"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Friday, July 16, 2010

Sealing Our Doom Part II
Posted by Jill | 9:06 PM
While Americans, despite the BP oil spill, have no stomach for adjusting our lifestyles one iota, nature doesn't care what we have the stomach for. We are killing this planet. Tonight on my way home I heard a radio spot for a Chevrolet SUV, with a female voiceover talking about how she bought this vehicle because "they're my CHILDREN". Clearly, protecting children is first and foremost in the minds of the suburban parents I see in mmy town who put their kids in body armor to ride a bicycle and who feel they need a four-ton behemoth armored vehicle for their kids to ride in.

They are not even thinking about the world their children will live in when they grow up:
A sobering new report warns that oceans face a "fundamental and irreversible ecological transformation" not seen in millions of years as greenhouse gases and climate change already have affected temperature, acidity, sea and oxygen levels, the food chain and possibly major currents that could alter global weather.

The report, in Science magazine, doesn't break a lot of new ground, but it brings together dozens of studies that collectively paint a dismal picture of deteriorating ocean health.

"This is further evidence we are well on our way to the next great extinction event," said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in Australia and a co-author of the report.

John Bruno, an associate professor of marine sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the report's other co-author, isn't quite as alarmist, but he's equally concerned.

"We are becoming increasingly certain that the world's marine ecosystems are reaching tipping points," Bruno said, adding, "We really have no power or model to foresee" the effect.

The oceans, which cover 71 percent of the Earth's surface, have played a dominant role in regulating the planet's climate. However, even as the understanding of what's happening to terrestrial ecosystems as a result of climate change has grown, studies of marine ecosystems have lagged, the report says. The oceans are acting as a heat sink for rising temperatures and have absorbed about one-third of the carbon dioxide produced by human activities.

Among other things, the report notes:

* The average temperature of the upper level of the oceans has increased more than 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 100 years, and global ocean surface temperatures in January were the second-warmest ever recorded for that month.

* Though the increase in acidity is slight, it represents a "major departure" from the geochemical conditions that have existed in the oceans for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.

* Nutrient-poor "ocean deserts" in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans grew by 15 percent, or roughly 2.5 million square miles, from 1998 to 2006.

* Oxygen concentrations have been dropping off the Northwest U.S. coast and the coast of southern Africa, where dead zones are appearing regularly. There is paleontological evidence that declining oxygen levels in the oceans played a major role in at least four or five mass extinctions.

* Since the early 1980s, the production of phytoplankton, a crucial creature at the lower end of the food chain, has declined 6 percent, with 70 percent of the decline found in the northern parts of the oceans. Scientists also have found that phytoplankton are becoming smaller.

Volcanic activity and large meteorite strikes in the past have "resulted in hostile conditions that have increased extinction rates and driven ecosystem collapse," the report says. "There is now overwhelming evidence human activities are driving rapid changes on a scale similar to these past events.

"Many of these changes are already occurring within the world's oceans with serious consequences likely over the coming years."

Labels: , ,

1 comments
Bookmark and Share
1 Comments:
Blogger Scribble A Day said...
I followed the link, read the story, and then the comments. Yes, we are totally screwed. Of 22 comments, 20 said (in varying ways) that the reports are not to be believed, or that science and technology will save us (in spite of ourselves) and that it's all liberal propaganda. The other 2 comments were by one of those uber-left wing spiritual types, rambling about ancient (American) Indian wisdom.
It would appear that, unlike Chicken Little believing the sky to be falling when it's not, a majority of Americans would refuse to believe the sky was falling even as pieces of it fell all around them. They'd argue that it was liberals throwing false arguments into the sky.
7/17/10, 3:23 PM  
Post a Comment
<< Home