Raise your hand if you’ve ever eaten a wild cow or chicken.

Not sitting in front of your computer screen with your arm in the air, are you? With the exception of the occasional bit of boar or venison, virtually every piece of meat Americans consume is cultivated for the purpose of being devoured.

Fish, of course, are different. When we tuck into a swordfish steak or halibut filet, we generally expect that it was caught in the open ocean. And yet, the efficiencies of aquaculture—or cultivating freshwater and saltwater fish under controlled conditions—are becoming ever more a part of our seafood diet.

Aquaculture is a divisive topic, pitting those who fear its potential to pollute ocean waters and wild fishes’ gene pools against those who see the possibility of alleviating pressure on traditional fisheries and providing an additional source of protein. Commercial fishermen frequently ally with environmental groups, their typical adversaries, to oppose the practice as one that will create additional competition for their product while potentially compromising the habitat and raising the specter of introducing non-native species to the marine environment that could outcompete their native counterparts.

This is a critical debate because seafood is big business. Americans consumed 4.83 billion pounds of fish in 2009—nearly 16 pounds per person. What’s striking is that 84 percent of that fish was imported, and fully half of our imports were farmed, not wild caught. The reality we must face is that as world population and prosperity increases, so too will the demand for fish, and we won’t be able to meet this demand solely with fish caught in the wild. Aquaculture will have to continue to play a role.

So what are our options to balance the demands of rising populations with aversion to aquaculture?

1. Become a nation of vegetarians.

In an ecologically ideal world, perhaps we would all go vegetarian. But let’s be real—that’s never going to happen. Because as Vincent Vega said during his debate with Jules about eating pig in the “Pulp Fiction” diner: “Bacon tastes good. Pork chops taste good.”

Rather than reprising Jules’s opinion about the gustatory merits of sewer rat, let’s just move on and say that—at least in the opinion of the hordes trooping into Red Lobster for their “Endless Shrimp” promotion—crustaceans also taste good. Ditto salmon, though comparing a farm-raised Atlantic salmon to a wild-caught Alaskan Chinook is a bit like comparing a Big Mac to Kobe beef.

In the land of the free (to choose our diet as we see fit) and the home of the brave (enough to attempt to eat the 72 oz. Big Texan steak in under an hour), tofu and tempeh, tasty as they may be, are unlikely to become a permanent replacement for surf and turf.

2. Increase wild harvest.

World fish harvest peaked in the mid-1990s at approximately 90 million metric tons per year, according to statistics from the Earth Policy Institute. It has leveled off since then, despite ongoing population growth and increasing fishing effort. More fishermen working harder to catch the same amount of fish is a recipe for disaster.

The United States has done more than any other nation to end overfishing, and those efforts should at some point begin to pay dividends by rebuilding fish populations leading to increased catch limits for fishermen. Still, no one expects that even the most optimistic scenarios will allow us to meet even our domestic demand for seafood exclusively from a sustainable wild harvest.

3. Increase our imports of farmed fish.

Every year the average value of U.S. seafood imports is $9 billion more than the value of our exports, making fish our second-largest natural resource trade deficit behind everyone’s favorite petroleum product, oil. Therefore, it’s a pretty good bet that our overseas suppliers would be only too happy to ratchet up their fish production and send us even more shrimp, salmon, tilapia, and catfish. But what would be the ramifications for the global environment? What about the implications for our own human health?

Foreign fish farms aren’t exactly models of sustainability—they’re often poorly regulated and sited with little or no attention to environmental factors. Shrimp is one of the worst offenders. A National Geographic report published in 2004 found that Southeast Asian shrimp farms accounted for up to 38 percent of the decline in the world’s mangrove areas—fragile coastal wetlands that protect shores from storm surge and serve as vital carbon sinks. The report also referenced a 1995 study by the American Society of Microbiology stipulating that “the use of antibiotics in aquaculture as potentially a leading cause of the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in humans.”

There are also health concerns. The United States suspended imports of some Chinese-farmed seafood in 2007 because samples contained residues of drugs banned from use in U.S. food production, including some that were not even approved under Chinese law. The Washington Post reported that fish had been found that “carried the tell-tale greenish tinge of malachite green, a disinfectant powder that has been banned in China for five years because it is a suspected carcinogen but is still commonly used.”

And The New York Times quoted a professor from Hong Kong who had found “heavy metals, mercury and flame retardants in fish samples we’ve tested.”

Expecting the U.S. government to catch every piece of tainted tilapia entering the U.S. food supply is naïve at best when the Food and Drug Administration and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, have the capacity to inspect less than 2 percent of the seafood we import. So while foreign-farmed fish is clearly here to stay as part of the American diet, I won’t be putting it on my family’s dinner table.

4. Farm more fish domestically.

Last week the NOAA announced a new domestic aquaculture policy intended to support an increase in domestic marine aquaculture. As expected, the move was greeted with largely negative reactions from environmental groups and fishing industry organizations.

But as we’ve just discussed, Americans will continue to consume fish; our wild fisheries are, for the moment, running at capacity; and foreign sources of farmed fish are rife with unsustainable and even unhealthy management practices. So we really have but one alternative remaining: more domestic fish farming.

Aquaculture in U.S. waters allows our regulators to oversee the inputs to the system more stringently. Still, it doesn’t solve many of the broader lingering concerns about fish farming, such as how to reduce the amount of wild fish that must go into feeding domesticated ones, or how to prevent escapes of farmed stock that could then interbreed with or even outcompete their wild counterparts.

NOAA’s policy prioritizes research into alleviating the lingering problems with aquaculture with its goals to “ensure … decisions protect wild species and healthy, productive, and resilient ocean ecosystems,” and “advance scientific knowledge concerning sustainable aquaculture.” But the policy is short on actual concrete steps to achieve the overall objective to “encourage and foster sustainable aquaculture development.”

In a statement about NOAA’s policy announcement, the consumer protection group Food and Water Watch called aquaculture “a filthy way to produce fish.” Perhaps, but is the alternative then to put increased pressure on our already maxed-out wild fisheries? Or is it to stop eating fish and seek other protein sources? If fish farming is “filthy,” then what are we to make of other large-scale livestock operations?

According to a report released last week by Conservation International and the WorldFish Center, fish are more efficient than either cows or pigs at converting feed to protein, and have dramatically lower potential to cause eutrophication from runoff of animal waste and pesticides and fertilizers used to grow the crops that feed the livestock. Not unrelated was another announcement from NOAA that this year’s dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico will be the largest ever—bigger than the state of New Hampshire. Dead zones are areas of the ocean in which nutrient-rich, polluted runoff saps oxygen from the sea and kills anything that can’t swim away from the toxins. Agriculture and livestock operations are major contributors to these phenomena.

As we meet our growing need for affordable sources of protein, NOAA is inevitably correct to begin seeking policies that acknowledge and attempt to solve problems rather than ignoring the reality that fish farming is here to stay. Addressing these needs will require a concerted effort to pursue ecological and sociological solutions to reduce the environmental impact of aquaculture and ensure a safe, sustainable seafood supply.

Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at American Progress. You can view this article at CAP’s website, where you can also read more articles from the “Fish on Fridays” series.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, drew ire from some environmental groups when it announced last week that the Atlantic bluefin tuna does not warrant a listing under the Endangered Species Act despite widespread decline the species over the past several decades. Despite its unpopularity, this is the correct decision from both a legal and a conservation standpoint.

The bluefin tuna is one of the most astounding creatures on the planet. Marine biologists frequently refer to sharks as perfect eating machines. If so, then the bluefin is a perfect swimming machine. Each fish is a tube of pure muscle that has evolved biological adaptations allowing it to swim faster, deeper, and farther than virtually any fish on the planet. Their circulatory systems make the cold-blooded fish operate with the power of a warm-blooded animal, and their fins are designed to retract into slots in their bodies, reducing drag and allowing them to travel through the water at speeds in excess of 45 miles per hour.

When bluefin are caught and brought to market, the same muscles that propel these bullet-shaped fish back and forth across the Atlantic are sliced up and routinely sold for upward of $50 per pound. Earlier this year, a single fish sold for $396,000 at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo—$526 per pound.

In short, one of the oceans’ apex predators has become apex prey for sushi connoisseurs. This is particularly shocking when you consider that what is now the world’s premium sushi fish was, as recently as the mid-20th century, primarily rounded up and sold for cat food. (Strangely enough, as recently as 2010, Whiskas was still selling cat food with “natural bluefin tuna flavor.”)

This price inflation begat a dramatic increase in fishing pressure—as one might expect of a fish that has effectively become a swimming lottery ticket—which in turn led to an equally steep decline in the fish’s population. Estimates show bluefin’s numbers have plummeted by as much as 80 percent from the 1970s when data were first collected. And of course it’s worth noting that by all anecdotal accounts, the stock had already declined dramatically by then.

On the domestic front, NOAA has already taken numerous steps to ensure the fish is managed as responsibly as possible. Bluefin would all stay in our exclusive economic zone, within 200 miles of our shores, if they were clever enough to recognize international boundaries and remain where they’re treated best. The U.S. fishery has the strongest conservation requirements in the world, which prevented us from even harvesting our internationally negotiated quota for most of the last decade until we did meet our full allotment in 2009 and 2010.

U.S. fishermen’s inability to catch our quota had nothing to do with their skill or the fish’s scarcity and everything to do with NOAA’s conservation efforts. The agency banned fishermen using longlines—miles-long strings of fishing line set with hundreds of individual hooks—from targeting bluefin in its breeding grounds in the Gulf of Mexico. It also increased minimum size limits to prevent the catch of juvenile fish, reduced trip limits (the amount of legal-sized fish a boat can catch in a day), and most recently, required longliners targeting swordfish and other tunas in the Gulf to use so-called weak hooks designed to straighten and release a fish under the amount of tension a bluefin can create.

So while bluefin is unquestionably overfished, that status is not due to U.S. fishing. Catches in many parts of the world still exceed the limits set by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, or ICCAT, the species’ international management body. But NOAA can only control U.S. fisheries, and an endangered finding would have shut down only the domestic fishery. It would have been easy to tout an “endangered” listing as making incremental progress but the reality is not so simple.

Primary among NOAA’s considerations is the law itself, which specifies that to merit a listing of “endangered,” a species must be “endangered with extinction.” NOAA’s analysis clearly showed that despite the well-documented population decline as a result of overfishing, at current catch levels, the western Atlantic stock of bluefin had a zero percent chance of becoming extinct by 2020. And it had a less than 2 percent chance of extinction by 2050. This clearly does not meet the legal threshold for a listing.

But even if it did, the United States only receives about half of the international quota for western Atlantic bluefin—948 of the overall 1,750 metric tons. The rest, along with the 12,500 metric tons ICCAT set as the quota for bluefin in the much more depleted eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea, is caught by countries with far-less-restrictive regulations and far-less-stringent enforcement records.

If the United States had listed bluefin as endangered and shut down its domestic fishery, the other members of ICCAT would have acted faster than the flick of a tuna’s tail to transfer our quota to neighbor countries only too happy to catch it for us. The same number of fish would be killed—or perhaps more given other countries’ lack of enforcement and by-catch documentation.* Meanwhile, our negotiating clout at ICCAT would be dramatically reduced since we would become nonparticipants in the fishery.

Of course it remains to be seen how the 200 million gallons of BP’s oil that flooded the bluefin’s breeding grounds last year will impact the juvenile fish spawned in 2010. We may not know the full effect the oil will have on bluefin for years, if indeed we can ever determine it. In Prince William Sound, the herring population simply vanished three years after the Exxon Valdez spill, and it has yet to return. NOAA must continue studying the impact of oil on bluefin and other Gulf species to ensure we have sufficient data to make reactive management decisions if conditions warrant.

The United States must also maintain its position as a world leader in reducing the fishing pressure on this drastically depleted species. Only implementation and strict enforcement of international catch limits will allow the species to continue the modest rebound that has begun in the last decade in the western Atlantic where the total biomass of bluefin has increased from about 21 percent to 29 percent of the 1970 population level as of 2009. More critical to the species’ survival will be ICCAT’s efforts to slash quotas in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean where quotas are typically 8 to 10 times the levels in the west, and reductions in effort have been far more difficult to achieve.

For years, ICCAT has been resoundingly pilloried for its inability to make tough choices and its propensity to ignore its scientists’ recommendations and bow to political pressure from fishing industry interests. But there is a glimmer of hope. In 2009 ICCAT members agreed to set 2010 catch limits that had at least a 60 percent probability of rebuilding bluefin populations by 2050. That’s not a lofty goal, perhaps, but it’s also not an unreasonable one. In 2010, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the U.S. delegation, the organization honored that commitment.

It’s certainly a small step, but a critical one. In NOAA’s status review of bluefin that determined an endangered listing was not warranted, the agency found current catch limits for eastern bluefin mean that species has a zero percent chance of extinction through 2040 and only a 0.2 percent chance by 2100.

Admittedly, preventing extinction is an extremely low threshold to meet. It is literally the least we can do. So let’s look at this decision as a springboard and turn attention back to the international stage where we can make legitimate strides toward a future for this majestic fish.

*By-catch is the term for fish caught by fishermen targeting other species, which are frequently either thrown back into the ocean dead or landed but not properly documented.

Michael Conathan is Director of Oceans Policy at the Center for American Progress. This article is cross-posted at the Center for American Progress website. Read more articles from the “Fish on Fridays” series.

In many cases, wild fisheries around the world have reached or exceeded their maximum sustainable harvest; the United Nations is projecting a 40 million ton seafood shortage by 2030. The $50 billion worldwide marine aquaculture industry— the deliberate farming of ocean species that provides half the world’s edible seafood—is the fastest growing form of food production in the world. Seafood provides a valuable supplement for a diversified and nutritious diet. It provides not only high-value protein, but also represents an important source of a wide range of micronutrients, minerals, and fatty acids and amino acids. Since few precious and finite freshwater resources are required for farming fish from the ocean, seafood could be a solution for global food and water security.

Open-ocean marine aquaculture, the free range of the sea

Marine aquaculture has several advantages over traditional capture fisheries. Since cultured fish are kept in a relatively controlled environment, it is possible to monitor production and predict the output and harvest. This makes it possible to adapt the harvest according to market demand and ensure the right size, quality, and volume of the fish at the most opportune time. These factors result in lower production costs and higher profits.

Conventional aquaculture, however, has numerous challenges that must be addressed as well. Penning lots of fish together in farms generates waste from feces and unconsumed commercial feed. These wastes can carry disease and the phosphate and nitrates in the mix can cause algal blooms that suck oxygen from the water, leaving it uninhabitable. Conventional near-shore cages presently used in salmon farming have become excessively dependent upon pesticides and antibiotics to combat diseases that are rampant in highly concentrated farming conditions—not unlike industrial-scale hog, poultry, and cattle farming on land.

Shrimp farms similarly are frequently overharvested and depleted within in a few years in many developing countries, leading to a continuum of destruction of coastal areas. They also depend on staggering amounts of antibiotics, fungicides, algaecides, and pesticides, and are polluting and water intensive. Nearly half the loss of mangroves in the world has been attributed to unsustainable shrimp farming.

But new techniques being developed in open-ocean fish cultivation can address many of these problems. “Open-ocean” aquaculture is an emerging concept that uses submersible cages deployed in deep water to produce farmed seafood while minimizing the environmental footprint. Farming locations are sited where optimum currents and other favorable conditions soften the footprint on the sea. One might think of open-ocean aquaculture as analogous in some ways to free range in terrestrial farming.

Modern open-ocean techniques use integrated multitrophic aquaculture, or IMTA, to address several of the problems of conventional aquaculture. IMTA uses waste from one species, salmon and shrimp for example, as the food or fertilizer for other species such as shellfish and seaweed. Data show that when seaweed or kelp are grown near fish cages it absorbs much of the excess dissolved inorganic nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, and increases its biomass 46 percent faster than when grown about a mile away from the reference site. Meanwhile bivalve shellfish feed on the organic particulates and grow 50 percent faster. This accelerated growth turns the natural recycling into an economic benefit. Despite concerns that the shellfish and seaweeds might be reservoirs for diseases that could affect the fish, scientists in Norway and Canada have observed that, to the contrary, mussels act as a bio filter, destroying the viruses responsible for fish diseases, such as infectious salmon anemia.

Critics also assert that aquaculture doesn’t alleviate pressure on fish feed stocks because many species of farmed fish are fed fishmeal and fish oil. In response to this concern, many farming operations are using plant-based protein sources as a sustainable and cost-effective substitute or supplement to traditional fishmeal protein. Soy-based protein, for example, is a promising substitute because of its nutritional profile, low cost, and consistent availability.

Alternative protein sources already provide from one- to two-thirds of the dietary protein in commercial feed that is supplied for the cultivation of fish. Soy-based protein can provide up to 40 percent of dietary protein in fish feed without significantly affecting the feed conversion ratio, the protein efficiency ratio, or the net protein utilization—in essence, without impacting the health or nutritional value of the fish. In the laboratory, 100 percent replacement of fishmeal protein in feed has been achieved, but it is not yet considered cost effective for commercial-scale production.

In sum, when properly designed, open-ocean marine aquaculture has the potential to make aquaculture a sustainable source of protein for our globally growing population. The “Blue Food Revolution” published in Scientific American February 2011 provides a balanced view for sustainably feeding a future population of 9 billion.

“The reality begs for a comparison rarely made: fish farming versus terrestrial farming. Done right, fish farming could provide much needed protein for the world while minimizing the expansion of land-based farming and the attendant environmental costs.”

Indeed, according to Neil Anthony Sims, the founder of Kona Blue Water Farms, sustainably designed marine aquaculture systems have the potential to produce staple fish species with the same ecological impact as anchovies, which have minimal environmental impacts because they are very low on the food chain. The Scientific American article also quotes Jane Lubchenco, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association:

“One of my goals has been to get to a position where, when people say food security, they don’t just mean grains and livestock but also fisheries and aquaculture.”

A sustainable food source for the Arabian Gulf

Open-ocean aquaculture could play a big role in addressing the pressing food and water needs of the Arabian Gulf region. According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development, or IFAD, Arab Gulf countries account for more than 5 percent of the world’s population but less than 1 percent of global water resources. Because of the arid desert climate, which is not conducive to large-scale farming, the region imports more than 80 percent of its food.  Furthermore, water used in agriculture consumes up to 80 percent of the total water supply; therefore, subsidized agriculture schemes are unfeasible and unsustainable on a large scale.

The Arabian Sea has great potential for open-ocean marine aquaculture development. With 1,700 kilometers of coastline, Oman has untapped potential to exploit this valuable resource with the development of a marine aquaculture industry. The 200-mile exclusive economic zone, extending seaward into the Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea, presents a promising proposition for diversifying and augmenting Oman’s oil-based economy. Moreover, there is a strong commitment from the sultanate to develop the aquaculture sector in a competitive and sustainable manner in harmony with the social, economic, cultural, and historic values of the country.

With nearly 2,000 kilometers of coastline contiguously south on the Arabian Sea, Yemen is also endowed with rich and bountiful fishing grounds for feeding its burgeoning population. Like Oman, the fisheries sector lags far behind the oil and gas industry, suffering from lack of infrastructure, proper organization, and modern technologies.

Yemen could be the first nation to completely run out of water in a few years and Sana’a could be the world’s first capital city to go dry as people flee from the parched outer reaches of the country. Water available across Yemen amounts to 100 to 200 cubic meters per person per year, far below the international water poverty line of 1,000 cubic meters. Groundwater reserves are being used faster than they can replenish themselves, especially in the Sana’a basin, where water once found 20 meters below the surface is now 200 meters deep. The government is considering a desalination plant for seawater, an expensive solution that may come too late. Another option is to cut down on the agriculture industry and import even more food than its current 85 percent. The best option would be the development of a marine aquaculture industry.

Growing the marine aquaculture industry in these countries must leverage modern scientific knowledge and engage in diligent monitoring in order to avoid the ecological pitfalls that have plagued conventional fish farms around the world. The governments in Yemen and Oman have been actively engaged in ensuring both aquatic and terrestrial development is done sustainably, and both countries have frameworks that require environmental monitoring prior to licensing. “Oman’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Affairs in particular is known for its strict enforcement of environmental regulation,” says Tim Huntington, who works with the sultanate frequently as founding director of Poseidon Aquatic Resource Management LTD.

Done sustainably, a marine aquaculture industry for the Arabian Sea would increase food security and mitigate the depletion of sparse water for agricultural resources. It would also create jobs, generate income, and help increase nonpetroleum exports, while resuscitating local fish stocks to revive the livelihoods of fisher folks in coastal communities.

Phil Cruver is a progressive social entrepreneur and president of KZO Sea Farms.

The islands, populated by 263 hardy souls, have no airport, and the sea voyage to reach them takes nearly a week from Cape Town, South Africa, roughly 1,500 miles to the east. They are the needle in the haystack that is the South Atlantic Ocean. So the chance that a freighter, not bound for the islands’ port, would somehow manage to run aground was as slim as the islands are tiny. And yet, there are now approximately 300,000 gallons of crude oil spoiling what had been one of the most pristine ecosystems on the planet. To put this event in perspective, recall the spill that occurred in San Francisco bay in 2007 when the cargo ship Cosco Busan collided with a bridge abutment, spilling approximately 58,000 gallons of its fuel oil—less than 20 percent of what was released on Nightingale Island.

Spills of this magnitude happen all too often. A 2007 report from the Government Accountability Office found that from 1990 to 2005 there were 51 oil spills from vessels in U.S. waters causing damages exceeding $1 million. The cost of the Cosco Busan spill has not yet been determined, but estimates place the amount in the neighborhood of $60 million.

The same report found that the three main factors affecting the cost of a spill are remoteness of location, the type of oil spilled, and the time of year the spill occurs. Clearly, locations don’t get more remote than Nightingale Island. And crude like the kind spilled in this case is described by the GAO’s report as likely to impose “severe environmental impacts” and harm “waterfowl and fur-bearing mammals through coating and ingestion.” Which brings us back to Nightingale’s reputation as an avian paradise. Tragically, this event also checked the timing box, as many of the birds that nest on the island are molting, meaning they’re spending more time on shore, preening their feathers—one of the behaviors that causes them to ingest oil.

Dr. David Guggenheim, commonly referred to as the “Ocean Doctor,” was at the midway point of his Cape to Cape Expedition and arrived at Nightingale Island the night before the spill. He and his crew were in position to jump directly into the recovery effort, and he has since returned to the U.S. to tell the story and plead his case for assistance. As of April 3, about 5,000 oiled birds had been transported to Tristan da Cunha from Nightingale and Inaccessible Islands, but many more are still waiting to be rescued.

The immediate concern about the situation at Nightingale Island is the effect the oil will have on the “uncountable” number of birds, including half the world’s population of the endangered Northern Rockhopper Penguin. There’s also the question of whether rats—frequent stowaways on cargo vessels and the proverbial first to leave a sinking ship—may have found their way from the hold to the shore. As a non-native species on Nightingale with no natural predators, rats could devastate the ecosystem if they manage to establish a population.

The bigger take-home lesson is that once again we have proven no spot on the planet, no matter how remote, is safe from the dangerous risks of our fossil fuel economy. As a culture, we have become inured to the constant occurrence of oil spills. On average, three times per year oil spilled from ships causes more than a million dollars in damage to our coastlines, but unless that accident happens in the harbor of one of the world’s most environmentally conscious cities, or the sheer magnitude of the spill exceeds anything we have ever experienced, no one bats an eye.

For the inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha who proudly tout their existence “far from the madding crowd in the South Atlantic Ocean” and for the endangered seabirds of Nightingale Island, this spill is the tragedy of a lifetime. For the rest of us, it’s little more than business as usual.

National Geographic Photographer Andrew Evans arrived on Nightengale Island shortly after the spill occurred. Watch the video he put together:

Michael Conathan is the Director of Oceans Policy and Lee Hamil is an intern with CAP’s Energy Opportunity team.

Take a look at our map, based on new data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, which shows just how much worse our forecasting would be without polar-orbiting environmental satellites.

For 2010′s “Snowmageddon” storm, without the satellite data, NOAA’s forecasts would have lost as much as 50 percent of their accuracy, underforecasting snowfall in Washington, D.C. by almost foot, and rainfall in the Gulf by up to an inch.

The resulting failure to prepare for flash floods, roadside strandings, air traffic delays, and transit interruptions could halt all commerce. Even worse, failing to maintain our satellite network, according to NOAA, would reduce future flood preparedness time from days to mere hours, putting human lives at risk.

Eric Schwaab, the administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service, or NMFS, stood before a crowd of fisheries experts on Monday at the Boston Seafood Show. Schwaab had made many forays to New England—home of some of the squeakiest wheels in our nation’s fishing industry—since taking over the job about a year ago. But this time was different. He came bearing a remarkable message: We are witnessing the end of overfishing in U.S. waters.

One of the biggest changes to fisheries law in the 2007 reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act was the imposition of strict annual catch limits, or ACLs, in fisheries experiencing overfishing beginning in 2010, and for all other fisheries in 2011, “at a level such that overfishing does not occur.” Schwaab said the 2010 target of putting ACLs in place for all overfished fisheries was achieved, and “We are on track to meet this year’s deadline of having [ACLs] in place, as required, for all 528 managed stocks and complexes comprising U.S. harvest.”

Schwaab went on to call this accomplishment an “enormous milestone.” Quite frankly, that is an even more enormous understatement.

The end of overfishing should be shouted from rooftops from New England to the Carolinas to the Gulf Coast to Alaska to the Pacific Island territories and back to NMFS’s Silver Spring, Maryland headquarters. This is the biggest national news story our fisheries have seen in years.

So where are the headlines? A few stories trickled onto the pages of local New England newspapers. But even the Boston Globe didn’t spare so much as a column inch. Prophetically, Schwaab alluded to the likelihood of radio silence during the second half of his remarks, in which he suggested the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration should “do a better job of getting out the word on the progress made.”

Fisheries doomsayers have certainly been more successful at garnering attention. Dr. Boris Worm, a scientist at Dallhousie University in Canada, published a study in November 2006 that splashed across major media outlets worldwide. His study, “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services,” contained a message far more digestible than its title: Continuing the world’s current rate of fishing would lead to the “global collapse” of fish populations by 2048.

Now that’s a headline.

As panic ensued about the possibility of empty seafood menus, Dr. Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington penned “Faith-Based Fisheries.” It was a sharp rebuke of not just Worm, but the entire scientific publishing community, which he accused of accepting “articles on fisheries not for their scientific merit, but for their publicity value.”

This all sounds esoteric on the surface. In the elevated discourse of academia, however, Hilborn’s words should have sparked nothing short of a Biggie-versus-Tupac-level throwdown.

Yet instead of Worm or Hilborn upping the ante with the academic journal iteration of “Hit ‘Em Up”—Tupac’s vitriolic rap widely credited with escalating the east coast/west coast hip-hop conflagration—a funny thing happened. The two scientists decided they had more in common than in opposition, so they sat down to work on a collaborative assessment of world fisheries.

Science published the result of their efforts, “Rebuilding Global Fisheries,” in July 2009. It is a comprehensive assessment of 10 large ocean ecosystems with the most comprehensive catch data. The findings showed that fishing in half of the areas they studied was either already sustainable or showing significant progress toward sustainability and that “combined fisheries and conservation objectives can be achieved by merging diverse management actions, including catch restrictions, gear modification, and closed areas.”

Not coincidentally, all of these practices are in place in the United States today to varying degrees.

Of course, an important distinction to draw here is the difference between the act of “overfishing” and the fact that some fish populations remain “overfished.” Overfishing means taking more fish out of the ocean than natural reproduction rates can replace—think of it as withdrawing principal from an endowment instead of just the interest. A fish stock that is overfished is defined as being below an optimal population level. While the two conditions can be and often are interrelated, one can also exist without the other.

In effect, this is the difference between a household’s budget and debt. Exceeding an annual budget is overspending. Overspending for multiple years will accumulate debt, which can be referred to as being in an “overspent” state. Even when overspending stops, the red ink doesn’t magically turn black. The deficit remains. Many of our fisheries are still overfished (or overspent), but the first step in resolving that dilemma is halting overfishing.

We balance our fisheries budget by ending overfishing. Then we can deal with the deficit. NMFS’s rebuilding plans establish catch limits that pay down the principal on the fishy debt we have accrued because in addition to ending overfishing, the law also requires that such limits rebuild fish populations to more productive levels within 10 years. Simultaneously, fishermen are already seeing some returns as a result of their sacrifices as fish stocks recover toward their rebuilding targets.

Schwaab touted Exhibit A in his statement: NMFS will increase catch limits for 12 of the 20 fish populations managed in the historic New England groundfishery for the new fishing year that begins on May 1. This includes haddock, flounders, and the iconic cod. This announcement follows decades of mismanagement that saw fishermen’s opportunity to fish cut deeper and deeper until by 2009 the average groundfisherman was allowed to operate for fewer than three weeks a year.

As an independent indicator of New England’s nascent success, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program shifted several groundfish species, including haddock and pollock, from the red “avoid” list to the yellow “good alternatives” list. And it even added line-caught haddock to the green “best choices” list.

Meanwhile, controversy continues to roil in New England ports about the implementation of a new regulatory system known as sector management that took effect in 2010. The next column in this series will delve deeper into the details of that saga. We must acknowledge, too, that reductions under the previous system, referred to as Days-at-Sea, took steps to begin reducing the overfishing that plagued the industry in the early 1990s.

After decades of decline—and thousands of pages of apocalyptic rhetoric—it’s time to give our fishermen and our fisheries managers a little credit. They are making the difficult choices. They have endured tremendous hardships. And they are turning a critical corner to ensure a healthy, sustainable future for America’s most historic profession.

This feature is part of a new series from CAP dealing with fisheries management issues. The series will publish biweekly on Fridays. It is a joint column with Science Progress.

Read more articles from the “Fish on Fridays” series.

Michael Conathan is Director of Ocean Programs at American Progress.

Weather predictions used to be a frequent punchline but they have improved dramatically in recent years. More often than not you’ll need an umbrella if your local television channel or website of choice tells you to bring one when you leave the house. But we could take a huge step back to the days when your dartboard had a reasonable chance of outpredicting Al Roker if House Republicans have their way with the 2011 federal budget.

The House of Representatives is debating the Full Year Continuing Resolution Act (H.R. 1) to fund the federal government for the remainder of fiscal year 2011. The Republican leadership has proposed sweeping cuts to key programs across the climate change, clean energy, and environmental spectrum. They have also decided that accurate weather forecasting and hurricane tracking are luxuries America can no longer afford.

The GOP’s bill would tear $1.2 billion (21 percent) out of the president’s proposed budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. On the surface, cutting NOAA may seem like an obvious choice. The FY 2011 request for the agency included a 16 percent boost over 2010 levels that would have made this year’s funding level of $5.5 billion the largest in NOAA’s history.

Even this total funding level, however, is woefully insufficient for an agency tasked with managing such fundamental resources as the atmosphere that regulates our climate, the 4.3 million square miles of our oceanic exclusive economic zone, the ecological health of coastal regions that are home to more than 50 percent of all Americans, response to environmental catastrophes including the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and fisheries that employ thousands of Americans and annually contribute tens of billions of dollars to the national economy.

More than $700 million of the president’s proposed 2011 increase in NOAA funding would be tagged for overhauling our nation’s aging environmental satellite infrastructure. Satellites gather key data about our oceans and atmosphere, including cloud cover and density, miniscule changes in ocean surface elevation and temperatures, and wind and current trajectories. Such monitoring is integral to our weather and climate forecasting and it plays a key role in projections of strength and tracking of major storms and hurricanes—things most Americans feel are worth keeping an eye on.

In fact, NOAA has been making great strides in hurricane tracking. The average margin of error for predicting landfall three days in advance was 125 miles in 2009—half what it was 10 years prior. This data translates into a higher degree of confidence among the public in NOAA’s forecasts, which means individuals will be more likely to obey an evacuation order. Further, since evacuating each mile of shoreline costs approximately up to $1 million, greater forecasting accuracy translates to substantial savings.

The United States needs these satellites if we’re to continue providing the best weather and climate forecasts in the world. The implications of the loss of these data far exceed the question of whether to pack the kids into snowsuits for the trip to school. The concern here is ensuring ongoing operational efficiency and national security on a global scale. In some cases it can literally become a question of life and death.

Consider the following numbers:

• The $700 billion maritime commerce industry moves more than 90 percent of all global trade, with arrival and departure of quarter-mile long container ships timed to the minute to maximize revenue and efficiency. Shipping companies rely on accurate forecasts to set their manifests and itineraries.
• Forecasting capabilities are particularly strained at high latitudes and shippers have estimated that the loss of satellite monitoring capabilities could cost them more than half a billion dollars per year in lost cargo and damage to vessels from unanticipated heavy weather.
• When a hurricane makes landfall, evacuations cost as much as $1 million per mile. Over the past decade, NOAA has halved the average margin of error in its three-day forecasts from 250 miles to 125 miles, saving up to $125 million per storm.
• Commercial fishing is the most dangerous profession in the country with 111.8 deaths per 100,000 workers. A fisherman’s most valuable piece of safety equipment is his weather radio.
• When disaster strikes at sea, polar-orbiting satellites receive emergency distress beacons and relay positioning data to rescuers. This resulted in 295 lives saved in 2010 alone and the rescue of more than 6,500 fishermen, recreational boaters, and other maritime transportation workers since the program began in 1982.
• Farmers rely on NOAA’s drought predictions to determine planting cycles. Drought forecasts informed directly by satellite data have been valued at $6 billion to 8 billion annually.
• NOAA’s volcanic ash forecasting capabilities received international attention last spring during the eruption of the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull. The service saves airlines upwards of $200 million per year.
• NOAA’s polar-orbiting satellites are America’s only source of weather and climate data for vast areas of the globe, including areas key to overseas military operations. Their data are integral to planning deployments of troops and aircraft—certain high-atmosphere wind conditions, for example, can prohibit mid-air refueling operations.

All of these uses will be compromised if the Republicans succeed in defunding NOAA’s satellite program. At least an 18-month gap in coverage will be unavoidable without adequate funding for new polar-orbiting satellites this year. More troubling, taking an acquisition program offline and then restarting the process at a later date would lead to cost increases of as much as three to five times the amount the government would have to spend for the same product today.

So here’s the choice: Spend $700 million this year for continuous service or $2 billion to $3.5 billion at some point in the future for the same equipment and a guaranteed service interruption.

Environmental satellites are not optional equipment. This is not a debate about whether we should splurge on the sunroof or the premium sound system or the seat warmers for our new car. Today’s environmental satellites are at the end of their projected life cycles. They will fail. When they do, we must have replacements ready or risk billions of dollars in annual losses to major sectors of our economy and weakening our national security.

That’s an ugly forecast. Tragically, it’s also 100 percent accurate.

Michael Conathan is Director of Oceans Policy at American Progress. This is cross-posted at the Center for American Progress.

Glaciers such as those spread across Greenland hold almost 70 percent of the world’s freshwater. If all of the world’s glaciers were to melt, the sea level would rise approximately 230 feet. Although this extreme scenario is unlikely, the panel concluded that it would not be off base to link the latest ice island to embark into warmer waters with human-caused global warming.

This is the second major iceberg to break off, or calve, from glaciers this year, the first being the Merz Glacier Tongue in Antarctica in March. The new floating ice island is the largest iceberg in the northern hemisphere, and the freshwater contained in it is enough to supply the entire U.S. population with public tap water for 120 days, according to Dr. Andreas Muenchow, an associate professor of physical ocean science at the University of Delaware who testified before the subcommittee. Dr. Muenchow also noted in his testimony that the ice island was the largest piece to break from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier in 50 years.

If you have ever poured a cup of water over a glass of ice, you know how much more quickly the ice melts when it is in contact with water than when it sits in an empty cup. The same is true for glaciers. Once they break free from land and plop into the ocean, they can melt up to twice as fast, according to Dr. Rober Bindschadler, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, who also testified before the subcommittee. Land ice entering the sea and melting is the largest contributor to rising sea levels.

This event is consistent with scientists’ recent findings that sea level is expected to rise at least one meter (about three feet, three inches) by the end of the century due to global temperature increases but possibly by much more. These more recent projections far exceed the 0.6 feet-to-two-foot rise predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The scientists at the emergency briefing last week said the IPCC presented “underestimates.”

A 2008 study in the prestigious journal Nature Geoscience, for example, showed that glacial melt could cause the sea level to rise by as much as five feet by 2100. A more recent study in Nature showed that catastrophic sea level rise of 20 inches per decade for five straight decades occurred during the last interglacial period when the world was 2 degrees warmer. Since human-caused global warming is expected to cause an increase in temperature by at least 2 degrees this century, the authors conclude that such a drastic jump in sea levels could happen again:

“…the potential for sustained rapid ice loss and catastrophic sea-level rise in the near future is confirmed by our discovery of sea-level instability at the close of the last interglacial.”

“When the world warms, the Arctic warms more. When the Arctic warms more, Greenland melts,” explained Dr. Richard Alley, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University.  In his testimony, he noted that both Greenland and the Arctic are losing mass.

Greenland’s ice sheet alone holds 10 percent of the world’s ice.  If the whole of it were to melt, the scientists told the subcommittee that the global average sea level would rise 23 feet. Rep. Markey pointed out that water heights in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina were almost this amount. Such sea level rise would drastically change the coastlines of each of the world’s continents, undoubtedly with severe social, economic, and security consequences.

Dr. Ally warned that it is possible that Greenland could completely melt by the end of this century. The scientists on the panel believe that a “tipping point” will be reached in one decade, where global temperatures become too high for Greenland’s ice sheet to remain frozen. Their claims are consistent with another study in Nature showing that the combined melting of Antarctic and Greenland coastal glaciers could create a “runaway effect” that would be difficult to reverse.

The panel of informed scientists that testified before the Select Subcommittee on Energy Independence and Global Warming agreed that this year’s melting in the polar regions is an early warning of future calamity. The scientists confirmed that this new ice island should be added to the snowballing narrative of global climate change.

Sean Pool is Special Assistant for energy, science, and technology policy at the Center for American Progress. Sarah Busch is a junior at Smith College and an intern at the Center for American Progress Energy Opportunity Team.

Native Olympia oysters were once ecologically and economically dominant along the Western Coast of North America. These bivalve shellfish were the ecosystem engineers of bays and estuaries, enabling prosperous habitats for other species and considered commercially important as a delectable food source. But a combination of over-harvesting, dredging, pollution, and wetlands destruction in the 1930s depleted natural populations.

Could Olympia oysters once again become a nutritional food source while also improving the water quality in Southern California bays and estuaries? Successful programs in Oregon, Washington, and the Chesapeake Bay have already set positive precedents. In Northern California, municipalities, local stakeholders, and nonprofit organizations have initiated native oyster restoration projects in San Francisco, Tiburon, and Tomales Bays.

The Puget Sound Restoration Fund, a Washington-based nonprofit organization, planted 10 million native oysters at 80 sites with the volunteer help of over 100 community partners. This organization also launched 3 community oyster farms to improve water quality, restore productive oyster growing areas and reconnect people to healthy marine resources.

A single adult oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day, allowing sunlight to penetrate so that foundations of the food chain can thrive: once water clarity increases, bottom vegetation, such as eelgrass, flourishes. Ecologically, oysters serve as indicators of overall health of the environment and oyster beds provide habitat for attracting fish, crustaceans, and other marine life. Moreover, oysters are environmentally sustainable on their own since they do not require fish feeds, compete with wild species for food, or consume more protein than they produce. Oysters are a keystone species: if they thrive, others will too.

Oyster beds are essential to the health of marine ecosystems, yet in the past, they have been solely managed for harvest, not habitat. Nutritional oysters are the number one farmed aquatic species in the $90 billion global aquaculture market, the fastest growing form of food production in the world. Oysters pack huge amounts of protein; are loaded with vitamins; stocked with omega-3 fatty acids; and, replete with minerals: calcium, iodine, iron, potassium, copper, sodium, zinc, phosphorous, manganese, and sulfur.

Oyster gardening is a community-based program for growing baby oysters in bags under docks, piers, and other structures until the “spat,” or cluster of molluscs, reaches a size making them safe from predators. The spat is then released onto nearby oyster beds where their density promotes propagation. Citizen scientists get hands-on harvesting experience while learning the economic and ecological benefits of the marine habitat. According to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, oysters in that body of water “could once filter a volume of water equal to that of the entire Bay (about 19 trillion gallons) in a week. Today, it would take the remaining Bay oysters more than a year.”

Awareness of the pollutants that oysters remove from the water could help coastal residents understand the impacts of pollution flowing into bays and estuaries as stormwater. More and more, those citizens are paying for the removal of contaminants from wastewater through utility bills and other fees for maintaining or upgrading sewage treatment facilities. Those contaminants include nutrients, especially nitrogen and phosphorus, which have “consistently ranked as one of the top causes of degradation in some U.S. waters for more than a decade,” according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Excess nitrogen and phosphorus lead to significant water quality problems including harmful algal blooms, hypoxia and declines in wildlife and wildlife habitat. Excesses have also been linked to higher amounts of chemicals that make people sick.”

Legislators and policymakers are beginning to recognize that oyster “ecosystem services” have real economic value. Some states are providing incentives for amateur oyster gardeners and restoration programs based upon economic and environmental benefits. For instance, Maryland taxpayers are entitled to a $500 state tax credit for the purchase of a float to grow oysters under their docks. As well, next year Virginia is slated to begin a mandatory nutrient trading system that will limit nitrogen and phosphorus output from point sources such as wastewater treatment plants and municipal stormwater systems. Treatment plants exceeding the limit can buy “nutrient credits” from those that have outputs falling below the regulatory nutrient load limit.

It is unlikely that restoration projects in Southern California would result in the commercialization of the delectable Olympia oyster, but they could enable recreational harvesting once the water quality in bays and estuaries improves. If the oysters did flourish, a contamination-imposed moratorium on community harvesting would give the shellfish populations time to reproduce before mitigating the ultimate source of the pollution. While high bacteria counts and trace metals can make oyster-eaters sick, they don’t harm the oysters themselves, so the restoration programs can proceed while oysters themselves remediate some pollution that might linger in coastal waters.

We pay for polluted waters in the form of remediation costs, fewer fish, and a lower quality of life for coastal communities. Restoring the Olympia oyster as the cornerstone species for cleansing estuaries and coastal embayments, and perhaps as a future food delicacy for the community, is a promising proposition for Southern California.

Phil Cruver is president of KZO Education, where he develops media-rich platforms for social networking and online training and collaboration.

Humans have undeniably changed the chemistry and biology of planet Earth. We are now faced with the consequences of our actions as fish stocks collapse and diseases spread across ecosystems. As a Ph.D. student in marine biology, I’ve learned this truth from the world’s most prominent scientists. I’ve also watched coral reefs rot away before my very eyes. The oceans are indeed running out of fish and clean water. Together, these stories are crucially important for the world’s food supply, for human health, and thus for public policy. Why, then, do my fellow scientists struggle so mightily to get the public’s attention?

We scientists write journal articles, issue press releases, give lectures and interviews, contribute to blogs, build websites, make movies, and sit on advisory panels. But when the time to act is now, scientists still need better tools to get research relevant to policymaking directly into the hands of decision makers.

In his recent New York Times editorial, Adam Cohen called this the “Age of Cassandra” after the prophet from Greek mythology whose warnings were true but never heeded. Why, Cohen wondered, if experts predicted the flooding damage of Hurricane Katrina, picked up on the terrorist activity that preceded the September 11^th attacks, and detected the fraudulence of Bernie Madoff a decade ago, are “well-founded warnings so often ignored”? Perhaps the struggle to sell a carefully honed expert opinion is not unique to science, but a burden shared by professions as diverse as civil engineering, intelligence gathering, and finance.

As it stands, scientists issue warnings and predictions in their publications, each momentarily covered by the media and barely heard by policymakers. A few years later, the scientists update the warning or confirm that the prophecy has become reality. The fishery completely collapsed. The corals were killed off by disease. Just as we predicted. We could have done something.

A crucial reason for this attention gap is the vast difference between the pace of science and the pace of journalism. I believe this disparity, once a nuisance to scientists, is now tremendously dangerous for society.

Scientific research requires years to plan, fund, conduct, analyze, and publish. Journalism operates with a one-day attention span. Therefore, an important scientific discovery that takes years to achieve will receive a short press release and, at most, one day of news coverage, even if it is critically important for society and for public policy. After years of development, it takes only 24 hours for a scientific discovery to become old news. Science shouldn’t be circulated for a day and then locked away behind a subscription wall. It should be a far more accessible form of information.

To shorten the distance between the laboratory and the policymaker’s desk, we should first knock down this pay wall and make more research freely available through open access databases. Especially when it is crucial for public policy, a research paper based on science supported by federal funds should be available open-access. Once liberated, scientific papers will be easier for policy experts to evaluate in real time. While the Internet has helped push some scientific journals toward open-access, Congress could support this step by passing the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would mandate that research papers financed by many federal agencies be posted online within six months of their publication date.

In addition to open-access publishing rules, a system for experts to highlight research that is critical for urgent policy decisions—like those that could save depleted fisheries —would help scientists to solve real-world problems much faster.

Because scientific knowledge is crafted through a formalized process—with repeated measurements, statistical analysis, peer review, and editor oversight—researchers already have an infrastructure to identify the most urgent findings and, potentially, move them to the policymaker’s desk.

For all of the relevant journals, editors and reviewers could assign each scientific article a priority rating during the review process to reflect its importance for policymaking and environmental management, and a single database could then collect this information. There will be debate over the relevance and urgency of some findings, but anonymous peer review and evaluation by an editorial board is a better system than most for making these kinds of value judgments. It is a system in which scientists operate quite comfortably, and it affords some protection from political influence.

As traditional journalism continues to erode and science journalism has been washed to sea, this type of information shortcut from scientist to policymaker is needed more than ever. Policymakers cannot wade through dozens of scientific journals and parse from the flood of papers what is most urgent. And they cannot wait years for reports from NGOs and working groups. Fisheries collapse and corals die much faster than consensus documents are written. Policymakers need a way to get closer to key information, faster, without relying on journalists. It is now up to scientists and scientific journals to make this happen.

I believe that any policymaker should be able to consult a single database, type “salmon run” or ”coral reef decline” into a search box, and immediately see the most authoritative and important scientific knowledge on that subject, with policy recommendations alongside.

In addition, each scientific article in this system should be accompanied by a summary for the broader public. In this curated collection of policy-relevant research, scholarly commentary and debate over the findings and their urgency should be indexed alongside the original work. News and blog coverage could be linked in real time as well.

Importantly, the database would also have links to the original scientific articles, made available at no cost or accessible through an open access policy. Access to this knowledge should be free. Furthermore, managers, scientists, and policymakers in developing countries deserve an opportunity to avoid mistakes already made by others. Scientific knowledge is meticulously crafted, but it should never be a luxury item.

Scientists may object to a ranking system that so clearly places value on applied science versus basic research. In addition to citations and press coverage, this could be yet another form of attention for which scientists feel they must compete. But science cannot advance policy through a single day of news coverage or by garnering a large number of citations over the course of a decade. Nor can it bear swiftly and heavily on policy while locked behind a subscription wall.

As a young scientist in a changing world, I am often told that communications skills are the key to making a difference. But if we simply invent new ways to mix the slow craft of science with the nearly extinct craft of science journalism, we’ll never save a rapidly dying planet. This may be the Age of Cassandra, but it is also the Age of Google. In this brave new world, science itself must be more brave, honest, and transparent by subjecting itself to new forms of ranking, sorting, and publicizing. Science produces some of the world’s most powerful information and we should be harnessing the full power of the information age to compile this knowledge and transmit it to policymakers. Otherwise we will simply be documenting, in exquisite detail but out of earshot of our decision makers, the death of planet Earth. From what I have learned underwater, in the literature, and from my mentors, science has enough of the world’s problems to tackle without being a problem in itself.

Kristen L. Marhaver is a Ph.D. Candidate in Marine Biology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

The back-to-back demands for insurers and government officials to get real about climate change highlights the importance of an important recent study on the sensitivity of Mid-Atlantic shorelines to rising sea level. The report, titled “Coastal Sensitivity to Sea-Level Rise: A Focus on the Mid-Atlantic Region,” laudably attempts to address that problem by translating the global effects of climate change to a geographic scale where local, state, and federal policymakers can act—as well as insurers.

That report, however, highlights just how complex it is to reconcile policy needs and stringent standards for uncertainty before coastlines from New York to North Carolina slip anywhere from 12 to 40 inches (30 centimeters to 100 centimeters) below rising sea water. Writ large, the study presents policymakers with a conundrum they must overcome—balancing the need to always gather more data to refine the analysis of dynamic problems versus taking action on climate change in the face of clearly intolerable consequences.

The Environmental Protection Agency took the helm of the study, and the U.S. Geological Survey and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration served as co-authors. Their report assumed three scenarios of relative sea-level rise between 30 cm and 100 cm by 2100.^[1] The authors then asked experts to explore the corresponding consequences. The report finds that shoreline erosion will likely increase, as will damage from storm surges. Some land will become submerged. More wetlands will probably disappear than will migrate inland, with a concomitant blow to wildlife that loses its habitat, including valuable spawning areas. Groundwater also may be contaminated.

Contributing author Denise Reed, professor and Director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of New Orleans, explains that the report creates frameworks for understanding what might befall a particular beach, estuary, or marsh—even if the report can’t specify the future impact of rising seas on any particular piece of coastline. Adding to the uncertainty of the predictions is this additional conclusion: the resilience of different coastlines will be unevenly distributed. As Reed explained in an interview, “Some places are in worse shape than others, or some might be okay if we don’t screw them up.”

The report also suggests—greenhouse gas emissions aside—that we may well screw some things up. Considering all the commercial interests, supervisory agencies, land-use policies, and other local social forces, Jim Titus, EPA’s lead author and sea level rise project manager, warns that “our systems were designed with a stable sea level, and in some instances they thwart our ability to respond to sea-level rise.” Case in point: the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s maps for insurance rates don’t incorporate rising sea level, yet requiring a sea wall or other barrier before approving a project now may impede the ability of the coastline and communities to adapt.

The report therefore tries “to educate the reader, the public, and the policymaker,” says Jeff Williams, Coastal Marine Geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, that “we ought to be taking sea-level rise seriously and making plans not just for the next 5 years, but the next 50 or 100 years.”

But between consensus and uncertainty, policy and science diverge.^[2] “Uncertainty” within the scientific community refers to levels of statistical confidence associated with the results of a study. Does the statistical analysis show that the results are 99 percent likely to indicate a genuine, or statistically significant, relationship? Or 95 percent? Or 80 percent? Statistical samples can never yield 100 percent certainty, but this practical impossibility does not mean that the results are somehow flawed or useless.

In scientific literature, as more and more studies conducted by a multitude of researchers add more test cases that reach similar conclusions, the overall “certainty” of these results increases. For instance, although there is not a 100-percent consensus on what the impacts of global warming will be on hurricane intensity, more and more studies now show that rising sea surface temperatures will result in stronger storms. This is how the scientific community develops its knowledge base.

That epistemological process also means results that are 94 percent or less certain may never appear in scientific publications, which tend to use standards of 95 percent or higher confidence. Nonetheless, even 80-percent-certain information could interest someone who has nothing better available for making decisions, such as climate policy.

Science retains a key role in convincing people to act.

After all, the word “uncertainty” in the rest of the world has a slightly different connotation than in statistics and can be used to feign ignorance or imply fault with scientific analyses. Indeed, “uncertainty” has been used as a policy weapon to delay action on global warming, as if we were paralyzed because we could not model exactly what might happen in Los Angeles on any given Sunday in 2050. One remedy might put whatever we do know into the public domain, with proper caveats about its relative uncertainty and mutability, so that legislators and others can act rather than continually ask scientists to refine and assess what we know before doing anything. That approach would mean scientific reviewers were not the only gatekeepers for information; different people could decide which standards of statistical certainty they could tolerate for different circumstances.

But science retains a key role in convincing people to act. As Titus said in a conference call, some people might consider “this report was a detour we had to take that maybe kept us from doing important stuff, but we had to do” because leaders inside and outside of government still needed persuading. Hence, in a contrasting approach, since uncertainty may present a motor for climate change naysayers to power their disinformation campaigns, we might wait until we can circulate data that inspire 95 percent confidence in order to withstand attempts to warp the interpretation or to preclude charges of flip-flopping as better data become available.

But extreme local confidence is difficult when it comes to rising sea level. This quest to balance urgency with certainty threads its way through “Coastal Sensitivity to Sea-Level Rise.” Indeed, the original title changed from “Coastal Elevations and Sensitivity to Sea-Level Rise” because local data about coastal elevations varied in precision and was largely dropped from the 790-page compendium. Meeting minutes of the Coastal Elevations and Sea Level Rise Advisory Committee note with irony and disappointment that the first task of the report was to decide which areas were low enough to be inundated by rising seas.^[3] CESLAC concluded it:

Understands the rationale that led the report authors to excise most of the spatially explicit material from the final document, and the committee believes that the decision underscores one of the principal governmental challenges in dealing with climate change. The fact that there is no comprehensive, highly resolved, and well-vetted inventory of coastal elevations means analyses of lands at risk suffers from variable resolutions and uncertainties. This kind of information can be problematic for agency accountability when it is the basis for published analyses. The default is to avoid publication of analyses that might be challenged. Unfortunately, this means less information and motivation for public decision making. In the case of SLR [sea level rise], risks are not static and indecision is an undesirable response. We believe there is a need for government to develop a tolerance for uncertainty in matters like this.^[4]

Various agencies are already acquiring more precise data and hope to establish a national clearinghouse of their combined efforts. But two of them, FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers, did not co-author SAP 4.1.

Michael MacCracken of the Climate Institute directed the U.S. Global Change Research Program under President Clinton from 1993–97 and oversaw the National Assessment Synthesis Team that produced the 2000 report on the impact of climate change on the United States. He said over email that the report’s main “success is that the report came out, indeed, given the Bush Administration’s aversion to doing anything on impacts. Basically, the report did a serious update of what is understood and what can be done with the available information,” rather than dwell on missing information or statistical uncertainty and use either to defer action.

In contrast, the report’s greatest flaw was “how the effort was organized,” He added. Asking government agencies to write scientific reports excluded other stakeholders, falsely implied the scientific community has an official opinion, and presents knowledge as static although much changes during a protracted report. Indeed, melting ice from Greenland and Antarctica puts “Coastal Sensitivity”’s scenarios at the low end of newer estimates.

How to improve the process, especially now that both the public and private sector will have to consider the effects of rising sea level? MacCracken said that assessments should be frequent and “the government and scientific community have to be very careful about making an evaluation of whether the results are well enough known or too uncertain to be of use to stakeholders.” For some stakeholders in certain cases, maybe only 95 or better percent confidence works; for others, maybe 75 percent is good enough to start. The report does not emphasize that different stakeholders have different expertise and different needs with different metrics for acceptable uncertainty. Thus, these different stakeholders must be included more than they have been by the Climate Change Science Program so that they can express their needs and understand the full range of available data. And they must also understand what different definitions and choices about uncertainty mean.

Reed, another veteran of the U.S. GCRP National Assessment, agrees that CCSP involved too few people, especially from academia, and should have clarified its audience earlier. Members of CESLAC questioned the audience and purpose of the report as late as March 2008. But CCSP, a small office with one person coordinating much of the work on 21 reports, was probably hard-pressed to advise closely any single Synthesis and Assessment Product. Peter Schultz, director of the CCSP office, is already “thinking about ways to enhance stakeholder engagement,” but the resources and timeline he receives to do so will be decided by the Obama administration.

His office, meanwhile, is ushering highlights from the 21 SAPs in the Unified Synthesis Product: “Global Climate Change in the United States,” through public review. This report, though prolonging the process, will address the General Accountability Office’s criticism that 21 separate reports “may be difficult for Congress and others to use.”^[5]

Similarly, Titus, Williams, Reed, and MacCracken emphasize scientists and policymakers should always be communicating, although not just for or through reports. “Let’s put what we know to work, which doesn’t mean giving someone what you know and letting them run with it. It’s not a hand-off,” Reed says. “Instead, we need to cultivate, educate, and appropriately reward academics and people” who forge “new ways of linking science, policy, and research.”

Being certain about each other’s needs and tolerances for uncertainty is one link to forge—not least because big private-sector industries and federal state and local officials soon will be demanding some kind of consensus.

Mark Meier, a former teacher and environmental consultant, writes about science and society from Charlottesville, Virginia.

Notes

[1] Coastal Sensitivity to Sea Level Rise: A Focus on the Mid-Atlantic Region, p. 19. Available at http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap4-1/final-report/default.htm (last accessed February 3, 2009). Relative sea-level rise incorporates global sea-level rise from melting ice and the expansion of water as it heats plus the effects of subsidence (land sinking, which occurs from extracting oil or water or other causes) or uplift (from plate tectonics). According to Jeff Williams of USGS, areas of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest may actually see decreases in relative sea level, as the land continues to rise, while much of the rest of the country will experience relative rises in sea level.

[2] Another SAP released January 16, 2009, SAP 5.2 Best Practice Approaches for Characterizing, Communicating and Incorporating Scientific Uncertainty in Climate Decision Making, is a rather philosophical and linguistic treatise on the problem of what different people mean by probabilistic statements.

[3] CESLAC was the federal advisory committee convened to review drafts of the report. Members, mostly from state or federal agencies and universities, met or had conference calls six times from January 2007 through October 2008. The draft documents it reviewed, its comments on the SAP, and meeting minutes can be found at http://www.environmentalinformation.net/CESLAC.

[4] Report of the Coastal Elevations and Sea Level Rise Advisory Committee, p.6, available at http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap4-1/default.php (last accessed February 1, 2009).

[5] GAO, Climate Change Assessment: Administration Did Not Meet Reporting Deadline, p. 4, available at www.gao.gov/new.items/d05338r.pdf (last accessed February 3, 2009).

Most experts now agree that the estimates made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, which predicted that a sea level rise between 7 inches and 2 feet by 2100, were much too conservative because they did not take the contributions from rapidly melting glaciers and ice sheets into account. Ocean thermal expansion, which occurs when oceans grow in volume when they absorb more heat, was once considered the driving factor behind sea level rise. But new melt rate data collected from Greenland and Antarctica in recent years now suggests that deglaciation is a more significant factor. A landmark study published in 2005 made the threat starkly clear, as it found that the complete melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets could raise sea levels by about 70 meters.

By some estimates, a 3-foot rise could still be too optimistic.

Here in the United States, a joint report co-authored by the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US Geological Survey, and the Department of Transportation unveiled this past week concluded that Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Texas were the most susceptible states. The report, entitled “Coastal Sensitivity to Sea Level Rise: A Focus on the Mid-Atlantic Region,” warned that coastal erosion will quicken as sea levels rise, causing the sandy shores that make up the region’s coast to slowly crumble and put millions at risk. Because some parts of its coast are already sinking, North Carolina would be especially hard-hit. Under the report’s worst-case scenario, sea levels could rise by as much as 3 feet by century’s end, which would result in some of the Mid-Atlantic’s barrier islands “crossing a threshold” and collapsing.

By some estimates, a 3-foot rise could still be too optimistic. According to a study published earlier this month in the journal Climate Dynamics, sea levels could rise between 0.9 and 1.3 meters by 2100—or roughly three times higher than what the IPCC forecasts. To predict what would happen in the future, the authors, an international team of researchers from Denmark, England, and Finland, looked to the past—specifically at the connection between average global temperatures and the sea level two millennia ago. They discovered a direct relationship between the two: warm episodes were often marked by periods of sea level rise, while cool periods, like the “little ice age” that took place during the 18^th century, were marked by periods of sea level decline.

If this relationship still applies today, and global temperatures rise by about 3 degrees by century’s end (if not more), as is widely expected, the authors conclude that the seas could rise over a meter, which would have disastrous consequences for many parts of the world. For this to happen, ice sheets and glaciers would have to melt at a much faster rate than most scientists have been forecasting—something that many, in the face of gloomy 2007 and 2008 melt rate measurements, now believe could be the new normal. Indeed, according to Wilfried Haeberli, the director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, glaciers are melting so fast that most could be gone by the middle of the century.

While the United States and other developed countries will eventually be forced to adapt to the impacts of rising sea levels, poor nations, which largely lack the resources to do so, will be in for a world of hurt if present trends continue. A World Bank report published last year in the journal Climatic Change determined that tens of millions of people in 84 coastal developing countries will likely be displaced by rising sea level over this century alone. As Science Progress noted last week, the country that could suffer the most devastating losses is Vietnam.

According to the report, a one-meter sea level rise could displace over a tenth of the country’s population—roughly 8.6 million people—which lives in low-lying areas and along the coast. Mauritania, Guyana, Jamaica, and the Bahamas—the latter of which could lose over a tenth of its land to sea level rise—would be some of the other hardest-hit countries. Overall, a one-meter rise would affect about 56 million people spread over 194,000 square kilometers. An earlier report commissioned by the IPCC identified the South Pacific, including the island nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu, as ground zero for sea level rise; the 7 million Pacific Islanders, most of whom live within 1.5 kilometers of the shore, could join the growing numbers of early climate refugees.

To help these countries avoid the worst, the developed world should begin to disburse aid according to the degree of threat, the authors conclude, and help their governments develop national adaptation plans. Which is easier said than done, of course. Even most developed countries are struggling to come up with strategies to forestall future losses caused by erosion, agricultural degradation, and coastal flooding. According to the U.S. Climate Science Program report, most current mitigation policies—rebuilding at the same location, relocating, coastal engineering, or some combination thereof—would fail to hold back the faster sea level rises that are now widely predicted. Existing structures are designed for current sea level and do not take into account the effects of coastal erosion. Better land-use planning, retrofitting, and science-based management are all necessary to prevent the worst from happening.

Jeremy Jacquot is a graduate student in marine environmental biology at the University of Southern California and is a contributing writer for The Huffington Post, Discover Magazine, DeSmogBlog, and TreeHugger.

Save for some new findings and spirited debate among the scientific community, the sulfurous gas, which some believe could play a vital role in mitigating climate change, has been overshadowed by its more infamous colleague, carbon dioxide. With efforts to slow the rapid accumulation of greenhouse gases at a virtual standstill in many parts of the world and clean energy technologies in their early stages of deployment, some scientists are optimistic about Earth’s ability to regulate its climate through the production of DMS and other natural processes. But before DMS becomes the next darling of geoengineering proponents, it’s worth understanding both this chemical’s place in the marine ecosystem and the point that the planet cannot fix the manmade problem of global climate change. Moreover, the planet cannot fix itself while humans continue to generate greenhouse gases unabated.

Relying solely on nature to rectify man’s mistakes will not be sufficient.

James Lovelock first articulated the DMS-climate link in the early 1970s. Lovelock is a renowned scientist and the originator of the Gaia hypothesis—which holds that the planet is a single large organism that self-regulates in order to maintain optimal conditions.^[1] Though Lovelock and his colleagues theorized that DMS, which is produced by phytoplankton, provided the missing link to explain the elevated levels of sulfate aerosols emissions above the sea surface, they initially lacked the appropriate mechanism to account for it.^[2]

Upon being excreted by phytoplankton, some fraction of DMS finds its way into the atmosphere, where, through oxidation, it forms sulfate aerosols, while the remainder is broken down by microbial activity in the water column. At a loss to explain how these aerosols helped moderate the climate, Lovelock turned to Robert Charlson, a chemist at the University of Washington, who suggested that they formed cloud condensation nuclei, or CCN—small particles that act as centers for the condensation of water to form cloud droplets. A higher concentration of cloud droplets would increase the reflectivity of marine clouds, blocking a portion of solar radiation and causing a slight cooling of the atmosphere. The presence of clouds over the oceans, which cover roughly 70 percent of the planet’s surface area, is more important climatically because they absorb a majority of the sun’s heat.

Charlson’s hypothesis was bolstered by satellite images that showed cloud plumes intensifying due to the addition of smoke particles from ships. Scientists already knew that marine clouds could become brighter, and therefore more reflective, if they had more particles. This breakthrough led to the publication of a seminal paper in which Lovelock, Charlson, and two colleagues proposed that DMS may have helped cool the Earth during past periods of high solar radiation or increasing greenhouse gases—serving, in effect, as the planet’s thermostat.^[3]

Now, with greenhouse gases once again on the rise, some scientists believe DMS production could pick up, providing a natural check on climate change. How effective a check it proves to be, especially in light of the pace at which we are consuming fossil fuels, remains to be seen; specifics about how much DMS is presently in the atmosphere and how quickly it moves there are still poorly understood. Some believe DMSP, or dimethylsulfoniopropionate—the precursor of DMS—is used by phytoplankton to regulate the salinity and temperature within their cells or to repel predators; others think phytoplankton convert DMSP to DMS in response to stress from UV radiation—the sulfur compound helps remove reactive molecules that cause damage from their cells.

Lovelock and Chris Rapley, the director of London’s Science Museum, recently put forth a scheme that would harness the phytoplankton’s increased productivity by installing large arrays of vertical pipes that would mix nutrient-rich deep water with surface waters. This, they argue, would cause more blooms and, in turn, speed up the production of DMS—essentially hitting two geoengineering birds with one stone. They are currently advising Atmocean, a startup that is developing such a technology. Supporters of ocean iron fertilization, a scheme in which iron sulfate particles are dumped into the ocean to stimulate blooms, have also latched onto this idea.

But as I’ve written about previously on Science Progress, such ecological tinkering could be the cure that is worse than the disease. While these proposals to assist natural temperature regulation could eventually show promise, many researchers believe it is still too early to tell whether natural processes alone can put a damper on climate change. Reducing the amount of heat reaching the oceans could change wind patterns or decrease surface water mixing, potentially cutting down the amount of nutrients available for phytoplankton to grow. And reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the planet could slash global precipitation levels, possibly leading to more droughts. Moreover, 200 countries at the U.N.’s Convention on Biological Diversity, citing the unknown risks, voted in May for a moratorium on projects that aim to spur algae growth in the oceans. Finally, these geoengineering proposals won’t stop other impacts of increased carbon in the atmosphere, like ocean acidification.

Because scientists still do not fully understand the DMS cycle, they are worried that they could be missing out on an important intermediary or process—which could throw a wrench into their predictions. In the end, relying solely on nature to rectify man’s mistakes will not be sufficient; while the planet has a role to play, it is simply too risky to hope Mother Earth, even with a little extra push, will clean up after our actions. Reducing our greenhouse gas emissions is the only guaranteed way to fix the problem.

Jeremy Jacquot is a graduate student in marine environmental biology at the University of Southern California and is a contributing writer for VentureBeat, DeSmogBlog and TreeHugger.

Notes

[1] J. Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford University Press, USA, 2000).

[2] R. A. Kerr, “No Longer Willful, Gaia Becomes Respectable,” Science, 240(1998): 393–395.

[3] R. J. Charlson, J. E. Lovelock, M. O. Andreae & S. G.Warren, “Oceanic phytoplankton, atmospheric sulphur, cloud albedo and climate,” Nature, 326 (16) (1987): 655 – 661.

Around 90 percent of the ocean’s largest fisheries species have now been extinguished, and live coral cover has been reduced by up to 93 percent on some reefs.

It’s time to face up to the facts: If we continue to ignore the terrible plight befalling our oceans for much longer, we risk losing what makes them such a unique and valuable natural resource: their rich biodiversity. With most large fisheries stocks now in decline, and with what is left over besieged on all fronts by global warming, ocean acidification, pollution and habitat destruction, it is only a matter of time before our fragile ocean ecosystems complete the long and painful transition from lush, species-rich habitats to barren deserts. But don’t take it just from me. Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the world’s preeminent experts on the impacts of human activities on the ocean, has written what can only be described as a disturbing diagnosis of our ocean’s health. In his article, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jackson warns that the ocean stands on the brink of a mass extinction—one that could just as easily be precipitated by our actions as by the impacts of climate change. Taken together, these problems risk “transforming once complex ecosystems like coral reefs and kelp forests into monotonous level bottoms, transforming clear and productive coastal seas into anoxic dead zones, and transforming complex food webs topped by big animals into simplified, microbially dominated ecosystems with boom and bust cycles of toxic dinoflagellate blooms, jellyfish, and disease,” Jackson writes.

As fatalistic as this may sound, Jackson’s prognosis is given all the more weight because many of the earlier predictions he made a decade ago—though greeted with snorts of derision and loud skepticism at the time—have largely been vindicated. Around 90 percent of the ocean’s largest fisheries species have now been extinguished, and live coral cover has been reduced by up to 93 percent on some reefs. Record amounts of agricultural runoff, fuelled by poor farming practices and our overreliance on industrial fertilizers, are choking our oceans—sparking mass toxic algal blooms and turning once vibrant ecosystems into lifeless dead zones. Sea-surface warming, by increasing the stratification of the oceans (preventing the mixing of deep, nutrient-rich waters with shallow, depleted waters), has caused the ocean’s least biologically productive areas—the so-called ocean “deserts”—to expand much faster than originally predicted, putting the populations of many fish species at risk of extinction. And, if we are to believe his most gloomy prognostications, the worse has yet to come: a future in which the “mass extinction of multicellular life will result in profound loss of animal and plant biodiversity” and lead to the rise of “slime” (what he calls microbes).

The best way to ensure the successful restoration of threatened habitats, the authors explain, is to devolve more authority to local communities, which are naturally more invested in them.

Yet, despite the severity of the situation, not all is lost. In addition to dispensing the usual set of solutions—reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving ocean and coastal management policies and establishing more marine protected areas, or MPAs—Jackson also suggests switching from wild fisheries, which he claims will not be able to sustain growing global demand (regardless of how well they are managed), to a sustainable form of industrial aquaculture. With the right environmental standards in place, and the requisite political will, he argues that aquaculture will be compatible with a policy approach focused on habitat preservation and pollution mitigation. Another interesting idea would be to eliminate the subsidies that have sustained the excessive consumption of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and to tax their use. This would help greatly reduce the number of hypoxia and eutrophication events that have contributed to the formation of over 400 dead zones—affecting an area of more than 245,000 square kilometers (roughly the size of Oregon)—worldwide.

In another article recently published in PNAS, Stanford University ecologists Paul Ehrlich and Robert Pringle prescribe a series of simple, commonsense solutions, which they whimsically call “a hopeful portfolio of partial solutions,” that, while not specifically targeted at the oceans, could easily be applied to just about any ecosystem. Encouraging ecotourism and placing an accurate value on the services ecosystems provide—such as natural water filtration, flood mitigation by plants and carbon sequestration and storage by trees—would help individuals, governments and businesses appreciate them more and make them more likely to integrate these ecosystem-service values into future policy and land use decisions. This is an idea that has long been advocated by economists: reduce the overconsumption of natural resources by making people pay the full price for their use (hence their overwhelming support for water pricing and a carbon tax scheme). The best way to ensure the successful restoration of threatened habitats, the authors explain, is to devolve more authority to local communities, which are naturally more invested in them. Poor communities in developing countries, which depend on their habitats for food, shelter and other resources, will be much more likely to protect their surroundings if they are made aware of the consequences of habitat degradation. Furthermore, imbuing local leaders with the knowledge and skills to manage and preserve their habitats will build local capacity and generate more grassroots support for conservation planning—an enthusiasm that is likely to be passed on to future generations.

Perhaps the simplest, and most obvious, solution the authors suggest is to get biodiversity back onto the “cultural radar screen”—to convince people that it is not their large homes, SUVs, clothing, and big screen TVs that they should value most, but the beauty and plentiful ecosystem services offered by nature. A herculean task, to be sure, but one that should be vigorously pursued by all educators and policymakers. Only by instilling in our children and grandchildren an appreciation for nature that can “rival virtual reality as a source of entertainment, intrigue, and inspiration,” can we make sure that the biodiversity crisis is eventually resolved.

Jeremy Jacquot is a graduate student in marine environmental biology at the University of Southern California and is the Los Angeles correspondent for TreeHugger.com.

But as I’ve watched Hurricane Dolly form in the Gulf of Mexico and careen towards the Texas-Mexico border—rapidly intensifying into a Category 2 storm just before landfall–I can only think one thing. If we’re worried about gas prices now, what will we do if (God forbid) at some point over the next several months, one or more Gulf hurricanes knock out oil production infrastructure and refining capacity?

Such a hypothetical disaster has already been discussed this year, based upon our alarming experience from the mega hurricane year of 2005. The Gulf of Mexico provides 30 percent of U.S. oil production and 45 percent of its refining capacity, according to the American Petroleum Institute. No wonder that after Hurricane Katrina shut down virtually all Gulf production in 2005, we saw average gas prices jump above $3 a gallon for the first time, climbing from $2.65 to $3.11 in the space of a week. (At the time, such a price was considered shocking.)

It’s worth raising questions like these in order to get a true and full assessment of our economy’s vulnerability due to our staggering dependence upon oil.

And then a month later came Hurricane Rita, another Category 5 aimed at oil rich Gulf waters and coasts. Taken together the two storms damaged 457 oil pipelines, destroyed 113 platforms, and most important, temporarily shut down oil production entirely. As the U.S. Minerals Management Service puts it, Katrina and Rita represented “the greatest natural disasters to oil and gas development in the history of the Gulf of Mexico.” Overall roughly three-quarters of total Gulf oil platforms were in the path of one or both storms, as were two-thirds of the region’s miles of pipeline.

To be sure, after the storms passed gas prices once again declined steadily, as production capacity in the Gulf gradually came back online and President Bush released oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The American Petroleum Institute assures us its companies worked as hard as possible to recover quickly.

The vulnerability of our economy to oil price spikes at that time, however, was nothing compared to what it is now. Today we would kill for $3 a gallon at the pump, and the entire stock market swoons over any increase in oil prices. Some forecasts suggest price spikes in the event of another well-targeted Gulf hurricane could be as high as $5 to $6 per gallon. We’re much more panicky now: Could we really withstand a price blip like the one that occurred after Katrina?

That’s something to consider, because every indicator right now is that this hurricane season is something to worry about. We’re not in the August-October peak of the season yet, but we’ve already seen four named storms this year and two strong hurricanes—far ahead of the typical schedule. In particular, although the recently dissipated Hurricane Bertha didn’t ultimately cause much impact upon any land areas, it showed record longevity and near-record intensity for a storm occurring so early in the year. Bertha could represent a harbinger of a still-more active season once Atlantic sea surface temperatures reach their peak. The calling card of the deadly 2005 hurricane season, after all, was a hyperactive month of July.

Meanwhile, Dolly has already required a few platforms to be evacuated, although most recently oil prices have declined, based in part upon the anticipation that the storm’s track will not pose a severe danger to production. But another storm this year certainly might.

Granted, we shouldn’t get too alarmist: Neither 2006 nor 2007 saw anything like the hurricane destruction that befell the U.S. in 2005. Hopefully we’ll be spared this year too—but we won’t be forever. And so I believe it’s worth raising questions like these in order to get a true and full assessment of our economy’s vulnerability due to our staggering dependence upon oil.

And for that matter, why only focus on the danger to our economy posed by Gulf of Mexico hurricanes? Last year, a rare Arabian Sea cyclone, Gonu, very nearly made its way into the Persian Gulf—if it had, a true oil economy disaster could have been in the offing. And in fact, some climate models now suggest that global warming ought to increase the occurrence of hurricanes in the Arabian Sea.

For indeed, oil production and hurricanes may ultimately be linked via climate change—the burning of oil warms the climate, which provides more ocean heat for hurricanes, which can then (as we’ve seen) temporarily wipe out production of the oil. We’re still waiting for a definitive understanding of the precise hurricane-climate relationship, but it remains a reasonable assumption that the storms will get worse on average.

None of which is to say that we ought to burn less oil to prevent global warming so as to (in turn) prevent hurricanes. That’s strained logic indeed, given the amount of warming we’re already committed to and the fact that hurricanes will always be with us, irrespective of what the climate is doing.

However, it is perhaps to say that burning less oil in the future—and instead turning to alternative power sources—would reduce the impact of inevitable hurricane catastrophes on our wallets. And these days, that kind of reasoning sounds more and more compelling.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

With international efforts to reach consensus on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol stalled, many scientists are arguing that drastic measures will be needed to prevent the worst excesses of climate change.

Geoengineering is loosely defined as the intentional large-scale manipulation of the environment in order to blunt man-made climate change.^[1] Once derided as little more than a mere distraction from the serious business of climate mitigation, the idea that humans may need to “tweak” the planet to avert a major catastrophe has gained currency in recent years. This shift in thinking has been spurred in part by the unprecedented nature of recent environmental shifts, such as the melting of the Arctic ice caps and the rapid acidification of the world’s oceans. These events, in addition to other clear instances of climate change, have cast into doubt even scientists’ most pessimistic scenarios. And while there remains a solid contingent of scientists who vehemently oppose geoengineering on scientific and ethical grounds, there is some indication that the tide may slowly be turning in favor of its advocates. With international efforts to reach consensus on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol stalled, many scientists are arguing that drastic measures will be needed to prevent the worst excesses of climate change.

The term geoengineering, as we know it today, was originally coined in the early 1970s by Cesare Marchetti, an Italian physicist, who used it to describe the injection of carbon dioxide into the deep ocean as a potential scheme for climate change mitigation.^[2] At the time, the U.S. had already discovered cloud seeding, a form of weather modification which increases precipitation by injecting chemicals such as silver iodide or dry ice into clouds, and was hastily stepping up its research into weather and climate modification to counter the Soviet Union’s dominanant position in the field at the time. Over the ensuing years, the practice of cloud seeding would fall out of favor, soon to be replaced with a newfound focus on the relationship between CO2 and climate change. The first government reports to seriously consider geoengineering as a potential countervailing measure were issued by the National Academy of Sciences in 1983 and 1992. The four options examined in the 1992 report were: reforestation, ocean fertilization, albedo modification, and the removal of atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons. Two of these—ocean fertilization and albedo modification—are at the center of the current debate over geoengineering.

Albedo refers to an object or surface’s ability to reflect solar radiation and is expressed as a value between zero and one; a colored surface with an albedo of 0.45, for example, would reflect 45 percent of the sunlight that falls upon it. Albedo modification schemes therefore intend to offset the warming effect of higher greenhouse gas concentrations by increasing the planet’s albedo. The most famous (some might say infamous), and well-studied, scheme consists of pumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect a slice of incoming solar radiation. Sometimes referred to as “sunshade” geoengineering, it is most commonly associated with Ken Caldeira, a scientist at Stanford University’s Carnegie Institution, and Lowell Wood (sometimes dubbed Dr. Evil), formerly of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Paul Crutzen, a 1995 Chemistry Nobel Laureate best known for his work on ozone depletion, lent his imprimatur to the scheme by publishing an essay in 2006 arguing in its favor.^[3] Caldeira and Wood believe injecting a million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere would reflect one to three percent of the sun’s rays—enough to counteract the warming impacts of climate change. The sulfur dioxide would be carried up to the stratosphere by a fleet of converted 747s, military fighters, or even large balloons. They estimate such a plan would cost roughly $1 billion a year.

The blooms, when they die off, release most of the carbon back to the atmosphere, thus causing no permanent reduction in atmospheric emissions.

The idea for ocean iron fertilization arose from John Martin, a renowned oceanographer who drew national attention for his pioneering work on the “iron hypothesis” when he jokingly told an audience at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, “Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age.” According to this controversial theory, large blooms of unicellular, plant-like phytoplankton could be stimulated in certain parts of the ocean, called high-nutrient, low-chlorophyll zones, or HNLCs, by dumping relatively small quantities of iron dust into the water. Martin believed the blooms would be able to absorb enough atmospheric carbon dioxide so as to slow and even partially reverse climate change. This theory hinged on the notion, now widely debated, that the absorbed carbon would sink to the bottom of the ocean when the blooms eventually collapsed—thus sequestering it.

The evidence obtained from the 12 fertilization experiments carried out since his pronouncement has largely been inconclusive, due in part to the fact that most have operated under less than ideal conditions or have been too short.^[4] Initial results do seem to suggest that the sequestration effect is only temporary—that the blooms, when they die off, release most of the carbon back to the atmosphere, thus causing no permanent reduction in atmospheric emissions. Despite the uncertainty, Climos, a San Francisco-based startup, sees an opportunity to make money selling carbon credits by organizing large-scale iron fertilization expeditions. Dan Whaley, the company’s CEO, insists Climos will not begin to sell carbon credits until the evidence is there and has pledged to work with the scientific community and international bodies to ensure its efforts abide by regulatory standards.

Whether any of these schemes proves to have staying power remains to be seen. Several recent studies have demonstrated that the risks of albedo modification could far outweigh the potential benefits. Reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the planet could slash global precipitation levels, possibly leading to more droughts. Another study explicitly linked sulfur injection to a depletion of the ozone layer. Simone Tilmes, the lead author, found that it would severely weaken the ozone layer for several decades and delay the recovery of the ozone hole by up to 70 years. In late May, close to 200 countries attending a United Nations conference voted to place a moratorium on the practice of ocean fertilization, potentially putting Climos’s future plans at risk. The decision will now be referred to the London Convention, a subset of the International Maritime Organization charged with regulating the disposal of wastes at sea, which is expected to deliberate on the issue within the coming months.

In the end, whether or not we decide to pursue geoengineering will boil down to a single question: How far are we willing to push our fragile planet in order to avert the looming climate crisis?

Jeremy Jacquot is a graduate student in marine environmental biology at the University of Southern California and is the Los Angeles correspondent for TreeHugger.com.

Notes

[1] Keith, D. W. 2000. “Geoengineering the climate: History and prospect,” Annu. Rev. Energy Environ., 25: 245-284.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Crutzen, P. 2006. “Albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulfur injections: A contribution to resolve a policy dilemma?” Climactic Change, 77: 211 – 219.

[4] Boyd, P. W. et al. 2007. “Mesoscale iron enrichment experiments,” 1993-2005: Synthesis and future directions, Science, 315: 612 – 617.

Much of the blame has been laid on anthropogenic activities, such as rising farm production and energy consumption, and the imbalances they have created in the global and phosphorus cycles.

While the Gulf dead zone may be the best-studied (and most infamous) example, many others—over 43, at last count—have sprung up around the country in recent decades, most noticeably in the Chesapeake Bay and off the coasts of Oregon and Washington.^[1] Ranging widely in size from small areas in coastal bays to vast swathes of water in the open ocean, they are typically located in temperate seas. According to a 2004 United Nations report, there are now over 150 documented dead zones around the world. Another report found that the number of dead zones had roughly doubled every decade since the 1960s.^[2]

And here’s the kicker: While most are still seasonal, climate change could prolong these events—and make them much more frequent.

One of the world’s longest river systems, and the country’s largest carrier of river-borne nutrients, the Mississippi River drains 41 percent of the contiguous United States.^[3] At the mouth of this system lies the planet’s second largest zone of oxygen-depleted waters—the Gulf dead zone—that is estimated to cover an area greater than 10,000 square miles this year. Over the past few decades, a number of studies have cast light on the causes and impacts of such hypoxia events.

Much of the blame has been laid on anthropogenic activities, such as rising farm production and energy consumption, and the imbalances they have created in the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles—increasing these key nutrients’ availability to coastal and ocean ecosystems. The presence of these excess effluents stimulates the rapid growth of phytoplankton, microscopic plant-like organisms, producing massive blooms. When they eventually deteriorate and sink to the seafloor, they are feasted upon by a vast array of microorganisms, which consume all of the available oxygen in the surrounding waters—creating anoxic, or dead, zones. Well-oxygenated waters typically contain up to 10 milligrams of oxygen per liter, or 10 parts per million (ppm). In hypoxic zones, by contrast, the concentration of dissolved oxygen often falls below 2 ppm; in some cases, it can plunge below 0.5 ppm and remain there for several months—leaving behind an area completely devoid of life. This process, which significantly reduces biodiversity and alters entire food webs, is known as eutrophication.

There is great concern among scientists and government officials that booming corn production could seriously harm these already stressed waters. U.S. farms are expected to produce record amounts of heavily fertilized food crops, and the government is signaling that it may free up even more land to plant corn. Combine this with the huge input of farm runoff the floodwaters from the Midwest will bring, and the result is the largest dead zone ever seen in the Gulf. With agricultural production likely to maintain its upward trend—especially in light of the current food crisis—and with more unprecedented weather events in the offing, such problems will become more commonplace.

Indeed, some scientists fear that global warming has already aggravated and prolonged dead zone events off the coasts of Oregon and Washington. Jane Lubchenco, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University, believes that the stronger winds produced as land heats up are prolonging upwelling in coastal waters.^[4] Upwelling is the process by which deep, nutrient-rich waters are driven up to the surface by winds; it provides a vital source of food that stimulates much of the ecosystem’s primary production. In this case, however, too much of a good thing can be harmful. An excess of phytoplankton that isn’t consumed will die and fall to the seafloor, creating large, oxygen-free zones. Worse, Lubchenco and her colleagues found that the low-oxygen areas, which typically reside in deep waters, are spreading to shallow fishing waters—a discovery Francis Chan, a fellow ecologist, described as “unprecedented.”

Efforts begun by the federal and state governments in 2001 to rein in these problems have yielded precious little by way of results. The original proposal, intended as a coordinated federal plan to shrink the dead zones by making cuts to nutrient runoff, never made it past the budget process once the Bush administration took office. A revised plan led by the Environmental Protection Agency would maintain the dual objectives of shrinking the Gulf dead zone to about one-quarter of last summer’s size by 2015 and of slashing nitrogen and phosphorus levels by 45 percent apiece. Yet because the plan mandates that states complete their implementation strategies by 2013, leaving only two years to achieve the necessary reductions, some scientists have already criticized it as being toothless and backward-minded.

At this rate, it is clear that we may be close to reaching a tipping point after which dead zones will be considered the “new normal,” as Lubchenco puts it. The consequences will be devastating: completely altered ecosystems, dwindling biodiversity and exhausted fisheries populations, to name a few. Buffeted by other forces, including acidification and thermal expansion, our oceans may have already passed the point of no return.

Jeremy Jacquot is a graduate student in marine environmental biology at the University of Southern California and is the Los Angeles correspondent for TreeHugger.com.

Notes

[1] Dybas, C.L. 2005. Dead zones spreading in world oceans. BioScience 55(7): 552 – 557.

[2] Dybas, C.L. 2005. Dead zones spreading in world oceans. BioScience 55(7): 552 – 557.

[3] Rabalais, N.N. et al. 2002. Beyond Science into Policy: Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia and the Mississippi River. BioScience 52(2): 129 – 142.

[4] Chan, F. et al. 2008. Emergence of anoxia in the California current large marine ecosystem. Science 319: 920.

The unprecedented influx of anthropogenic CO2 emissions since the 1800s has fundamentally altered the equation.

Starting in the late 1950s with the groundbreaking research of Roger Revelle and Charles Keeling, scientists have long been aware of the essential role played by the ocean in mitigating the impact of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels. Ice core record measurements of carbon dioxide taken mid-century showed that atmospheric concentrations had remained about constant for several thousand years until the rapid onset of industrialization during the 1800s, after which they began their meteoric rise. Revelle’s work was instrumental in demonstrating that a large fraction of the gas remained in the atmosphere. At the same time, it also suggested that a significant amount was being absorbed by the ocean—a realization that would lead him to conclude that, over the long term, it would permanently change the chemistry of seawater. A number of oceanographer-led global surveys completed in 2004 determined that the ocean had absorbed nearly half of all carbon emitted since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Other studies have found that around a third of fossil fuel-derived CO₂ is currently taken up by the ocean ^[1].

Upon entering the ocean, a portion of CO₂ reacts with water to form carbonic acid, a weak acid; the other portion stays in dissolved form. Some fraction of the acid will then release hydrogen ions into solution, yielding either bicarbonate or carbonate ions, while a smaller fraction will remain as carbonic acid. The relative proportion of these three forms of dissolved inorganic carbon—carbon dioxide, bicarbonate ions and carbonate ions—acts as a natural buffer, called the “carbonate buffer,” by absorbing small pH changes induced by the increase in hydrogen ion concentration. The pH scale, which ranges from 0 to 14, is used by scientists to measure a solution’s acidity or basicity—the lower the value, the more acidic the solution. The scale is logarithmic, so a one-pH unit drop corresponds to a ten-fold increase in the hydrogen ion concentration, making seawater more acidic. With an average pH of 8.1, seawater is considered slightly basic, or alkaline.

This buffering system has helped keep the ocean’s pH in check for thousands of years. However, the unprecedented influx of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions since the 1800s has fundamentally altered the equation, threatening to overwhelm the delicate balance maintained by this system and tipping the ocean into a period of prolonged acidification. The problem is simple: as increasing amounts of atmospheric CO₂ are absorbed by surface waters, more hydrogen ions are formed—which leads to an overall decrease in seawater pH. Many of these hydrogen ions will combine with carbonate ions, forming bicarbonate ions and reducing the concentration of carbonate ions. The net effect is to weaken the carbonate buffer, rendering it less effective at keeping slight pH variations in check.

By some estimates, all of the planet’s corals could disappear by century’s end if present trends continue.

Researchers believe this process lowered the oceans’ average pH by 0.1 since the pre-industrial era—equivalent to a 30 percent increase in the ocean’s average hydrogen ion concentration ^[2]. A recent analysis postulated that pH levels might fall by as much as 0.5 units by 2100, which would be equivalent to a three-fold increase in the hydrogen ion concentration since pre-industrial times ^[3]. The impacts of ocean acidification are already being felt closer to home: a report published just this past month in Science showed evidence for the upwelling of “acidified” water onto the Pacific continental shelf between central Canada and northern Mexico. Seasonal upwelling, which brings nutrient-rich deep waters up to the surface, is a natural phenomenon in this region and one that is critical for many developing marine organisms.

“So what?” you may ask. Why should I care about this when other climate-induced phenomena like heat waves and droughts seem much more urgent? Diminishing the ocean’s capacity to absorb CO₂ is no small problem in itself, because without the ocean serving as a carbon sink, more carbon dioxide will have no where to go but into the atmosphere. But aside from that, what worries scientists most about ocean acidification is that it will inhibit certain organisms’ ability to produce calcium carbonate shells—to the extent that they would have great difficulty growing. And not just any organisms: those, like phytoplankton, which support entire food webs by acting as the ocean’s primary producers (like plants in terrestrial ecosystems). Without them—or with their numbers greatly reduced—many populations and ecosystems could simply collapse. Moreover, oceanographers are deeply concerned about the potential impact of acidification on corals. These tiny organisms, which secrete calcium carbonate skeletons that, over time, accumulate to form large reef assemblages, could become more prone to so-called “bleaching” episodes—in which algae that form symbiotic associations with the corals (and give them their colors) are expelled, depriving the latter of a critical source of nutrients. Worse, the precipitous drop in carbonate ion concentration could make many regions of the ocean acidic enough to dissolve calcium carbonate structures ^[4]. Corals, phytoplankton and other calcifying organisms would be unable to survive under such “undersaturated” conditions. By some estimates, all of the planet’s corals could disappear by century’s end if present trends continue. The continued uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will cause these areas to expand until only a sliver of the ocean’s surface layer remains inhabitable.

That’s not to say that certain species won’t also benefit. Indeed, a few recent studies have demonstrated that some phytoplankton species may thrive under conditions of elevated CO₂ concentrations. Larger organisms, like seagrasses, use dissolved carbon dioxide directly and could therefore also experience gains. While the current state of research may be ambiguous in some areas, it is clear that the overall picture is decidedly grim. Though more studies are needed, scientists are concerned that acidification is taking place at such speed that we—let alone marine species—will have little time to adapt.

Jeremy Jacquot is a graduate student in marine environmental biology at the University of Southern California and is the Los Angeles correspondent for TreeHugger.com.

Notes

[1] Doney, S.C. 2006. The dangers of ocean acidification. Scientific American: 58 – 65.

[2] Brewer, P.G. 1997. Ocean chemistry of the fossil fuel CO2 signal: the haline signal of “business as usual”. Geophys. Res. Lett. 24: 1367 – 1369.

[3] Caldeira, K. and Wickett, M.E. 2003. Anthropogenic carbon and ocean pH. Nature 425: 365.

[4] The Royal Society. 2005. Ocean acidification due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Tomorrow, the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment of the Committee on Science and Technology will host a hearing on H.R. 4174: The Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act (FOARAM) Act. Representative Thomas Allen’s (D-ME) sponsorship of this bill follows Senator Frank Lautenberg’s (D-NY) parallel legislation, S. 1581: FOARAM Act of 2007, proposed almost exactly a year a go today. However, it was just recently that Lautenberg’s S.1581 was placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar for a Senate vote.

The FOARAM bills in the House and Senate take into account the imminent and long-term threats of greenhouse emissions and industrial pollution; an increasing amount of carbon dioxide is being absorbed by the oceans. The bills take the first step to building a larger movement on ocean acidification awareness; they establish outreach activities, educational opportunities, and an incentive-based monitoring system of acidic levels in the ocean. They also establish grants for research projects to explore many of the unknown effects of ocean acidification. Under the direction of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, FOARAM requires federal agencies to collaborate on strategic ocean research with public and private organizations.

Acidification monitoring will help curb faster paced increases in acidity and potential consequences for the ocean’s vast natural resources. Scientists can monitor reef habitats that protect marine ecosystems and prevent their destruction by hurricanes and tropical storms. Organisms being monitored for their environment’s acidification fluctuations will help researchers understand species-specific physiological responses and develop strategies for what can be done to prevent harm to wildlife.

Bi-partisan support the Senate and House versions of FOARAM brings an auspicious vision for future congressional resolutions on water policy. Last year Amy Carroll, a Republican aide with the House Science and Technology Committee, commented (subscription) during the Capital Hill Oceans Week: “This is a good year, and a good Congress for oceans issues.” Amy Fraenkel, senior Democratic counsel for the Senate Commerce Committee, said, “The House is becoming more active on these issues…the administration is also stepping up in this Congress in a way they haven’t before.”

The panelists at tomorrow’s hearing will address the above issues and beyond. Dr. Scott Doney of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will discuss how the current and future research on ocean acidification can lead to increased marine source management efforts. Mr. Brad Warren, a policy with the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership and technical advisor for many seafood suppliers and producers, will discuss the effects ocean acidification on the world’s seafood industry. With America boasting the world’s third largest seafood industry, Congress has another reason to pay special attention to FOARAM. Whether or not the natural resource losses caused by acidification will force Congress to move on this issue is unclear, but this threat is too long-lasting to stall another year.

Image: flickr.com/sam_and_ian