The world's oceans cover 70% of the earth's surface and absorb a vast amount of the sun's energy. The oceans have absorbed 90% of global warming from the heat-trapping gases we humans have pumped into the atmosphere since the beginning of industrialization.
The top 16 feet of ocean surface water store as much heat as the entire atmosphere of the planet. The surface temperatures determine the amount and patterns of precipitation and, large-scale atmosphere circulation, which affects our weather.
One-third of carbon dioxide dissolves into the ocean, so it acts as a buffer against rising temperatures that otherwise would result in an unlivable climate for our civilization. The carbon consumed by plants and marine animals eventually ends in the mud at the bottom of the ocean. The carbon cycle is changed, when the temperature rises throughout the water column releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere contributing even more CO2 to global warming.
In Glasgow at the COP 26, the oceans' complexity leaves some mysteries which governments and science are incapable of understanding all the risks that disrupt the climate system.
This much we do know, the greenhouse gas experiments that we have undertaken since the Industrial Revolution undermine ocean ecosystems to our detriment. If fossil fuel emissions are not reduced, we will likely lose our longest and greatest carbon store. We simply can’t survive the loss of the oceans. The results will be devastating with sea-level rise, more powerful storms, coral bleaching, ocean acidification leading to the death of the marine food web and, acceleration of the melting of the polar ice caps.
COP26 – Update on Ocean Negotiations
The draft text on 1/CP.26 calls for an annual-dialogue to strengthen ocean-based action, ensuring that the work to integrate ocean and climate change across the UNFCCC will continue. This means the ocean will play a role in processes related to achieving ambitious mitigation, adaptation and finance goals in the future.
A recurring ocean climate dialogue provides the opportunity to share lessons learned, challenges faced, as well as opportunities to include ocean-based climate mitigation and adaptation in national and sub-national plans, like NDCs, adaptation plans, and other sector-based decarbonization strategies. It provides a forum to discuss where to direct available finance and technical assistance in support of sustainable ocean-based solutions.
While this may be a step forward for recognizing the impacts of climate change on the ocean and the role ocean-based solutions can play to addressing the crisis, the most important thing we can do for the ocean is meet the 1.5-degree target of the Paris Agreement. COP26 unfortunately has not mobilized the ambition we need to protect the ocean and communities who rely on it with regards to emission reduction targets or financing to address the challenges communities are already facing.
Innovation from Belize; debt relief for coral reef swap.
LONDON (Reuters) - Belize provided a likely 'blue' model for conserving some of the world's most vulnerable marine ecosystems on Friday, swapping a promise to protect the northern Hemisphere's biggest barrier reef for much-needed debt relief.
While urgent efforts to limit global warming are expected to see at least half a trillion dollars of 'green' bonds this year, 'blue' bonds are still in their infancy, despite estimates that oceans contribute around $3 trillion per year to global GDP.
Financial incentives have been one of the main pillars of efforts at the United Nations COP26 climate change summit to tackle rising temperatures, with demands from poorer countries for increased help from richer states.
Serial defaulter Belize's move is seeing it buy back its $533 million 'superbond' with help from non-profit organisation The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and European bank Credit Suisse.
The pioneering step involves the central American country committing to spend $4 million a year and fund a $23 million marine conservation trust to protect the world's second-largest coral reef, damaged in the past by oil drilling and overdevelopment.
More good news, this is one success story on a global initiative of preserving one-third of the ocean from human exploitation.
BOGOTA, Colombia — Four Latin American countries announced Tuesday that they will expand and unite their marine reserves to create a vast corridor in the Pacific Ocean in hopes of protecting sea turtles, tuna, squid, hammerhead sharks and other species.
The new marine corridor will connect the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador with Colombia’s Malpelo Island and the Cocos and Coiba Islands in Costa Rican and Panamanian waters, protecting migratory species from fishing fleets of hundreds of vessels that visit the eastern Pacific each year.
The announcement was made during the U.N. climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, where world leaders gathered to discuss carbon emission targets and other environmental policies.
It comes amid growing concern over industrial fishing in the eastern Pacific, where fishing fleets from China and other countries are hauling in hundreds of thousands of tons of marine life each year using questionable methods.
The Atlantic writes on a Nature study (behind a paywall) that found that whaling in the twentieth century resulted in a loss of massive blooms of whale poop critical to the ecosystems and biodiversity of the oceans.
In the 20th century, the largest animals that have ever existed almost stopped existing. Baleen whales—the group that includes blue, fin, and humpback whales—had long been hunted, but as whaling went industrial, hunts became massacres. With explosive-tipped harpoons that were fired from cannons and factory ships that could process carcasses at sea, whalers slaughtered the giants for their oil, which was used to light lamps, lubricate cars, and make margarine. In just six decades, roughly the life span of a blue whale, humans took the blue-whale population down from 360,000 to just 1,000. In one century, whalers killed at least 2 million baleen whales, which together weighed twice as much as all the wild mammals on Earth today.
All those missing whales left behind an enormous amount of uneaten food. In a new study, the Stanford ecologist Matthew Savoca and his colleagues have, for the first time, accurately estimated just how much. They calculated that before industrial whaling, these creatures would have consumed about 430 million metric tons of krill—small, shrimplike animals—every year. That’s twice as much as all the krill that now exist, and twice as much by weight as all the fish that today’s fisheries catch annually. But whales, despite their astronomical appetite, didn’t deplete the oceans in the way that humans now do. Their iron-rich poop acted like manure, fertilizing otherwise impoverished waters and seeding the base of the rich food webs that they then gorged upon. When the whales were killed, those food webs collapsed, turning seas that were once rain forest–like in their richness into marine deserts.
But this tragic tale doesn’t have to be “another depressing retrospective,” Savoca told me. Those pre-whaling ecosystems are “still there—degraded, but still there.” And his team’s study points to a possible way of restoring them—by repurposing a controversial plan to reverse climate change.
snip
The team plans to propose a small and carefully controlled experiment to test the effects of iron fertilization on the whales’ food webs. The mere idea of that “is going to be shocking to some people,” Savoca admitted. Scientists and advocacy groups alike have fiercely opposed past iron-addition experiments, over concerns that for-profit companies would patent and commercialize the technology and that the extra iron would trigger blooms of toxic algae.
But with Savoca’s new estimates, “we now have a much better idea of exactly the quantity of iron that whales were recycling in the system and how much to add back so we don’t get bad effects,” he said. His goal isn’t to do something strange and unnatural but to effectively act as a surrogate defecator, briefly playing the role that whales did before they were hunted to near extinction. These creatures would still face many challenges—ship strikes, noise pollution, entangling fishing gear, pollutants—but at least food supplies would tilt in their favor.
Whaling almost destroyed a thriving food web, “but in the sliver we have left, I see a lot of hope,” Savoca said. He’s not talking about restoring long-lost ecosystems, such as those that disappeared when mammoths and other land-based megafauna went extinct tens of thousands of years ago. “This is a system that was alive and well when our grandparents were alive,” he said. “And we want to bring it back.”
This diary does not discuss plastics, oil, overfishing, loss of mangroves, seagrass, and sea ice. Despite the critical importance of each. I made the decision to keep the diary short.
Though some progress will have been made at COP, it won't make much of a difference in our trajectory toward a diminished planet. There were too many speeches and not enough concrete actions to make a difference. Blah, blah blah.
The world's focus is on the world's coastlines and the enormous population centers that will be lost to rising seas. But across the oceans, island nations will lose their homes. There is no international law to protect them as climate refugees, talk about being boned. Their situation is not comparable in any way to New York City, Miami, or Shanghai, where residents can move inland.
The powerless will be the first to suffer the consequences of a dying planet despite having little to nothing to do with causing the crisis. Though that belief should be revisited after a summer of climate hell suffered by the entire planet in 2021.
It is all so sad; this video shows what we will lose with rising seas. The people need the world’s help now, not later.
As COP 26 winds down, I would like to thank all the Daily Kos bloggers who helped us get the story out, whether by writing a diary, recommending, and/or commenting on one of the many stories we provided. We appreciate you. This effort would not have occurred without the leadership of blogger boatsie, who was the brains behind and organizer of not only Climate Brief (we’re not going anywhere) but the coverage on COP26.