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The Killer Seas Begin — Mass Marine Death off Chile as Ocean Acidification Begins to Take Down Florida’s Reef
11
May, 2016
We
should be very clear. There is no way to save the beautiful and
majestic coral reefs of our world without a rapid cessation of fossil
fuel burning. And, if we continue burning fossil fuels, we will not
only lose the reefs and corals — we
will also turn the world’s oceans into a mass extinction engine.
(Masses
of dead sea life wash up onto Chile’s shores after the worst red
tide in history for that nation. As we witness the tragic carnage in
Chile, we should remember that the red tide there, the mass coral
bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, and the onset of
ocean acidification damage to the Florida Reef are all linked by the
same thread — fossil fuel burning and a related heating up of the
global climate. Image source: Largest
Red Tide in Chilean History.)
Mass
Extinction Driven by the Awful Engine of Greed
Killer
Seas. That’s what we’re turning the world’s oceans into in our
allowing the fossil fuel industry to retain dominance over the
world’s energy sources. In allowing them to continue to keep us
captive to the burning of high carbon fuels through their corrupting
and pervasive political and economic power. We certainly bear some of
the blame for apathetically allowing ourselves to be hood-winked and
lead about by the noses. But we shouldn’t fault ourselves too much.
For the blame mostly rests within the policy-making apparatuses of
dominance-based economic systems and in the very few individuals
around the world who now hold the keys to that power.
An
enforced global injustice set in place by wealthy individuals like
the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch and Warren Buffet —
who through
a corrupt monetary influence regularly hijack the political process
to protect legacy fossil fuel assets and to assault renewable energy
industries.
Those like the members of the governing board of Exxon Mobile — who
have waged a decades-long campaign to misinform the public on the
dangers of human-caused climate change.
These so-called global elites are the authors of the climate change
denial that has now crippled and deeply divided most legislative
bodies around the world. The same fossil fuel drug pushers who’ve
worked so hard to keep the global economic system addicted to the
most damaging and corrupting of energy sources — oil, gas and coal.
These
people are the real monsters of the climate crisis. The ones who,
often without any kind of visibility or accountability, have done
everything they can to ensure that we, the people of an ailing Earth,
have less and less power to make the right decisions and to form the
kind of political consensus that would actually provide a pathway to
leading us out of this worsening global nightmare. And so, whether we
individually realize it now or not, we are in the fight of our lives
— what is likely to be the most important struggle for justice that
the human race has ever undertaken. For as difficult as such a fight
will ultimately be — we must fight the fossil fuel interests and
win if human civilization and much of life on Earth is to survive.
The
Advent of Killer Seas
I
don’t usually talk about religion here in this blog. And I’m not
what many people would consider to be a religious person. I do not,
for example, attend church very often. Nor do I tend to agree with
many so-called religious authorities — whom I often see as
short-sighted and relying too much on mythical and dogmatic beliefs
that are at best failures in logic and at worst the outgrowths of
institutional corruption or general backwards-thinking and
small-mindedness. But in this particular case — in the case of the
killer seas that are starting to plague our world — I cannot help
but to often be struck by how one of the deadly sins that the Bible
warns of is resulting in so much terrible harm to the Earth, to its
creatures, and to her people. And it is impossible to turn away
from the
clear-sighted and beautifully written moral imperative laid down by
the Pope Francis in his Encyclical.
A warning that we should all heed and not turn our eyes from.
(Nothing
is Frozen — by Miep. This is what happens when the world loses its
ice — Killer Seas. Image source: There
are So Many Things Wrong With This.)
For
in the book of Revelation, the Bible speaks of a terrible global
disaster. One that begins when the seas turn blood-red and a third of
all the fish are killed. Many have interpreted this book, this
passage, as a kind of inevitable wrath of a literal God coming down
from heaven to divide and punish the human race. But I think that
this is a false interpretation. A loving, nurturing God is not a God
of Wrath. No, that does not ring true to me at all. I think of this
passage, this book, instead as a kind of stark warning against the
direct and deadly consequences of bad actions. Of what happens to us
if we succumb to what the Bible identifies as the sin of greed. For
‘the love of money is the root of all evil.’
The
Bible is, after all, a sort of lore of the ancients passed down over
hundreds of generations. A book of parables and lessons for how human
beings should treat one another in ways that help not only
individuals — but the entire race to survive. In this way, the
Bible could be seen as an ancient guide for civilization survival. A
book that includes numerous passages on how cities and nations can
prosper by living in balance with one another and with nature. And
one that issues this essential and stark warning to those who do not
treat the Earth and her creatures with kindness. For ‘those who
destroy the Earth shall be destroyed.’
Well,
we’ve already destroyed 2/3 the globe’s predatory fish that
humans eat through over-fishing alone.
But the kind of ocean-wrecking destruction of callously-over-fishing
pales in comparison to what happens when the short-sighted protection
of money in the form of ‘legacy fossil fuel assets’ forces the
dumping of billions of tons of toxic carbon into the world’s airs
and waters. If you do that, then the ocean really does turn blood-red
and purple-red. If you do that, you
unleash the mass extinction machine that was the killing mechanism in
four of the five great die offs in Earth’s deep history.
You begin to temp the fates by invoking the names Permian, Triassic,
Devonian, and Ordovician. And if you allow the fossil fuel powers to
keep on doing it for the sake of their imagined wealth, then you make
the oceans so acidic that the skeletons of the fragile and yet
ever-so-beautiful and necessary creatures living within the world’s
waters dissolve.
Florida’s
Coral Reefs Start to Dissolve
Here,
we’ve frequently warned of the two-pronged threat posed to global
coral reefs as a result of human fossil fuel burning. In the south,
as oceans heat up due to fossil fuel emissions, coral bleaching
begins to take hold. Becoming more pervasive as temperatures rise
into a range between 1 and 2 C above preindustrial averages, by the
2030s about 90 percent of the world’s reefs will fall under threat
of ghosting away into whiteness.
This
year, we
saw some of these stark consequences begin to unfold as the Great
Barrier Reef suffered a horrific bleaching event.
This kind of event was predicted and expected by ocean researchers.
Brave scientists who acted as modern-day prophets in their issuing of
warnings to Australian and global governments. Governments which are
now, in so many cases, stacked to the gills (due to the corrupting
influence of fossil fuel money mentioned earlier) with the political
extremists we today call climate change deniers.
The
second prong of the threat to global reefs comes in the form of ocean
acidification spreading down from the north. Because waters in
northern regions of the world are colder, they are able to take in
more of the excess greenhouse gasses produced. As more carbon is
drawn into these colder waters, their acidity increases to the point
that ocean organisms with calcium carbonate skeletons begin to see
those skeletons dissolve. And corals are one of many key ocean
organisms that possess calcium carbonate skeletal structures.
(A
global ocean acidification front resulting from a rampant burning of
fossil fuels is starting to dissolve higher latitude reef systems.
The Carysfort Reef — above — has had numerous coral structures
completely dismembered due to ocean acidification creeping into this
section of the Florida Reef. Image source: Science
Daily.)
Until
recently, the threat of ocean acidification to reef systems was still
thought to be at least a couple of decades off. And many mainstream
scientists believed that acidification would not seriously threaten
corals until the 2050s. Unfortunately, a new study has found that the
United States’ only large reef — stretching from Biscayne Bay to
the Looe Key National Marine Sanctuary in the Atlantic Ocean — is
now starting to waste away due to ocean acidification. A surprising
event that researchers are saying is disturbing, unprecedented, and
unexpectedly soon.
University of Miami scientists called the collapse of the reef’s limestone framework, a critical habitat for fish, “unprecedented” and “cause for alarm.” “Lots of scientists think that ocean acidification is not going to be a problem until 2050 or 2060,” says Chris Langdon, a marine biology professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. “This is happening now. We’ve just lost 35 years we thought we had to turn things around.”
In
essence, the reef is wasting away. During the Spring and Summer,
reef-building corals bloom and produce the calcium carbonate
(limestone) structure that is the body of the Florida Reef. During
Fall and Winter, however, reef building activity halts and the newly
acidified water begins to take limestone away. The
study found that the rate of loss now exceeds the rate of gain.
The corals aren’t able to keep up, the reef has reached a tipping
point, and the limestone structures the corals rely on for life is
dissolving.
The
Florida Reef is one of the highest Latitude coral reef structures in
the world. But if it is starting to succumb to ocean acidification
now, it means the progress of the acidification front is presently,
during 2016, starting to enter regions the corals inhabit. If fossil
fuel burning continues and atmospheric CO2 concentrations — this
year peaking at around 408 parts per million at the Mauna Loa
Observatory — continue to rise, it won’t be long before a growing
portion of the world’s reefs begin to succumb to effects similar to
those now destroying the Florida Reef.
And
while coral bleaching is a condition that reefs have at least some
chance to recover from, acidification is inevitably lethal. Once a
certain oceanic carbon concentration is reached, acidification
impacts the reef for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, robbing it of
the very skeletal structures necessary for coral survival. And since
about 1/4 of all the fish in all the world’s oceans (not just the
large, predatory fish we eat) rely on coral reef systems for their
own life-giving habitats, the loss of coral reefs would truly be a
disaster of biblical proportion.
Hot
Pacific Ocean Runs Bloody off the Coast of Chile
Back
during March, another lethal ocean condition associated with a
warming of the world’s waters began
to appear in the ocean zone off the southern coast of Chile.
There, a massive algae bloom spread over a region where sea surface
temperatures were ranging between 1 and 3 C hotter than normal.
(Abnormally
warm sea surface temperatures driven by human forced climate change
sparked a the largest red tide ever witnessed off the coast of Chile.
The image above shows sea surface temperature anomalies as recorded
in late March of 2016 by Earth
Nullschool.)
The
algae bloom — called a red tide — generated toxic levels of
domoic acid that subsequently killed off massive amounts of clams,
fish, and even marine mammals. Beaches across Chile were littered
with dead sea creatures and Chilean officials are now saying that the
current red tide is the worst ever to occur off Chile.
The
red tide forced Chilean officials to ground the nation’s fishing
fleets — sparking mass riots and protests as thousands of poor
fishermen lost access to their means of generating a livelihood. The
Chilean government has since offered 150 million dollars in aid to
the fishermen. But locals say it’s not enough to make ends meet.
The severe blow to the fishing industry, which makes up 0.5 percent
of Chile’s GDP, will also negatively effect the Chilean economy.
This severe red tide has lasted for months now. But
recent reports indicate that the bloom is growing larger as
more and more sea life succumbs.
As
has been the trend with most major media sources this year, El Nino
has been linked by BBC and others to this record red tide. But doing
so is short-sighted and fails to take into account the larger context
of the global climate picture. Warm ocean waters are well known to
generate conditions favorable for red tide development. The warmer
waters favor a more rapid rate of algae reproduction and allow algae
access to a greater range of food sources. Over the past Century, the
world has warmed by more than 1 C above preindustrial levels. And
this year is the hottest on record — not due to El Nino, but due to
a century-long increase in temperatures exploring a new threshold of
extreme global heat.
(An
algae bloom spurred by global warming is turning the waters off Chile
blood-red. Poisonous domoic acid and mass fish and sea life killings
resulting from this event are wrecking Chile’s fishing industry,
ruining the lives of poor fishermen, and damaging Chile’s economy.
Image source: Lethal
Red Tide.)
In
the Northeast Pacific, this record global heat forced waters there to
new extremes —setting
off a 2015 record red tide together with a chain of related mass
mortality events affecting ocean life.
An event that is linked, by ocean warming and climate change, to the
largest ever red tide in Chile. One that is also linked, by climate
change, to the
terrible damage inflicted upon the Great Barrier Reef this year due
to coral bleaching. One
that is linked to ocean acidification now starting to take down the
Florida Reef. And since we are taking a moment to engage in
establishing links in a chain of evidence, we can draw one last link
from all these events to the ongoing fossil fuel emission that is
still being vomited into the world’s airs by an industry that is,
itself, nothing more than a means for some of the world’s richest
people to continue to increase their amount of individually
accumulated wealth.
Ultimately,
it’s pretty clear that people all over the world have a crucial
choice to make —
What’s
more important? The ability of a few people to grow their wealth
through the continued burning of fossil fuels? Or the preservation of
the vitality of the oceans which all life on Earth ultimately depends
upon and the prevention of the warming that will transform the
life-giving waters into Killer Seas?
To
this point, I’ll leave you with the
end-note of the recent National Geographic article on corals
succumbing to ocean acidification:
“The
only way to prevent that is to prevent the build-up of CO2 in the
atmosphere.”
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