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Uniting Ocean and Earth for Climate Action

By Courtney Mattison  This winter, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris will feature one of the largest gatherings of world leaders to ever address global warming. The stage is set for all United Nations member states to come together and create an international agreement on the climate with the goal of keeping global warming below 2°C. In anticipation of this opportunity, President Barack Obama announced an action plan to combat climate change in June. Also this summer, Pope Francis demonstrated a masterful understanding of the science behind global warming and urged Catholics to take immediate action to combat greenhouse gas emissions in his recently released encyclical. Even China, the world’s heaviest polluter, has committed to significantly reduce its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.…

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Hurricanes are Making History this Year

Did you know that the 2015 tropical cyclone season in the Northern Hemisphere is already the most active on record? It’s a fact. Check out the graph below published by The Weather Channel and created by Colorado State University tropical scientist Dr. Phil Klotzbach and National Hurricane Center specialist Eric Blake. The take away: we are breaking records this year with the frequency of large weather events in the Northern Hemisphere.

The effects of this intensifying trend were more than evident on Mission Blue’s recent Gulf of California Hope Spot expedition. For starters, the original expedition was slated to launch in September of 2014. Those plans, however, were scuttled in the face of Hurricane Odile, a major category 4 hurricane that is known as the most powerful landfalling tropical cyclone ever recorded.…

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Sea Lion Pups Starving Along California Coast

By Courtney Mattison
Sea lion pups are starving and washing up on California beaches for the third consecutive year. Every winter since January 2013, throngs of sickly young sea lions have stranded themselves on beaches and in seaside backyards and parking lots in California coastal communities, often weighing less than half of their ideal body weight. “They’re extremely emaciated, basically starving to death,” says veterinarian Shawn Johnson of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito.
Over 2,000 emaciated, dehydrated and diseased sea lion pups have washed up on California’s shores from San Diego to San Francisco since the beginning of 2015. For the two-month period of January and February this year, California sea lion strandings were almost 20 times the average stranding rate.[i]…

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Priority chemicals and marine biodiversity

From our new partners at the GOES Foundation (Global Oceanic Environmental Survey):
by Dr. Howard Dryden, GOES Founder
Nature 2010 and Nature 2011 reported that there has been a 40% drop in primary productivity in the North Atlantic since the 1950s. At the same time, oceanic pH started to decline sharply, causing seawater to acidify.  This trend may be related to an increase in industrial output and carbon dioxide emissions. However, as a marine biologist specializing in some of the largest aquarium life support systems in the world, I know that carbon dioxide is used to increase primary productivity. Woods Hole reported that an increase in carbon dioxide increased photosynthetic productivity, yet over the last 60 years there may have been a reduction by 40%.…

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Pope to Urge Action on Climate Change

The words Pope and Catholic Church may not often occur in the same sentence as climate change, but that is all about to change. This year is set to be a major milestone in humanity’s acceptance of our impacts on global warming as Pope Francis embarks on a mission to protect the planet.
Pope Francis has already stated that the greatest “sin” is destroying God’s Creation, and humanity’s contributions to climate change are doing just that.[i] Early last year, Pope Francis told a crowd in Rome, “if we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us!” According to the Associated Press and The Guardian, these statements may soon grow into an official Church document called an “encyclical,” instructing the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics to acknowledge human-caused climate change and act to fight it because doing so is essential to their faith.[ii]…

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Speaking Up for the Ocean During Climate Week NYC

By Courtney Mattison
Climate Week is in full swing and started out with a spectacular series of events in New York City last weekend, many of which related to the ocean. While the ocean was not (to many conservationists’ surprise and dismay) a focal point of the UN Climate Summit with world leaders yesterday, it has received the attention it deserves for absorbing carbon dioxide (CO2) and bearing the brunt of climate change at numerous independent events.
On Saturday night, the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) illuminated the 30-story United Nations Headquarters with a magnificent architectural-scale public light display of inspiring imagery ranging from macro footage of undulating coral polyps to a vast landscape of the aftermath of an oil spill. The visual effects were dynamic, constantly morphing and pulsing into one another with music and creating an experience that was at times haunting and at others uplifting.…

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Our Lonely Home in Nature

By Alan Lightman
The tornadoes that devastated parts of the South and Midwest this Spring, just weeks after a deadly mudslide in Washington, demonstrated once again the unimaginable power of nature.
After each disaster, we grieve over the human lives lost, the innocent people drowned or crushed without warning as they slept in their beds, worked in their fields or sat at their office desks. We feel angry at the scientists and policy makers who didn’t foresee the impending calamity or, if forewarned, failed to protect us. Beyond the grieving and anger is a more subtle emotion. We feel betrayed. We feel betrayed by nature.
Aren’t we a part of nature, born in nature, sustained by the food brought forth by nature, warmed by the natural sun?…

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Art brings the coral reef crisis above the surface

By Courtney Mattison
Coral reefs have captivated my imagination for as long as I can remember. I am happiest when the exotic forms, vibrant colors and often-venomous appendages of the animals that inhabit a tropical reef dance through the window of my scuba mask as I slowly hover above. Maybe it’s because I’m relatively small and I respect small creatures that can build big beautiful things, but I feel like I relate to corals – arguably one of the least relatable animals – on a very deep level.
I often feel like a coral, working in my studio using simple tools and my hands to methodically sculpt and texture clay to construct large, delicate, stony structures that mimic the prolific reef-builders.…

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The Entire IPCC Climate Change Report – in Illustrated Haiku!

Originally published in it’s entirety at Sightline Daily, by Anna Fahey. Edited by Mission Blue.
Reports released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can be daunting, even for science and policy insiders. The full Physical Science Assessment, the first installment of the Fifth Assessment Report(pdf), released in manuscript form earlier this year, is over 2,000 pages long.
And even the Summary for Policymakers, rather optimistically referred to as a “brochure,” is a dense 27 pages.
What if we could communicate the essence of this important information in plain language and pictures? Well, that’s just what one Northwest oceanographer has done. He’s distilled the entire report into 19 illustrated haiku.
The result is stunning, sobering, and brilliant. It’s poetry. It’s a work of art.…

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Pacific Warriors: We’re not drowning. We are fighting.

There is global war underway. This war is being fought to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

The Carbon War Room was set up by Ocean Elder Sir Richard Branson and was established to harness the power of entrepreneurs to unlock gigaton-scale, market driven solutions to climate change. President José María Figueres has explained that their war effort is necessary because “there is no Planet B.”

People are fighting this global war on many fronts and in many ways. Nowhere is the need for lowering our carbon emissions more obvious than in the Pacific island countries where the carbon emissions are tiny, but the impact from carbon driven climate change is most serious and already resulting in climate refugees and climate-driven evacuation plans across the Pacific region.…

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