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Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Oxygen


Here is my comment on that video:
"The oceans are not prospering."

This is a simple statement of fact. I have seen it for myself, snorkeling 10 years apart in St. John. The reefs have gone from brilliant colors to grey.

Fish populations have plummeted world-wide. The oceans are warming, acidifying and rising. These are empirical facts, not scientific conspiracies.

I would add that the same process of changing our climate is wreaking havoc on the terrestrial environment as well. Aside from CO2 raising average global temperatures, the "other" greenhouse gases - nitrous oxide, sulphur dioxide and volatile organic compounds, the precursors to inexorably rising tropospheric ozone - are toxic to all forms of life. Ozone causes cancer, emphysema and asthma in humans.

Ozone is even more poisonous to vegetation. Crop losses world-wide are in the billions of dollars every year. Ozone is killing the trees, which are in a rapid decline similar to what is happening to coral reefs.

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