The BBC has an article on a new report from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean that says we are about to witness a marine extinction event unprecedented in human history. Here’s a blunt assessment:
Carbon dioxide levels are now so high, it says, that ways of pulling the gas out of the atmosphere need to be researched urgently – but not using techniques, such as iron fertilisation, that lead to more CO2 entering the oceans.
“We have to bring down CO2 emissions to zero within about 20 years,” Professor Hoegh-Guldberg told BBC News.
“If we don’t do that, we’re going to see steady acidification of the seas, heat events that are wiping out things like kelp forests and coral reefs, and we’ll see a very different ocean.”
Another of the report’s authors, Dan Laffoley, marine chair of the World Commission on Protected Areas and an adviser to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), admitted the challenges were vast.
“But unlike previous generations, we know what now needs to happen,” he said.
“The time to protect the blue heart of our planet is now.”
What does Sarah Palin think about this? What does the American Petroleum Institute think? What does the Republican Party think? What do Democrats from oil and coal-producing states think?
I’ll tell you what I think. We’re fucked.
And we’re fucked because we don’t listen to and respect our scientists. Our scientists handed us these computers and smart phones and we used them to play video games and pretend we’re experts about shit we’re not qualified to have an independent opinion about. We need American leadership on the climate crisis, but the people are perfectly happy with a Congress filled with assholes who are bought and paid for by the energy corporations.
If this is true, and not hyperbole on the part of Hoegh-Guldberg, then we are well and truly fucked. If the oceans really are going to die if we don’t get CO2 emissions down to zero in 2 decades then the oceans are dead.
And if we thought the wars we fought in the 19th and 20th centuries over resources were brutal, imagine what the resource wars of the 21st century are going to look like with a dying ecosystem.
I really hope that Hoegh-Guldberg is engaging in hyperbole to wake people up to the threat, because otherwise…
Supposedly Mitsubishi has a warehouse full of frozen bluefin. They’re fine with the extinction of the species because then they can sell their stockpile at luxury/monopoly prices. This seems to be an important dynamic when it comes to natural resources.
All of the blame can’t be placed on public indifference and the lack of leadership. A lot of blames belongs to the arrogance of the environmental community that despite failure-after-failure continues to employ a type of “we’ll build it and they will come” messaging. I work for a major environmental organization so I know of what I speak. They hire full-time communications staff with graduate degrees from Yale School of Forestry and other Ivey League schools ONLY who have NEVER managed an effective public education campaign or worked in corporate marketing. They are no match for the oil and power company public relations teams. They talk about climate change in this academic and esoteric way that the average American can’t understand. The program side looks much like the Republican Party or Netroots Nation. And it’s not just the lack racial diversity it’s also geographical and cultural which means NO outreach to communities who will be most effected by climate change. And rather than higher professionals who know what they are doing they waste a shit load of money on six figure salaries and sit around and blame stupid Americans and Predident Obama.
You know what George Carlin said, right?
I understand your point, but until there is significant money for a program on the side of pushing an honest understanding of these threats, and until the major media stops engaging in false balance stories and treat charlatans as charlatans with real-time debunking of their bunk, the public will continue to be confused. I have had no problem understanding the messages coming out from most environmental organizations. They are perfectly clear.
They are no match for the oil and power company public relations teams because the oil supported teams lie, and their lies fit on bumper stickers and sound reasonable (the sun sure is big and hot, surely it drives climate), and refutation of these lies requires grounding and arguments that run longer than 10 words.
Can you suggest even one message that hasn’t already been used that would resonate more persuasively with “the public:” that couldn’t also be instantly derailed with a “common sense tells us” lie in response?
And, did you know Al Gore is fat?
On the bright side we can always find another 100billion to throw at a 2-3 trillion dollar campout/bonfire in southern Asia.
The welfare of the people and their shared world is one thing, but blowing up mud-huts in Af-pak is serious business. We’ve got to do it cadets, and you should know since that’s the business you’re in.
Plus you know, regional stability and security etc. etc. (shhh-WMD-shhh)
But we thought real hard about it and had a review period, and now we’re recommitting to coordination and capability in our Afghani allies. And we’ve got the best-equipped and most highly trained expeditionary forces in human history. Hooraa.
The USA is hopeless right now as far as contributing to the solution goes, I’ve concluded. We must beat back a Koch bros takeover of our democracy, already in process, before much can be done, and frankly, your sentence about computers and smart phones is all too true. Fortunately the rest of the world isn’t waiting for us to wake up, though it’s tough for them to do it without us. Read this article this a.m. about the Huntsman wealth – guess JH is the Koch bros real candidate, underneath the shiny- objects- Palins etc. And Huntsman’s so called doom is precisely what the Kochs are facing if we ever return to majority rule.
http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/16/news/companies/huntsman_family_dynasty_full.fortune/index.htm
Our scientists handed us these computers and smart phones and we used them to play video games and pretend we’re experts about shit we’re not qualified to have an independent opinion about. We need American leadership on the climate crisis, but the people are perfectly happy with a Congress filled with assholes who are bought and paid for by the energy corporations.
Alas, it has always been thus. The difference is that now the fatal flaw in the human species is going to have catastrophic consequences on a planetary level.
Here’s a story that took place long ago, but the parallels with modern issues are astounding. Enron, dot.com, the housing bubble, and global warming — the idiocy that created all of these issues happened before, but we of course failed to learn from it.
In the late 1860s a man named Fairlie wrote a paper arguing that a narrow 3′ gauge would be far cheaper and more efficient than the standard gauge. The railroad engineers at the time immediately and nearly unanimously rebutted him — they knew that in fact the optimal gauge was probably somewhat wider than standard and also that networks of multiple gauges were extremely expensive.
But, the finance geniuses at the time got ahold of this paper and wanted to believe it was true. Throughout the 1870s it was very difficult to get financing for a new standard gauge railway. Like saying “dot.com”, all you had to do was say “narrow gauge” and the capital investment was yours to be had.
The engineers were, of course, right. And the financiers wrong. By 1883 some spectacular financial collapses of narrow gauge railways made this clear (similar to Enron, Worldcom). In the aftermath it was learned that the supposed cost savings had been achieved through a combination of shoddy construction, deferred maintenance, and flat out financial fraud.
But even in the early years of the movement the well-run narrow gauge lines had begun quietly converting to standard gauge as their own internal numbers indicated narrow gauge was a bad idea except for very special situations.
Ignore the experts. Hope for the best. And make sure someone else is holding the stock when the whole thing collapses.
As the oceans go, so goes the human species. It’s just amazing how people seem to think well, we’ll miss the dolphins and fishies and all, but we can still go to the zoo if we need to see some. If the report is correct, our day is done. We’ve reached the point where we’re no longer smart enough to adapt to environmental change in time. I wonder if there’s anything in the universe that will miss us, or mourn us?
Um, I think you’re wrong about this.
What will more likely happen is that once it becomes obvious that the world is fucked, the resource wars will start in earnest. The folks with the biggest armies will grab as much as they can, build whatever materials are needed to survive (underground bunkers, for example) and fuck over everyone else.
As for “whatever is needed to survive” – basically take the plan for building colonies on the moon or Mars and adapt it for “colonizing” a fucked-up Earth ecosystem. Except only the biggest assholes will be populating these bunkers. And whatever staff they need to maintain them, but those guys will probably be assholes too.
Essentially the vast majority of us are screwed, but the worst possible representations of humanity will probably survive to pass their genes on to future generations. yay us!
I didn’t mean to suggest that it will happen instantly. It will take some years, decades, or even generations for the leftovers to be consumed. Once the cascade begins, it will be unstoppable. Your scenario needs to assume that massive energy will be available. It won’t, because fossil and nuclear, which is all there will be time for, need enormous resources in expertise, water, transportation, distribution, and simple social coherence. That won’t be available.
The dream of the caveman is bogus because the lush biomass that sustained them is long gone. The only real question will be, what species will replace us?
“Enjoy OUR extinction”.
Once the oceans go, we’re not far behind.
Thus, a major reason we decided not to have children.