Global warming stoked '05 hurricanes, study says
USA Today
Updated 6/23/2006 12:05 PM ET
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

"Global warming helped fuel 2005's destructive hurricane season, researchers said Thursday. Their study adds to a roiling scientific debate over the role of climate change in spurring more intense hurricanes.

'About half of last year's extra (ocean) warmth was due to global warming,' says a co-author of the study, Kevin Trenberth of the federally funded National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. That translates into an increase in ocean temperatures of just under 1 degree Fahrenheit above natural year-to-year variability in temperatures."

The article continues "Sea-surface temperatures are key because hurricanes are essentially heat engines. They draw energy from warm ocean waters and release it in tremendous storms."

QUOTATION OF THE DAY 11/3/06
"When humans get into trouble they are quick to change their ways. We still have rhinos and tigers and elephants because we saw a clear trend that was going down and we changed it. We have to do the same in the oceans."
BORIS WORM, of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, on threats to fish species.

Article in The Seattle Times
Nation & World: Sunday, June 10, 2001
                  *****
White abalone fights for survival
By Kenneth R. Weiss
Los Angeles Times

"White abalone, the most succulent and rarest of California's abalone populations, is receiving federal protection as an endangered species.

The abalone has been off-limits to harvesting for five years. Placing it on the endangered-species list, as the federal government did May 29, imposes criminal penalties for harvesting and may make federal money available to help revive the species.
White abalones once were so plentiful that divers found 5,000 of the mollusks per acre in waters off Southern California. Now, there are fewer than 2,600 adult white abalones scattered throughout their range from Point Conception north of Santa Barbara through much of Baja California."

"White abalone became a delicacy in seafood houses and high-end restaurants beginning in the late 1960s. Populations crashed from overfishing. "We just weren't paying attention," said Gary Davis, an abalone expert and science adviser to the Channel Island National Park."

"The strategy was to take the big ones and leave the smaller ones to reproduce. But the surviving small ones were scattered so far apart they couldn't find each other to reproduce."

Scientists estimate that more than 99 percent of the species has vanished, declining from as many as 4.24 million white abalones to somewhere between 1,613 and 2,540 today, according to scuba- submarine surveys."

Full story: http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=abalone10&date=20010610

USA Today 7/5/06
Corals and shelled sea creatures face an uncertain future in oceans made increasingly corrosive by the industrial emissions that fuel global warming, a government report warned Wednesday.

From corals to sea snails to microscopic plankton, the creatures affected underpin many ocean food chains, say the authors of the report, a document reflecting the views of 50 top experts in ocean chemistry. The research was sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other federal agencies.
Coral reefs are living things, built of the calcium-carbonate skeletons of microscopic sea creatures. They serve as home to a diverse array of fish species and as nurseries to many others. Increasingly acidic waters slow the ability of sea creatures to secrete calcium carbonate. And at high enough concentrations, acid actually eats away at their shells, posing an obvious threat to beings such as sea snails that rely on shells for protection from predators, says report co-author Victoria Fabry of California State University in San Marcos.