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Spaceship Earth – Your Main Oxygen Systems are Collapsing
As the brilliant futurist Buckminster Fuller used to point out, our Spaceship Earth is hurtling through space at a great speed. Imagine if someone told you (a passenger on that ship) that the main oxygen systems were failing because of how food was being grown.
World’s largest marine reserve in Antarctica
Read the full article online at http://newatlas.com “Not a week goes by where we don’t hear about the impending extinction of another species, so here’s something positive for a change: after six years of diplomatic impasse, the countries that determine the fate of Antarctica’s waters have finally reached a historic agreement to declare the Ross […]
Oceans Are Absorbing Globe’s Excess Heat
Read the full article online at http://www.nytimes.com “This year is on track to be the third consecutive hottest year on record. Where does that heat go? The oceans, mostly. Ocean temperatures have been consistently rising for at least three decades. Scientists believe that global sea surface temperatures will continue to increase over the next decade […]
S. Florida Republicans Tackle Climate Change
Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo and Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch, whose South Florida districts are already enduring increased flooding, salt water intrusion and other effects of rising sea levels, are leading the first truly bipartisan congressional effort to tackle climate change.
100% Edible Six-Pack Ring
Drinking beer to save ocean life? Cheers to that. Saltwater Brewery in Florida has partnered with the New York-based ad agency We Believers to create a plastic-free six-pack ring that feeds marine life, rather than choking or ensnarling them. The Edible Six Pack Ring is made from byproducts of the brewing process such as wheat and barley, making it the first 100 percent biodegradable, compostable and edible packaging implemented in the beer industry.
Florida’s Coasts and Their Ecosystems are in Danger
“Central Florida’s Indian River Lagoon, North Florida’s Apalachicola Bay and a trio of coastal estuaries in South Florida are in the throes of ecosystem collapses that threaten sea grass, fisheries, recreation and local economies.
What’s to blame? A historic toll of chronic pollution and crippled drainage has been compounded by drought in recent years and El Niño downpours this winter. The troubled environments are far apart, but their stories are similar and even intertwined.”
Climate Shift Coming Within Decades, Not Centuries
“The nations of the world agreed years ago to try to limit global warming to a level they hoped would prove somewhat tolerable. But leading climate scientists warned on Tuesday that permitting a warming of that magnitude would actually be quite dangerous.
The likely consequences would include killer storms stronger than any in modern times, the disintegration of large parts of the polar ice sheets and a rise of the sea sufficient to begin drowning the world’s coastal cities before the end of this century, the scientists declared.”
Bacterium That Eats Our Plastic Waste
“Hundreds of millions of tons of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic are produced each year to package everything from sodas to shampoo. That only a fraction of this is recycled leaves much of it to rest in landfills and the ocean. But efforts to deal with this monumental mess may soon receive a much-needed boost, with scientists in Japan discovering a new bacterium with the ability to completely break down PET plastics in a relatively short space of time.”
Oceans will soon contain more plastic than fish
“‘The best research currently available estimates that there are over 150 million tonnes (165 million tons) of plastics in the ocean today,’ [a] report reads. ‘In a business-as-usual scenario, the ocean is expected to contain 1 tonne (1.1 tons) of plastic for every 3 tonnes of fish by 2025, and by 2050, more plastics than fish (by weight).’
In other words, in just 34 years, plastic trash in the ocean will outweigh all the fish in the sea.”
There is More Plastic in Our Oceans Than We Thought
The 5 Gyres Institute co-authored this study which is the most comprehensive estimate of small plastics in the world’s oceans. There were two other papers published earlier, one by Cozar (2014) and Eriksen (2014) using separate data sets.
The paper published last week in Environmental Research Letters, A Global Inventory of Small Floating Plastic Debris, uses three ocean models and every dataset published since the 1970s. With 10 authors contributing to it, it’s the best so far. This new study suggests there are 15 to 51 trillion microplastic particles in the world’s oceans, weighing somewhere between 93 and 236,000 metric tons. This is roughly seven times more than what we thought before.
