Re: SC37

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=31703a5f-450f-4f24-9398-4458b6675db0&p=1

Signs of life out there, disaster back here

Dumping of CO2 threatens oceans with massive extinction, scientist says

Unless we halt completely the emission of carbon dioxide from the world's energy systems, we risk an oceanic catastrophe worse than the one associated with the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

That's the message a chemical oceanographer and environmental scientist intends to deliver to a conference on the future of the world's oceans today at the University of Victoria.

Ken Caldeira, who teaches out of the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University in California, says the level of acidification caused by dumping hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the world's oceans is so great that it could cause a major disruption on par with, or worse than, the sudden dumping of sulphuric acid into the oceans 65 million years ago when an asteroid slammed into the Earth's surface.

When that happened, he said, it took 500,000 years for plankton to reappear, two million years for corals to redevelop, and 10 million years for the current level of oceanic biodiversity to re-emerge.

And unless drastic steps are taken now, Caldeira says, a similar marine disaster could occur within the next few decades.

"We risk a catastrophic event that's on the scale of what happened in the ocean when the dinosaurs became extinct."...........

.........."Business as usual," he said, will mean "a massive extinction of life in the oceans and on land."..............