I wanted to talk about the oceans one more time before Friday. It is a subject near and dear to my heart. I don't so much want to talk about new scientific studies, though I will mention some, but rather I want to talk about human ignorance and avoidance of the subject.
If you do the Google query mass extinction in the oceans, you will get a cluster of articles dated to June/July, 2011. And if you do the same query on You Tube, you will see the same thing. Why is that? Because that's the last time a major scientific report was issued warning humans about a mass extinction in the oceans, outside of the stuff I have reported on in the last two years. Another journal study appeared in that time, and I reported on it, but it appears to have been trapped in the science ghetto; it did not get picked up by the AP, UPI, Reuters or the other big wire services that are the source of almost all mainstream articles about such subjects.
What can we conclude from this? That nobody cares about the incipient, ongoing mass extinction in oceans? Yes. That very few people even know about the incipient, ongoing mass extincton in the oceans? Yes. That the incipient, ongoing mass extinction in the oceans was just one more story in the daily news cycle, sort of like weekly jobs claims or Lindsay Lohan's latest embarrassment? Yes.
There was a book about a coming mass extinction published this year, although I can't find any particular focus on the dire state of the oceans in reviews of the book, or video interviews and news stories about the author—I have not read it, would not have it in my house, and certainly would not pay to read it.
The author's name is Annalee Newitz and the book is called Scatter, Adapt And Remember (excerpts from Google Books). And the first sentence of chapter 1 reads like this.
If you think that humans are destroying the planet in a way that's historically unprecedented, you're suffering from a species-level delusion of grandeur.
And here is the last few sentences of the book.
Things are going to get weird. There may be horrific disasters, and many lives will be lost. But don’t worry. As long as we keep exploring, humanity is going to survive.
Her "point" in the opening sentence is that there have been other mass extinctions during the Phanerozic (the last 542 million years) and this is just another one. Her last sentence expresses her ineffable Hope that humans will survive the next mass extinction—it is sure to occur sometime within the next one million years!—because there are always species which survive mass extinctions. And are we humans not great? Sure we are!
But of course what makes the "6th Extinction" historically unprecedented is its astonishing rapidity. The other mass extinctions, bigger or smaller, took tens or hundreds of thousands of years, or millions of years, whereas this one is happening so quickly that it is effectively invisible on the geological time-scale. And this mass extinction is also unique because of its cause, which is us.
But that's the merely the beginning of Annalee's complete (but not surprising) inability to come to grips with the near-term consequences of human destructiveness. (See the chapter on Terraforming, by which she means geo-engineering.) I could, if I so chose, get into the details and thoroughly dispense with Ms. Newitz. You can look at this article and come to your own conclusions about the quality of her so-called "thoughts" on these matters.
I will not waste my time doing that today because I've got other fish to fry. Suffice it to say—and Annalee, please repeat after me—
There is a mass extinction under way, humans are causing it, it is centered in the oceans, and it is happening incredibly rapidly on the geological time-scale.
The point, really, is this: Annalee's mass-extinction-for-optimistic-idiots book doesn't matter because it will soon be forgotten. My articles on the incipient, ongoing, very rapid mass extinction in the oceans don't matter because they will soon be forgotten by all by a few hundred people.
More alarmingly, scientific papers like this one (and see here) don't matter because the results will never register with all but a scant few scientists who study these issues professionally. Here's the abstract, from the journal Nature Climate Change (no. 2, pages 33–37, 2012).
Climate model predictions and observations reveal regional declines in oceanic dissolved oxygen, which are probably influenced by global warming. Studies indicate ongoing dissolved oxygen depletion and vertical expansion of the oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) in the tropical northeast Atlantic Ocean. OMZ shoaling may restrict the usable habitat of billfishes and tunas to a narrow surface layer. We report a decrease in the upper ocean layer exceeding 3.5 ml l−1 dissolved oxygen at a rate of ≤1 m yr−1 in the tropical northeast Atlantic (0–25° N, 12–30° W), amounting to an annual habitat loss of ~5.95×1013 m3, or 15% for the period 1960–2010. Habitat compression and associated potential habitat loss was validated using electronic tagging data from 47 blue marlin. This phenomenon increases vulnerability to surface fishing gear for billfishes and tunas, and may be associated with a 10–50% worldwide decline of pelagic predator diversity. Further expansion of the Atlantic OMZ along with overfishing may threaten the sustainability of these valuable pelagic fisheries and marine ecosystems.
That may appear to be unfathomable goobledygook, but what it means is that hypoxia (dissolved oxygen depletion) in the upper oceans has been increasing since 1960, and this is "compressing" the habitat of the fish which were studied (tuna and billfins like blue marlin). Further expansion of the OMZ (oxygen minimum zone) "may [further] threaten the sustainablity of these valuable pelagic fisheries and marine ecosystems."
Yo! Annalee! Did you read that one?
Thus it is hard to escape the conclusion I am pissing in the wind here on DOTE, and more tragically, so are the authors of that Nature Climate Change paper.
I wrote about the dire state of the oceans because nobody else seemed to be doing it. And I love the ocean.
So ends my last oceans post on DOTE.
If that's true, why are we just sitting here???
"If you think that humans are destroying the planet in a way that's historically unprecedented, you're suffering from a species-level delusion of grandeur."
That's a very confusing sentence. History is just that slim segment of time where humans have written records - the past 12K years or so. We've done plenty to wreck ecosystems before now, so no, it's not unprecedented. And it's rife with hyperbole - "destroying the planet" and "species-level delusion" - that are the stock-in-trade of the denial machine.
Here's an article from that author:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/05/surviving_the_next_mass_extinction_humans_will_need_to_leave_earth_for_space.html
Her message is: the Earth itself is dangerous, we need to move to space. Nothing about humans - total blind spot there.
On the oceans - out of sight, out of mind. It's classic human behavior. If you don't directly see it, you can pretend it doesn't exist.
Mike Roberts mentioned this video in his comment on your post yesterday:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zMN3dTvrwY
And it's a really excellent overview of the state of the oceans. Dr. Jeremy Jackson raises the point about why hasn't society noticed what has been going on in the oceans? Even many marine scientists ignore the severity of it.
I'll miss your posts on the subject. It's very hard to find good info on this subject, and your posts always have had excellent sources. Thanks again.
Posted by: Jim | 07/22/2013 at 01:31 PM