by Elizabeth Grossman

The acidification of the world’s oceans from an excess of CO2 emissions has already begun, as evidenced recently by the widespread mortality of oyster larvae in the Pacific Northwest. Scientists say this is just a harbinger of things to come if greenhouse gas emissions continue to soar.

Standing on the shores of Netarts Bay in Oregon on a sunny fall morning, it’s hard to imagine that the fate of the oysters being raised here at the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery is being determined by what came out of smokestacks and tailpipes in the 1960s and ‘70s. But this rural coastal spot and the shellfish it has nurtured for centuries are a bellwether of one of the most palpable changes being caused by global carbon dioxide emissions — ocean acidification.

It was here, from 2006 to 2008, that oyster larvae began dying dramatically, with hatchery owners Mark Wiegardt and his wife, Sue Cudd, experiencing larvae losses of 70 to 80 percent. “Historically we’ve had larvae mortalities,” says Wiegardt, but those deaths were usually related to bacteria. After spending thousands of dollars to disinfect and filter out pathogens, the hatchery’s oyster larvae were still dying.

Finally, the couple enlisted the help of Burke Hales, a biogeochemist and ocean ecologist at Oregon State University. He soon homed in on the carbon chemistry of the water. “My wife sent a few samples in and Hales said someone had screwed up the samples because the [dissolved CO2 gas] level was so ridiculously high,” says Wiegardt, a fourth-generation oyster farmer. But the measurements were accurate. What the Whiskey Creek hatchery was experiencing was acidic seawater, caused by the ocean absorbing excessive amounts of CO2 from the air.

Ocean acidification — which makes it difficult for shellfish, corals, sea urchins, and other creatures to form the shells or calcium-based structures they need to live — was supposed to be a problem of the future. But because of patterns of ocean circulation, Pacific Northwest shellfish are already on the front lines of these potentially devastating changes in ocean chemistry. Colder, more acidic waters are welling up from the depths of the Pacific Ocean and streaming ashore in the fjords, bays, and estuaries of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, exacting an environmental and economic toll on the region’s famed oysters.

For the past six years, wild oysters in Willapa Bay, Washington, have failed to reproduce successfully because corrosive waters have prevented oyster larvae from forming shells. Wild oysters in Puget Sound and off the east coast of Vancouver Island also have experienced reproductive failure because of acidic waters. Other wild oyster beds in the Pacific Northwest have sustained losses in recent years at the same time that scientists have been measuring alarmingly corrosive water along the Pacific coast.

The region’s thriving oyster hatcheries have had to scramble to adapt to these increases in acidity, which pose a threat to their very existence. Some of the largest operations, such as Whiskey Creek, are buffering the water in which they grow their larvae, essentially giving their tanks a dose of antacid in the form of sodium bicarbonate.

While the operation may look modest — a handful of small buildings just yards from the shore of a wide bay — Whiskey Creek is one of the largest suppliers of oyster seed on the West Coast. Its baby oysters are grown all along the U.S. Pacific coast, where the oyster industry is currently valued at about $73 million annually. Washington's Taylor Shellfish Hatchery — the country’s largest producer of farmed shellfish and one of the largest oyster producers — has also experienced dramatic losses. Its hatchery on Hood Canal, which has had some of the Pacific Northwest’s highest levels of ocean acidification, experienced the loss of about three-quarters of its oyster larvae before the owners began buffering the high acidity.

Together, Whiskey Creek and Taylor Shellfish, which also raises clams and mussels, account for most of the West Coast’s commercial shellfish production. Oysters are the biggest product, making up more than 80 percent of the Pacific coast shellfish produced and more than 60 percent of the revenue. According to industry and federal officials, the West Coast oyster industry generates about 3,000 jobs and has a total annual economic impact of about $207 million — significant numbers for their coastal communities.

The situation at the hatcheries has improved substantially in the past couple of years, thanks largely to an ongoing, intensive scientific monitoring effort and to measures to control the pH of seawater in the tanks where oyster larvae are raised. But ocean acidification continues apace, which makes understanding what’s been happening to Whiskey Creek oysters vital to grasping what will eventually threaten every ocean organism that builds a shell or coral branch.

Because of the way seawater circulates around the world, the deep water now washing ashore in Oregon and Washington is actually 30 to 50 years old and absorbed its CO2 long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. This time lag is important because oceans absorb about 50 percent of the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels, emissions that have been rising dramatically in recent decades. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ocean acidity has increased approximately 30 percent since the Industrial Revolution, and if we continue our current rate of carbon emissions, global oceans could be 150 percent more acidic by the end of the century than they have been for 20 million years.

“This problem is real,” says Hales. “There are measurable human impacts.”

Once absorbed by seawater, CO2 undergoes chemical reactions that make the water more acidic, says Richard Feely, a senior scientist at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and an expert in the ocean’s carbon chemistry. The chemical reactions that lower the ocean’s pH also reduce the availability of the kind of calcium that a variety of sea creatures need to build shells. On a 2007 research cruise along the Pacific Coast from British Columbia to Baja California, Feely discovered that “corrosive waters were everywhere we looked.”

When seasonal wind patterns change in spring, north winds create upwellings of deep and more acidic seawater off the Pacific Northwest coast. These waters — with their lowered pH and lack of available calcium carbonate in the form of what’s called aragonite — are what have been killing the oyster larvae. The availability of aragonite is particularly vital at an oyster’s earliest stages of development. In the first 24 to 48 hours of an oyster’s life, as it forms its first shell, the larvae go from being almost 0 percent shell to at least 70 percent shell before they begin to grow more tissue, explains George Waldbusser, assistant professor of ocean ecology and biochemistry at Oregon State University’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. Lower aragonite saturation means the tiny larvae — much smaller than a poppy seed — need to expend more energy to make their shells.

“If too much energy is used at one stage, they may not be able to survive to a subsequent stage or overcome the stress,” says Waldbusser.

Acidic water sometimes kills oyster larvae outright, so that they fail to survive past the egg stage. At other times, the eggs hatch, but larvae fail after a week or two.

“A lot is happening to an egg in the first 24 hours,” says Benoit Eudeline, chief scientist at the Taylor Shellfish Hatchery. “It goes from what’s essentially a blob to a creature with a shell, a digestive tract, organs. The oyster has to use a lot of aragonite to make its early shell and there seems to be a strong correlation between aragonite saturation and survival of larvae at a later stage.”

Waldbusser and colleagues are now researching the impacts of the stress induced by low aragonite saturation — how it may be affecting the oyster larvae’s use of its food reserves, and how it may impact development. “At this stage they’re floating around and eating as much as they can,” explains Christopher Sabine, director of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. “Anything that’s going to take energy away from shell-building is going to cost them.”

In response to the devastating die-off of larvae from 2006 to 2008 — and with the help of Hales, Waldbusser, and other scientists — Whiskey Creek and Taylor Shellfish began a program of ongoing monitoring to help avoid the intake of acidic water. Particularly at Netarts Bay, where the deep ocean water is on shore in early morning, they discovered they could improve pH conditions by varying the time of day they took water into their tanks. A better, less acidic time to pull in water is later in the day, after growth of phytoplankton has been stimulated by sunlight, thus soaking up some of the excess CO2. Buffering the acid also was crucial. A half-million dollars in federal funds has helped cover the expensive work of monitoring and controlling the seawater chemistry.

At the Taylor Shellfish Hatchery, where water takes much longer than it does at Netarts to move in and out of the bay, organic matter — dead algae for example — can build up, die, and become food for bacteria that use up oxygen and further increase CO2 concentrations. This underscores the fact that controlling the flow of excess nutrients into the ocean, such as fertilizers and sewage, can to some degree offset the impacts of growing acidity.

Feely said problems with ocean acidification are also starting to be seen on the U.S.’s Atlantic coast and in Australia. Agricultural runoff and sewage have been taking a toll on the once-thriving oyster business in the Chesapeake Bay, and now rising ocean acidity is further exacerbating the problems of CO2-laden waters there. But for shellfish growers in the Pacific Northwest, these impacts are already too clear. As Bill Dewey of Taylor Shellfish put it, Pacific Northwest oysters may be “the canary in the coal mine.”

Yet on a November morning, with the snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountains just visible through the fog, the landscape around Taylor Shellfish looks much as it always has: the sea, the mountains, and a shore lined with fir trees. But as Dewey understands, the green-gray water is changing in a way it hasn’t for eons — changes that will be with us well into the next century, and possibly longer.

“We have to find a way in our industry to adapt,” says Dewey.

A U.S. panel has called for a concerted effort to study proposals to manipulate the climate to slow global warming — a heretical notion among some environmentalists. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Jane C. S. Long, the group’s chairwoman, explains why we need to know more about the possibilities and perils of geoengineering.

Jane C. S. Long, associate director-at-large of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, is convinced that the only sensible way to combat climate change is to work toward “a zero-emission energy system as fast as possible.” But as chairwoman of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s 18-member task force on geoengineering, the hydrologist and energy expert realized two fundamental things: that the world has still not come to its senses on global warming, and that science would be remiss if it didn’t consider the possibility that CO2 emissions will continue to soar for decades.

This scenario lies at the heart of a report issued last week by the task force, composed of noted experts in climate science, social science, and foreign policy. It called for a comprehensive study of geoengineering options — including removing CO2 from the atmosphere and reflecting solar energy back into space — in case the Earth’s climate crosses certain tipping points, such as a mass release of methane from the Arctic that would drastically warm the planet.

The report drew sharp criticism from some climate activists, who accused the task force of trying to put a positive marketing spin on doomsday technologies by labeling them efforts at “climate remediation.” But Long and her colleagues say it is best to be well informed about geoengineering options should they one day be needed. “Everyone I know who works on this is scared to death of this stuff,” Long said in an interview with Yale Environment 360 senior editor Fen Montaigne. “People aren’t doing this because they think, ‘Oh whoopee! We can change the Earth!’ They’re doing it because they just don’t see any progress [on CO2 emissions] and it just seems to be getting worse and they want options on the table.”

Yale Environment 360: What factors led the task force to the conclusion that it was time for the U.S. government to take a serious look at whether geoengineering, or climate remediation, was possible or advisable?

Jane Long: Number one, of course, is the fact that we’re still producing greenhouse gases, and they are getting to be at a dangerous level and they’re going higher and nobody really knows what’s going to happen. The risks seem to be very large and there’s a strong sense that even if we were by some magic wand able to stop emitting tomorrow, we still have a problem with a lot of unknowns. So in the long run the chance that we would hit something that was very, very difficult for both humans and ecosystems to be able to handle successfully was significant. And we felt it was prudent to start doing research. There are other factors, such as other countries beginning to look at this. Certainly the UK has and it behooves the United States to be a member of this group that’s looking at it, rather than on the sidelines and just having to accept what other people do. There was definitely not a sense that we should get ready to deploy these things right now. We have to consider it, but we’re not planning to do it. So the idea is just really to become informed.

e360: Were you driven by a sense that these geoengineering schemes have not been subject to rigorous, coordinated studies?

Long: Absolutely. What we thought was that we knew very, very little about whether these technologies could be effective, whether they were advisable, and whether they were even doable, and we were only at the very beginning of understanding that and that it would take a coordinated program by government research to get there. You weren’t going to get there on the margins. You are going to have to do a coordinated, focused program.

e360: One thing you make very clear is that by far the preference of the people on the panel is to lower, or mitigate, greenhouse gas emissions. But given what’s happening now — we had records emissions in 2010, China and India are booming, the U.S. is not making a lot of progress — are you optimistic that the world is going to get its act together in the next 10 or 20 years to really start lowering CO2 emissions?

Long: I think we will start, but we won’t necessarily do it in time. I’m afraid it’s going to become absolutely obvious that we have to do it. And we will start doing it for a variety of reasons. But will it change in time? I have to admit to a certain amount of pessimism. I don’t think we will avoid some of the really difficult impacts of this.

e360: That leads to a much quoted part of your report, which was that geoengineering schemes may have to be tried if the climate system reaches a tipping point, an emergency situation. What kind of tipping points did some of the scientists have in mind that might speed up the necessity to consider climate remediation?

Long: Certainly methane issues in the Arctic and positive feedbacks in the Arctic. Also positive feedbacks that would change rainfall patterns dramatically and threaten food supplies. There are some perfect storms out there where the food supply and water supply available to humans is dramatically changed and at the same time population growth accelerates. So I think what we felt was it wasn’t really possible to predict these things, but the possibility of them could not be denied.

e360: Among those was the potential impact of ocean acidification on fisheries and marine life?

Long: Sure. And of course some of the technologies that are being thought about simply don’t help that. I think that the situation now in the field of geoengineering — it’s my guess and only a guess — is that pretty much everything that’s been prominently discussed to date will be thrown away. And that what will happen as we begin to study this is we’ll begin to find new and better ideas and it will take decades to sort through what might really be something you want to try if we absolutely had to. It’s very likely that the things we’re considering right now will not be the ones that we end up considering in 10 years.

e360: There was an interesting comment in the report concerning tipping points, that science to date has in fact underestimated some of the physical impacts taking place, such as the rate of melting Arctic Ocean ice.

Long: Absolutely. I mean [Harvard atmospheric chemist] Jim Anderson was on our committee and he was the most articulate about this issue. We’re not even tracking what’s actually happening the way we ought to be tracking it. We have the potential for the release of huge amounts of methane gas, but we have no methane observation system in the Arctic. And he points out that if a small percentage of the methane locked up in the Arctic were released every year, it would overwhelm, by a factor of ten, all emissions due to energy. If you reach one of these tipping points, it’s conceivable that mitigation won’t even make any difference anymore. And that is the nightmare scenario.

e360: And therefore you have to have in your quiver some geoengineering weapons, assuming you understand what they might do?

Long: Right. I mean the best way to solve a problem is not to have it. The best way to solve this problem is to mitigate as fast as we can manage. We should be talking about how we can get to a zero emission energy system as fast as possible. That’s what the climate science tells you the context should be. The discussion about saying, “Well we’re going to reduce by 10 percent or 20 percent”— it doesn’t really jibe with what the problem is. The problem is how fast can we go to zero and then probably below zero. Believe me, I know how hard it’s going to be. Even if we had the will tomorrow to do it, it would not be easy. So the next arrow in the quiver is we know some areas are going to flood, we know we are going to have more forest fires, we know we’re going to have more droughts. And how are you going to better manage these phenomena? And the last and the scariest is we’re going to intentionally manage the planet so that climate change doesn’t destroy us.

e360: Can you in a general way talk about the overall risks, costs, and limitations of trying to engineer the climate?

Long: It’s a huge spectrum of issues that vary very much by the technique and approach that you’re talking about. As [Harvard physicist] David Keith pointed out, these solar radiation management techniques are so amazing because it’s conceivable that you can do them for literally billions of dollars a year — peanuts in the scale of things, and you could significantly change the temperature of the Earth that way. So you have the possibility of being able to do it. You have some information about some natural phenomena like the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which spewed a lot of sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere and cooled the Earth by a couple of degrees for a couple of years. But there are three pieces here — whether it’s effective, whether it’s advisable, and whether you can actually do it.

We can think of a lot of ways to deliver particles to the stratosphere at concentrations that would be sufficient to reflect enough radiation to make a difference. We think it would be effective because we have some information from natural phenomena, but it might be very, very inadvisable. And the scariest thing about this particular type of technology is that it might be very effective and is potentially very doable, but someone might decide to do it out of desperation when other parts of the world were not really in favor of doing it because they have real concerns about unintended consequences. So it has implications for international relations that are very important, and that is why it is very important that we begin to work with other countries so that we jointly discover the pitfalls and possible benefits of these technologies so that they are not used willy-nilly by a desperate nation.

Second, other kinds of technologies, such as carbon removal technologies, have a very wonderful characteristic in that they remove the source of the problem, but they’re very slow and can be very expensive and when you deploy them at scale they could have some pretty serious environmental implications that would need to be evaluated very carefully. And it could cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars a ton to remove carbon from the atmosphere. And then when you have removed it, you still have to do something with it. If you store it underground or dispose of it in the deep ocean, this is where your impacts are going to come from.

e360: Do you think it would be exceedingly difficult to get some sort of unified global action to reduce incoming solar radiation or pull C02 out of the atmosphere?

Long: To do that in a way that was consistent with international consensus seems to me to be nearly impossible. I think it’s very unlikely that we would in an intentional way move to global methods because the governance issues will become extremely difficult to overcome. And it’ll also very difficult to know that it’s really the right thing to do. A lot depends on how desperate people begin to feel. And that I just don’t know. But I do know one thing — it’s better not to be ignorant. With the possibility of people becoming very desperate, it’s better to know more. I do think what is very likely to happen is regional intervention, where a country could decide it just can’t take any more of these floods, these droughts, these fires. These countries might try to do something to perturb the local climate if they can figure out a way.

e360: You’re recommending a focused and systematic program of research on climate remediation. What does that mean in the United States? Which agencies or laboratories might be involved?

Long: That really caused us a lot of struggle because there is no one place to go, no place in government where environmental sciences, social sciences, and the humanities all meet. So we were pragmatic in the sense of, “Here’s the government you’ve got, what’s the best way to use it to its best advantage?” The most important thing we recommended is an advisory commission that would deal with the problem of both governance and risk-based decisions of whether or not you should go ahead with research, dealing with issues like public engagement, transparency, interaction with the similar bodies doing this work in other nations. Somebody has to have an overview. There is a tremendous tension between the need to get some information about these technologies so we can quickly determine if there are any ideas that have merit, and the need to have public engagement and transparent risk management of research so that we can make good decisions about using them.

If you just battle ahead without taking some time to do public engagement, you’re going to end up doing what the Brits are doing right now, which is funding some geoengineering research [to spray aerosols into the atmosphere], sending the scientists out in the field to deal with the public, and then having to postpone the whole project because they just mismanaged it. So we feel that’s a very good example about how not to run it, that it should be done in a much more deliberative way. It shouldn’t just be science. It should be social science and law and humanities and members of the public that are debating about how we move forward, and then in the future if there is anything that we think would be a good idea to do, you are in a position to use the products of your research. A secret project in the back room is just the absolute wrong idea.

One of the first things the advisory commission could do would be to say, “Here is a bunch of all-indoor research and the government can proceed and you can get going.” At the same time, this commission would begin its own learning process on how to govern stuff that was outside of that zone.

e360: Why do you think it is so important that the U.S. take a leading global role in this research effort?

Long: Well I guess as a citizen of the U.S. I would rather have us be engaged than having to accept other countries’ interpretations of what is the right thing to do. I’m pretty unhappy with what the Brits have done right now in terms of how they’re managing this experiment. I think we should take the leadership in building norms of behavior around geoengineering research.

e360: And you would envision in this research phase reaching out to other nations in Europe, to China and India, etc., to involve some of their government agencies or scientists?

Long: Yes. And reach out to them through science, not through diplomacy. Leading with cooperation in the sciences is the best way to develop the norms of behavior that we’re looking for.

e360: Did you at times feel like you were a scientist who was in a scene from some futuristic Mad Max movie where you’re having to even think about this kind of stuff?

Long: No. But there’s also this complete sense of frustration that we have to be thinking about this, that somehow as a species we aren’t able to recognize this horrible foible and deal with it in a rational way. But people’s needs — their financial needs, their short-term needs — seem to prevent them from factoring in their long-term interests. And that’s downright depressing. But I don’t feel that sense of science fiction because everyone I know who works on this is scared to death of this stuff. People aren’t doing this because they think, “Oh whoopee! We can change the Earth!” They’re doing it because they just don’t see any progress [on CO2 emissions] and it just seems to be getting worse and worse and they want options on the table.

One thing we didn’t talk about is a concern I have that the only people who are engaging in this issue are people belonging to groups who think there is a geoengineering conspiracy, that the government is already doing climate modification and that’s why we get all these jet contrails everywhere. I just think it’s very important to expand the discussion beyond this group, which is not extremely legitimate as representatives of concerned society. I’m very concerned that we take this beyond the conspiracy folks.

e360: I have to ask you, did you find any evidence that anyone out there — a government or individual — was already engaging in any kind of secret geoengineering research?

Long: There wasn’t anything that we know about that’s going on like that. The conspiracy theorists have a right to their opinion, but I don’t know of any evidence that would support what they think is going on.

e360: What is the reaction to the criticism that you’re using the term “climate remediation” instead of geoengioneering as spin or a marketing move to make some terrible technology seem palatable?

Long: That was kind of a surprise. I don’t think there was any motivation to make it palatable or spin it. The issue is that we thought the term geongineering doesn’t seem to refer to climate — it’s used in oilfields, in hydrology — so we wanted to have a term that would really talk about climate rather than focus on a word like geoengineering that is used for so many other things that it’s not precise. Members also felt that the term “engineering” was misleading because we would never be able to design a new climate with a perfectly predictable outcome. It’s in the report that not everyone on the panel agreed [on the term], and I really don’t think it should be the thing that gets everybody worked up about the report. A lot of people thought that “geoengineering” was an unfortunate choice of words, and that maybe we should try to do something about the name at this point in time.

Photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/flickr/Creative Commons

by Rhett Butler

A new imaging system that uses a suite of airborne sensors is capable of providing detailed, three-dimensional pictures of tropical forests — including the species they contain and the amount of CO2 they store — at astonishing speed. These advances could play a key role in preserving the world’s beleaguered rainforests.

This summer, high above the Amazon rainforest in Peru, a team of scientists and technicians conducted an ambitious experiment using a pioneering technology. Deploying a pair of sweeping lasers that sent 400,000 pulses per second toward the ground, as well as an imaging spectrometer that could detect the chemical and light-reflecting properties of individual plants and trees 7,000 feet below, the researchers were able to instantaneously gather a vast amount of information about the unexplored tracts of cloud forest that passed beneath their airplane.

Conceived by Greg Asner, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, the new system — known as AToMS, or the Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System — has the potential to transform how tropical forest research is conducted. By combining several breakthrough technologies, Asner and his colleagues can capture detailed images of individual trees at a rate of 500,000 or more per minute, enabling them to create a high-resolution, three-dimensional map of the physical structure of the forest, as well as its chemical and optical properties. In Peru, the scientists hoped to not only determine what tree species lay below, but also to gauge how the ecosystem was responding to last year’s drought — the worst ever recorded in the Amazon — as well as help Peru develop a better mechanism for monitoring deforestation and degradation.

Asner’s new system, a significant advance on the so-called Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO) that he originally developed in 2006, could also play a vital role in global forestry in the decades ahead. The technology could help alleviate uncertainty about carbon emissions from deforestation and different forms of forest management, both of which are critical to the emerging policy of REDD (Reducing Emissions form Deforestation and Forest Degradation), a UN program that aims to compensate tropical countries for preserving their forests.

“The whole idea was to measure each of the things plant ecologists measure on the ground to evaluate biodiversity,” said Asner, as he flew over the Amazonian cloud forest. Asner is now helping the National Science Foundation develop an airplane with this suite of monitoring technologies, and is in talks with NASA about equipping a satellite with the system.

One of the key technologies Asner uses is known as LiDAR, which employs two powerful lasers to blast through canopy vegetation, reach the forest floor, and return a wealth of information about the forest’s structure. Depending on the aircraft’s altitude, sensors can map the forest at resolutions ranging from 10 centimeters to one meter, fine enough to “see” understory shrubs and epiphytes in tree crowns. LiDAR is also very good for measuring aboveground biomass, or the amount of carbon stored in a forest’s vegetation. It can also detect surface elevations to identify watersheds and waterways.

To truly understand an ecosystem, however, scientists need to know more about its characteristics, including aspects that can’t be been with the naked eye. This is where Asner’s CAO really sets itself apart, using newly developed sensors — built by engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — that can detect dozens of signals, including photosynthetic pigment concentrations, water content of leaves, defense compounds like phenols, structural compounds such as lignin and cellulose, as well as phosphorous and other micronutrients — all of which can be used to build signatures to distinguish individual plant species, as well as other measures of forest condition. The result, using the so-called VSWIR Imaging Spectrometer, is a system that can map the chemical and spectral attributes of a forest that may have more than 200 species of trees in a single hectare.

“When leaves interact with sunlight, the compounds bend, stretch, and vibrate at different patterns and rates,” said Asner. “These different rates led to different scattering of light. The spectrometer picks up on this and we’ve been able to deduce chemicals from these signatures.”

But for the CAO to accurately assess biodiversity, Asner’s team has to first do the groundwork by creating a database of the chemical and spectral properties of various plants, which are then fed into the CAO’s library of information on individual plant species. These are then correlated with the data collected by the CAO’s various sensors. In the Amazon, Asner and his team conducted extensive, on-the-ground work to compile information on nearly 5,000 plant species. “We have the best team of tree climbers in the world,” said Asner. “They can climb 75 trees a day, conducting full sampling.”

The aircraft that carries the system allows Asner’s team to map very large areas, sometimes more than 49,000 hectares (120,000 acres) a day. In 2009, using an older, less sophisticated version of the system, Asner mapped 4.3 million hectares of Peru’s Madre de Dios region. Now he is working on a bigger scale: nearly the entire Peruvian Amazon. After this, he goes to Colombia and Panama.

“We’re looking at biodiversity in regions that have never been put down on the science map,” said Asner.

by Christina Larson

Shenyang — once a key in Mao Zedong’s push to industrialize China — has begun to emerge from its smoggy past, cleaning up its factories and expanding its green spaces. In doing so, this city of 8 million people has been in the forefront of a growing environmental consciousness in urban China.

Almost every day of his childhood, He Xin remembers the skies in his hometown of Shenyang being gray. “If I wore a white shirt to school, by the end of the day it would be brown,” recalls He, who was born in 1974, “and there would be a ring of black soot under the collar.”

He grew up in Shenyang (population 8 million), the capital of northeastern China’s Liaoning province, a city famous for its heavy industry and manufacturing — and soot and pollution. Growing up, the view he remembers most vividly was looking out over Shenyang’s fabled Tiexi industrial district, home to several large iron and steel plants and the site of China’s first model workers village: “When I was a teenager, if I climbed a tall building to look out over Tiexi, all I would see was a forest of large smokestacks, chimneys, and dark, billowing smoke.”

But today all that is gone. No longer standing are Tiexi’s iconic smokestacks and its blocks of red brick workers’ dormitories, with their rows of coal-fired chimneys atop. Now He is the vice president of the environmental consultancy BioHaven and splits his time between Shenyang, Beijing, and St. Louis. To him, Shenyang looks almost unrecognizable today.

“It’s not perfect, but the air is cleaner... almost like it’s not in China,” he said, adding: “The only thing the same is the statue of Chairman Mao.” He was referring to the saluting bronze figure that still dominates downtown People’s Park, one of the largest statues of Mao Zedong in China.

If the city long known as the “elder brother” of industry for its central role in Mao’s drive to industrialize China in the 1950s and ’60s has recently made strides to clean up its act, He isn’t the only one to take notice. Last November, the Urban China Initiative (UCI), a think tank co-founded by McKinsey & Co., Columbia University, and Beijing’s Tsinghua University, released its first “Urban Sustainability Index” for China. The index assessed sustainability in 112 cities by looking at 18 environmental indicators — from air pollution to waste recycling to mass transit — for the years 2004-2008. Among Chinese cities, Shenyang emerged as a leader in environmental improvement.

According to UCI’s research, Shenyang had removed virtually all traces of heavy industry from its core by 2010. In new residential areas, coal heating had been replaced by natural gas. Urban green space had increased 30 percent from 2005 to 2007. Perhaps most significantly, the heavy industry that does operate in the city — now relocated to facilities in the outer suburbs — is significantly less polluting than heavy industry elsewhere in China: Shenyang’s plants emit about one-fifth the level of sulfur oxides as the national average in China. The reason, quite simply, is that the city tore down most of its old factories and literally started again, with newer facilities and desulfurization equipment. “The evolution is significant,” Jonathan Woetzel, a director in McKinsey’s Shanghai office, told me.

Curious to see the changes for myself, I visited Shenyang last month. For four days, the skies were eggshell blue, with intermittent clouds and one rain shower. As anyone who has lived in a Chinese city knows, air pollution levels vary day to day, with weather and the direction of the wind. But even if Shenyang’s skies were not always as bright as what I saw, it’s clear the city’s run of unending gray days is over. Residents told me the skies were much clearer than ten years ago.

The Tiexi district today is worlds away from the forest of smokestacks that He remembers. It now has new four-lane roads, upscale apartment complexes, a Carrefour store, and Shenyang’s first Ikea (the sign outside reads: “No dream too big, No home too small”). Many residential streets are lined with gingko trees. Shenyang’s other central districts were also in various stages of a makeover.

Of course, I wouldn’t yet label Shenyang as “green” on par with, say, Portland, Maine. Construction dust accompanying the city’s current building boom adds a new kind of air pollution, and while Shenyang’s wastewater treatment rate of 77 percent is better than most Chinese cities (the average rate is 70 percent), it remains well below developed-world standards. Still, it’s worth asking: Why did a once-infamous Smogville begin to shed its gray?

To a large extent, it was necessity.

“To be honest with you, it is very hard to shut down a factory that still makes a lot of money,” an air-quality specialist in Shenyang’s environmental protection bureau told me. “But many of Shenyang’s factories had 50-year-old equipment, and they were economically dead already.” With a nod to the fact that economic and environmental ministries in China often have clashing priorities, she added, “It is hard to make any real progress without the other ministries [in agreement].”

It’s common in China for environmental officials to find themselves crusading to shut down lucrative but dirty factories, often in vain. But Shenyang turned out to be the exception that proves the rule about economic growth trumping green priorities in China. The reason many of its storied old factories shut down was because they had to — they simply weren’t making money.

The change didn’t happen overnight, nor was it painless. In the 1990s, Beijing began to withdraw support from many large state-owned enterprises, forcing them to sink or swim in the market. If Shenyang’s factories represented China’s state-of-the-art in the 1950s, a half-century later that was no longer true; the equipment was rusted, and the management systems bloated and inefficient. Hundreds of Shenyang’s factories were closed, from foundries to farm-equipment manufacturers, and thousands of workers laid off. (By some estimates, the unemployment rate was twice the national average.) In the early 2000s, the demolitions began; wrecking crews worked day and night tearing down, block by block, the shell of the past.

During this time, Shenyang was lucky to have an innovative and charismatic environmental protection bureau chief, Li Chao. His popular initiatives included starting the bureau’s environmental blog and establishing a citizen complaint line for air and noise pollution. But more importantly, his goals often aligned with those of the city’s far more powerful construction and development ministries, as well as the district-level governments that managed reconstruction.

When it came time for rebuilding, Tiexi district manager Li Songlin knew there was no looking back. His goal was not to recreate an industrial district, but instead to build a foundation to tap into China’s red-hot residential real-estate market and attract light manufacturing. To that end, he coordinated with the city’s environmental protection bureau and the Shenyang Academy of Environmental Sciences, a local research institute, to develop a program for soil decontamination at the sites of old factories, such as the former Shenyang Smelting Plant, demolished in 2000. For that site, the government paid the $19 million cleanup tab. But the value of land around the plant, now converted to real estate, has risen many multiples that investment, according to the Xinhua news agency. In short, the green makeover made economic sense.

For large infrastructure projects, Shenyang has also benefited from the ability of its savvy and well-connected leaders to make their case in Beijing. Each year, the central government announces a pot of money for new municipal infrastructure projects that cities can bid for. The details of how money is transferred are opaque to outsiders. But Shenyang, ever a stronghold of the political establishment, has fared well. For instance, the city recently received a slice of funding from Beijing for its subway system, now under construction; the first line opened in 2010, and the second line is scheduled to open next year.

Money and unified political will make things happen. “One of our study’s key findings was that those cities that have made the most environmental progress,” McKinsey’s Woetzel explained, “were often those that had the best coordination across departments and levels of government.”

While much of China’s recent environmental news is bleak, from water shortages to rising energy demands, Shenyang’s example provides at least one beacon of hope. It just might be that, as with Pittsburgh and London before it (in the 1950s, London smog was so thick it hid the sun at noon), this Chinese city’s dirtiest days may finally be behind it.

by David Fogarty

A new plan to curb global warming risks becoming a battleground between rich and poor nations and could struggle to get off the ground as negotiators battle over the fate of the ailing Kyoto climate pact.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol covers only emissions from rich nations that produce less than a third of mankind's carbon pollution and its first phase is due to expire end-2012. Poorer nations want it extended, while many rich countries say a broader pact is needed to include all big polluters.

Australia and Norway have proposed negotiations on a new agreement, but say it is unrealistic to expect that to be ready by 2013. They have set a target date two years later, in 2015.

"This is the only way ahead. There is no other way than failure," said a senior climate negotiator from a developed country on the Australia-Norway proposal, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the talks.

Developing nations insist Kyoto be extended to commit rich countries to tougher carbon cuts and fiercely resist any attempts to side-line the world's main climate pact, meaning the Australia-Norway plan faces a tough time .

Failure to agree on a new climate deal could lead to nations committing only to voluntary steps that are unlikely to put the brakes on climate change, risking more extreme droughts, floods, storms and crop failures. It would also weaken efforts to put in place tough policies to promote cleaner fuels and green energy.

The proposal calls on major economies to quickly strengthen steps to curb emissions, agree on a way to standardize actions and a system to compare and verify what everyone else is doing.

Marathon U.N.-led climate talks failed to meet a 2009 deadline to agree a new pact to start in 2013 and a major conference in Durban, South Africa, in two months is under pressure to launch a process to negotiate a new treaty.

WILD WEATHER

As negotiators haggle, data show the world is heating up, as emissions, particularly from big developing nations, keep growing from burning more coal, oil and gas.

Scientists say floods similar to those that left millions homeless in Pakistan last year and ravaged parts of Australia, could become more common, along with more intense Atlantic hurricanes and wildfires.

The United States has already tied its yearly record for billion-dollar weather disasters and the cumulative tab from floods, tornadoes and heat waves this year has hit $35 billion, the National Weather Service said in mid-August.

That doesn't include billions in losses and disaster relief from Hurricane Irene , which struck in late August.

All this throws the spotlight on emissions curbs by the world's major economies and the fact that these are not enough. When Kyoto was agreed, emissions from poorer nations were much smaller. Now they dwarf those of rich countries.

At the least, the talks need to restore faith that countries can do more to fight global warming.

"We need to push away from this annual cycle of what are we going to achieve into a more realistic timeline of when can we achieve a new agreement. My sense is that none of the negotiators disagree with that. It's obvious," said the senior delegate.

The Australia-Norway proposal will be a focus of U.N.-led climate talks in Panama this week, the last round before the conference in Durban.

"RECIPE FOR INACTION"

The EU said it broadly supported the submission.

"It tries to take forward the international climate negotiations into the next years, seeing how we can build a broader climate regime," Artur Runge-Metzger, the EU's chief climate negotiator, told Reuters. "We think that this seems to be a workable timeline."

He said it was crucial the Durban meeting agrees on building a new climate framework for all countries, referring particularly to the United States and major developing economies.

China produces about a quarter of mankind's greenhouse gas pollution and is the top global emitter. While the government is taking steps such as promoting energy efficiency and vehicle fuel standards, these are voluntary.

The proposal will prove divisive for poorer countries.

None more so than nations most vulnerable to climate change, such as low-lying islands that face ever rising sea levels, flooding and shrinking fresh water supplies. They want faster action by big polluters and feel Kyoto is the way to go.

"It basically delays real action to address climate change and vulnerable countries aren't going to like it," said Ian Fry, lead climate negotiator for the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, told Reuters, adding: "It's a gift to the United States."

India, the world's third largest carbon polluter, has also dug in its heels over the proposal.

"Such a plan takes the focus away from Kyoto and redraws negotiating paradigms. Why should the developing countries agree?" said an Indian official with knowledge of the global negotiations, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The United States, the world's second-biggest polluter, never ratified Kyoto, saying the pact is flawed because it doesn't commit big developing economies to meet legally binding emissions curbs.

The proposal could however benefit investors in cleaner power generation, carbon-offset projects and greener buildings.

"Anything which moves the world toward more unified action increases the confidence level of investors," said Geoff Rousel, global head of commodities, carbon and energy for Westpac Institutional Bank in Sydney.

"Therefore, if this plan was to be accepted, you'd be more likely to see more confidence in capital expenditure in energy efficiency and emissions abatement," he said.

The United States remains cautious.

"A legal agreement has to apply with equal legal force to at least the major developing countries so that means China, India, Brazil and so forth," said chief U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern in recent remarks to the media. And that meant no "escape hatches" or conditions on meeting those commitments, he said.

Reprinted with permission from Reuters

California's Air Resources Board (CARB) can proceed with implementation of the state's cap-and-trade program, a Supreme Court judge ruled Wednesday.

The program, which was announced in November 2010 after four years of development, has been held up because of a March court ruling that requires CARB to further examine alternatives to cap-and-trade that might be better routes to reducing greenhouse gases.

CARB says it did adequately consider alternatives such as a carbon tax, and is appealing the decision in Superior Court.

This week's ruling allows CARB to move forward on cap-and-trade before the Superiour Court rules.

Cap-and-trade is a key component of AB32, California's 2006 landmark climate change legislation, which attempts to fill the yawning gap left by the lack of federal policy. Under the law, California must reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

California's cap-and-trade program sets industry-wide limits on GHG emissions for the first time in the US. A similar national system has successfully reduced acid rain for decades.

Companies that exceed industry emissions limits can buy carbon allowances from cleaner companies that can meet those limits as well as buy carbon offsets. Industry emission limits become more stringent each year through 2020.

It provides an overall limit on emissions from sources responsible for 85 percent of California's GHG emissions.

Carbon trading was scheduled to begin in 2012, until a court put a hold on it pending further analysis.

Wednesday's court order was issued in the case of California Air Resources Board vs. Association of Irritated Residents, in which antipoverty "environmental justice" organizations, argued a market-based approach exposes poor and minority communities to higher levels of pollution.

In response to the ruling, attorney Alegria De La Cruz of the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, says, "This case is far from over."

CARB counters that the program allows businesses the greatest flexibility for compliance, stimulates clean energy technologies, increases energy security and independence, protects public health and will drive clean energy jobs in California. It's designed to work in collaboration with other complementary policies that expand energy efficiency programs, reduce vehicle emissions, and encourage innovation.

Governor Brown Signs Important Solar Bills

Last week, Governor Brown signed two bills intended to maintain the state's status as a leader in solar energy.

Senate Bill 585 authorizes a budget increase for the California Solar Initiative, an incentive program created in 2006 to drive the installation of 3,000 megawatts (MW) of rooftop solar by 2016, bring down the cost of solar, and create a vibrant solar industry in the state.

The program is so successful, that after four years, over 800 MW have been installed - more than all but four countries in the world.

Solar prices have come down significantly. If costs continue to decline at the same rate as expected, residential solar will pass the break-even point by mid-2014.

Assembly Bill 1150 extends the Self Generation Incentive Program, which provides rebates for wind, fuel cells, and other renewable technologies that generate electricity on-site.

Governor Brown has called for building 12 GW of rooftop solar and other forms of small scale renewable energy by 2020, enough energy for 9 million single-family homes.

Photo by Vectorportal/flickr/Creative Commons

The technology needed to cut the world's greenhouse gas emissions by 85 percent by 2050 already exists, according to a joint statement by 11 of the world's largest engineering organizations.

Collectively they represent over 1.2 million engineers spanning four continents.

They presented the statement last week to South African Deputy High Commissioner ahead of December's COP17 climate change talks in Durban.

It says that generating electricity from wind, waves and the sun, growing biofuels sustainably, zero emissions transport, low carbon buildings and energy efficiency technologies have all been demonstrated.

However they are not being developed for wide-scale use fast enough and there is a desperate need for financial and legislative support from governments around the world if they are to fulfill their potential.

"While the world's politicians have been locked in talks with no output, engineers across the globe have been busy developing technologies that can bring down emissions and help create a more stable future for the planet, says Dr. Colin Brown, Director of Engineering at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

"We are now overdue for government commitment, with ambitious, concrete emissions targets that give the right signals to industry, so they can be rolled out on a global scale."

The statement calls for:

- A global commitment at Durban for greenhouse gas emissions to peak by 2020, followed by substantial reductions by 2050;
- Governments to ensure that green policies don't unfairly and unintentionally act to the detriment of one particular industry or country;
- Intensive effort to train and retrain workforces to ensure we have the right skills for new industries that will spring up around green technologies;
- A heavier emphasis to be placed on boosting energy efficiency, which is the best available measure to bring down emissions in the short and medium term.

The joint statement resulted from the Future Climate 2 conference on technologies needed to combat climate change.

Highlights from the conference include:

- The German Association of Engineers reported that phasing out of nuclear in Germany could lead to a doubling in national carbon emissions by 2050, with domestic renewable energy simply unable to fill the gap.

To reach a planned 80 percent reduction in emissions, Germany must brace itself for expensive technological fixes and large-scale import of green electricity produced by solar from the Mediterranean;
- The UK Committee for Climate Change, which is advising the Government on its low carbon strategy, recommends an energy mix of 40 percent nuclear, 40 percent renewable, 15 percent Carbon Capture and Storage and 5 percent fossil fuel by 2030. It also suggests we aim for 40 percent of our vehicles to be hybrid and 20 percent to be wholly electric by 2030;
- An investigation into the environmental impact of reducing the high level of meat in our diets shows it would free up tens of thousands of hectares of arable land in the UK. If this land was, in turn, left to revert back to its natural woodland state this could lead to huge reductions in CO2.

The 11 engineering institutions that signed the joint statement are:

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) (UK)
The Institution of Engineers (India)
The Association of German Engineers (VDI) (Germany)
The Japanese Society of Mechanical Engineers (JSME) (Japan)
The Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers (APESMA) (Australia)
The Danish Society of Engineers (IDA) (Denmark)
The Civil Engineer Organisation of Honduras (CICH) (Honduras)
The Finnish Association of Graduate Engineers (TEK) (Finland)
The Union of Professional Engineers (UIL) (Finland)

Photo by _sarchi/flickr/Creative Commons

Global carbon dioxide emissions increased by 45 percent between 1990 and 2010, reaching a record high 33 billion tons last year, according to a report by the European Commission’s Joint Research Center. The report said that increased energy efficiency, renewable energy, and nuclear power are not compensating for a surge in emissions from developing countries, most notably China — with a 257 percent increase in CO2 emissions from 1990 to 210 — and India, whose emissions increased by 180 percent. By contrast, the European Union’s emissions declined by 7 percent from 1990 to 2010, and Russia’s dropped 27 percent. U.S. emissions increased by 5 percent from 1990 to 2010. After a slowdown in CO2 emissions at the height of the recession in 2008 and 2009, global emissions saw a record-breaking increase of 5.8 percent from 2009 to 2010, the report said. Meanwhile, a study in the journal Climate Change Letters said that even if average global temperature increases can be held to 2 degrees C (3.5 F) this century — an increasingly unlikely prospect — 70 to 80 percent of the globe’s land surface will experience summertime temperatures that exceed observed historical extremes in at least half of all years.

Medical researchers at the University of Edinburgh have shown that chemical particles emitted by diesel exhaust fumes significantly increase the risk of heart attack in otherwise healthy adults.

That’s right, people: in addition to environmentally damaging carbon emissions, political strife, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians, the contamination of waterways, and devastating ecological impact (even when things are going “right”, like in Canada) we now have a fresh, new reason to hate big oil.

The research, funded by the British Heart Foundation, showed that it is these tiny diesel particulates, and not the gases, that noticeably impaired the function of small blood vessels and their ability to direct blood flow to the body’s organs (the heart, in particular). These particles can be filtered out of exhaust emissions through the use of particle traps (like those found in AdBlue and Bluetec cars, and those already being retro-fit to public transit vehicles here in the US) but these filters require consistent, expensive maintenance.

Considering the evident health risks, Professor Jeremy Pearson (Associate Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation) believes that policy-makers should clamp down on diesel particle emissions – despite the costs involved – rather sooner than later. “Our research shows that while both gases and particles can affect our blood pressure, it is actually the miniscule chemical particles … that are really harmful. These particles produce highly reactive molecules called free radicals that can injure our blood vessels and lead to vascular disease, … in the future we can try and remove these chemicals, and prevent the health effects of vehicle emissions.”

Dr. Pearson’s team of researchers are now pushing for environmental health measures that are designed to reduce diesel particle emissions in the UK (where diesel cars are significantly more common than in the US) to be tested to determine whether they reduce the incidence of heart attack, as well as greenhouse gasses.

Until that happens, though, Pearson advises that “people with (existing) heart disease should avoid spending long periods outside or in areas where traffic pollution is likely to be high … or near busy roads.”

Reprinted with permission from Gas 2.0

The largest species invasion in over 2 million years is now underway as Arctic ice cover melts and shrinks, permitting a freer exchange of species between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans; dire and dramatic consequences for Atlantic biodiversity are predicted.

From microscopic plants and jellyfish to predatory packs of Orcas and soon-to-be-arriving squid…The “alien” invasion of the Atlantic ocean by Pacific Ocean species is fully underway, all made possible by ever-decreasing Arctic sea ice cover.

It is now accepted that oceanic and atmospheric warming is causing the Arctic ice sheet to steadily shrink, accelerated by loss of ice albedo (reflectivity of light off ice); Arctic ice cover has become so fragmented and sparse in some areas that, for the first time in centuries, an “ice-free” Northwest Passage was possible during winter. This summer’s ice-cover is at it smallest extent in centuries, if not millennia.

But humans aren’t the only ones who like a short-cut and a new frontier; many native Pacific ocean species are making the trip across the pole and finding food and habitat in the Atlantic.

At-sea observations indicate that large numbers of Orca (“killer”) whales have been making the crossing since at least 2007. This invasion of highly-skilled, predatory whales is have a dramatic impact on populations and defensive behaviors of other trans-Arctic whale species, such as the Pacific gray, beluga and narwhal.

This blog writer reported on gray whales starting to cross the Arctic over a year ago. This new migratory behavior (gray whales would normally travel far south, around Cape Horn) was made possible by receding ice cover; loss of Arctic ice cover permits northern whale migration as there is plenty of open sea in which to surface and breath. At that time, the concern was about increased shipping posing a hazard to migrating gray whales. Now, it seems, the grays have to face a double threat: one from ship propellers and the other from their fellow “invaders”: groups of killer whales.

For other, smaller species like Arctic cod and char, the threat is in the form of competition over food, as east-moving schools of foraging capelin out-compete the char for the same types of food. Marine scientist warn of further threats to cod that come from warming waters, and, less saline water (due to ice melting into the sea) will generally result in fewer fish species overall.

And Humboldt squid — normally found off the coast of Chile – recently have been found in colder Alaskan waters, and they are predicted to make it across the Arctic into the Atlantic perhaps within another year.

News of this current “invasion” has been spreading since the publication of a report by the research project called CLAMER (Climate Change & European Marine Ecosystem Research). CLAMER is a collaboration of 17 marine institutes in 10 European countries.

Ocean ecosystems will surely be altered, over time, by all of this inter-mixing and struggling for survival. Food chains will reach critical points as, for example, copepods — tiny, nutritious crustaceans that are eaten by many smaller fish species — are out-competed and replaced by smaller, less nutritious invaders, altering the size and nutrient value of the fish that eat them. It is believed that such shifts in zooplanktonic nutrition can result in the collapse of larger fish stocks.

Such a case is currently happening with the copepod Calanus finmarchicus (a crucial source of oil for many fish) which is being replaced by Pacific varieties that are smaller and less nutritious. Copepods are a main food source for krill which are the primary food source for many marine animals, including emperor penguins and many whale species.

According to the Marine Board of the European Science Foundation:

“In the North Sea, seasonal changes in the timing of biological events for plankton as a response to warming are leading to a mismatch between phytoplankton and zooplankton, between zooplankton and fish, between bivalve larvae and shrimp, and between fish and seabirds.”

When a fish stock collapses, the result is a loss of an ecosystem service — and often the means of survival or livelihood of numerous humans who depend on it. The complete loss of such an ecosystem service could take many decades, or as short as a year of two.

As evolution proceeds in fits and starts, and in the meantime, invasive species also take a more immediate economic toll, proving very costly in unexpected ways. Recently, huge hordes of a poisonous jellyfish (Pelagia noctiluca) have clogged up the water intake valves of a sea-side nuclear power plants in Scotland and Israel.

An earlier warning sign of ecological trouble brewing occurred in November 21, 2007, when a 10-square-mile (26 km2) swarm of jellyfish (numbering billions of individuals) decimated a 100,000-fish salmon farm in Northern Ireland, with over a GBP 1 million in losses.

The increase in jellyfish “swarms” has been attributed to a decrease in jellyfish competitors and predators. This decline, in turn, is linked to ocean acidification (from excess CO2 forming carbonic acid in water) which prevents smaller creatures from forming their calcium-carbonate skeletons (a problem with many coral species in particular), critically damaging the food source for smaller prey fish that the big fish depend on. But most jellyfish are immune to acidification and move into areas that the bigger fish have left and quickly increase in numbers.

Ocean bio-chemistry and ecology is complex stuff.

One of the first clues that a massive invasion was underway was the discovery on the Atlantic east coast of a microscopic plant (phytoplankton) species named Neodenticula seminae, which was only found in the Pacific, and hadn’t inhabited the Atlantic for 800, 000 years, according to the fossil record.

This discovery represents “”the first evidence of a trans-Arctic migration in modern times” related to plankton, according to the UK-based Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science. The foundation also warns that “such a geographical shift could transform the biodiversity and functioning of the Arctic and North Atlantic marine ecosystems.” The foundation is documenting this current planktonic shift as part of its Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey, the longest and most geographically extensive marine biological survey in the world.

Of course, the invasion can work in both directions.

This massive, natural invasion is being described by some researchers as the “largest species invasion in the last 2 million years.” For the past 2 million years, the polar ice cap has been an effective barrier to Pacific-Atlantic species mixing. Now, as East-West/West-East shipping lanes across the Arctic expand, and ice-sheet extent continues to fluctuate generally downward, more species invasions will occur, as these same ships bring plankton and other hitch-hiker species along with them.

Another consequence of warming oceans is the diminishing of water-column mixing; as our seas grow more stratified (layered), less nutrient mixing occurs, and this can lead to large accumulations or “blobs” of marine “mucilage” (a mixture of living and dead organic matter) that serve as habitat for bacteria and viruses, but which can be fatal to fish. A similar phenomenon seems to be happening currently in the Mediterranean Sea.

As climate warming impacts continue to manifest most starkly at the planetary poles, and increasingly in our oceans, a massive West-meets-East, ecological experiment is being conducted…Just one of many ecological upheavals due to anthropogenic climate change.

Stay tuned, friends, it won’t be the last you’ll hear of this.

Reprinted with permission from PlanetSave.com