Enric Sala, Claire Nouvian and Marcia McNutt in Penobscot Bay, off the coast of Maine. (More photos from Pop!Tech 2007)

On a Wednesday session preceding the Pop!Tech conference last week, a group of participants sailed from Camden, Maine through Penobscot Bay on the Appledore schooner with Marcia McNutt, Claire Nouvian, Enric Sala and Ted Ames.

Ames, Nouvian and Sala talked about sustainable fishing and ways to encourage resilient ecosystems. Then McNutt spoke up. With dark sunglasses and a hooded black coat shielding her against the wind, the President and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute looked a bit like the grim reaper as she offered a vivid analogy to understand the impact of bottom trawling and tuna farming: “We clear-cut a forest to catch a deer. Then we feed the deer to tigers, and finally, we eat the tigers.” We’re not just taking the fish out of the ocean, but we’re also destroying the ability to regenerate habitat. Even if we stop trawling the ocean, it may not recover.

While the imagery of empty oceans sunk in, she got down to business, explaining that in the long term, ocean acidification dwarfs any fishing issues and even global warming. Most of the discussions about climate change seem to be around our human habitat and atmosphere over land, but approximately 71% of the earth’s surface is covered by water. The rising amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere will profoundly affect everything from top to bottom, from microbes to whales in several ways:

• CO2 is fundamentally changing the ocean’s chemistry, resulting in ocean acidification.
• Ocean warming directly impacts humans and marine life in multiple ways, including sea level rise, increased storm intensity, habitat shifts and receding coastlines.
• Climate change disrupts food supplies for marine organisms, from the base of the food chain to humans.

Ocean acidification in particular is bad for all species. There will be losers and big losers. Species with calcium carbonate shells and skeletons, such as clams, sea urchins, corals and microscopic plants that make up the base of the ocean food chain, will Microbial life will dominate the ocean — they are the only species that evolve fast enough. intact ecosystems are more resilient to climactic change.

McNutt recommends Reading Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed to get an understanding of the big issues. She noted that humans seem to have a goldfish memory when it comes to the oceans, so learn all you can, teach your children well and vote for action around climate and pollution issues.

Technorati Tags: climate change, maine, ocean acidification, oceans, poptech2007, marcia mcnutt, sustainability

Pop!Cast from Marcia McNutt’s presentation at Pop!Tech 2006: