Professor Jackson: My government funded research shows we need to stop fishing, shut down all factories, quit driving cars, forget about offshore drilling and elect Obama -- IMMEDIATELY -- or the oceans will turn to slime.
Posted on 08/14/2008 3:28:30 PM PDT by Zakeet
Human activities are cumulatively driving the health of the world's oceans down a rapid spiral, and only prompt and wholesale changes will slow or perhaps ultimately reverse the catastrophic problems they are facing.
Such is the prognosis of Jeremy Jackson, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, in a bold new assessment of the oceans and their ecological health. Publishing his study in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Jackson believes that human impacts are laying the groundwork for mass extinctions in the oceans on par with vast ecological upheavals of the past.
He cites the synergistic effects of habitat destruction, overfishing, ocean warming, increased acidification and massive nutrient runoff as culprits in a grand transformation of once complex ocean ecosystems. Areas that had featured intricate marine food webs with large animals are being converted into simplistic ecosystems dominated by microbes, toxic algal blooms, jellyfish and disease.
Jackson, director of the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation, has tagged the ongoing transformation as "the rise of slime." The new paper, "Ecological extinction and evolution in the brave new ocean," is a result of Jackson's presentation last December at a biodiversity and extinction colloquium convened by the National Academy of Sciences.
"The purpose of the talk and the paper is to make clear just how dire the situation is and how rapidly things are getting worse," said Jackson. "It's a lot like the issue of climate change that we had ignored for so long. If anything, the situation in the oceans could be worse because we are so close to the precipice in many ways."
(Excerpt) Read more at scrippsnews.ucsd.edu ...
Professor Jackson: My government funded research shows we need to stop fishing, shut down all factories, quit driving cars, forget about offshore drilling and elect Obama -- IMMEDIATELY -- or the oceans will turn to slime.
“Warns of Mass Extinctions and ‘Rise of Slime’”
Wait a minute...we’ve already got the democrat party!
Don’t tell me. We have 10 years to make changes or it’ll be too late?
Sorry dude, you’re too late. Jacques Cousteau and Ted Danson told us the oceans would be dead in 10 years back in 1991. So the ocean have already been dead for for the last seven years.
Same old, same old from the envirowhackos.
“The rise of slime” We are already seeing this in congress and elsewhere in the liberal community
The Good Professor in that shirt looks like one of those “gone fishin’” TV hosts from the Sixties.
Once again, we are all gonna DIE!
I thought that ended when Clinton left the White House in 2000
Don't they ever go away?
"We are all doomed!!!" shouts the fool. "We know better" respond 31,000 scientists
Revelation 16:3
The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it turned into blood like that of a dead man, and every living thing in the sea died.
He is RIGHT, and we have been seeing it happening for YEARS!!
The slime has oozed more and more into the limelight, loudly pimping Global Warming, and laying down and spreading for more funding and Carbon Credits.
Anyone questioning the agenda is slimed as well.
That's when I hit the proverbial brakes.
Couldn’t we just smart-bomb the slime with out stealth fighters?
Of course there are those of us who caution the doomsayers. The oceans are not warming, but cooling
http://www.greenhousetruth.com/blog/2006_09_22_ocean_cooling.shtml
but this only leads the gloom and doom crowd to move the topic to acid levels. Yes, a higher level of CO2 will lead to a higher level of carbonic acid in the ocean. However cooler water will lead to more disolved gas of all types, hence more oxygen in the water too.
Its too soon to cry wolf. (Speaking as a former member of Zero Population Growth — we are going to overpopulate the world you know.) Why former? well, the public cannot carry a fear that does not materialize for more than ten years. So ocean fears will collapse in the near term as will the global warming crisis.
Could it be?
No, he's actually Keith Richards.....
And no mention of the technologies that could quickly reverse any problems and make the oceans even better.
For example, enormous offshore fish farms, that would not only relieve the pressure of overfishing, but double, triple or quadruple the amount of fish for the world’s tables. Offshore fish farms are fairly low overhead, just descending nets attached to pontoons and Purina fish chow. Hatchery fish are raised inside the nets, and ocean currents handle oxygenation and cleaning.
When the fish are ready for harvesting, just raise the interior net. The exterior heavy net is to keep out the predators. And when the market is saturated with fish, the fish farms can raise and release endangered fish to repopulate the oceans.
Another example is creating artificial reefs with a simple grid of cables. It was discovered that if you run a weak current through cables, they get radical growth of coral on them. Soon you get a reef growing where there was just sand.
And another example is to plant kelp beds, like any other garden. Kelp beds cause explosive growth of animal life, and grow quickly. Half a dozen scuba divers can plant a new kelp bed in an afternoon, for just a few dollars and the cost of their compressed air.
The bottom line is that most problems have fairly easy and inexpensive fixes. Whining that government should do something just proves that the problem matters less to them than government involvement. It’s called an ulterior motive.
Note that James E. Hansen used to propose the exact same “solutions” to global cooling as he does now for global warming. And they’re the same “solutions” proposed by butterfly expert Paul R. Ehrlich, when he told us that the world was doomed, DOOMED, because of overpopulation. We were all going to die before 1980.
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