Musical interlude: our biggest challenge

For those whose attention span does not extend to the length of the previous video.

A mortal danger overtaking humanity

"There is a mortal danger - there is a danger which is overtaking humanity. And we will not solve it unless we all pull together, unless we all agree to do something. Now that is a fantastically difficult thing to achieve. It has never happened in the history of humanity that all humanity has agreed."

- David Attenborough, Beyond the Brink, final quote.

What is he talking about? David Attenborough regularly polls as the most trusted public figure in the UK (along with the Queen). Do you think he is overstating things here?

The death of the oceans?

Sir David Attenborough has narrated a new BBC documentary titled "The death of the oceans?" which is currently on BBC iPlayer. It is worth watching as it addresses many of the various threats facing marine ecosystems: overfishing, ocean acidification, ocean warming (mentioned only briefly) and noise pollution. No mention of other kinds of pollution (especially plastics: did you know that one in three albatross chicks, hatched in the middle of the Pacific 3000 miles from both the US and Japan, die from being fed too much plastic waste?), but it's a step forward, and having Attenborough narrate it will give it more exposure.

I've seen some other pieces that address one or two of these, but this is the first popular piece to put more of the puzzle together. The End of the Line was really worth seeing on overfishing, but doesn't really touch anything else.

The documentary is also of interest as it introduces the Census of Marine Life, a massive ten year international research project to establish a baseline against which future measurements can be made. More information on the census here, which gives some sense of the size of this project:

"The Census cost $650 million, and involved 2,700 scientists from more than 80 nations and territories working at 670 institutions. They mounted more than 540 expeditions, comprising about 9,000 days at sea, where they studied organisms from the surface all the way down to more than six miles down and in environments that ranged from freezing cold to above the boiling point of water (at the great pressures at the bottom of the sea, water can become superheated near volcanic vents) and ultimately produced about 2,600 scientific papers.

"What was in those papers? Glad you asked: the scientists collectively made 30 million observations of some 120,000 species, found more than 6,000 new ones, tracked the migratory patterns of thousands, and extrapolated from what they saw that the 250,000 known marine species (excluding microbes) are probably only a quarter of what's really out there. If you want to talk microbes, they say, there may be as many as a billion different kinds in the world's oceans."