Something big is going on out there

With a record number of dead seabirds washing up on West Coast beaches from Central California to British Columbia, marine biologists are raising the alarm about rising ocean temperatures and dwindling plankton populations."Something big is going on out there," said Julia Parrish, an associate professor in the School of Aquatic Fisheries and Sciences at the University of Washington. "I'm left with no obvious smoking gun, but birds are a good signal because they feed high up on the food chain."

The bird deaths are between 5 and 10 times greater the highest ever previously recorded. In the past, researchers found one dead Brandt's cormorant for each 34 miles of beach. This May they averaged one every eight-tenths of a mile.

The culprit may be the higher ocean temperatures---from 2 to 5 degrees above normal near the coast.

In some scenarios years ago, the effects of global heating would show up in the ocean last. Today they may be showing up first. Sensitivity to temperature may be the main reason, but the hotter water may also be just the last straw. Toxic chemicals have already killed off fish and other sea life, and there are high levels of toxic substances in many of the survivors.

Environmentalist David Suzuki talks about the canary in the coal mine, kept there because toxi fumes killed them first, warning miners of danger so the miners would flee. Now, he said, the canaries are dying all around us and we ignore them. This is a literal case of that.

It's not just the climate crisis. Suzuki reminds us that asthma was almost unheard of among children in the 1930s. Now in North American cities, one in four children are affected. Robert Kennedy, Jr. talks about the high levels of mercury in the bloodstreams of his own children, while nothing is done, and Americans permit the Bush administration to gut regulations, destroy existing law and do whatever the polluting and climate altering industries want.

Suzuki and Kennedy ask us, if we can't pay attention to what's happening to our own children, what kind of a species are we? If something big is going on out there in the ocean, it's going to mean far more to us and the future than whether Karl Rove gets canned or Paris Hilton gets a blue collar pal.

Print Story: Scientists Raise Alarm About Ocean Health on Yahoo! News

UPDATE: And this story, UNESCO investigating climate crisis effects on world heritage natural sites, which turns out to be a mechanism to pressure governments to take action on global heating.