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Subscribe to RSSCoral reefs aren't just pretty, they're also vital to marine species and island communities. But they're also facing threats from warming seas. NBC's Anne Thompson reports.
More than half of 82 species of coral being evaluated for inclusion under the Endangered Species Act "more likely than not" would go extinct by 2100 if climate policies and technologies remain the same, federal scientists concluded.
The experts cited "anthropogenic," or manmade, releases of carbon dioxide as a key driver of warming seas and oceans absorbing more CO2, in turn making waters more acidic.
"The combined direct and indirect effects of rising temperature, including increased incidence of disease and ocean acidification, both resulting primarily from anthropogenic increases in atmospheric CO2, are likely to represent the greatest risks of extinction to all or most of the candidate coral species over the next century," the experts concluded in a report released Friday by the National Marine Fisheries Service.
The report was part of a process to determine which species, if any, merit protection. The Center for Biological Diversity in 2009 had petitioned for the review of 82 species it considered in jeopardy.
Of the 82 species, all of which are in U.S. waters, 46 are "more likely than not" to face extinction by 2100, while 10 are "likely," the report stated.
The authors did note that the limited science of corals meant that "the overall uncertainty was high."
The fisheries service will next seek public comment as it considers the petition for listing.
The Center for Biological Diversity, which in 2006 petitioned and got protection for staghorn and elkhorn corals, said conditions have only worsened for corals.
"Coral reefs are home to 25 percent of marine life and play a vital function in ocean ecosystems," the center said in a statement. "Since the 1990s, coral growth has grown sluggish in some areas due to ocean acidification, and mass bleaching events are increasingly frequent."
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But it seems like sooo many other stories where the number of people is soaring while the number of plants & animals are plummeting. It doesn't surprise me at all that sooo many coral species are going extinct. Hey want about sea plankton. They are like the forests on land. 80% of the life on the planet. Down by 40%.
Where's the problem say mr grover, the gop, & the rushbo. We need more people. We need to ban planned parenthood & family planning. We should all have 5 kids & 15 grandkids like romney. Including the chinese. Sure population is 350% that of 1930. Not a problem. That the planet can have trillions of people not the mere 7B today.
And it's because there is no such thing as man-made global warming. That 7B today has had no effect on the planet they will say. They are mostly lay people though. Not many professional climate scientists. 97% of those say that mr grover, the gop, & the rushbo are wrong.
I noticed you included Romney in your diatribe but left out Mexicans! They have 5-8 nonos each,all at the expence of all of us! You don't want to talk about or denegrade any potential voter,right!I'll tell you about Mexicans!The come,the ruin,the stay anddo not pay their way anfbleed the state and local communities dry!Their pollution goes to the oceans in larger masses than anyone! The air pollution is worst than most.They children they have exploit the resources more than anyone else!Write something negative about someone other than those for whom you are not voting!
Why are these people worried about coral? They don't have jobs! But they seem precooupied with coral! Want to know why? They are all paid operatives and thats their talking points for today! One can usually skip the bs and just start commenting on real issues and like with cockroaches,they will run away when the light is turned on!
No Apologies for being an American, of course you are SO right. Let's just keep dumping more toxins in the water and hope that mother nature will take care of our trash. Are you the same people spewing personal responsibility? Nothing like killing off a planet because you are to cheap and lazy to do business in a responsible way. Why don't YOU visit a site next to a coal mine and vacation next to sludge ponds, bet it is good for the skin, not to mention your lungs.
All this is due to human activity in general. Even if all the corals are given protection, all the oceans are connected, the only way to ensure their survival is to keep them in captivity until ocean conditions are suitable again. That won't happen for many reasons, economic being the first, inability to keep some species in captivity, etc.....
The larger problem is unwillingness to curb CO2 emissions in developing nations. Until all nations cooperate, coral species aren't the only ones on the chopping block.
Working the swing shift tonight? Guess so! Why aren't you people talking about jobs,jobs,jobs! That is what is important today,not coral! If you can't eat,you will die,faster than the coral might be dying!
Did all of you miss this little nugget tucked away near the end of the article?
The authors did note that the limited science of corals meant that "the overall uncertainty was high." That's a fancy way of saying that they're just guessing!
And how many total species of coral are there today? How many species of coral existed since day one have already died off? How many species of coral died off before man became its nemesis? This is a typical environmental story.
Moretimer are you trying to say that since over the last few million years SOME Coral has gone extinct it is okay for man to rush the ones left extinction along??? We need that Coral NOW more than EVER but people like you live under the illusion that no matter what we do Mother Nature will clean up YOUR mess, well it won’t. I think it is sad that so many have evolved at a much slower rate than others.
and you are a typically, scientifically illiterate right wing idealog .... please extinct yourself
mas098, you have proven once again you can’t fix stupid. Listen up, when the oceans die so goes man. When you kill off the animals and insects like the bats and the bees you will looking for more than a job, YOU will be scrounging around for stupid stuff like clean air, safe drinking water and FOOD. What good is money on a dying planet. Like I said you can’t fix stupid but does there have to be so many of you???
Reefs Dying in the Egyptian Red Sea | Save Our Seas Foundation
Dead Coral Found Near Site of Gulf Oil Spill - NYTimes.com
Gulf Oil Spill: Coral Death 'Definitively' Linked To BP Spill
Warming, Disease Causing Major Caribbean Reef Die-Off
Trying to Save the Coral Reefs - TIME
Hawaii Coral Reef Strategies
Coral Reefs In The Philippines "Slowly Dying" | Ecology and ...
NOAA 200th: Why Are Coral Reefs So Important?
Pacific coral reefs dying faster than expected
Dying Coral Reefs | PBS NewsHour | Feb. 1, 2005 | PBS
Kuwait's coral is dying as sea warms up - The National
Indonesia’s Coral Reefs Dying Faster Than Expected « Reef ...
Coral Reef Protection: What Are Coral Reefs? | Habitat Protection ...
NOAA CoRIS - Hazards to Coral Reefs - NOAA Coral Reef Information ...
No mention of Cuba's reefs flourishing, does it not fit your agenda?
I want the reefs to survive and my belief is the harm comes mainly from fertilizer and phosphate mining, which makes sense since the one country that has had a fertilizer ban for decades has beautiful reefs.
OMG...How did the Earth ever survive before us humans showed up to save it!!! Science ALWAYS say's one thing then goes, oops, it actually happened this way, oh wait, I mean like it was this. If Scientist are right, they tell us we have had at least 4 ice ages. Let’s see, in order for an ice age to begin the world must 1st freeze. In order for an ice age to end (wait for it) the world must warm up thus making the ice melt. I'm guessing here but after the ice melts, in order to have a 2nd ice age I'm assuming the world must refreeze, then melt & refreeze for the 3rd ice age. Then after the Earth warms up & melts the ice from the 3rd ice age (again I'm guessing here) it must freeze again to start a 4th (maybe it’s just me but I’m starting to see a pattern here) .Then let’s see, possibly for the 4th ice age to end the Earth must have warmed up AGAIN (this brings us to modern day). If this is true, what caused the 1st 3 ice ages to thaw because we humans were not here to screw thing up & cause the warming trends that melted them? We were also just advanced apes (according to evolutionist) when the 4th started to melt. Could it be possible that we are headed towards a 5th ice age? Earth will take care of itself people. Just the fact that it has been here for 4 billion years & us humans have only walked on it a few hundred thousand years (some scientist say more, others say less) convinces me of that. Not to mention that over 95% of all life that has ever lived on Earth is extinct. Now I’m not a scientist of course, I’m just going by how they tell us of all the mass extinctions, climate changes, shifting plates, super volcanos, earthquakes & how South America used to spoon with Africa. How the Sahara desert used to be lush & green & Alaska was once tropical. This brings me to the unscientific conclusion that maybe the earth is an ever changing planet, life come & goes, it warms up, and it cools down, climates change & then changes again. The coral you are so distraught over will someday die off & become extinct & another coral will take its place. How is your life different because you didn’t get to see the Doo Doo bird, Wooly Mammoth or some other long gone life that used to be a part of this planet? Just because we figured out how to cook our meat, cloths our fur less bodies, use our thumbs & drill for oil so we can advance our technology & make that plastic (oil product, if you’re not for drilling, toss out ALL plastic products you own, including the batteries in you Prius) key board we are typing on does not make us the most successful creatures to live on earth…the cockroach & scorpion have been here longer & will be here long after Earth puks us back into her bowels. Learn to adapt to the 100% natural changing of the climate, or die…those are your choices, deal with it.
It survived because there weren't money at any cost human scum like you destroying it. Great future you right wing nutjobs are leaving to our children and grandchildren. Go get a vasectomy please.
Those cycles are well known and were NATURAL events unlike what we are artificially doing to the environment at the current time. Those places which were once tropical were millions of years ago and mostly due to plate tectonics. And, how the world came out of those past cold periods were the result of plate tectonics and over acive vulcanism (lots of volcano activity). All of which were NATURAL and took several thousands of years to occur unlike the couple of hundred in which we are seeing changes.
The same can be said of the past species which have gone extinct. Those extinction events were caused by outside forces such as asteroid/meteor impacts and NOT by the greed, ignorance and selfishness of ONE species!!!
The Planet Earth has been changing for Billions of Years. The planet has been hot at times and very cold at times. Sea levels have risen and fallen. Land masses have moved and changed. Polar and arctic Ice has expanded and retreated. The Global Warming Fear is nothing more than to push someones political agenda.
Roadkill: All the stuff you say is true enough. I hasten to point out that over the vast majority of the earth's history ( cover your ears, "Christians" ), the world would not have been survivable by humans. So are you willing to tempt a future similarly constituted? If so, then continue with business as usual.
Let me quite naughtily excise the first three words of your last sentence, quoting out of context "...Fear is nothing more than to push someones ( sic ) political agenda". Could anyone describe the NRA's mission more precisely?
Roadkill: Your stupidity is only exceeded by your ignorance.
You guys missed your dinner date with Al Gore.
And, Roadkill, you missed yours with Jerry Falwell. Those past events are well known and have NOTHING to do with what is happening now!
Pardon my natural skepticism, but we have been regularly burned by the hyper-exagerated alarmist claims for years from those who have exploited the “global-warming” movement, and this just seems more of the same, but here in this report with a new supposed threat to coral. We all know that if research can tie itself to “global-warming” in some way, it has a greater chance for funding—certainly this too is the case in the research represented here. It was laughable that the researcher Rebecca Albright so readily concluded that the only “solution” to coral-bleaching was reducing anthropogenic atmospheric CO2!
Some aspects of this report do not make sense. The claims that certain oceanic regions suddenly suffer a significant temperature increase from one year to the next is not credible. An affected temperature change to the huge ocean volume actually takes many decades to be affected by an increase in atmosphere temperature. So obviously, temperature is not the source of these instances of coral degradation. The claim that increased ocean acidity caused by increased CO2 in the oceans seems equally dubious: increased atmospheric CO2 does not translate directly to increased oceanic CO2. Also, it is well known that the oceans give up CO2 to the atmosphere when ocean temperatures rise. Additionally, research has shown that coral is robust enough to thrive in a fairly wide range of oceanic pH, and certainly has not become extinct through much wider ranges in pH that have occurred in the oceans over millions of years. If the levels of CO2 in oceans actually did increase in the future, since CO2 is essentual to coral, just as an increase in CO2 is a positive benefit to land-based plants and trees, one might expect a positive effect on coral by an increase in oceanic CO2 too.
This is not to say that research in the lab as shown in this report, where water temperature and acidity, cranked up to extraordinary levels will not retard growth or kill coral. But did you notice that in the presentation, there was actually no claim that ocean acidity had increased to the artificial levels of their experimentation, killing coral?! Perhaps as is typical in the bogus “global-warming” movement, the researchers in this report, just assume there will be increased oceanic CO2 and temperature in the future, such as might be signaled by unreal output from unvalidated/corrupted “global-warming” computer simulations, and used these CO2/temperature values for their research. Thus this is path/outcome and the associated conclusions reached for coral bleaching are hardly scientific. I believe that there are several other directions of ongiong research to determine more credible causes for coral bleaching—directions that do not get research funding because of a claimed tie to “global-warming”. Just as the claim that “global-warming” was causing bee hive collapse or a worldwide frog die-off were found to be false, time will tell what are the real causes of coral decline.
So in conclusion, there is no evidence that there is any significant oceanic temperature or acidity increase that has occurred to harm coral. Of course the more significant claim that man is causing “global-warming” has also never been proven either, and in fact, the proof is that the small increase in temperature in the 20th century is normal and unrelated to atmospheric CO2. From this presentation, the causal chain from mankind causing increased atmospheric CO2, causing higher atmospheric temperatures, causing higher oceanic temperatures/acidity, and then finally destroying coral, has many broken links.
Sun's too hot.
See my comment below. No matter what the acidity of the ocean is, this fact is going to impact availability of fresh water because it is being evaporated too suddenly. New Englanders have seen extremely unusual weather. I have watched the development of the torrential downpours over the last 5 years causing road washouts that we never had while I grew up here. My sons remember the massive snow banks in winter - we had NONE this year.
So, there is no one that will convince me that the intensity of the solar storms isn't impacting our oceans. I am not out on a watercraft taking samples, but I really do not have to - I can see the impact with my eyes right here.
We had no freeze over these glacial lakes this year.
Pretty damned serious.
Since every reputable scientific organization in the world says that you are uninformed and wrong, I'll take their educated opinion and ignore yours as the right wing, pro-buisness, stupidity and propaganda that it is.
Thank you Hal Guernsey, post #97. You saved me a lengthy reply. Global warming is an atmospheric problem. In other words, CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere. In fact, it is slow to be absorbed by the oceans, and that the amount being exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere is huge compared to amount humans are adding to the imbalance. I do agree that we need to forget the politics and fund a study on global warming. Especially, since so many scientists believe we are about to fall off a cliff.
Well hell! There you have it folks, Hal, has spoken so all is well. Go back to your homes, nothing to see here! Gee, Hal, I'm so glad I read your post and didn't pay attention in chemistry, geology, or any of those other stupid science college courses I took. All we had to do was ask either, Hal, or, Willie! Who woulda thunk it!!??
I'd go into a rebuttal but after reading four pages of assinine comments of people who think since the world has gone through changes in the past there is no difference in this change, I'm a bit worn out. Despite the past 200 years we have dumped untold amounts of crap into our environment and our numbers have grown exponentially. Despite nearly 95%+ of scientists from MANY different fields telling us that we are INDEED changing our planet and the outcome does NOT seem to bode well for us. Despite fishing our oceans nearly empty, causing the extinction of who knows how many species by our own hand, changing our environment simply to suite our own desires. Despite these things and MANY MANY others people still do NOT realize or want to face what WE have done and are doing!! Nice.
James I think you would be smart to do that because as GarrettB correctly pointed out Hal doesn't have an inkling of a clue about AGW. Therefore I would suggest you click no value on his post.
Sun's too hot.
New England never had a freeze over the lakes this winter. I've never seen that in my entire life. We're about a month ahead of schedule so far as growing season is concerned and very much like the typical mid-Atlantic weather patterns.
I guess Al Gore knew what he was talking about. And the age of the sun is older than we thought.
But - if my children were babies again - I'd keep them covered in something from head to toe - cotton fabrics so that they do not burn out in that sun. Keep their heads covered. This is nothing like I have ever seen up here.
Instead of coral, I wish that the right wing idealogs, who deny scientifically accepted Global Warming, would face extinction.
How come Cuba's reefs are not effected? Are they in an air conditioned doom?
From another poster above- Cuba's reefs are among the most at risk and already impacted by the range of human and natural impacts that sicken, kill, damage, or physically destroy reefs. the caribbean as a whole has lost over 80% of their live reef cover since ~1980, with average live cover dropping from anywhere from 50-70% to below 5%. curious to see for yourself? a quick websearch will surely lead you to non-partisan scholarly research confirming these serious declines. a second quick search will show you how valuable healthy reefs are for food, income, tourism, etc. which gets us to this point why the comments for potential listing coral species as endangered has arrived. this is not sham science or political maneuvering. this is the world we've created for ourselves.
James, reefs are very valuable to life. They create so much it is unbelievable. I fish and dive them all the time in the Keys. Cuba looks like the Keys did thirty years ago, a lib that doesn't watch 60 minutes?
Artificial reefs are great also, do you know the Gulf of Mexico's major reefs are oil rigs? That one major oil spill, that was prolonged by a agenda driven President waiting nine days to send clean-up crews, probably damaged one millionth of the amount of life that the rigs create and I am sure they will continue to generate more.
no global warming but if there was, man did not cause it. Oh and the world is flat.
Yeah, people have been making up liberal nonsense, since the earth was created 6,000 years ago ... at least that's what they tell me on Fox. ( tongue in cheek comment ).
This is crap! The warming is not the problem, it is fertilizer and phosphate mining.
If it is the warming, please explain why Cuba's reefs, where they do not use fertilizer, are flourishing. How does global warming miss an island just 90 miles away?
@lvingbarefoot - cuba's reefs are among the most at risk and already impacted by the range of human and natural impacts that sicken, kill, damage, or physically destroy reefs. the caribbean as a whole has lost over 80% of their live reef cover since ~1980, with average live cover dropping from anywhere from 50-70% to below 5%. curious to see for yourself? a quick websearch will surely lead you to non-partisan scholarly research confirming these serious declines. a second quick search will show you how valuable healthy reefs are for food, income, tourism, etc. which gets us to this point why the comments for potential listing coral species as endangered has arrived. this is not sham science or political maneuvering. this is the world we've created for ourselves.
Not true, Cuba's reefs, not all of the Caribbeans, as your stat shows, are thriving.
And yes manmade factors are killing our reefs, but it is not warming. Reefs need warm water and if some areas lose reefs to being to hot, others areas or depths will now thrive.
I grew up on the only living reefs in our country, their food and life values are enormous, but we need to focus on the real problem, not this false political agenda.
@lvingbarefoot: i encourage you to take a read of Burke et al. (2011): Reefs at Risk - Revisited (easily searchable on your favorite search engine). cuba's reefs: 75% threatened by local threats. add thermal stresses, it climbs to 97%. with some of the largest reef systems in the Caribbean (even more reef area than the Bahamas and all its islands), I'm not surprised that they have better-looking reefs than say the Florida Keys, Haiti, or Jamaica. But because of where they are in the Caribbean / Gulf, and population denisities, etc., the risk is higher than in the Bahamas (again, see Burke et al.) But the risk is a sum total. local issues (as you point out rightly) wear them down, global issues put them away. to over-use the phrase, the camel is staring at the blade of straw in our hand. whether it is mining or sewage or destructive fishing or washed out fertilizer or eroding shorelines, or by the steady loss from bleaching and disease brought on by waters too warm to support coral life, or too acidic to support their growth, well, those are the likely choices. some can be changed almost overnight (stopping destructive fishing), but to remove threats of weakened coral systems, you need to address the short- and the long-term. placing coral communities under endangered species protections is one of the principal ways the USA does this important work.
And if you happen to not like Burke et al., (as I'm not any of those authors), I'd be happy to point you towards any number of Cuban studies that highlight their state and trends.
You list risk, yet there are already results. Everywhere else has been negatively effected already due to global warming according to the 'experts', why not them?
You are quoting that they are at risk, I am saying they are currently pristine. How are they pristine and the rest of the fertilizing using world is already damaged to world wide global warming.
90 miles away can control the amount of man-made chemicals the reefs are exposed to, but the temperature can not be the culprit. There is zero logic to that argument.
I will continue to kill lion fish and try to get our reefs healthy, I will refuse to cave in to lies to fit an agenda.
@lvingbarefoot - like any system, there will be a range of reef conditions from healthy to dead, and cuba is no exception. havana bay has likely lost its reefs due to sewage, storm-water runoff, deforestation, etc. the sabana-camaguey archipelago had live coral fall from ~20% cover in 1994 to under 8% in 2003. many of the losses were directly associated with impacts of the 1998 bleaching event. as you are well aware, it is not one thing killing coral, but a host. whether it's a local or global stressor, a weakened coral is more likely to succumb to disease or predation. that is the urgency behind this potential listing, and something that may be lost in how the news article is writing the headline. i encourage you to keep killing lionfish and telling people to not deforest steep hillsides in cuba, or let untreated sewage make its way to the shore, or to buy seafood from reckless fishers. all this helps reduce the total stress (getting back to that "threat index"). but it is foolish to believe that the reefs in cuba are immune to losses caused by global factors. whether you believe in global warming or not, surely you understand the implications of annual bleaching and disease because of elevated sea temperatures. the healthier you can make your reef, be it cuba or florida or further east in my neck of the woods, the better the chance for resilience against things beyond your level of control. that is what this should be about. and that is again why this review on listing endangered species is going on. because healthy coral reefs are getting rarer all the time and yet they are so incredibly important to so many.
If 80% of the worlds population were to "disappear," natures balance might be restored. Anyone up for cookies and koolaid!
How about a little simple science.
Take two sodas. One at room temperature and one in the refrigerator. Shake both equal amounts and open. The room temperature one will spew more than the cold one.
Warm water whether it is a soda or the ocean is able to hold less CO2 than cold water. That is why atmospheric CO2 rise actually happens after temperatures rise. Warm oceans release CO2.
And it is dishonest to use the term acidic when talking about pH levels above neutral. You can say more or less base or basic but the pH level has to drop below 7.0 before it is classified as an acid. Does Minute Maid call their reduced acid orange juice "More Base"? Of course not.
Perhaps MSNBC and the rest of the main stream media need to look at the pH scale.
http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/184ph.html
@economykiller - your science experiment is of little value to what is going on at the air-ocean interface. your experiment is a demonstration of Henry's Law, which defines how much gas is soluble at some liquid temperature based on partial pressures (which change near instantaneously the moment you open a shaken soda to 1 atmosphere). in actuality, your shaking of the cold or warm bottle (assuming both have the same initial ratio of dissolved:gaseous CO2) will release the same amount of pressure. that the warm one shoots more foam or whatever is illusionary to the rapid change in pressure you're describing.
In ocean science, colder waters have more solubility for gases than warmer water. simple, relevant example, many hot water faucets initially pour out "milky" water, because the gases are not in solution, but are microbubbles. as the water cools, more of the microbubbles go back into solution and the water "clears up". note, there is no change in pressure here. just solubility of a gas. getting to the ocean, cooler waters absorb more CO2, allowing for greater opportunity to retain them in solution as carbonate (H+ CO3-) ions. as a an individual with a sense of the chemistry, this ion formula is your simple dissolved salt formula, with the H+ positive ion responsible for the pH of that solution. when the ocean loses the ability to absorb CO2 and keep it as dissolved negative ion partners of the H+ ion, the ocean has more H+ untied as an ion salt (like table salt, in solution is weakly held H+ and Cl- ions. as a solid, HCl...) so this relative INCREASE of H+ concentration will INCREASE the relative acidity of the fluid (again, in this case the ocean), thereby reducing the pH (as you would know, increasing H+ leads to decreases in pH). therefore, while the ocean remains more-or-less around a "neutral" pH (~8.14 these days) and is indeed leaning into "basic" conditions, the trend of increasing H+ concentration is moving the pH downward, therefore it is not incorrect to saying that the ocean is acidifying (that is to say, gaining more H+ ions, becoming more acidic than its previous state, etc.).
The paradox to examine is how increasing CO2 concentrations in the air capture longwave energy (heat), thereby warming the oceans (and lakes and everything that holds dissolved CO2 in carbonate form), thereby reducing the ability to maintain that CO2 pump into the ocean. the end product is likely even more CO2 being released, thereby positively forcing the atmosphere into having more CO2, which strengthens the warming capacity, which warms the oceans, and further increases the H+ concentration. and even small increases (in the logarithmic scale of pH and ocean acidity) mean that all life that needs carbonate for its skeleton (shells, corals, forams, etc.) will lose the ability to grow a skeleton, get larger, defend itself from disease or predators, etc. you can quickly see how this has large implications to humans at a global scale.
saying nothing at all about how surface warming changes currents and deep-water transfer and plankton blooms and food chains and the global fleets that rely on these harvests to feed the world.
Hey at least he voted himself up. That has to count for something.
Great job and good explanation, BK!
"The authors did note that the limited science of corals meant that "the overall uncertainty was high."
Uh-huh. NOAA's got such a great track record. Here's another headline:
"NOAA temperature record “adjustments” could account for almost all “warming” since 1973"
Enough said.
Better coral than me and besides i do not want to live like the Talaban.
No one has mentioned the under ocean earthquakes, what amount of CO2 does that put into the waters? No one has mentioned the Blue Planet series that show all the underwater fissures that are constantly spouting CO2 and the animal/plant life that is THRIVING in those areas.
Also, no one has mentioned the fact that the Coast Guard just sunk that Japanese ship with all that diesel fuel and their comment was "oh, it will dissipate before any damage is done to the oceans. BS.! but then hey, I guess that's a male's way of thinking. Don't send the Japs a bill for taking the time to unload the fuel, just sink it and let it leak out naturally into the oceans over many years! thus, by 2100, it will maybe be all out of the tanks and into the waters, destroying the fish, corals, and anything else.
I know it's a cylical thing, that the earth heats and cools, that volcanos that have been spitting up lava and CO2 for years (Hawaii, for example) have a lot to do with air polution. Mt. St. Helens when it errupted, that other one in Europe somewhere. That the dirtiest rivers are in China (have you seen those pictures going around the internet of the filth of China's rivers)? Disgusting. Yet, you don't see them attempting to clean it up.
I for one feel there are to many EPA groups and regulations. Not that I don't think someone should be overseeing people who just don't give a damn about what they trash, but I would think that the states could do a better job of policing their own areas. Those people in the Federal government are only there either by appointment/bribery, or because their lips kiss a$$ and they figure that whatever they can steal from the coffers is rightfully theirs. They have no idea what it takes to feed a nation and the world. Yet they feel they can write laws and regulations to control what farmers do and have to go thru to feed the world population.
Most farmers are quite frugal, respect the land, and try very hard not to contaminate the soils and air.
Yet, other nations are cutting down the rain forests and who's making them stop? Those forests help to clean the air, and when they are all cut down who's gonna clean the air? Last night on River Monsters, Jeremy Wade was in, I believe, Africa where he pointed out that a huge dam built in the 1950's created such a disturbance in the balance of nature that weather changes in a snap over the lake he was investigating.
Yes it's a lot of human's influence, but the nature of volcanos, etc are a participant. How do you control Mother Nature to suit your human needs?
DSC93 - VERY GOOD post. Love it. Well put!
Anyone heard of "Natural Selection" ? It happens.
So the U.S. is killing the planet all by itself ? Where is the finger pointing when it comes to China, Mexico, Brazil, India & all the other countrys spewing out pollution whom we practically buy all our products from ?
This is another thing that our planet is trying to tell us and the answer isn't clear, but it is real, no matter if it's man made or natural occurrence. First for all the political trolls out there, shut up and go to the political comments because you're in way over your head, (so am I ). Second, for all the commenter's that are bringing the scientific facts, thanks it really helped me see what and how this effects all of us and the world at hand.Third, some make a lot of sense, especially wje37fcsm, on bottom of page 1, marschal2837519 page 4 fifth post,tao of wow page 1, and page 4. As far as tipping point, I fear we might be getting close and I think the fear that those that believe that makes a lot of sense. When it starts so go over the edge it's all over from there. The global warming has many factors both, natural and man made. Acidity, CO2, pollutants, volcanic vents( above ground and under the sea ), certain food chains being disrupted, and orbital location as the earth's orbit changes. It's all of the above. Can we change it, well that's still to be seen. As long as big business, owns our governments, I'm afraid not. Oh well ! It's been nice while it lasted. Be well, Be truthful, and try to care for each other.