A first of its kind global assessment has found one third of reef-building corals face extinction because of climate change [ark | moreark]. Climate change brings rising water temperatures and more intense solar radiation, which leads to coral bleaching and disease, often exacerbated by nutrient rich water run-off from denuded lands. Together the result is often mass coral mortality. Add this to acidic oceans [search], ocean dead zones [search] and widespread over-fishing [search] and it is clear we are witnessing the climate-mediated collapse of ocean ecosystems [search].
Death of coral reefs from climate change is not theory or conjecture of what might happen if we continue relentlessly emitting greenhouse gases. This is but the most recent evidence that climate change continues to...
As incredible as it may sound, the world's oceans are running out of fish [ark]. Terribly wasteful and unsustainable industrial harvest of natural, wild fisheries [search] has led to much of humanity's swollen population eating ever smaller fish from inexorably shrinking populations. "Ninety years of industrial-scale exploitation of fish has... led to 'ecological meltdown'. Whole biological food chains have been destroyed."
Remaining high quality fish stocks are being stolen by rich nations from developing countries, and neither politicians nor consumers have invested much in developing a sustainable wild fish industry. Solutions including marine reserves [search] and greatly diminished harvests, including bans on some species as they recover, are possible and needed immediately. If not...
I remember being told by a friend only fifteen years ago that oceans were so massive that humans could never significantly alter or damage them. As with every formerly massive ecosystem, the oceans are now succumbing to the human disease. The scale of the human enterprise has simply become too huge to be accomodated any longer by the Earth. We shall learn to live within ecological limits or we will die in huge numbers as ecosystems begin their inevitable and deadly collapse.
New Historical Data on the Seas Spells Alarm
New historical data reveal that the world's oceans are in crisis, largely due to overfishing -- and they may not recover. The records indicate that the existing model for commercial fishing will exhaust fisheries in a decade or...