THE HUMANS MUST TAKE CARE OF THE OCEAN

Posted by: chaamjamal on: April 22, 2021

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THIS POST IS A BRIEF PRESENTATION OF CLIMATE SCIENCE NEWS FOUND IN MY INBOX ON APRIL 22, 2021

ITEM#1: Total immersion: re-imagining the ocean: LINK: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03050-0

WHAT THE ARTCLE SAYS: On a calm day, the ocean can resemble a vast mirror. The ocean is “an ideal screen for human projections of fear and hope. Humanity’s fundamental ignorance about the sea has often fed fantastical ideas of it as saviour, battlefield, playground, storehouse, angry beast or hapless victim. We have struggled to see Earth’s oceanic reaches for what they truly are: the face of our changing planet. That recognition of a rapidly, irreversibly altering ocean permeates. Oh! the splendour, complexity and vulnerability of coral reefs. There is a sense of urgency about the ocean’s perilous state but with the hope that we have reached a turning point in our relationship with the ocean. Scientific inquiry into the ocean began 200 years ago, and the findings coalesced into an interdisciplinary field called Oceanography. International collaboration in research is needed because the ocean is a common good. Of particular resonance is the transformation in our understanding of oceanic limits with the ocean seen as an inexhaustible, boundless resource. Earth’s ocean ecosystems are now recognized as fragile and in decline. More than 90% of fish stocks are fully or overexploited, and climate change is compromising the ocean’s oxygen supply and productivity. Nothing else will matter if we fail to protect the ocean. The ocean of the Anthropocene is in the geological epoch that marks humanity’s dominant impact on planet Earth and the slow disintegration of coral reefs from the combined impacts of pollution, habitat destruction, overfishing and ocean warming. Coral reefs are a canary in the coal mine threatened by the the transformative effects of climate change and other human stressors on oceans. Reefs cannot be climate-proofed and they can’t hide from climate change. Without drastic emissions reductions, we are indeed facing a world without coral. The battered and bleached reefs are like ailing parents gradually robbed of mobility, independence and dignity.

This is a valuable reminder that we are at a crossroads in our collective relationship with the ocean. Think about what the ocean does for us in regulating Earth’s climate with heat absorption and carbon sequestration. Human impact is disrupting ocean systems and threatening ocean life. We must allow marine ecosystems to recover with sustainable development. The ocean is not too big to fail, nor is it too big to fix. It is too big to ignore.

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CRITICAL COMMENTARY

The weight of the ocean is 1.4E21 kg or 1.4E18 tonnes. The 7.8E9 humans on earth with an average weight of 62.5 kg is 287E6 tonnes or 0.00000007% of the ocean. The weight of all the things that humans have built is 1.1E12 tonnes. This means that the weight of the ocean is about a million times the combined weight of all the humans and the weight of all the things that humans have built.

That the ocean is threatened by humans or that the environmentalism of the humans can include the ocean is nonsensical in view of its immense size and complexity and the relative insignificance of humans and their technological and industrial civilization.

The other issue here is that we don’t really know the ocean. It is a huge place that we are only begining to study at depth. That humans are an ecological threat to the ocean and that humans are able and obligated to take care of the ocean tells us more about the human ego than useful information about the ocean or about ocean ecology. In terms of their ecological impact, the humans have over estimated themselves. We are too small and insiginficant to have the kind of impact imagined by the eco wacko worrywarts who must be running out of real impacts to worry about.

What makes the ocean worrywartism even more ridiculous is that we don’t really know the ocean. We are now in the year 2021, just beginning to study the ocean at sufficient depth the make the kind of assessments about human impacts on the ocean that has been assumed by the egotistical humans.

AS FOR A ROLE OF HUMANS AS CARETAKERS OF THE PLANET: We describe the relative insignificance of humans on a planetary scale in a related post: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/03/30/the-humans-must-save-the-planet/ where we find as follows:

Our Cosmic Insignificance | Unariun Wisdom

The crust of the planet where we live is an insignificant portion of the planet. Life on earth is an insignificant portion of the crust of the planet. Humans are an insignificant portion of life on earth.

Although it is true that humans must take care of their environment, we propose that the environment should have a more rational definition because the mass balance above does not show that humans are a significant force on a planetary scale or that they are in a position to either save it or to destroy it even with the much feared power of their fossil fueled industrial economy.

And that implies that it is not possible that there is such a thing as an Anthropocene in which humans are the dominant geological force of the planet.

Like ants and bees, humans are social creatures that live in communities of humans so that when they look around all they see are humans. This is the likely source of our human oriented view of the world. Paul Ehrlich’s overpopulation theory is derived from his first visit to India which he described as “people people people people people!” It is this biased view of the planet that makes it possible for us to extrapolate Calcutta to the planet and come up with the fearful image described by Jeff Gibbs as “Have you every wondered what would happen if a single species took over an entire planet?”