Diagram showing an open-loop Marine Exhaust Gas Cleaning System that removes sulfur and nitrogen compounds from a ship’s engine exhaust and dumps them into the surrounding water. Graphic: Tritech Engineers

Thousands of ships fitted with “cheat devices” to divert poisonous pollution into sea – “In the North Sea and some parts of the Channel, the water quality has already been heavily degraded”

By Wil Crisp 30 September 2019 (The Independent) – Global shipping companies have spent billions rigging vessels with “cheat devices” that circumvent new environmental legislation by dumping pollution into the sea instead of the air, The Independent can reveal. More than $12bn (£9.7bn) has been spent on the devices, known as open-loop scrubbers, which extract […]

Graphs from the “Climate Change and Land 2019” report by the IPCC, showing changes relative to 1961 of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, world agricultural production, food demand, and desertification and land degradation. Graphic: IPCC

World food security increasingly at risk due to “unprecedented” climate change impact, new UN report warns

8 August 2019 (UN News) – More than 500 million people today live in areas affected by erosion linked to climate change, the UN warned on Thursday, before urging all countries to commit to sustainable land use to help limit greenhouse gas emissions before it is too late. Speaking at the launch of a Special […]

Remote sensing imagery of discolored water and algal blooms in the Florida Bay and the Florida Keys region between 1992 and 2013 showing connectivity of the mainland and the lower Florida Keys, all outlined in red. (a) Landsat true color image on 29 May 1992 shows turbid water in western Florida Bay and discolored, black water in central Florida Bay that extends southward to the lower Florida Keys; (b) AVHRR reflectance image on 12 March 1996 shows high turbidity from the Shark River Slough plume extending beyond the lower Florida Keys towards Dry Tortugas; (c, d) VIIRS chlorophyll a anomaly images show phytoplankton blooms off Shark River Slough reaching the lower Florida Keys that were partially composed of the cyanobacterium, Synechococcus, on (c) 24 November 2013 and (d) 27 January 2014. Graphic: Lapointe, et al., 2019 / Marine Biology

Nutrient loading lowers resistance to thermal stress in Florida Keys corals – “These data make clear that this is not an ‘either temperature or nutrients’ situation, but rather a ‘both/and’ combination of multiple stressors”

By Gisele Galoustian 15 July 2019 (FAU) – Coral reefs are considered one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet and are dying at alarming rates around the world. Scientists attribute coral bleaching and ultimately massive coral death to a number of environmental stressors, in particular, warming water temperatures due to climate change. A […]

Four major drivers of insect decline for each of the studied taxa according to reports in the literature. Graphic: Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys, 2019 / Biological Conservation

Insect apocalypse: German bug watchers sound alarm – “Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades”

By Daphne Rousseau 1 July 2019 (AFP) – For almost 30 years they passed as quirky eccentrics, diligently setting up their insect traps in the Rhine countryside to collect tens of millions of bugs and creepy crawlers. Now the group of German entomology enthusiasts can boast a world-class scientific treasure: evidence of what is described […]

Free air CO2 enrichment experiments using native Australian forests. Elevated CO2 levels are used to examine the effects on native forests, animals, soils and grasses. Photo: Western Sydney University

Leaving microbes out of climate change conversation has major consequences, experts warn – “Climate change is literally starving ocean life”

By Ivy Shih 19 June 2019 (UNSW) – An international group of leading microbiologists have issued a warning, saying that not including microbes – the support system of the biosphere – in the climate change equation will have major negative flow-on effects. More than 30 microbiologists from 9 countries have issued a warning to humanity […]

Permafrost forms a grid-like pattern in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska in Alpine, Alaska, a 22.8 million acre region managed by the Bureau of Land Management on Alaska's North Slope. USGS has periodically assessed oil and gas resource potential there. Photo: David Houseknecht / USGS

Warming Arctic permafrost releasing 12 times more nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, than previously thought – “This needs to be taken more seriously than it is right now”

By Caitlin McDermott-Murphy 6 June 2019 (The Harvard Gazette) – About a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere is covered in permafrost. Now, it turns out these permanently frozen beds of soil, rock, and sediment are actually not so permanent: They’re thawing at an increasing rate. Human-induced climate change is warming these lands, melting the ice […]

Global warming has quadrupled ocean dead zones – “The decline in ocean oxygen ranks among the most serious effects of human activities on the Earth’s environment”

4 January 2018 (SERC) – In the past 50 years, the amount of water in the open ocean with zero oxygen has gone up more than fourfold. In coastal water bodies, including estuaries and seas, low-oxygen sites have increased more than 10-fold since 1950. Scientists expect oxygen to continue dropping even outside these zones as […]

Estimated disruptions to Earth’s great elemental cycles

23 March 2016 (Desdemona Despair) – Back in 2011, Desdemona was asked by a local church to give a presentation on the condition of the world’s oceans (State of the Oceans 2011 video; pdf slide deck; PowerPoint). As part of the talk, Des wanted estimates for human disturbances to the great cycles of elements on […]

Video: State of the Oceans 2011

20 November 2011 (Desdemona Despair) – Here’s Desdemona giving a presentation on the accelerating destruction of the oceans by various human activities. It’s basically Graph of the Day with narration. Download the slide deck: http://www.leftopia.com/presentations/State_Of_The_Oceans_2011.pdf http://www.leftopia.com/presentations/State_Of_The_Oceans_2011.pptx State of the Oceans 2011 Technorati Tags: ocean acidification,global warming,climate change,phenology,overfishing,ocean overexploitation,fish decline,mass extinction,extinction,coral,habitat loss,ecosystem disruption,dead zone,ocean anoxia,phosphorus,nitrogen,carbon,carbon dioxide,overpopulation,doom

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