How a 'digital ocean' can unlock climate fighting potential
Our oceans represent our single best opportunity to avert the pending climate crisis. However, oceans are suffering and underperforming as a result of human development. The warning signs are flashing red with rising ocean temperatures, new troubling migration patterns and dying underwater ecosystems. Further, the Arctic is melting before our very eyes, raising sea levels and threatening coastal communities.
While our oceans are suffering, they are not powerless in this epic battle for the health of our planet. We need to stop looking at our oceans as defeated, victims in this fight, but rather as young, still developing fighters that with a bit of training — and the right tools could ultimately be victorious. It’s our oceans with their amazing resilience and fighting spirit that may turn back this crisis and rescue our planet.
But in order to realize the full potential of our oceans, we need to see our oceans. The oceans cover 70 percent of the planet but most of those waters are still unexplored, unobserved and unmapped. While we are discovering more each day about the oceans ability to fight combat climate change, the truth is that there is still so much we don’t understand. We know that oceans have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat from greenhouse gas emissions and without them our average world temperature would be 122 degrees Fahrenheit by some estimates, making our planet uninhabitable, but we don’t know how effectively oceans will continue to absorb carbon dioxide.
A 2021 MIT study indicated that we may have five years less time than predicted to cut emissions sufficiently to meet the Paris Agreement targets for less than 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. This sort of lack of understanding could have catastrophic consequences.
It doesn’t have to be that way. We have the tools now to see and understand our oceans more clearly, more deeply.