Breckenridge Destinations supports independent journalism. Click for great deals on vacation lodging in Breckenridge.
Puget Sound in a NASA satellite image.
Washington designates Puget Sound as ‘waters of concern’
By Summit Voice
SUMMIT COUNTY — The waters of Puget Sound are at-risk from ocean acidification, Washington State officials said as they designated the entire sound as “waters of concern” in a water quality report to the EPA.
Data collected by the state suggests that ocean acidification is threatening the region’s ability to support fish and shellfish. The designation also makes the area a priority for more monitoring and assessment.
Ocean acidification is a direct result of increasing greenhouse gas emissions. As the ocean absorbs more carbon, the altered chemistry affects the ability of shellfish to build their shells.
“Ocean acidification is putting the whole Puget Sound ecosystem at risk,” said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Focusing on the entire Sound as a ‘water of concern’ because of ocean acidification is a key step toward monitoring the effects of this sea change and curbing those effects.”
The Pacific Northwest is particularly vulnerable to the impacts of ocean acidification. For many of the past six years, the region’s baby oysters have been unable to survive, in part due to acidifying waters. Scientists have documented waters affected by ocean acidification upwelling along the Pacific Coast during certain seasons and exposing marine life to corrosive waters.
“The science is in, and it says the Northwest’s stretch of ocean, and all the marine life it supports, is in trouble,” said Sakashita. “Washington may also be a warning beacon for the future of our oceans. But it isn’t enough to simply recognize the problem. We have to act, and that means cutting carbon pollution.”
In 2009, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit challenging Washington’s prior water-quality assessment for failing to declare coastal waters impaired by ocean acidification. As a result of a settlement of that lawsuit, the EPA directed all states to consider ocean acidification as a threat to water quality under the Clean Water Act.
In its new assessment, Washington again declined to identify coastal waters as “impaired” by acidification — a classification that would have required steps to curb carbon pollution causing acidification. Instead, only Puget Sound was put on the “waters of concern” list, a less urgent category.
Each day the world’s oceans absorb 22 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, most of which comes from burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. Carbon dioxide reacts with seawater, causing it to become more acidic.
Since preindustrial times the world’s oceans have become about 30 percent more acidic. Ocean acidification strips seawater of the materials that marine animals — such as corals, plankton and shellfish — use to build their shells and skeletons. This can stunt growth or cause deformations, often at a cost to the animal’s overall health.
Filed under: climate and weather, Environment, global warming, Marine biology, Summit County news, water Tagged: | Center for Biological Diversity, Environment, global warming, marine biology, ocean acidification, Puget Sound
Arapahoe Basin supports independent journalism. Click to visit The Legend online.
Powder's falling at Monarch!! Have you reserved your spot yet?
Innovative energy underwrites coverage of energy stories.
Let’s just hope that sanity returns to the forefront of the thinking toward the use of fossil fuels. Ever since the the “acid rain” experience of the last century where the forests east of those coal burning plants around Chicago killed thousands of trees, that should have been the impetus to change, but was/has been fought tooth & nail by the industry, because of the costs to clean up their act[s].
So if an island nation is submerged beneath the ocean, does it maintain its membership in the United Nations? Who is responsible for the citizens? Do they travel on its passport? Who claims and enforces offshore mineral and fishing rights in waters around a submerged nation? International law currently has no answers to such questions.
United Nations Ambassador Phillip Muller of the Marshall Islands said there is no sense of urgency to find not only those answers, but also to address the causes of climate change, which many believe to be responsible for rising ocean levels.
“Even if we reach a legal agreement sometime soon, which I don’t think we will, the major players are not in the process,” Muller said.
Those players, the participants said, include industrial nations such as the United States and China that emit the most carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases. Many climate scientists say those gases are responsible for global warming. Mary-Elena Carr of Columbia University’s Earth Institute said what is now an annual sea level rise of a few millimeters will increase dramatically by the year 2100. “The biggest challenge is to preserve their nationality without a territory,” said Bogumil Terminski from Geneva. International legal experts are discovering climate change law, and the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is a case in point: The Polynesian archipelago is doomed to disappear beneath the ocean. Now lawyers are asking what sort of rights citizens have when their homeland no longer exists.
t present, however, there appear to be at least three possibilities that could advance the international debate about ‘climate refugee’ protections and fill existing gaps in international law.
The first option is to revise the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees to include climate (or environmental) refugees and to offer legal protections similar to those for refugees fleeing political persecution. A second, more ambitious option is to negotiate a completely new convention, one that would try to guarantee specific rights and protections to climate or environmental ‘refugees
[...] http://summitcountyvoice.com/2012/01/11/global-warming-puget-sound-faces-acidification-threat/ This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. ← Clean Energy Growth in North America [...]