Washington Post science writer Juliet Eilperin took part in a debate on the occasion of the future of the earth’s oceans and answered some interesting questions.
Eastern Market, D.C.: Juliet,
Having just seen “An Inconvenient Truth,” I am more than ever convinced that the unprecedented (and therefore unpredictable) melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps present a clear and present (”present” here means possible within a decade, or a year!) danger to the world’s coastal cities. I would like to find out more on this, specifically on the models used to predict the sea level rise and the way it would actually play out on the continental margins. What’s a good, succinct source?
Juliet Eilperin: One of the scientists I talk to regularly who has studied this question is Michael Oppenheimer at Princeton University-he has written on the West Antarctic ice sheet and I’m sure you can find his work at www.princeton.edu. Konrad Steffan at the University of Colorado at Boulder is a Greenland ice sheet expert, so you can google him to look at his research. And you’re right, both these ice sheets could transform the planet if they melted.
Washington, D.C.: The announcement of the new “preserve” in the Pacific is tempered by the fact that the pro-whaling nations seem about to win their 20-year battle to reopen commercial whaling (scientific and small- to mid-scale commercial whaling were never banned). The “whales are plentiful” argument which Japan, Norway and Iceland have advanced seems to have been purchased with grant-payments to smaller countries in the Whaling Commission. Two questions:
1. Why has there been no press attention to the agonizing inhumanity of whaling (i.e., the animal takes several hours to die, during which time it is live-butchered, fully conscious), as opposed to mere availability statistics?
2. Will Japan, Norway and Iceland win?
Juliet Eilperin: So far we’ve seen a mixed message out of the International Whaling Commission: they voted against a move to secret ballots (which would have helped the pro-whaling camp) and in favor of a declaration backing the idea of returning the commission to the idea of a body that regulates commercial whaling. So stay tuned this week and I can give you a better idea in a couple of days of what’s happening on this.
Washington, D.C.: What do you believe are the most serious short-term threats to the ocean’s health and what, if anything, can the average person do about them?
Juliet Eilperin: Overfishing is the most serious short-term threat to the oceans. Boris Worm, a professor at Canada’s Dalhousie University, recently published a paper with several other researchers in which he wrote about the “roving banditry” of commerical fishing fleets, which rely on modern technology to just fish a population to collapse and then move onto the next target. This is not to say all commercial fishermen are irresponsible: many care about sustaining their livelihoods over the long term. The industry in Alaska, for example, has done a much better job of regulating itself than the New England fishing industry. So that’s the most serious immediate problem (global warming is the most serious long-term threat). And the best thing ordinary consumers can do is eat fish that’s sustainably caught, or get involved in the legislation that’s currently pending before Congress, the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act. This is the law that regulates fishing in the United States.
As early as the late 1800s scientists were writing about man’s wholesale impact on the planet and the possibility of an “anthropozoic era” having begun, according to Crutzen, who is credited with coining the term Anthropocene (anthropo = human; cene = new) back in 2000. That year, Crutzen and a colleague wrote in the scientific newsletter International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme about some of the dramatic changes: