workshop- A high-level international workshop convened by IPSO met at the University of Oxford earlier this year. It was the first inter-disciplinary international meeting of marine scientists of its kind and was designed to consider the cumulative impact of multiple stressors on the ocean, including warming, acidification, and overfishing.
The 27 participants from 18 organisations in 6 countries produced a grave assessment of current threats - and a stark conclusion about future risks to marine and human life if the current trajectory of damage continues: that the world’s ocean is at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.
Delegates called for urgent and unequivocal action to halt further declines in ocean health.
For full details relating to the report summary on major ocean impacts and stressors, released June 20th 2011, please click here
http://www.stateoftheocean.org/ipso-2011-workshop-summary.cfm
Case Study 1: The potentially deadly trio of factors — warming, acidification and anoxia — affecting today’s oceans, by Professor Jelle Bijma, Marine Biogeosciences, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. Watch his explanation, beginning with the growing problem of anoxia, or dead zones, in the ocean.
Case Study 2: End of paradise: Coral reefs facing multiple attacks, by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg , Director, Global Change Institute, University of Queensland
Case Study 3: Pollution and Marine Species: new challenges of an old problem by Professor Tom Hutchinson, Centre for Environment, Fisheries & Aquaculture Science (CEFAS)
Case Study 4: Vanishing Resource: The Tale of the Chinese Bahaba by Dr William Cheung, Lecturer in Marine Ecosystem Services, School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia
workshop- A high-level international workshop convened by IPSO met at the University of Oxford earlier this year. It was the first inter-disciplinary international meeting of marine scientists of its kind and was designed to consider the cumulative impact of multiple stressors on the ocean, including warming, acidification, and overfishing.
The 27 participants from 18 organisations in 6 countries produced a grave assessment of current threats - and a stark conclusion about future risks to marine and human life if the current trajectory of damage continues: that the world’s ocean is at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.
Delegates called for urgent and unequivocal action to halt further declines in ocean health.
For full details relating to the report summary on major ocean impacts and stressors, released June 20th 2011, please click here
http://www.stateoftheocean.org/ipso-2011-workshop-summary.cfm
Case Study 1: The potentially deadly trio of factors — warming, acidification and anoxia — affecting today’s oceans, by Professor Jelle Bijma, Marine Biogeosciences, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. Watch his explanation, beginning with the growing problem of anoxia, or dead zones, in the ocean.
Case Study 2: End of paradise: Coral reefs facing multiple attacks, by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg , Director, Global Change Institute, University of Queensland
Case Study 3: Pollution and Marine Species: new challenges of an old problem by Professor Tom Hutchinson, Centre for Environment, Fisheries & Aquaculture Science (CEFAS)
Case Study 4: Vanishing Resource: The Tale of the Chinese Bahaba by Dr William Cheung, Lecturer in Marine Ecosystem Services, School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia
Our society has well and truly screwed the pooch. We are in the midst of the fastest die-off in the last 65 million years, and yet people deny we have a problem. Now, where are we going and where did I put my hand basket?
It’s so sad to think of all the denialists out there who somehow believe all is plugging along, and that we humans are too puny to make an impact upon this only Earth we will ever know . . .
Oceans Acidifying Faster Today Than in Past 300 Million Years
Few parallels for today’s rapid ocean changes in geologic record
March 1, 2012
The oceans may be acidifying faster today than they did in the last 300 million years, according to scientists publishing a paper this week in the journal Science.
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In a review of hundreds of paleoceanographic studies, the researchers found evidence for only one period in the last 300 million years when the oceans changed as fast as today: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM.
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In the last hundred years, rising carbon dioxide from human activities has lowered ocean pH by 0.1 unit, an acidification rate at least 10 times faster than 56 million years ago, says Hönisch.
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It’s so sad to think of all the denialists out there who somehow believe all is plugging along, and that we humans are too puny to make an impact upon this only Earth we will ever know . . .
“...Why does Man pollute the Land?...
Maybe Nature littered Man.”
(The last lines of a poem I wrote almost 40 years ago. Most fellow humans remain unenlightened as ever, today.)
Does human overpopulation relate to any of those stresses?
I’d guess it relates to all of them.
I don’t think it’s overpopulation per se. The earth can easily support a few billion organisms even as large as we are. IMO, the problem lies in our life style. Our overconsumption of natural resources and pollution of the biosphere borders on “crimes against nature”. And by the laws of cause/effect the biosphere of earth will change to the detriment of all living species.
As water (evaporation) and (filtered) sunlight is our main souce of life itself, is it wonder that we are beginning to see the results of our onslaught on these precious resources. Man is (has become) a viral organism that is consuming it’s host.
