Humanosity says..we have looked at the state of the oceans before and sadly there is little hope on the horizon. We are fast turning our oceans into deserts and the consequences will be huge. Check out our special report which looked at the impact of overfishing in West Africa.
The latest report from the UN paints an alarming picture of the state of health of the oceans. Our seas are warming up, becoming more acidic, rising and losing their capacity to hold oxygen. The report is the result of work done by over 100 scientists from 36 nations who cite the results of some 6,900 studies.
The report’s authors believe we need to take notice because the ocean is the true reflection of what climate change is doing to the planet.
“Over 90% of heat from global warming is warming the oceans,” said Josh Willis, a NASA oceanographer, “Global warming is really ocean warming,”
For anyone inhabiting the planet in the coming decades and centuries, this means increased sea level rise and warming, among other effects. The problem will get worse, but humanity still can limit the consequences, specifically by radically curbing carbon emissions.
(Reminder: Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions are now skyrocketing. CO2 levels haven’t been this high in at least 800,000 years — though more likely millions of years. What’s more, carbon levels are now rising at rates that are unprecedented in both the geologic and historic record.)
“Even with aggressive [carbon] mitigation efforts, we’re still going to have to deal with consequences of an ecosystem and an environment that has changed,” noted Jeremy Mathis, a longtime Arctic researcher and a current board director at the National Academies of Sciences. Mathis had no involvement with the U.N. IPCC report.
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