Mountain Views News          Saturday, October 2, 2010

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Mountain Views News Saturday, October 2, 2010


Only One Earth

Climate Change and the 
World’s Oceans

 by Albert Metzger

The disaster in the Gulf has focused 
attention on mankind’s potential 
to negatively impact the marine 
environment on a large scale.. A 
less dramatic but even broader and 
more far reaching situation involves 
the world’s oceans. An article in 
the July 4th issue of the Sacramento 
Bee by Les Blumenthal has drawn 
our attention to a report entitled 
“The Impact of Climate Change on 
the World’s Marine Ecosystems” 
in the June 18th issue of Science. 
This heavily referenced summary 
article draws on a multitude of 
studies, most of them published 
within the last four years, to review 
and summarize the condition 
of the oceans. Oceans make up 
71% of the world’s surface. The 
“overwhelming evidence” is that 
their condition is deteriorating, 
that the cause is predominantly 
the result of human activities, and 
that serious consequences are likely 
in the next 20 to 100 years. Their 
extent will depend on actions taken 
or ignored.

 The data discussed includes 
ocean temperatures, acidity, 
and carbonate concentrations. 
Increased greenhouse gas (carbon 
dioxide being the principle one) 
concentrations have increased the 
energy content of the atmosphere. 
Most of the additional energy 
is being absorbed in the ocean, 
which has lead to an increase in the 
upper 2000 feet of over one degree 
Fahrenheit in the past century. 
This may sound small but a great 
deal of energy is involved. The 
global upper ocean temperature 
average for January 2010 was the 
second warmest January on record. 
Oceans are also absorbing about 
a third of the man-made carbon 
dioxide. The resultant acidification 
has lead to a substantial decline 
in carbonate ion concentration 
and represents a major departure 
from the ocean chemistry which 
has existed unchanged for at 
least hundreds of thousands, and 
perhaps millions, of years until 
now.

 With an increase in water 
temperature comes thermal 
expansion. This thermally-caused 
expansion of ocean volume, along 
with the melting of glaciers and ice 
sheets, forms the basis for current 
observations and future predictions 
of sea level rise. Current estimates 
of the rise in sea level by the year 
2100 range from 20 to 47 inches. 
This is hardly consequential in 
Sierra Madre, but check it out with 
someone living, for example, in 
Venice, Italy. 

 The surface temperature of 
large bodies of water affects the 
weather. As tropical storms are 
tracked out of the Caribbean, 
it’s become common to hear in 
weather reports how warmer 
water temperatures intensify wind 
and wave movements. Increasing 
surface water temperatures will 
tend to increase the severity of 
tropical storms.

 The effect of global warming 
on the oceans is not uniform, 
depending in part on local factors 
such as current, water depth, and 
wind. This is particularly true with 
regard to latitude. Temperature 
and the acidity of the polar oceans 
are changing at more than twice 
the global average, with the rate 
in the northernmost 15 degrees of 
latitude running about twice that 
in the southernmost 15 degrees. 
Arctic sea ice is disappearing at an 
increasing rate and the stability of 
the continental ice sheets in high 
latitudes, both north and south, is 
in question.

 Yet another consequence of upper 
layer warming is to increase the 
thermal contrast of the (vertical) 
water column. Circulation 
models predict such an increase 
will result in less mixing and in 
decreased oxygen concentration, 
with an adverse effect on nutrient 
production and availability. To 
this is ascribed the startling 
finding that nutrient-poor ocean 
“deserts” have grown by over 
2.5 million square miles in only 
nine years, from 1998 to 2006. 
This is almost 2% of the entire 
surface area of the Earth’s oceans. 
Paleontological evidence points to 
declining oxygen concentrations 
as playing an important role in 
some mass extinction events. 
Another unsettling measurement 
reported is that the production of 
phytoplankton, which represents 
the base of the ocean food chain, 
has decreased by 6% in the past 
thirty years.

 The article points out that the 
effects on marine species stemming 
from the extent and rapidity of 
changes to the global ocean need to 
be considered in terms of metabolic 
rates, population growth, and the 
degree to which organisms can 
adapt to changing conditions. 
All of these are temperature 
dependent. Emphasis is placed on 
the interrelated nature of marine 
ecosystems, and on global warming 
as facilitating the spread of diseases 
and intrusive species to the 
detriment of native populations, 
and on other factors such as 
sediment deposit, coastal pollution, 
overfishing and increased 
ultraviolet exposure, all of which 
act to intensify the effects of global 
warming. Among the most 
vulnerable and already impacted 
ecosystems are coral reefs, kelp 
forests, mangrove, and sea grass 
communities, all four of which 
share the property of providing 
habitat for thousands of species, 
many of whom will disappear when 
their habitat expires or is seriously 
degraded. Polar warming puts at 
risk, not only the polar bear, but 
also penguins, seals, walruses, and 
many species of birds.

 The article’s authors, Ove Hoegh-
Guldberg who directs the Global 
Change Institute at the University 
of Queensland in Australia, and 
John F. Bruno at the University 
of North Caroling, state that, 
with continuing increases in the 
concentrations of atmospheric 
carbon dioxide, we face a growing 
risk that several thresholds for 
long term and perhaps irreversible 
damage will soon be reached 
and therefore, in their words, “...
avoiding any further increases and 
aiming to reduce the atmospheric 
concentration of carbon dioxide 
below 350 ppm in the long term [ed 
note: the Mauna Loa Observatory 
in Hawaii puts it now at 390 
ppm] must be an international 
imperative.” This is so, “...not 
only because it will reduce the 
huge costs of adaptation but also 
because it will reduce the growing 
risk of pushing our planet into an 
unknown and highly dangerous 
state.” The situation can hardly be 
put more strongly than that.


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