

Records from a sailing ship’s round-the-world research voyage almost 150 years ago provide further evidence that the Earth is continuing to warm unchecked.

LONDON, 6 February, 2016 – Ocean temperatures first collected during one of the great 19th-century voyages of exploration confirm one of the consequences of climate change: humans have managed to warm even the deepest parts of the ocean.

A new study in Nature Climate Change calculates that the amount of heat absorbed by the ocean has doubled in the last 18 years. A third of this heat has collected in the depths at least 700 metres below the waves − and the same region is rapidly getting hotter.

Peter Gleckler, a research scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, and colleagues started with data collected by the world’s first modern oceanographers aboard the British survey ship HMS Challenger in 1872-76.

Deep-sea soundings

Challenger circumnavigated the globe, sailed 70,000 nautical miles (130,000 kilometres), collected 4,700 new species, and made 492 deep-sea soundings and 283 sets of measurements of water temperatures.

With such systematic findings, the American research team could begin to make estimates of how ocean temperatures have changed between 1865 and 2015.

They calculate that, since 1970, around 90% of the Earth’s uptake of heat associated with man-made global warming, as a consequence of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion, has been absorbed by the oceans.

In effect, they have used the evidence collected from the depths by 19th-century scientists aboard a three-masted, square-rigged wooden ship to settle a 21st-century puzzle: where has the heat from global warming actually gone?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

WTO Ruling on Dolphin-Safe Tuna Labeling Illustrates Supremacy of Trade Agreements

November 25, 2015

WTO Ruling on Dolphin-Safe Tuna Labeling Illustrates Supremacy of Trade Agreements

International trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) need to be carefully examined piece by piece because they can take precedence over a country’s own laws.

Case in point: the World Trade Organization (WTO) on Friday ruled that dolphin-safe tuna labeling rules — required by U.S. law, in an effort to protect intelligent mammals from slaughter — violate the rights of Mexican fishers.

As a result, the U.S. will have to either alter the law or face sanctions from Mexico.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how the “investor-state dispute settlement system” baked into trade agreements can force countries to compensate corporations when regulations cut into their profits.

The long-running quarrel over tuna reveals another way that domestic laws can be overturned by trade agreements: when countries can file trade challenges on behalf of domestic industries.

“This should serve as a warning against expansive trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would replicate rules that undermine safeguards for wildlife, clean air, and clean water,” said the Sierra Club’s Ilana Solomon in a statement.

In the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) of 1972, the United States banned importation of yellowfin tuna harvested with netting that also scooped up dolphins, which often swim in the eastern Pacific Ocean above yellowfin schools. Since the 1950s, millions of dolphins have been killed in the tuna fishing trade, but the MMPA resulted in significant reductions in dolphin deaths.

Mexico, which has more lax fishing standards than the U.S., launched trade challenges in 1990 to overturn the import ban. Other nations piled on to the trade challenges, seeking to force the U.S. to change its dolphin conservation practices.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The race to fish: how fishing subsidies are emptying our oceans

October 19, 2015

The race to fish: how fishing subsidies are emptying our oceans

Fish numbers are rapidly dwindling globally, and fishery subsidies are one of the key drivers behind this decline. In 2009, these subsidies totalled about US$35 billion, creating incentives for fishers around the world to increase their catch. But this short-term “race to fish” is jeopardising the long-term environmental, social, and economic security that fisheries offer us all.

My group at the University of British Columbia recently cast our net into the troubling waters of fishery subsidies, to see how this ship might be turned around.

Overfishing: a major issue facing our oceans

According to the recently released World Wildlife Fund Living Blue Planet Report, our oceans are in a bad state. Climate change, habitat destruction, and deep-sea mining are wreaking havoc on marine biodiversity.

But overfishing is in a league of its own.

The WWF report found that population numbers of utilised fish (those species used by humans for subsistence or commercial purposes) have fallen by half in the four decades from 1970 to 2010. A full 90% of fish stocks globally are now classified as either overexploited or fully exploited. Common seafood choices such as tuna, shrimp, whiting, and salmon are among the worst affected.

Only the very deepest parts of the oceans are currently safe from the pressure of fisheries. But how long this remains the case is yet to be seen. The demand for fish is growing the world over, driven by population growth, increased wealth, and the continued mass subsidisation of the fisheries industry.

Fishing subsidies are a global problem

The US$35 billion of subsidies that we estimate that were handed out globally in 2009 is not trivial. In fact, this figure constitutes between 30% and 40% of the landed values generated by marine fisheries worldwide.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Oceans Are Becoming Too Hot for Coral, and Sooner than We Expected

October 10, 2015

The Oceans Are Becoming Too Hot for Coral, and Sooner than We Expected

Soon the oceans will be too warm to support thriving coral reefs. USFWS – Pacific Region/Flickr, CC BY

This week, scientists registered their concern that super-warm conditions are building to a point where corals are severely threatened across the tropical Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans. They did so after seeing corals lose colour across the three major ocean basins – a sign of a truly momentous global change.

This is only the third global bleaching event in recorded history.

Underwater heat waves

The situation has been worrying scientists like myself for many months. Over the past 12 months, the temperatures of the upper layers of the ocean have been running unseasonably warm. Underwater heatwaves have torn through these tropical regions over summer, and corals across large areas of reef have lost their colour as the algal partners (or symbionts) that provide much of the food for corals have left their tissues. Bereft, corals are beginning to starve, get diseased and die.

The “heatwaves” that are causing the problem are characterised by extremes that are 1-3 degrees C warmer than the long-term average for summer. It doesn’t seem like much but past experience has shown us that exposure to small increases in temperatures for a couple of months is enough to kill corals in great numbers.

In the first global mass bleaching event in 1998, regions such as Okinawa, Palau and north-west Australia lost up to 90% of their corals as temperatures soared.

By the end of 1998 up to 16% of the corals on the world’s tropical reefs had died.

The key concern here is that corals are not an inconsequential part of the biology of the ocean. While geographically insignificant (less than 0.1% of the ocean), coral reefs punch well above their weight in terms of their importance to the ecology of the ocean and to humans.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

As Ocean Waters Heat Up, A Quest to Create ‘Super Corals’

August 5, 2015

As Ocean Waters Heat Up, A Quest to Create ‘Super Corals’

With the world’s coral reefs increasingly threatened by warmer and more acidic seas, scientists are selectively breeding corals to create species with the best chance to survive in the coming century and beyond. Are genetically modified corals next?

In Hawaii this summer, as corals engage in their once-a-year courtship ritual of releasing sperm and eggs into the water by moonlight, Ruth Gates will oversee a unique mating: the coming together of “super-corals” in her lab.

Gates and her team at the Institute of Marine Biology in Kaneohe tagged corals in their local waters that thrived through a heinous hot spell last September. A few of those rugged specimens will be picked for arranged marriages this month, hopefully yielding some offspring even better suited

Australian Institute of Marine Science

Researcher Madeleine van Oppen collects coral fragments for her breeding project.

to thriving in the warmer waters of the future. It will be, she thinks, the first selective mating of corals to try to help them thrive in the face of climate change.

Gates and her colleague, Madeleine van Oppen at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, have been awarded $3.9 million from Paul G. Allen’s philanthropic organization Vulcan Inc. for this and other work into the “assisted evolution” of corals — an attempt to intentionally beef up the genetic stock of reefs to survive the onslaught of climate change. “This idea of homing in on super-performers is a no-brainer,” says Gates. “We have been doing it in the food supply for millennia.”

The work can be tricky — corals don’t like to be touched when breeding. And it’s controversial — some find the idea of active intervention in coral ecosystems disconcerting, since it turns a natural environment into a planned one that might be less biodiverse and less resilient to unexpected challenges like disease. The idea of tinkering with coral genetics is even touchier, even if current work focuses on simple selective breeding for the hardiest corals, rather than on the more controversial prospect of producing corals that have been genetically modified.

The Perfectly Nasty Ocean Storm

August 3, 2015

The Perfectly Nasty Ocean Storm

The oceans of the world are currently experiencing a “perfect storm” that is nasty, real nasty with too much warming, too much acidification, too much CO2, too much fishing, too many chemicals, too much Ag runoff, too much radiation (Fukushima), and too little ice (Arctic Ocean) bringing on too much methane (CH4). Whew!

How much can the oceans handle?

The answer to that question may be coming to surface. According to ABC News, May 19, 2014, Mysterious Mass Animal Deaths All Over the World: “Millions of birds, fish, crabs and other small marine life have been turning up dead in massive numbers from the United States, through Europe and down to South America.”

Albeit, headlines about mysterious animal deaths must be tempered by evidence of similar events in the past, as for example, “Wildlife die-offs are an ancient phenomenon. One fossil site in Chile revealed recurring mass marine-mammal deaths, most likely from toxic algae blooms, dating back at least nine million years. Aristotle, in his ‘Historia Animalium,’ in the fourth century B.C., remarked on mass dolphin strandings as simply something that the animals were known to do ‘at times’,” J.B. Mackinnon, On Animal Deaths and Human Anxieties, The New Yorker, April 21, 2015.

That is not to downplay the seriousness of the foreboding signaled by the ABC headline about mass deaths. That needs to be taken seriously and studied. Indubitably, it is extremely important to be absolutely sure of correct analyses, connecting the dots is important. Otherwise, news reports and science are constantly on a wild goose chase, not knowing from where, or where to turn next.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part Two: A Landscape of Hallucinations

July 24, 2015

The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part Two: A Landscape of Hallucinations

Last week’s post covered a great deal of ground—not surprising, really, for an essay that started from a quotation from a Weird Talesstory about Conan the Barbarian—and it may be useful to recap the core argument here. Civilizations—meaning here human societies that concentrate power, wealth, and population in urban centers—have a distinctive historical trajectory of rise and fall that isn’t shared by societies that lack urban centers. There are plenty of good reasons why this should be so, from the ecological costs of urbanization to the buildup of maintenance costs that drives catabolic collapse, but there’s also a cognitive dimension.

Look over the histories of fallen civilizations, and far more often than not, societies don’t have to be dragged down the slope of decline and fall. Rather, they go that way at a run, convinced that the road to ruin must inevitably lead them to heaven on earth. Arnold Toynbee, whose voluminous study of the rise and fall of civilizations has been one of the main sources for this blog since its inception, wrote at length about the way that the elite classes of falling civilizations lose the capacity to come up with new responses for new situations, or even to learn from their mistakes; thus they keep on trying to use the same failed policies over and over again until the whole system crashes to ruin. That’s an important factor, no question, but it’s not just the elites who seem to lose track of the real world as civilizations go sliding down toward history’s compost heap, it’s the masses as well.

Those of my readers who want to see a fine example of this sort of blindness to the obvious need only check the latest headlines. Within the next decade or so, for example, the entire southern half of Florida will become unfit for human habitation due to rising sea levels, driven by our dumping of greenhouse gases into an already overloaded atmosphere.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

1930s Dust Bowl Drought – and Current California Drought – Caused By Warm Ocean Anomalies

May 6, 2015

1930s Dust Bowl Drought – and Current California Drought – Caused By Warm Ocean Anomalies

A scientific paper published last month in the journal Climate Dynamics by a scientist from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and three universities found that the 1930s drought was exacerbated by an anomalous warm spots in the ocean:

Unusually hot summer conditions occurred during the 1930s over the central United States and undoubtedly contributed to the severity of the Dust Bowl drought. We investigate local and large-scale conditions in association with the extraordinary heat and drought events, making use of novel datasets of observed climate extremes and climate reanalysis covering the past century. We show that the unprecedented summer heat during the Dust Bowl years was likely exacerbated by land-surface feedbacks associated with springtime precipitation deficits. The reanalysis results indicate that these deficits were associated with the coincidence of anomalously warm North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific surface waters and a shift in atmospheric pressure patterns leading to reduced flow of moist air into the central US. Thus, the combination of springtime ocean temperatures and atmospheric flow anomalies, leading to reduced precipitation, also holds potential for enhanced predictability of summer heat events. The results suggest that hot drought, more severe than experienced during the most recent 2011 and 2012 heat waves, is to be expected when ocean temperature anomalies like those observed in the 1930s occur in a world that has seen significant mean warming.

Similarly, a warm “blob” of ocean water is currently floating off the West coast of the U.S. And – as reported by the Washington Post, NBC News, and CBS – scientists say that the warm anomaly may be causing the California drought.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A 1,000 Mile Stretch Of The Pacific Ocean Has Heated Up Several Degrees And Scientists Don’t Know Why

April 15, 2015

A 1,000 Mile Stretch Of The Pacific Ocean Has Heated Up Several Degrees And Scientists Don’t Know Why

According to two University of Washington scientific research papers that were recently released, a 1,000 mile stretch of the Pacific Ocean has warmed up by several degrees, and nobody seems to know why this is happening. This giant “blob” of warm water was first observed in late 2013, and it is playing havoc with our climate. And since this giant “blob” first showed up, fish and other sea creatures have been dying in absolutely massive numbers. So could there be a connection? And what is going to happen if the Pacific Ocean continues to warm up? Could we potentially be facing the greatest holocaust of sea life in the Pacific that anyone has ever observed? If so, what would that mean for the food chain and for our food supply?

For a large portion of the Pacific Ocean to suddenly start significantly heating up without any known explanation is a really big deal. The following information about this new research comes from the University of Washington…

“In the fall of 2013 and early 2014 we started to notice a big, almost circular mass of water that just didn’t cool off as much as it usually did, so by spring of 2014 it was warmer than we had ever seen it for that time of year,” said Nick Bond, a climate scientist at the UW-based Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, a joint research center of the UW and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Bond coined the term “the blob” last June in his monthly newsletter as Washington’s state climatologist. He said the huge patch of water – 1,000 miles in each direction and 300 feet deep – had contributed to Washington’s mild 2014 winter and might signal a warmer summer.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Long Can Oceans Continue To Absorb Earth’s Excess Heat?

April 3, 2015

How Long Can Oceans Continue To Absorb Earth’s Excess Heat?

The main reason soaring greenhouse gas emissions have not caused air temperatures to rise more rapidly is that oceans have soaked up much of the heat. But new evidence suggests the oceans’ heat-buffering ability may be weakening.

For decades, the earth’s oceans have soaked up more than nine-tenths of the atmosphere’s excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions. By stowing that extra energy in their depths, oceans have spared the planet from feeling the full effects of humanity’s carbon overindulgence.

But as those gases build in the air, an energy overload is rising below the waves. A raft of recent research finds that the ocean has been heating faster and deeper than scientists had previously thought. And there are new signs that the oceans might be starting to release some of that pent-up thermal energy, which could contribute to significant global temperature increases in the coming years.

The ocean has been heating at a rate of around 0.5 to 1 watt of energy per square meter over the past decade, amassing more than 2 X 10²³ joules of energy — the equivalent of roughly five Hiroshima bombs exploding every second — since 1990. Vast and slow to change temperature, the oceans have a huge capacity to sequester heat, especially the deep ocean, which is playing an increasingly large uptake and storage role.

That is a major reason the planet’s surface temperatures have risen less than expected in the past dozen or so years, given the large greenhouse gas hike during the same period, said Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist with theNational Center for Atmospheric Research. The phenomenon, which some call the “hiatus,” has challenged scientists to explain its cause. But new studies indicate that the forces behind the supposed hiatus are natural — and temporary — ocean processes that may already be changing course.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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1930s Dust Bowl Drought – and Current California Drought – Caused By Warm Ocean Anomalies

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