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Woops, I broke the Ocean
WMain00
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
World's oceans in 'shocking' decline
So the state of the planets ocean's are in such disarray due to pollution, over-fishing and climate change that a damning report today has concluded that we are seriously reaching the point of no return for marine life. The report suggests that unless we put in some proper environmental policies on the ocean, entire sections of marine sea life could end up extinct. Over fishing has been heavily criticised and should be noted, considering that there has been a noticable increase of jellyfish swarms within the areas in which over fishing has occurred.
The report is pretty grim; though it doesn't quite say "It's the end of the world as we know it," it does make it pretty clear that unless we sort this shit out we could turn our ocean into a nice acidic bath of death (and jellyfish).
What can we do then? Or indeed, is there anything we can do?
The oceans are in a worse state than previously suspected, according to an expert panel of scientists.
In a new report, they warn that ocean life is "at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history".
They conclude that issues such as over-fishing, pollution and climate change are acting together in ways that have not previously been recognised.
The impacts, they say, are already affecting humanity.
The panel was convened by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), and brought together experts from different disciplines, including coral reef ecologists, toxicologists, and fisheries scientists.
Its report will be formally released later this week.
"The findings are shocking," said Alex Rogers, IPSO's scientific director and professor of conservation biology at Oxford University.
"As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realised.
"We've sat in one forum and spoken to each other about what we're seeing, and we've ended up with a picture showing that almost right across the board we're seeing changes that are happening faster than we'd thought, or in ways that we didn't expect to see for hundreds of years."
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
The challenges are vast; but unlike previous generations, we know what now needs to happen”
Dan Laffoley IUCN
These "accelerated" changes include melting of Arctic sea ice and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, sea level rise, and release of methane trapped in the sea bed.
But more worrying than this, the team noted, are the ways in which different issues act synergistically to increase threats to marine life.
Some pollutants, for example, stick to the surfaces of tiny plastic particles that are now found in the ocean bed.
This increases the amounts of these pollutants that are consumed by bottom-feeding fish.
Plastic particles also assist the transport of algae from place to place, increasing the occurrence of toxic algal blooms - which are also caused by the influx of nutrient-rich pollution from agricultural land.
In a wider sense, ocean acidification, warming, local pollution and overfishing are acting together to increase the threat to coral reefs - so much so that three-quarters of the world's reefs are at risk of severe decline.
Carbon deposits
Life on Earth has gone through five "mass extinction events" caused by events such as asteroid impacts; and it is often said that humanity's combined impact is causing a sixth such event.
Fish at market Some marine fish are already fished way beyond their limits - and may also be affected by other threats
The IPSO report concludes that it is too early to say definitively.
But the trends are such that it is likely to happen, they say - and far faster than any of the previous five.
"What we're seeing at the moment is unprecedented in the fossil record - the environmental changes are much more rapid," Professor Rogers told BBC News.
"We've still got most of the world's biodiversity, but the actual rate of extinction is much higher [than in past events] - and what we face is certainly a globally significant extinction event."
The report also notes that previous mass extinction events have been associated with trends being observed now - disturbances of the carbon cycle, and acidification and hypoxia (depletion of oxygen) of seawater.
Levels of CO2 being absorbed by the oceans are already far greater than during the great extinction of marine species 55 million years ago (during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum), it concludes.
Blue planet
The report's conclusions will be presented at UN headquarters in New York this week, when government delegates begin discussions on reforming governance of the oceans.
Flowers between solar panels In the long run, greenhouse gas emissions must be cut to conserve ocean life, the report concludes
IPSO's immediate recommendations include:
stopping exploitative fishing now, with special emphasis on the high seas where currently there is little effective regulation
mapping and then reducing the input of pollutants including plastics, agricultural fertilisers and human waste
making sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Carbon dioxide levels are now so high, it says, that ways of pulling the gas out of the atmosphere need to be researched urgently - but not using techniques, such as iron fertilisation, that lead to more CO2 entering the oceans.
"The challenges for the future of the ocean are vast; but unlike previous generations, we know what now needs to happen," said Dan Laffoley, marine chair of the World Commission on Protected Areas and an adviser to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
"The time to protect the blue heart of our planet is now."
So the state of the planets ocean's are in such disarray due to pollution, over-fishing and climate change that a damning report today has concluded that we are seriously reaching the point of no return for marine life. The report suggests that unless we put in some proper environmental policies on the ocean, entire sections of marine sea life could end up extinct. Over fishing has been heavily criticised and should be noted, considering that there has been a noticable increase of jellyfish swarms within the areas in which over fishing has occurred.
The report is pretty grim; though it doesn't quite say "It's the end of the world as we know it," it does make it pretty clear that unless we sort this shit out we could turn our ocean into a nice acidic bath of death (and jellyfish).
What can we do then? Or indeed, is there anything we can do?
WMain00 on
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MWO: Adamski
Humboldt squid will survive, too. They're like the rats of the sea. Predatory rats.
Even if by some miracle the western powers pass sufficiently strict regulations, (and if they do I'm a monkeys uncle) China and India never will.
At this point I'm pretty much resigned to oceans that will be utterly laid to waste in a decade or two.
Yeah, the tragedy of the commons really sucks.
I really hope humanity makes a sincere effort to at least gather genetic information from as many species we knock out as possible. I've had people tell me that I'm silly for feeling this way, but I'm really annoyed that I'll never get to see a Dodo.
It scares me that I'm evidently not the only person who's had this view expressed to them.
A friend of mine from university is quite conservative for a Canadian, and along with other friends from that era, we make a point of vacationing together once in a while to catch up. Whenever we do, he and I debate more or less incessantly while traveling to and from wherever we're going. He presented that view, once, and I was just flabbergasted. It seems to me that holding it requires either remarkable naivety or deliberate ignorance --we've depleted lots of stuff in the ocean. If we can hunt something to the point of it being hardly there anymore, how is it in any way viable to say that the ocean is so big that we can't fuck it up?
Well, we haven't replaced the water with methane, so we haven't affected the bodies of water yet, just the stuff suspended in the ocean.
I'd be interested to know more about O2 levels... One of our biggest issues with man-made pollution in the seas is the resulting "Algal Blooms" that occur. Admittedly, thats more from waste runoff than whole-sale chemical dumping...
If the plankton dies than we are going to get slightly worse than a mass extinction on land.
Unless most land based creatures can live on half the oxygen they're getting now.
Ugh. Stupid end-of-the-world.
At the best.
Technology exists that could, in theory, scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere and lock it into a stable form like calcium carbonate. The issue is that it would cost, more or less, all of the money that ever has and ever will exist to actually make a measurable difference. There's literally no profit at all - money goes in, synthetic seashell comes out. Plus, it's only a trickle down benefit - once the CO2 gets into the ocean, I'm pretty sure it stays there until it gets used by plants or forms a new molecule in some non-photosynthesis reaction.
Shit is bad, and probably will only get worse.
I was thinking more in terms of real biodomes. And rainforests will probably be ok to live in.
...
whoops
Ahh, I gotcha. Long term, shit-got-real survival strategies rather than an unfeasible pie-in-the-sky "solution".
The only issue I've got with biodomes is that they're also massive money-sinks like the carbon neutralizers. Climate change already affects the less affluent (ie, the vast majority of the world) so biodomes would only be available to the lucky few. They also don't offer anything by way of repair/remediation beyond 'bunker down and wait for this shit to blow over in a couple of hundred years'.
"Biodome" in this case is a metaphor for mitigation. Air tanks will become popular real quick, and cities would develop sealed off zones with some kind of carbon sink (probably biological) for people to hang out and recharge. The upside here is that the die-off and its consequences won't be instant. People will have time to adapt, so civilization might not collapse.
If I understand correctly, the timeframe for this is a "a few hundred years" under current climate models, and it would truely lead to a massive extinction event.
Nightmare fuel like this lives down there and needs to be destroyed.
I think my point still stands - it takes sophisticated infrastructure to support technology like you're talking about, and that means a huge investment of resources over a prolonged time. So countries that are already industrialized won't feel the hit quite as badly. In the developing/3rd world, people are already feeling the pinch much more keenly than elsewhere. I don't see that trend changing, unfortunately.
I don't think we're likely to see a mass extinction of the Earth's oxygen-producing plankton. They live at the water's surface and are close to the simplest possible ocean-going life, so they're pretty hardy.
That isn't to say that fucking up marine ecosystems won't lead to all other sorts of fun disasters.
True that. The only thing that I worry about is that those other fun disasters are likely to occur within our or our children's lifetimes.
What are we, as in normal people and forumgoers, supposed to do? Or what can we do right now?
The ocean is salt water.
Tears are salty.
WE CAN SAVE THE OCEANS WITH OUR TEARS!!! We can dilute all the bad water with our gentle weeping.
My time has come!
This kind of takes the wind out of their theory.
So, basically, you need to get the population so incredibly angry about it that they actually act on it and make it one of their main issues. AND you need to do this without rampant corruption taking advantage of it.
So... go to the beach and the aquarium and take LOTS of pictures and videos while you can.
This isn't feasible with anything near current tech. If we cause a general ecosystem collapse*, we're dead. End of story. You can't produce enough to offset the loss of what we get naturally. That's the idea behind "ecosystem services"; estimating how much it would cost to replicate what we get naturally with tech means.
The last time I saw an estimate, the ecosystem services was something like 10x global GDP. As in, produce 10 times as much just for a minimal, "we're all going to...not quite die" level.
*as opposed to a mass extinction, which we're already IN. And helping people realize that might go a long way to stalling the damage..
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=phytoplankton-population