Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Overfishing, Habitat Loss, Global Warming Escalating Ocean Life Extinction

Read the State of the Ocean report summary. This should remind us that at the very least we need to have a president who "believes" in climate change. The sad thing about global warming is Al Gore brought the issue to light, but he also made it political and now people fight it without reason just because they view it as a "liberal" issue.
"Not only are we already experiencing severe declines in many species to the point of commercial extinction in some cases, and an unparalleled rate of regional extinctions of habitat types (e.g. mangroves and seagrass meadows), but we now face losing marine species and entire marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, within a single generation," the experts said.
The chief causes for extinctions at the moment are overfishing and habitat loss, but global warming is "increasingly adding to this," the report said.
Carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels ends up sinking in the oceans, which then become more acidic, devastating sensitive coral reefs. Warmer ocean temperatures also are shifting species from their normal habitats, Rogers said. Non-native species moving into new areas can cause havoc to those ecosystems. MSNBC