The comic strip says:

The moderately okay liberal guilt pages:

- Gee honey, the bumblebees are dying, the polar bears are dying, and the oceans are acidifying.

- Something must be done.

- Where’s my checkbook?

“If the seas continue to warm, we can expect to see stronger storms in the future,” James Elsner of Florida State University said.

Satellite data has shown that during the last 25 years “strong cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons have become more frequent in most of the tropics”. But according to the scientists, who published their findings in the journal Nature, the strength of weaker storms have not been “noticeably altered”.

“The researchers believe weaker storms are not affected so much because the factors that prevent them developing to their full potential, notably wind shear – abrupt changes in wind speed and direction that prevent the cyclone fuelling itself with ocean heat – are not related to ocean temperatures.”

But the scientists also calculated that only a 1C rise in sea surface temperature will increase the amount of strong storms by about one third. More controversial, some scientists warn that a warmer sea temperature will not just create stronger storms but also increase their numbers.

Read more at BBC News and Reuters.

Research by the University of Gothenburg shows that more than 400 marine zones around the world has such “a great lack of oxygen in soft seabeds that fauna and fish have been harmed.” The research made by the Swedish University also shows that the dead soft seabeds have doubled every decade since the 60′s.

Back in 1995 Rutger Rosenberg, from the Department of Marine Ecology, University of Gothenburg, and Robert Diaz, from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in the USA, carried out research and studies on the world’s soft seabeds. Their research then showed 44 zones “that were so afflicted by oxygen deficiency that soft-seabed fauna and fish had been harmed.”

Now, nearly 13 years after that research the numbers of dead zones have risen to more than 400. These latest findings, which have been presented in the latest issue of the magazine Science, draw the conclusion that this is “the most serious threat to the health of the sea” and that it is and will affect important fishing areas.

“There are no other variables of such great ecological significance for coastal marine ecosystems, and which have changed so drastically in such a short time, as the reduced amount of oxygen in the sea. In the periods when the oxygen deficiency has its largest spread in Scandinavia, there can be a deficit of over three million tonnes of soft-seabed fauna, compared to the situation if the soft seabeds had been well oxygenated”, says Rutger Rosenberg.

The dead zones together are “at least” 245,000 square kilometres big, or equal to the size of Great Britain. The worst places hit are the Baltic Sea in northern Europe, the Gulf of Mexico and the East China Sea.

Image credit: txd. Image licensed under a Creative-Commons Attribution license.

According to a recent published report, by Benjamin Halpern and his colleagues at UCSB’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, over 40% of the world’s oceans are heavily impacted by anthropogenic activities. Only a few, “if any”, areas are unaffected.

The report have taken four years to compile and resulted in 17 models of the earth. Each of the different models shows the damage caused by human activities such as pollution and fishing. The different models have then been merged into one showing the global effect (see image).

Benjamin Halpern explains, on the UCSB website, the process he and his colleagues followed to make the composite map:

“1. We gathered or created maps (with global coverage) of all types of human activities that directly or indirectly have an impact on the ecological communities in the ocean’s ecosystems. In total, we used maps for 17 different activities in categories like fishing, climate change, and pollution. We also gathered maps for 14 distinct marine ecosystems and modeled the distribution of 6 others.

2. To estimate the ecological consequences of these activities, we created an approach to quantify the vulnerability of different marine ecosystems (e.g., mangroves, coral reefs, or seamounts) to each of these activities, published in Conservation Biology, October 2007. For example, fertilizer runoff has been shown to have a large effect on coral reefs but a much smaller one on kelp forests.

3. We then created the cumulative impact map by overlaying the 17 threat maps onto the ecosystems, and using the vulnerability scores to translate the threats into a metric of ecological impact.

4. Finally, using global estimates of the condition of marine ecosystems from previous studies, we were able to ground-truth their impact scores.”