Climate Changes

By Ranil Senanayake –August 11, 2015

Ranil Senanayake

Internationally there is a palpable sense of urgency among the climate scientists. While waiting for our climate scientists to even twitch from their slumber, we should begin to consider what all this means to us. There seems to be a real concern that the sea level will rise substantially. On July 20th, a major study suggested that mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065. While the level is up for debate the fact of sea level rise seems to be certain. One emerging, disturbing fact is that while the IPCC climate [change] models predict a gentle, slow change, the current experience is one so rapid that neither scientists, nor animals can keep up with it.

As our fossil profligate lifestyles, keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a large part of it is absorbed by the oceans. As the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it’s converted into carbonic acid and the pH of seawater declines. Unlike a prediction of massive sea-level rise just decades away, the warming and acidifying oceans represent another problem that seems to have kick-started an oceanic mass extinction on the same time scale. Acidification has a direct effect on mollusks and other marine animals with hard outer bodies: A striking study last year showed that, along the West Coast of the US, the shells of tiny snails are already dissolving, with as-yet-unknown consequences on the ecosystem.

The combination of excessive nutrients from agricultural runoff, abnormal wind patterns and the warming oceans is already creating seasonal dead zones in coastal regions when algae blooms suck up most of the available oxygen. The appearance of low-oxygen regions has doubled in frequency every 10 years since 1960 and should continue to grow over the coming decades at an even greater rate.Read More