West Coast Publishing Ocean 2014 affirmative page

Ocean-Specific Impacts

Ocean Ecosystems Collapsing Now

Ocean ecosystems rapidly declining – many species will be extinct within a decade.

David Jolly, staff writer, June 21, 2011, New York Times, http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/oceans-are-at-dire-risk-team-of-scientists-warns/ (accessed 5/5/2014)

The state of the oceans is declining far more rapidly than most pessimists had expected, an international team of experts has concluded, increasing the risk that many marine species — including those that make coral reefs — could be extinct within a generation. Coral bleached as a result of stresses including global warming and acidification. The scientists, who gathered in April at the University of Oxford, cited the cumulative impact of the stresses on the oceans, which include ocean acidification related to growing carbon dioxide emissions, a global warming trend that is reducing the polar ice caps, pollution and overfishing. ‘‘This examination of synergistic threats leads to the conclusion that we have underestimated the overall risks and that the whole of marine degradation is greater than the sum of its parts, and that degradation is now happening at a faster rate than predicted,’’ they wrote in the report, released on Monday.

Ocean ecosystems collapsing – we’re facing a global extinction event.

Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News, February 9, 2014, Earthly Happenings, http://www.earthlyhappenings.com/2014/02/facing-mass-extinction-of-marine-life.html (accessed 5/5/2014)

Some species are already fished way beyond their limits - and may also be affected by other threats "So if you look at almost everything, whether it's fisheries in temperate zones or coral reefs or Arctic sea ice, all of this is undergoing changes, but at a much faster rate than we had thought." But more worrying than this, the team noted, are the ways in which different issues act synergistically to increase threats to marine life. Some pollutants, for example, stick to the surfaces of tiny plastic particles that are now found in the ocean bed. This increases the amounts of these pollutants that are consumed by bottom-feeding fish and in turn the pollutants that humans ingest. Plastic particles also assist the transport of algae from place to place, increasing the occurrence of toxic algal blooms - which are also caused by the influx of nutrient-rich pollution from agricultural land. In a wider sense, ocean acidification, warming, local pollution and overfishing are acting together to increase the threat to coral reefs - so much so that three-quarters of the world's reefs are at risk of severe decline.Carbon deposits Life on Earth has gone through five "mass extinction events" caused by events such as asteroid impacts; and it is often said that humanity's combined impact is causing a sixth such event. The trends are such that it is likely to happen, they say - and far faster than any of the previous five. "What we're seeing at the moment is unprecedented in the fossil record - the environmental changes are much more rapid," Professor Rogers told BBC News. "We've still got most of the world's biodiversity, but the actual rate of extinction is much higher [than in past events] - and what we face is certainly a globally significant extinction event."

Ocean Ecosystems Collapsing Now

Human activity inducing ocean ecosystem collapse – entire species disappearing.

Tom Levitt, journalist and former deputy editor at the Ecologist, March 27, 2013, CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/22/world/oceans-overfishing-climate-change/ (accessed 5/5/2014)

Bottom-trawling's knock-on impacts are best illustrated by the plight of the deep-sea fish, the orange roughy (also known as slimeheads) whose populations have been reduced by more than 90%, according to marine scientists. Orange roughys are found on, or around, mineral-rich seamounts that often form coral and act as feeding and spawning hubs for a variety of marine life. "Anywhere you go and try to harvest fish with a trawl you are going to destroy any coral that lives there, and there is example after example of the damage that is done by trawlers," says Ron O'Dor, a senior scientist on the Census of Marine Life. "If I ruled the world, they would be banned, they're just such a destructive method of catching fish. Fishermen have other methods, such as long-line, that cause far less damage. "The disturbing truth is that humans are having unrecognized impacts on every part of the ocean, and there is much we have not seen that will disappear before we ever get a chance," says O'Dor, who is also a professor of marine biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.

Oceans Prevent Extinction

Ocean ecosystems critical to survival of all life.

Robin Kundis Craig, Associate Professor of Law at Indiana University School of Law, 2003, McGeorge Law Review, p.264 (accessed 5/5/2014)

Biodiversity and ecosystem function arguments for conserving marine ecosystems also exist, just as they do for terrestrial ecosystems, but these arguments have thus far rarely been raised in political debates. For example, besides significant tourism values - the most economically valuable ecosystem service coral reefs provide, worldwide - coral reefs protect against storms and dampen other environmental fluctuations, services worth more than ten times the reefs' value for food production. Waste treatment is another significant, non-extractive ecosystem function that intact coral reef ecosystems provide. More generally, "ocean ecosystems play a major role in the global geochemical cycling of all the elements that represent the basic building blocks of living organisms, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, as well as other less abundant but necessary elements." In a very real and direct sense, therefore, human degradation of marine ecosystems impairs the planet's ability to support life.

Oceans key to global ecosystems.

Robert B. Zoellick, President, The World Bank Group, February 24, 2012, “A New S-O-S: Save Our Seas,” https://www.globalpartnershipforoceans.org/remarks-robert-b-zoellick-new-s-o-s-save-our-seas (accessed 5/5/2014)

Oceans are the lifeblood of our world. They flow over more than 70 percent of our planet, and hold about 97 percent of its water. They absorb heat and carbon dioxide, generate oxygen, and shape the world’s weather patterns. They provide about 15 percent of the animal protein for the world’s population. The air that we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. Whether we live inland or on coastlines, each one of us relies on healthy oceans. So I’m particularly pleased to have this opportunity today to discuss the need for coordinated global action to restore the oceans to health. I’d like to thank The Economist for convening this Summit, and John Micklethwait for chairing today’s session. And I’d especially like to thank all of you for your commitment to this issue. Over centuries, we thought that oceans were so vast, so deep, that we could take from them whatever we chose, and could dump whatever we chose into them. Today, we know that isn’t true. The world’s oceans are in danger. Fish stocks are crashing from overexploitation. Rising pollution is flowing into the oceans from land, air, and rivers, choking plant and animal life. Ocean habitats are disappearing – some with alarming rapidity – as coastal cities boom. A changing climate has brought warmer oceans, higher sea levels, and ocean acidification.
 Oceans are the natural capital of all countries, developed and developing; all countries suffer from degradation of these ecosystems. There are close connections between land and water, human and ocean health, sustainable management and renewable benefits.

Oceans Prevent Extinction

All life depends on ocean ecosystems

Robin Kundis Craig, Associate Professor of Law at Indiana University School of Law, 2003, McGeorge Law Review, p.264 (accessed 5/5/2014)

Maintaining biodiversity is often critical to maintaining the functions of marine ecosystems. Current evidence shows that, in general, an ecosystem's ability to keep functioning in the face of disturbance is strongly dependent on its biodiversity, "indicating that more diverse ecosystems are more stable." n859 Coral reef ecosystems are particularly dependent on their biodiversity. [*265] Most ecologists agree that the complexity of interactions and degree of interrelatedness among component species is higher on coral reefs than in any other marine environment. This implies that the ecosystem functioning that produces the most highly valued components is also complex and that many otherwise insignificant species have strong effects on sustaining the rest of the reef system. n860 Thus, maintaining and restoring the biodiversity of marine ecosystems is critical to maintaining and restoring the ecosystem services that they provide. Non-use biodiversity values for marine ecosystems have been calculated in the wake of marine disasters, like the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. n861 Similar calculations could derive preservation values for marine wilderness. However, economic value, or economic value equivalents, should not be "the sole or even primary justification for conservation of ocean ecosystems. Ethical arguments also have considerable force and merit." n862 At the forefront of such arguments should be a recognition of how little we know about the sea - and about the actual effect of human activities on marine ecosystems. The United States has traditionally failed to protect marine ecosystems because it was difficult to detect anthropogenic harm to the oceans, but we now know that such harm is occurring - even though we are not completely sure about causation or about how to fix every problem. Ecosystems like the NWHI coral reef ecosystem should inspire lawmakers and policymakers to admit that most of the time we really do not know what we are doing to the sea and hence should be preserving marine wilderness whenever we can - especially when the United States has within its territory relatively pristine marine ecosystems that may be unique in the world. We may not know much about the sea, but we do know this much: if we kill the ocean we kill ourselves, and we will take most of the biosphere with us. The Black Sea is almost dead, n863 its once-complex and productive ecosystem almost entirely replaced by a monoculture of comb jellies, "starving out fish and dolphins, emptying fishermen's nets, and converting the web of life into brainless, wraith-like blobs of jelly." n864 More importantly, the Black Sea is not necessarily unique.

AT: Oceans Too Far Gone

Oceans can bounce back – new protections critical.

Jane Lubchenco, Valley Chair in Marine Biology at Oregon State University, February 3, 2014, UN Sustainable Development Goals—Oceans & Seas, Biodiversity and Forests Keynote, http://www.icsu.org/science-for-policy/sustainable-development-goals-1/pdfs/OWG8_Oceans_Jane_Lubchenco.pdf (accessed 5/4/14)

The ocean goal is timely. And it can be accomplished if it is tackled in the near future. Oceans can be resilient if changes are made before the ecosystem becomes too degraded. Scientific studies of no-take marine protected areas, for example, illustrate that once extractive and destructive activities stop, biodiversity, abundance, size and reproductive potential increase dramatically inside the area, and that some of this recovered bounty spills over to outside the areas.

Establishing protections can boost ocean resilience – action now is critical.

Lance Morgan, president of the Marine Conservation Institute, October 3, 2013, BBC News, http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24380441 (accessed 5/4/14)

To have any reasonable chance to avert mass extinction in the oceans we must establish a worldwide network of protected areas. Current efforts hold some reason for hope, but they are moving at an insufficient pace and scale to address the severity of the problem. A system of large areas - a global ocean refuge system - where we stop killing marine life and destroying their habitats can provide resilience for marine life by helping to maintain healthy populations that will be able to replenish areas that become degraded. The state of California recently enacted a network of marine protected areas along its 1,300 km coastline, but this only covers waters out to three miles. Regional and international efforts along the West Coast of North America have made less progress towards a network (for example the Baja California to Bering Sea initiative, has not yet matured), although a number of marine protected areas (mostly weakly protected) have been established. This is just a tiny start. Humans worldwide need to act now to save us and future generations.

AT: Adaptation

Ecosystem loss too rapid – adaptation can’t keep up.

Craig Welch, environment reporter at the Seattle Times, November 2, 2013, Seattle Times, http://apps.seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2013/nov/2/can-sea-life-adapt/ (accessed 5/5/2014)

“Evolution can happen, and it can happen quickly,” said Hofmann, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), who has studied urchins for years. “But concerns about extinctions are very real and very valid. Biology can bend, but eventually it will break.” The oceans are absorbing a quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted by burning coal, oil and natural gas. That, researchers say, is causing sea chemistry to change faster than it has for tens of millions of years. Which plants and animals can accommodate these more corrosive seas — and for how long — will depend on many factors, from where they live to their population sizes to the depth of stress they face from other forces, such as warming temperatures and pollution. Survival will vary species by species. Not everything will make it. “This kind of change is not free; evolution is not a gentle sport,” said Stephen Palumbi, an evolutionary ecologist at Stanford University, who also works extensively with urchins. “When evolution happens, it’s because the unfit are dying. It’s pretty brutal.” And that’s when things work well.

Ocean Acidification

Ocean acidification is accelerating now – empirically causes massive marine die-offs

Michael Marshall, Staff Writer for New Scientist, January 3, 2012, “The Geological Record of Ocean Acidification,” http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21534-oceans-acidifying-at-unprecedented-speed.html, accessed 4/21/14

Humanity's greenhouse gas emissions may be acidifying the oceans at a faster rate than at any time in the last 300 million years. The sheer speed of change means we do not know how severe the consequences will be. As well as warming the planet, carbon dioxide seeps into the oceans and forms carbonic acid. As a result the water becomes more acidic. The pH is currently dropping by about 0.1 per century. This ocean acidification harms organisms such as corals that rely on dissolved carbonate to make their shells. It also disrupts behaviour in some animals. Bärbel Hönisch of Columbia University in Palisades, New York, and colleagues used the chemical record preserved in rocks to gauge previous ocean acidification events. The best match for current changes was the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum of 55 million years ago, when vast amounts of methane were released into the atmosphere causing rapid global warming, ocean acidification, and mass extinction. But even then, it took at least 3000 years for ocean pH to drop by 0.5. "That is an order of magnitude slower than today," Hönisch says. The 300-million-year period that Hönisch and colleagues studied includes the biggest extinction of them all: the end-Permian extinction. This event, 252 million years ago, wiped out up to 96 per cent of marine species. But it probably had other causes. Acidification is not the only threat to the oceans from greenhouse gases, says Nicolas Gruber of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in Switzerland. Marine life also faces a threat from rising water temperatures and less dissolved oxygen. "We have to think about these effects co-occurring," Gruber says. While we have information on the consequences of each individual factor, we have no idea what the combined effect will be.

Adaptation fails unless we act to prevent acidification

Craig Welch, Staff Writer for The Seattle Times, November 2, 2013, “Sea Change: Can sea life adapt?”, http://apps.seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2013/nov/2/can-sea-life-adapt/, accessed 5/5/14

Yet work with urchins, as well as other species, suggests that acidification sooner or later may still push these and other marine organisms beyond what they can tolerate. “Evolution can happen, and it can happen quickly,” said Hofmann, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), who has studied urchins for years. “But concerns about extinctions are very real and very valid. Biology can bend, but eventually it will break.” The oceans are absorbing a quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted by burning coal, oil and natural gas. That, researchers say, is causing sea chemistry to change faster than it has for tens of millions of years. Which plants and animals can accommodate these more corrosive seas — and for how long — will depend on many factors, from where they live to their population sizes to the depth of stress they face from other forces, such as warming temperatures and pollution. Survival will vary species by species. Not everything will make it. “This kind of change is not free; evolution is not a gentle sport,” said Stephen Palumbi, an evolutionary ecologist at Stanford University, who also works extensively with urchins. “When evolution happens, it’s because the unfit are dying. It’s pretty brutal.” And that’s when things work well. In the late 2000s, commercial urchin fisherman Bruce Steele feared things would not go so well. And for good reason. Urchins graze on algae, drive out kelp and are eaten by sea otters, sunflower stars and humans. Steele, a scuba diver, had made his living since the 1970s scooping the spiny delicacies off the seafloor to sell to sushi restaurants as uni. But when he read a research paper about acidification, he saw right away what it could mean for his business — and for the ocean he loved.

Ocean Acidification

Ocean acidification destroying coral reefs

Australian Institute of Marine Science, December 4, 2013, “Ocean acidification: A bleak future for pacific biodiversity - from corals to crabs, http://www.aims.gov.au/latest-news/-/asset_publisher/MlU7/content/ocean-acidification-a-bleak-future-for-pacific-biodiversity-from-corals-to-crabs, accessed 5/5/14

Researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) have published a paper today in the UK-based Royal Society's peer-reviewed journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, which shows the detrimental effects of increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) on the diversity of invertebrates that inhabit our coral reefs. It's a snapshot of the centuries to come for our coral reefs, which house hundreds of thousands of species, including: octopi, clams and crabs. "We have shown how detrimental high CO2 can be for corals. When CO2 from the atmosphere mixes with water, it causes ocean acidification, lowering the pH of the water and changing its carbonate chemistry. This in turn makes it harder for a range of marine animals to form their shells and skeletons," said AIMS coral reefs research scientist, Dr Katharina Fabricius. Ocean acidification slowly selects boulder-like massive coral over structurally complex branching and foliose (leaf-like) corals, which are the home of many species like crabs, shrimps and sea stars. As a result, ocean acidification has a domino effect: as the habitat structure decreases, the animals that live and hide in their nook sand crannies find it far harder to survive, simply because they cannot hide from predators." Fabricius' team has been investigating the consequences of long-term exposure to high CO2 on coral reef communities around three, shallow volcanic CO2 seeps (or vents) in eastern Papua New Guinea (PNG) in Milne Bay province over the past few years. This location is one of the few known CO2 seep sites in tropical waters within coral reef ecosystems. "The decline of the structurally-complex corals means the reef will be much less rich and complex, and there will be less habitat for the hundreds of thousands of species we associate with today's coral reefs," she added. The AIMS research project has given scientists valuable insights into what tropical coral reefs could look like if human-induced atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to rise at the present rate. The ecological effects of ocean acidification has been largely