The Catskill Chronicle

By Mort Malkin

In 1979 Pemex was drilling its Ixtoc oil well in 150 feet of water off the coast of Mexico. In accordance with Murphy’s Law, an explosion & fire occurred and the rig collapsed. Ipso facto, 30,000 barrels of crude oil poured into the Gulf.
In 2007, a storm in the Gulf of Mexico blew the Usumacinta drilling rig into the Kab 101 platform, causing a collapse, conflagration and, of course, lavish oil escape.

In 2010, BP gave us an encore performance with the Deep Water Horizon off the coast of Louisiana. The rig exploded, burned, and sank, and the well spewed crude for five months. BP and the White House minimized the oil escape and maximized the efficiency of bacteria at the bottom of the sea in eating up the oil-dispersant soup.

Explosions, fires, and oil-coated pelicans are media candy, and the networks also had no reticence to picture the CEO of a foreign (British) oil company being grilled by Congress. The environmental websites showed us wetland death by petroleum. News coverage went on from April 2010, month after month, as each attempt to plug or cap the hemorrhaging oil well failed till finally it was permanently sealed in mid-September.

Meanwhile, in slower time, an oceans disaster is taking place mostly unnoticed. There is plenty of talk about the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen oxides. We hear about the dangers of global overheating if we go above a CO2 level of 350 ppm. Yes, I know CO2 is already at 390 ppm, but we surely can invent a technological fix to block out a bit of sunshine. The oceans, however are a major player in the global temperature game, and the mechanism is chemical and not so amenable to a mechanical solution such as giant umbrellas floating above all the mall parking lots in Arizona.

Of all the CO2 cast up from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants and out from the exhaust pipes of autos and trucks, one third to one half the total amount ends up in the oceans. The CO2 is absorbed and held mostly in chemical combination in the form of carbonic acid (H2CO3) — much to the dismay of clams, oysters, and corals. The shellfish are suffering thinner shells and fewer numbers because of poor reproduction skills that won’t respond to Viagra. As well, ocean acidification, combined with increasing surface water temperatures and layer stratification, have caused a severe decline in plankton populations. Plankton species, both animal and plant forms, form the base of the marine food web and, so, affect all life in the ocean. Also, the world wide loss of corals — the nurseries of many species of sea creatures from angel fish to parrot fish to octopi to lobsters and langouste — is further lessening life in the oceans. Of course,overfishing and pollution with toxic chemicals must be given due credit  for helping to sterilize the ocean. For a striking view of the problem, Randazzo’s Clam House in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn will affirm that in 1880, a few hundred million oysters were sold in New York. Imagine the ambrosia — oyster bisque, scalloped oysters, pan fried oysters, poached oysters … 365 days a years.

As the oceans heat up and become more acid, the waters become less willing to accept all the CO2 we produce, thus accelerating the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The past five years confirm the theory. With record CO2 emissions from 1990 to 2010, uptake by the oceans decreased by 50%.  It won’t take long before the planet is at the point of no return where self perpetuating climate mechanisms will kick in. There are about eight such malevolent weather ways and, perhaps a couple more the climatologists don’t even know about yet. One that is straightforward enough is that as the ice and snow of the far north & south melt, less white surface is present to reflect the heat of the sun. So, the earth warms more and melts yet more ice and snow, and at some point soon we will be unable to stop the carnival. Already, we have open water over the North Pole for a few weeks during the summer. Open water at the North Pole? The imagination reels. A second mechanism is related. The permafrost of the far north is no longer permanent the year round. When it melts during the warmest days of the summer, methane gas is released from its frozen state and, naturally, enters the atmosphere. Methane gas produces 25 times the greenhouse effect of wimpy CO2 and may be the Siberian mammoth in the back of the conference room. With all eight weather mechanisms encouraging each other, a planetary chain reaction will occur leading to runaway heating of the earth. The processes have already started.

As the earth burns and the oceans sour (ok, so only the plains become deserts and coral reefs bleach), the glaciers and icebergs melt and the seas rise to submerge the island nations of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. In the US, the coastal one-third of the state of Florida will disappear, and Disney World will become a saltwater park.
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What is happening to the oceans of the world has received little attention, even in the climate community, but the increasingly acid waters of the oceans that refuse new anthropogenic CO2 of the atmosphere will likely speed up global heating faster than the scientific models predict. We don’t have until 2050 or even until 2020. We must stop using coal, oil, and gas for electric power and return to more basic, universal sources — wind, sun, tides, and geothermal — in a massive survival project. Now. Then, we must run our autos, trucks, and trains on electricity produced by such clean energy sources. We have only two or three years. Nancy Reagan was right — she just didn’t know she was talking about fossil fuels.