How much time do we have before Nature and the planet’s life support system completely fails?
We have already passed the tipping point and are on our way to the end point, the point of no return. Academics at the Stockholm Resilience Centre misled the world into believing we were still in the safe zone for ocean acidification.
This could not be further from the truth; we have now passed the tipping point, and the ocean ecosystems and the planet’s life support system are on the verge of collapsing. This is referred to as a regime shift by biologists. The last major ecosystem crash occurred around 1980, and it was probably not noticed by most people, but it was the point at which everything changed. From the 1940s to 1980, the planet cooled, marine productivity increased, cloud formation increased, and atmospheric water vapour or humidity decreased, and then everything changed. Sea urchins were the first to perish in the Caribbean, followed by coral reefs. Ecosystems, both marine and terrestrial, began collapsing all over the world.
https://lnkd.in/eQYRg2WS Climate Disruption Caused by a Decline in Marine Biodiversity and Pollution
After 1980, the world began to heat up, there was less cloud formation, and the humidity of the atmosphere began to rise.
This was all caused by changes in phytoplankton productivity and biodiversity in the world’s oceans. The reason for this was that the concentration of lipohillic toxic for ever chemicals, including herbicides, had been steadily increasing for the previous 40 years, and had reached a point where it outweighed the benefit of increased nitrates and phosphates from artificial fertiliser and pollution. Specific plankton species are required to slow the rate of water evaporation from the oceans and form clouds. They are made of carbonates, but due to ocean acidification, they are now rapidly dwindling. Aragonite a form of carbonate begins to dissolve at pH 8.04, and the Pacific’s oceanic pH is now 8.03. The pH is lower in the most productive Arctic and Southern Oceans. Already, the pH and aragonite saturation index in the Antarctic are too low for many species to survive, and 25% of the Southern Ocean is described as an HNLC dead zone, which are rapidly spreading. However, the Stockholm Centre leads us to believe that everything is fine.
By 2045, the average ocean pH will be 7.95, the high latitude oceans will be too acidic to support life, and the entire ocean ecosystem will collapse. This is not a theory or hypothesis; it is basic chemistry and biology, it has already happened in the Mediterranean.
We’re arguing about climate change and carbon net zero, and it’s all for naught. We are not protecting nature or the planet’s life support system upon which our survival depends. We will survive climate change, we will not survive ecosystem destruction and the loss of the marine life support system for the planet.
www.goesfoundation.com
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
