Solar Storms Affirmative – 4 Week Lab [1/3]
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Impact – OceansCO2 emissions will destroy the oceans. Geoffery Lean, Environmental Editor of the Independent, 8/1/’4 (The Independent, l/n) The world's oceans are sacrificing themselves to try to stave off global warming, a major international research programme has discovered. Their waters have absorbed about half of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities over the past two centuries, the 15-year study has found. Without this moderating effect, climate change would have been much more rapid and severe. But in the process the seas have become more acid, threatening their very life. The research warns that this could kill off their coral reefs, shellfish and plankton, on which all marine life depends. News of the alarming conclusions of the research - headed by US government scientists - follows the discovery, reported in Friday's Independent, of a catastrophic failure of North Sea birds to breed this summer, thought to be the result of global warming. The disaster - forecast in The Independent on Sunday last October - appears to have been caused by plankton moving hundreds of miles to the north to escape from an unprecedented warming on the sea's waters. Sand eels - millions of which normally provide the staple diet of many seabirds and large fish - have disappeared, because they, in turn, depend on the plankton. The new study warns of an even more alarming collapse throughout the world's oceans if climate change continues. It is the result of a mammoth research effort, which has taken and analysed 72,000 samples of seawater from 10,000 different places in the oceans since 1989. Led by scientists working for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle, it has also involved teams of researchers from Australia, Canada, Spain, Japan, South Korea and Germany. It has discovered, for the first time, that the seas and oceans have soaked up almost half of all human emissions of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, since the start of the Industrial Revolution. By doing so they have greatly slowed climate change, and almost certainly prevented it from already causing catastrophe. "The oceans are performing this tremendous service to humankind by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," says Dr Christopher Sabine, one of the leaders of the research. But, he adds, this is coming at a great cost because the act of salvage "is changing the chemistry of the oceans". The research concludes that "dramatic changes", such as have not occurred for at least 20 million years, now appear to be under way. They could have "significant impacts on the biological systems of the oceans in ways that we are only beginning to understand". As the water naturally absorbs carbon dioxide from the air, it forms carbonic acid. And the acid then mops up calcium carbonate, a substance normally plentiful in the oceans that sea creatures use to make the protective shells that they need to survive. The scientists say that if the world goes on producing more and more carbon dioxide, this shell formation will become increasingly difficult, while the world will heat up anyway. The results are incalculable, because so may shelled creatures live in the seas, ranging from clams and corals to the plankton and other tiny creatures that form the base of the entire food chain of the oceans. The surface waters and upper 10 per cent of the oceans - which contain most of the life - are the most acidic, the research shows. The acidity also varies around the world. The North Atlantic - the nearest ocean to the world's most polluting countries, is the most affected; the southern ocean that encircles Antarctica the least. When the scientists took a species of snail from the relatively unpolluted waters of the far north of the Pacific, near the Arctic Circle, and put it in seawater with carbon dioxide levels similar to those found elsewhere, the animals' shells began to dissolve. Dr Peter Brewer, of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute - who was not himself involved in the research - calls the results "a wake-up call". He adds: "The numbers are crystal clear. The analysis is impeccable. There is no uncertainty about this. These impacts of a high carbon dioxide ocean are real, and are measurable today." The research also explodes a heavily touted "solution" to global warming. Critics of international action, including members of the Bush administration, say that there is little need to curb carbon dioxide emissions because the gas could be collected and injected into the oceans for disposal. However, the study shows that this cure could be even worse than the disease. Warming devastates ocean ecosystems- disrupts salinity, plankton, oxygen and circulation IPCC, a scientific intergovernmental body set up by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 2007, Climate Change 2007:Synthesis Report, Summary for Policymakers An Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf In terrestrial ecosystems, earlier timing of spring events and poleward and upward shifts in plant and animal ranges are with very high confidence linked to recent warming. In some marine and freshwater systems, shifts in ranges and changes in algal, plankton and fish abundance are with high confidence associated with rising water temperatures, as well as related changes in ice cover, salinity, oxygen levels and circulation. {1.2} Of the more than 29,000 observational data series, from 75 studies, that show significant change in many physical and biological systems, more than 89% are consistent with the direction of change expected as a response to warming(figure SPM.2). However, there is a notable lack of geographic balance in data and literature on observed changes, with marked scarcity in developing countries. {1.2, 1.3} Extinction. Robin Craig, Assc. Prof. Law @Indiana, Winter, ‘3 (34 McGeorge L. Rev. 155, l/n) Biodiversity and ecosystem function arguments for conserving marine ecosystems also exist, just as they do for terrestrial ecosystems, but these arguments have thus far rarely been raised in political debates. For example, besides significant tourism values - the most economically valuable ecosystem service coral reefs provide, worldwide - coral reefs protect against storms and dampen other environmental fluctuations, services worth more than ten times the reefs’ value for food production. Waste treatment is another significant, non-extractive ecosystem function that intact coral reef ecosystems provide. More generally, “ocean ecosystems play a major role in the global geochemical cycling of all the elements that represent the basic building blocks of living organisms, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, as well as other less abundant but necessary elements.” In a very real and direct sense, therefore, human degradation of marine ecosystems impairs the planet’s ability to support life. Maintaining biodiversity is often critical to maintaining the functions of marine ecosystems. Current evidence shows that, in general, an ecosystem’s ability to keep functioning in the face of disturbance is strongly dependent on its biodiversity, “indicating that more diverse ecosystems are more stable.” Coral reef ecosystems are particularly dependent on their biodiversity. Most ecologists agree that the complexity of interactions and degree of interrelatedness among component species is higher on coral reefs than in any other marine environment. This implies that the ecosystem functioning that produces the most highly valued components is also complex and that many otherwise insignificant species have strong effects on sustaining the rest of the reef system. Thus, maintaining and restoring the biodiversity of marine ecosystems is critical to maintaining and restoring the ecosystem services that they provide. Non-use biodiversity values for marine ecosystems have been calculated in the wake of marine disasters, like the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Similar calculations could derive preservation values for marine wilderness. However, economic value, or economic value equivalents, should not be “the sole or even primary justification for conservation of ocean ecosystems. Ethical arguments also have considerable force and merit.” At the forefront of such arguments should be a recognition of how little we know about the sea - and about the actual effect of human activities on marine ecosystems. The United States has traditionally failed to protect marine ecosystems because it was difficult to detect anthropogenic harm to the oceans, but we now know that such harm is occurring - even though we are not completely sure about causation or about how to fix every problem. Ecosystems like the NWHI coral reef ecosystem should inspire lawmakers and policymakers to admit that most of the time we really do not know what we are doing to the sea and hence should be preserving marine wilderness whenever we can - especially when the United States has within its territory relatively pristine marine ecosystems that may be unique in the world. We may not know much about the sea, but we do know this much: if we kill the ocean we kill ourselves, and we will take most of the biosphere with us. The Black Sea is almost dead, its once-complex and productive ecosystem almost entirely replaced by a monoculture of comb jellies, “starving out fish and dolphins, emptying fishermen’s nets, and converting the web of life into brainless, wraith-like blobs of jelly.” More importantly, the Black Sea is not necessarily unique. The Black Sea is a microcosm of what is happening to the ocean systems at large. The stresses piled up: overfishing, oil spills, industrial discharges, nutrient pollution, wetlands destruction, the introduction of an alien species. The sea weakened, slowly at first, then collapsed with shocking suddenness. The lessons of this tragedy should not be lost to the rest of us, because much of what happened here is being repeated all over the world. The ecological stresses imposed on the Black Sea were not unique to communism. Nor, sadly, was the failure of governments to respond to the emerging crisis. Oxygen-starved “dead zones” appear with increasing frequency off the coasts of major cities and major rivers, forcing marine animals to flee and killing all that cannot. Ethics as well as enlightened self-interest thus suggest that the United States should protect fully-functioning marine ecosystems wherever possible - even if a few fishers go out of business as a result. 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