There is a global ocean crisis due to carbon.

Date:   3/10/2009 3:14:19 PM ( 15 y ago)

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

It is a very simple concept that the oceans are what keeps the conditions for life on planet earth stable. The oceans cover two-thirds of the area of earth's surface, and they are deep and water is heavy, unlike the thin, light atmosphere.

Sea Sick - a book by Alana Mitchell

The premise of this book is that there is a global ocean crisis due to carbon.

The oceans are by far the biggest single entity that helps to stabilise Earth's atmospheric temperature, and in large part the ocean temperature and PH levels are the mechanism for that stability. It is a certainty that this mechanism is at a tipping point, where it is no longer able to stabilise itself, and therefore it will not be able to stabilise the atmosphere either.

The Plankton are the main actor in the ocean's mechanism that keeps everything else stable. The CO2 in the atmosphere is mostly absorbed by the oceans, partly or mostly through plankton's respiration.

When the ocean water becomes acidified, the plankton die. Plankton are also very sensitive to temperature changes, and the oceans are measurably warmer, and getting warmer, due to the atmosphere holding in the heat from the sun with the increase of greenhouse gasses and other factors.

As a way to address the opinion that says "we are not sure that global warming is due to CO2 emissions" , I ask that the deniers simply keep in mind that if this is not a problem completely due to the carbon emissions due to our burning of fossil fuels, then at the very least the burning of fossil fuels is contributing to what is an alarming situation.

Alana Mitchell also explains why the ocean's life forms are suffering, and dying out at extinction rates that dwarf the extinction rates on land. Acidification, again, is the culprit killing the coral reefs, and those reefs support much diversity of life in the oceans. From large to small creatures, the health of the plankton [again!] determine the health of the ocean's life forms.

She makes an analogy that is more like a direct comparison of the ocean and the human body. When the core temperature of our body swings even just a few degrees, we die ; when the PH of our blood and tissues changes just a little bit, we die.

To add my own thought to this analogy - when the small creatures in our colon and on our skin - microflora - are gone, we suffer greatly [we get diarrhea when just some of our colonic microflora die]. The ocean is critical to life on earth, and we have driven a nail in to the coffin of the oceans by emitting so much carbon all at once [about 20 billion tons since yr.1800, which is the blink of an eye in geological terms!]

So, it is a good easy read, with lots of critical information about the oceans, and I hope many of you will read this new book by Alana Mitchell.

 

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