WiLD Blog

Yesterday, the U.S. Navy admitted that it discharged more than 14 million gallons of sewage into San Diego Bay from its east Bay location at 32nd Street. This is a crisis and more than likely is the reason that quite a bit of the bay has been polluted (I had a traithlon swim cancelled in the bay in 2005 and so did my kids). Shame on the Navy for not not protecting the natural resources that we all depend on. The U.S. Navy can and should do better. At least they've come clean on the discharge and are takng responsibility for it--that is a lot more than many other agencies do. Serge

This week the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert continues her groundbreaking analysis of global climate change with a look at how human related carbon emissions are turning the ocean acidic in “The Darkening Sea: What Carbon emissions are doing to the ocean.” Kolbert’s original work in The New Yorker is spelled out in her book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe. The article is an excellent summary of the reams of scientific research that has been published widely. Kolbert’s article should be required reading for anyone who believes that San Diego’s coast will be or has been immune from the impacts of climate change and that a small population of harbor seals represents a significant threat to our coastline.

Some of Kolbert’s observations include the following:

• “The concentration of carbon dioxide in the aid today—three hundred and eight parts per million—is higher than it has been at any point inn the past six hundred and fifty thousand years, and probably much longer.

• “At the current rate of emissions growth, carbon dioxide concentration will top five hundred parts per million—roughly double pre-industrial levels—by the middle of this century.”

• Increases in carbon dioxide levels “will produce an eventual global temperature rise of between three and half and seven degrees Fahrenheit, and that this in turn, will prompt a string of disasters, including fiercer hurricanes…and the inundation of many of the world’s major coastal cities.”

• “Already, humans have pumped enough carbon into the oceans—some hundred and twenty billion tons—to produce a .1 decline in surface pH…a .1 drop represents a rise in acidity of about thirty percent.”

• “Because of the slow pace of deep-ocean circulation and the long life of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it is impossible to reverse the acidification that has taken place.”

Kolbert, as did Ken Weiss did in his brilliant Alerted Oceans series in the Los Angeles Times, argues that this drop in pH levels will give way to an increase in ocean slime and jellyfish that will occupy ecological niches now filled by, well, fish and the rest of the ocean food chain.

The irony here, is that while Jerry Sanders, Scott Peters and the Stepford Wife public servants at the City’s Recreation Department squander public monies on dredging projects for Children’s Pool, continue to defend the bizarre rope barrier at La Jolla Shores, and oversee San Diego’s wasteful kelp eradication program, Mother Ocean will soon be taking its revenge on San Diego. The years of defending the dumping millions of gallons of sewage into the ocean, failure to clean up Mission Bay, criminal contempt for warnings about the antiquated sewage treatment system, spending millions on sand replenishment projects, and ignoring the corruption of the Bajagua project’s blocking efforts to reduce border pollution, are now coming home to roost.

If a small population of harbor seals freaks out the anti-seal brigade in La Jolla, imagine the response to beaches filled with slime and jelly fish. It is rumored that Jerry Sanders, like President Bush believes that global climate change is a hoax. Sorry, Jerry. Let’s see you finally, for once, take some leadership on the issue that will matter most to the future of San Diego.

NOAA announced new regulations to restrict the use of PWCs for tow-in surfing at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. While many of the professional tow-in crowd are upset about this, it is clear that jet-skis and tow-in surfing have no place in a federally protected marine sanctuary. The irony here, however, is that the Monterey Sanctuary is about the only place in the U.S. where the Bush administration has been strictly enforcing attempts to regulate the use of recreational machines (e.g. snowmobiles and jet-skis) in federal protected areas. Even in La Jolla, they have actually encouraged humans to assault marine mammals. Monterey is an excellent example of what federal resource agencies can to protect our natural heritage if they choose to. But surfers who are angry at the restrictions would be correct about pointing out the double standard of a ban in Monterey and the willful ignorance by NOAA of assaults on federal ecosystems and protected species in other parts of Californa such as La Jolla.

Restrictions on tow-in surfing will impact a very tiny minority of the surfing world. The reality is that there are still plenty of places to carry out this sport. But the lesson is clear that the tow-in community needs to either come up with a set of guidelines for self-monitoring or agencies around the globe will also begin to restrict activities on their own. Having watched last year as people towed into 6-8' beachbreak in Mexico or as idiots tried to town in bodyboarders into 3' slop in Imperial Beach I know that the emergence of hordes of copycat wannabees create a massive set of problems for everyone. Serge

In the film The Matrix, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) offers to Neo (Keanu Reeves) two pills. The red pill will answer the question "what is the Matrix" (by removing him form it) and the blue pill will mean simply for life to carry on as before. As Neo reaches for the red pill Morpheus warns Neo "Remember, all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more."

If you take the blue pill you can continue your same energy consumption patterns, continue believing that scientists confirming global warming are wrong and pessimistic, continue thinking that fisheries are plentiful and that species are not dissapearing. Living a comfortable life. Essentially, if the truth is unknown, or you believe that you know the truth, what is there to question or worry about? Ignorance is a bliss.

Are you ready to take the red pill, to be unplugged, or you are so hopelessly dependent on the system that you will fight to protect it?

Saul

Thanks to San Diego Councilperson Donna Frye and our friends at the Sierra Club especially Ellen Shively and John Hartley for continuing to lead the effort to have the City of San Diego protect harbor seals at Children's Pool. Given the overall threats to marine mammals due to increasing changes in ocean chemistry (becoming more acidic), it is more important than ever to protect these seals. The behavior by anti-seal activists who devote their energy to harassing the seals is unprecedented. Serge

S.D. panel OKs more time for seals


Proposal extends closure of beach
By Bruce Lieberman
SAN DIEGO  UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

November 16, 2006

The harbor seals at Children's Pool beach in La Jolla could receive an early Christmas present this year – an extra month of private beach access.

A proposal approved by a city committee yesterday would extend the period Children's Pool is roped off to people from Dec. 15 through May 15. The beach is now closed from Jan. 1 through May 1.

The extra time will help protect pregnant seals and their unborn pups, and young seals still dependent on their mothers, city officials said. The pupping season for harbor seals typically runs Jan. 1 through May 1. Mother seals have sometimes abandoned their pups on a beach after they've been disturbed or harassed.

The San Diego City Council must approve the proposal, and the California Coastal Commission will likely review the plan.

Activists who want the beach preserved for the seals supported the proposal, but they said it will mean little if the city doesn't enforce it. They have long complained that neither city lifeguards or federal officials enforce barriers at the small beach.

“As long as there is no enforcement of your own municipal code, this travesty will continue,” said Ellen Shively, conservation chair of the San Diego chapter of the Sierra Club and one of 12 speakers in support of the measure. “Let the seals have their distance.”

A city ordinance unrelated to the barrier states, “it is unlawful to kill, wound, disturb, or maltreat any bird or animal, whether wild or domesticated” unless permitted by the city.


A rope barrier was erected along the western section of the cove in 1999, but in September 2004, it was taken down when the City Council decided to give people and seals equal access.

In 2005, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that enforces the federal Marine Marine Mammal Protection Act, recommended to the city that it replace the rope barrier. City signs urging people not to harass the seals were not effective, and the seals needed to be further protected during pupping season, the agency said.

On April 19, the City Council voted to re-erect the barrier from Jan. 1 through May 1.

“Children's Pool offers a unique experience,” said San Diego resident John Hartley. “Nowhere else can people get so close to harbor seals and . . . experience nature. It's a treasure that we should protect.”

In the Sea of Cortez the estimate is that each inch of the sea floor is raked at least seven times each year. Bottom trawling has a huge impact on ocean life and destroys critical fish spawning areas.

November 15, 2006 — By Patricia Reaney, Reuters
LONDON — Deep-sea trawling is destroying underwater mountains teeming with marine life and causing irreparable damage to ecosystems, scientists warned on Wednesday.

Most of the underwater volcanic mountains, or seamounts, which contain deep-sea corals and are home to thousands of marine species, are in unregulated areas.

Over-exploitation of traditional fish such as cod and hake has prompted fleets to trawl the high seas for deep-dwelling species such as orange roughy, alfonsino and roundnose grenadier, but they are harming biodiversity in vulnerable regions of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

We invite you to visit San Diego and experience what is to live in a city that resembles an episode of The Twilight Zone. San Diego is a city that faces an $87.4 million budget deficit in 2007, and spends annually more than eight million dollars to promote tourism and more than 20 million dollars every three years to replenish sand in their beaches. It is also a city that is willing to promote a half-million-dollar project to dredge a 200-foot beach to get rid of federally protected harbor seals. In a city with miles and miles of beaches, this tiny beach is occupied by a colony of about 200 harbor seals. The site, considered by the New York Times as one of the best places to visit in San Diego, attracts more than a million tourists every year who come to enjoy the unique sight of harbor seals giving birth and nursing their young.

Unfortunately, some City Council members are more interested in making happy some time travelers visiting from the 1930s, who don't realize that the year is 2006, than to do what is good for San Diego. How do I know these individuals have lived in the Twilight Zone for the last few decades? These individuals violate a federal law that has protected marine mammals since 1973; they scream that children do not have places to swim in a city with hundreds of swimming pools; they scream that minorities are not welcomed in a country where segregation laws were abolished in the 1960s; and they scream that sharks are going to eat your children in a city where the only (unconfirmed) shark attacked happened in 1957.

The San Diego City Council members have in their hands the opportunity to stop the madness by protecting year-round harbor seals in Casa Beach, withdrawing the Casa Beach dredging project, and stopping the support for those individuals living in the Twilight Zone.

E-mail San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders and the City Council members and ask them to place year-round the rope that protect the Casa Beach harbor seals, to withdraw the dredging project proposal, and to establish the San Diego Marine Mammal Sanctuary in Casa Beach. Saul

Although globalization has been a buzz word for a decade, free flow of goods, people, and money, have never really happened. But finally, true globalization is here! There is overwhelming scientific evidence that our excesive use of fossil fuels is causing global warming, and that its effects on all species, including humans, will be catastrophic in every part of our planet. Global warming is not an issue of beliefs as some politicians such as George W. Bush wants to frame it. Just like you are affected by gravity even if you don't "believe" in it, you will be affected by climate change.

The burning of fossil fuels and the consequential global warming is a classic example of the "Tragedy of the Commons." In his 1968 essay published in Science magazine, Garrett Hardin popularized the concept of the "Tragedy of the Commons" in reference to natural resources. TheTragedy of the Commons is a class of phenomena that involve a conflict for resources between individual interests and the common good: free access and unrestricted deman for a finite resource ultimately dooms the resource through overexploitation. The "tragedy" should not be seen as tragic in the conventional sense, but in the sense that the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead used it: "the remorseless working of things." Furthermore, Hardin's use of "commons" has frequently been misunderstood, leading Hardin to later remark that he should have titled his work, "The Tragedy of the Unregulated Commons."

Peter Barnes, author of Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons, sees climate change as a pair of tragedies: first of the market, which has no way of curbing its own excesses, and second of government, which fails to protect the atmosphere because polluting corporations are powerful and future generations don't vote.

One of the tragic flaws of our current capitalist system is the destruction of nature. The voracious use of our limited natural resources will continue unless future generations, pollutees, and non-human species are represented in our economic models instead of being dismissed as externalities. We need an economics with less emphasis on mathematics, more plurality, and a return to the human side of the subject. An economics that makes room for ethics and ecology, which have being excluded by the dominant neoclassical economic approach. Saul

 

 

Scientists Fret over Starving and Missing Whales
By LiveScience Staff

posted: 23 October 2006
01:07 pm ET

Finding one 30-ton grey whale in the vast North Pacific might be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but finding 17,000 shouldn't be. But that's the situation researchers faced while searching for the creatures in their traditional summer feeding grounds last season—and the whales' absence has them concerned.

"We've just come off a second summer in Canada in which we've had next to no whales show up," said William Megill of Bath University in the UK. "Not only in our little area, but apparently throughout the traditional feeding areas from Washington on up north. We have no idea where the whales all went this year."

Grey whales usually spend their summers feeding in the waters of the North Pacific, from northern California to the Bering and Chuckchi Seas, because these areas are rich in plankton. But lately these regions haven't seemed to provide enough food for the whales.

"We know that the Bering Sea has taken a beating over the last ten years, and that productivity has plummeted there, forcing the whales into new habitat," Megill said today.

But researchers haven't yet found where these new feeding grounds might be.

"Presumably they found other feeding areas, but they will have had to look hard," Megill said. "This suggests they may be quite lean this winter, particularly as this is now the second summer they've had to deal with this problem."

Megill plans to study the impact of these changed feeding patterns on the whales as they spend the winter in the warm lagoons off Baja California, where they breed and give birth to their calves [video].

The 6,000-mile journey between their summer and winter homes is one of the longest known mammal migrations on the planet.

Generally, the whales rarely feed in their winter breeding grounds in and around Baja, but researchers observed them trying to feed from the lagoon bottoms last winter.

"How much they were getting out of the mud they were sifting, I don't know," Megill said. "But there was a lot of it going on, more than I'm used to seeing. We're expecting to see the animals feeding even more in Mexican waters this year."

Although they were removed from the endangered species list in 1994 because populations had recovered after nearly being hunted to extinction, the grey whales still face an uncertain future.

The bad news is here, but in California, the potential for sea level rise isn't even an issue. Maybe that would create a whole new generation of beachfront property. Wasn't that the story of the Lex Luthor's plan in the first Superman movie. Sea level rise is going to happen and it seems bizarre that the U.S. government is planning to spend tens of millions of dollars on dumping sand on beaches in California. All of the sand would wash away during the first winter rains. Serge

Scientists Say Millions Could Flee Rising Seas

November 10, 2006 — By Daniel Wallis, Reuters
NAIROBI — Nations must make plans to help tens of millions of "sea level refugees" if climate change continues to ravage the world's oceans, German researchers said on Thursday.

Waters are rising and warming, increasing the destructive power of storms, they said, and seas are becoming more acidic, threatening to throw entire food chains into chaos.

"In the long run, sea level rises are going to be the most severe impact of global warming on human society," said Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, presenting a report by German scientists at a major United Nations climate change meeting.

Warming could melt ice sheets and raise water levels, and the report said nations should already be considering making a "managed retreat" from the most endangered areas, including low-lying island states, parts of Bangladesh or even the U.S. state of Florida.

A report by international scientists who advise the U.N. has predicted a sea level rise of up to 88 cm between 1990 and 2100.