Jorge Sarmiento: We don’t know yet what will happen, but one of the speculations is that global warming is going to tend to push the ocean towards new directions.
That’s Jorge Sarmiento, professor of geosciences at Princeton, talking about a major shift in ocean life. He spoke of a 10-year satellite record of ocean color used to study microscopic sea plants called phytoplankton.
Jorge Sarmiento: And we’ve been examining this record trying to look for patterns in it that could help us to understand how the biology in the ocean – as the world warms – might respond to this global warming, to the changes that will occur.
Phytoplankton live on the ocean surface, where fewer nutrients are available as water warms according to research by Sarmiento conducted in the tropics. He said that climate models indicate slightly less phytoplankton in the ocean overall by the year 2100. But because the tiny plants form the base of the ocean food chain, even a small change can have a big impact on ocean life.
Jorge Sarmiento: I suspect that the kinds of ecosystem changes or ocean biology changes that are going to have the biggest impact on human beings are going to be more like things that happen on the west coast, for example, the huge change in salmon fisheries that occurs, shifting between the Northwest United States and up farther north in Canada and Alaska where one fishery can go up while the other goes down.
Satellite data on ocean color data were used to estimate chlorophyll-a, a pigment contained in phytoplankton. The depth of the mixed layer was determined from an ocean-atmosphere model. Sarmiento and colleagues intend to keep studying how year-to-year changes in climate affect ocean biology.
Our thanks today to NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Our thanks to:
Jorge Sarmiento
Professor of Geosciences
Director, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program
Princeton University
Sir,
Will the aquatic animals adapt to the rise in temperature and evolve accordingly in the future?
Sarang,
Every aspect of nature is constantly evolving.
Well, this was inevitable, when you think about it.
No bail-out from global warming………..
http://www.oregonlive.com/commentary/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/editorial/1224199517206370.xml&coll=7
There’s no bailout for the next crisis
Monday, October 20, 2008 The Oregonian
The recent haggling over how to solve the nation’s economic crisis seems to have done little to ease the anxieties of either Wall Street or Main Street. And with good reason: Intuitively, we know we haven’t seen the worst of it yet.
Watching a lifetime of stock options head south? Worried about where you’ll find the money to pay for college or about the spiraling costs of health care? Certainly nothing could hurt worse than a foreclosure, could it? Well, maybe it could. If $700 billion sounds like a lot, try fathoming $9 trillion — roughly 13 times the cost of today’s hotly debated bailout. That’s the projected cost of letting global climate change go unaddressed within this decade.
The thorough shakeup of today’s economic climate foreshadows an even more disastrous global crisis heading our way. The same belief in unlimited, unchecked growth (some would say outright greed) that fattened our economy on a diet of junk bonds and hollow lending is also strip-mining our planet’s environment of the currency that nature safely invested for us over millions of years, and upon which all life — including our own — depends.
The concept of peak oil is not just some naysayers’ delusion. According to the U.S. Energy Department’s own findings, commonly called the Hirsch report and issued in 2005, it’s an unavoidable reality, one that is hurtling toward us faster than we know what to do about.
But like the blind eye that was turned on the proliferation of high-risk, foolhardy mortgages in the midst of a slowing economy, we’ve bolstered our bravado in the face of such warnings while enthusing about drilling offshore and in the arctic.
While we’ve been busy digging our fossil-fuel foundations out from under us with the same kind of naive bluster and faith in infinite growth that gutted the economy, we’ve also been busy ruining things at the top as our upper atmosphere becomes choked with carbon dioxide, leaving us in an environmental demise of our own doing.
When it comes to the economy, a few sleights of hand and a heavy toll on taxpayers, all partisan bickering aside, can be called upon to help us avert disaster and restore faith in the unlimited expansion model. But when it comes to nature’s bank, cashing out is forever. No amount of midnight meetings, government-ordered buyouts or credit freezes can save a habitat laid fallow by years of unregulated dumping of chemical waste, nor can they lower our thermostats to an inhabitable temperature in the face of global warming.
Sound policy and the pursuit of new technologies might ameliorate some of our excesses, helping to slow down the rate of climate change and postponing the date of disaster. But like the banking and credit crisis that arrived to the surprise of so many experts — despite the many warnings sounded years earlier — environmental failure is going to rear its ugly head someday.
And when mother earth forecloses on us, there will be nowhere else to go.
Lisa Weasel is an associate professor of biology at Portland State University and a board member of The Greenhouse Network.
Jorge, I understand that you may not be receiving emails about comments to interviews. If you get this, please send me and email and reply to this email. My email is glenn@alignideas.com
Experts have talked about this before. How many times have you read about the importance of ‘adding value’ for your audience? How many times have you read about ‘building trust’ with your readers/prospects?
Many, many times. You know it well. Every marketing guru has spoken about this topic. I’m sick of hearing it. But it STILL bears repeating.
http://www.onlineuniversalwork.com