Say goodbye to the ocean. Sorry to break the news, but the global ocean covering 70 percent of the earth's surface is rapidly reverting to its gooey-gray primeval state. Deprived of oxygen, by the end of this century, the ocean will be unable to support the vast diversity of life we have come to associate with it. Instead of shellfish, whales, and tuna, it will be teeming with algae and jellyfish.

Humankind's gluttonous appetite for plastic, fertilizers, and carbon fuels is the cause.

Plastic? You might wonder what planet I'm writing this from, but the average consumer in an industrialized country uses 250 pounds of this foul stuff every year. Plastic from around the world, including billions of plastic pellets representing its initial form, gets into the ocean from multiple entry points—rivers, sewage, ship spills, litter, runoff, etc.

Virtually nonbiodegradable, plastic absorbs concentrated amounts of toxic chemicals such as DDT and PCBs. Eating pellets or other pieces of plastic kills more than a million birds each year along with hundreds of thousands of other fish and wildlife.

The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that 46,000 pieces of plastic are floating on every square mile of the ocean. It has gotten so bad that a plastic garbage patch the size of Texas has formed in the Pacific in an area of slack wind and sluggish currents between California and Hawaii. And there is another such patch off the coast of Japan.

And now for fertilizer: You may think we are fertilizing lawns and crops, but ultimately we are fertilizing the ocean and feeding algae, jellyfish, and bacteria. As a result, huge dead zones of marine biotoxins are spreading from the mouths of the world's major rivers, and massive algae blooms are occurring off many coastlines.

Off the coast of Sweden, for example, gigantic blooms of cyanobacteria turn the Baltic Sea into a cesspool of stinking, yellow-brown slush each summer. Off Florida's gulf coast, toxins from red tides are killing thousands of sea mammals and causing respiratory illnesses among coastal residents. Jellyfish swarm so thick near the Spanish coast that nets have to be strung to protect swimmers, and white mucus blobs of congealed algae and bacteria, some bigger than a person, foul the beaches north of Venice, Italy. And there are many more examples—it's getting worse every year.

Last but not least is the burning of carbon fuels. Since the Industrial Revolution began, the ocean has absorbed 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide, steadily increasing to today's rate of 100 million tons per hour. Normally the ocean acts as a passive sponge for CO2, but we've long since passed the tipping point where acidification kicks in.

As the acidity of the ocean rises, it produces less of the calcium carbonate that coral and other sea animals need to build shells and skeletons. Since 1980, the world's coral has been reduced by 20 percent, even though 25 percent of all species of ocean life live at least part of their life cycles on coral reefs. By the end of the century, the acidity of the ocean will have increased by 150 percent. There will be no more coral, no more shellfish, and no more of the plankton that most other fish depend upon.

The ocean, as we know it, will no longer exist.

This makes me mad as hell.

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posted at 09:59:30 AM