Monday, October 7, 2013

Enjoy your Northwest grown Oysters while you can. Unless something changes dramatically in the very near future, they are going to either become very expensive or simply unavailable for pretty much ever.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/04/1243700/-The-Oceans-are-Dying-Oxygen-is-Depleting-Acidity-Rising-at-Fastest-Rate-in-300-000-000-Years

It does not take a biology degree to see what's going on and what the cause of it is. Pouring all of this carbon into the atmosphere and ocean is having a dramatic effect unprecedented in the lifetime of this planet.

From the Article:
"
Today's explosive increase in human CO2 emissions and warming of the oceans are recreating the conditions of the great Permian extinction 300 million years ago when massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia triggered the release of enormous amounts of stored carbon. A leading theory is that deoxygenation and acidification of the oceans led to the bacterial production of toxic hydrogen sulfide gas which poisoned species dependent on oxygen. By the end of this natural catastrophe 90% to 95% of all marine species were extinct. The biodiversity of the oceans took 30 million years for to recover."

I don't think we've got 30 million years just lying around for nature to come back and correct this colossal problem. This is no longer a problem we can ignore for future generations to sort out. This is the problem past generations ignored and now we have to deal with it.