Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Monday, October 6, 2008
The International Union for Conservation of Nature updated the “Red List” which may be the world’s most respected inventory of biodiversity.
On Monday, at the IUCN’s World Conservation Congress in Barcelona many experts agreed that the Earth is undergoing the “first wave of mass extinction since the dinosaurs died out 65 million years go.”
Aggressive, commercial fishing techniques have more than tripled the amount of fish being harvested from the worlds oceans. Trawlers and factory ships using radar and sonar have been able to find fish with nearly pin point accuracy as they prowl the oceans stalking their prey. Using nets as large as jumbo jets has led to the extinction of some intended catches, and other unintended catches.
Over the past two decades an 89 percent decline in hammerhead sharks in the Northeast Atlantic have been attributed to bycatch. The Caribbean monk seal was officially, albeit woefully late, extinct in June of this year. Though the last reported sighting of this monk seal was reportedly in 1952.
I hope I’m not dead 56 years before anyone notices I’m gone.
The seals demise is also officially attributed directly to man. Will it be too late to save the last two monk seal species? There are now estimated only 1,200 Hawaiian monk seals, and only 500 Mediterranean Monk seals inhabiting the planet.
The photo was taken May 27, 2007 of two Hawaiian monk seals. One died from drowning after being tangled and trapped in fishing lines. The other followed his friend to shore barking at people for assistance at Makua Beach on Oahu.
The IUCN estimates that 25% of the planet’s known Mammals are at risk of disappearing forever and in reality that number could be as high as 36%.
Experts say the window of opportunity to save great apes and monkeys appears to be closing far more quickly than Scientists realised.
Can Mankind be far behind?
Ocean-dwelling mammals are reportedly dying at a rate of 1,000 per DAY, victims of mile-wide fishing nets, vessel strikes, toxic waste and sound pollution.
For many decades man’s hubris has increased as the quality of life in the world around him has decreased. If mankind has believed the world was his oyster, the Planet is setting out to prove him wrong.
Photo thanks Gordon Olayvar/ Hawaii Dept. of Land and Natural Resources.
Labels: IUNC, Mass extinct, Monk seal, Ocean, Ocean Habitat, Ocean Mammals, marine mammals
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Tangled up and blue. Marine mammals and primates forecasted to be the first victims of mass extinction.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Just like Yogi Berra Said, “It’s like deja-vu, all over again”.
California based Planktos has postponed its ocean “iron-fertilization” plans indefinitely. Planktos failed to find sufficient funding for its efforts.
Batter up.
Climos. Climos has raised $3.5 million in Marchto conduct the same “ocean iron fertilization” plan. Climos, like Planktos was founded in California.
Dan Whaley, a self-taught computer programmer and Richard Whilden,a wildly successful money raiser. Whilden is also very familiar with the banking industry. You’ll want to have a look at his experience in that industry.
The Climos website has listed as a co-founder and Chief Science Officer Dr. Margaret Leinen. In addition to being Chief Science Officer, Dr. Leinen is also Dan whaley’s mother.
Studies show that the North Atlantic Ocean is only absorbing half of the CO2 it once did and that the Southern Oceans have stopped absorbing it at all, and are now in fact releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere. Emissions of carbon dioxide from the oceans have increased by 40% since 1981.
Enter the catcher.
Emissions trading is being hyped as a $30 billion market already that could grow to $1 trillion within the next 10 years. Where oh where would there be a vault large enough to hold 1 trillion dollars worth of emissions? Maybe the ocean? Maybe that why Dan Whaley, came up with a business plan that involved selling ‘carbon offsets’.
Whaley’s light bulb moment came after talking to his oceanographer mother about ocean iron fertilization. She had known John Martin, who is apparently the father of the whole ocean iron fertilization concept,known as the “iron hypothesis”. Martin said in 1991 “Give me half a tankerload of iron, and I’ll give you an Ice Age. He died in 1993. shortly after his death his theory was proven to be correct by Moss Landing Marine Laboratories after they spread an iron solution into the ocean near the Galapagos Islands and algae bloomed.
The Umpire calls, “stee rike”.
Never mind that algae blooms are also responsible for ‘dead zones’ in the oceans. The proliferation of plankton is what depletes oxygen in the waters creating dead zones in which some fish can flee, but many slow moving creatures are less able to escape. Oxygen levels in Dead Zones are too low to support marine life.
Rob Fujita, Environmental Defense Fund marine ecologist thinks Dead Zones are already hard enough to control. “It’s not a great time to increase the risk to oceans ecosystems”, says Fujita.
Russ George, of the shut down Planktos said, “This isn’t rocket science, it’s ocean farming.” George believed there wasn’t any reason a profit couldn’t be made while still helping the environment.
Foul ball.
There is a line between fertilization and pollution. Nether side of the line looks to be territory where the iron “ball” should be played as fair.
Whaley says, “Basically, the business model hinges on the price of carbon and the efficacy of sequestration.”
Isn’t all of this really a means to generate wealth for a wealth generating machine? A New York Times article called carbon trading one of the fastest-growing ’specialties in financial services’. Have we learned nothing from the past ‘financial services’ hatched from thin air?
CCX, the Chicago Climate Exchange, ECO.L EcoSecurities or how about the EU ETS. The government backed trading program in Europe called European Emission Trading Scheme. I don’t happen to like anything with Scheme in its official title and there are plenty.
Game called on account of rain.
Some estimates have fertilizing the entire Southern Ocean with iron for 100 years would only reduce atmospheric CO2 levels by 20-30%. This providing the organism decay isn’t released back into at shallow or intermediate depths creating an unnatural decomposing leading to more devastating Dead Zones
Patient: It hurts when I poke my eye.
Doctor: Stop poking your eye.
Labels: Carbon-credit, Climos, Frankenplankton, Galapagos, Iron fertilization, Ocean, Planktos, Sequestration, carbon dioxide, carbon-trading market, ocean dead zone
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Planktos out, Climos at bat. Frankenplankton lives.
Friday, June 27, 2008
The oceans are currently uptaking 22 million tons of CO 2 daily which is making a significant and exponential change in the ocean’s chemistry.
In 2004, it was projected that the pH balance of the oceans would be lower in the middle of this century than they had been for more than 20 MILLION years.
There was a spike in methane release last year from the thawing Arctic permafrost too. Scientists are concerned that as the Arctic continues to warm and the permafrost thaws a cycle of carbon release and temperature rise will add to the reverberating feedback cycle…In April Ed Dlugokencky from NOAA’s Earth System Research Lab said, “It’s too soon to tell whether last year’s spike in emissions includes the start of such a trend.”
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That was just 2 short months ago. Now the grim news is that for the first time in human history the ice at the North Pole will disappear entirely if it continues its current rate it will be gone by summer’s end. Science is placing the odds at 50:50. About 70% of the sea ice this spring was new ice formed over last winter. New ice melts faster than the old ice.
Inuit natives, near Baffin Bay, are reporting the sea ice is breaking up much earlier than normal this year. They have also seen wide cracks appearing where the ice normally remains stable.
The rate of Arctic land warming is 3.5 times greater than the average 21st century
warming rates predicted in climate models; more feedback cycles. So much so that
Science News is reporting over the past century the leading edges of conifer forests
have crawled from 20-60 meters of the mountains and have begun to overrun the tundra.
There are now conifers growing where no living tree has grown in the last 1,000 years. The greening of the Arctic is something we don’t want. The albedo, or the extent of which light from the sun can be reflected will be decreased more and more as the ‘green’ of the plant material continues to advance toward the Arctic.
The cycle continues to compound as the tundra thaws and releases methane. Scientists think between 1/3 and 1/2 the CO 2 that has been produced by humans since
the industrial revolution is now in the ocean. Water that is upwelling today is water that was exposed to 1958 CO 2 concentrations. 50 years from now the water being upwelled will be that exposed to the methane and carbon dioxide levels of today…
So, the last thing the Bush Administration wants getting out is a 250 page report by the EPA giving detailed alternative approaches of how to regulate greenhouse gases!
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Did you ever hit that nasty ’send’ button on an email, and wish you could bring it back?
You aren’t alone. It generally happens to me after I’ve had a little too much wine. I’m not suggesting that’s the problem at the White House, but if the cork fits…
The White House demanded that an email the EPA had ’sent’ be ‘recalled’. If, however, the pesky ’send’ button has already been hit, then the White House has its own simple and fairly elegant solution to news it just doesn’t want to see. Just don’t open the email.
That won’t work either.
The EPA apparently had 250 pages of ‘detailed alternative approaches’ to regulate greenhouse gases from fuels, cars and some industry. But, no; the White House doesn’t want anything to do with solving problems. It appears, as is widely speculated, this administration is all about creating problems. Speculated is a generous term in this case. The time for speculation, in regard to the intentions of this administration, has long past.
The Supreme Court had already tried to set the White House straight when it ruled carbon dioxide is an air pollutant, and the Clean Air Act gave the EPA the power to start mandating that new vehicles to reduce their pollutants.
If we do have the technology and the money to regulate greenhouse gases it seems apparent those in power don’t want us to know about them.
Photo Thanks: NOAA
Labels: Acid Ocean, Arctic, Arctic Ice, Baffin, CO2, EPA, Methane, NOAA, North Pole, Ocean, Speak no Evil, Tundra, carbon dioxide, cover-up
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Learn To Take Your Drinks ‘neat’; We’re running out of ice, among other things.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Rainforests cover only 2% of the Earth’s surface, or 6% of its land mass, yet they house over half the plant and animal species on earth. They originally covered at least twice that area.
By some estimates 137 plant, animal and insect species vanish everyday from the earth. 25% of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients. Less than 1% of the treasure trove of what is available has been tested by scientists. Think of all the possible cures for disease and possible future antibiotics that are being lost daily.
Achim Steiner, executive direct of of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) says,”the world is losing the intellectual patents of nature before we even have the chance to understand or unravel them.” Stiener also believes biodiversity is linked to the phenomenon of climate change.
The loss of biodiversity in our oceans is impairing the ocean’s capacity to provide food, maintain water quality and recover from stresses.
The depths of the oceans also hold untold treasures that are unexamined, making the loss of biodiversity in the seas even more heart wrenching. What has been lost with the extinction of species such as the southern gastric brooding frog, science is able to imagine. Having only been discovered in the 1980’s it has already gone extinct and with it a possible cure for peptic ulcers from which 10’s of thousands of people suffer. We are losing species everyday in our oceans we don’t even know about.
The problem with losing species we don’t even know existed isn’t just the loss of their existence and potential benefits to the environment and mankind, but not knowing what we have lost gives some sort of creepy credence to Donald Rumsfeld’s statement:
“…there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Photo thanks: Science News. New fish discovered off Ambon Island, Indonesia.
Labels: Biodiversity, Donald Rumsfeld, Environment, Extinct Frogs, Ocean, Ocean Habitat, UNEP
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
The loss of biodiversity and Donald Rumsfeld; the connection is creepy!
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Sport fishermen have always tossed back the little fish they caught. In theory the young ones are released back into the water so they can fully mature. But, little fish make more little fish.
“It’s not the young ones that should be thrown back, but the larger older fish that should be spared.” says George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD. “Not only do the older fish provide stability…to the population, they provide more and better quality offspring.”
In a four-year study that was released back in 2002 that was headed by David O. Conover at the Marine Sciences Research Center at State University of New York at Stony Brook, harvesting the largest of a population leaves only the smaller fishbehind to breed which practically ensures more small fish in the long run.
Science magazine published Conover and a graduate student’s findings in July 2002. When the smallest fish in a group were removed the remainder became individually larger. (4.5 grams) When the largest in a group were removed the mean weight of individuals left was decreased. (2.5grams) In a third group where random sized fish were removed the remaining fish stayed similar to the size they started out at which was about 3.5 grams.
A member of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission said when striped bass were protected up to 36 inches, the fish of that size were depleted until the minimum limit was lowered to 28 inches.
Taking only the larger older population of fish creates an age-imbalanced population. A lack of older fish induces early maturation in the younger fish.
Young fish left behind, thought to be too small to bring to market, are also more vulnerable to suffering from changes in their environment.
The absence of only the larger fish being harvested must have a ripple effect on the whole ecosystem.
It’s a tangled web we weave. There is one bit of conventional wisdom that remains constant…It’s not wise to fool with Mother Nature…
Labels: Environment, Fish, Ocean, Size limit, ecosystems
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Size Does Matter! Conventional Wisdom Proves Wrong when it comes to fish. Size limits have backfired!
Saturday, April 12, 2008
The West Coast fishery managers put it to a vote; suffer now or maybe suffer forever. They voted on Thursday to ban salmon fishing for one year hoping a rest will allow the salmon population to recover along the Oregon and California coast.
Two years ago the salmon catch was only at 80% of normal and the Commerce Department estimated the losses then at $16 million. This year with the catch being 0% of normal the losses will be unthinkable.
The loss of the king salmon is being billed as the “catastrophic disappearance” of the famous fish.
6 years ago the Sacramento River and tributaries had more than 800,000 salmon spawning. The predictions for this coming fall are a frightening 50,000. The reason for the vanishing king salmon (chinook) could be a ’sudden lack of nutrient-rich deep ocean upwellings. The sudden lack is thought to be caused by ocean temperature changes.
The decline in the salmon isn’t something that happened overnight in spite of the sudden lack of upwelling. There can be problems in the ocean that affect the salmon populations, or problems in the rivers that do the same. This year there are problems in both and that spells catastrophic.
As gas reaches $4.00 a gallon in the U.S. a lovely salmon entree any favorite eatery could reach $40.00 a portion.
This has to be good news for the salmon aquaculture business. For the consumer trying to stay clear of Malachite Green, Ciprofloxacin and Enrofloxacin just to name a few known toxins in aqua-farmed fish this ban on salmon fishing is bad news.
The list of reasons for the down turn in salmon populations could be a foot long. For years juvenile salmon have been turning up in irrigation ditches and in some cases dead juveniles have turned up in fields that are irrigated by those ditches. The laws requiring screens that hold back young salmon have not been enforced and the regulations are not uniform.
Diseases that spread quickly through high density farmed salmon populations can spread to adjacent waters. Some salmon often escape and compromise nearby native salmon habitat.
This news release from the Pacific Fishery Management Council indicates just how bad the situation really is for the salmon population. It also indicates this news came rather suddenly after a very successful rehabilitation of the Chinook previously known as the “work horse”.
Labels: Ciprofloxacin, Enrofloxacin, Global Warming, Malachite Green, Ocean, Ocean Habitat, Salmon, aquaculture, upwelling
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Salmon Season Canceled; Oregon and California take steps to protect the species.
Friday, March 21, 2008
The White House’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2009 restored a bit of good news for 3 of 5 key climate instruments crucial in tracking earth changes. CERES, a sensor to measure the Earth’s radiation, another instrument that tracks solar irradiance and the OMPS-Limb instrument (Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite) all received a sentence commute in the proposed 2009 budget.
The death sentence handed down to 2 other instruments intended to measure sea-surface temperatures and wind directions over the oceans were left twisting in the wind.
Given the fact that scientists, on a whole, generally behave in an unflappable manner hearing words and phrases such as; ‘alarm bells’, ‘borders on criminal negligence’,'devastating’, ‘grave jeopardy’ and ‘blinding’ do not evoke feelings of confidence in the future. Since blowing winds and sea-surface temperatures are two key ingredients increasing the dead zones in our oceans.
A panel of scientists at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Boston last month reported…Climate change is rapidly transforming the world’s oceans by increasing the temperature and acidity of seawater, and altering atmospheric and oceanic circulation…
In the past ocean dead zones could be attributed to fertilizers, farm run-off, and sewage which over fed phytoplankton which are eaten by bacteria when they die that use up the oxygen in the water. These dead zones in the past were more likely to be found in places where rivers run into the oceans like the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, but more dead zones are being found in the open oceans.
We need to have more ability to observe these growing dead zones, not less.
Image NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Scientific Visualization Studio
Labels: AAAS, Global Warming, NOAA, NPOESS, Ocean, Phytoplankton, ocean dead zone
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Ocean Dead Zones Observation Left Twisting In The Wind.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Like a rock-n-roll guitar player that stands too close to his amplifier, climate change is now creating a dreaded ‘feedback’ affect.
Loss of ice in the Arctic means less ‘white’ which reflects the sunshine back into space. In the summer we wear white or light colored clothing to reflect the heat of the sun away from us. In the winter we wear dark colors that absorb the heat. The tundra is melting absorbing more heat. The heat is rapidly decomposing plant material and in return releasing methane. Methane is over 20 times more potent than other greenhouse gases.
A study done at the University of East Anglia shows that the North Atlantic Ocean is only absorbing half of the C02 it once did, and southern oceans have stopped absorbing it, and are now releasing C02 back into the atmosphere.
The ocean’s ability to absorb C02 is called C02 sink. Merchant ships equipped with instruments to measure carbon dioxide (C02) in the water have been collecting data every month and have generated more than 90,000 measurements in just the past few years.
The North Atlantic Ocean’s ability to absorb C02 abruptly declined, while the Indian Ocean’s absorption ability was making more of a taper.
Emissions of carbon dioxide from the ocean have actually increased by 40% since 1981.
International team leader Dr. Corinne Le Quere, from the University of Eat Anglia and British Antarctic Survey says, “This is serious. All climate models predict that this kind of ‘feedback will continue and intensify during this century.”
See PSMI’s Franken-plankton story in the archive.
Labels: Arctic, Climate Change, Environment, Frankenplankton, Global Warming, Ocean, Phytoplankton, Sea, carbon dioxide, ecosystems, greenhouse gas
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Oceans Losing The Ability to Trap CO2, they may be reaching the saturation point.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Plastic doesn’t pollute, people pollute?
It’s no surprise that a member of the American Plastics Council was quoted in 2004 saying the reason plastic is everywhere is because it’s such a good material that does so much so well.
Plastic does do so many things so well. One of the things we are finding out it does so well is cause Testicular Dysgenesis Syndrome (TDS) which has been increasing daily. Plastics that contain Phthalates can migrate into the foods they come into contact with and be ingested and absorbed into our systems.
The chemical BPA, Bisphenol A, which has been used in the manufacturing of some plastics since the 1950’s is now being shown to cause ‘gender confusion’.
BPA has been found to actually pass from generation to generation in utero. This is a topic of conversation best left to other forums, but cosider the fact that there may be less gender confusion in underdeveloped countries where less plastic has been used customarily in every aspect of life for generations.
We have now been exposed to so much plastic that we are urinating the stuff!
Why would anyone be surprised to find there is a bundle of trash, estimated to weigh 3.5 MILLION tons of trash floating in the Pacific Ocean. 80% of this heap, larger than twice the size of Texas, is made up from plastic debris. Debris that is blown washed and flooded out to sea.
Tons of plastic that doesn’t find its way into land fills finds it way to the coastlines and is carried out to see into a giant vortex of currents.
Shame on you, shame on me. Shame on all of us.
We are being told at this point cleaning this mess up isn’t an option. Continuing to live as though there is no tomorrow, and letting the petroleum and plastics industry continue to dictate our futures isn’t an option.
Not anymore.
Labels: BPA, Bisphenol, Ocean, Ocean Habitat, Phthalates, Plastic, Trash, Urine, ecosystems
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
3.5 MILLION tons of trash floating in the Pacific Ocean!
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
The only US-Indian treaty that expressly gives a tribe the right to hunt whales as well as seals is the 1855 Treaty of Neah Bay. In the late 1920’s the Makah themselves suspended whaling because the population of Gray Whales had become so diminished from commercial whaling that began in the mid-ninetieth century,
The Gray Whale was placed on the federal endangered species list essentially banning the hunt for Gray Whales by anyone. The Makah’s had already stopped whaling in the 20’s so the ban had no relevant point to the tribe at that time.
When the Gray was removed from the endangered species list, in 1994, the point became one of the US federal government’s responsibility to live up to the 1855 Treaty of Neah Bay. As it was determined that the population of the Gray Whales was at a healthy number, a lawsuit was brought against NOAA fisheries in 1997 which led to the Makah’s being granted a quota of 5 ’strikes’ per year until 2002.
The quota of 5 was set by the ‘whaling commission’.
The Makah resumed whaling in 1998. It is widely recognized that the tribe has only taken one whale since then, which was an adult female taken in 1999. An agreement was reached that after the quota period expired in 2002 the Makah would have to obtain a waiver before a hunt. So in February 2005 the Makah did just that…The US government is ‘reviewing the Tribe’s request’.
Is it reasonable for the federal government to take more than 3 1/2 years to review the Makah request to grant or deny the waiver?
Was Saturdays strike on the Gray Whale by some members of the Makah tribe a direct result of the frustration felt by having to wait more than 43 months for the thumbs up or down from the government?
The Makah Tribal Chairman Ben Johnson Jr, is afraid Saturday’s killing of the Gray Whale will affect the Makah’s case to be granted their waiver, and reaffirms the tribe did not authorize the killing of the whale over the weekend. He promises to prosecute ‘those responsible’.
Of the 5 men detained and later released on bail 2 of them were participants in the legal 1999 hunt. One of the men said he wasn’t ashamed of what he had done, and he was feeling ‘kind of proud’ and that he should have done it years ago.
Brian Gorman, A spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, the agency that has taken 43 months to review the Makah request for a waiver said he does not believe Saturday’s whale killing will affect the tribe’s application.
What a sad state of affairs. The whale, now at the bottom of the sea, serving no one and 5 men facing fines of up to $20,000.00 each and a year in prison.
Photo: Museum of History and Industry
Labels: Gray Whale, Makan, Ocean, Ocean Habitat, Ocean Mammals, Sea Mammals, US Coast Guard, Whales
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
The Makah’s, the Gray Whale and the Waiver…
