Tag Archives: blue marble

The Craziest Things Republican Candidates Have Said About Climate Change In One Video

by Nathan64Pdlnc Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared in the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Can the GOP’s 2014 candidates give a straight answer on climate change? It appears not.

Many Republican candidates have offered roundabout answers to climate change questions. Some have said the climate isn’t changing at all, while others have disputed research showing that human activity is driving those changes. Then there’s Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM), who said during a debate this year that he’s confident our climate isn’t changing because he has “Googled this issue.”

Lee Fang of The Republic Report put together a mash-up of Republican candidates’ greatest hits on climate change this year.

Watch it above.

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The Craziest Things Republican Candidates Have Said About Climate Change In One Video

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5 New York Epidemics That Were Way Worse Than Ebola Will Be

by KayleeSXTE Posted on October 24, 2014

Mother Jones

An 1865 cartoon from Harper’s Weekly ridicules the incompetence of the New York City Board of Health, first established to fight yellow fever. US National Library of Medicine

Ebola has arrived in New York City. So should residents here be worried about a widespread outbreak? Almost certainly not: The disease is not airborne, and infected patients are only contagious once they show symptoms. Craig Spencer, the infected doctor in New York, has said he didn’t have symptoms Wednesday night when he rode the subway between Manhattan and Brooklyn and went bowling. Three people he came into contact with, who have not shown symptoms, have been placed in precautionary quarantine. And unlike West Africa, where health care is sparse and low-quality, the US is well equipped to handle cases of the virus; the hospital where Spencer is being treated has been preparing to treat Ebola patients. (Public heath officials in the city expected cases of Ebola to turn up sooner or later.)

But the prospect of a deadly disease outbreak in the Big Apple is still pretty scary, and the city hasn’t always dodged the pathogen bullet. Here are a few epidemics in New York that were far worse than Ebola is likely to be.

Yellow fever (1795-1803):

The wharf in Philadelphia where yellow fever cases were first identified. Wikimedia Commons

The city’s first health department was created in 1793 to block boats from Philadelphia, which at the time was in the grips of a yellow fever epidemic that left 5,000 dead. The tactic didn’t work: By 1795 cases began to appear in Manhattan, and by 1798 the disease had reached epidemic proportions there, with 800 deaths that year. Several thousand more died over the next few years. (The disease causes victims’ to vomit black bile and their skin to turn yellowish, and the fatality rate without treatment is as high as 50 percent.) This was no small blow for a city that at the time had only about 60,000 residents. As is the case today with Ebola in West Africa, misinformation was a big part of the problem: Doctors at the time had only just begun to speculate that the virus was carried by mosquitoes (other theorized sources included unsanitary conditions in slums and rotting coffee). Little effort was made to publicize the epidemic for fear of a mass exodus from the city, according to Baruch College. Today yellow fever is extremely rare in the United States but still kills 30,000 people every year, 90 percent of whom are in Africa.

Cholera (mid-1800s):

An 1865 poster from the New York City Sanitary Commission offers advice on how to avoid contracting cholera. Wikimedia Commons

By the 1830s New York was a booming metropolis of 200,000, with swarms of newcomers arriving daily on boats from Europe. When word of a raging cholera epidemic in Europe reached the city’s Board of Health, it instituted quarantines on incoming ships and tried to clean up the filthy streets. But again the board was reluctant to make public announcements, this time to avoid disrupting trade, according to city records. One resident claimed the board was “more afraid of merchants than of lying.” By June 1832, the disease, which causes severe diarrhea and can kill within hours if untreated, arrived in New York via boats traveling down the Hudson River from Quebec. Within two months, 3,500 people were dead—mostly poor Irish immigrants and blacks living in the city’s slums. Outbreaks occurred again in 1849, with some 5,000 deaths, and in 1866, with 1,100 deaths.

Polio (1916):

A physical therapist works with two children with polio in 1963. Charles Farmer/CDC

New York City was the epicenter of an outbreak of polio in 1916 that began with a handful of cases reported to a clinic in Brooklyn. The disease, which advances from feverlike symptoms to paralysis and sometimes death, ultimately spread to 9,000 New Yorkers and caused 2,400 deaths. Across the Northeast, the infection toll climbed to 23,000 by the fall. The disease remained prevalent in the United States until the 1954 introduction of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. Polio is now extremely rare here. But worldwide, it still infects 200,000 people every year, particularly in Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan.

Influenza (1918):

In 1918, soldiers with influenza are treated at an Army hospital in Kansas. Wikimedia Commons

In August 1918, a Norwegian ship called the Bergensfjord pulled into New York Harbor carrying 21 people infected with a new and virulent strain of the flu. Over the next several weeks, dozens more arrived, mostly on ships from Europe, and sick passengers were quarantined in a hospital just blocks from the modern-day Bellevue, where Spencer is currently being treated. Those unfortunate sailors were just the first in what would become the deadliest disease outbreak in the city’s history to that date. Over 30,000 deaths were recorded by November—the actual number was likely much higher—including 12,300 during the first week of November alone. One health worker visited a family in lower Manhattan and found an infant dead in its crib and all seven other family members severely ill.

Other nearby cities fared even worse: The death rate in New York was 4.7 per 1,000 cases, compared to 6.5 in Boston and 7.3 in Philadelphia, according to the National Institutes of Health. That may not sound like a lot, given that the Ebola death rate is closer to 50 percent, but because influenza is so easily spread it can infect a much greater number of people. Globally, the 1918 flu killed between 50100 million people, the worst public health crisis in modern times. Today, the flu is still considered the greatest infectious disease risk for Americans, killing between 3,000 and 50,000 every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In other words, it’s possible that more people could die from the flu this year in America than have died worldwide from Ebola during this outbreak. And yet only 1 in 3 Americans get a flu shot. Get a flu shot, people!

HIV/AIDS (1981-present):

An AIDS poster from New York City in the 1980s US National Library of Medicine

The scourge of HIV/AIDS is the most familiar epidemic for modern New Yorkers, beginning with the June 1981 discovery of 41 cases of a rare cancer among gay men across the country. Throughout the 1980s, campaigns by the city encouraged New Yorkers to use protection during sex and not to share needles or use intravenous drugs. By 1987, according to city records, $400 million had been spent on AIDS services. But activists for AIDS rights groups like ACT UP accused city officials, led by Mayor Ed Koch, of dragging their feet and ignoring the true scale of the crisis. It took until the mid-’90s for anti-retroviral drugs to become widely available. Today, for people who have access to adequate health care, HIV is often manageable. But to date, more than 100,000 New Yorkers have been killed by AIDS-related maladies, according to state health statistics. Despite recent advances in medical treatment, infection rates are still high in New York, disproportionately affecting racial minorities and gay men.

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5 New York Epidemics That Were Way Worse Than Ebola Will Be

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People Are Trying to Sell Cinnamon Bark as an Ebola Cure

by ShayneMagee Posted on October 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Marion Nestle reports that several supplement manufacturers are selling vitamins that promise to prevent or treat Ebola. The claims caught the attention of the FDA, which has issued warning letters to three of the manufacturers: Natural Solutions Foundation, Young Living, and DoTERRA International LLC. The agency lists specific claims it finds worrisome; for example, on a Young Living consultant’s website, “Ebola Virus can not live in the presence of cinnamon bark.”

Here’s a screenshot from Natural Solutions Foundations’ website:

An article on the Natural Solutions site talks about “the intentional introduction of Ebola into the United States by what will appear to be ISIS terrorists.” It continues, “And it will happen soon, since we know from Dr. Rima’s research that Ebola can become an airborne disease in temperate climates, such as North America’s coming winter.” It urges readers to prepare by stocking up on supplements that contain nanoparticles of silver: “The only protection we have against this new level of tyranny is making sure we do not get sick!!! The best way to do that is to make sure that EVERYONE you can reach has Nano Silver and knows how to use it.”

Another supposed natural Ebola cure making the rounds: Vitamin C. Nestle found this gem on an alternative health information site called NaturalHealth365, which claims that a giant dose of vitamin C can cure Ebola (though it doesn’t actually sell Vitamin C):

NaturalHealth365

It’s not terribly surprising that supplement manufacturers have seized on Ebola. A new Harvard School of Public Health poll has found that 38 percent of Americans (up from 25 percent a few months ago) “are now concerned that they or someone in their immediate family may get sick with Ebola over the next year.” That’s quite a market.

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People Are Trying to Sell Cinnamon Bark as an Ebola Cure

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It’s Now Illegal to Kill Wolves in Wyoming

by BeulahWinchcomb Posted on September 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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For the past two years, killing a wolf in Wyoming was pretty simple. In a trophy game area near the border of Yellowstone, licensed hunters were allowed to take a certain number of gray wolves. In the rest of the state, or about 80 percent of Wyoming’s land, anyone could kill a limitless number of them on sight.

Read “10 Reasons We Need Wolves”

But that’s about to change. A judge ruled Tuesday that the animals’ delisting in 2012, which handed management of the species over to the Wyoming government, was “arbitrary and capricious,” and that the state isn’t ready to manage wolf populations on its own. The move has wolf activists breathing a sigh of relief; Wyoming’s management plan, as Sierra Club’s Bonnie Rice put it, could have potentially taken wolves “back to the brink of extinction.” Judge Amy Berman Jackson did not challenge the previous finding that wolves had recovered and that the species “is not endangered or threatened within a significant portion of its range.” But even so, her ruling means that Wyoming’s wolves will again enjoy protections under the Endangered Species Act and can no longer be hunted—at least in the short term.

While as many as 2 million gray wolves once roamed North America, the carnivores were nearly wiped out by humans by the early 1900s. Roughly 5,500 remain today, though an uptick in laws permitting wolf hunting in states like Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana, and Idaho all threaten to keep the animals scarce. Wyoming’s hunting and “kill-on-sight” policies, for instance, meant 219 wolves were gunned down since 2012, according to Earthjustice.

In part because wolves were reintroduced in Wyoming, whether to kill or protect this predator remains a very polarizing issue in the state. Wolves kill farm animals and pets, pissing off ranchers and rural landowners alike and feeding into the attitude that the canids are just a deadly nuisance. A Facebook photo posted last year by hunting outfitters, for instance, shows a group of hunters posing with a dead wolf with blood covering its paws and mouth. The caption reads “Wyoming if FED up.” Commenters responded with notes like “the only good Canadian gray wolf to me is a dead Canadian gray wolf” and “Keep on killing guys!”

But scientists and conservationists have fought hard to restore this species into the North American ecosystem. Studies have shown that wolves maintain balance in the environment: they prey on other large mammals like moose and elk, whose populations (and eating habits) can get out of control without a predator to keep them in check; their hunting helps feed scavengers like wolverines, bald eagles, and mountain lions; their predation can force elk to hang out in smaller groups, thereby reducing the spread of diseases; and they’ve even been found to be good for the soil.

By restoring protections to gray wolves, states Rice in a press release, “the court has rightly recognized the deep flaws in Wyoming’s wolf management plan.” She argues that the state needs to reevaluate how it treats the animal and develop “a science-based management plan that recognizes the many benefits wolves bring to the region.”

The conservation groups that sued after the wolves were delisted in 2012 include Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, and the Center for Biological Diversity. Though yesterday’s news comes as a victory to these groups, a bigger hurdle lies ahead: The US Fish and Wildlife has proposed to remove the gray wolf from the federal Endangered Species list altogether based on the animals’ perceived recovery. A final decision is expected later this year.

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It’s Now Illegal to Kill Wolves in Wyoming

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Carbon Emissions Are Higher Than Ever, and Rising

by EusebiaWaite Posted on September 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Yesterday was a good day for the climate movement, as over 300,000 people—according to the event’s organizers—descended on Manhattan for the biggest climate change march in history. The record-breaking turnout was a powerful sign that climate change is gaining traction in mainstream consciousness.

But even as the marchers were marching, new science was released that underscores how just how little time the world has left to break its addiction to fossil fuels. Global carbon emissions are the highest they’ve ever been, and are on the rise, according to a new climate study published in Nature Geoscience over the weekend.

The study totaled global carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production—which together account for over 90 percent of total emissions—and found that they rose 2.3 percent in 2013 to their highest level ever recorded, approximately 36.1 metric gigatons.

Emissions have been on the rise for decades, setting a new record almost every year. The rate of emissions growth has increased since the 1990s—when it was 1 percent per year—to the last decade, when the average annual growth rate has been around 3 percent. The rate of growth in 2013 was actually slower than in 2012, the study found, reflecting energy efficiency improvements in the US and Europe that have reduced the amount of carbon emitted per unit of GDP. But that obscures increasing rates of growth in emissions from China and India. Globally, greenhouse gas emissions are still on pace to trigger what scientists say could be a catastrophic amount of warming, said Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter, the study’s lead author.

“China will be twice as much in 10 years,” Friedlingstein said. “We need to change the trend. There’s a need to reduce emissions in every country.”

Which brings us to the really unsettling part of this report—its attempt to pin down exactly how long we have to make that happen. Climate scientists often talk about a carbon “budget,” which is the total cumulative emissions that will lead to a specified level of global warming. To have a better-than-even chance to stay within a 3.6 degree Fahrenheit increase over 1990s temperatures, the international standard for a reasonably safe level of warming, our global carbon budget is 3,200 gigatons. Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve used up about two-thirds of that. On our current path, the study finds, we’ll use up the rest in just the next 30 years.

In other words, if the emissions trend isn’t reversed before 2045, we would have to drop immediately to zero carbon emissions on the first day of 2046. Since an instantaneous gearshift like that is obviously impossible, there’s a need to bring emissions under control in the short term. That way we can stretch the “budget” for many more years and not face a choice between catastrophic climate change or a plunge into the Dark Ages.

We’ll get an updated sense of how serious world leaders are about that goal at tomorrow’s United Nations climate summit, which is meant as a curtain-raiser for major international climate negotiations next year in Paris.

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Carbon Emissions Are Higher Than Ever, and Rising

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BP Lashes Out at Journalists and “Opportunistic” Environmentalists

by ChristoSprouse Posted on September 4, 2014

Mother Jones

News of this morning’s federal court decision against BP broke as I was aboard a 40-foot oyster boat in the Louisiana delta, just off the coast of Empire, a suburb of New Orleans.

The reaction: stunned silence. Then a bit of optimism.

“This is huge,” said John Tesvich, chair of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force, his industry’s main lobby group in the state. “They are going to have to pay a lot more.” Standing on his boat, the “Croatian Pride,” en route to survey oyster farms, he added: “We want to see justice. We hope that this money goes to helping cure some of the environmental issues in this state.”

On Thursday, a federal judge in New Orleans found that the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster—in which the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 people and spilling millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf—was caused by BP’s “willful misconduct” and “gross negligence.”

Tesvich says he’s seen a drastic decline in his company’s oyster production since then—company profits down 15 to 20 percent and oyster yields slashed by 30 percent. He says he’s suspicious that this new decision will force the kind of action from local politicians needed to clean up the Gulf once-and-for-all. The politicians in Louisiana, he says, “haven’t been the best environmental stewards.”

BP’s own reaction to the news has been fast and pointed. “BP strongly disagrees with the decisionâ&#128;&#139;,” the company said in a statement on Thursday, published to its website. “BP believes that an impartial view of the record does not support the erroneous conclusion reached by the District Court.”

The company said it would immediately appeal the decision.

With the fourth anniversary of the busted well’s final sealing coming up in a couple weeks, BP has been pushing back aggressively against the company’s critics. On Wednesday night—just hours before the court’s ruling—Geoff Morrell, the company’s vice president of US communications, spoke in New Orleans at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference, and blamed the media and activists for BP’s rough ride.

The company’s efforts to clean up the spill have been obscured, he said, by the ill-intentioned efforts of “opportunistic” environmentalists, shoddy science, and the sloppy work of environmental journalists (much to the chagrin of his audience, hundreds of environmental journalists).

“It’s clear that the apocalypse forecast did not come to pass,” he said. “The environmental impacts of the spill were not as far-reaching or long-lasting as many predicted.”

Back in 2010, BP’s then-CEO Tony Hayward lamented—a month after the explosion—that he wanted his “life back.” He didn’t find much sympathy at the time. Within a couple months, he resigned out of the spotlight (with a $930,000 petroleum parachute). But his flub didn’t retire so easily, and it became emblematic of BP’s astonishing capacity for tone-deafness, something Morrell seemed intent on continuing Wednesday.

Morrell said that while “impolitic” remarks had been made by BP officials in the past, the spill’s aftermath has been “tough on all of us.”

I can only imagine.

I can faithfully report that no rotten tomatoes were hurled during Morrell’s talk, and grumbles and cynical chuckles were kept to a polite murmur. But the response on Twitter was more free-flowing:

Yup, that last one is true.

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BP Lashes Out at Journalists and “Opportunistic” Environmentalists

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BP Was Just Found Grossly Negligent in the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster. Read the Full Ruling.

by TheresaBitner Posted on September 4, 2014

Mother Jones

In a blunt ruling handed down on Thursday, a federal judge in New Orleans found that the biggest oil spill in US history, the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster, was caused by BP’s “willful misconduct” and “gross negligence.”

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 people and spilling millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf over the next several months. According to Bloomberg, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit include “the federal government, five Gulf of Mexico states, banks, restaurants, fishermen and a host of others.”

The case also includes two other companies that were involved in aspects of the design and function of the Deepwater Horizon—Transocean and Halliburton—though the bulk of the blame was reserved for BP.

“BP’s conduct was reckless,” wrote District Judge Carl Barbier, in a 153-page ruling. “Transocean’s conduct was negligent. Halliburton’s conduct was negligent.”

The judge ruled that BP was responsible for 67 percent of the blowout, explosion and subsequent oil spill, while Transocean was at fault for 30 percent, and Halliburton for the remaining 3 percent.

According to Bloomberg, BP could face fines of as much as $18 billion.

Here’s the full ruling.

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BP Was Just Found “Grossly Negligent” in the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster. Read the Full Ruling. (PDF)

BP Was Just Found “Grossly Negligent” in the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster. Read the Full Ruling. (Text)

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BP Was Just Found Grossly Negligent in the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster. Read the Full Ruling.

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Earthquake Warning Systems Exist. But California Won’t Pay for One.

by JoelParrott Posted on August 26, 2014

Mother Jones

As Bay Area residents clean their streets and homes after the biggest earthquake to hit California in 25 years rocked Napa Valley this weekend, scientists are pushing lawmakers to fund a statewide system that could warn citizens about earthquakes seconds before they hit.

California already has a system, called ShakeAlert, that uses a network of sensors around the state to detect earthquakes just before they happen. The system—a collaboration between the University of California-Berkeley, Caltech, the US Geological Survey (USGS), and various state offices—detects a nondestructive current called a P-wave that emanates from a quake’s epicenter just before the destructive S-wave shakes the earth. ShakeAlert has successfully predicted several earthquakes, including this weekend’s Napa quake. It could be turned into a statewide warning system. But so far, the money’s not there.

“For years, seismic monitoring has been funded, essentially, on a shoestring,” says Peggy Hellweg, operations manager at UC-Berkeley’s seismological lab.

Maintaining ShakeAlert in its current state costs $15 million a year—a tiny fraction of the estimated $1 billion in damage caused by the Napa quake. Turning it into a statewide early-warning system would require installing new earthquake sensors throughout the state, building faster connections between sensors and data centers, and upgrading the data centers themselves. Since many of California’s population centers, including the Bay Area, sit on fault lines, a warning system would likely give residents little time to prepare, ranging “from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds,” depending on a person’s proximity to the earthquake’s epicenter, according to ShakeAlert’s website—not enough time to leave a large building, but perhaps enough to take cover under a desk or table. Warnings could be deployed via text messages, push notifications, or publicly funded alert systems. Setting the whole thing up could cost as much as $80 million over five years—and keeping it running would cost more than $16 million annually, according to a USGS implementation plan published earlier this year.

In September 2013, the California legislature passed a bill requiring the state’s emergency management office to work with private companies to develop an early warning system, but forbade it from pulling money from the state’s general fund. The effort got a boost last month when the House appropriations committee approved $5 million for the system, the first time Congress has allocated money for a statewide system. But the project is still short on funding.

An earthquake early-warning system would not be a unprecedented: Similar systems already exist in China, India, Italy, Romania, Taiwan, and Turkey. In Mexico City, a warning system connected to sensors 200 miles to the south gave residents two minutes’ warning before a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck earlier this year—enough time for many to leave buildings and congregate in open areas.

More than 200 people were injured following last weekend’s Napa earthquake, 17 of them seriously, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Among those hit was a boy who was hit by debris from a falling chimney.

On Monday, the USGS said the likelihood of a “strong and possibly damaging” aftershock (magnitude 5.0 or higher) occurring within the next week was around 29 percent.

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Earthquake Warning Systems Exist. But California Won’t Pay for One.

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5 Ways Climate Change Is Ruining Your Breakfast

by ArielO42brir Posted on August 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Welcome to the worst breakfast-related crisis since Lord of the Rings: There might be an impending Nutella shortage. And there’s a good chance the culprit is climate change.

The price of hazelnuts, a main ingredient in the delicious chocolate spread, is up 60 percent after unseasonable ice storms devastated hazel tree farms in Turkey’s Black Sea coastal region this year. And colder winters and heavier precipitation are exactly what the EU’s Centre for Climate Adaptation says the Black Sea coast should expect as climate change advances. Though Nutella’s manufacturer hasn’t raised its prices yet, it’s facing increasing strain as palm oil and cocoa get more expensive, too.

It would be bad enough if Nutella were the only food that melting ice caps and changing weather patterns are threatening to rob from the breakfast table. But no—the list of climate change’s culinary casualties goes on. Here are some other ways it’s making the most important meal of the day a little less satisfying:

  1. Rising cereal prices. Kix might be kid-tested and mother-approved, but have fun buying them in 2030, when their cost could be as much as 24 percent higher due to drought-stricken grain crops, according to an Oxfam International report. (And that doesn’t even account for inflation.) Lovers of Frosted Flakes and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes should also start stockpiling now—Oxfam predicts their respective prices will rise by 20 and 30 percent by 2030.
  2. A global bacon shortage. The aporkalypse is nigh. Even if you’re on a no-carb diet, shrinking grain supplies are bad news. Pricier corn and soybeans equals pricier pig feed, and pricier pig feed equals smaller pig herds. In 2012, Britain’s National Pig Association announced that a pork and bacon shortage “is now unavoidable.”
  3. Bland-but-costly coffee. There’s an epic drought in Brazil, the world’s largest coffee exporter. As a result, one commodities trading firm says caffeine addicts will consume 5 million more bags of beans than coffee growers can produce in the 2014-2015 season, and the price of coffee futures has already doubled to $2 a pound. To make matters worse, beans grown at higher temperatures don’t develop the blend of aromatic compounds that give coffee its distinctive flavor.
  4. Waffle woes. The nation had to collectively leggo its Eggos in November 2009, when record flooding in Atlanta stopped waffle production at the local Kellogg plant. Sure, this has happened once so far, but according to the Environmental Protection Agency, “projected sea level rise, increased hurricane intensity, and associated storm surge may lead to further erosion, flooding, and property damage in the Southeast.”

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5 Ways Climate Change Is Ruining Your Breakfast

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Humans Have Tripled Mercury in the Oceans

by Perry67Yfbpuqm Posted on August 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, researchers released the first comprehensive study of mercury in the world’s oceans over time according to depth. Their finding: Since the Industrial Revolution, the burning of fossil fuels and some mining activities have resulted in a more than three times increase in mercury in the upper 100 meters (about 330 feet) of the ocean. There, it builds up in carnivorous species like tuna—a food staple in the US that health experts have been concerned about for years because of its high mercury levels. Much of the 290 million moles (a unit of measure for chemical substances) of mercury in the ocean right now is concentrated in the North Atlantic.

A neurotoxin, mercury is especially dangerous for children and babies: The American Academy of Pediatrics warns that exposure to it can lead to “poor mental development, cerebral palsy, deafness and blindness.” In adults, mercury poising can lead to problems with blood pressure regulation, memory, vision, and sensation in fingers and toes, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. And if that wasn’t scary enough, it’s invisible, odorless, and hiding in fish meat.

The researchers say that the increase in mercury levels is starting to overcome the natural ocean circulation patterns. Typically, the coldest, saltiest water in the world’s oceans naturally sinks and brings much of the mercury along with it, offering shelter to marine life from the chemicals. But now, because of the sheer volume of the stuff, the circulation of water can no longer keep mercury out of shallower depths. According to co-author Carl Lamborg, humans are “starting to overwhelm the ability of deep water formation to hide some of that mercury from us.” According to David Krebbenhoft, a geochemist working for the US Geological Survey, these shifts are directly correlated to the increase in mercury outputs over time.

The good news: If we can curb power plant mercury emissions and buy more products with reduced mercury, we can expect to see ocean mercury levels drop in the future. Says Krebbenhoft, “It’s cause for optimism and should make us excited to do something about it because we may actually have an impact.”

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Humans Have Tripled Mercury in the Oceans

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