Troubled waters
OUR planet consists of three spheres – the lithosphere, the hydrosphere and the atmosphere, all of which interact and play a vital part in our daily lives.
November 2018 saw the release of two major reports, one produced by the WWF title “Living Planet Report 2018” and the other was a paper, published in the scientific journal “Nature,” concerning the warming of our oceans.
Both publications revealed staggering facts and figures underlining our race against time to provide a more sustainable environment for both ourselves and wildlife. The Living Planet Report Tracking 16,704 populations of 4,005 vertebrate species, it was found that the global populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians have declined, on average, by 60 per cent between 1970 and 2014.
This was due to a variety of factors — habitat loss, land degradation, the illegal trade on wildlife, pollution and hunting. All are directly linked to human activities. Natural systems such as forests, oceans, and rivers remain in decline and it’s only now that we are appreciating them as essential to our very survival.
Already, over the last 30 years, we have lost 50 per cent of our shallow water corals, and since 1970, over 20 per cent of the Amazonian rainforest has disappeared for good!
If we take our world’s total biomass into account, wild animals today account for only four per cent of animals, humans (30 per cent) and livestock (60 per cent) whereas 11,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age, these figures would have been reversed.
With today’s total world population of over seven billion people, then perhaps these figures are not surprising.
Over 25 per cent of all marine life is supported by shallow water reef corals. Some scientists maintain that coral mortality, at the rate at which the mean world temperature is currently rising, will shortly amount to 70 to 90 per cent. This has been exacerbated by back-to-back heatwaves and the warming of the oceans, leading to coral bleaching.
This realistic and factually honest report also focuses on the value of nature to people’s lives in terms of their healthy, society and economy and reminds me of a remarkable book, I read at university, titled “Habitat, Economy and Society,” first published in 1934, by Dr Daryll Forde of University College, London.
It became the ethnologist’s “bible” and is well worth a read today, 84 years later. It is a study of tribal life worldwide and focusses on the ways in which mankind responded to his or her environment.
Today globally, this WWF Report estimates that nature provides services worth US$125 trillion per year while also ensuring supply of fresh air, clean water, food, energy, and medicines. to name but a few benefits. Co-existence of wildlife and man Much has been achieved in conservation and preservation work in many parts of our world with recent population increases in giant pandas, mountain gorillas, the critically endangered Mekong Delta dolphins, tigers, grizzly bears, manatees, and various types of eagle and other birds of prey.
This has only been possible in those countries where conservation and biodiversity are prioritised. Such models exist globally and it now lies in the laps of all governments, for we are pushing our only planet’s natural systems that support life on Earth to the very edge.
Biodiversity loss can be averted, for where there is a will, there is a way. New research on ocean warming Startling and worrying revelations appear in a joint paper, written by oceanographic scientists from the US, China, France and Germany, regarding the massive accumulation of heat in our oceans, thereby suggesting an even faster rate of global warming!
It is now a scientifically proven fact that over the last 25 years, our oceans have retained 60 per cent more heat each year than found in previous research.
Before 2007, various different methods were used to record oceanic temperatures at oceanic depths, It was in 2007 that reliable recording devices, called “Argo floats.” were sited in our oceans worldwide.
From the information recorded and transmitted from these devices, it is now blatantly clear that our oceans have warmed at a rate of 6.5 Centigrade every decade since 1991 and will continue to do so as carbon dioxide emissions from our industrial world rise.
2017 saw the world’s record for these emissions.
As the oceans warm up, so their capacity to absorb oxygen and carbon dioxide decreases, thus making it increasingly difficult to keep global warming within “safe” limits in the 21st Century.
Rapidly warming oceans mean that sea levels will rise much faster as the waters expand. More heat will be transported by ocean currents around the world, thus, in tropical areas, leading to even more coral reef destruction and in polar latitudes, to an even faster melting of Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice caps and glaciers.
Putting aside the implications of these long- term implications of warmer oceans, small short term changes in ocean temperatures can affect the annual weather patterns wherever we live on the globe.
US meteorologists maintain that warmer seas off the eastern seaboard states in the US, swept by the warm Gulf Stream ocean currents, have contributed to more intense winter storms.
We must remember that hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are mostly born over the oceans where heat is transferred to the atmosphere. In short, our daily weather affecting our lives is directly related to what is going on at the interface of the hydrosphere and atmosphere.
Massive challenges face us if we are, as nations, to severely reduce our carbon emissions to slow down the rate of mean global warming and especially in our oceans. Antarctic anxieties In late October and early November this year, 22 countries assembled in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, for a meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) with the main item on its agenda to declare the Weddell Sea, in the north west of this vast continent, as a vast maritime protection zone and reserve.
This sea area, five times the size of Germany and covering 1.8 million square kilometres, has the clearest waters in the world in which endangered species of whales, seals and penguins live, thriving on krill and fish.
The purpose of the meeting was to seek unanimous approval from the delegates to create this reserve and to ban fishing there.
Sadly what was planned as a scientific meeting appears to have evolved into a political contretemps with China, Russia and Norway objecting to the plan. Clearly, political and economic interests came into play, for each of these three countries possess large fishing fleets.
Normally, the CCAMLR is quick to release its latest report but as yet, there’s nothing to review! The obvious need for the conservation of our wildlife resources for future generations of mankind and animals and, in this case, marine life seems to have been totally overlooked.
When will we ever learn?