Jane Lubchenco: Climate change is happening now. It’s not a theory. It’s a set of observed facts. It’s affecting many of the things that people care about
Marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco is head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. Dr. Lubchenco told EarthSky that global climate change from fossil fuel burning is impacting Earth’s oceans today.
Jane Lubchenco: Climate change is already affecting oceans. It’s making them warmer. It’s making sea levels rise. And it’s making them more acidic. All of those change both the beauty and the bounty of oceans.
Lubchenco gave some specific examples from NOAA research.
Jane Lubchenco: We know that in the North Atlantic, 24 of the 36 stocks of fish that NOAA tracks have been moving northward. Fish are changing their distribution, so they can no longer be found where fisherman used to find them. They are moving to a different place. This general pattern is happening globally.
Climate change is affecting other sea life as well, said Lubchenco.
Jane Lubchenco: Other changes that are happening in oceans as a result of the warming waters is that corals are bleaching with increased frequency. They’re losing their colored microscopic symbionts that live inside them and causing coral reefs to become stressed. As the water warms, it also is melting ice in the Arctic, and many species that are dependent on ice for their homes, from polar bears to ice seals, to many of the plants and animals that live in the water, are becoming increasingly threatened with extinction.
Dr. Lubchenco described the emergence of “dead zones,” oxygen starved waters, off the western U.S. Coast, caused by a disruption of wind circulation that stalls upwelling of deep, nutrient-rich water.
Jane Lubchenco: Since 2002, every summer now, we have seen a dead zone off the coast of Oregon and Washington that is apparently caused by a change in both coastal winds that are linked to larger scale atmospheric circulation and caused by changes in oceanic circulation. Areas that used to be very, very productive are now becoming wastelands, if you will, ‘dead zones’, because of insufficient oxygen in the water that is a result of these combined oceanic and atmospheric changes that we think are most likely related to global climate change.
These “dead zones” are large areas, something completely unexpected by scientists, said Lubchenco.
Jane Lubchenco: The area ranges in size from year to year, and even during the summertime. It is a significant fraction of the area over the shelf off Washington and Oregon, so it’s a very huge area that’s being impacted.
So glad we have Earth Sky to keep us up to date on these critical changes. This is very likely much more important that the financial crisis the media is focused on. Listen to the 8-minute interview if you can.
Thank you Donna! We were very fortunate to be able to interview Dr. Lubchenco. Our lead producer Jorge Salazar caught up to her in Copenhagen at the climate conference in December. She has a big big job to do …
I agree with Donna, thanks to EarthSky for bringing us up to date. The sad part that there is to many people that are thinking that climate change is all made up. If professor at Colledge telling to his students that all this climate change stuff sientists are making it up, what about regular people!? Now days all people are thinking about how to survive, how to feed family, put gas in the car, get a job, kids, mortgadge… Last thing they worried about is killing oceans, polar bears, forests… People are overpopulating the planet. Dinosouars lived on this planet millions of years, humans compare to dinos almost nothing, but during this time humans are destroying forests, oceans, poluting air, wiping from the face of Earth so many kinds of birds, fish, animals, bleaching the oceans, ext.. We messing up with mother nature and then complaining about mother nature fiting right back at us. Humans like monkeys sitting on the tree branch and sawing it of. And after so much damadge has beeng done, people still not beliving the Climate Change. In your experience what can we do about explaining to people the truth and do you have any information how we can volontier to help.
It might become a smarter strategy to more effectively inform and convince people of Climate Change by dropping the inflammatory and as-yet-to-proved-beyond-a-doubt that it is due to human activity.
Since that seems to be exactly where people on both sides of the debate stop listening to each other, it would be wiser to focus instead on the simple fact that Climate Change IS DEFINITELY happening, whether humans are causing it or not. Then we can more easily move forward to solutions, rather than getting “bogged down” in culpability/guilt issues about it.
Climate is definitely changing. It always has and always will. The issue is the role of people in this and the proposed ‘solutions’. We absolutely should pay attention to the facts and data supporting changes. But equally important, as scientists, we have a duty to maintain a healthy skepticism to underlying causes and purported solutions. This is a vastly tricky topic to delve into–the human impact–climate is driven by multitudes of natural factors which have been with us for millions of years. Change is inevitable. What I fear is a ‘lemming mentality’ where we all follow blindly into ‘human solutions’ which cripple the 3rd world, drive up energy and food costs globally and might not even make a difference. This will be an interesting talk. As a geologist, I would love to see a similar talk on the geological and historical data on climate change and can offer a number of very interetting speakers if called upon.
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Thanks to all of you for being here just as you are and for all you are doing to protect life as we know it on Earth from huge human-induced threats. Surely all of you are probably correct about the formidable challenges from greenhouse gas emissions and climate destabilization that are likely the results of human activity, stupidity, arrogance and greed. To be a species with such remarkable self-consciousness, intelligence and other splendid gifts and to do no better than we are doing now is a source of deep sadness and occasional outbreaks of passionate intensity (likely signifying nothing).
Still I believe in remaining engaged with you in this necessary struggle for the future of life as we know it, a sacred struggle in which so many human beings with feet of clay have been involved for a lifetime. The first fifty years of my life were lived as if in a dream world, the profane one devised by the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us. I had no awareness a single generation would elect sponsors of powerful, greed-mongering economic powerbrokers who would formulate policies and implement business plans that irreversibly degrade Earth’s environs, recklessly dissipate its limited resources, relentlessly diminish its biodiversity, destabilize its climate and threaten the very future of children everywhere. My failures include not realizing that I and my selfish generation were ravaging the Earth and effectively behaving in a way that could lead to the destruction of our planetary home as a fit place for habitation by the children (let alone coming generations). Even though it is discomforting and difficult to responsibly perform our duties to science and humanity, at least we can speak out loudly, clearly and often about these unfortunate circumstances and in the process educate one another as best we can. Like you, I do not have answers to forbidding questions related to the patently unsustainable ‘trajectory’ of human civilization in its present, colossally expansive form. Much more problematic, however, is the ruinous determination of many too many experts who have colluded to consciously obstruct open discussion of the best available scientific evidence of “what could somehow be real”. If what could be real about the human condition and the Earth we inhabit is not confronted with intellectual honesty and moral courage, how is the family of humanity to adapt to the practical requirements of “reality” in a reasonable, sensible, sustainable and timely way?
An ecological wreckage of some unimaginable sort is likely to be the end result of experts choosing to remain willfully blind, hysterically deaf and electively mute rather than examining extant science of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth. This refusal to respond ably by acknowledging evidence and accepting responsibility for the distinctly human-driven global challenges that have emerged robustly and converged rapidly in our time could be one of the greatest mistakes in human history. After all, what mistake in history could be greater than the ones made in our time that lead humanity inadvertently to precipitate the demise of life as we know it and to put at risk a good enough future for the children?
Sincerely,
Steve
Excellent ideas here, have emailed my mum so expect a big reply!!
[...] majority of scientists about climate changes expected from a human-warmed atmosphere. A typical comment last year: “Climate change is already affecting oceans. It’s making them warmer. It’s [...]