bad news for Pacific Coast divers ...

[ArcticDiver]

Bob said he wanted to call a problem to our attention, not get involved in a political discussion. I wholeheartedly agree. We, humans, need to do something.

Instead we act like the planet began when we were born and is, and should be, a stable place for our entire lives. Nothing could be further from the truth as we know it. We live on the constantly changing surface of a planet. Whether it is warming or cooling sort of depends on what reference point a person wants to use. And, in fact, it doesn't matter which. The planet has radically changed in the past, is changing now and will continue to change.

It is also true that we are consuming its' resources at an ever increasing rate. Of course we are; the number of humans is constantly increasing and the lifestyle of those humans is becoming more resource intensive. Those humans actively resist any effort to limit their numbers. One example: China, recognizing that poplulation was a major problem, tried to limit the number of children. They were crucified here in the US and throughout the world. Yet, at its' core our problems are too many people for the planet to support.

We haven't stopped the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse; we have merely slowed them down.

Like Bob, I'm tired of the posturing and political plays for power with no actual results. Won't someone do something?

 

[Skull]

Time will heal this problem ... it is the universal necessary ...one way or another time will heal the problem. Unfortunately time is not on the side of humans as a species.

 

[jbmooney]

I read in a Dept. of Ecology report that the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez worth of pollution gets dumped into Puget Sound ... EVERY YEAR.

Bob, I'd bet that report was referring to an annual outflow of just petroleum pollution equivalent to the Exxon Valdez, with other non-point-source pollutants added on top of that load. Just the amount of oil washed off our roads into the sea by each good rainstorm (something I gather you guys see fairly often ) is truly staggering, and the effects of those runoffs is concentrated in congested coastal systems like Puget (or Long Island) Sound.

Fertilizers, phosphate cleaners, and other inputs (like raw sewage outflows that have overwhelmed treatment facilities in the rain) that cause algal blooms are an additional problem that have separate and often even more lethal effects, as Skull has pointed out, and we absolutely need to do better at controlling those loads on coastal ecological systems (Skull, it wasn't my intent to argue that they're not critically important - I think they are).

I have a question, though. I understand that you're seeing a decrease in bottom life in Puget Sound, but I wonder if you often see red tides (algal blooms) on the surface when you dive. My sister the fisheries biologist has explained to me that they function differently than the "just on the bottom" die-offs described in the LAT and Seattle paper pieces. We see red tides all too often hereabouts, and the fish kills they cause are epic, but they are unmistakable, and they don't just cause deaths at the bottom. Again, not saying those shore runoff problems aren't real, but what those articles describe sounds different to me, for reasons I tried (apparently unsuccessfully) to describe.

We need to stop allowing all of our ecological decisions to be driven by "market forces" ... because quite frankly, the market doesn't take into account that what we do today may very well kill us 50 years from now ...

The market not only fails to take into account what may kill us in 50 years, it frequently fails to take into account what may kill us right now. Garret Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons essay is 40 years old, but it's still well worth reading - for the part which bears most directly on the phenomenon you describe (and also gives the essay a name drawn from a problem named 130 years before that), scroll down to the passage entitled "Tragedy of Freedom in a Commons".

It's pretty sobering stuff.

 

[Peter Guy]

A question came to me about the CO2 increase in the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuel use. As I understand it, the CO2 percentage increase is fairly substantial (albeit from a very small base) -- but I've heard nothing about a decrease in the O2 level.

This lead me to the question, where is the O2 in the "new" CO2 coming from? Or is this just a stupid question?

 

[divingyogini]

On a good note, there are people doing something about it and making it practical and accessible for people to incorporate basic changes in their every day life.

Check this out:
Carbon fast

 

[jbmooney]

A question came to me about the CO2 increase in the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuel use. As I understand it, the CO2 percentage increase is fairly substantial (albeit from a very small base) -- but I've heard nothing about a decrease in the O2 level.

This lead me to the question, where is the O2 in the "new" CO2 coming from? Or is this just a stupid question?

Peter, it's not my specialty, but as I understand it, the O2 in CO2 isn't "new", it comes from the already existing supply of O2. It required work to fix it into a CO2 molecule (like respiration or combustion), and it will require more work to make it available as O2 again (photosynthesis/plant respiration being the cheapest option).

The CO2 percentage increase is fairly substantial, and CO2 is a very small percentage of the atmosphere (though the largest of the greenhouse gases). Percentages being what they are, a percentage increase in CO2 by definition means a decrease in something else, but the decrease in available O2 may be undiscussed because it is a tiny fraction of total O2 - consider that CO2's globally averaged atmospheric concentration (warning, sloppy numbers ahead) is 382 parts per million, whereas O2 concentration (as we know from nitrox class) is 21% or 210,000 parts per million.

It's like filling Dixie cups from a swimming pool - you can have a lot more full Dixie cups before you begin to have a noticeable effect on the amount of water in the pool.

HTH,