Rolling Stone - Jeff Goodell
The ocean is undergoing unprecedented changes. What does it mean for marine life, the planet, and us?
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A giant kelp forest off Santa Barbara Island. Dave Fleetham/Newscom
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The blob went unnoticed at
first. In the summer of 2013, a high-pressure ridge settled over a
Texas-size area in the northern Pacific, pushing the sky down over the
ocean like an invisible lid. The winds died down, and the water became
weirdly calm. Without waves and wind to break up the surface and
dissipate heat, warmth from the sun accumulated in the water, eventually
raising the temperature by 5 degrees Fahrenheit — a huge spike for the
ocean.
When scientists noticed this temperature anomaly in the
satellite data, they had never seen anything like it. Everyone knew
about heat waves on land, but in the ocean? “As the Earth heats up, the
ocean is changing in very dramatic ways,” says Jane Lubchenco, a marine
ecologist and former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. “It is less predictable, and we are seeing more
surprises. The heat waves are one of those surprises.”
Nick Bond, a climatologist at the University of
Washington, nicknamed the Pacific heat wave “the Blob,” after a campy
1958 sci-fi movie about a gelatinous monster that arrives on Earth in a
meteor and eats up a small town. But this Blob would turn out to be far
more deadly than anything Hollywood imagined.
The hot water killed
the phytoplankton — a form of microscopic algae — that live in the top
few hundred feet of the ocean. The tiny organisms that feast on them
starved, including krill, the small shrimplike creatures that swarm the
ocean by the billions and are the preferred food for whales, salmon,
seabirds, and many other creatures. The population of herring and
sardines, an important food source for many larger fish and marine
mammals, also declined. By killing phytoplankton, the Blob disrupted the
entire Pacific food chain.
Over the next two years, it
drifted down the coast of Alaska to California, eventually responsible
for thousands of whale and sea lion strandings on beaches along the
coast; the collapse of the Alaska cod fishery; the bankruptcy of
fishermen and worker layoffs at fish-processing plants; the vanishing of
great kelp forests on the Pacific coast; and the starvation and death
of a billion seabirds — the largest single mass mortality of seabirds
ever recorded. Dead murres littered beaches like washed-up plastic
bottles.
And its destruction was not limited to the ocean: The Blob
changed the weather on the Pacific coast, pushing heat inland and
altering rainfall patterns, contributing to the California drought. “It
raised temperatures on the coast all the way from British Columbia down
to Southern California,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.
The big question is how much the Blob accelerated wildfires; 2017-18
saw historic blazes, including the Camp Fire in Northern California, the
largest in the state’s history, which burned more than 150,000 acres
and killed at least 85 people. Swain says the Blob increased nighttime
temperatures in the western third of the state, where many of the
wildfires flared. “Firefighters will tell you that’s really important,
because wildfires often lie down at night, burning more slowly and
behaving less erratically, becoming less dangerous to approach for human
crews. While the Blob was off the coast, that didn’t happen.”
All in all, the Blob was a slow-rolling climate
catastrophe. It’s also compelling evidence of how tightly all life on
Earth is linked to the ocean. Because we live on land, we often think of
the climate crisis as a terrestrial event. But as the planet heats up,
it’s what happens in the ocean that will have the biggest impact on our
future.
Earth was not born with
an ocean. Water arrived here from the cold depths of space with icy
asteroids and comets, which bombarded the planet during the first few
million years of its existence. It’s been a watery world ever since.
Today, 97 percent of the Earth’s water is in the ocean, which covers
more than 70 percent of the planet. The ocean was the petri dish for the
creation of life, and we carry that early history within us. The salt
content of our blood plasma is similar to the salt content of seawater.
“The bones we use to hear with were once gill bones of sharks,” says
Neil Shubin, professor of anatomy at the University of Chicago and
author of
Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body. “Our hands are modified fish fins, and the genes that build our basic body architecture are shared with worms and fish.”
Despite our intimate connection to the sea, for most of
human history the ocean has been as strange to us as a distant planet, a
realm of monsters and mayhem. Humans stuck close to the shore, mostly,
and our ignorance about the ocean was profound. It still is. Scientists
have only a vague understanding of exactly how ocean currents are
driven, or how ocean temperatures impact cloud formation, or what
creatures thrive in the depths. Far more people have been to the moon,
which is 240,000 miles above us, than have been to the deepest part of
the ocean, which is seven miles down. Eighty percent of the ocean
remains unmapped, unobserved, unexplored. Marine biologists don’t know
how sharks sleep or an octopus learns to open a jar.
But scientists know enough to know that the ocean is in
trouble. Largely because of overfishing, 90 percent of the large fish
that were here in the 1950s are now gone. One metric ton of plastic
enters the ocean every four seconds (at this rate, there will be more
plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050). But the biggest problem, thanks
largely to our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels, is that the ocean
is heating up fast. The past five years have been the five warmest ever
measured in the ocean, with 2019 the hottest ever. According to one
study, the amount of heat being added to the ocean is equivalent to
every person on the planet running 100 microwave ovens all day and
night.
Until now, the ocean has been the hero of the
climate crisis — about 90 percent of the additional heat we’ve trapped
from burning fossil fuels has been absorbed by it. “Without the ocean,
the atmosphere would be a lot hotter than it already is,” says Ken
Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in
Palo Alto. But the heat the ocean absorbed has not magically vanished —
it’s just stored in the depths and radiated out later. By absorbing and
slowly releasing heat, the ocean reduces the volatility of our climate,
cushioning the highs and lows as temperatures change from day to night,
winter to summer. It also means the heat will continue to seep out for
centuries to come, slowing any human efforts to cool the planet.
“The ocean is the main driver of our climate system,”
Hans-Otto Pörtner, a scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar
and Marine Research in Germany, tells me. One of the central functions
of the ocean, Pörtner says, is to redistribute heat from the tropics
toward the poles via deep currents like the Gulf Stream system, which
begins in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica, flows across the equator,
up to the Arctic and back again. “Even small changes in that system can
have large impacts on things like the size and intensity of storms,
rainfall patterns, sea-level rise,” says Pörtner, “and of course the
habitats of all the creatures that live in the ocean.”
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A dead whale in Pacifica, California, 2015, amid an ocean heat wave that disrupted the food chain in the Pacific. Photo credit: Bruce Gifford/Getty Images
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The ocean is also one of the main drivers of many regional
economies. In Alaska, one of the fastest-changing parts of the planet,
the seafood industry employs more than 50,000 workers, earning $2
billion in total annual income. Across the U.S., fishing, ocean farming,
shipping, ocean tourism and recreation support 3.25 million jobs and
contribute about $300 billion to the U.S.’s annual gross domestic
product. No one thinks this blue economy is going to vanish overnight,
but as fish and other species migrate to cool waters or die off from
temperature changes, there can be profound impacts on local fisheries —
just ask the cod fishermen in Alaska, or shrimpers in the Gulf of Maine,
who have been wiped out by rapidly warming waters in the Atlantic.
Pörtner
is one of the lead authors of a recent report on the ocean and
cryosphere by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was the
IPCC’s first report to focus specifically on the world’s oceans and ice —
it was a massive project, the work of 105 scientists over a three-year
period. There is a lot of nuance in the report, but the basic message is
clear: In the coming decades, the ocean will get hotter, more acidic,
with less oxygen and less biodiversity. Seas will rise, flooding coastal
cities. Ocean circulation patterns will shift, driving big and
unpredictable changes in the weather, with scary implications for the
global food supply. The report’s summary was blunt: “Over the 21st
century, the ocean is projected to transition to unprecedented
conditions.”
Monterey Bay is
a crescent on the Northern California coast, a place haunted by the ghosts of John Steinbeck’s
Cannery Row.
The old sardine canneries are now T-shirt shops and touristy
restaurants. From the pier, you can watch sea otters playing in the surf
and, if you’re lucky, whales breeching just offshore. A deep canyon
delivers cold, nutrient-rich waters into the bay, creating one of the
most diverse ecosystems in the Pacific, including giant kelp beds that
grow along the coast all the way up to Alaska. In good times, these kelp
beds are teeming with life — otters, seals, sharks, rockfish, lingcod.
“The kelp beds are the rainforests of the Pacific,” Kyle Van Houtan, the
chief scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, tells me.
But like everything in the ocean, the kelp beds are
changing fast. On a recent Saturday morning, I pulled on scuba gear and
jumped in the water near Monterey to have a look for myself. What I saw
was not the rainforest of the Pacific. Instead, I was greeted with
nothing but rock and water and hundreds of purple sea urchins, their
thorny spikes like medieval armor. A voracious horde had invaded the
once-magnificent kelp forest and devoured everything (“purple urchins
are the cockroaches of the sea,” one scientist told me), leaving only
some empty abalone shells, a rockfish poking around, and a few pathetic
kelp stipes. And this spot is just one fragment of a bigger picture. As a
result of the Blob, many of the kelp forests along the coast from
California to Oregon have vanished, done in by warming and the army of
purple sea urchins, which thrive in a hotter world.
“If
a 200-mile-long stretch of forest in the California mountains suddenly
died, people would be shocked and outraged,” says Laura Rogers-Bennett, a
marine scientist at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, who
works at the Bodega Marine Lab just up the coast. “We’re talking about
the collapse of an entire ecosystem. But because it happened in the
ocean, nobody notices.”
Rogers-Bennett was one of the first scientists to
understand the impact of marine heat waves like the Blob. In 2013, she
was diving in Northern California when she saw a sea star that looked
like it was melting. “When I touched it, its skin came off in my hand,”
she recalls. And it wasn’t just one sea star, she discovered. This was
the beginning of a mass die-off of 20 species of sea stars in the
Pacific from a condition known as “sea star wasting disease,” which is
linked to warming waters. With the loss of sea stars, which are one of
the main predators of purple sea urchins, the urchin population exploded
and devoured the kelp forests. “It’s very scary,” Rogers-Bennett says.
“The Blob shows you how fast a tipping point can happen.”
In the past decade, scientists have detected marine heat waves around the world: The Medi
terranean was hit in 2012, 2015, and 2017. In 2018, a marine heat wave appeared off the coast of New Zealand
and helped spike land temperatures to record highs. Along the coast of
Tasmania, giant kelp once stretched over 9 million square meters. Today,
thanks to warmer water and an invasion of urchins, the kelp covers
fewer than 500,000 meters. Off the Uruguayan coast, a blob of hot water
covers 130,000 square miles of ocean, an area nearly twice as big as
Uruguay itself. It has caused a massive die-off of clams and mussels, an
important food source for tens of thousands of people who live on the
coast. “Last fall, another heat wave started building in the northern
Pacific,” says Andrew Leising, a scientist at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries
Science Center. “It couldn’t come at a worse time — the fisheries are
just beginning to recover from the Blob.”
Marine heat waves are driving a massive reorganization of
underwater life, with many creatures migrating to cooler waters. “Right
now, you can go diving off the Monterey pier and see spiny lobsters,”
says Van Houtan. “They are a subtropical species that are normally found
down in Baja. It’s absurd to see them up here.” (Attention swimmers:
Van Houtan also says warmer waters are encouraging juvenile great white
sharks to linger in the area). At the Bodega Marine Lab, scientists
documented 37 species that had never been found so far north before.
Bull sharks have been hanging off the coast of North Carolina, 500 miles
north of their habitat in Florida. Lobsters have all but vanished from
Long Island Sound. These migrations are radically changing underwater
ecosystems, as well as the lives of people who depend on healthy
fisheries. A recent study by scientists at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, showed that nations in the tropics would be hit hardest
by fish migration. By 2100, some countries in northwest Africa could
lose half their stocks as fish move to colder water. “If you know you
are losing a stock, then the short-term incentive is to overfish it,”
said James Salzman, a professor of environmental law at UC Santa Barbara
and co-author of the study. “What have you got to lose? The stock’s
going to move anyway.”
Marine heat waves are also
inflicting massive damage on coral reefs (where they are often called
“bleaching events”). Reefs are the most bio-diverse ecosystems on the
planet — they occupy less than one percent of the ocean floor, but are
home to more than 25 percent of marine life. Reefs are created by
millions of coral colonies that build calcium carbonate skeletons. For
the past 100 million years or so, corals have thrived in a happy
marriage with microscopic plants called zooxanthellae that live embedded
in their tissues. Zooxanthellae produce 85 to 95 percent of corals’
food through photosynthesis. In return, corals give the plants
protection, nutrients, and carbon dioxide, one of the ingredients for
photosynthetic food production. This marriage, however, is exquisitely
sensitive to changes in ocean temperature. One or two degrees of
warming, and the zooxanthellae become toxic to the corals. The corals
spit them out like an abusive spouse and eventually starve to death,
leaving only their bleached skeletons behind.
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a UNESCO World Heritage
site and one of the crown jewels of the natural world, has been hit hard
by warming. The reef stretches about 1,400 miles along the east coast
of Australia — it’s the largest structure built by living organisms on
the planet, so big it’s visible from space. Since 1998, the Great
Barrier Reef has suffered four bleaching events, including devastating
back-to-back heat waves in 2016 and 2017. Further bleaching in 2020 has
scientists worried it will be a near-annual event. According to Terry
Hughes, a marine scientist at James Cook University in Queensland,
Australia, 93 percent of the corals in the Great Barrier Reef have been
impacted by some level of bleaching. “We’ve now added enough greenhouse
gases to the atmosphere that mass bleaching of the reef is at risk every
summer,” Hughes says. “It’s like Russian roulette.”
If you look at a few drops
of ocean water under a microscope, you’ll see a wild world of
bizarre-looking creatures swimming around, fighting and devouring each
other. Many of these animals — forams, pteropods — have thin shells made
of calcium carbonate. And thanks to the rising acidity of ocean waters,
their shells — like the shells and skeletons of many other creatures in
the sea — are slowly dissolving.
Acidification is primarily a
consequence of rapidly rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The IPCC
report notes that carbon pollution so far has decreased the average
ocean pH, which is based on a logarithmic scale, from 8.2 to 8.1,
meaning the ocean is 25 percent more acidic today than before the
Industrial Revolution. If we manage to hold global warming to 2 C, we
could limit ocean acidification to 40 percent by 2100. But in a
high-emissions scenario, the ocean could become 150 percent more acidic
than it was before we began burning fossil fuels. In effect, we’re
running a giant chemistry experiment in the ocean, and nobody has a
clear understanding of how it will turn out.
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Purple sea urchins — the “cockroaches of the sea” — thrive in a hotter world, and they devour giant kelp forests. Photo courtesy of Katie Sowul/California Department of Fish and Wildlife/UC Davis
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The increasingly acidic waters in the Pacific are already
impacting the shells of Dungeness crabs, jeopardizing the $200 million
crabbing industry on the West Coast. To prevent the acidic waters from
dissolving those shells, oyster farmers in Oregon and Washington have to
raise baby oysters in incubators before planting them on the beach to
grow to adulthood.
In lab experiments, scientists have found acidification
can do strange things to a fish’s mind. Clown fish, for example,
normally stay close to home in coral reefs. But as the water becomes
increasingly acidic, they wander farther and farther away, making them
more likely to be eaten. Greater acidity also “impairs their ability to
discriminate between the smell of kin and not, and of predators and
not,” according to Philip Munday, a professor at the Coral Reef Studies
center at James Cook University in Australia.
Over time, the biggest threat from acidification is the
impact it could have on the food chain. Pteropods, a.k.a. “the potato
chips of the sea,” are a food source for everything from seabirds to
whales. Their thin shells are extremely sensitive to changes in ocean
pH. A collapse of the pteropod population would have a domino effect on
the entire ocean food chain, especially in the Southern Ocean.
On coral reefs, most of which are already weakened by
bleaching events, acidification attacks the calcium skeletons that they
build to support themselves. “By midcentury, pretty much every reef in
the world will be eroding away,” says Caldeira. That’s astonishing.
Coral reefs have been around for about 250 million years, evolving into
some of the most complex, diverse, and beautiful living structures on
Earth. And yet if nothing changes, within 40 or 50 years, they will be
crumbling ruins. “I think if we stopped emitting C02 tomorrow, some
reefs would probably survive,” Caldeira says. “But if we go on a few
more decades, I think the reefs are gone. Over geological time scales,
they will come back, depending how long it takes the ocean chemistry to
recover. But it’s likely to be at least 10,000 years before anyone sees a
reef again.”
Sea-level rise
is driven by a number of physical processes, including the fact that as
the ocean warms, its water expands. And even though scientists often
talk about “global” sea-level rise as if the ocean were one big bathtub,
there is actually considerable local variation due to changes in the
tug of gravity from melting ice sheets and the rising or sinking of land
along the shore.
But for the future of -coastal cities, what really
matters are two things: the rate of carbon emissions in the coming
decades, and how sensitive the big ice sheets in Greenland and
Antarctica are to the warming from those emissions. Greenland holds
enough ice to raise sea levels about 22 feet; Antarctica holds enough to
raise them more than 200 feet. According to the IPCC report, the ice
sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are now contributing 700 percent more
to sea levels than two decades ago. In both cases, the ice melt is
being driven largely by the warming of the ocean.
On a research expedition I took to Antarctica last year with British and U.S. scientists aboard the
Nathaniel B. Palmer,
the big question scientists were trying to answer was how much warm
circumpolar deep water was upwelling onto the continental shelf and how
much of that warm water was getting beneath the West Antarctic Ice
Sheet, melting it from below. “The ocean holds the key,” one scientist
told me. “To understand what is happening in West Antarctica, you have
to understand what is happening in the Southern Ocean.”
The more scientists learn about ocean and ice-sheet
dynamics, the more concerned they get. The latest IPCC assessment puts
the range of sea-level rise by 2100 at two feet in a low-emissions
scenario, or up to 3.6 feet in a high-emissions scenario, which is about
10 percent higher than predicted in the last IPCC report, in 2018. But
this is, as Pörtner tells me, “a conservative number. We are basing it
on what we know, not on processes that we think could happen.”
In fact, virtually every scientist I know who studies
sea-level rise thinks the risk is understated, even if they don’t yet
have enough data or sophisticated-enough climate models to say by how
much. As Richard Alley, a geophysicist at Penn State and one of the most
respected ice scientists in the world, recently argued: “It could be
two feet of sea-level rise, it could be 15 or 20 feet [by the end of the
century]. There is no good to offset the bad. And the chances of
something really bad are really there.”
In West
Antarctica, the ice sheet is particularly vulnerable to melting from
below, due to its contact with ocean water on the edge of the continent
and because the ground beneath the ice sheet is a reverse slope — warm
ocean water could run down the slope and penetrate deep underneath the
glacier, which could begin a cascading collapse in which enormous sheets
of ice begin falling into the sea like a giant pile of ice cubes. A big
concern is how much warm circumpolar deep water is upwelling near
Thwaites glacier, a chunk of ice the size of Florida that is basically
the cork in the bottle for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. If it goes, the
rest of the glaciers behind it could collapse quickly, raising sea
levels more than 10 feet. How fast could this happen? No one knows for
sure.
In Antarctica, small changes in ocean temperature have big
implications. A change of even one or two degrees in the waters that
wash up against the base of the glaciers could cause the ice to melt.
“Before our trip last year, I think I was already convinced that
extensive retreat of Thwaites is almost inevitable,” Robert Larter, a
marine geophysicist and the chief scientist on my trip to Antarctica,
told me. “But the more research results I see from our trip and others,
the more certain I become.”
Sea-level rise is not the only potential consequence of
melting glaciers. Thirty years ago, Wallace Broecker, a pioneering
climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory, saw a very different climate catastrophe developing in the
North Atlantic. Broecker understood that as the Greenland Ice Sheet
melted, it would dump huge volumes of fresh water into the North
Atlantic. This would interfere with circulation of the Gulf Stream
system, which depends on the sinking of dense, salty water in the
Atlantic to drive the great deepwater current that circulates warm water
from the tropics up to the North Atlantic.
“The Gulf Stream system is
why the East Coast of the U.S. is much colder than the western coast of
Europe,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam
Institute for Climate Research in Germany. “If the Gulf system were to
slow down or stop, it would have a major impact on the weather of the
Northern Hemisphere.” Broecker (who died in 2019) hypothesized that the
shutdown of the system could plunge Northern Europe into a reign of snow
and ice — which is more or less the scenario that plays out in
The Day After Tomorrow, a cheesy 2003 disaster flick.
“The
Hollywood scenario is not going to happen,” says Rahmstorf. In his
view, the shutdown of the Gulf system is a decades- and century-scale
risk, not an overnight event. But the Gulf Stream doesn’t have to
collapse to wreak havoc. The IPCC report noted that the Gulf Stream
system slowed down 15 percent in the 20th century. In the coming years,
the report says, it will likely continue to weaken, intensifying storms
and bringing frigid weather to Northern Europe, as well as shifting the
path of the West African monsoon season, which 300 million people in one
of the poorest, most climate-vulnerable areas depend on to grow food.
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A healthy reef in Palmyra Atoll. “By midcentury, pretty much every reef will be eroding,” says one scientist. Photo credit: Kydd Pollack/ARC Centre of Excellence For Coral Reef Studies
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Nature is change. But
humans have stomped on the accelerator. We are dumping carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere about 10 times faster than volcanoes did 250 million
years ago, which cooked the planet, triggering the End-Permian
extinction that wiped out 96 percent of the species on Earth and turned
the ocean into a lifeless, slimy Jacuzzi. “No one knows where our modern
experiment with geochemistry will lead,” writes Peter Brannen in
The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions, “but in the End-Permian, massive injections of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere led straight to the cemetery.”
Despite all the massive climate impacts that are
transforming the ocean now, it’s a long way from dead. “If we stopped
putting carbon in the atmosphere today, most of the species in the ocean
would bounce back,” says Caldeira. “It might take some time, but they
will make it back.” Unfortunately, we are not going to stop putting
carbon into the atmosphere today. And it’s less clear that, even if we
did, we could stabilize the ice sheets. But we can certainly reduce the
risk of catastrophic collapse.
Tragic images of sea turtles wrapped in fishing lines and
dead whales on the beach with hundreds of plastic shopping bags in their
stomachs have helped people connect the dots between what they buy at
Target and what happens in the ocean. As a Democratic presidential
candidate, Elizabeth Warren championed “the Blue New Deal,” which
addresses everything from streamlined permitting for new offshore wind
farms to climate-smart management of wild fisheries. Globally, there is a
big push by scientists and conservationists for a U.N. treaty that
would protect 30 percent of the world’s ocean from human activity by
2030 (right now, only about two percent is protected). The rise of
aquaculture gives hope that, if it’s done intelligently, the ocean can
become a steady source of low-carbon, high-protein food.
Matthew
Moretti, the 36-year-old CEO of Bangs Island Mussels in Portland, Maine,
grows 300,000 pounds of mussels and 100,000 pounds of kelp each year on
seven acres of ocean. Mussels, which grow on fuzzy ropes that hang down
from the company’s rafts in Casco Bay, filter the water, removing
nitrogen and carbon. Kelp, a highly nutritious food that is increasingly
popular in everything from pickled salads to animal feed, grows nearby,
sucking up carbon and de-acidifying the water around the mussels.
“Aquaculture is hope,” says Moretti. “I see so much potential to do a
lot of good, to produce a lot of food for a lot of hungry people. We can
adapt to changes. As the water warms, we can move. As the ocean
chemistry changes, we can change our practices. Ocean farming will
produce the seafood of the future, and it’s starting now.”
Former
NOAA director Jane Lubchenco says it’s time to stop thinking of the
ocean as a victim of climate change and start thinking of it as a
powerful part of the solution. A recent study that Lubchenco co-authored
suggests that by developing renewable energy from the ocean, including
tidal power and offshore wind farms, as well as eating more fish and
less red meat and substituting kelp for traditional feeds for farm
animals, as much as one-fifth of the carbon-emission reductions needed
to hit the 1.5 C target could be found in the ocean.
To Lubchenco, we
have spent far too long focused on the problems and not enough on the
solutions. “For the last few decades, the narrative about the ocean is
that it’s too big to fix,” says Lubchenco. “Coral bleaching, gross
plastic pollution, ocean acidification, heat waves, collapsing
fisheries. It’s been one disaster after another. But now a new narrative
is beginning to emerge, one that recognizes how central the oceans are
to mitigating climate change, to adapting to climate change, to
providing food security, to so many things that we care about. The new
narrative is far more hopeful, and it says the ocean is too big to
ignore.”
But we are in a race against time. Every ton of coal and
every barrel of oil we burn heats up the atmosphere a little bit more,
and that heat makes its way into the ocean, changing currents in nearly
imperceptible ways, bringing new droughts and storms, shifting rainfall
patterns, melting ice, eroding coral reefs, spawning toxic algae blooms,
and moving the ocean a little closer to a world dominated by jellyfish
and slime. “The future of the ocean,” says marine biologist and ocean
activist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, “is in our hands.”
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