Answers to their Scenarios Oceans Scenario Answers

Marine ecosystems resilient and will recover – BO Spill proves

Internally quoting Luis A. Soto, a deep-sea biologist with advanced degrees from Florida State University and the University of Miami who teaches at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. By Glenn Garvin – reporter for McClathy news – “Ixtoc: The Gulf's other massive oil spill no longer apparent” – McClatchy Newspapers – June 12, 2010 – ev is modified for gendered language – http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/12/95793/ixtoc-the-gulfs-other-massive.html#storylink=cpy

Marine life resilient

Bjørn Lomborg, Director, Environmental Assessment Institute, THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST, 2001p. 189

A2: Ocean Acidification

Ocean acidification will be slow and stable, proven by 1000 studies- it improves ocean resiliency

Codling ‘11 [Jo, received a Bachelor of Science first class and won the FH Faulding and the Swan Brewery prizes at the University of Western Australia. Her major was microbiology, molecular biology. Nova received a Graduate Certificate in Scientific Communication from the Australian National University in 1989,[4] and she did honours research in 1990, prize-winning science graduate, Jo has has done over 200 radio interviews, many on the Australian ABC.  She was formerly an associate lecturer in Science Communication at the ANU and is based in Perth, Western Australia, , “Ocean Acidification — a little bit less alkalinity could be a good thing,” Sept. 11, http://joannenova.com.au/2011/09/ocean-acidification-a-little-bit-less-alkalinity-could-be-a-good-thing/]
Studies of how marine life copes with less alkaline conditions include many experiments with water at pH values in a range beyond anything that is likely on planet Earth — they go beyond the bounds of what’s possible. There are estimates that the pH of the ocean has shifted about 0.1 pH unit in the last 200 years, yet some studies consider the effects of water that is shifted by 2 or even 4 entire pH units. Four pH units means 10,000 fold change in the concentration of hydrogen ions). That’s a shift so large, it’s not going to occur in the next few thousand years, even under the worst of the worst case scenarios by the most sadistic models. Indeed, it’s virtually impossible for CO2 levels to rise high enough to effect that kind of change, even if we burned every last fossil, every tree, plant microbe, and vaporized life on earth. (Yet still someone thought it was worth studying what would happen if, hypothetically, that happened. Hmm.)¶ 1103 studies on acidification say there’s no need to panic¶ CO2 science has an extraordinary data base of 1103 studies of the effects of “acidification” on marine life. They reason that any change beyond 0.5 pH units is “far far beyond the realms of reality” even if you are concerned about coral reefs in the year 2300 (see Tans 2009). Even the IPCC’s highest end “scenario A2″ estimate predicts a peak change in the range of 0.6 units by 2300.¶ Many of the headlines forecasting “Death to Reefs” come from studies of ocean water at extreme pH’s that will never occur globally, and that are beyond even what the IPCC is forecasting. Some headlines come from studies of hydrothermal vents where CO2 bubbles up from the ocean floor. Not surprisingly they find changes to marine life near the vents, but then, the pH of these areas ranges right down to 2.8. They are an extreme environment, nothing like what we might expect to convert the worlds oceans too.¶ Marine life, quite happy about a bit more CO2?¶ Studies of growth, calcification, metabolism, fertility and survival show that, actually, if things were a little less alkaline, on average, marine life would benefit. There will be winners and losers, but on the whole, using those five measures of health, the reefs are more likely to have more life on and around them, than they are to shrink.¶ Figure 12. Percent change in the five measured life characteristics (calcification, metabolism, growth, fertility and survival) vs. decline of seawater pH from its present (control treatment) value to ending values extending up to the beginning pH value of "the warped world of the IPCC" for all individual data points falling within this pH decline range.¶ How can this be?¶ First, marine life evolved under conditions where most of the time the world was warmer and had more CO2 in the atmosphere than it does today. Second, like life above the water, life-below-water is based on carbon, and putting more carbon into the water is not necessarily a bad thing. That said, the dots in the graph above represent study results, and the ones below zero tell us there will be some losers, even though there will be more winners (above zer0). Thirdly, watch out for some of the more devastating headlines which also come from studies where researchers changed the pH by tossing hydrochloric acid into the tank. Chlorine, as they say, is not the same as the gas nature breathes — CO2. (The strange thing about the studies with hydrochloric acid, is that it doesn’t seem to be bad as we might have expected– nonetheless, it seems like a dubious practice to use in studying the health of corals.)¶ The Ocean Acidification Database is housed at CO2 science.¶ The graph above is just one of many on their results and conclusions page.¶ The bottom line:¶ Yes, we should watch and monitor the oceans careful. No, there is no chance the Great Barrier Reef will be gone in the next 100 years: 1103 studies show that if the worlds oceans were slightly less basic then marine life as a whole will be slightly more likely to grow, survive, and be fertile.

A2: Overfishing / Fish Stocks

( ) Fish stocks resilient to status quo levels of overfishing.

Hilborn ‘10

Ray Hilborn is a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington. “Apocalypse Forestalled: Why All the World’s Fisheries Aren’t Collapsing” – The Science Chronicles – November – http://www.atsea.org/doc/Hilborn%202010%20Science%20Chronicles%202010-11-1.pdf

About 30 percent of the stocks would currently be classified as overfished — but, generally, fishing pressure has been reduced enough that all but 17 percent of stocks would be expected to recover to above overfished thresholds if current fishing pressure continues. In the United States, there was clear evidence for the rebuilding of marine ecosystems and stock biomass. The idea that 70 percent of the world’s fish stocks are overfished or collapsed and that the rate of overfishing is accelerating (Pauly 2007) was shown by Worm et al. (2009) and FAO (2009) to be untrue. The Science paper coming out of the NCEAS group also showed that the success in reducing fishing pressure had been achieved by a broad range of traditional fisheries management tools — including catch-and-effort limitation, gear restrictions and temporary closed areas. Marine protected areas were an insignificant factor in the success achieved. The database generated by the NCEAS group and subsequent analysis has shown that many of the assumptions fueling the standard apocalyptic scenarios painted by the gloom-and-doom proponents are untrue: For instance, the widespread notion that fishermen (fisherpeople) generally sequentially deplete food webs (Pauly et al. 1998) — starting with the predators and working their way down — is simply not supported by data. Declining trophic level of fishery landings is just as often a result of new fisheries developing rather than old ones collapsing (Essington et al. 2006). Catch data also show that fishing patterns are driven by economics, with trophic level a poor predictor of exploitation history (Sethi et al. 2010). Furthermore, the mean trophic level of marine ecosystems is unrelated to (or even negatively correlated with) the trophic level of fishery landings (Branch et al. 2010). And the oft-cited assessment that the large fish of the oceans were collapsed by 1980 (Myers and Worm 2003) is totally inconsistent with the database we have assembled — for instance, world tuna stocks in total are at present well above the level that would produce maximum sustained yield, except bluefin tuna and some other billfish that are depleted (Hutchings 2010).

( ) Fish stocks resilient. Won’t be a horror story, they’ll recover quickly.

Dean ‘12

CORNELIA DEAN – Guest Lecturer in Environmental Studies @ the Center for Environmental Studies at Brown University. She is also a science writer for the New York Times. This card is internally quoting Ray Hilborn is a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington. “How Well, and How Poorly, We Harvest Ocean Life” – New York Times – April 16, 2012 – http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/science/overfishing-book-review-how-well-and-poorly-we-harvest-ocean-life.html

To hear some other people tell it, many depleted stocks are recovering nicely. Ray Hilborn, a fisheries scientist at the University of Washington, wades into this disagreement in his new book and comes out with a lucid explication of a highly tangled issue. Each argument, he concludes, has some truth on its side. “It depends on where you look,” he writes. “You can paint horror story after horror story if you want. You can paint success after success.” He navigates the path between horror and success through scores of questions and answers, nearly all of which demonstrate how difficult it is to sort this issue out. Take the most basic question: What is overfishing? There are several answers, the book tells us. There is “yield overfishing,” in which people take so many fish that they leave too few to spawn or catch too many fish before they are grown. Then there is “economic overfishing,” in which economic benefits are less than they could be. If too many boats chase too few fish, for example, the struggle to make a good catch leads to overspending on boats, fuel and so on. (There is also “ecological overfishing,” but that is something we must live with as long as we want to eat fish, Dr. Hilborn says. Fishing by definition alters the marine environment.) Dr. Hilborn tells us of fisheries that succeed — like the halibut industry in Alaska — and fish stocks managed into difficulty, and then out again, like the pollock of the Bering Sea. And he gets into the issue of trawling, in which boats drop weighted nets to the bottom and drag them along, scraping up everything in their path. Critics liken trawling to harvesting timber by clear-cutting. For Dr. Hilborn, this analogy is not always apt, since in some areas the creatures rapidly repopulate the ocean floor.

( ) Aff exaggerates – stocks are resilient in the face of over-fishing

Hilborn ‘11

Ray Hilborn is a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington. New York Times – “Let Us Eat Fish” – April 14, 2011 – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/opinion/15hilborn.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&

Over the last decade the public has been bombarded by apocalyptic predictions about the future of fish stocks — in 2006, for instance, an article in the journal Science projected that all fish stocks could be gone by 2048. Subsequent research, including a paper I co-wrote in Science in 2009 with Boris Worm, the lead author of the 2006 paper, has shown that such warnings were exaggerated. Much of the earlier research pointed to declines in catches and concluded that therefore fish stocks must be in trouble. But there is little correlation between how many fish are caught and how many actually exist; over the past decade, for example, fish catches in the United States have dropped because regulators have lowered the allowable catch. On average, fish stocks worldwide appear to be stable, and in the United States they are rebuilding, in many cases at a rapid rate.

Fish stocks recovering

Economist 9 (“Grabbing It All”, 1-3, Lexis)
A variety of remedies have been tried, usually in combination. Thus regulations have been issued about the size and type of fish to be caught, the mesh of nets to be used, the number of days a month that boats may go to sea, the permissible weight of their catch and so on. In some countries fishermen are offered inducements to give up fishing altogether. Those that continue are, at least in theory, subject to monitoring both at sea and in port. Large areas are sometimes closed to fishing, to allow stocks to recover. Others have been designated as marine reserves akin to national parks. And some of the technology that fishermen use to find their prey is now used by inspectors to monitor the whereabouts of the hunters themselves. Most of these measures have helped, as the recovery of stocks in various places has shown. Striped bass and North Atlantic swordfish have returned along America's East Coast, for instance. Halibut have made a comeback in Alaska. Haddock, if not cod, have begun to recover in Georges Bank off Maine. And herring come and go off the coasts of Scotland. Those who doubt the value of government intervention have only to look at the waters off Somalia, a country that has been devoid of any government worth the name since 1991. The ensuing free-for-all has devastated the coastal stocks, ruining the livelihoods of local fishermen and encouraging them, it seems, to take up piracy instead.

Data concludes no collapse

Economist 9 (“Plenty More Fish in the Sea?”, 1-3, Lexis)
An even gloomier assessment came in an article by 14 academics in Science in 2006. The accelerating erosion of biodiversity, often associated with overfishing, presaged a "global collapse" to the point, in 2048, where all species currently fished would be gone, they said. Even many scientists who are alarmed by the evidence of overfishing find such conclusions controversial. Most non-scientists are unmoved. For a start, fish appears to be in plentiful supply. Even cod is available; over 7m tonnes of cod-family (Gadidae) fish are caught each year. Sushi bars have spread across the world. To cater for the aversion to red meat, and a new-found need for omega-3 fatty acids, fish dishes are on every menu, even in steak houses. Supermarkets and restaurants boast of "sustainable" supplies, and sandwiches are reassuringly labelled "dolphin-friendly", however threatened the tuna within them may be. Best of all, for the ethical consumer, fish are now farmed (see box below). Salmon has become so plentiful that people weary of its delicate taste. Moreover, fishermen themselves seem sceptical of any long-term scarcity. They clamour for bigger quotas and fewer restrictions (except on foreign competitors), and complain that the scientists are either ignorant or one step behind the new reality. Those with long memories can cite previous collapses that have been followed by recoveries. And, in truth, not all collapses are due solely to overfishing: the sudden crash of California's sardine industry 60 years ago is now thought to have been partly caused by a natural change in the sea temperature. Plenty of figures seem to support the optimists. Despite the exploitation round its coasts, Britain, for instance, still landed 750,000 tonnes of Atlantic fish in 2006, two-thirds of what it caught in 1951; even cod is still being hauled from the north-east Atlantic, mostly by Norwegians and Russians. Some British fishing communities—Fraserburgh, for example—are in a sorry state, but others still prosper: the value of wet fish landed in Shetland, for example, rose from £21m in 1996 to £54m ($33m-99m) in 2006. Earnings from fishing in Alaska, in whose waters about half of America's catch is taken, rose from less than $800m in 2002 to nearly $1.5 billion in 2007. And for the world as a whole, the catch in 2006 was over 93m tonnes, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, compared with just 19m in 1950 (see chart on next page). Its value was almost $90 billion.

No overfishing – declines are natural

Bluemink 8 (Elizabeth, Staff Writer – ADN, “Greenpeace Puts Pollock Fishery in its Cross Hairs”,

Anchorage Daily News, 12-3, http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/609562.html)

Federal scientists say there are fewer fish but the accusation of overfishing is false. The pollock industry agrees with the federal scientists. "This (population decline) was not unexpected, and the sky is not falling," said David Benton, executive director of the Marine Conservation Alliance, which represents western Alaska fishing fleets, processors and ports. Federal scientists have called for a dramatic reduction in the pollock industry's harvest next year -- the lowest catch in the fishery's history -- in response to the decline. Greenpeace and other conservation groups say even deeper cuts in the catch are needed to ensure that pollock remain healthy in the long run. The federal scientists have recommended limiting the pollock harvest to 815,000 tons -- the smallest in more than 30 years. Greenpeace is pushing for a much smaller harvest: 458,000 tons. "Pollock is one of the most important food sources for every animal in the Bering Sea food web," said George Pletnikoff, a Greenpeace campaigner based in Alaska. Next week, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council will meet in Anchorage to consider next year's catch limit, among other tasks. The meetings begin Monday and are expected to spill over into the following week. "People can go to the Anchorage Hilton hotel next week and give their opinions and thoughts about the fishery. They should be involved in it," Pletnikoff said. National Marine Fisheries Service scientists say the decline in Bering Sea pollock is due to natural variability in the fish population that has been documented for decades, not too much harvesting.

A2: Dead Zones

No impact to dead zones – hurricanes check

Turner et al 2009 – PhD in zoology, distinguished professor of environmental studies at LSU (Nancy N. Rabalais, R. Eugene Turner, Robert J. Diaz, Dubravko Justic, ICES Journal of Marine Science, 66:1528-1537, “Global change and eutrophication of coastal waters”, https://blog.uwgb.edu/bachelen/wp-content/uploads/bachelen/2009/08/hypoxiapaper.pdf)
The 2005 tropical storm season for the Gulf of Mexico is notorious for the devastating effect of hurricanes Katrina (in August) and Rita (in September) on the Louisiana coast. However, two additional earlier storms—hurricanes Cindy and Dennis— generated sufficiently high wave and windfields to disrupt hypoxia on the Louisiana shelf in July, before the scheduled cruise that maps the extent of midsummer hypoxia took place. The subsequent size of the hypoxic area was smaller (11 840 km2) than predicted by the nitrate–N load in May (16 083 km2) based on the Turner et al. (2006) model (Figure 5). However, hypoxia had re-established across a larger area by August (NNR, unpublished data), when Hurricane Katrina crossed the southeastern Louisiana coast. The variability in the changes of oxygen conditions near the bottom in a 20-m water column is illustrated by the 2003 hurricane season (Figure 6). The passage of several tropical storms and hurricanes in June–August 2003 disrupted stratification and hypoxia, but to varying degrees. The path of Tropical Storm Bill was very close to station C6C, but it passed rapidly north and the wave field was insufficient to re-aerate the bottom waters. Although it passed well to the south of station C6C, Hurricane Claudette generated a field of 30-knot winds at the site of the observing system, as it moved slowly towards the west. As with Hurricanes Cindy and Dennis in 2005, which resulted in a smaller area of hypoxia than predicted for the spring nitrate–N load, the effect of Hurricane Claudette in 2003 was sufficient to reduce the size of the bottomwater hypoxia to 8560 km2, which was 2.5% less than the predicted size of 20 000 km2. Tropical Storms Erika and Grace had opposite effects. The former had no effect on hypoxia former, whereas the latter caused an increase in bottom oxygen.

Tech solves

G.B.E., 12 (Green Building Elements, 11/26, “New Technology Could Revive Oceanic Dead Zones” http://greenbuildingelements.com/2012/11/26/new-technology-could-revive-oceanic-dead-zones/, jj)
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Veolia Water North America partnered for a study of Veolia’s patented Actiflo Carb technology. In an eight-week test-run, the technology cut phosphorus concentrations in wastewater and removed 75 percent of pharmaceuticals and personal care product residue from water. If able to be implemented on a broader scale, this clarification technology could be extremely helpful in reducing the occurrence of algal blooms. The Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission estimates 15,000 tons of phosphorus flows into the sea every year; the algal bloom in the Baltic is actually visible from space. The commission estimates that wastewater phosphorus levels would need to be reduced from 1.0mg/L to .50 mg/L for any noticeable improvement in the sea. And Veolia’s technology was able to reduce levels to .05 mg/L – a promising development for the Baltic Sea.

Tech already solving dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay—mitigation efforts are successful

John Hopkins U, 11 (11/3, “A Decline in Dead Zones: Study Shows Efforts to Heal Chesapeake Bay Are Working” http://releases.jhu.edu/2011/11/03/a-decline-in-dead-zones-study-shows-efforts-to-heal-chesapeake-bay-are-working/, jj)
Efforts to reduce the flow of fertilizers, animal waste and other pollutants into the Chesapeake Bay appear to be giving a boost to the bay’s health, a new study that analyzed 60 years of water quality data has concluded. The study, published in the November 2011 issue of Estuaries and Coasts, was conducted by researchers from The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. The team found that the size of mid- to late-summer oxygen-starved “dead zones,” where plants and water animals cannot live, leveled off in deep channels of the bay during the 1980s and has been declining ever since. The timing is key because in the 1980s, a concerted effort to cut nutrient pollution in the Chesapeake Bay was initiated through the multistate-federal Chesapeake Bay Program. The goal was to restore the water quality and health of the bay. Rebecca Murphy, lead author of the Chesapeake Bay study, is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering art Johns Hopkins. Photo by Tim Murphy. Rebecca Murphy, lead author of the Chesapeake Bay study, is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins. Photo by Tim Murphy. “I was really excited by these results because they point to improvement in the health of the Chesapeake Bay,” said lead author Rebecca R. Murphy, a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins. “We now have evidence that cutting back on the nutrient pollutants pouring into the bay can make a difference. I think that’s really significant.” Don Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, agreed. “This study shows that our regional efforts to limit nutrient pollution may be producing results,” he said. “Continuing nutrient reduction remains critically important for achieving bay restoration goals.” The Chesapeake Bay is the nation’s largest estuary, a body of water where fresh and salt water mix. According to the Chesapeake Bay Program, the bay is about 200 miles long, has about roughly 4,480 square miles of surface area and supports more than 3,600 species of plants, fish and other animals. But the bay’s health deteriorated during much of the 20th century, contributing to a drop in the Chesapeake’s fish and shellfish populations. Environmental experts blamed this largely on a surge of nutrients entering the bay from sources such as farm fertilizer, animal waste, water treatment discharge and atmospheric deposition. Heavy spring rains typically flush these chemicals, primarily nitrogen and phosphorus, into the Susquehanna River and other waterways that empty into the Chesapeake. There, the nutrients promote the prolific growth of algae. When the algae die, their remains sink to the bottom of the bay, where they are consumed by bacteria. As they dine on algae, the bacteria utilize dissolved oxygen in the water. This leads to a condition called hypoxia, or depletion of oxygen. As this process continues through the spring and summer, the lack of oxygen turns vast stretches of the Chesapeake into dead zones. Hypoxia sometimes results in fish kills. To find out whether these dead zones are expanding or diminishing, the Johns Hopkins and Maryland researchers retrieved and analyzed bay water quality records from the past 60 years. They determined that the size of the dead zone in mid-to-late summer has decreased steadily since the late 1980s and that the duration – how long the dead zone persists each summer – is closely linked each year to the amount of nutrients entering the bay. That timeline coincides with the launch of state and federal efforts to reduce the flow of algae-feeding pollutants into the bay. For example, farmers were encouraged to plant natural barriers and take other steps to keep fertilizer out of waterways that feed the Chesapeake. Also, water treatment plants began to pull more pollutants from their discharge, and air pollution control measures curbed the movement of nitrogen from the atmosphere into the bay. “By looking at existing data, we have been able to link decreasing hypoxia to a reduction in the nutrient load in the bay,” said study co-author Michael Kemp, an ecologist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s Horn Point Laboratory. “The overall extent and duration of mid-to-late summer hypoxia are decreasing.” Another part of the study looked at a trend that has troubled some bay watchers. In recent years, Chesapeake researchers have seen an early summer spike in dead zones. They feared that keeping more nutrients out of the bay was not improving its health. But the new study found that the early summer jump in dead zones was influenced by climate forces, not by the runoff of pollutants. In a phenomenon called stratification, fresh water from the rivers entering the bay forms a layer on top of the more dense salt water, which comes from the ocean. The two layers don’t easily mix, so when air near the surface adds oxygen to the top layer, it doesn’t reach the deeper salt water. Without oxygen at these lower depths, marine animals cannot live, and a dead zone is formed. “Rebecca discovered that the increase in these early summer dead zones is because of changes in climate forces like wind, sea levels and the salinity of the water. It was not because the efforts to keep pollutants out of the bay were ineffective,” said William P. Ball, a professor of environmental engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins. Ball, a co-author of the new study, is Murphy’s doctoral adviser.

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