Oysters and Dabob Bay
CO2 and policy and politics in Washington State got some New York Times attention yesterday: nytimes.com/2014/08/04/us/as-oysters-die-climate-policy-goes-on-stump
Ralph Schwartz adds a little local perspective ny-times-shows-that-stances-on-coal-terminal-look-fuzzy-at-a-distance.
While Washington State comes out better as far as future climate change in model predictions relative to other locations and even sea level rise will be less here than the world average, it turns out that we will see much greater and earlier impacts due to changes in carbonate availability in local sea water. A change that has local shell fish folks very concerned. A couple of previous posts on ocean changes due to CO2: ocean-co2-yes-it-is-alarming and more-notes-on-ocean-acidification.
I will add that at the Washington State political level Governor Inslee is a CO2 optimist in his view that the State can make a difference. It really is too bad that CO2 has been caught up in party tribalism and that not a single Washington Sate GOP member of the State Senate can act on CO2.
Not being a climatologist (I am only a geologist), perhaps I don't have the right training and experience. But I continue to wonder why virtually all projected impacts of climate change due to the release of industrial gasses are reported to be negative. It seems reasonable to me that some aspects of climate change would induce negative (harmful to life) impacts while perhaps an equal number of positive impacts would also occur. There is, after all, nothing particularly special about the climate that we want to hang on to.
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