‘Ocean temperatures are rising 50 per cent faster’

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Rome: Katherine Richardson
teaches biological oceanography at the University of Copenhagen. She chaired the scientific steering committee for the International Association of Science Researchers’ Climate Congress in March to update scientific information for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) before the December Copenhagen meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. She spoke to Narayani Ganesh on the sidelines of Globe International’s G8+5 Legislators’ Forum:


Has scientific fact-finding helped shape government policy?
Science cannot tell legislators what to do; it can only give information. It is up to legislators to make sensible decisions. Surface ocean temperatures are rising 50 per cent faster than realised at the last IPCC report. It is happening too quickly for evolution to firefight it. Some species might learn to cope but most will not. The oceans will soon reach a tipping point when they would no longer be able to support life. You wouldn’t take a flight that has only a 10 per cent chance of reaching its destination. Yet you remain inactive even when the IPCC report tells you that there is only a 10 per cent chance that climate change was not due to human activity; but that there is a 90 per cent chance that it is.
Why the focus on ocean species?
The oceans cover two-thirds of the earth’s surface and contain 71 per cent of all water. Yet we have only one-tenth of nature reserves in oceans of what we have on land, like the Great Barrier Reef and some off the coasts of Kenya, Malaysia and South America. There is nothing to suggest that ocean species are less important than those on land. Let’s not forget that all life began in the oceans. To build resilience in bio-systems we will have to consider increasing nature reserves in oceans.
It’s really the smaller organisms in the ocean that are more important; they produce calcium carbonate and help absorb carbon dioxide. The oceans are full of really tiny organisms. The plants in the ocean are older in terms of evolution; so they’re more important. But only 4 per cent of oceanic plants like plankton and algae are visible.
Is iron fertilisation an effectivecarbon-capturemechanism?
The ocean has a warm surface layer and a cold layer beneath that. We need to sink carbon to the bottom of the bottom layer or into the seabed. There is a biological mechanism when CO2 sinks with plants. With iron fertilisation, you stimulate plant growth, but would it go all the way down? Not sure, because fish eat up the plants before they can sink to the bottom. A lot of material gets degraded on the surface instead of sinking to the bottom; so they end up releasing more CO2.
We’re in a mess, all right. We need to do whatever we can. Should we play God and engineer bio-systems? Maybe yes, to restore them to their original state. What are our chances of survival? It depends on how soon legislators and others take action.