Come Hell and High Water: Last Call for a Living Ocean

The siege upon the ocean is now in its final convulsion. Nearly all marine species are enduring man-made forces that are outpacing their ability to reproduce and adapt to a deteriorating environment. Overfishing, dumping pollutants, rising sea levels and temperatures, dissolving reefs and shelled organisms by spewing ever more CO2... all besiege the ocean. The assault on terrestrial species and habitat, as bad as it is, pales in comparison.

Rio+20, the U.N. summit meeting supposedly guiding sustainable development and Earth's environmental future, began June 20, 2012 with a terribly watered-down draft statement, titled "The Future We Want." Representing 190 nations, the great majority of delegates were instead protecting their governments' shortsighted monetary interests rather than addressing the reality of an imperiled planet, which included the glaring omission of a clear mandate to end the unabated decimation of the ocean.

Now is not the time for toothless proclamations from summits like the charade taking place in Rio de Janeiro. The International Energy Agency, the world's foremost authority on energy economics, issued a no-nonsense deadline in their annual World Energy Outlook in November of 2011. They revealed that Earth would lock-in runaway feedback processes by 2017 if fossil fuel use continued to increase. While lifestyle choice depends on using more fossil fuel, life depends on using less. It's too late for piecemeal solutions. We have just five crucial years to level out on fossil fuel extraction and emissions while halting the degradation of vital greenhouse gas reservoirs: the soil, tundra, forests and ocean.

In early 2011, marine scientists at the International Program on the State of the Ocean, working with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, examined the ocean's condition regarding the combined impact of climate chaos, acidification and overfishing. They concluded that the ocean would soon approach catastrophic, potentially irreversible change. The consequence is unequivocal: "If the ocean continues to decline, it will reach a point where it can no longer function effectively and our planet will be unable to sustain the ecosystems that support humankind."

Without exaggeration, a ruined ocean rivals a massive asteroid strike in orders of magnitude. As the ocean is essential to maintain Earth's life-support systems, this unfolding disaster will severely impact life on land as well. Sixty-five million years ago, Earth's 5th mass extinction event destroyed 85% of all life when an asteroid slammed into the Yucatan peninsula. This time around, we are the asteroid.
Tragically, despite decades of increasingly dire warnings from the world's leading organizations on climate and earth science, no significant action is underway. The perpetual growth myth and willful ignorance remain the status quo, even though our own survival is clearly at stake. The answer lies within our capacity to foresee and forestall. Unlike an asteroid, we possess a precious gift: the ability to alter course.
While dangerous acidity and greenhouse gas levels are already embedded in Earth's ecosystems, overfishing is a major stressor that can be readily eliminated. We can rapidly downscale fishing pressure and expand marine protected areas (MPAs). Government subsidies for fishing fleets must cease, while only science-based management should govern legislation on the proper use of the seas. Navies and coastal patrols can enforce a new generation of strict maritime laws in a global campaign to seize all illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing vessels.
Artisanal boats can strive to achieve sustainability by monitoring their catches through local consensus and by using selective methods such as handline fishing. Conversely, most far-ranging nomadic ships are indiscriminately pillaging the seas with mechanized efficiency, such as netting entire schools that gather beneath fish aggregating devices (FADs). Using equipment such as longlines, trawls, purse seines and driftnets, these vessels are ultimately producing famine rather than nourishment. After an area is fished-out, they simply move on to ravage yet another fishery. All IUU ships should be recognized as weapons of mass destruction in an on-going attack and acted upon in terms of disarmament. Confiscated vessels can be refitted for benign use, cut up for scrap or sunk. After decontamination, sunken ships can provide replenishment as new habitat.

People are a part of nature, its domination is an ingrained conceit we can no longer indulge. All the rhetoric about marine preservation is ultimately about one single goal: to curtail economic ruthlessness to ensure the ocean's vitality for the sake of its inhabitants and, in return, a habitable world. Once the consequence of unsustainable exploitation is fully realized, that greed-driven practices will devastate young and future generations, reason and integrity can spur both individual lifestyle change and collective systemic change. As for the latter, governments can be compelled to act, but only with a growing public involvement demanding an all-out offensive to end the ocean's destruction.

Saving the ocean is nothing less than an absolute necessity...humankind's most immediate and profound planetary challenge. The seas can still possibly rebound, but only if the carnage is reversed with a surge of action based on precaution, protection and restoration. When those we love face immanent danger, we'll use all means necessary to defend them. By extension, we must be equally determined to defend the life of an ocean which sustains all we love.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Top Predators Key to Extinctions as Planet Warms

Global warming may cause more extinctions than predicted if scientists fail to account for interactions among species in their models, Yale and UConn researchers argue in Science.

"Currently, most models predicting the effects of climate change treat species separately and focus only on climatic and environmental drivers," said Phoebe Zarnetske, the study's primary author and a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. "But we know that species don't exist in a vacuum. They interact with each other in ways that deeply affect their viability."

Zarnetske said the complexity of "species interaction networks" discourages their inclusion in models predicting the effects of climate change. Using the single-species, or "climate envelope," approach, researchers have predicted that 15 percent to 37 percent of species will be faced with extinction by 2050.
But research has shown that top consumers -- predators and herbivores -- have an especially strong effect on many other species. In a warming world, these species are "biotic multipliers," increasing the extinction risk and altering the ranges of many other species in the food web.

"Climate change is likely to have strong effects on top consumers. As a result, these effects can ripple through an entire food web, multiplying extinction risks along the way," said Dave Skelly, a co-author of the study and professor of ecology at Yale.

The paper argues that focusing on these biotic multipliers and their interactions with other species is a promising way to improve predictions of the effects of climate change, and recent studies support this idea. On Isle Royale, an island in Lake Superior, rising winter temperatures and a disease outbreak caused wolf populations to decline and the number of moose to surge, leading to a decline in balsam fir trees. Studies in the rocky intertidal of the North American Pacific Coast show that higher temperatures altered the ranges of mussel species and their interaction with sea stars, their top predators, resulting in lower species diversity. And in Arctic Greenland, studies show that without caribou and muskoxen as top herbivores, higher temperatures can lead to decreased diversity in tundra plants and, in turn, affect many other species dependent on them.

"Species interactions are necessary for life on Earth. We rely on fisheries, timber, agriculture, medicine and a variety of other ecosystem services that result from intact species interactions," said Zarnetske. "Humans have already altered these important species interactions, and climate change is predicted to alter them further. Incorporating these interactions into models is crucial to informed management decisions that protect biodiversity and the services it provides."

Multispecies models with species interactions, according to the paper, would enable tracking of the biotic multipliers by following how changes in the abundance of target species, such as top consumers, alter the composition of communities of species. But there needs to be more data.

"Collecting this type of high-resolution biodiversity data will not be easy. However, insights from such data could provide us with the ability to predict and thus avoid some of the negative effects of climate change on biodiversity," said Mark Urban, a co-author and an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com