Five Ways Climate Change Is Altering Our Oceans—and Harming UsThe IPCC report on our oceans and cryosphere is out. Here’s how the latest sci...

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Five Ways Climate Change Is Altering Our Oceans—and Harming UsThe IPCC report on our oceans and cryosphere is out. Here’s how the latest sci...
Five Ways Climate Change Is Altering Our Oceans—and Harming Us
The IPCC report on our oceans and cryosphere is out. Here’s how the latest science reflects what’s happening to America’s coastal economies and ecosystems.
The IPCC report on our oceans and cryosphere is out. Here’s how the latest science reflects what’s happening to America’s coastal economies and ecosystems.

Our marine environment is the largest habitat on earth, so immense that more than 80 percent of it remains unobserved and unexplored by humans. Scientists believe that somewhere between 700,000 and one million species call it home, even if we’ve been able to identify only about 230,000 of them so far.

Of course, the oceans don’t just sustain marine life; they sustain us, too. Seafood accounts for nearly 17 percent of humanity’s protein intake, reaching more than 70 percent in some coastal and island nations. Fisheries and aquaculture support the livelihoods of at least 10 percent of all people living on the planet. And in the United States, more than 100 million people live in coastal counties, where the ocean plays a central role in shaping economic strength and cultural heritage.

Oceans and their ecosystems also play key roles in regulating global temperatures and protecting communities from some of the worst ravages of climate change. Our oceans absorb fully 93 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gasses and one-quarter of the carbon dioxide given off by the burning of fossil fuels. In warm, shallow waters along coastlines, coral reefs create natural barriers that protect communities from storm surge and erosion.

We both love and need our oceans. If they fail, we all do.

That’s an admittedly simplified distillation of a new analysis by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that should be seen as a complement to last year’s bombshell of an IPCC report on the consequences of allowing global warming to rise by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. As the authors of the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) observe, we are transforming the sea through our actions—and as we do so we’re interfering with the crucial role it plays for humanity, from stabilizing our climate to protecting coastal communities to providing food for billions.

This comprehensive report describes the extent of this transformation in great, and often discomfiting, detail. Scientists are seeing warning signs—clear signals that our life-giving, planet-protecting oceans are in deep distress: Elevated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has caused ocean water to become an average of 1 °F warmer and 30 percent more acidic since the industrial revolution, and 2 percent lower in precious oxygen in the past 50 years. To coastal communities in the United States, these are more than just statistics. Many are feeling the consequences today—consequences beyond the devastating sea level rise and coastal erosion they’re already facing.
https://www.nrdc.org/bio/lisa-suatoni/five-ways-climate-change-altering-our-oceans-and-harming-us

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