Ocean acidification and animal extinction are Tim Flannery's next subjects, neither presently offering much promise for the atmosphere of hope he's seeking.
Two hundred years ago the pH of the ocean surface was a tenth of a percent higher than today, meaning the oceans are 30% more acid, What does that mean for complex and delicate marine ecosystems? Nothing good. "The current rate of CO2 increase is the fastest in Earth's recorded history," so the oceans aren't getting time to assimilate the change and absorb the acid.
It's ironic, or even perverse, that we first began to learn about this problem while exploring the possibility of colonizing Mars. Does it make sense to dream of creating a new human habitat in an alien world before we've learned to manage our impact on the old home world? That's a rhetorical question to which many will reply with a resounding No. I vote for boldly going, myself. We always learn more by going and doing, than by staying and fretting. But the irony and the perversity are palpable.
Will seaweed save the sea? Happily, its potential to reduce acidification and warming are huge. Unhappily, time is not on our side.
"How are the animals doing?" Not well, as Elizabeth Kolbert has documented. The extinction rate is 1,000 times too great, the prospect of species loss over 20% is real. “Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature," Kolbert writes, "it’s not clear that he ever really did.” We'd better learn quick.
A little perspective: "a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.” Look on our works and despair, Ozymandias.
Or, we can get to work cleaning up our mess so we don't leave a colossal wreck in the dirt for tomorrow's archaeologists to dig up.
And we can divest. Leaving the oil in the soil may be our greatest work of all. How are we doing?
5:30/6:58, 72/88/65
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Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick was first published as The Whale on this date in 1851. The novel begins with the famous line, “Call me Ishmael.” It continues: “Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation …” WA
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