Picture this scenario. You're a fisherman, dependent on the sea for your living. Lately your catch has been dwindling, a lot. Every morning you see your neighbour wrestling a 40-pound bag of toxic chemicals down to the end of your dock where he dumps it into the sea. Every day, week in and week out, year in and year out. Do you think you might tell him to stop it?
Okay, next scenario. This time you're the person manhandling the 40-pound bag of toxins to the end of the dock and pouring it into the sea. You would never do that, right? Well, that's probably just what you are doing - every day, week by week, month on month. How do you like yourself now?
In the November 20 edition of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert has written a piece entitled "The Darkening Sea - What carbon emissions are doing to the ocean." It's worth reading if you can get your hands on it.
The article notes that research involving seventy thousand seawater samples from around the world has shown that nearly half of all the carbon dioxide that humans have produced since the start of the 19th century has been absorbed by the sea, causing a 30% rise in ocean acidity levels.
"This year alone, the seas will absorb an additional two billion tons of carbon, and next year it is expected that they will absorb another two billion tons. Every day, every American, in effect, adds forty pounds of carbon dioxide to the oceans."
Kolbert reports on the work of climate scientist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution who has studied the effects of ocean acidification from carbon emissions. It turns out it's bad news for all things marine that build shells from coral to plankton to crustaceans. These creatures rely on alkaline seawater levels. When pH turns less alkaline their shells dissolve. Ooops.
Caldeira describes the problem this way, "I think there's a whole category of organisms that have been around for hundreds of millions of years which are at risk of extinction - namely, things that build calcium-carbonate shells or skeletons. ...if we cut our emissions in half it will take us twice as long to create the damage. but we'll get to more or less the same place. We really need an order-of-magnitude reduction in order to avoid it."
Like just about everything in the marine world, the calcium-carbonate critters are an essential and integral part of most other lifeforms. It is estimated that somewhere between one million and nine million distinct species are dependent on coral reefs and therefore at risk by the changing ocean pH.
A lot of research is needed to determine which species are most at risk of extinction but included are everything from mollusks to core marine feed stocks such as plankton and krill. The scientist who coined the term 'biological diversity', Thomas Lovejoy puts the problem this way:
"For an organism that lives on land, the two most important factors are temperature and moisture. And for an organism that lives in the water the two most important factors are temperature and acidity. So this is just a profound, profound change. It's a systemic change. You could have food chains collapse, and fisheries ultimately with them, because most of the fish we get from the ocean are at the end of long food chains."
Another scientist put it this way: The risk is that at the end we will have the rise of slime."
And what is Canada doing about it? Ask Rona Ambrose. No wait, don't ask, what's the point?
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