Barbara Boxer's global hot seat
Sen. Barbara Boxer, who takes over as chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has promised that combatting climate change will be her top priority. While Congress will likely move "incrementally," she vows that there will be a "sea change" in how the committee addresses environmental issues.
Boxer and other committee members might look no further than the sea for a sense of just how far beyond a certain "tipping point" climate change has already taken us.
According to a New Yorker article entitled 'The Darkening Sea,' nearly half of all the carbon dioxide that humans have emitted since the start of the nineteenth century has been absorbed by the sea -- which covers 70 percent of the earth.
That has led to a 30% increase in what is called 'ocean acidification' -- a term coined by two Lawrence Livermore Lab scientists -- which will only increase as we continue to dump billions of tons of carbon into the oceans every year, resulting in a process that cannot be reversed, according to scientists quoted in the article.
How is marine life dealing with what is threatening to become one gigantic, global bath of acid? Well, for one thing, the calcium-containing shells of pteropods, part of the zooplankton family, are dissolving."I think there's a whole category of organisms that have been around for hundreds of millions of years which are at risk of extinction -- namely, things that build calcium-carbonate shells or skeletons," says one of the Livermore scientists, Ken Caldeira.
So, what can be done about it?
According to a New Yorker article entitled 'The Darkening Sea,' nearly half of all the carbon dioxide that humans have emitted since the start of the nineteenth century has been absorbed by the sea -- which covers 70 percent of the earth.
That has led to a 30% increase in what is called 'ocean acidification' -- a term coined by two Lawrence Livermore Lab scientists -- which will only increase as we continue to dump billions of tons of carbon into the oceans every year, resulting in a process that cannot be reversed, according to scientists quoted in the article.
How is marine life dealing with what is threatening to become one gigantic, global bath of acid? Well, for one thing, the calcium-containing shells of pteropods, part of the zooplankton family, are dissolving."I think there's a whole category of organisms that have been around for hundreds of millions of years which are at risk of extinction -- namely, things that build calcium-carbonate shells or skeletons," says one of the Livermore scientists, Ken Caldeira.
So, what can be done about it?
"To a first approximation, if we cut our emissions in half it will take us twice as long to create the damage. But we'll get to more or less the same place. We really need an order-of-magnitude reduction in order to avoid it."
And that's just what planktos ecorestoration projects will provide!
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