Horizon: Death Of The Oceans? (BBC)

Hartmann: Republicans ‘helping to destroy all life on Earth’

HT Raw Story via twitter

Climate expert on changes in the deep

Matthew England discusses the impact of climate change on the world's oceans.

The Climate Show 16: Keith Hunter on oceans, acids and the carbon cycle

Multiple ocean stresses threaten "globally significant" marine extinction

Multiple ocean stresses threaten "globally significant" marine extinction

More on peak fish: Sylvia Earle

Can we stop it?

Changing Climate Means Changing Oceans



Do you think we can stop it?

HT Climate Progress

Calculating the True Cost Of Global Climate Change

Other experts see the hit to GDP as much greater. “We did a survey of top economists in the country, asking what they think about the costs and benefits of climate legislation,” says Michael Livermore, executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. “They said that climate change is a clear threat to America and the global economy.” Adds Berkeley’s Hanemann: “I don’t want to be Dr. Gloom, but our complacency in the U.S. is wrong.”
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Harvard economist Martin Weitzman even suggests that the economic costs of a catastrophic event, however unlikely it might be, would be so enormous that it would overwhelm the whole analysis. “Perhaps in the end the climate-change economist can help most by not presenting a cost-benefit estimate for what is inherently a fat-tailed situation with potentially unlimited downside exposure,” he writes.

Calculating the True Cost Of Global Climate Change
by john carey


Read the whole thing

The direct economic damages from acidification are negligible. “We know the actual economic impacts are almost sure to be small because they involve fisheries, which are already pretty small, and they involve only ocean fisheries that are sensitive to carbon,” Nordhaus says.

Well now an economist thinks he's an oceanographer. This is common. People do not realize how much our very lives depend on a healthy ecosystem.

Acid Test: The Science of Ocean Acidification from Tristan Bayer on Vimeo.

Playing God with the planet.

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Removing carbon from the atmosphere would help the ocean acidification issue, but the most commonly discussed method for doing this is ocean fertilization. This involves adding nutrients to the ocean to induce phytoplankton to bloom and suck carbon out of the atmosphere. The phytoplankton would then die and sink and take their carbon to the deep sea, there to be stored forever. At least, that’s the idea.


Some kind of geoengineering may very well be part of the solution to our climate woes. As Goodell points out, we are currently geoengineering the planet by accident – changing the albedo and adding all kinds of things to the atmosphere and warping the entire water cycle. However, we got ourselves into this mess by doing irreversible things to the planet without adequately considering the cost. Ocean scientists need to be at the forefront of geoengineering considerations, making sure that decision makers don’t forget about the health and welfare of 70% of the earth’s surface. And hopefully in the future, that will include participating in meetings like Future Tense.

Why ocean scientists can’t ignore geoengineering

A Future Tense Event: Geoengineering

Very scary stuff!

Rob Dunbar: Discovering ancient climates in oceans and ice

TED