A note to a friend that has a few things that one normally doesn’t see or hear when climate change and vulnerable island nations are discussed: Kiribati (Christmas Island) is a Pacific atoll that is one of the ones that will succumb to sea level rise first. It was known as Christmas Island in World…
Increasing warming in the Pacific has been difficult to prove because of El Nino and La Nina. ENSO as it is known, or El Nino Southern Oscillation, is the periodic change in south and equatorial Pacific ocean temperatures that can wreak havoc around the globe. El Nino (warming equatorial and south Pacific ocean temperatures) conditions…
HMS Challenger Expedition gave us exceptional baseline data for 21st century ocean warming evaluation. Average global ocean temperature change is 0.59 degrees C. The Royal Society, University of Edinburgh and Mechiston Castle School sponsored the expedition around the globe to explore the deep oceans. Led by Captain George Nares, the expedition is credited with the…
These biogeochemists are getting smarter everyday. Now they have determined how to identify different species of nitrogen that have been created in different areas. Tropical waters create one kind of nitrogen, polar waters create another. Deep water corals utilize nitrogen in growth. These researchers have sampled deep water corals in the northwest Atlantic off of…
How do we curb emissions with the way our society has evolved? Really. I mean serious curbing; enough to prevent dangerous climate change? When considering the answer, dangerous climate change must be clearly defined. So, what exactly is dangerous climate change? Read More — First published on the Rag Blog
Primary productivity is phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are the bottom of the food chain. All life in the oceans depends on phytoplankton. They sequester tremendous amounts of carbon in the form of calcium carbonate in their tiny little shells. Primary productivity in our oceans is also responsible for the generation of half of the oxygen in our…
This landmark study by the French National Center for Scientific Research, reveals the results of The Continuous Plankton Recorder Program that has been monitoring plankton species and abundance at Plymouth in the United Kingdom, every month since1946. They have been studying nearly 450 species of plankton in the North Atlantic and have found that a…
May 21, 2010 From Science News: "Earth’s upper ocean warmed substantially between 1993 and 2008, a new analysis reveals. The trend signals growing heat storage in oceans, researchers say, a result of human-caused warming. The new study, reported in the May 20 Nature, combined oceanographic data gathered worldwide between 1993 and 2008, the time period…
The Oceans are our largest natural sink for CO2. They absorb excess carbon dioxide from our atmosphere, but the oceans become more polluted as they absorb more CO2. It’s like a bioaccumulating toxin. CO2 is the mercury of our ocean’s water. The CO2 pollutes our oceans just like it pollutes our skies. Ocean acidity is…
More and more areas of the ocean are turning up with little oxygen. these anoxic, or "dead zones" are caused natural but organic decay, they are caused by nutrient pollution from stormwater runoff and they are caused by upwelling of deep ocean waters that have naturally lost their oxygen load through a number of different…
This low oxygen state of deep ocean waters is a normal thing, but what is not normal is the encroachment of these waters into continental shelf waters. The phenomena is happening more often around the world and is likely associated with climate change. Why is this bad? Nothing can live in these waters. If living…
Oceans are acidifying ten times faster today than during the mass ocean extinction that happened 55 million years ago. A study by two University of Bristol scientists has bad enough news for the present, but as we continue this hyper-acidification event, these scientists are concerned that the coming extinction event will be greater than the…
This is a very significant petition, more of which will likely follow in the unexpectedly near future. It is this kind of species reduction and species extinction risk that will only accelerate in the future as our planet continues to warm even faster than it has been warming recently. Species across the globe will find…
From the Seattle Times, Jan 20, 2010: "If you see these changes across an entire ocean basin, you can be assured it’s happening on a global scale in other ocean basins around the world," said Robert Byrne, a marine chemist at the University of South Florida and lead author of an upcoming paper in Geophysical…
August 14, 2009, NOAA’s global temperature report shows that our Earth’s oceans are now warmer than they have been since record keeping began in the 1880s. The combined land /ocean temperature for July 2009 was 1.03 degrees above the 20th century average of 60.4 degrees F or the fifth warmest ever recorded. The global ocean…
The study reviewed nearly 500 surveys of 200 different reefs all cross the Caribbean between 1969 and 2008. The causes are varied and all are directly attributable to climate change. This discovery is devastating beyond belief. We new this could happen on a warmer planet, and we new that our coral reefs were being impacted…
The science academies of 70 nations addressed the opening of the climate talks in Bonn today concerning the seriousness of emission cuts required to keep ocean acidity under control. From the statement: Ocean acidification is irreversible on timescales of at least tens of thousands of years; At current emission rates models suggest that all coral…
A team of 32 scientists have released a report that summarized 48 research project covering 318 reefs and 273 reef fish species during the period 1955-2007. The decline started about 1995. The scientists say the half of the fish species groups studied are decreasing at 2.6 to 6% loss per year. This loss rate is…
March 23, 2009 Just a little known fact here to make your life a little more accurate. Recent studies have found that the ocean’s pH has changed from 8.16 to 8.05 since the Industrial revolution. This is 100 times faster than normal, but it just doesn’t look like much until one understands the significance of…
A study in Science on the 13th shows a 12% average decline in ocean productivity along the western Antarctic Peninsula in the last 30 years. Temperatures have increased here 4.6 times the global average. In the last few years of the study (beginning about the time the Big Melt began in Greenland – about 2004)…
