oceans

Manatee deaths down, lonely penguin count up by one

... a Hong Kong sushi restaurant owner paid a record $55,700 for a bluefin tuna at a Tokyo market, a rate of $92 per pound ...

... a judge ordered the U.S. Navy to cease use of sonar within 12 nautical miles of the California coastline and whenever a marine mammal was sighted within 2,200 yards ...

... fish from a Canadian salmon farm tested positive for malachite green, a carcinogenic substance. "We have no explanation as to what has happened," said the company manager ...

... a study of Caribbean coral reefs found a correlation between high human population and coral loss. "It's like a cascade," said one of the researchers ...

Coral reefs suffer from proximity to humans, says study

The main factor contributing to declines in coral-reef health is proximity to human populations, says new research in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B. A study of 322 reef sites in the Caribbean found that many suffered significant damage from overfishing and agricultural runoff. Author Camilo Mora estimates that reefs in […]

Sea-level rise at our doorstep; puts nation at risk

What the scientific community has failed to communicate, and the public has failed to grasp, is that the U.S. is particularly vulnerable to very small increments of sea-level rise.

The IPCC Fourth Assessment projects a sea-level rise of 0.18 meters to 0.59 meters this century. Even though the report includes a caveat that this range does not include any significant contribution from the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets, global warming skeptics continually characterize those who mention a six-meter sea-level rise as scaremongers.

There is also a common notion in circulation, advanced by the media and many studies on the impacts of climate change, that wealthier countries in the West will be able to adapt, while underdeveloped countries will bear the brunt of the impacts.

It is no wonder then that global warming scarcely registers as an issue in the presidential election. Until the American public understands that the U.S. is directly threatened by impacts resulting from global warming, little meaningful action to curb our greenhouse-gas emissions will take place.

With just one meter of sea-level rise, the U.S. will be physically under siege, with calamitous and destabilizing consequences.

Sea levels may rise five feet by 2100

A recent Nature Geoscience study, "High rates of sea-level rise during the last interglacial period," ($ubs. req'd) finds that sea levels could rise twice what the IPCC had project for 2100. This confirms what many scientists have recently warned (also see here), and it matches the conclusion of a study (PDF) earlier this year in Science.

[As an aside, in one debate with a denier -- can't remember who, they all kind of merge together -- I was challenged: "Name one peer-reviewed study projecting sea-level rise this century beyond the IPCC." Well, now there are two from this year alone!]

For the record, five feet (PDF) of sea level rise would submerge some 22,000 square miles of U.S. land just on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts (farewell, southern Louisiana and Florida) -- and displace more than 100 million people worldwide. And, of course, sea levels would just keep rising some six inches a decade -- or, more likely, even faster next century than this century.

What will US ratification mean for health of the oceans?

I recently wrote a short piece for Seed about the Law of the Sea -- a piece of legislation that has been held up in the US Senate for the past 25 years, and which, if ratified, could have a major impact on ocean health.

The treaty -- which was given a thumbs-up in October by the US Foreign Relations Committee and now awaits ratification in the Senate -- declares most of earth's vast ocean floor to be the "common heritage of mankind," placing it under UN aegis "for the benefit of mankind as a whole."

That language has some people running scared. The treaty recently earned some scathing critique in the Wall Street Journal:

New fishing quotas and Japanese whaling ships on notice

The European Union set quotas for 2008, with an 18 percent decrease for cod in most trawling areas except the North Sea, where quotas were raised by 11 percent. Scientists had pushed for cuts to less than half of 2006 levels ...

... the Swedish Board of Fisheries found that no cod had spawned in the waters between Sweden and Denmark this year ...

... two New Zealand fishing companies aimed to earn the Marine Stewardship Council's environmental standard for their Patagonian toothfish (Chilean sea bass) catch ...

...Australia announced plans to send planes and a ship to surveil Japanese whaling ships, and will use the photographs and video gathered in potential future legal action to force Japan to recognize a ban on hunting whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary ...

Australia steps up to oppose Japanese whaling

This move by the Australian government is great news. Moral: elections matter! Let's hope other countries follow suit and stop this madness masquerading as "scientific research".

The ethanol boom could trigger a ‘tipping point’ in the Gulf

Days after Congress voted to ramp up the government mandate for corn ethanol, bringing it to fully three times current production levels within a decade, we get bracing news from the Gulf of Mexico. Here is the AP: The nation’s corn crop is fertilized with millions of pounds of nitrogen-based fertilizer. And when that nitrogen […]

Killer farmed salmon and non-deadly sharks

More than 10,000 people worked to clean up the worst oil spill in South Korean history after a crane punched a hole in an oil tanker, releasing 2.7 million gallons of crude. A 63-year-old shellfish farmer wept as she showed dead tar-coated oysters to a reporter ...

... a study published in Science suggested that leaving more fish in the sea leads to higher profits than the traditional target known as maximum sustainable yield. "We like to say it's a win-win," said one of the study's authors ...

... a detailed new study of salmon farming found that farmed fish spread sea lice, which killed juvenile wild salmon ...