Abrupt Climate Justice

SUBHEAD: Resistance gives ultimate meaning to life in the Anthropocene.  Let’s embrace it, and each other. 

By John Foran on 16 November 2017 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-11-16/abrupt-climate-justice/)


Image above: Photograph of dawn as Somali woman walks through a camp of people displaced from their homes by the drought in Qardho, Somalia, March 9, 2017. From (https://www.voanews.com/a/dire-food-insecurity-five-east-african-countries-facing-drought/3944455.html).

Three of the most intense hurricanes ever recorded just ripped through Puerto Rico and the southern US – within weeks of each other! Ash rained from the sky in Seattle and Portland for weeks. Record monsoons swept through Asia. Parts of Sierra Leone and Niger are underwater. San Francisco recorded its hottest day ever and Europe endured a triple-digit heat wave they called “Diablo.”

The fucking devil is here man, and its name is climate change. – Wendy & Jesse & Hayley & Teresa, “Face Down Climate Change,” Slingshot issue 125 (Autumn 2017)

I recently attended a talk by Guy McPherson, generally acknowledged as the doyen –some consider him the “superhero” – of the abrupt climate change [ACC] thesis [note to readers:  I understand that Guy McPherson can be a “polarizing” figure for some in the Resilience community; I ask only that you read my essay with the usual care, and stay focused on the nuances of my argument!).

I only came across this debate because I met – to my great good fortune – Shanelle LeFage, a millennial expert on it, and have subsequently followed her leads into the literature, discussed below.  As I learned more, I began to realize something that I had always intimated:  the science is grimmer than any of us know…

This has important implications for how those of us in the global climate justice movement approach our work, that it’s high time we tease out and engage with.

The Science of Abrupt Climate Change
The science is new, not widely known, and even less widely accepted.  In shorthand form, it connects these dots:

• We are on the verge of an “ice-free” Arctic, or a so-called “blue ocean event,” meaning that, at the end of the summer months in the northern hemisphere, ocean waters have warmed to the point where there is nearly no ice left in the Arctic Ocean except in secluded enclaves.
  
  
• This leads to even more warming because of the loss of the reflectivity of the ice, the so-called albedo effect.
  
  
• Now we have the first of many positive feedback loops – less ice, warmer air, warmer water, less ice.
  
  
• As the northern ocean warms further, the risk increases of the release into the atmosphere of both methane clathrates (methane deposits that have been kept on the ocean floor because they have till now been “frozen” in the slush) and of methane on northern lands as permafrost warms and melts.
  
  
• And, of course, this all comes with the attendant feedback loops: more extreme weather events and all the rest – rising seas, changing ocean currents, warmer weather and oceans, ad infinitum, literally and unfortunately.

As Dahr Jamail, one of the few climate journalists reporting on the ACC thesis, noted back in 2013:

Moving beneath the Arctic Ocean where methane hydrates – often described as methane gas surrounded by ice – exist, a March 2010 report in Science indicated that these cumulatively contain the equivalent of 1,000-10,000 gigatons of carbon. Compare this total to the 240 gigatons of carbon humanity has emitted into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began.

A study published in the prestigious journal Nature this July suggested that a 50-gigaton “burp” of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian sea is “highly possible at any time.” That would be the equivalent of at least 1,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide.

Even the relatively staid IPCC has warned of such a scenario: “The possibility of abrupt climate change and/or abrupt changes in the earth system triggered by climate change, with potentially catastrophic consequences, cannot be ruled out. Positive feedback from warming may cause the release of carbon or methane from the terrestrial biosphere and oceans.”

Dahr Jamail’s book, The End of Ice, is promised for 2018.

Robert Hunziker, another excellent climate journalist who is covering the story, quotes Oxford University researcher Peter Wadhams, author of the recently released A Farewell to Ice:

Leading researchers, like Peter Wadhams, professor of Ocean Physics and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge for years have repeatedly warned, over and over again, the day will come when the Arctic will be ice-free.

That’s when bright red flashing lights and sirens start going off, as the water will be absorbing all but 6% of sunlight. Whereas with its icy cover, the Arctic reflects up to 90% of sunlight back to space, no harm, no foul.

When Dr. Wadhams was asked in an interview if “civilization could withstand a 50-gigaton release of methane,” he answered: “No, I don’t think it can.”

From here, all bets would be off.  How much methane could be released is the subject of at best a SWAG – “scientific wild-assed guess” – according to methane specialist Ira Leifer, whom Shanelle and I spoke with in Santa Barbara in September.

The scientists in the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, the Russian team of Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semilitev of the University of Alaska-based International Arctic Research Center, along with Leifer and others, are extremely concerned that the amounts could be significant.  And remember, methane’s warming potential as a greenhouse gas is many times greater than carbon dioxide, its better known cousin.

While it’s true that methane’s warming effect wears off in a matter of decades, as opposed to centuries for CO₂, the last thing that humanity needs at this point in the twenty-first century – at the very dawn of the Anthropocene and the halting first steps by the international community to come to terms with the climate crisis, however ineffectually – the last thing that humanity needs now is a single to several degree spike in average temperatures, which would accelerate ocean acidification, glacier and ice melt, rising oceans, and the “extreme” (now proven to be a polite word) weather that has started to beset us with alarming regularity.  Oh, wait, that’s already happening, so this would all be intensified.

As Robert Hunziker notes, it may be that:

“The only question going forward is whether climate change rapidly accelerates as an out of control defiant monster or evolves little by little, in which case the gradualists will be correct, meaning future generations can fight the demons of ecosystem collapse.”

The Stakes when We Connect the Dots
We should therefore be asking some “what if” questions.  What if a sudden burst of methane led to a collapse or serious disruption of industrial society?  Apocalypse then?  Dystopia in our lifetimes, anyone?

Since we can’t answer this question, the stakes couldn’t be higher.  Repeat:  the stakes could not be higher.  No one tells the disheartening story of the implications of abrupt climate change better than Guy McPherson, Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, who walked away from his life as a tenured teacher when colleagues and administrators found his message (and his anarchist pedagogy) too disturbing for the undergraduates he so openly and creatively tried to explore this with.

McPherson then spent seven years in the arid landscape of New Mexico, learning the difficult arts of homesteading, self-sufficiency, and community-building with an assortment of like-minded spirits before packing that in and moving to Belize (a rather hot spot for a climate “doomist,” as he is often accused of being), where he now runs workshops for people whose lives have been shattered by their reading of the crisis as a terminal, near-term one for civilization.

As Dahr Jamail, the leading investigative journalist of abrupt climate change puts it:

Not surprisingly, scientists with such views are often not the most popular guys in the global room. McPherson, for instance, has often been labeled “Guy McStinction” – to which he responds, “I’m just reporting the results from other scientists. Nearly all of these results are published in established, esteemed literature.

I don’t think anybody is taking issue with NASA, or Nature, or Science, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  [Those] and the others I report are reasonably well known and come from legitimate sources, like NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], for example. I’m not making this information up, I’m just connecting a couple of dots, and it’s something many people have difficulty with.”

McPherson does not hold out much hope for the future, nor for a governmental willingness to make anything close to the radical changes that would be necessary to quickly ease the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; nor does he expect the mainstream media to put much effort into reporting on all of this because, as he says, “There’s not much money in the end of civilization, and even less to be made in human extinction.” The destruction of the planet, on the other hand, is a good bet, he believes, “because there is money in this, and as long as that’s the case, it is going to continue.”

And it is true that McPherson has met with fierce criticism from many well-placed climate scientists, as for example, this broad-ranging dismissal by Scott Johnson at Fractal Planet.

I have no firm position in this debate, other than to take seriously the general line of argument that follows from the ice-free Arctic to the possibility of a severe and sudden disruption of our climate system’s ongoing dysfunction.

  

Abrupt Climate Justice
Our first responsibility remains, as always, to tell the truth.  The debate that exploded in climate circles this summer over the widely-read essay, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” by David Wallace-Wells in New York magazine, touched a nerve, and it was fascinating to see such eminent climate scientists as Michael Mann react to its harsh thesis, while activists such as Margaret Klein Salamon of the Climate Mobilization and journalists such as Dave Roberts at Vox generally found it worth taking on board.

All Wallace-Wells did was report what leading scientists think will happen in the worst-case scenario of continued business as usual (BAU).

We need to take a similar hard look at the situation now, in light of the possibility of abrupt climate change – however remote, and remember it’s anyone’s SWAG as to the precise likelihood, possibility, or probability, and even more of a SWAG to suggest when (or if) and how much of a temperature spike might hit us.

So please don’t misread my views as anything more than acknowledging the possibility of yet another worst-case (actually a worse case) scenario.  It just turns out that Wallace-Wells may have erred on the optimistic side.  Yikes!

Speaking now as a social scientist and scholar-activist, here are some of the things (I think) we know.
In the global climate justice movement, we know that BAU neoliberal global capitalism is already a slow-fuse death sentence for humanity.  The best science, such as that of Kevin Anderson, established this almost ten years ago.

We know that our only hope is the global climate justice movement.  I can hear friends like Shanelle over my shoulder saying “But there is no hope!”

But with other heroes of mine, from Bill McKibben (in all of his work, including a new novel, Radio Free Vermont) to Naomi Klein (in This Changes Everything and No Is Not Enough) to Rebecca Solnit (in Hope in the Dark and countless exquisite essays), I remain a deeply serious and (fun-) loving “hopist.”

And aren’t referring (or at least I’m not) to a kind of false hope that we can really contain the climate crisis from taking humanity into extremely dangerous climate change.

What we mean is real(istic) hope for deep, radical social transformation as the crisis unfolds.  This is what we are fighting for, and if you don’t think that overthrowing capitalism and the one percent is worth fighting for … then don’t join us.  Except, I suspect that increasing numbers of readers could be on board for this.

We already knew that time is short:  Carbon Brief’s meticulous carbon budgets tell us that we have perhaps four years of current-level GHG emissions left before we pass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

Geoengineering – risky, untested, capitalist wishful thinking – is about to be (or is already being) foisted on us for effectively allowing two degrees to become a fait accompli, thus dictating that we somehow develop the capacity to remove already released greenhouse gases from the air.

So now, the existential urgency of our politics has just been accelerated by the possibility of abrupt climate change, or at the very least, the knowledge that tipping points, positive feedback loops, and so much more that is not in the IPCC’s climate models and future scenarios is on the cards.

We have to be clear about this:  we probably can’t prevent the climate from deteriorating toward a nearly uninhabitable Earth.

Does this mean have to do things differently? Well, since we aren’t winning at present, that would probably be a good idea. We need new ideas, fresh voices, radical imaginations, and loving hearts, still and always.

To address abrupt climate change as a possibility and extremely dangerous climate change as a certainty, we might want to adjust and re-imagine our work as abrupt climate justice. This is not just for me to do, but here are a few starters that I have been thinking about recently…

• Emergent Strategy – the title of adrienne maree brown’s 2017 book, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds – is a useful new approach to building stronger movements by attending to process, cultivating relationships, maximizing our diversity, and staying open to learning and deciding in unfolding situations, which are skills much in demand by the many strands of the social movements that need to link up today.
  
  
• Following on directly from this, the breakthroughs of Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock in the practice of intersectionality need to be studied and deepened as we proceed together, for many of us for the first time. Let’s resolve to learn more about the possibilities, pitfalls, and possible new options they open up for doing this work.
  
  
• One idea for us to play with is what I am calling the New Kind of Party (NKoP).

What if we saw the path forward now as some excitingly new and original kind of party that in each country or area comes out of the social movements that would bring it to power and can then be held strictly accountable by them as it turns this ship of fools we’re on around?

Such a “party” (and the name is apt for the convivial connotations it holds) will be the patient, challenging, loving product of the actions of many people, and it will embrace the multiple, richly diverse threads of the new political cultures of opposition and creation that are bubbling up from the recesses of our wildest imaginations.

What if we could harness the people power, radical imagination, and boundless energy of all of these new actors in the present and the future, starting to facilitate discussions among the new social movements, brainstorming how to fashion some new kind of party to take power where that is possible while beginning or continuing to support and enable all the emerging transition initiatives to co-create radical social transformation on every level, from the always available local to the much needed national, not to mention our global arenas of struggle?

What have we got to lose?  We aren’t winning at present.  We need to try something different, something, really, that we haven’t tried before.

As Nathan Thanki, a young Irish climate justice radical has said in his trenchant response to the Wallace-Wells controversy, “Fuck Your Apocalypse”:

[W]hat good is our analysis, what is the point of our writing, if we can’t offer anything else? If we can’t contribute to transforming the world? It speaks to a poverty of the imagination if we cannot even see past our nihilism to ideas about how we might possibly fight and win.

“Ordinary” people are fighting for life all around the world. They always have and they always will. Some have sacrificed everything for this struggle, their deaths like their agency going unnoticed in the annals of any New York publication.

Deniers, you can keep your opinions to yourselves. Doomsayers, you can keep your apocalypse. I’ll keep my belief that another world is possible and worth fighting for.

Yes, I think now, that existence means resistance.  Or we simply won’t exist.  I’m not ready just yet to accept that.  And no one has to.

Resistance gives ultimate meaning to life in the Anthropocene.  Let’s embrace it, and each other.  And let’s move forward now, with urgency, with or without hope!

.

Can "Super Coral" save reefs

SOURCE: Sam Monet (monets001@hawaii.rr.com)
SUBHEAD: Researchers in Hawaii are using an "assisted evolution" to grow coral to withstand the hotter more acidic oceans.

By AP Staff on 5 November 2015 for the Guardian -
(http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/nov/05/scientists-attempt-to-breed-super-coral-to-save-threatened-reefs)


Image above: Juvenile coral is prepared to transplant on to reefs in hopes that the high-performing specimens will strengthen the overall health of the reef. Photograph by Caleb Jones/AP. From original story.

[Note from Source: In the 1970's, acid rain from Germany killed much of Sweden's native forests and lakes.  After the German's initiated green controls, the Swedes replaced their native forests with mono cultured trees that, unfortunately did not and cannot replicate or replace the bio diversity that existed in their native forests.  However, that is better than nothing.  President Ronnie Reagan denied the existence of Acid Rain or ozone depletion, both well documented by the Swedes.]

The super coral might help us, however, if it cannot support the entire ecosystem, the life forms that depend on the existing corals will not survive and will not support the rest of the food chain that is much more complex than a Swedish forest.  Mono cultured coral reefs will not be the same.

I have been writing about and warning the politicians and people of Hawaii about global warming since the very early 1990's.  The direct result of our global greed and ignorance, today it is upon us.

The Ala Wai yacht harbor is much hotter, more polluted, acid and silted than Kaneohe Bay.  What little corals we have, have been bleached in our harbor.  I suggest the real test of the super coral is in Ala Wai harbor.  If it can live and breed here, then it can do that anywhere in Hawaii and similar climate zones world wide.


Researchers in Hawaii are using an "assisted evolution experiment" to grow coral that can withstand the hotter and more acidic oceans caused by global warming

Scientists at a research centre on Hawaii’s Coconut Island have embarked on an experiment to grow “super coral” that they hope can withstand the hotter and more acidic oceans that are expected with global warming.

The quest to grow the hearty coral comes at a time when researchers are warning about the dire health of the world’s reefs, which create habitats for marine life, protect shorelines and drive tourist economies.

When coral is stressed by changing environmental conditions, it expels the symbiotic algae that live within it and the animal turns white or bright yellow, a process called bleaching, said Ruth Gates, director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.

If the organisms are unable to recover from these bleaching events, especially when they recur over several consecutive years, the coral will die. Gates estimated that about 60 to 80% of the coral in Kaneohe Bay has bleached this year.

“The bleaching has intensified and got much more serious,” said Gates, of the coral around the bay. Where they once looked for the bleached coral among the h

Gates and her team are taking the coral to their centre on the 29-acre isle and slowly exposing them to slightly more stressful water.

They bathe chunks of coral that they’ve already identified as having strong genes in water that mimics the warmer and more acidic oceans. They are also taking resilient strains and breeding them with one another, helping perpetuate those stronger traits.

The theory they are testing is called assisted evolution, and while it has been used for thousands of years on other plants and animals, the concept has not been applied to coral living in the wild.

“We’ve given them experiences that we think are going to raise their ability to survive stress,” Gates said. She said they hope to see these corals, which will soon be transplanted into the bay, maintain their colour, grow normally and then reproduce next summer.

In early October, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said that coral reefs worldwide are experiencing bleaching, calling the event extensive and severe.

“We may be looking at losing somewhere in the range of 10 to 20% of the coral reefs this year,” Noaa coral reef watch coordinator Mark Eakin said when the report was released. “Hawaii is getting hit with the worst coral bleaching they have ever seen.”

And this is the second consecutive year Hawaii has experienced widespread bleaching.

Scientists say some coral has already fallen victim to global warming. About 30% of the world’s coral population has already perished as a result of above average ocean temperatures, El Niño’s effects and acidification.


Image above: Researcher Jen Davidson places a tray of enhanced coral on to a reef during a practice run for future transplants off the island of Oahu. Photograph by Hugh Gentry/AP. From original story.

Gates and her team understand the challenges of scalability and time. Having success locally does not necessarily mean they will be able to scale their project to address a massive, global marine crisis before much of the world’s coral reefs are already gone.

Tom Oliver, a marine biologist and team leader at Noaa’s Coral Reef Ecosystem Division, said the project is scalable with the requisite amount of effort and funding. He said, “the question is not can they do it, it’s can they do it fast enough?”

Oliver said that many reef restoration projects struggle because of the cost and time involved with raising standard coral and planting it in the ocean. “Restoration needs to have brood stock that can handle the changing conditions on reefs,” he said.xxx

Gates said more research needs to be done before they can begin to address scalability.

In 2013, Gates and her Australian counterpart Dr Madeleine van Oppen, who does coral research at the Australia Institute of Marine Science, won the $10,000 (£6,500) Paul G Allen Ocean Challenge for their proposal to assist coral evolution.

Allen’s foundation then asked them for a proposal to fully fund the idea, which they eventually did with a $4m grant in June. Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, has various climate-related projects in his philanthropic portfolio.

Hawaii’s Gates said that while the goal of their project is to help coral survive global warming, there is still a need to end human’s reliance on fossil fuels and to mitigate the emission of greenhouse gasses that cause global warming.

“Even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today, there is still this lag in the atmosphere where climate change will continue for probably hundreds of years,” Van Oppen said. “It’s hard to imagine it’s not going to get worse.”


.

Coral bleaching worldwide

SUBHEAD: Here is evidence that something very bad is happening in Earth's oceans.

By Nick Visser on 8 OCtober 2015 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/coral-bleaching-climate-change_561568d9e4b021e856d33d0f)


Image above: Bleached corals in West Papua, Indonesia. The world's corals are experiencing a mass bleaching as a result of warmer ocean temperatures and other factors. From original article.

The planet's coral reefs are experiencing a mass global bleaching, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced on Thursday. The bleaching, only the third event of its type in recorded history, is another troubling sign of the damaging effects of climate change on the planet's health.

Bleaching happens when usually vibrantly colored corals lose their hues and turn bright white due to warmer oceans or other environmental factors. The colorful algae that live in and feed coral polyps leave in stressful times, turning the otherwise breathtaking formations into ghostly shells.

Warmer ocean temperatures are wreaking havoc on the undersea biome, causing widespread damage to delicate coral ecosystems that may well get worse due to the potential effects of a strong El Niño tropical weather system.

Reefs cover about 0.1 percent of the ocean floor, but are home to some 25 percent of marine life and have long been one of the main victims of a hotter world. However, Mark Eakin, the coordinator for NOAA's Coral Reef Watch program, said corals are often out of the public eye simply because they're underwater.

"What do you think people would do if, in a matter of months, 60 percent of the redwood forest would die?" he asked. "It's a bit of a problem of being out of sight, out of mind."

Eakin was referring to a smaller-scale bleaching that took place in the Caribbean in 2005 that wiped out 60 percent of corals in that region, but went relatively unnoticed. Now, however, bleaching is taking place on a much larger scale. Mass bleaching has happened just twice before, Eakin said, once in 1998 and again in 2010.

The current global bleaching began in the northern Pacific in the summer of 2014 and has since expanded throughout the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Corals in the U.S. have been among the hardest-hit, and scientists are particularly concerned with formations around Hawaii and the Caribbean.

The chart below shows the probable threat of bleaching around the globe for the next several months, with the dark red areas showing the places that face the greatest risk.


NOAA's standard 4-month bleaching outlook showing threat of bleaching continuing in the Caribbean, Hawaii and Kiribati, and perhaps expanding into the Republic of the Marshall Islands, from October 2015 to January 2016. From original article. From original article.

When algae leave coral during a bleaching, the reef is left sick, hungry and vulnerable. This doesn't necessarily kill the coral, and some certainly recover. But severe or long-term bleaching -- like the current phenomenon -- is often fatal, according to NOAA. As reefs die, a slew of biodiversity is thrown out of whack. Fish lose their homes, crustaceans leave and many other species die as well.

"After corals die, reefs quickly degrade and the structures corals build erode," a press release from NOAA reads. "This provides less shoreline protection from storms and fewer habitats for fish and other marine life, including ecologically and economically important species."

However, Eakin was quick to note that while the current bleaching event is severe enough, the ongoing El Niño could amp it up to "frightening" levels in the near future, as illustrated below.


Image above: An extended bleaching outlook showing the threat of bleaching expected in Kiribati, the Galapagos, the South Pacific -- especially east of the dateline and perhaps affecting Polynesia -- and most coral reef regions in the Indian Ocean, from February to May 2016.

The news is the latest in a series of troubling climate-related milestones. Last month, NOAA announced that this year's summer had been the hottest in recorded history. In August, scientists said the world's glaciers had melted to the lowest levels since record-keeping began more than 120 years ago. And in March, researchers said Arctic sea ice had seen the smallest annual growth ever.

NOAA's announcement about the bleaching comes a little less than two months ahead of the highly anticipated Paris climate summit in December. Hundreds of world leaders will attempt to devise a global plan for combating climate change, as time is running out to keep the planet below an agreed-upon warming threshold of 2 degrees Celsius.

Oceans will be a key issue during the summit, and Eakin says there's an "absolutely urgent need" for action. By the end of the current bleaching event, he says, some 4,600 square miles of reefs could be dead.

"One of the most heart-wrenching dives I've made in my life was in 2010 during the second global bleaching event," Eakin said of a dive he took in Thailand. "It was just fields of bleached coral. The fish were swimming around in midwater looking stunned."


.

Quest to Create ‘Super Corals’

SUBHEAD: Coral reefs are increasingly threatened by warmer more acidic seas. Is selectively breeding corals the answer?

By Nicola Jones on 4 August 2015 for Environment 360  -
(http://e360.yale.edu/mobile/feature.msp?id=2900)


Image above: Reefs thrive in the hot waters of American Samoa that would kill other corals. Photo by Floris van Breugel/Naturepl.com. From (http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-adaptation-designer-reefs-1.15073).

In Hawaii this summer, as corals engage in their once-a-year courtship ritual of releasing sperm and eggs into the water by moonlight, Ruth Gates will oversee a unique mating: the coming together of “super-corals” in her lab.

Gates and her team at the Institute of Marine Biology in Kaneohe tagged corals in their local waters that thrived through a heinous hot spell last September.

A few of those rugged specimens will be picked for arranged marriages this month, hopefully yielding some offspring even better suited to thriving in the warmer waters of the future. It will be, she thinks, the first selective mating of corals to try to help them thrive in the face of climate change.

Gates and her colleague, Madeleine van Oppen at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, have been awarded $3.9 million from Paul G. Allen's philanthropic organization Vulcan Inc. for this and other work into the “assisted evolution” of corals — an attempt to intentionally beef up the genetic stock of reefs to survive the onslaught of climate change. “This idea of homing in on super-performers is a no-brainer,” says Gates. “We have been doing it in the food supply for millennia.”

The work can be tricky — corals don’t like to be touched when breeding. And it’s controversial — some find the idea of active intervention in coral ecosystems disconcerting, since it turns a natural environment into a planned one that might be less biodiverse and less resilient to unexpected challenges like disease.

The idea of tinkering with coral genetics is even touchier, even if current work focuses on simple selective breeding for the hardiest corals, rather than on the more controversial prospect of producing corals that have been genetically modified.

But Gates thinks it’s necessary. Studies on the Great Barrier Reef and in the Red Sea have shown that the rate at which corals calcify their hard shells has declined by 15 to 30 percent since 1990 thanks to thermal stress; an influential 2008 report on global coral status showed that about 20 percent of global coral coverage has been lost since 1950.

In August 2014, an unprecedented 20 species of coral were listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, bringing the total on the list to 22.

The global culprit is climate change — which brings heat waves that devastate the symbiotic algae living within coral and bleaches the animals deathly white — along with rising acidity that literally dissolves coral bodies.

Locally, reefs also face disease, fishing nets that scrape the ocean floor, water pollution, and hurricanes. “Coral reefs are astonishingly resilient and have survived devastating blows from natural disasters in the past,” writes evolutionary ecologist Les Kaufman of Boston University. But he adds that they have never faced all these challenges together.

The usual plan for coral conservation is to create a marine protected area to limit the extra harms of fishing and pollution. But many think more proactive intervention is needed.

“Corals grow so slowly they only need to reproduce once every 100 years,” says David Vaughan, executive director of the Mote Tropical Research Laboratory in the Florida Keys. “But now we’ve killed so many we don’t want to wait that long for them to do it themselves.”

There is a shortcut available. In 1995, Baruch Rinkevich of Israel’s National Institute of Oceanography in Tel Aviv proposed that researchers start “gardening” coral reefs on a grand scale, actively restoring corals in the same way that silviculture manages forests.

The idea is simple: take broken pieces of coral, grow them in a nursery under controlled conditions (as hobbyists have been doing for decades), and then replant them where needed.

But this approach faces challenges: Replanted corals are often gobbled up by hungry parrotfish or wiped out by disease. And the scale is daunting. Some reef-building corals grow just a millimeter a year, and there are more than 110,000 square-miles of coral reef on the planet.

Nursery projects have proven they can boost coral growth. Once planted in the ocean, some nursery corals are an order of magnitude more reproductive than their natural brethren, says Rinkevich. “They’ve had the best start in life,” he explains.

In Florida, Vaughan has learned how to boost some particularly sluggish coral growth rates dramatically: His team surgically slices donor coral fragments into tiny pieces to promote faster regeneration. Doubling the size of a quarter-sized fragment used to take several years; now it takes months. Around the world to date, more than 100 species of coral have been successfully raised in nurseries.

But such projects are still just a drop in the bucket. The largest efforts, from the Philippines to Florida, have replanted tens of thousands of corals and the total globally stands at about 100,000, altogether covering perhaps less than a square mile. Some are hoping to scale that up. “I have a personal challenge to not retire until I plant a million corals,” says the 61-year-old Vaughan.

Rinkevich has also applied for funding for a one-million-coral project in Tanzania. At that scale they hope their ‘drop’ will start to have an ecological impact. “If we could plant 10 million staghorn corals we could de-list them,” estimates Vaughan. “So I need nine other crazy people like me,” he laughs — and, at a cost of about $1 to $10 per coral, a lot of funding, too.

Regardless of scale, these efforts are useless if the corals die — which sometimes happens. In one project in Bolinao, the Philippines, replants were walloped by bad weather, including two super-typhoons and three regular typhoons. “We were unlucky. Many died,” says Rinkevich. To face those odds, conservationists need to be sure they’re planting not just a lot of corals, but the right corals. “We want to be sure we’re picking winners,” says Vaughan.

This July, Vaughan switched on some adjustable tanks in his Florida lab that will let his group control the temperature and pH in which their baby corals are raised. In this way they can select the hardiest for future planting in the ocean.

Likewise, van Oppen will be studying coral responses to stressful conditions in Australia’s massive National Sea Simulator, a facility with more than 900,000 gallons of seawater tanks. And Stephen Palumbi, a marine biologist at Stanford University in California, last year started to build his own ‘smart reef’ off Ofu Island in American Samoa, with the hardiest corals he could find.

Palumbi’s experimental reefs were hit by warm waters and started bleaching in January; he and his team are just now looking to see if the transplanted corals from a warm-water-adapted pool fared better than other corals in the region.

Researchers don’t need to know the specific genes involved to do selective breeding, but they do need to know that the traits are inheritable. Recent work suggests they are.


Image above: This juvenile coral was raised from sperm and eggs in the lab, and then infected with symbiotic algae that are used to coping with elevated temperatures. Photo by Emily Howells/AIMS. From (http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-adaptation-designer-reefs-1.15073).


Mikhail Matz at the University of Texas in Austin and colleagues crossed four coral colonies from two locations in the Great Barrier Reef off Australia to make 10 different offspring families, and tested their survival in hot waters of 35.5 degrees C, or 96 degrees F. They found that having a coral parent from the warmer location boosted survival odds up to five-fold.

Matz argues that the best way to use these genes is to simply take some warm-water corals and move them, so they can spread their adaptive genes through natural breeding. This “assisted migration” might be cheaper and less risky than nursery-based projects.

“Coral selection in captivity might be severely limiting genetic variation in what comes out of it,” he says. “I don’t think we understand enough about the genetic underpinnings of coral tolerance to actually be able to guide their evolution in any meaningful way.”

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute and professor of marine science at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, co-wrote a provocative policy piece in Science in 2008 supporting investigation into assisted migration for corals and other animals. But he describes himself as a pragmatist.

“I believe some of these things might be useful on a local scale, perhaps to rebuild a reef for tourists to come and see — that makes economic sense,” he says. “But it’s a long way from starry-eyed ambitions to replant the world’s reefs.”

The most important thing, he emphasizes, is to ensure the world community works together to stabilize carbon dioxide emissions and ocean temperatures: “Without that,” Hoegh-Guldberg says, “any attempt at restoration will be washed away by our rapidly changing climate.”

Meanwhile, van Oppen, Gates, and others are trying to work out how best to get coral gardens to grow. Alongside selective breeding programs, they are also going to see how corals can best acclimatize to new conditions — there are hints that simply raising corals in challenging conditions can activate their latent ability to cope with those environments in a way that can be passed on to the next generation.

They will also be working with zooxanthellae — the algae that live in symbiosis with corals and that sometimes flee when waters get too hot. They are trying to increase the rate at which the algae’s genes mutate — using chemical cocktails or radiation for example — hoping to stumble upon a new variant that helps with heat resistance.

Van Oppen says they’re even “playing around a bit” with trying to intentionally splice in specific gene variants to make genetically modified (GM) corals designed to cope with heat or acid. “But,” she quickly adds, “that’s when you start to hear a lot of resistance. That’s not part of the Paul Allen grant for that reason.”

Genetic modification for ecological preservation is very rare, but not unprecedented: Researchers have made GM American chestnut trees to resist fungal blight, although they don’t yet have permission to plant them.

Van Oppen predicts that resistance to these projects will fade as time passes and the plight of corals gets worse. “I presented these ideas to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority late last year,” says van Oppen. “They were quite excited about developing these technologies ‘just in case’.”

See also:
Nature: Climate-change adaptation - Designer Reefs 4/23/14

.

Pacific Ocean Catastrophe

SUBHEAD: Emergency shut-down of US west coast fisheries after crash of forage fish population.

By Mark Slavo on 17 April 2015 for SHTF Plan -
(http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/food-chain-catastrophe-emergency-shut-down-of-west-coast-fisheries-populations-have-crashed-91-percent_04162015)


Image above: Illustration of the Pacific Ocean Food Web. The Small fish, like sardine and anchovy, that feed on zooplankton, thatare the foundation of the food web for larger birds, fish, and sea mammals. From Seattle Times and (http://homosapienssaveyourearth.blogspot.com/2012/09/human-caused-oceanic-death-spiral.html).

Earlier this week Michael Snyder warned that the bottom of our food chain is going through a catastrophic collapse with sea creatures dying in absolutely massive numbers. The cause of the problem is a mystery to scientists who claim that they can’t pinpoint how or why it’s happening.

What’s worse, the collapse of sea life in the Pacific Ocean isn’t something that will affect us several decades into the future. The implications are being seen right now, as evidenced by an emergency closure of fisheries along the West coast this week.

On Wednesday federal regulators announced the early closure of sardine fisheries in California, Oregon and Washington. According to the most recent data, the sardine populations has been wiped out with populations seeing a decline of 91% in just the last eight years.

Meeting outside Santa Rosa, California, the Pacific Fishery Management Council voted to direct NOAA Fisheries Service to halt the current season as early as possible, affecting about 100 fishing boats with sardine permits…
…
The action was taken based on revised estimates of sardine populations, which found the fish were declining in numbers faster than earlier believed…
The council did not take Wednesday’s decision lightly and understood the pain the closure would impose on the fishing industry, said council member Michele Culver, representing the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. She added that it was necessary because a new assessment of sardine stocks showed they were much lower than estimated last year, when harvest quotas were set.
Source: New York Times via Steve Quayle / ENEnews

Sardines, like honey bees, don’t seem important to the casual observer. But just like honey bees, which are experiencing their own colony collapse, they are critical to the propagation of the global food chain. The immediate effects can be seen on the creatures next in line:

… 90 percent of this year’s class of sea lion pups were starving for lack of sardines to eat.

“The sardine populations have crashed 91 percent since 2007,” he said after the vote.

“We would have liked to see this happen much sooner, but now we can start to rebuild this sardine population that is so important to the health of the ocean.”

But even closing of commercial fisheries may not be the solution. As Snyder points out in the aforementioned report, there are some unexplained phenomena occurring in the Pacific ocean and either scientists don’t have a clue what is happening, or someone is keeping a gag order on researchers.

According to two University of Washington scientific research papers that were recently released, a 1,000 mile stretch of the Pacific Ocean has warmed up by several degrees, and nobody seems to know why this is happening.  This giant “blob” of warm water was first observed in late 2013, and it is playing havoc with our climate.  And since this giant “blob” first showed up, fish and other sea creatures have been dying in absolutely massive numbers.

The issue could potentially be one of climate change – but not the kind of climate change we hear from politicians who just want to put carbon tax credits in their pocket. Rather, we could be talking about cyclical climate shifts that have occurred regularly throughout the course of earth’s history. And with those shifts come massive migrations and species die-offs.
Or, as one contributor at ENEnews.com suggested, the answer to why this is happening should be obvious:

We have three cores melted out of their reactor buildings, lost in the mudrock and sandstone, which we have failed to locate and mitigate.

We have an underground river running under the ruins, which we have failed to divert around the reactors.

We have three empty reactors, containing nothing but corium splatter left when they blew up and melted out.

We have the Pacific Ocean Ecosystem, which we have stressed beyond endurance, through ocean dumping, over fishing, agricultural runoff, and now unrestricted radiation.

We have the sudden collapse of the Pacific Ocean Ecosystem, with a threatened collapse of the biosphere.

We continue to allow corporate and governmental inaction.

What in hell did you think was going to happen?

Something is wrong with world’s food chain and one Harvard Professor suggested last year that recent signs, namely with the die-off of honey bee populations, are a prelude of things to come:

But he now warns that a pollinator drop could be the least our worries at this point.
That it may be a sign of things to come – bees acting as the canary in the coalmine. That not only are we connected to bees through our food supply, but that the plight that so afflicts them may very well soon be our own.

Could it be that the collapse of honey bee colonies, mass sea life die-offs, and changing climates in once lush growing regions are all the result of the same underlying phenomena?

If so, then we can soon expect not just higher food prices, but a breakdown in the food chain itself.

And though none of us can truly prepare for a decades’ long (or longer) food disaster and the complexities that would come along with it (like mass migrations and resource wars), we can take steps to make ourselves as self sustainable as possible, while also preparing emergency plans to respond to the initial brunt of the force should it hit.

.

This is your ocean on acid

SUBHEAD: More than 40 percent of the world’s oceans are heavily impacted by human activities with few areas left unaffected.

By Mickey Zezima on 3 November 2014 for World News Trust -
(http://worldnewstrust.com/this-is-your-ocean-on-acid-mickey-z)


Image above: Coral reefs are severely threatened by processes such as ocean acidification: A, "Healthy" coral reef with living Acropora palmata and good water quality. B, Degraded coral reef with dead A. palmata and poor water quality. IB note: Kauai reefa looks more like B than A. From (http://soundwaves.usgs.gov/2009/11/).

“I don’t know how to save the world. I don’t have the answers or The Answer. I hold no secret knowledge as to how to fix the mistakes of generations past and present. I only know that without compassion and respect for all of Earth’s inhabitants, none of us will survive -- nor will we deserve to.”

- Leonard Peltier

The oceans aren’t dying. The oceans are being killed.

[IB Publisher's note: And we're not even talking about the effects of three nuclear cores melting into the ocean in Fukushima, Japan, everyday for the rest of our lives.]

More than 40 percent of the world’s oceans are heavily impacted by human activities with few areas -- if any -- left unaffected by anthropogenic factors. This means we humans (and what we deem civilization) have played a primary role in the despoiling of the waters of the earth.

The relentless quest for profit, however, has distracted us from the plight of the deep blue sea and how it impacts all forms of life.

It’s not some unstoppable force of nature or preordained theology. Human decisions have led us to where we are now and new human decisions are immediately needed to forge a more logical and compassionate path.

Why not start this urgent turnaround with the oceans? After all, it’s where 80 percent of all life on earth is found and where over half our oxygen is created.

To follow is a tiny sampling of what human culture has done and is doing to our beautiful -- and essential -- oceans.

Acid Trip

We can begin this discussion with the ever-increasing ocean acidification. The carbon dioxide (CO2) that results from the burning of fossil fuels dissolves in the ocean and decreases the pH.

Consider this:

• Roughly 25 percent of all CO2 emissions are absorbed by oceans
• Before humans began burning coal and oil, ocean pH had been relatively stable for 20 million years
• During the last 250 years, oceans have absorbed 530 billion tons of CO2, which has resulted in a 30 percent in ocean acidity

The myriad deleterious impacts of acidification include the reduction of a mineral called carbonate, which forms the shells and skeletons of many shellfish and corals. As pH levels drop, shells literally dissolve. This effect also slows the building of coral reefs and some believe the tipping point for such reefs could be less then 40 years away.

Often called “rain forests of the sea,” coral reefs are home to a quarter of all marine fish species and their presence buttresses coastal regions from strong waves and storms.

This is Your Ocean on Capitalism
The ocean life that’s still somehow able to manage the increasing acidity are not exactly in the clear -- thanks, for example, to bottom trawling. This is the highly non-selective fishing method of dragging immense nets along the ocean floor. Think of it as the sea-based version of forest clear cutting. Arguably the single most destructive human action for the world’s oceans, trawling often leaves a trail that can be seen from space.

Ocean trawling is a major component in overfishing (or more accurately: “fishing”). Since large-scale industrial fishing methods was introduced in the 1950s, 93 percent of the large fish -- e.g. tuna, swordfish, marlin, cod, halibut, skate, and flounder -- are gone.

In addition, estimates range as high as 50 to 100 million sharks killed each year -- sometimes as unintended “bycatch,” other times more specifically when untold millions of sharks are targeted  for their fins.

This practice involves catching sharks, cutting off their fins while they are alive, and tossing the maimed fish back into the ocean. The fins are dried and used in shark fin soup. To make this even more despicable, the shark fins don’t add flavor to the soup. They are added solely for texture.

More than 200 million years before the dinosaurs, there were sharks. Do we really want to be part of the species that wiped them out?

Big Picture
Another ecocidal human decision is offshore drilling. Over its lifetime, a single oil rig can:

• Dump more than 90,000 metric tons of drilling fluid and metal cuttings into the ocean
• Drill between 50-100 wells, each dumping 25,000 pounds of toxic metals, such as lead, chromium, and mercury, and potent carcinogens like toluene, benzene, and xylene into the ocean
• Pollute the air as much as 7,000 cars driving 50 miles a day Other ocean-killing realities to consider include oil spills and slicks, beach erosion, the fact that the world’s largest landfill happens to be floating in the Pacific Ocean, etc. etc. etc.

We urgently need to make these big picture connections in our minds and in our activism. While each of us can play a role in a wide range of crucial issues, we must never lose sight of how it all comes together. Without functioning oceans, a functioning eco-system cannot exist. Without a functioning eco-system, all other efforts are pointless.

So yeah, it’d be great if corporations paid more taxes or if single-payer health care were enacted but such changes would ultimately fall into the proverbial Titanic/deck chair category if our oceans are not restored and respected -- now.

• Mickey Zezima is the author of 12 books, most recently
 Occupy this Book: Mickey Z. on Activism. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on the Web here. Anyone wishing to support his activist efforts can do so by making a donation here.
.

Alaskan Environmental Failure

SUBHEAD: Global Warming, Ocean Acidification, Fukushima Radiation, Overfishing? Alaska fisheries are in midst of an economic collapse.

By Canis Maximus on 29 July 2014 for Daily Kos -
(http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/07/29/1317631/-Alaska-Fisheries-In-Midst-Of-An-Economic-Collapse#)


Image above: Unusual growth observed in salmon tissue from Hydaburg, Alaska on 24 October 2013. From (http://beforeitsnews.com/mass-animal-death/2014/01/fuked-white-goo-everywhere-creepy-white-stuff-in-alaskan-salmon-2432326.html).

And not one politician is talking about it. But fisherman are talking about it. The people in the villages are talking about it. People who rely on outfitting the boats, who repair boats; the fish buyers and brokers. The cannery workers(!), the roe packers, and all the ancillary businesses.

They're talking about it. And what they are talking about is ocean acidification.

My daughter is a customer service rep at a major company. She deals with customers from all over the state; from Barrow to Ketchikan to Nome to Valdez to Cantwell to Kodiak, Dutch Harbor and ALL the Interior. So she hears a LOT of 'local' news from people who chit-chat; who k'vetch about politics, the economy and Obama.

But since the opening of the herring fishery and the salmon fisheries, it been about the failure of the runs. But as you see in the link, they aren't talking about why and what might be happening in the ocean while the fish are pelagic. One captain with whom my daughter spoke said it's the worst he's ever seen. He's hauled maybe 5 tons when he should have had 100-120 thousand pounds.

Others (crew, hands, etc) talk about working two weeks and being basically in the hole. My daughter says that many, many of them talk about 'ocean acidification.' The salmon just aren't showing up, especially Reds and Kings.

Many have lesions or worms and parasites.The crabs they are seeing are more easily damaged and there is a lot of 'dead catch'.

She also says that many of the old-timers are talking about Fukushima too. She says these guys are convinced it has something to do with it.

Other fisheries and species are also dropping off the cliff (herring, rock cod, ling cod, halibut, pollock) This is what is NOT being talked about in the so-called 'media' up here.  Don't want the tourists to stay away.

Here's something else you won't see soon (at least until fall when the people start applying for food stamps en masse.)

The Interior villages are hurting. Especially the Elders who depend on the salmon as their traditional diet and to feed the sled dogs, if they have them. As you see here from January 2013, this has been happening for some time.

While this was reported, it doesn't make a blip of difference in "Seattle North" (Anchorage). Out of sight out of mind. Just like Native Americans in the lower 48.

But this little slice of the growing ecological disaster will snowball to an avalanche (get it, Alaskans?) and one of the pillars of the economy will collapse taking a LOT of capital with it. It will be interesting to watch who starts bailing first: The big corporate factory ships and Japanese investors or the fishermen themselves who can't make a go on 5 or 10% of what they need to make it profitable.

The Arctic is the laboratory for Climate Change. In the more than 34 years I've been here, I've watch most of the vegetation change. I've felt the differences in the winters and summers now and then.

(This summer is warm and gorgeous, BTW)

I've watched year to year as the animals change behaviors; invasive weeds; seen the bubbling methane in our lakes and ponds; and watched my favorite fishing places -where at times it was possible to catch a fish every cast!- now bereft of even sculpins.

Yet, from the politicians who are promising everything BUT action on climate change we get jabber about everything BUT climate change, even though it's slapping us in the face. Recently the Republican-dominated Legislature made a HUGE giveaway to the oil companies in the form of tax breaks. The people didn't want it, but the 'pubs did so....

There great advantages to living in Alaska and one of them is our ballot initiative laws. An initiative here quickly put the repeal of that giveaway on November's ballot (along with cannabis legalization!) Since then, the Kochs and others are wasting millions of dollars to fight the evil environmentalists who don't like mushy crabs.

Ah, well.... I meant to turn this into a real diary with charts and pictures and EVERYTHING! But I got lazy and it turned into a rant. I realize most people don't care what happens up here apart from reality shows, but I present this as a slice of what is happening before our eyes if we will see it.

The world is dying.


.

Surfing in Gaza

SOURCE: Elaine Dunbar (inunyabus@gmail.com)
SUBHEAD: Palestinians in fact resemble the Hawaiian people in many ways and have a form of Aloha that is virtually identical.  

By Ken O'Keefe on 20 April 2011 in Island Breath - 
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2011/04/surfing-in-gaza.html)

 
Image above: Surfing with two Palestinians in Gaza. From email distribution by Ken O'Keefe.

Aloha everyone at Deep Ecology & Hawaii,

 I just surfed in Gaza yesterday, although I have lost so much in my abilities to surf if was an absolute joy. Below is a video of the day, it also includes thoughts about my dear brother Vittorio who was murdered last week. The day reminded me of my fondest memories as a kid. My love for the sea will never die and I want to share that love with my extended family in Gaza by bringing them more surfboards and other water equipment.

Whether it is kayaks, surfboards, inflatable boats, outboard motors, boogie boards, you name it, anything to enhance the ability of the children to interact with the sea. I will be leaving from London for Gaza around mid may and we have the means to transport valuable items so please give what you can. Thanks to everyone in advance, please spread this message to the entire surfing community, please be reminded that those that live and surf as I did in Hawaii and California are so blessed that it is practically criminal to not do good in this world.

The people of Palestine in Gaza have been through more than most know and despite decades of horrendous propaganda meant to villainize all the people here, the truth of the matter is that the people of Palestine are among the most generous and beautiful people you will ever meet. They do in fact resemble the Hawaiian people in incredible ways and they have a form of Aloha here that is virtually identical. I would love to have something sent from the Hawaiian/kanaka maoli community to Gaza as well, it is a dream of mine to connect the kanaka maoli with the Palestinian people.

And of course I hope this message reaches the surfing community and I really hope that this community responds. Put down most of what you have been told about Gaza, I am telling you most of it is absolute bullshit. The truth is that there are over 800,000 innocent children here and if you give to this cause you will bring joy to some of them.

Thank you all in advance. If you want to support this cause please email me (1worldcitizen@spamarrest.com)and cc samouniproject@hotmail.com

Here is a link to the page giving information about our convoy; (http://www.indiegogo.com/Samouni-Family-Convoy-to-Gaza)
 


Video above: Thoughts on Vittorio Arrigoni and surfing in Gaza. From (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ0abc8GQKo).

 .