Posts tagged as:

ocean acidification

The cost of losing coral: no drop in the ocean

by Bryan Walker 21 October 2009

Perhaps it will register if it’s expressed in money terms. The latest issue of the New Scientist carries an article reporting an estimate of  the loss of the world’s coral reefs at $172 billion per year. The estimate comes from the work of Pavan Sukhdev and colleagues. He’s an economist with the United Nations Environment [...]

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Climate compendium: important insights

by Bryan Walker 28 September 2009

“The Climate Change Science Compendium is a wake-up call. The time for hesitation is over”. So wrote Ban Ki-moon in his foreword to this UN Environment Programme publication released last week. The publication is a review of how climate science has evolved since the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), and is based on some 400 major scientific contributions [...]

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A solemn warning on coral reefs

by Bryan Walker 29 August 2009

Australian scientist and coral reef expert John Veron reckons there’s a “great big gorilla in the cupboard” — advancing ocean acidification. It cleans out reefs, leaving them “horrible places – dead, empty, slime-covered.” He paints this grim picture in a lecture given to the Royal Society in London last month. It’s available on line and [...]

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A deep sigh of relief…

by Bryan Walker 11 July 2009

Elizabeth Kolbert recently interviewed Jane Lubchenco  (pictured), appointed by President Obama as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Kolbert comments that when Lubchenco was appointed the reaction among climate scientists was an almost audible sigh of relief. During the Bush administration the work of NOAA staff was frequently ignored or even suppressed, and [...]

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Copenhagen 2: dangers ahead

by Bryan Walker 22 June 2009

The second section of the Copenhagen synthesis report, Social and Environmental Disruption, discusses the dangers of climate change relating to society and the environment, noting that scientific research provides a wealth of relevant information which is not receiving the attention one might expect.    
Considerable support has developed for containing the rise in global temperature to a [...]

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What’s a few tears to the ocean?

by Gareth 12 May 2009

New Zealand could be amongst the first places in the world to feel the effects of ocean acidification, according to a new “emerging issues” paper released today by the Royal Society of New Zealand. Surrounded by cold oceans which absorb CO2 faster than warm waters, and with a $300 million shellfish industry based on mussels, [...]

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The Long Thaw

by Bryan Walker 24 January 2009

The legacy of our release of fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere will be long-lasting. It will affect the Earth’s climate for millenia. We are becoming players in geologic time. That is the conclusion that climatologist David Archer shares with a general audience in his newly published book The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing [...]

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The heater

by Gareth 19 January 2009

While some on the crank fringe fixate over a “global cooling” (that ain’t happening), the imbalance in our planet’s heat budget has inevitable — and inexorable — consequences for our climate. More heat’s coming into the system than can leave, as this excellent new article at NASA’s Earth Observatory spells out. It’s an easy [...]

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Cry me a river

by Gareth 8 January 2009

I missed out on the field trip to the Waipara Gorge to look at the evidence for tropical temperatures around Eocene New Zealand, laid low by the

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Friday on my mind (once more)

by Gareth 6 June 2008

Before you ask, the picture shows the shell of a coccolithophore, and it’s in trouble. We’ve been adding a lot of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and a good chunk of it has ended up in the oceans. The water is getting more acidic, and some sea creatures are finding it harder to build [...]

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