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No good news for oceans (part 3): questions

Click on the words or phrases in the article that answer these questions:

  1. Where will temperature changes be smallest?
  2. Which polar region is mentioned?
  3. How many ocean habitats did the scientists examine?
  4. Which kinds of environment will not be affected so badly?
  5. In which countries will humans suffer the most?
  6. What word is used to describe the reliability of the report’s findings?
  7. How probable are bad consequences, according to the scientists?
  8. What should be our response to the problem?

As for the surface, the magnitude of the projected changes will vary by place. The tropics will experience the smallest changes in acidity; temperate regions will suffer the least significant shifts in temperature and productivity; and the Southern Ocean near Antarctica will be spared the least fluctuations in oxygen. But overall, across the board the ocean surface will suffer significant impacts.

With those data in hand, they then overlaid habitat and biodiversity hot spot information for 32 diverse marine environments around the world to see how these changes would impact ocean flora and fauna. Coral reefs, seagrass beds and other shallow areas will suffer the greatest impacts, they found, while deep ocean seamounts and vents will suffer the least.

Humans will not be spared the repercussions of those changes. In a final analysis, they quantified humanity’s dependence on the ocean by analyzing global jobs, revenues and food that comes from the sea. Most of the up to 870 million people who will be affected most by these changes live in some of the world’s poorest nations, they found.

While these predictions are subject to the same limitations that plague any computer model that attempts to represent a complex natural system and project its future fate, the authors believe that the results are robust enough to strongly support the likelihood that our oceans will be very different places in the not-too-distant future. If carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, they write, “substantial degradation of marine ecosystems and associated human hardships are very likely to occur.”

“It is truly scary to consider how vast these impacts will be,” co-author Andrew Sweetman of the International Research Institute of Stavanger, Norway, emphasized in the press release. “This is one legacy that we as humans should not be allowed to ignore.”