Oceans in the news: December

Here's another post discussing oceans in the news. Unfortunately, there have not been many articles recently, so both of these are early on in December!

4^th December – ‘Experts say the IPCC underestimated future sea level rise’

(The Guardian, 2013)

The article discusses a new study in Quaternary Science Reviews that argues the past IPCC predictions of sea level rise are too conservative. In the paper, the authors conducted a literature survey to find the top 360 sea-level experts before conducting 90 questionnaires. The scientists were asked how large they believed sea level rise would be, under different greenhouse case scenarios, by 2100 and 2300.

In summary:

• The sea-level rise ranges provided by the experts are on average higher than those of the IPCC 5th assessment (see Figure 1).
• For the best case scenario, with strong mitigation, the likely range is 0.4–0.6 m by AD 2100 and 0.6–1.0 m by AD 2300.
•  For the unmitigated warming scenario, the likely ranges are 0.7–1.2 m by AD 2100 and 2–3 m by AD 2300. 

Figure 1. Scenarios of future sea-level rise between 2000-2100 generated from the survey results. Blue represents strong mitigation whilst red denotes the unmitigated scenario. For comparison, the current NOAA sea-level scenarios (dashed lines) and IPCC predictions are shown alongside (vertical bars).

As can be seen, the paper’s predictions are significantly higher than those recently made by IPCC, reflecting the increasing pessimism about future sea level rise. The fact that the scientists in this study were polled individually meant they could express their own opinion and there was no need to come to a consensus position, like that required for the IPCC. Overall, this paper has added fuel to the debate around the IPCC’s conservativeness.

13^th December – ‘EU discards ban will change the way we fish our seas’ 

(The Guardian, 2013)

Article discusses the reforms to the Common Fisheries Policy that have been made in the past week. Most importantly, discards have been banned - the practice of throwing away perfectly good fish due to quotas.

            1 January 2015 – ban on discarding in ‘pelagic’ fisheries takes effect.

            1 January 2016 – ban on discarding in other fisheries.

This will transform anthropogenic fishing practices and help towards more sustainable usage in the future. Furthermore, a legally binding commitment to fishing at sustainable levels has been secured. Scientific advice will underpin all annual quotas, ensuring the health of fish stocks whilst achieving a prosperous fishing industry. This will come into force on 1 January 2014.