Sea Change
An acid peril is rising from the depths and falling from the air. It kills local oysters and threatens everything that lives in the sea.
Forestalling global warming won’t necessarily stop acidification. If massive injections of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere (via either volcanoes or geoengineering) blocked the sun’s heat, but humans kept burning fossil fuels, the oceans would continue to take up CO2. Acidification might even speed up, because colder water absorbs more CO2.
Mark Wiegardt is hardly a global warming Jeremiah; he’s wary of the term, perhaps even a bit skeptical. But he and Brown have grown impatient with people who say carbon effects are mere matters for study—or, worse, just hype. “It’s not trumped up when you’re trying to grow oysters and it’s not working—and your livelihood depends on it,” he says. “If this business fails, I don’t know what we’ll do.”
And so, last December, they and 10 of their fellow toilers of the sea—oystermen from Maine and Washington, a shrimper from Louisiana, a Maryland crab processor, a seiner and a troller and a crabber from Alaska—pounded the marble halls of Washington, DC, talking to the senators who this spring will wrestle with the climate legislation that’s already passed the House. At the same time, one of their comrades, the owner of one of TV’s Deadliest Catch crab boats, flew to Copenhagen to pitch in at the UN climate conference.
“We let them know right up front we’re feeling profoundly the effects of what’s happening,” says Brown. Indeed, the changes below the waterline alarm him more than the warming above it. “We can learn to deal with moderate variations in temperature,” he says measuredly. “Fundamental chemical changes in the ocean are more profoundly worrying. If the zooplankton lose their shells, the wheels come off the bicycle. The whole ecosystem collapses.”
Their message was simple and heartfelt: Pass meaningful carbon caps. And remember, it’s not just about the climate. It’s the ocean, stupid.
Published: March 2010
Thanks for an excellent article.
We know what the cause is… and we know what to do about it.
The obstructions now are political