Ocean warming is off the charts. Literally.
We know that the last ten years have seen
unprecedented warming, with 2014 the
warmest ever measured. We have
evidence that the warming is influencing extreme weather including drought, floods, heavy snowfalls and rising seas.
But the area most affected by atmospheric warming lies below the Earths surface. Check out the chart on the right for a stunning look at what is happening out of sight. Andrew Freedman at Mashable
writes that "Ocean heat content is climbing so quickly that the tracking chart 'broke'". And a
new study is predicting a mass extinction of marine life a lot sooner than we anticipated.
The ocean warming and acidification is having a profound effect on Coral and in fact, there is concern about a major Coral bleaching as soon as 2015 writes Tom Philpott at Mother Jones.
[..] coral scientist C. Mark Eakin, who coordinates the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch program, is surprised that the warning he has been sounding since last year (PDF)—that the globe's reefs appear to be on the verge of a mass-scale bleaching event—hasn't drawn more media attention.
[...]
Eakin says it will take major action to reverse climate change to save the globe's coral reefs. Currently, carbon dioxide makes up nearly 400 parts per million of the atmosphere, and for coral to thrive, we'll need to throttle that back to 350 ppm or possibly even 320 ppm, he said. Those are ambitious goals. Making coral resilient enough to survive until we can manage to do that, he added, will require taking action against "local stressors" that also harm them, like overfishing and pollution.
"People say corals are the rainforests of the sea. But coral reefs are more biodiverse than rainforests," he said. "It ought to be the other way around: Rainforests are the coral reefs of the land." And these glorious cradles of oceanic life aren't getting any stronger. "The punch that knocks a boxer out in the ninth round doesn't have to be as hard as the punch that would knock him out in round one," Eakin said.