Insert head (A) into sand (B)

CP: Amazonian drought, another climate wildcard. This is a lengthy post, but worth a read for its significance.

BBC: Mining tax should be higher says OECD.

TPM: Insert head (A) into sand (B).

Running out of places to fish.

Alaskan wildfires getting more intense, and now Alaskan forests and soils are releasing more carbon than they are storing.

The places where fish choke.

Hot Topic: The rainforests of the sea are burning.

Mongabay: Climate change likely to kill five million annually by 2020, mainly children.

This storm is what we call progress

By the end of the century, ocean acidification will have passed a biological tipping point.

SMH: Australian native mammals in sharp decline. On current trends, many are likely to be extinct in twenty years.

Twenty one percent of Africa's freshwater plants and animals are threatened with extinction.

Land grab: we're turning forests into food (see also here for another take on the same story).

Ocean dead zones on the rise.

Trouble ahead for developed world: "Pretty soon the U.S. will be spending more on debt service than national security. ... That's a tipping point for any global power."

BBC: Don't let the bed bugs bite: "we are on the threshold of a bed-bug pandemic."

Hot Topic: Widespread sacrifices amongst developed nations for ecological stability will never happen. Or will they?

CP: Why healthcare is less important than climate and energy policy.

The title of this post comes from this quote.

Struggling to breathe underwater

"Unless we find a way to rein in our carbon emissions very soon, a low-oxygen ocean may become an inescapable feature of our planet."

- Carl Zimmer, "A Looming Oxygen Crisis and Its Impact on World's Oceans".

Carbon dioxide emissions from human activities are destabilising the climate under which human civilisation has developed. That is well known and widely discussed. They are also acidifying the oceans ten times faster than during a mass marine extinct event 55 million years ago. That is less well-known, but possibly just as serious. But there is yet another global threat from rising carbon dioxide levels: a decline in oceanic oxygen levels. Not simply the local devastation caused in an increasing number of sites from fertiliser run-off creating marine "dead zones" starved of oxygen, but a global issue. Warmer water can hold less oxygen and warmer water is more stratified, making the mixing of surface oxygen with deeper water slower. Although the absolute drop in oxygen may seem slight (single digit percentages over many decades), this could have severe effects on many marine creatures for whom oxygen intake represents a primary limiting factor. The winners? Jellyfish and certain bacteria that thrive in oxygen-depleted conditions. The former are presently experiencing a population explosion (largely due to overfishing removing competition, amongst other causes). The latter are a source of yet more potent greenhouse gases.

Take a deep breath and read the full article.

"And God said, 'Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.' So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.'"

- Genesis 1.20-21.

Are we undoing creation and denying the blessing of God?

A taste of the menu

Global warming turns 35: both the term itself and the experience of rising temperatures have lasted a little longer than my lifespan. Predictions made back in the mid-70s were in the right ballpark.

Ben discovers the law of ice cream (well, gelato actually).

Phytoplankton, the base of the ocean's food chain, are in serious decline, according to a new global study in Nature.

Alison points out what has largely been missing from the Australian election campaign.

The Automatic Earth: why deflation matters more than inflation.

Dominic Knight: How to make the election more interesting.

SMH/Crikey: Gillard's cash for clunkers is a lemon costing almost twenty times as much to reduce a tonne of carbon as an ETS. And that is with some generous assumptions. And the claims of money for R&D when looked at carefully also fare poorly. Neither the emperor nor the would-be emperor are wearing any climate clothes.

Gravity, it's only a theory. The hoax unmasked.

John Cook: Ten ways we know the earth is warming and ten reasons we know that the primary driver is human activities enhancing the natural greenhouse effect.

Popular author Anne Rice has "quit being a Christian" (but still follows Christ).

Joe Romm: US EPA gives ruling on ten different petitions submitted by climate change deniers: "These petitions - based as they are on selectively edited, out-of-context data and a manufactured controversy - provide no evidence to undermine our determination."

Wynne Parry asks whether the oceans primed for mass extinction in an article that starts to join the dots between pollution, overfishing, nutrient run-off, dead zones, ocean warming and acidification from carbon dioxide.

Is the BP gusher the greatest ecological disaster in US history? No.

"On Meet the Press recently, energy and climate czar Carol Browner said the Gulf spill is 'probably the biggest environmental disaster the country has ever faced.' In a speech this week, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson called the spill 'the largest environmental disaster in American history.'

"Both were eager to show how seriously the Administration is taking this disaster – and both were wrong. America is in the middle of several environmental disasters whose impacts affect not only the Gulf Coast, but all our coasts and everything in between.

"One of the crises, of course, is global climate change – the insidious self-afflicted tragedy whose adverse impacts already are underway, some to be felt for the next 1,000 years according to government researchers.

"Another is freshwater supplies. After surveying water officials around the country in 2003, the General Accounting Office reported that 36 states were expecting shortages of fresh water by 2013, even without drought. Some experts say those shortages are already underway with adverse consequences for energy production, agriculture and peace between neighbors. As the Economist recently noted in a special section on water, we can find substitutes for oil but there is no substitute for water.

"The casualty list goes on: ocean acidification, nitrogen loading, the destruction of wetlands, forests falling to fires and bugs, the decline in soil fertility due to mono-agriculture, the loss of biodiversity, all with very real consequences for our economy, safety and health."

- Bill Becker

The BP oil gusher (it is not an oil spill, which implies a finite container spilling out) is indeed a terrible disaster and will continue for many weeks or months yet. But it is not going to end the world. It will continue to be a very major problem for the Gulf of Mexico, especially the southern states of the US.

Yet as this quote points out, it is neither the only nor the greatest ecological disaster in the US, let alone the world. We just don't hear as much about the others because they don't have sexy pictures of birds covered in oil, occur on timescales of years or decades rather than weeks or months, and because they cannot be easily blamed on a single company or individual.

Although these other disasters might not make as many headlines, this doesn't mean they are smaller or less important. I have previously attempted to list some of the many ecological and resource challenges facing the world (not just the US). It is tempting to pick one of these and decide that it is the most crucial and minimise the others in order to make more political elbow-room for one's favourite cause, but that is ultimately short-sighted. We need to face them all. They may not be equally threatening, but black-and-white thinking that assumes that for one to be taken seriously, the others can or must be ignored is itself one of the great dangers we face.

Indeed, one of the second order problems is that so many of these threats are interrelated. Biodiversity loss is multiplied by climate change. Deforestation contributes to carbon dioxide levels. Peak oil will tempt us to exploit non-conventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands, accelerating the loss of boreal forests. Decline of fish stocks increases pressure on agriculture and soil degradation. Monocultural agriculture creates nitrogen runoff and creates oceanic dead zones. And so on and so on.

Let us not lose the wood for the trees. These connections are crucial to understand so that we don't push down a bump in the carpet only to have it reappear elsewhere. Any response requires joined up thinking that can see patterns and relations. So many of these problems have underlying causes in the rapid growth of human activity associated with the globalisation of industrialism and its evil twin, consumerism. Until we face the roots of these issues, we are merely trying to treat the symptoms, often in ways that could ultimately worsen the prognosis.

"And the sea was no more"

Deepwater Horizon: overview of a catastrophe
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on 20th April, killing eleven workers and injuring seventeen more. The well which it had been drilling was in water over 1.5km deep and descended another few kilometres into the sea floor into an oil field estimated to contain about 50 million barrels of oil (enough to supply the world's needs for less than a day, by the way). After the explosion, oil started gushing from the well into the deep waters of the Gulf and has continued to do so until today, over one month later.

After initially claiming that the oil slick on the surface was just from the sunken rig and not from the well, BP then offered an first estimate that about 1,000 barrels a day were leaking. This was revised up to 5,000 barrels a few days later by NOAA (National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration) and has remained the official government estimate. Scientists analysing the size of the visible spill on the surface put the figure at around 20-25,000 barrels a day, though this ignored the significant amounts of dispersant that BP was pumping into the oil as it exited the well (causing much of the oil to never make it to the surface) and the enormous oil slicks, some 10 km long, floating well below the surface.

Critics of BP started to point out numerous problems in their response, including their use of inferior and more toxic dispersants purchased from a company linked to BP (they have recently been ordered to find a less toxic alternative, having already employed 3 million litres of the stuff) and perhaps of greater concern, a pattern of trying to hide or minimise the extent of the problem. Under pressure, BP finally released some video footage of the underwater oil eruption, from which independent scientists estimated the flow rate at up to 70,000 barrels per day. More pressure from Senators lead to BP posting more videos, from which it has been estimated that it may be closer to 100,000 barrels per day, of which BP have now managed to siphon off up to about 5,000 barrels per day via a pipe they have managed to thread down the gushing hole. That is, it appears that the disaster is one hundred times greater than they first admitted. It is already the largest oil contamination in US waters and is moving up the charts towards the largest in the world. About one fifth of the waters in the Gulf are now off-limits to fishing and some of the oil has been caught in the Loop Current, pulling it towards Florida and the lower eastern states.

Tony Hayward, CEO of BP has been quoted calling the 38,000 square kilometres of visible surface spill "a drop in the ocean" when compared to the enormous volume of water in the Gulf. Despite numerous apparent serious breaches of safety protocol and a history of pollution infractions from the rig, he has called the disaster "unforseeable" and "inconceivable" and assured people that the environmental damage is likely to be "very, very modest".

This is not an oil leak, which sounds slow, nor an oil spill, which implies that the oil is pouring from a tank of a given size. This is an ongoing underwater oil gusher, filling an olympic swimming pool every four hours or so. Although efforts to stem the flow are ongoing, ultimately, it may not be stopped until a relief well is drilled, which is likely take a few months. Many commentators are beginning to suggest this may turn out to be the largest environmental catastrophe in US history.

Our dying oceans
However, this is just one of a number of deeply troubling problems facing the world's oceans, and despite potentially affecting the Gulf of Mexico for years to come, its effects are dwarfed in both scale and long term impact by a range of other threats to ocean life: acidification (from carbon dioxide), plastic pollution - including a floating garbage patch possibly larger than Australia, dead zones from agricultural run-off (the oil pollution is likely to exacerbate this problem in the Gulf of Mexico), warming causing coral bleaching, thermal stratification and other changes in marine life, indiscriminately destructive fishing techniques (trawling and dredging) and overfishing, global fish catch peaked in the 1980's and on current trends all commercial fish stocks will likely be depleted (unprofitable or extinct) in the next few decades.

For the authors of holy scripture, the ocean was a terrifying chaos, filled with monsters and a symbol of destruction. The vision of the new heavens and new earth in Revelation 21 includes the telling phrase "and the sea was no more", indicating an end to chaos and destruction.

But today, the picture is reversed. Our oceans are threatened and dying. It is we who are the chaotic (or perhaps all too systematic) destroyer.