At Climate Progress, Joe Romm writes:
| We’ve known for a while that we are poisoning the oceans and that human emissions of carbon dioxide, left unchecked, would likely have devastating consequences. A 2010 study found that oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred. And we’ve known those impacts might last a long, long time —a 2009 study concluded ocean dead zones "devoid of fish and seafood" are poised to expand and "remain for thousands of years." Worse, a Nature study just found that global warming is already the likely cause of a 40% decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton: "Microscopic life crucial to the marine food chain is dying out. The consequences could be catastrophic." Carl Zimmer, a noted science writer and winner of the 2007 NAS Communication Award, reveals some more chilling facts about the path our oceans may be on in this repost from Yale’s Environment 360 online magazine. As warming intensifies, scientists warn, the oxygen content of oceans across the planet could be more and more diminished, with serious consequences for the future of fish and other sea life. ... In order to project how global warming will alter oxygen in the oceans, climate scientists are developing a new generation of computer models. The models are still too crude to capture some important features of the real world, such as the way winds can change how deep water rises in upwellings. But the models are good enough to replicate some of the changes in oxygen levels that have already been recorded. And they all predict that the oxygen in the world’s oceans will drop; depending on the model, the next century will see a drop of between 1 and 7 percent. |
• • • • •
Green diary rescue appears Sundays and Thursdays in this time slot. Inclusion of a particular diary does not necessarily indicate my agreement with it. The rescue begins below and continues in the jump.
matching mole had a wonderful Wednesday, as recounted in 24 Hours of Wonder: Gulf Region Nature: "We had guests and we showed them a couple of the local natural wonders: St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge and Wakulla Springs and river - both just to the south of Tallahassee in the Florida panhandle. We had an unusually fantastic time and I thought I would share some of what we saw."
continued at Daily Kos....
