A Greenpeace ship flies a banner demanding "Stop climate change here" as it welcomes flights into nearby Copenhagen airport. Monday Dec. 7. 2009. (AP Photo/Nanna Kreutzmann/POLFOTO)

“Jeremy Brown, a fisherman from the Pacific Northwest, is pulling things from the ocean he says are so disturbing that he came to Washington to warn U.S. lawmakers about it.  “This is not overfishing, this is something far larger,” said Brown, one of 10 people who met with lawmakers and legislative aides this week on behalf of the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, a San Francisco-based group that advises seafood producers on fishing practices.

The group said the ocean is becoming more acidic because of carbon-dioxide emissions that are damaging coral reefs, decimating populations of tiny animals at the base of the food chain and eating away at the shells of clams, mussels and oysters.

“Every so often we snag a piece of coral on the gear,” Brown, of Bellingham, Washington, said in an interview. “It doesn’t look healthy, the color has gone out of it. The evidence is that we have instabilities in the system, and this last year was really scary.”

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of a United Nations scientific advisory panel on climate change, highlighted ocean acidification this week in remarks at the global conference on greenhouse gases in Copenhagen.

World trade in seafood products is valued at $100 billion and feeds 3 billion people, according to the fisheries partnership. That production is threatened by rising acidity, caused by the ocean absorbing more carbon from the atmosphere, and by the effects of agricultural runoff, said Mark Green, a professor of oceanography at St. Joseph’s College of Maine in Portland, who accompanied the fishermen on the trip.

The group met with Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and aides to other coastal senators during a three-day visit.

Small snails and other tiny animals at the base of the food chain are disappearing at alarming rates, jeopardizing the health of pink salmon and other fish that feed on them, said Green, who lives on Maine’s Peaks Island.

“What we see with ocean acidification, we are seeing on time scales that are far more rapid than any sort of changes we are seeing on terrestrial systems,” said Green. “People who weren’t able to agree with climate-change science will have an easier time accepting the science on acidification.”

The U.K.-based Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership reported in April that acidification has increased 30 percent since the start of the industrial revolution, a rate faster than at any time in the last 65 million years

More acidic water eats away at clam, oyster and mussel shells, said Mark Wiegardt, who raises shellfish larvae in Tillamook, Oregon, and sells them to commercial harvesters.

“The shells stop growing and the acidic water literally dissolves the calcium of the shells,” Wiegardt said.

Wiegardt said he has seen an 80 percent cut in production in [...]

Umbria Veloce: ritratti e autoritratti futuristi

December 12, 2009 – February 7, 2010
*Vernissage, Dec. 12th – 5:30pm
Palazzo della Penna – Perugia

Related events include Futurist Cooking Lessons on Feb. 5. 2010!

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Climate change migrants-- Sculptures in Copenhagen

Sea level is rising along US Atlantic coast, say Penn environmental scientists

An international team of environmental scientists led by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that sea-level rise along the Atlantic Coast of the United States was 2 millimetres faster in the 20th century than at any time in the past 4,000 years.

Sea-level rise prior to the 20th century is attributed to coastal subsidence. Put simply, land is being lost to subsidence as the earth continues to rise in response to the removal of the huge weight of ice sheets during the last glacial period. Using sediment cores from the U.S. Atlantic coast, researchers found significant spatial variations in land movement, with the mid-Atlantic coastlines of New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland subsiding twice as much as areas to the north and south. Coastal subsidence enhances sea-level rise, which leads to shoreline erosion and loss of wetlands and threatens coastal populations.

Researchers corrected relative sea-level data from tide gauges using the coastal-subsidence values. Results clearly show that the 20th-century rate of sea-level rise is 2 millimetres higher than the background rate of the past 4,000 years. Furthermore, the magnitude of the sea-level rise increases in a southerly direction from Maine to South Carolina. This is the first demonstrated evidence of this phenomenon from observational data alone. Researchers believe this may be related to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and ocean thermal expansion.

‘There is universal agreement that sea level will rise as a result of global warming but by how much, when and where it will have the most effect is unclear,’ said Ben Horton, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at Penn. ‘Such information is vital to governments, commerce and the general public. An essential prerequisite for accurate prediction is understanding how sea level has responded to past climate changes and how these were influenced by geological events such as land movements.’

The study provides the first accurate dataset for sea-level rise for the U.S. Atlantic coast, identifying regional differences that arise from variations in subsidence and demonstrate the possible effects of ice-sheet melting and thermal expansion for sea level rise.

Source:
Science Centric | 12 December 2009