Fisheries and corals succumb to ocean acidification, worsening the global food crisis (part of "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, supported by current news, facts and scientific predictions.)
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["Reports from 2050" is a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, supported by current news, facts and scientific predictions. To see what's real and what's not, click on the links within the text.]
JANUARY 10, 2050 (Auckland) -- Forty-five years ago, in 2005, a study entitled "
Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the twenty-first century and its impact on calcifying organisms"
was published in the journal Nature. Though its findings were extremely
frightening, it received little attention by the media.
The study was undertaken by almost 20 scientific and academic institutions, including the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Seattle, Washington;
Laboratoire d'Océanographie et du Climat: Expérimentations et Approches Numériques (LOCEAN), Plouzané, France;
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts;
Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, UCLA, Los Angeles, California;
Frontier Research Center for Global Change, Yokohama, Japan;
Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute, University of Bern, Switzerland;
Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS) Program, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey; and
Max Planck Institut für Meteorologie, Hamburg, Germany.
According
to the report's authors, "Today's surface ocean is saturated with
respect to calcium carbonate, but increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide
concentrations are reducing ocean pH and carbonate ion concentrations,
and thus the level of
calcium carbonate
saturation. Experimental evidence suggests that if these trends
continue, key marine organisms -- such as corals and some plankton --
will have difficulty maintaining their external calcium carbonate
skeletons...Our findings indicate that conditions detrimental to
high-latitude ecosystems could develop within decades, not centuries as
suggested previously."
Less than five decades later, their predictions -- based on 13 models of the
ocean-carbon cycle used to assess calcium carbonate saturation under the
IS92a "business-as-usual" scenario for future man-made carbon dioxide emissions -- have come true.
In 2010,
Achim Steiner, then the head of the
U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), said, "
Ocean acidification
is yet another red flag being raised, carrying planetary health
warnings about the uncontrolled growth in greenhouse gas emissions,"
according to
Reuters.
" About 25 percent of the world's emissions of carbon dioxide, the main
greenhouse gas,
are absorbed by the seas, where it converts to carbonic acid,"
according to the Reuters article. "The pH value of the oceans, a scale
from alkaline to acidic, has fallen 30 percent since the
Industrial Revolution in a shift to acidity. "
But
neither the world's leaders nor the general public listened to such
warnings, and as a result, the world's coral reefs and commercial fish
stocks have been devastated.
Most
marine animals that depend on the health of coral reefs -- about a
quarter of all marine life on Earth -- have been declared extinct or
threatened. Ocean acidity is on target to
increase by 150% of its 2010 levels by the end of the century.
For
the past five decades, humans have chosen the "business-as-usual" path
of carbon dioxide emission, and as a result, the Earth's oceans are
reeling from the greatest change in their chemistry in the last 65
million years, and it is fully man-made.
Shellfish like mussels,
shrimp and lobsters are in extremely short supply as these animals
cannot form their shells in their natural oceanic environment. The vast
majority of them are now grown in a small number of high-tech food labs,
which are expensive to maintain. As a result, market prices have
skyrocketed. With the average price of lobster reaching upwards of 900
ameros per pound, shellfish are now eaten only by the super-rich.
Combined
with the effects of overfishing, climate change, desertification and
human overpopulation, the effects of ocean acidification have
exacerbated the
rapidly growing global food crisis -- particularly the over 1 billion people around the world who rely on fish as a main part of their diet.
"Part
of the problem is education -- most humans have been unaware of the
grave environmental situation that has plunged the world into several
crises over the past fifty years," said
Professor Ned Land of the
Nautilus Underwater Ocean Observatory (NUOO), located about 300 miles west of Auckland in the Tasman Sea, via email.
Land noted a little-known
2011 Michigan State University study that found that most American college students did not grasp the scientific concept of the
carbon cycle,
one of the most important of Earth's natural cycles. As a result, Land
said, "the vast majority of Americans -- and indeed, humans in general
-- conducted their lives as if they were living in a bubble. And now,
that bubble has finally popped."
[Part of the series " Reports from 2050 ."]
Authors Website: http://momentech.blogspot.com
Authors Bio:
Reynard Loki is a New York-based artist, writer and editor. He is the environment and food editor at AlterNet.org, a progressive news website. He is also the co-founder of MomenTech, a New York-based experimental production studio whose projects exploring cosmology, post-humanism, neo-nomadism and futurism have been presented around the world, including Center for Book Arts (New York, NY); DUMBO Arts Festival (Brooklyn, NY) Eastern Bloc Center for New Media and Interdisciplinary Art (Montreal), ITCH Magazine, School of Literature, Language and Media, Wits University (Johannesburg, South Africa); 48 Stunden Neukölln Festival (Berlin); Daet New Media Festival (Philippines); 3///3 (Athens, Greece), Fotanian Open Studio (Hong Kong) and Magmart International Video Festival (Naples). Reynard is a contributing author of Biomes and Ecosystems: An Encyclopedia (Salem Press, 2013). His writing has also appeared in Salon, Truthout, Justmeans, EcoWatch, GreenBiz, Resilience.org and Social Earth.
